6 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.
A farm family in Robertson County, Tennessee, said a spirit knocked, spoke and tormented them for four years. The story was printed in full only in 1894, and historians treat much of it as folklore built around a real family.
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.
Australia's most famous ghost story says Frederick Fisher's spirit sat on a fence rail and pointed to his own grave. The 1826–27 newspapers report the murder, the search, an Aboriginal tracker and a trial, but no ghost. The apparition first appears in print in an anonymous poem in 1832, and in 1841 the man said to have seen it denied it.
In December 1900, families living in the ruins of the abandoned Fort Lowell said a tall figure in high boots and a soldier's uniform was coming out of the walls at night. Shots and dogs couldn't catch it. Within weeks two territorial papers had turned it into a running joke, and the people who first reported it were nearly written out of their own story.
For a month in the autumn of 1894, people on South Main Street in Tucson reported a night prowler that changed shape: a dog, a hog, a burro, a man on all fours. Armed parties hunted it, and rumor blamed an elderly Tohono O'odham woman. Then the Citizen announced that “the Main street spook has been laid.” It was a thief in a pillow-case mask.
