There comes a time in one’s monster-blogging career where the well of holiday-themed boogeymen runs dry. This year, I perused a couple cheery articles about how Santa loves the flesh of small children (tip: distract him by leaving out cookies instead), but struggled to find enough material to write an actual post on. 

In the end, I decided to follow an old holiday tradition that scratches the same itch: the Christmas ghost story. 

This solstice, our tale takes us up north, to the site of one of the most peculiar structures in Canada–White Otter Castle. 

The ultimate Lincoln Logs

White Otter Castle is not a castle in a traditional sense. It is a 24×28 foot, three-story log cabin masterpiece. There’s even a turret. A 14×20 foot room lines the back of the building, and steep stairs climb to the upper floors. The logs are carefully hewn, the gaps between them perfectly chinked. Tall windows gape out into the Ontario woods.

The castle sits on the rocky banks of White Otter Lake–a remote, 21,000-acre fisherman’s paradise that gets up to 11 stories deep. To visit the castle, you have to take either a boat or a bush plane. Over 100 years after its construction, there is still no footpath in. 

Despite the difficulty getting there, vandals have managed. Over the years, they have carved hundreds of obscenities into the castle’s neat walls and ceiling. The nonprofit Friends of White Otter Castle led a wave of restoration efforts in the 1980s and again in 2021, but the vandals keep coming. Cameras watch the area now, with “smile!” signs warning would-be defacers that they’re being watched. 

The castle deserves protecting. After all, it’s not impressive just for its unusual construction, size, or age. No: White Otter Castle is impressive because it was built by one man. 

Little Dremel boy

Jimmy McOuat (pronounced mc-kew-it) was born in 1855 to a family of Scottish stonemasons in Brownsburg, Quebec. It was a large family, and though Jimmy was not large himself, he quickly learned to pull his weight. 

When he came of age, Jimmy took his construction skills west as a pioneer, building a homestead for himself in Ontario. He loved the natural world and quickly found his place in it. Thanks to his talent and hard work, the farm flourished. But he was alone. Jimmy had everything he wanted…except for a wife. 

So, in what was doubtless the most romantic gesture of 1887, he wrote a letter to demand that his new neighbor go fetch him one. 

“Our short acquaintance did not suit me. I want you to get me a woman, rather a wife. Well, I want you to get me a good one. Remember you’ll have to live alongside of her.”

Jimmy went on to list several required attributes, from the way the woman grew up to her weight to the color of her hair. His selling points for himself? He didn’t swear (“hundreds could attest to that”). And he was a moral man. 

Shockingly, Jimmy’s neighbor obliged him. Even more shockingly, the neighbor found a woman willing to marry the ole’ charmer. But for whatever reason, the feeling wasn’t mutual. Ultimately, Jimmy backed out. He sold his homestead, and then threw all that he had into going farther out west and prospecting for gold. 

That went about as well as it went for everyone else. After years of saving and back-breaking work, Jimmy lost everything. He was as alone as ever.

Frosty the hermit

Now Jimmy moved to White Otter Lake, close to the site where he would ultimately construct his masterpiece. He built another cabin. This time, instead of farming, he became a trapper–the only person to live on the lake year-round. To say he set himself up far from other people is an understatement. The nearest town, Ignace, was 30 miles away. The trip there took more than a day, and that was only one way, and in good weather. 

Jimmy did make the trip sometimes, mostly for essentials he couldn’t get from the land. The townsfolk would remember him as a man lit up by nature, with keen eyes peering from a heavily tanned face. He was not unkind, helping neighbors after a fire and giving children candy (though with sand in it. Jimmy claimed it was good for children to have a little sand in their candy. No one could tell whether he was joking). But living so far from civilization, he was 100% a recluse.

No one knows for sure why Jimmy started building White Otter Castle. Construction took some time, from 1903 to about 1915. When a reporter asked him about it, Jimmy told him a story: When he was a child, his friend threw a corncob and hit an older man in the ear. Furious, the man whirled, and, thinking the perpetrator was Jimmy, cursed him: “Ye’ll never do no good! Ye’ll die in a shack!” Jimmy was still shaken all these years later. He built the castle to buttress against that fate. “What do you think of my home?” he asked the reporter, and anyone else who came to visit. “Does it look like a shack to you?”

So that’s what Jimmy said. The other rumor was that Jimmy was continuing his quest for a wife. People whispered that, smitten with an unknown woman, Jimmy built the castle as a wedding gift. 

That gift required no small amount of effort: alone, he felled trees, pulled them from the woods, and hewed them into the right shape. Alone, he used a block and tackle to haul the logs into place, though some weighed as much as 1600 pounds. Alone, he hauled roofing and windows in 15 trips across the expanse from Ignace. 

It was a frontiersman’s magnum opus. But it was all for naught. The woman never showed.

Blue, blue, blue Christmas

Jimmy grew into more and more of a hermit. While he had occasional visitors, he generally chafed at anyone else setting foot on his land. When loggers moved onto the shores of the lake, he wrote increasingly irate letters in an attempt to get the legal deed for his property. “They’re on my back!” he protested.

At the same time, he was clearly still lonely. One visitor to the castle found the huge front room full of bunk beds. He asked Jimmy what the deal was. Jimmy, now in his 60’s, replied blithely, “Oh, when I get married, my wife is going to have lots of company coming here.”

In 1918, on Christmas day, Jimmy failed to show up for a dinner at his neighbor’s house (“neighbor” being a loose term–their property was some 12 miles from the castle). Concerned, the neighbor snowshoed over to check on him. He found White Otter Castle empty, pails of water frozen all the way to the bottom. No one had been there in some time. Jimmy had disappeared. 

Ontario’s winter weather being what it is, the mystery remained unsolved until over six months later, after the spring thaw. From the Fort Frances Times and Rainy Lake Herald (or at least a website claiming to have the transcripts of the Fort Frances Times and Rainy Lake Herald), 1919:

“The body of Jimmy McQuat, the hermit of White Otter Lake, who has been missing since last October, was found on June 27th by T.C. Campbell, a fire ranger.

“The head and arms were gone, but the body was identified, and the mystery of his disappearance solved. He had apparently fallen into the water near his home while working on his nets, and becoming entangled with them was drowned, although he was said to be a good swimmer.”

Obviously, there were some unanswered questions. But if you’re hoping for closure, don’t hold your breath. The mystery of Jimmy’s death was never fully solved.

At least no one had to wonder where the headless, armless, 6+ month-old waterlogged corpse would be buried. Jimmy had already built his own grave. His headstone? The castle he so loved.  

Do you see what I see?

Given the drama of Jimmy’s story, it’s no surprise that his castle is haunted. Jimmy despised the loggers making a mess in his neighborhood. What would he think of teenagers desecrating his house? Of young lovers canoodling in its shadows, when he himself was so utterly alone?

Strange sounds echo from inside the wooden walls. Sensitive people feel a change in energy, as if they are not alone (sometimes quite unpleasantly). And if visitors look closely, they might spot Jimmy watching from the woods.

Around 1991, a man and his family canoed out to explore the castle up close. Even in a state of disrepair, it took their breath away. After lingering at Jimmy’s burial site, they decided to make camp a little ways away. 

After dinner, the wife and kids went to bed, while the man stayed up to make sure the fire died down. Experienced in bush camping, he made sure it was out completely–poured a couple gallons of water on it, and covered it in sand. The smoke gone, the forest quiet, the man turned in for the night. 

He woke a few hours later to the sound of crackling flames. An orange glow seeped through the tent walls. Frustrated and confused, the man struggled out of his sleeping bag and unzipped his tent. Then he had a surprise:

“I saw an older man with a floppy hat poking the fire. He was sitting right where I had been sitting. He was a man of small stature and looked directly at me.”

He had to be dreaming. Shaking his head, the man got back in his sleeping bag and fell back to sleep. The next morning, the fire was just as he had left it–completely and utterly cold.

It wasn’t until much later, after he heard all the stories of other campers in the area experiencing the same thing, that he put two and two together:

“I had a real tingle shoot up my back. I realized that maybe what I saw was not a dream but an encounter. I really wish I would have taken up his silent invitation to sit around the fire with him…That was the last night I saw him.”

The man was spooked, but never felt like he was in danger. Why? Because though Jimmy remains alone in death, sometimes people give him a consolation:

“He may have realized we did not come to harm his property, but simply to admire it.”

 ****

Scary Solstice to all! Would a fireside chat with a ghost be better or worse with swearing? Share your opinions in the comments below.

IMAGE CRED: Thank you very much to Joel & Jasmin Førestbird for the visual ASMR of fitted logs, BiblioArchives for the old timey photographs, ForestWander.com for the snowy cabin, Finally, to Tony Webster for the main image (slightly altered so that it will fit in a rectangle; his original photo was even more stunning).