I keep my personal collection of artifacts in a mug that I use to burn incense in. Fingering through these relics now is a reminder of days spent cloaked in mud and sweat. The euphoric feeling of a cold shower after digging a trench on mornings so humid, my sunburns blistered. Tan lines that ended mid-calf from wearing duck boots, and the sweet satisfaction of sharpening the blade of my trowel.

Some say the best way to get to know a city is to take a ghost tour. Most of those people are ghosts. The following is a review of ghost tours I have participated in, with analysis of the haunting level of each. Next week, The Toast will feature a piece by a ghost tour conductor!

Lantern Ghost Tour of Boston, 2003

Tour details: This is an evening activity for a Literary Pilgrimage I have elected to go on during my junior year of high school. The stops on the Pilgrimage range from highly literary (Louisa May Alcott’s childhood home) to confusingly not-literary (performance by the Blue Man Group.) The Ghost Tour falls at the absolute zero between these two poles. Each participant holds a large lantern which I am happy to report had a real candle, none of that flickering faux-votive stuff. I quite cannily manage to land in a group with my best friend and a few other people who I trust to take something like this seriously. At one point everyone stops to take a picture with an aggrieved-looking Native American statue. As a group, we spend a fair amount of time discussing what the creepiest type of ghost is, with the males of the group claiming angry suicide victim (The Sixth Sense had come out two years prior) and girls deciding that old-woman-ghost just barely supercedes child ghost.

Most recently in Scare Yourself Silly: Robert the Doll.

Have you ever been to Calgary? If you haven’t, you should go. But don’t limit yourself to the usual tourist attractions. By all means, take advantage of the wonderful arts and culture and that permeate the city – but know this, too: Beneath it all lies something else. Something different. Something just a tiny bit… off.

There is, for example, a wall in the basement of a restaurant called Teatro. The wall is a sickly shade of yellow; no attempts to paint it a different color have ever been successful. Bring with you a small jar of hazelnut oil, paint the outline of a door on the wall with it, and push. You will find yourself in a sparsely furnished room with walls the same shade of yellow as the wall you passed through to get to it. Examine the desk to find a collection of documents written on the stationary of a bank you won’t ever have heard of and dated 1912. These documents predict every stock market crash and financial disaster around the entire world from 1912 until, astonishingly, twenty years in the future – at which point the predictions abruptly stop mid-sentence.

Or, say you find yourself in the administration building of the University of Calgary. In the basement, you’ll find a disused office. You’ll have to do a little work to get into it; its door has been painted shut and a broken bookcase has been placed in front of it. Once you make your way inside, however, you’ll discover a room that has seemingly been untouched for roughly 30 years. The degrees hanging on the wall reveal that the office once belonged to a Dr. Earl Wiser, PhD; his specialty appears to have been history, but you’ll find no record of Dr. Wiser in the university’s records. The books in the bookcases lining the walls all cover the Second World War, as does the ream of paper stacked next to the typewriter on the desk. There’s just one problem: According to both the typewriter and the books, the Axis powers won.

Most recently in Scare Yourself Silly: The Himuro Mansion.

He is four years old when the doll comes to him.

It is a gift from his family’s maid, a girl from an exotic place called The Ba-ha-mas (the word means little to him; after all, he is very young). The doll is dressed in a sailor suit and carries a small toy of its own, a stuffed lion; its face bears an expression not unlike the jes-ters he has seen entertaining the kings and queens in his picture books. At 40 inches, it is nearly as tall as he is himself; it is stuffed with wool made from wood (excelsior, his parents tell him), and its hair seems to him as though it might be real.

He is fascinated by the doll, entranced by it – so much so that he gives it his own name. Or does the doll choose the name itself? He is unsure, but he would not be surprised to find that the doll had done it on its own.

He begins to carry it with him everywhere.