Three Knocks: An Atlantic Ghost Story

Do you remember the man at the start of the episode, the one who saw his own face? We're starting with him, because the belief behind that story runs underneath of every single thing that you're going to hear tonight.

On the East Coast, they call it a forerunner.

A forerunner is a sign that comes before a death or a disaster.

And I don't mean a bad feeling in your gut.

I mean something real, something outside of you.

Three heavy knocks on a wall at night, and you get up, you check, and there's no one there.

A picture that falls off the hook by itself in an empty room.

A light moving out on the water where you know there is no boat.

A clock that stops all on its own the exact minute somebody dies 40 miles away.

And then a few days later, someone's gone.

And the family nods quietly because they already knew.

They got the warning.

Now, the woman who collected most of these stories was named Helen Creighton, and she's the reason why we have any of it written down at all.

So I want you to actually know who she was.

She was from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, born in 1899.

And starting back in the 1920s, she spent decades driving the back roads of the Maritimes, hauling around this heavy, awkward recording equipment and going house to house.

sitting in people's kitchens with a cup of tea in front of her, getting them to give her the old songs and the old stories before the people who'd remembered them died.

She actually collected something like 4,000 songs and stories in her lifetime.

She even got six honorary doctorates and the Order of Canada for it.

She is, no exaggeration, the most important folklorist this country has ever had.

And in 1957, she put the ghost stories into one book called Blue Nose Ghosts.

And if you only ever read one book of Canadian folklore in your life, well, make it that one.

But here's what makes it so unsettling to read.

These are not campfire tales that she dressed up.

These are first-person accounts.