Ghost Stories and History

William took a picture of Katherine:

At the same time that she was taking a picture of him:

This seems to have crossed the streams, because something strange happened when preparing this image for upload. I found that if I converted it to black and white:

And then zoomed in a bit, I could some campers from days gone by:

Or Not ...

It is interesting to learn about other people that have used the park over the years. While searching for Bug Lake trip reports from August 2020, I found this picture from the Algonquin Provincial Park Archives & Collections. This photo was taken on August 14, 1946 from the same Bug Lake campsite.

Unsurprisingly, the campsite's huge front porch rock has changed very little in 75 years. We were just lucky that Katherine took a picture from nearly the same location. The reverse angle in William's image is another view of the rocks that are visible in that 1946 picture.

Mrs. McHardy-Smith

With some more googling, I learned that Mrs. McHardy-Smith (shown on the right here) was a previous owner of the cottage on Gilmour Island, which we passed on the way in. I can imagine that Mr. and Mrs. Neil Fergusson were visiting from Toronto, and they all took the 800m portage for lunch at Bug Lake. Perhaps the McHardy-Smith's even left that canoe on the lake for fishing.

In talking with Madison Somerville (from Friends of Algonquin) I learned that Mrs. McHardy-Smith was the mother of Ann Sinclair, who is famous for having canoed 1500km of the Mackenzie River in 1982. Ann Sinclair passed away in 2013, her obituary noting that she spent many summers at Cedar Lake.