The words "never seen again" are the creepiest phrase I've ever heard. They show up in childhood fantasy tales, as well as horror stories. So any story, fiction or fact, with those words haunts me. They are creepy and fascinating and a mystery usually not solved.

I turned on Tubi and watched a few episodes of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction last night. One of the episodes, 'The Kid in the Closet', was about a boy with a monster in his closet. His older brother teased him about it and then, to prove there was no monster, he went into the closet and shut the door. They heard him making a ruckus, yelling and banging at the door, then it went quiet. The Mother came in to see what was going on. She opened the closet, no one was inside. No older brother. But, his shoes and a pile of the clothes he had been wearing were there, without him.

Police were called, inspected the closet and found no way for him to get out. At the end of the episode they said he was never seen again and claimed this story is based on a true event.

Any time someone is never seen again is creepy. The police thought the boy had run away. On the show they left that sort of hanging, but doubtful. Also, the police had not found any way he would have gotten out of the closet, other than the door. His clothes and shoes were left in the closet. Those two things seem a bit odd, even after I found out more.

It turns out, according to the source I found after a bit of a search, that the boy did run away. So, how did he get out of the closet? The police didn't notice the ceiling panel when they looked? I guess he was at least wearing his underwear, the show didn't say all his clothes were left in the closet. So, it is still a little puzzle. It is possible the whole thing really is a hoax, in spite of the show saying it was fact, not fiction.

A bit of digging turns up at least one comment on the show’s IMDB message board, posted on February 12, 2008, in which the commenter shared her correspondence with someone who had worked on Beyond Belief and knew the actual truth:

“The Beyond Belief: fact or fiction story about the monster in the kid’s closet was based on an actual event that I personally investigated,” she was told. “At the time it happened there was no explanation for the boy’s disappearance— until two weeks later when it was learned that he had climbed out of the closet through a ceiling panel and ran away from home. He stayed at a friend’s house surreptitiously until the friend’s mother discovered him hiding in the attic of their home and exposed the ruse.”

The show’s producer wouldn’t discover this very important detail until it was far too late.

Source: Stranger Dimensions - Beyond Belief: The Kid in the Closet

The odd thing about this is that Hugh Cochrane has been reported as deceased and also to never have existed at all. Not the first time someone who has written about the mysterious and unexplained has been a fake name, or something like that.

Dubbed the Marysburgh Vortex, or alternatively “The Graveyard of Lake Ontario,” the small stretch of water off the shores of Prince Edward County has for centuries played host to shipwrecks, airplane mishaps, strange sightings and mysterious disappearances.

Global News has identified at least 270, and as many as 500, ships that met their watery end in this part of the lake. And at least 40 planes have met a similar grisly fate in and around these shores — a far higher concentration of shipwrecks and plane crashes than can be found in the famous Bermuda Triangle in the North Atlantic Ocean.

...mysterious tales from the eastern shores of Lake Ontario that are documented in Hugh F. Cochrane’s 1980 book Gateway to Oblivion.

“The locals were aware of the strange stories that came out of this area,” says Picton-based storyteller and author Janet Kellough.

But it was Cochrane who came up with the name: the Marysburgh Vortex.

The Vortex is generally thought to encompass the eastern part of Lake Ontario, bounded by Prince Edward County on the west, Kingston to the east, and Oswego, N.Y. to the south.

Global News - ‘Strange things out there’: Inside Lake Ontario’s ‘Bermuda Triangle’

Articles

• Haunted Areas of British Columbia
• Haunted Fort Garry Hotel, Winnipeg: Ghost and Spirit Sightings at Manitoba Canada's Historic Hotel |
• Haunted Vancouver British Columbia, Canada: Ghosts at the Orpheum Theater,Hycroft Mansion and Hotel 

Provincial Ghost Societies and Researchers

• The Alberta Paranormal Investigators Society
• British Columbia Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society

Cities and Towns

• Ghosts of old Vancouver
• Paranormal Victoria (Victoria, B.C. based)
• EntitySeeker (Alberta based)
• Paranormal Explorers (Edmonton, Alberta based)

The following is cut and pasted from an abandoned site, on Tripod. I would have reposted more newsletters, but I only found two.

Welcome, to The STRANGE TRAVELER Hi. I'm Fred, the Robin Leach of haunted castles, alien landing fields, mystical monoliths and really cool bars. You have just stumbled into the only travel Website on the Internet that takes a "Twilight Zone" approach to vacation planning. This is how it works: First, dim the lights. Stare deeply into your computer screen. Then imagine you are in the black-and-white world of early 1960s television, sitting in a AAA travel office filled with happy brochures on Disneyland, the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. Suddenly, you realize that the terse, thin-lipped agent marking up your TripTik is actually Rod Serling, host of "The Twilight Zone" and one of modern society's first supernatural tour guides. In your head, you hear his clipped, dramatically inflected words offering guidance in your search for vacation ideas that don't center on theme parks, relatives or all-inclusive resorts: "You're traveling through another dimension - a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead. Your next stop ...Alton, Illinois." Or Pascagoula, Mississippi. Or Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Paris, Roswell, Loch Ness, the Nazca Plain, Stonehenge, Area 51, The Queen Mary or that spooky old house everyone whispered about in the neighborhood you grew up in. The Strange Traveler thinks vacations should be more than sunscreen and lengthy discussions about where to eat dinner. Your travel tales should make jaws drop around the office water cooler, and widen the eyes of fellow parents on the T-ball sidelines. You see, the world is filled with Strange Travel possibilities: destinations reputed to be haunted, cursed, charmed, visited by aliens, inhabited by monsters, worshiped by strange cults, or infested by vampires, faeries and zombies. Some of these places are the doorways to true mysteries. Others are heavily hyped tourist traps. Most have overnight accommodations, lots of local color, and at least one decent bar. That's where The Strange Traveler comes in. This Website and its newsletter are your tour guides to bizarre, out-of-the-way destinations. This e-zine both guides readers to strange places they can visit, and advises them of the supernatural undercurrents flowing beneath traditional getaways. Travel Advisories …more

You won't find a lot written or reported about the paranormal in Canada. Canadians just don't talk about it all that much. Almost seems to be a secret from the rest of the world.

But, Canada has a dark past, hidden history and things that go bump in the night.

Canadians have not always been so polite and quiet as they appear. You can hide a lot in the frozen tundra, the endless forests, islands and the long stretches of roads between small towns and the odd big city.

The Haunted Canada Collection is available at Canada Post this year (the collection came out Friday, June, 13, 2014).

…more