The Giant Skeleton of the Borrego Badlands
In his excellent 2024 book An Anthology of American Strangeness: Volume 1, my friend and fellow researcher Kevin Guhl – who has started to publish his own impeccably-researched stories in video format on his YouTube channel ‘American Strangeness’ – included a chapter on a strange spectre said to roam California’s Borrego Badlands in the wake of the California Gold Rush. The first sighting of this desert demon occurred sometime in the 1880s, when a prospector nicknamed “Arizona Charlie” was searching for gold between California’s Seventeen Palms Oasis and southeasterly Superstition Mountain, beyond the western shores of the Salton Sea. As Kevin put it, “something spooked Charley’s burros in the middle of the night and he got up to quiet them. It was then, through the darkness and about two hundred yards east of where he stood, that Charley saw an enormous skeleton.” The ghoulish figure stood about eight feet tall and rambled about drunkenly, as if unable or unwilling to keep a straight course. From the midst of its ribcage flickered an eerie light, which Charley likened to the soft glow of a kerosine lantern. Before he had time to react, Charley watched the strange creature scale a ridge and disappear from view.
Throughout the succeeding decades, at least six other prospectors claimed to have encountered the same frightening figure in the Anza-Borrego Desert, always apparently wandering aimlessly as if in search of something, its path lit by either a lantern clutched by bony fingers, or a weird glow emanating from its latticed thorax.
La Corriveau
Incredibly, the unearthly image of an animated skeleton roaming the wilderness at night is not unique to the folklore of southern California, but also recurs with surprising frequency in the legends of the Great White North. Undoubtedly, the most famous Canadian iteration of this international folktale is the legend of La Corriveau, one of Quebec’s spookiest and most beloved ghost stories. The tale revolves around the corpse of a French-Canadian woman hanged in 1763 for the murder of her husband, which once dangled from a gibbet at a crossroads on the southern shores of the St. Lawrence River opposite Quebec City. Legend has it that the centerpiece of this grisly display came to life at night to commit all manner of mischief, from harassing passing travelers to consorting with werewolves and warlocks.
The tale of La Corriveau begins in 1749 during the French regime, in the tiny rural settlement of Saint-Vallier, on the southern banks of the St. Lawrence River near the Ile d’Orleans. On November 17th of that year, a sixteen-year-old French-Canadian girl named Marie-Josephte Corriveau married a 23-year-old farmer named Charles Bouchard. Their union produced three children – two daughters and a son – before Bouchard’s life was tragically cut short by what was initially supposed to be a battle with typhus in the spring of 1760.
A little more than a year after the death of her first husband, Marie-Josephte married again, this time to a local farmer named Louis Dodier. On the morning of January 7th, 1763, after a year and a half of childless marriage, Dodier was found dead in his barn, apparently having been kicked in the head by his horse. The young widow wasted no time in burying her second husband’s mutilated remains, leading locals to suspect that she had a hand in his death, and perhaps in the untimely demise of her first husband as well.
Rumours from Saint-Vallier soon reached the ears of British authorities, the British having governed the region since the Conquest of Quebec three years prior. A military tribunal held in Quebec City concluded, on the weight of witness testimony, that Marie-Josephte’s father, Joseph Corriveau, had murdered his son-in-law. The old man was promptly sentenced to death by hanging. Marie-Josephte was convicted of accomplice to murder, and her cousin, Isabelle Sylvain, was convicted of perjury for providing testimony which conflicted with the official verdict.
While receiving the Sacrament of Reconciliation in preparation for his execution, Joseph Corriveau confessed to Father Augustin-Louis de Glapion, Superior General of the Jesuits in Quebec, that Louis Dodier had actually been murdered by his daughter, Marie-Josephte, and that he had accepted the sentence laid upon him without protest in order to spare her from the gallows. Glapion advised the penitent that it would be sinful to permit his niece to unjustly receive punishment for perjury, which entailed public scourging and branding with the letter ‘P,’ and to allow his daughter to escape the consequence of her crime. On the priest’s urging, Joseph Corriveau brought his evidence to the British authorities. A retrial was held, during which Marie-Josephte Corriveau was determined to have murdered her husband in bed by splitting his skull with a hatchet.
The murderess was sentenced to death, and was executed by hanging on April 18th, 1763, near the Plains of Abraham on which the British had won Quebec three years prior. Her body was ferried across the St. Lawrence River, placed in an iron cage, and suspended from a scaffold at a crossroads near Pointe-Levis as a warning to criminals.
As it fell into decay, local rumour grew that ‘La Corriveau,’ as the corpse came to be known, came to life at night and descended from her gibbet to commit unholy deeds, probably owing to a pact that Marie-Josephte had made in life with the Devil. Interest in the old legends was revived in 1851, when the cage was accidentally disinterred from its final resting place in unconsecrated ground outside the church graveyard of Saint-Joseph de Levy. Decades later, when a handful of French-Canadian nationalists took it upon themselves to immortalize the tales of their homeland in literature, the legend of La Corriveau was set down in ink.
In his 1863 book Les Anciens Canadiens, or ‘Old-Time Canadians,’ Quebecois lawyer Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspe described the fictional account of a run-in with La Corriveau which, though coloured by the subtly-humorous tongue-in-cheek dramatic irony that seems to typify French-Canadian contes, succeed s in capturing the essence of the legend. In his book, a traveller tells his companions the tale of his father’s encounter with the spectre many years earlier, saying in French, “It happened one day that my late father, who is now dead, had left the city for home somewhat late. He had even diverted himself a little, so to speak, with his acquaintances in Point Levis. Like an honest man, he loved his drop; and on his journeys he always carried a flask of brandy in his dogfish-skin satchel. They say the liquor is the milk for old men…
“It happened that it was quite dark when my father at last got under way. His friends did their best to keep him all night, telling him that he would have to pass, all by himself, the iron cage wherein La Corriveau did penance for having killed her husband.
“You saw it yourselves, gentlemen, when leaving Point Levis at one o’clock. She was quiet then in her cage, the wicked creature, with her eyeless skull. But never you trust to her being blind. She is a cunning one, you had better believe! If she can’t see in the daytime, she knows well enough how to find her way to torment poor folks at night. Well, as for my late father, who was as brave as his captain’s sword, he told his friends that he didn’t care – that he didn’t owe La Corriveau a farthing – with a heap more reasons which I cannot remember now. He put the whip to his horse, a fine brute that could travel like the wind, and was gone in a second.
“As he was passing the skeleton, he thought he heard a noise, a sort of wailing; but, as a heavy southwest wind was blowing, he made up his mind it was only the gale whistling through the bones of the corpse. It gave him a kind of a start, nevertheless, and he took a good pull at the flask to brace himself up. All things considered, however, as he said to himself, Christians should be ready to help each other; perhaps the poor creature was wanting his prayers. He took off his cap and devoutly recited a de profundis for her benefit, thinking that, if it didn’t do her any good, it could at least do her no harm, and that he himself would be the better for it. Well, then he kept on as fast as he could; but, for all that, he heard a queer sound behind him – tic-tac, tic-tac, like a piece of iron striking on the stones. He thought it was the tire of his wheel, or some piece of the wagon, that had come unfastened. He got out to see, but found everything snug. He touched the horse to make up for lost time, but after a little he heard again that tic-tac, tic-tac, on the stones. Being brave, he didn’t pay much attention.”
The storyteller went on to describe how his father proceeded to take a nap on the side of the road at around midnight. Just as he was nodding off, he spotted, out of the corner of his eye, a cluster of weird lights flickering on the neighbouring Ile d’Orleans. Upon closer examination, he discovered that a Witches’ Sabbath, or occult ritual, was being performed on the island by a band of goblins.
“There he was, the dear man,” the storyteller said of his father, “with his eyes bigger than his head, never daring to budge. Presently he thought he heard behind him the ‘tic tac, tic tac,’ which he had already heard several times on the journey; but he had too much to occupy his attention in front of him to pay much heed to what might pass behind. Suddenly, when he was least expecting it, he felt two great bony hands, like the claws of a bear, grip him by the shoulders. He turned around horrified, and found himself face to face with La Corriveau, who was climbing on his back. She had thrust her hands through the bars of her cage and succeeded in clutching him; but the cage was heavy, and at every leap she fell back again to the ground with a hoarse cry, without losing her hold, however, on the shoulders of my late father, who bent under the burden. If he had not held tight to the fence with both hands, he would have been crushed under the weight. My poor late father was so overwhelmed with horror that one might have heard the sweat that rolled off his forehead dropping down on the fence like grains of duck-shot.”
The storyteller described how the skeleton asked his father to carry her across the St. Lawrence so that she could dance her “friends” on the Isle d’Orleans, as she was unable to cross the consecrated waters of the St. Lawrence without the assistance of a Christian. When the man refused, La Corriveau proceeded to strangle him until he fell unconscious. He woke up the next morning lying in a ditch. La Corriveau was back on her gibbet, inanimate once again, swaying softly in the breeze. “At this,” the storyteller concluded, “he plucked up his courage and stretched out his hand to take a drink. But no such luck! The flask was empty! The witch had drained every drop.”
The Doppelganger of Karsdale, Nova Scotia
Although La Corriveau is perhaps the most famous animated skeleton to prowl the shadowy byways of Canadian folklore, it is but one of many traditions which span the country, stretching from the Maritimes of Eastern Canada to Vancouver Island at the country’s western end.
Nova Scotian folklorist Helen Creigton included one such story in her 1957 classic Bluenose Ghosts. Creighton heard this chilling tale first-hand from a man named A.B. Thorne, who hailed from the settlement of Karsdale near the western coast of the Nova Scotian Peninsula, on the Annapolis Basin near the ancient settlement of Annapolis Royal.
“Mr. Thorne is a man of medium height,” Creighton began, “with blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a rather sensitive mouth. Now probably in his sixties, he can still dig a garden or ditch in a way that would shame many a younger man. Yet with work to occupy him, and an excellent wife to care for all his needs, he appears to be a singularly nervous man. This is little wonder, considering the experience of his youth which we had come to hear.”
Creighton proceeded to repeat Thorne’s tale verbatim, related to her and her friend, poet Martha Banning Thomas, in the Thorne family cottage in the summer of 1947. Thorne explained that, when he was a young man, he had a good friend named Joe Holmes, with whom he spent much of his free time. Although Joe distinguished himself as an exceptionally swift runner, he had a meagre frame and a delicate constitution which inclined him to illness.
One evening in the early 1900s, when the two of them were about twenty years old, Holmes accompanied Thorne to a farmhouse, which lay between their two homes. This house, the residence of the Riorden family, served as the local post office, such arrangements being customary in rural Nova Scotia in those days, and Thorne had to mail a letter. By the time the business was concluded, it was about ten o’clock.
“It was a bright night with a full moon,” Thorne said, “and it was too nice to separate and go home so early. The Riordens’ grass was about three feet high at that time, and there was a turnip field behind it. We heard a hoe strike against a rock and it attracted our attention. We sat forward then and looked, and to our surprise, we saw a Thing come crawling on its hands and feet from the southeast corner of the house. Then it stood up and we could see it was a man. We were on the lower or south side of the road, and it was on the upper or north side. Then it went out of sight.
“In the country, we often think a lot without saying anything, and anyway there’s often no need of words between friends. So we just sat there and didn’t say anything, and before long it came out again. We didn’t move an inch, but we watched, and this time it came half-way across the road.”
The strange creature once again retreated to the corner of the house, then repeated its performance a third time, coming to a standstill beneath a cherry tree on the other side of the road. The spectre watched the friends in silence, its features obscured by shadow, and the friends stared right back. At the height of this eerie showdown, a handful of apple trees on the friends’ side of the road trembled violently, as if shaken by invisible hands, loosing a cascade of apples which thudded in the grass.
Now thoroughly spooked, the two friends mutually agreed to head to Holmes’ house, and took off down the road at a run. Although Holmes was the faster of the two, Thorne managed to keep up, spurred by the terrifying prospect of being left behind with the mysterious figure.
“When we got to his house, we stood in the road and talked,” Thorne said. “We were young men and curious, and we didn’t like to leave it there because it would always pester us and we’d never know what we’d seen. It didn’t seem like a prank, but if it was, we wanted to settle it. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s go back; I’m not afraid.’ I wasn’t either, so long as Joe was with me. Nothing was going to hurt the two of us and besides, it’s easy to be brave when you have company. ‘We’ll see what it is,’ I said. So we walked back and pretty soon we saw it, and it was coming to meet us… I said, ‘There it is; don’t leave me.’ As I said, I figured that with two of us it couldn’t do much harm, and I wanted to find out what it was. I meant to touch it and then I’d know for sure if it was real. When we were within twenty feet of it, I said again, ‘Joe, don’t leave me,’ and then I walked up till my face was close beside it. I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live.
“It had on black pants, a white shirt with a hard bosom front, and black braces. Its head was bare and he was of medium size. It looked as though its eyes were deeply sunk in, and they were very bright and penetrating, and the only thing it looked like was a skeleton. I didn’t touch it, although I would have even then, but Joe gave a scream and ran, and I was scared. I wasn’t long overtaking him, and from that time Joe had a hard time to keep up with me. It followed and kept twenty feet behind us. There were bars on the Holmes fence. We jumped them, and the Thing cut across the field to head us off, but we got there first.”
The two friends reached the safety of the farmhouse and stood panting in the doorway. They watched in horror as the apparition, apparently unwilling to violate the sanctity of the home, climbed atop a rotten pole which jutted out from a stone wall nearby and perched itself there, staring intently at the two men without saying a word. “In the morning,” Thorne said, “I went out and felt that pole and, do you know, it was so rotten it just crumbled up in my hands. Why that pole was so rotten it couldn’t have held a bird.”
Thorne went on to relate how, one year after their strange adventure, Joe fell ill with laryngeal tuberculosis – a condition which left his mind clear and rational, but caused his throat terrible pain. Near the end of his illness, when the pain became almost too much for him to bear, Holmes claimed that he was visited by the same skeletal apparition that he and Throne had encountered one year earlier. The frightening figure massaged the dying man’s throat, immediately relieving him of pain. Several days later, Holmes succumbed to his illness.
“I sat up with him every night,” Thorne said, “and do you know what he looked like when he died? He looked just like that man, for he was pretty well wasted away.”
As Thorne himself surmised at the end of his narrative, the skeletal figure that he and his friend encountered appeared to be a forerunner – an omen of impending disaster common in Maritime folklore. This particular forerunner evokes the old German legend of the doppelganger – an apparition of a living person portending the demise of the unfortunate whom it resembles, which, in this case, appeared to be a vision of Holmes’ future self at the moment of his death.
The Pa’guk of the Anishinaabe
West of the Maritimes, in the Canadian Shield of what is now northern Ontario, the Anishinaabe nations tell campfire stories of an entity called the pa’guk – an animated skeleton which, in physical appearance, behavior, and symbolic significance, strongly resembles the doppelganger described by Helen Creighton.
One nation whose traditional stories on the subject have been recorded for posterity is the Algonquin of Lake Temiskaming, the latter being a northerly augmentation of the Ottawa River which straddles the border of Ontario and Quebec. In a 1915 anthropological paper for the Canadian Department of Mines, American anthropologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck wrote that the Temiskaming Algonquin regarded the pa’guk as “a creature of bones, a skeleton, that clatters through the forest, making a great rattling and squeaking noise. When this is heard, it is understood as an omen that some friend will be lost. Pa’guk is accounted for by the story of a hunter who got starved out in the bush. Before he died, he wished that his life and the strength of his flesh might be transferred to his bones. He got his wish, and his strength went into his bones when his flesh fell away. Whenever he wished, he could fly through the air as though on wings.”
Just southwest of Lake Temiskaming lies Lake Temagami, the historic homeland of the Temagami Ojibwa, who also believed in the pa’guk. Speck recorded these people’s interpretation of the entity in his aforementioned treatise, writing, “This is a personification of a human skeleton without the flesh, which wanders about the country. When he travels, he goes as fast as he thinks. When he wishes himself to be in a place, he is there as soon as he thinks of it. When he is heard by the people, it is a sign that someone will die. It is thought that he is heard occasionally three times in succession, making his peculiar noise, once at the horizon, once at the zenith, and again at the opposite horizon.”
Anthropologists Sister Bernard Coleman, Ellen Frogner, and Estelle Eich elaborated on the Ojibwa conception of what they called the “Pagak” in their 1962 book Ojibwa Myths and Legends, writing, “The Pagak used to wonder restlessly in the woods as a skeleton, sometimes a flying skeleton. He was a sign of bad luck to anyone who saw him. One woman spoke of how with the coming of spring, the Indians kept very quiet and listened for the Pagak in the woods. They would hear him shoot, for he was a hunter, or they would hear his bones make a noise as he walked. Generally he was spoken of as the skeleton of a human being, although one person described him as monster-like in appearance.”
The Flying Skeleton of Oji-Cree Legend
More than a thousand kilometres northwest of Lake Temagami, in the remote lake-ridden wilds of northwest Ontario, lies Sandy Lake, home to an Oji-Cree First Nation whose flying skeleton stories appear in anthropologist James R. Stevens’ 1995 book Sacred Legends. In one of the tales which Stevens reproduced, a luckless hunter named To-maton was searching for game in the forest one winter day when he heard a strange whispering on the wind. “As it sounded like someone calling his name,” Stevens wrote, “he went into the forest to investigate. He had not gone far when he saw a human skeleton caught on the branch of a small birch tree. ‘Free me, To-maton,’ the skeleton cried. The Indian wanted to run away because he was very frightened. But he was afraid to run away, so he gathered all his courage and lifted the skeleton off the branch.
“The skeleton then flew into the air, crying, ‘I am Paguck, the flying skeleton. You, To-maton, are a very courageous Indian and will be blessed with good hunting and a long life.’ Then Paguck became invisible and flew off into the stormy winter sky.
“To-maton sat down and smoked a tobacco offering to his guarding spirit, Paguck, the flying skeleton. From this day on, the hunter was always successful in his hunting and trapping.”
Skeleton Ghost of the Woodland Cree
The legend of the flying skeleton can be found further to the west, in the boreal forest of northern Saskatchewan, the historic domain of the Woodland Cree. Fur trader George Nelson, who managed the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Lac La Ronge, described the Woodland Cree conception of the entity in a letter to his father, written in April 1823. Nelson’s native clients described the figure as the ghost of one who died in a state of emaciation, from either starvation or tuberculosis, which appears in the form of a skeleton with skin.
At the time the letter was written, Nelson was playing host to a sick Indian who claimed to have had several frightening encounters with these entities. The first incident, the native explained, took place on a spring night several years prior, when he took his canoe out onto Lac la Ronge to hunt moose. He paddled over to a shallow part of the lake, tied his craft to a clump of rushes so that it would not drift, and waited quietly, hoping to hear the bellowing of a bull moose.
While he waited, the native discerned a strange sound in the distance, directly ahead of him. The sound resembled a human voice crying “hey, hey, hey” in rapid succession, its tone oddly cold and monotonous. The hairs of his neck stood on end as the noise drifted directly towards him, as if it were floating on the air.
Terrified, the native laid low in his canoe, too frightened to hazard a glance in the direction of the unearthly voice, which was now fast approaching. Despite this precaution, the aerial vociferant flew straight up to the canoe and threw the Indian into the lake. Choking and sputtering, the hunter scrambled for the shore, hounded all the while by the mysterious chanter, which hovered directly above his head, crying its metronomic incantation. “Then I took some dry grass,” the Indian told Nelson, “which I rubbed and bruised till it became soft and put it under my arm pits and crumpled myself into a small heap and remained till the sun began to warm…” All night long, the chanter hovered above the Indian, maintaining its incessant cry, before finally departing at dawn.
The native’s second encounter with such an entity took place while he was hunting beaver with a friend. The pair ventured far from camp and, after killing six beavers, built a roaring fire and decided to sleep under the stars. “I awoke in the night,” the Indian told Nelson, “and was much astonished to observe a man seated on the opposite side of the fire, resting his head on both hands, with his elbows on his knees apparently in a very pensive, sullen manner. He had but skin and bone- not the least particle of flesh: and this one had hair on his bony head. I gently pushed my friend and told him to look at that stranger. We were both extremely agitated in consequence of our fear, and were at a loss what to do. Having no alternative, I arose; conceiving he came to ask for something to eat I took a Beaver, cut it in two, and… presented him the half of it: he did not deign to look at it- I was much afraid. I then bethought of cutting it into mouthfuls, which after presenting him I threw into the fire- thus I did with the whole; and when done, he arose and walked off peaceably in the air.”
The native’s third encounter took place on the night of March 31st, 1823, several days before Nelson wrote his letter. “At a late hour in the night,” Nelson wrote, “he was pulled most violently out of his bed; so that his wife that was lying beside him awoke and with difficulty kept him down.” Shortly thereafter, the cabin in which the couple were sleeping shook violently.
Later on in his letter, Nelson described an elaborate ritual by which the Cree attempted to protect themselves from the vexations of these skeletal ghosts, which involved tobacco smoking, speech making, dancing, incantations, and offering bowls of grease to a wooden figure intended to represent the spirit in question.
Skeleton Ghost of the Plains Cree
Further to the south, the Woodland Cree’s prairie-dwelling cousins, the Plains Cree, have their own stories involving skeletal apparitions, some of which appear in American linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s 1934 book Plains Cree Texts. In one of Bloomfield’s stories, told to him by a Plains Cree elder named Adam Sakewew at Battleford, Saskatchewan, a “bony specter,” as the storyteller called it, kidnapped a Cree woman and flew her to his aerial lodge, where he kept her as his wife. The woman’s human husband, who was gifted with powerful medicine, performed a ritual which allowed him to track his wife to the specter’s teepee. As redress for his offence, which he had committed contrary to the advice of his skeletal father, the bony kidnapper taught the husband magic songs which would assist him in hunting and grant him the ability to heal the sick. As payment for these gifts, the husband agreed to offer the bony specter all of the marrow fat from the first two moose that he killed.
In another story told by elder Coming Day, a young Plains Cree hunter married a Woodland Cree girl whose father was reputed to be an evil medicine man. Before allowing his daughter to join her husband’s horse-riding people on the plains, the boreal sorcerer prevailed upon his son-in-law to spend a season hunting and trapping with him in the northern bush. While living among his wife’s people, the Plains Cree husband incurred the ire of his father-in-law by spending too much time playing a certain childhood game of which he was inordinately fond, thereby neglecting his hunting duties. As punishment for his indolence, the Woodland Cree “manitou man,” as the storyteller called him, cursed the young man so that he could not kill any game, and forbade his people from feeding him. Heedless of the lamentations of his daughter, who had grown to love her husband, the medicine man gradually starved his son-in-law until he was too weak to move, whereupon he abandoned him in the bush to die alone.
When he was on the brink of death, the Plains Cree husband was approached by a bony specter, whose arrival was accompanied by a gust of wind, a sound like a gunshot, a whoop, and the words “hey, hey, hi, hi,” whispered on the wind. The skeletal figure, clad in shreds of smoky leather, took pity on the young man and transformed him into an entity like himself. He taught the husband how to fly through the air, and how to feed himself on melted fat that was offered to him by Cree hunters.
The husband was eventually captured by his own relations and nourished back into human form. Armed with powerful medicine he had obtained from his skeletal mentor, the young man tracked down his evil father-in-law and paralyzed him, initiating his slow and painful death by starvation.
In a final story told by Adam Sakewew, which has elements in common with a dwarf story told by Coming Day that appears in David Mandelbaum’s 1979 treatise on the Plains Cree, a hunter named Crooked Moccasin encountered a bony specter in a forest meadow. The figure proposed a wrestling match, waging their guns as the prize. He boasted that his own firearm never missed, but said that he wished to obtain a human musket as a gift for his father. After some hesitation, Crooked Moccasin agreed, and the two began to grapple.
When he grew tired, Crooked Moccasin tripped the bony specter and threw him to the ground. Pleading that the move was unfair, the specter demanded a rematch, to which the hunter consented. The wrestlers fought two more bouts, each of which ended the same way. Finally, the bony specter conceded defeat and granted Crooked Moccasin his gun, which looked like a piece of driftwood, or a sun-bleached stick. With this new weapon, the hunter killed two moose, had his wife extract the marrow from their bones, and invited his skeletal rival to feast with him in his teepee.
Another Plains Cree flying skeleton story appears in Reverend Edward Ahenakew’s posthumous 1973 book Voices of the Plains Cree, told to him by Chief Thunderchild of the Thunderchild Reserve near Turtleford, Saskatchwan. “We have all heard of another small creature,” Thunderchild said, “and he is not harmless, for he is the Pah-ka-kos, the hard-luck spirit.”
The chief proceeded to relate a story told to him by an Onion Lake Cree named Sam Cook while the two of them were encamped on a creek near Island Lake, at the edge of the boreal forest. “I am used to the open country,” Thunderchild said, recalling the evening on which he heard the tale, “and at night that forest seemed to close in upon us, primeval, almost unearthly. Then Sam told me his experience with Pah-ka-kos, and in that setting it was impossible for me to doubt them.”
Many years earlier, at that very same creek, Sam and a Metis hunter named Francois Ladouceur were making camp when they heard someone cackling in the trees. Looking up, the two men saw a Pah-ka-kos watching them from a tree branch. “[It was] a small creature,” Sam told Thunderchild, “like a man in build, but so thin that he seemed all skin and bone. He had a dry stick in his hand, birch, about three feet long, and his queer little face was so full of malice that it angered me, though I felt fear too, and a kind of foreboding. I ran to the wagon for my rifle, but before I could reach it, that shrill cackling laugh came again, and when I looked I saw Pah-ka-kos flying away, without wings. But first he had hurled that stick of birch, and it exploded with a sound like the report of a gun. And then Pah-ka-kos was gone.”
Thunderchild then repeated another story told to him by his father’s cousin, Ma-su-ska-pew. While sleeping under a large spruce tree during a hunting trip in the northern bush, Ma-su-ska-pew was awakened by the sensation of a weight on his chest – “something that moved,” he said, “was alive.” Without betraying any awareness of this alarming development, the hunter opened his eyes a crack and saw a small creature perched on his breast. “I knew it was a Pah-ka-kos,” he told Thunderchild, “by that crafty smile on his bony little face.” Mustering his courage, he seized one of the creature’s legs and held it firmly, intending to bring it back to his main camp.
Recognizing that it would not escape on its own, the creature pleaded with Ma-su-ska-pew, promising to send him two moose if he let him go. The hunter accepted the offer and released the creature, which shot up into the air and out of sight.
“In the morning,” the hunter said. “I started back to camp, and as I went, I came on three moose. I killed two easily, but I did not shoot at the third. Pah-ka-kos had said, ‘Two.’”
Mountain Cree, Blackfoot Stories, and Thompson Indian Stories
According to the late Albertan historian Hugh Dempsey in his 2010 book Maskepetoon, the bygone Rocky Mountain Cree believed that the pakakos haunted the Canadian Rockies, describing it as “a skeleton figure that punished careless hunters.”
Another of Dempsey’s books, entitled The Vengeful Wife: And Other Blackfoot Stories, includes an old Blackfoot tale in which the skeletal ghost of a murdered woman haunted a Blood Blackfoot named Heavy Collar. One dark night, while returning home from an unsuccessful horse raid, Heavy Collar had the misfortune to sleep beside the woman’s skeleton, which lay in the grass near present-day Lethbridge, Alberta. The following day, the ghostly woman, in skeletal form, sat herself beside his campfire and stretched out her bony legs towards him, prompting him to shoot her with his musket. In consequence, the spirit forbade Heavy Collar from returning to the place on pain of death. Many years later, when American whisky traders established the notorious Fort Whoop-Up nearby, Heavy Collar returned to the forbidden location, where he was killed by an errant bullet fired by a drunken reveller.
Further to the west, in British Columbia’s Interior Plateau, the Thompson Indians have traditional stories about gaunt human-like creatures said to haunt the North Cascade and Lillooet Mountains. As anthropologist James Teit put it in his 1900 ethnological treatise on the Thompson, these creatures were said to be “of the same size and height as ordinary people, but naked… and of a ghost color. They are very gaunt, the shape of all their bones and joints being visible. Their eyes are very large and round, and protrude from their heads. Like ghosts, they chase people, but are more persistent.”
Other native tribes across the country have old tales about skeletal man-eating entities which were more numerous in the ancient past, which are typically given the name ‘Cannibals’ by anthropologists. One complex iteration of this motif is the Cree and Anishinaabe legend of the Wendigo – a subject which this author has explored in the past, and hopes to cover more thoroughly in the future.
The Skeleton Lifeboat of Barkley Sound
Finally, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, at Canada’s westernmost end, there is an eerie ghost story associated with the wreck of the SS Valencia, a passenger steamer which sank in January 1922 near cliffs known today as the Valencia Bluffs, resulting in the deaths of 136 passengers and crewmembers. According to T.W. Paterson in his 1983 book British Columbia Shipwrecks, in the years succeeding the disaster, native fishermen in Barkley Sound sometimes encountered a lifeboat crewed by skeletons, rowing silently through the fog.
Whether regarded as omens of impending disaster, preternatural denizens of the northern woods, or apparitions of the restless dead, animated skeletons are little-known yet curiously universal staples of Canadian folklore, the stories of which deserve retelling.
Sources
An Anthology of American Strangeness, Vol. 1: Thunderbirds, Lost Temples and Skeleton Ghosts (2024), by Kevin J. Guhl
“Corriveau, Marie-Josephte,” by Luc Lacourciere, in Volume 3 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1974)
Les Anciens Canadiens (1861), by Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé
Bluenose Ghosts (1957), by Helen Creighton
“Myths and Folk-lore of the Timiskaming Algonquin and Timagami Ojibwa,” by F.G. Speck, in Memoir 71 of the Canada Department of Mines Anthropological Series (1915)
Ojibwa Myths and Legends (1962), by Sister Bernard Coleman, Ellen Frogner, and Estelle Eich
Sacred Legends (1995), by Carl Ray and James R. Stevens
The Orders of the Dreamed: George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth, 1823 (1988), by Jennifer S.H. Brown and Robert Brightman
Plains Cree Texts (1934), by Leonard Bloomfield
Voices of the Plains Cree (1973), by Edward Ahenakew
Maskepetoon: Leader, Warrior, Peacemaker (2010), by Hugh Dempsey
The Vengeful Wife – and Other Blackfoot Stories (2003), Hugh A. Dempsey
The Thompson Indians of British Columbia, by James Teit, in the April 1900 issue of the Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History: Volume II: Anthropology I: The Jesup North Pacific Expedition.
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