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One Man's Eerie River Crossing

ALONG THE RIVER--It was a dark and foggy night--mostly because of the darkness and the fog. Some say the fog that night was thicker than phlegm, and couldn't be cut with even the sharpest of your father's steak knives. The roads were practically unnavigable, were it not for the lines dividing one side from the other. And the river was blanketed from bank to bank, covered more completely than the fibreglass insulation in your attic. The visibility was so limited, an embarrassed teen wouldn't have been able to lance the boil on the end of his own nose. And one man's tale of a ghostly crossing will be told again and again until it becomes legend, or until people really get sick of it.

Jean-Jacques Laroque, a raspberry farmer from the near side of the river was caught in the fog that night. He was trying to deliver a shipment of seedless raspberry jam to a local market on the other side when the fog rolled in unannounced like a mother-in-law on a long weekend.

Jean-Jacques Laroque points to the ferry dock from where he says he and his Ford pick-up were mysteriously ferried from one side of the river to the other.

Jean-Jacques claims that the ferries were out of service that evening, because not even the sharpest river captain in the service would be able to negotiate the wild currents in those blind conditions. But he says a mysterious ghostly vessel pulled up to the terminal despite the fog, loaded Jean-Jacques and his truckload of raspberry jam, and ferried him across to the other side.

"It's true I tell you," said Jean-Jacques, who has been making the same trip since he started delivering raspberries for his father when he was twelve--two years before he got his driver's license. "This was the very place where that there ghost ferry ferried me from one side to the other. They say this river's haunted. Well I do anyhow."

Jean-Jacques recites the events.

"There was an eerie stillness on the river that night," Jean-Jacques recalls. "I was ready to turn around and head back to the farm, when out of the fog came that there ghost ferry, which docked itself at the loading ramp--much in the same way the regular ferries do. A ghostly deckhand beckoned me aboard this strange spectral vessel, his face hidden behind the insubstantial mist. I drove my truck onto the deck of the ferry, not knowing what it was that was keeping me from splashing into the river."

Jean-Jacques says it was a lifetime of watching Scooby-Doo cartoon reruns that helped him keep his sanity.

"The ghost ferry's horn kept blowing, sounding like the cries of a choking moose with two apples shoved up its nostrils," described Jean-Jacques. "All the while, the ghost ferry silently carried me across the river--practically floating from one side to the other! When I drove off the ferry on the other side, I was more scared than a talking rabbit caught stealing a box of fruity cereal from a group of angry tweens."

Jean-Jacques recalls the night when the River Mare, an old steam-powered ferry, sunk on this very same river back in 1968. He thinks that his was the spirit of that lost vessel that carried him across the river.

"It was a night not much different than this one that the old Mare went down," states Jean-Jacques. "Except I can't tell you that for certain, as I wasn't there--in person anyhow."

No one had any reason to doubt Jean-Jacque's story. They believed him when he said he shot that space-suited alien in his driveway riding the mysterious two-wheeled spacecraft--it was on the same night that that young motorcyclist disappeared. And they believed his story about the bizarre, erratic crop circles discovered on his front lawn, although his neighbours found an empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the seat of his tractor-mower the next day.

Jean-Jacque's story was confirmed when the ferry corporation admitted that yes, it was foggy that night. However, the ferry commissioner denied any report that their ferries were out of service that night. In fact, he stated quite plainly that it was "business as usual" despite the foggy conditions, mostly thanks to the GPS equipment recently installed on each ferry in the fleet.

And the commissioner further stated that the River Mare never sank--it was retired to dry-dock in 1982. In fact, you can see the River Mare in the main harbour near the mouth of the river, where the tourism board conducts tours on it every weekend.

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