Mysteries of Ontario brings together, for the first time, some five hundred accounts of strange events and eerie experiences, each keyed to one of 250 places in the province. It turns out that, far from being a humdrum part of the planet in which to live and work, Ontario is a province that is alive with ghosts and spirits, mysterious disappearances, and peculiar happenings enough to make your hair stand on end, turn your blood cold, and send shivers up and down your spine!
John Robert Colombo has been collecting materials for this book since 1967. Even so, more than two years were devoted to researching, writing, copy-editing, and photo editing Mysteries of Ontario. The reader is invited to peruse the great historical mysteries that have moved Canadians in the past from LaSalle’s missing Griffon to the peculiar disappearance of Ambrose Small, from the spiritualistic legacy of the Fox Sisters of Consecon to the appearance in the 1990s of "ghost walks," "haunted hayrides," and "boo barns." This is a book that unites folklore and scholarship, the supernatural and the speculative, culture and mysticism, the occult and the peculiar, the psychical and the cultural, the human and the non-human.

John Robert Colombo, who edited and annotated Worlds in Small, is known as the Master Gatherer for his many compilations of the lore and literature of Canada. Colombo has complied, translated, and written over eighty books. He co-translated into English five books of Bulgarian literature, not to mention books of verse originally written in Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, etc. In the field of native studies he has compiled Windigo, Poems of the Inuit, Songs of the Indians, and Songs of the Great Land. Among his large-scale literary anthologies are The Poets of Canada and Colombo’s Book of Canada. He edited Other Canada, the country’s first anthology of science fiction and fantasy, and beginning with Mysterious Canada, he has written or complied six books of Paranormal Canadiana. These books, plus media appearances, have earned him the title "Canada’s Mr. Mystery."

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"A fascinating book, whether for sitting around a summer night's campfire, or for the cold and dark of a winter night."

Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal