Happy Canada Day, readers! I’m sure you are all happy to be in Glorious Mother Canada, wrestling moose, eating beaver tails, and downing Timmies left and right. Surely, you say, Canada is a modern and sensible country. Surely, there is nothing left that you don’t want to know.
Of course, regular readers will know that that is ridiculous. We are just as silly as everyone else. Here are five things about Canada that you may not want to know.
Toronto’s First Lighthouse is Haunted
The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse is one of the oldest buildings in Toronto, and its first keeper was a gentleman with the awesome name of John Paul Radelmüller. Unfortunately for him, he was very good at brewing beer, and one fateful day a couple soldiers came to the lighthouse to get drunk. The drunken soldiers got into a fight with Radelmüller and ended up throwing him off the lighthouse, killing him. Terrified, they supposedly tried to hide their crime by chopping his body up into small pieces and burying the pieces in different places. Come on, you idiots, maybe you could have made it look like an accident at the beginning but that just makes you look more suspicious. Of course, the bits of him were found and the soldiers were caught, but there wasn’t enough proof and they were acquitted. That, of course, didn’t satisfy Radelmüller’s ghost, so he goes around making mysterious creepy noises and shit, as ghosts do.
Something Must Have Happened
There are several weird old laws in Canada that must be there for a reason. For example, in Toronto it is illegal to drag a dead horse down Yonge street… on Sundays. All these guys dragging corpses around on weekends! It’s getting to be too much. In case you are disposing of a horse, pick another day.
In Alberta, it is illegal to set someone’s wooden leg on fire. Some things really should go without saying. It is a common enough problem (or prank?) that a dedicated law is necessary.
In Newfoundland, it is illegal to drive cows through the streets… after 8 AM. Make sure you do it in the middle of the night. (These laws about livestock seem to be simultaneously obvious and too specific to be useful.) Meanwhile, in Fredericton, it is illegal to wear a snake or lizard in public.
Finally, it is illegal to pretend to be a witch. Actually being a witch is fine.
To all the rascals who necessitated these laws, I take my hat off to you.
We Hosted a Sex Cult Over A Hundred Years Ago
After all, the state has no place in the bedrooms of this nation. Still, sometimes things can be taken too far, as they were by a gentleman named Edward Arthur Wilson in the 1920s. Since his own name was boring, he took to calling himself Brother XII (“Twelve”, not “Xeeee”). He started a commune on Vancouver Island and took money from his followers, while having sex with a variety of women because come on, what other reasons are there for leading a cult? He also claimed to be a reincarnation of Osiris. Eventually his followers got fed up with him and the Province tried to stop him, but the witnesses fainted in court and the judge made animal noises, allegedly due to Brother XII’s black magic (Y’all got a better explanation?). Eventually his organization was dissolved, but some loyal followers remained. Then he got a new mistress who called herself Madame Z. She turned out to be a sadist who forced his followers to work with a whip, and finally those last few turned on him. The two cult leaders then absconded with all the money to Switzerland, and Brother XII either died there or faked his death.
Feet in the River
Since the early 2000s, no fewer than 16 human feet have been found washed up on the shores of the Salish Sea in the west coast. They belong to various ages and sexes, and only five were identified (they belonged to 4 people).
Although it isn’t unusual for feet to come off decomposing bodies naturally, there are several weird statistical anomalies that make one suspect that it doesn’t come from the…normal…number of drownings? In the first place, sixteen feet in one area, and no other body parts. Secondly, and rather creepily, all but two of them are right feet. The two that are left make a pair with some of the other right feet. Still, what happened to all those other left feet? And the bodies? Why are these feet found so close together time-wise, when the last naturally separated foot of a drowned person was found in 2014? Is it a serial killer who only awakens every hundred years?
Some numbskulls also made hoax feet, with animal bones and meat and such, for God only knows what sick reason.
Surely, things would be better without these mysterious feet…
Dude Without Feet, Also Without History
In 1863, a small boy in Nova Scotia discovered a strange, swarthy looking man on the beach. Both of his legs had been surgically removed, quite well by the standards of the time, and he couldn’t talk. However, he could growl, which he did at people he didn’t like. The people called him Jerome, because he did make noises that sounded like that. Eventually, the people who found him decided to hand him over to the French-Canadians, on the grounds that he “looked Catholic” which is as good an excuse as any, and the French-Canadian village nearby took care of him for the rest of his life. They also charged admission for people to come and see him, and apparently made a lot of money that way. Doesn’t everyone want to gawk at some poor guy with no legs?
There are a lot of rather wild theories about who he was and where he came from, but no one knows to this day. Some say he was royalty, but that theory doesn’t really have a leg to stand on.
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