Haunted Canada: The Ghost of Tom Thompson

Our tales of national spooks and creatures continue this Thanksgiving day with this classic, mysterious Canadian tale straight out of Ontario's most famous park. You’ve really only needed to take one art class, to fulfil some mandatory credit in high school or middle school, to have at least heard of The Group of Seven, the iconic group of Canadian wilderness painters that focused primarily around the region of Algonquin park, and could be argued to have put Canada on the artistic map. In July of 1917, Tom Thompson – perhaps the most famous of these painters, for this reason – went out in his boat on Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Park… and he never came back. The facts around his death have blurred with myth and legend over time; officially, his death was ruled an accidental drowning, but you can ask anyone in the so called “know” and get any numerous reasons for why his death was anything but an accident. Over time, there have been several claims of people, upon the edge of Canoe Lake, meeting with a man canoeing alone on the lake, often through the fog, and turning quite abruptly once they’ve made eye contact with him. Could this mysterious paddler and Tom Thompson be one in the same? Many claim that the best day to arrive is July 17^th (the date his body was supposedly removed from the water), to see an “annual” pilgrimage of the Spector yourself.