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Over the past several years I have spoken with individuals who have had extraordinary or preternatural experiences at Thunderhouse. I was astounded at the numbers who have had things happen to them that were unexplainable, bizarre, eerie, and wonderful. Strange occurrences have been recorded as far back as 1781, in the journals of Phillipe Turner, who blamed his Indian porteurs of misplacing a pack while portaging around Thunderhouse Falls. White explorers had no time for Native superstitions, yet his guides insisted that a “devil” had stolen it. Most recent accounts of mysterious happenings, oddly enough, have focused on disappearing equipment. It happened to me.

It was my first trip down the river and I had a mid-size party of clients. I was vaguely aware of the deaths that had occurred at the falls, and of its historical import as a spiritual gathering place. Everything was systematic; we portaged the gear to the campsite and set up at the gorge site across from the Conjuring Rock. We then went back to the trailhead and portaged the four canoes and stacked them at the far end of the carry, just below the gorge on a bedrock terrace. We kept the canoes back from the edge of the river, about fifty feet, leaving my canoe on the outside so I could come back later and take it out to scout for firewood. I remember pushing my lifejacket and paddles under my canoe. High water had left driftwood in remnant piles along the outside bend of the gorge. The current was strong, funneling through the gorge just upstream and pushing hard downriver toward Hell’s Gate. The movement of water through the rock walls of the canyon created its own eerie wind — light, cool, and pulsing with the surge and flow of the current. There was always uneasiness here.

We ate dinner with an hour left of evening light. The alpenglow on the canyon wall across the river ascended as the sun slipped behind the trees of the campsite. At these places I keep a vigilant eye on the clients; there was a hundred-foot cliff only metres from the pitched tents and, after a couple of shots of rum, the day’s wear and tear can make them careless. Nobody had moved from the campsite since we carried the canoes across, and I knew no other canoeists had come through that day, as the portage trail went right by the campsite. I wanted to check on the canoes; for some reason I had the impulse to walk to the end of the portage.

Walking the half kilometre to the end of the trail I saw that the canoes were still neatly stacked. I was about to turn around and go back when I took a second look. Something definitely was different. I walked over to the canoes and saw that mine was gone — even the lifejacket and two paddles. All my clients were accounted for and no one had come down to the river, and no other paddlers had come through. I walked to the river edge and looked downriver but saw no sign of my canoe. It was a seventeen-foot, eighty-pound expedition canoe — it wouldn’t just blow off the site on its own. Even with a freak wind funnel, it was too heavy. And where were my paddles and lifejacket?

I grabbed another canoe and borrowed a client’s lifejacket and put it on. All I could do was to paddle downriver and hope my canoe had gotten hung up on a rock; it was unlikely, though, because of the current and rapids that now went on for at least fifteen kilometres. It seemed hopeless. What was I going to do with one less canoe? What was I going to tell the group? I slipped the canoe into the water and was about to shove off, heading downstream, when something caught my eye upstream. It was my canoe, and it was moving of its own volition, up against the current, rounding a bend out of sight into the canyon. I had the feeling that someone was watching me. I looked around but nobody was there.

I paddled hard against the current, trying to keep to the backwater eddy and the sheerline that ran along the inside of the canyon bend. I caught up to my canoe just before the conjuring rock, grabbed the gunwale and looked inside. My two paddles and lifejacket were lying neatly on the bottom of the canoe; there was no water splash or bilge-water, just a dry, neat canoe with an apparent mind of its own. It was possessed.

I towed it back and restacked the two canoes with the others. Just to be sure, I tied the canoes together with a painter and secured it to a tree nearby. It was nearly dark and I hurried back to the campsite. I didn’t tell the others. It was my secret. I did ask if anyone had been down to the canoes earlier but everyone had been married to their evening cigars and whisky and warm campfire. I wanted to tell the others but couldn’t. They wouldn’t have believed me, anyway.

I have been back to Thunderhouse since, both with other clients as well as on my own. By then I had learned some of its secrets and made sure my canoes were either left at the campsite, or secured by ropes at trail’s end. People started sharing their stories with me during the time I was writing my guidebook about the river and researching the deaths, and the stories were as peculiar as my own. Several canoe parties had lost at least a canoe, or some part of their kit and gear, for no apparent reason or sloppy woodsmanship — it just disappeared. Others complained about disturbing dreams, voices from the woods at night, and even sightings of ghosts and other creatures at the edge of the campsite. A friend of mine stayed at Thunderhouse for two nights with her husband and confessed that she was never so terrified in her life. Each night was an ordeal of frightening dreams, and when she lay awake, the night sounds were unrecognizable and unearthly.

My last solo trip down the river was the most memorable for me. It was late September and frost was already forming on the overturned canoe each morning. There was ice in the tea pail, and the occasional snow shower. There was nobody else on the lower river at the time, just sandhill cranes and Canada geese. I had planned to stay at Thunderhouse for three days and nights, hoping to extract some of its mystery, to perhaps prove that the strange occurrences were simply explainable coincidences. When I arrived at Thunderhouse there was a light rain falling, and it was cold and windy. I sat on the precipice overlooking the conjuring rock, and in my own way requested permission to be there. Sitting thirty metres above the cauldron below, from the campsite perch, I could look at the rapids above the falls on a level plane before the river tumbled into the gorge. In the canyon, huge piles of refuse timber had nestled into the crevices of the walls, suspended ten metres above the diminished, passive late-summer flow. Swirling eddies and whirlpools cast out ribbons of spiralling white foam.

I visited my favourite spot on the rocks, next to the narrow second chute where the full spirit of the Missinaibi is compressed and compelled to expose itself. Between the upper falls and where I stood was a temporary pool — a foaming, pulsating maelstrom of liquid energy, surging in half-metre rhythms. The rain transposed the multi-coloured stones and rock into a gallery of glistening art treasures, like a high-gloss lacquer brings out the grain in a piece of wood. The more resistant rock stood out like veins gorged with blood; potholes, deep and sometimes conjoined were now exposed in low water — strange recesses with a prize in their bellies of a rounded stone; glacially-carved fissures, and deep grottos pockmarked the walls of this luminous art gallery.

I stood at the edge of the cliff once again and dropped some tobacco into the canyon. The wind took it and moved it in gentle circles, scattering the gift along the cliff wall and as far down as the river. I touched the rock with my hands, felt the wind on my face, and breathed the damp air. Most of the time I would just sit and listen and watch. For three days and nights, by the campfire, I listened to the rush of water through the canyon; loud but not so loud that I couldn’t hear the flying squirrels gliding about the trees above my head.

I had dreams; even dreams that I could remember, and none of them were apocalyptic or threatening. There was no malevolent spirit living here, not for me, anyway, but there was an energy that commanded authority and respect. I always felt that someone, or something, was watching me the whole time I was there. And I waited and watched and hoped for some little bit of magic to happen. But it didn’t. Maybe it was happening all around me and I was a part of it and didn’t realize it. Isolation without extraneous human interaction is a liberating experience; it also allows the mind to wander and absorb each nuance of the surroundings, without interruption or obligation. I wondered what muscaria mushrooms would taste like mixed in with my rice and beans.