12 case files, newest first.
On a farm near Wallaceburg in what is now Ontario, the McDonald family reported stones and bullets flying through windows, fires and phantom footsteps. The story ends with a silver bullet and a witch with a broken arm. It was written down decades later and is told as local folklore.
Since the 1930s, people around Victoria, British Columbia, have reported a long, horse-headed sea serpent called 'Caddy'. A carcass from a whale's stomach in 1937 was claimed as a baby. Zoologists now favour known animals, and many scientists read the famous 1937 carcass as a decomposing basking shark.
In the woods along New Brunswick's Dungarvon River, lumbermen said a murdered camp cook's ghost let out unearthly whoops at night until a priest laid it to rest. Michael Whelan's 1912 ballad fixed the story; folklorists have collected it since.
Prospector Stefan Michalak came out of the Manitoba woods with grid-shaped burns on his chest and a story about a landed craft. The RCMP and the military investigated; the files are now public. They never found what burned him.
Named in 1960 to rhyme with Ogopogo, Manipogo is the lake monster of Lake Manitoba. A 1962 photograph shows something long and dark in the water. A provincial park and a winter festival carry its name.
In 1908 two prospectors, the McLeod brothers, were found dead along the South Nahanni River, their heads reportedly missing. More deaths followed and newspapers named it Headless Valley. Today it is a UNESCO-listed national park; the deaths look like the hazards of a brutal wilderness, embellished.
Since the 1790s, treasure hunters have dug into a small island in Nova Scotia's Mahone Bay, chasing a shaft said to hold pirate gold, Templar relics or Shakespeare's manuscripts. More than two centuries, six deaths and a TV series later, no treasure has been found.
British Columbia's Okanagan Lake has a resident monster with a music-hall name. Scholars trace it from Syilx water-spirit traditions through settler sightings to a tourism mascot. No specimen, no clear photo, plenty of folklore.
A senior Department of Transport radio engineer, Wilbert B. Smith, persuaded his department to study flying saucers and their possible magnetic propulsion. He built an observatory at Shirley's Bay near Ottawa. Official funding ended in 1954; the records are now with Library and Archives Canada.
'Sasquatch' comes from a Halq'eméylem word for a hairy wild being, popularized by a schoolteacher in Harrison Hot Springs in the 1920s. The village now calls itself Sasquatch country. Scientists find no evidence of an unknown ape; the creature lives on as folklore and a tourism icon.
On a Wednesday night in October 1967, people in a Nova Scotia fishing village saw a row of lights descend and hit the water. RCMP officers went out in boats and found yellow foam. The Navy searched. Canada's own files call the object unidentified.
A brilliant fireball over the Yukon and northern British Columbia dropped fragments onto a frozen lake. A local man collected them without thawing them, preserving one of the most primitive and organic-rich meteorites known.
