Читать книгу The Big Book of Canadian Hauntings - John Robert Colombo - Страница 12
Оглавление4 STRANGE EVENTS AND STRANGER PEOPLE
In this section will be found phenomena that are not readily explained. The blind seemingly see, the deaf apparently hear. Events that occur in distant parts of the world might be accessible to people living far, far away. Even the future may be “seen” or foretold. Prophecies are fulfilled! All through the ages there have been reports of such powers, and these reports, when not anecdotal, are quite often well-attested by reputable people, professionally trained observers, et cetera. Yet such powers, if and when they are manifested, exert themselves sporadically at best. It seems that they cannot be recreated in laboratories. Carl Sagan, the astronomer and advocate of the scientific method, nourished a sense of awe and wonder about man and the natural world, especially the cosmos. He was attracted to mysteries, yet all the while he kept foremost in his mind Marcello Truzzi’s maxim: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
A Native woman predicts the outcome of a battle fought elsewhere between her people and the English forces based on a vision. This instance of successful “jugglery” (the term used by Europeans to describe the work of medicine men or shamans) among the Mississauga Indians of that region was reported by Pierre Pouchot, a French officer at Fort Niagara in 1756. His account appears in Memoir upon the Late War in North America, Between the French and English, 1755–60 (Roxbury, Massachusetts. Printed for W. Elliott Woodward, 1866), a two-volume work translated from French and edited by Franklin B. Hough. (For knowledge of this reference I am grateful to Donald Smith of the Department of History of the University of Calgary.) Pouchot’s circumstantial account, although sketchy in the extreme, is interesting in at least one way. It states that an unnamed officer took notes and “confirmed” the Native woman’s account. In other words, the account is not simply hearsay or rumour but fact, and although brief, represents centuries of “jugglery.”
At the end of six or seven days, they [the French officers at Fort Niagara] enquired why they [the Mississauga Indian women] made no more medicine, when an old woman replied that their people had beaten [won]; that she had juggled and that they had killed many people. An officer who knew these juggleries, wrote down the spot, the day that she designated, and when the party returned, he questioned the Indians and prisoners whose answers confirmed the old woman’s account.
“A Reputed Canadian Witch” appeared in The Bathurst Courier (Bathurst, New Brunswick), April 7, 1854. The account is apparently reprinted from the Bytown Gazette (Bytown, now Ottawa, Ontario).
We find the following singular statement in the Bytown Gazette: —
