” I heard voices again last night.”

“Me, too.  About midnight?”

“Yeah.  I was asleep but I woke up enough to hear ’em and then listened for a bit and then rolled over and back to sleep.  Weird, eh?”

“Very.  I mean, there are no boaters, no kayakers, no campers nor even any neighbours. It’s winter and we are still hearing voices.  It’s like they are just down the shore.  The part that keeps me awake is that I just can’t seem to make out a single word.  It’s conversation for sure and it has to be English because it doesn’t have any weird tones or whatever. And yet, I cannot make out one single word.”

“Ghosts.  Gotta be.”

Sal and I have been here for more than a decade and approximately three or four times a year we hear these voices.  Usually at night.  Sometimes late, sometimes at dawn.  The voices sound like a nice, fun, but-not-wild campfire party happening about 3 or 400 yards away. Loud voices but not yelling.  Constant.  Sounds like six or seven, maybe eight people.

At first we were pretty sure it was ghosts and, of course, we made them out to be First Nations ghosts.  But the general sound, the tempo, the tone, the similarity to a summer BBQ just seemed to rule out FN’s languages.  And every ‘hearing’ sounded the same.  It was as if the same group was gathering at the same place each time and, even more strangely, having exactly the same party.

One summer night we heard it so distinctly and so much earlier in the evening, we went in the boat, turned the corner of the point and headed to the place kayakers sometimes gather to pitch camp.  Sure enough, there was a fire and a bunch of kayakers sitting around talking and having fun.

At first we thought the mystery was solved.  But it was NOT.  Most of the time we hear the voices, it is very late, after midnight.  Sometimes early morning.  Both those facts could still be consistent with a kayaking party but not when the aren’t any kayaking parties out there.  No groups kayak in the winter. Occasionally, some lone adventurer heading to or from Alaska or some place way north will paddle by in December but it is very rare.  And the lone kayaker is the definition of quiet.  Even two such adventurers wouldn’t make the sound of a party.

This is a gaggle of voices persisting for up to an hour in much the same location and showing up at all times of the year.  They party in the mid evening, wee hours and dawn. They leave no trace.  They sound the same every time. The communicate in an English-like speech pattern but with not a single word distinct enough to make out.   It’s the same group.

I tend to believe in ghosts.  I have experienced a couple.  Sal has, too.  But Sal won’t commit  to believing (which means she doesn’t believe but she admits that she did see one….?  Think about that….that, in a nutshell is how our minds differ.  I hear dead people and live with nutty ones!).  But this is a mystery that just keeps on giving and, despite our lack of discomfort and tendency to accept the voices now as just part of the world in which we live, they still surprise us when then show up. We still listen to the voices trying to pick out some words.  We still wonder who they are and what they are saying.  And we still don’t know.