An integral part of Canadian mythology is The New Republic's 1986 most-boring-headline award to The New York Times for "Worthwhile Canadian initiative." The U.S. magazine said each of the headline's three words is sleep-inducing on its own and, "taken together, they are virtually lethal."

British novelist Kingsley Amis fleshed out the genre by proposing the fictional title "Canadian Wit and Humour" for a list of the world's shortest books. A visiting British journalist in 1984 -- 17 years before The Daily Telegraph's Robert Philip discovered Deadmonton -- wrote home that we were "a great white waste of time."

An Australian writer called us frozen Americans. Clever.

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The downside is Canadians come to believe the image reflected back to them from the global mirror -- "They say we're boring; we guess we must be, eh?" -- and the more defining mythology of Canada as a place of forbidding and forbidden mystery (consider the vaginal forests of an Emily Carr painting) gets short shrift.

The late poet Douglas Le Pan called us "Wild Hamlet with the features of Horatio." Meaning we may look to the world and each other like a convention of actuaries -- "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" -- but underneath we're raging romantics and maybe dark souls with secrets.

"No one knows my country, neither the stranger nor its own sons," wrote journalist Bruce Hutchison in his 1942 The Unknown Country. "My country has not found itself nor felt its power nor learned its true place. . . . Who but us can feel our fears and hopes and passions? How can aliens or even blood brothers know our inner doubts, our secret strengths and weaknesses and loves and lusts and shames? Who can know our loneliness, on the immensity of the prairie, in the dark forest and on the windy sea rock?"

For some of us, Mr. Hutchison was a more profound read as a lyrical portraitist of Canada than as a political journalist.

In any event, for mysteries of the True North we turn to John Robert Colombo, who has kept a third eye on the subject -- 24 books published on the paranormal in Canada -- while engaged in the larger task of coaxing Canadiana from the margins of North American life. From his records:

Toronto's and maybe Canada's best-known haunted house is the former residence of the city's first mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie -- whose grandson, W. L. M. King, partook in séances and spoke to his dead mother.

The founders of the modern spiritualist movement were 19th-century Ontario farmgirls Katie, Maggie and Leah Fox.

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The first "crop circles" were reported in Saskatchewan, not the English downs.

The village of Angikuni in the Northwest Territories vanished in 1930.

The most famous mystery ship is the Nova Scotia-built Mary Celeste.

Ogopogo, the mystery beast of Lake Okanagan, was first sighted in the 1920s, about a decade before the first sighting of the Loch Ness monster.

The most widely reported 19th-century account of house poltergeistry in North America was the six-month-long haunting of the Cox family cottage in Amherst, N.S.

The most notable crisis apparition in the literature of psychical research is that of John Wynyard, who, at the point of death in England, made a well-attested appearance to his brother George in Nova Scotia on Oct. 15, 1785.

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An enigmatic people, Canadians.