The Ghost of Meaford Mary

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On May 17th, 1961, President John F.

Kennedy stood before the Canadian Parliament and delivered the following words.

It is just and fitting and appropriate and traditional that I should come here to Canada across a border that knows neither guns nor guerrillas.

Geography has made us neighbors.

History has made us friends.

Economics has made us partners.

And necessity has made us allies.

Those whom nature has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

Current politics aside, we here at Wartime Stories have our own partnership with Canada, both in the tens of thousands of loyal and dedicated viewers, many of whom have shared their stories with us, and with Jake Howard, our Canadian writer, war history enthusiast, and all-around swell guy.

Speaking of war, aside from the War of 1812, Canadian and American soldiers have served alongside one another on countless battlefields across history, from World War I all the way up to the Global War on Terror.

Don't let their cheerful demeanor, tasty syrup, and love for poutine fool you.

When it comes to fighting, Canadians are as tough as they come.

Even when we aren't at war, it's not uncommon for soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen from the U.S.

and Canada to participate in joint training exercises.

One of the bases that often hosts these exercises is Canadian Forces Base Meaford.

Located on what used to be sprawling farmland in southern Ontario, CFB Meaford, or simply the Tank Range, serves as the primary training center for reserve units of the 4th Canadian Division.

Like its American counterparts, such as Fort Campbell, Meaford is always buzzing with military activity.

And like Fort Campbell, it has its share of strange stories.

To put it bluntly, if you ask any members of the Canadian forces who were familiar with the base, CFB Meaford is one of the most haunted postings in the entire military.

I've never been to Meaford or personally trained with Canadian soldiers, but after reading these stories, I'll forward the same word of caution that they do to anyone heading to CFB Meaford.

If you you are out there training and hear the sound of a little girl calling for help in the dead of night, or see a little girl with glowing blue eyes in the woods,

stay where you are.

Do not, under any circumstances, go looking for her

because it might be the last thing you ever do.

This is the smoke pit, and these are the true and chilling stories

of Meford Mary.

I'm Luke Lamana,

and this is Wartime Stories.

Check that out, eh?

Old farmhouse.

Think that's from the pioneer days or something.

Hmm, maybe.

Robertson said the entire training area was loaded with ruins like that.

Maybe even some old graveyards.

Think that has anything to do with the story he was telling us?

About that little girl?

You don't believe that old blue-eyed shit, do you?

He's probably just trying to scare us new guys, dude.

I don't know, man.

This place is kind of giving me the creeps.

Money, yes, you were one of those kids that thought the house hippo was real, too, huh?

We all thought the house hippo was real.

Don't try to be cool and pretend like you didn't.

This first story was originally submitted to Nick Orton's Tales from the Grid Square Project.

An airman with the Royal Canadian Air Force was participating in training on CFB Meaford and had the strangest experience of his life.

He writes,

Back before I joined the RCAF, I was an Army reservist in my home province of Ontario.

All the combat units in the brigade sent their new recruits to CFB Meaford, the training area for Land Force Central.

I spent the summer of 2014 there for my infantry DP-1 development period.

The place is in the middle of nowhere on the Georgian Bay, about 50 square kilometers, riddled with ruins of old stone farms and dilapidated graveyards.

When you arrive in Meaford, you start hearing the story of Meaford Mary in passing.

Even the old guard knows about her.

Stories differ, but supposedly, before the military took ownership of the land, a young girl in the late 1800s tripped and fell down down a well and then drowned while crying helplessly for her parents.

I can confirm that this well still exists.

Now, she said to stalk the training area at night.

Most of us were around 17 or 18 at the time and had a good chuckle about the whole idea.

Close to the end of the course, me and one of the boys were manning the gun at the 6 o'clock position of our platoon hide site at around 0300 in a wooded area near one of the graveyards.

Everyone else was asleep, except the guys at these clock positions keeping watch.

I remember it being a dark, windless night.

Hey, what time is it?

You've got a watch.

Yeah, but back light doesn't work.

Busted it on the repel tower.

Oh,

nice.

It's O three hundred.

The witching hour.

Aw, is that a rippet?

Yep.

Here I am tipping a coffee packet, eh?

Should I thought to break?

So much for light discipline.

Hey, what's with the blue lights?

I don't even think any of our guys.

Whatna?

So, we're staring out into the woods.

Could only see maybe five feet in front of us.

Then, maybe

20 yards away, we see these two glowing blue lights, like eyes.

They first go from left to right, and then it was like they turned to face in our direction, like

whatever this was had just noticed us.

The lights start moving toward us,

and now it gave the distinct impression of being eyes, because they were bobbing up and down.

like someone walking.

But we didn't hear anything.

It was totally silent.

We didn't even hear the rustling of leaves.

I don't think it really hit us what we were seeing, but we were just frozen.

And then it stopped a few yards away, and that's when we heard her.

The distinct voice of a little girl crying.

We just...

Stared at it,

and then the glow went out like it had never been there at at all,

and everything was quiet again.

When we looked around the hide site, everyone else nearby was still asleep.

At the time, we just chalked it up to some of the staff messing with us and laughed it off.

But I know what a headlamp looks like.

I know what a grown man sounds like.

And I know that nothing four to five feet tall could move through those woods without making a sound.

The Canadian Armed Forces is a small community, and I've met a number of others who have encountered Miford Mary.

She's also been simply called Blue Eyes.

I'm convinced that we came face to face with her that night.

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Hey, it's Luke, the host of Wartime Stories.

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So, we're screwed, right?

Bad enough that it's dark.

Now I can't see a damn thing in this fog.

How about you quit whining and actually say something useful?

Look, the nav point's got to be around here somewhere.

We're in the saddle, right?

The grid point says it's on the south side of the northernmost hill.

Leave it to the army to put a nav point way out here in the tulees.

What are you doing, Jacobs?

I'm gonna walk back to the other side of that hill.

If it's a gradual slope on the other side, then I'll know we're at least in the right saddle.

Genius.

At least one of us paid attention in class.

Was that a kid?

All the way out here?

Ah.

Hello?

The soldier in this next story, also first submitted to Tales from the Grid Square, found himself in a situation that most lieutenants can relate to.

Lost in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night during a land navigation exercise, and as a dense fog settled over the training area, a most unsettling thing happened.

He writes,

I think I had an encounter with the old Meford Mary.

Let me set the scene.

Full night land navigation practice, multiple points throughout the area.

And of course, the very last nav point was all the way out in the boonies.

I cleared the entire way through the night without much issue and reached the approximate location of the last grid point around 0200, 0230.

But it was around that time when it got insanely foggy.

NVGs, headlamps, with white or red light, it didn't matter.

We couldn't see anything.

By this time, there was a group of four of us, and the boys and I didn't know what the hell to do.

After taking about 20 minutes to confirm the location,

we heard something in the distance.

A female voice saying,

help me.

Help me.

Not knowing where it came from, we radioed it in and were told that we were the only ones in that area.

I know it doesn't sound as wild compared to some other stories, but damn, the uneasy feeling you get when you can't see five feet in front of you and you hear that out in the distance really makes your hair stand on end.

I don't know which is more terrifying, hearing the disembodied voice of a ghost out in the woods at night,

or the thought that there was actually a little girl out there who needed help, and she was never found.

For the soldiers listening, I'm not sure why these guys couldn't have still located their nav point in the fog.

Maybe they were all lieutenants.

I had this happen to me, which is frustrating.

But there's a land nav technique for this exact scenario.

Using the larger terrain features, which is I'm sure what they did, you get as close as you can to the right area where the point, which is usually like an engineering stake, stuck into the ground.

You get as close to the point as you can using your map and your compass.

And if the point is hard to find, like you just don't see it, well, you start from one point, you start walking in a spiral, concentric circles, going further and further out until you run into the nav point.

It can take some time, but it works.

But if you start hearing the voice of a little girl calling for help, or see blue eyes floating through the air,

yeah, that's not covered in the guidebook.

Just try not to stumble into any nearby wells.

Dude, can we wake him up?

Bro's snoring is gonna lead the op four right to us.

I mean, you think they don't already know where we are?

Yeah, but sleep apnea over here ain't doing us any favors.

Hold on a sec.

Hmm?

Is that

what

you see something?

Dude.

What?

You're gonna think I'm nuts.

Why?

Because unless one of the op four brought their kids to work today,

I just saw a little girl.

This next story was sent to me a while back by a soldier with the Canadian Army.

He writes,

Blue Eyes is her name.

She was a young girl who lived on a farm in the area now occupied by CFB Meaford.

She fell into a nearby well where she sadly passed away.

After joining the military, many unit members would would taunt us new guys with stories of blue eyes roaming the base and wreaking havoc.

In 2017, I attended the Canadian Forces Base Meaford in Ontario, Canada for my infantry course.

I was on the field portion of the course where we dug up trenches and learned how to live and fight out of a defensive position.

This trench system was about 100 feet outside of a mock training town, overlooking a gravel road, a big open field, and forest in the distance.

This portion of the training involved sleep deprivation and high stress operation.

One night while manning my three-man trench, something happened that I will never forget.

We were on the furthest left trench manning a machine gun with night vision goggles.

We took turns sleeping, but since my trench had three people, two of us were always on guard.

I periodically scanned the the road and landscape in front of me with my night vision, looking out for enemy activity.

As I was scanning the road, I saw a little girl with long black hair and a white dress

run down the road from our left.

She was running at a pace that I can only describe as inhumanly possible.

I pulled the NVGs off and I could see her dimly, but now her eyes were like two bright blue lights moving down the road.

I was really just in disbelief at what I was seeing.

I quickly put the nods back on, and when I put them back on, she was still running.

After running 50 to 100 feet, she stopped dead and then turned and ran back the other way.

I realized right away that this was the girl that I'd heard so many stories about.

I told my buddy what we saw, but

we laughed it off as a hallucination.

After graduating, I did a bit of research and found that many soldiers share similar stories at CFB Meaford.

Soldiers were actually known to fall out of patrol formations because they hear her voice or see her eyes glowing off in the distance.

When these guys were finally located, apparently they would sometimes be found at the well the little girl died in.

Based on what I read, this became such a problem that the Army ended up filling the well with concrete and putting a chain link fence around it.

It's a popular site that instructors will show you when you're training in the field.

So

what happened?

Some rookie hardy gunners accidentally plastered one of the utility roads.

Yeah

something like that.

Nice

is it uh is it just me

or did it get cold all of a sudden?

Yeah,

it did, didn't it?

Hold up

11 o'clock.

Flashlight.

Is that someone with the cadre?

Might be a civilian.

They sometimes hop.

Nobody move.

Sir.

What do you mean?

That's a kid.

She probably needs

ignore her.

Sir?

That is the way to the old well.

The old well,

yeah.

A lot of guys have fallen into it.

No one's died yet, but they all said that they followed the voice of a little girl.

Sir, you can't.

Do I sound like I'm joking?

Pass the word down the patrol.

Make sure Jimmy knows.

Ignore the voice.

We keep moving.

This next story was submitted in the early 2010s by a Canadian soldier to the Toronto and Ontario Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society.

He writes:

On my basic training course, we were told about the ghost of a little girl on the east coast of the peninsula.

The story is that the little girl had been out picking flowers, as she normally did before dinner, when her mother called.

Her house and that area of the base is all forest and sits on top of a huge cliff edge that goes down into Georgian Bay.

The little girl's mom called and she came running, but what she didn't see was the old boarded up well that her parents always warned her about.

She fell down into the well and was there for a good while.

As she was eight years old and could swim, it took a long time for her to be overcome with hypothermia,

and she eventually drowned in the well.

She screamed for help the whole time.

A gravestone still sits outside between the house and the well.

I have seen it.

Two years ago, I was on a patrol with my section commander and three other guys.

We were doing a reconnaissance patrol of a road over that way.

It was mid-August, about 0-300 in the morning.

We had reports from base command Command that new artillery gunners might have hit an old road that went through that part of the woods.

Command wanted us to get eyes on the damage to know if we could still use the hilly forest road.

As we began our walk to the extraction point on the side of a road, we could see something moving in the woods.

There was a little white glow, and We could all feel that we were being watched.

We all wanted out of there.

The air turned like ice and our hair stood on end.

Our stomachs dropped to our feet when we heard, help me, please help me,

from a little girl's voice far off in the distance.

We all knew we heard it, but our section commander said, no,

that's the way to the old well.

Lots of troops have fallen into that well.

Luckily, none have died yet, but anyone who has went after the little girl has fallen into the well.

We soon realized that we had lost one of our troops on the patrol.

We went back to find him headed right for the well.

He said, I could hear a little girl moaning for help, and I lost track of you guys after I stopped to listen.

We grabbed him and left the area.

When we got back to the road, the truck was waiting for us.

I have only only been out that way on the base one other time.

On that fighting patrol, at about the same time of night and a year and one month later, I saw what I thought to be a little girl in an old Victorian-style nightgown in the woods about 150 meters away.

This time I saw her through IR night vision goggles.

No voice accompanied this apparition, only her and the the same creepy feeling.

The air once again turned cold and the hair on my neck stood on end.

A couple of years after that last story was posted to the Toronto and Ontario Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society's webpage, a Canadian soldier read it.

He then submitted his own account to the Society, which they posted underneath the first one as a response.

He writes,

As a general rule for all of us CF personnel, we aren't allowed to enter gravesites within the training area as respect for the dead.

A bit of an addition to the posted encounter.

In late 2007, I was posted to LFCA TC Meaford to do my DP-1 infantry course.

Blue Eyes seemed like a bit of a running joke among some of the staff, who in some cases would shrug you off if you asked about the tale.

In November, my course was doing its one-week defensive exercise in the Hogsback area, training area 5 Alpha.

on the linked map.

I don't recall exact grids of our position, unfortunately.

The exercise was geared at defensive positions and sleep deprivation.

By week's end, people were seeing all sorts of things.

Batman running through the camp, etc.

However, myself and a few others do recall seeing, through our night vision goggles, a human figure walking through the field in front of us.

When we challenged about their identity, the figure disappeared and did not reappear.

There were no enemy force, OP4, active that night, and none of the staff were forward of our trenches.

There shouldn't have been anybody out there.

The human figure was too far away to tell gender or height, but it was most definitely not wearing army gear.

Just a white human shape walking around.

On a separate field exercise, my wreck-it patrol walked through some ruins and came across an open well.

A few of us noted that we had that distinct, we're being watched, feeling.

But again, no military personnel were active in that area aside from us.

I don't know if this will help any, but I figured it couldn't hurt to share.

These are some of the longer stories available to read, but they are hardly the full scope of the experiences recounted by Canadian soldiers over the years regarding Meaford Mary.

There are soldiers training or working in the area around CFB Meaford who have never seen any ghosts, but confirm that the area is creepy and certain locations always left them feeling inexplicably chilled.

After reading through these stories and a handful of other smaller anecdotes, I think it's safe safe to say that Meaford Mary is one of, if not the most, prolific paranormal legend in the Canadian Armed Forces, at least among the units based out of southern Ontario.

Interestingly enough, there seems to be a fair amount of historical backing to lend credibility to the story.

When it was first settled in 1837, Meaford was only home to a handful of small homesteads.

But by the time it was incorporated as a town in 1874, it had become a sprawling farming community, home to about 1,700 people.

When World War II rolled around, the Canadian military was in desperate need of land for the purpose of training their newly raised armored divisions and artillery units.

Meaford, with its wide open grasslands, terrain variations, and cheap price, was an attractive option for the federal government.

So the land was purchased in 1942 and the Army had their new training ground.

As for the 200 200 families still living in Meaford at the time, well, they didn't have any say in the matter.

As soon as the sale was finalized, they were ordered to pack up their belongings and practically abandon their homes overnight.

Despite government promises to compensate the displaced families and claims that they would be able to move back when the war was over, neither of these ever happened.

The many abandoned homesteads and cemeteries scattered throughout the base now stand as somber reminders of the people who once called Mieford home.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much information about how far back tales of Miford Mary actually go.

All the stories shared by soldiers seem to come from the last three decades, but it would be interesting to know if the men training for combat in World War II had similar run-ins with this spirit.

As far as the grave sites go, some Canadian soldiers are convinced that they've actually located the grave of Miford Mary.

It's even become a bit of a tradition for troops to visit the grave during their downtime between exercises.

But after looking at the photos and reading the faded writing, the name and epitaph on the headstone raises questions as to why anyone would think this is the right grave.

Jemima, child of Alexander and Henrietta McLaren, died May 8, 1874, aged 19 years and 8 months and 14 days.

With respect to the young woman buried there, and probably better for her sake, it really doesn't make much sense for this woman to be the ghost of Miford Mary.

Most, if not all, accounts of the spirit describe her as being a little girl, about seven or eight years old, not 19.

As for finding any information about children who died in the town, most of Meaford's historical records are difficult to come by, at least those detailing life before the arrival of the military.

This isn't surprising, given that Meaford was already such a small, middle-of-nower community to begin with.

But there is one thing worth pointing out.

According to the Toronto and Ontario Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society, They were contacted in 2012 by another Canadian serviceman in response to their article about Meaford Mary.

The soldier was active duty at the time, and before arriving at the base, he wasn't familiar with the Meford Mary legend, nor did he consider himself to be any kind of ghost or paranormal enthusiast.

He did, however, have an interest in photography.

While he was on the base, he spent his downtime taking photos of the old ruins and graves scattered around the training area.

It was during one of these outings that he stumbled across something, a single gravestone from over a century ago, worn down by exposure and neglect.

Despite its poor condition, the epitaph was still legible.

In memory of May Williams, died June 26, 1890, age seven years, one month, eight days.

She has gone to heaven before us, but she turns and waves her hand, pointing to glories o'er us in the fair and happy land.

The photos he took were posted to the Research Society article, but the links seem to have become corrupted and the photos are no longer visible.

Of course, there's no way to know how the young Mae Williams actually died.

A century ago, children died from pneumonia, probably far more often than from falling down wells.

But regardless, the fact that this little girl's grave does exist on the CFB training grounds does add an air of intrigue and somberness to the ghost story.

Perhaps instead of Mary, the legends should be known as Meeford May.

As with many ghost stories, we are left with the question of which is more horrifying?

To encounter the spirit of a little girl crying for help in the woods?

Or

to imagine that the reason her spirit continues to be seen by Canadian soldiers is because that is how she spent the final moments of her life.

Trapped, alone,

scared,

crying out for anyone who could hear her.

And no one ever did.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive produced by Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Written by Jake Howard and myself.

Audio editing and sound design by me, Luke Lamana, and Alex Carpenter.

Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stiddam.

Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.

Mixed and mastered by Brendan Kane.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone.

Production coordination by Avery Siegel.

Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden.

Artwork by Jessica Cloxen Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picada.

If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com.

Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.

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