Prophecies and Premonitions: Unraveling the Mysteries of Clairvoyance in Canadian History

Last Saturday, on July 13th, 2024, an attempt was made on the life of former U.S. President Donald Trump. While speaking at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old man fired six rounds at him from a rooftop. Trump narrowly escaped, but three attendees were struck, one fatally. This event was eerily predicted by an American Christian named Brandon Biggs, who claims to receive prophecies from God. This incident adds to the long history of prophecies and premonitions that have fascinated humanity for centuries. Let’s delve into some of the most intriguing stories of clairvoyance from Canadian history.

Key Takeaways

• The recent attempt on Donald Trump’s life was predicted by Brandon Biggs.
• Clairvoyance and prophecy have a rich history in Canada, from native medicine men to modern-day psychics.
• Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in Alberta is a significant site for Blackfoot prophecies.
• Stories of premonitions and warnings are prevalent in Canadian folklore, particularly in Nova Scotia.

The Attempt on Donald Trump’s Life

On July 13th, 2024, former U.S. President Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired six rounds at him with an AR-15 rifle from a rooftop about 150 yards away. The first bullet grazed Trump’s ear, prompting him to duck for cover, and his Secret Service detail neutralized the shooter. Unfortunately, three rally attendees were struck by Crook’s stray rounds, one of whom, named Corey Comperatore, died at the scene. This tragic event appears to have been foreseen by an American Christian named Brandon Biggs, who claims to receive prophecies from God. In a video uploaded to the YouTube channel ‘Steve Cioccolanti & Discovery Ministries’, Biggs related a disturbing vision he received, saying, “I saw Trump rising up, and then I saw an attempt on his life. This bullet flew by his ear, and it came so close to his head that it busted his eardrum. He fell to his knees during this timeframe, and he started worshipping the Lord. He got radically born again during this timeframe. He becomes really on fire for Jesus.”

Historical Prophecies and Clairvoyance in Canada

Throughout history, people like Brandon Biggs have described seeing, hearing, or having premonitions of events before they happen. Whether attributable to divine will, sorcery, luck, or some mysterious power beyond mortal comprehension, cases of apparent prophecy and clairvoyance recur with surprising frequency throughout Canadian history.

In the last video published on this channel, we re-examined old tales of the Shaking Tent, a device by which native medicine men appear to have acquired hidden knowledge, avowedly with the assistance of human and inhuman spirits. In two previous pieces, we examined cases of clairvoyance on the Canadian frontier, in which Dene natives apparently gifted with Second Sight were able to watch distant events unfold while they slept, as if by astral projection. In my documentary on the mysteries of the Beaver Wars, we learned about the prophecy of Jesuit martyr Father Jean de Brebeuf, who predicted the genocide of the Huron nation, and of the foresight of Sister Catherine de Saint-Augustin and two Algonquin women, who appeared to have received divine warnings of the 1663 Charlevoix earthquake.

Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park: A Hub of Prophecies

On the southern edge of the Canadian prairie province of Alberta, just 27 kilometers northeast of the Coutts border crossing, lies Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, one of the strangest-looking places in the whole country. This desert-like stretch of the Milk River Valley, in the shadow of Montana’s Sweetgrass Hills, is more congruous with the surface of the moon than the wilds of the Great White North, with its eerie sandstone hoodoos and wavy sedimentary cliffs, supposed to have been carved millennia ago by the waning glaciers of the last Ice Age. These badlands were once regarded as sacred by members of the Blackfoot Confederacy, an alliance of four related tribes who dominated the western prairies from the North Saskatchewan River to the Missouri. For centuries, Blackfoot youths made vision quests to the area in the hope of attaining the guardianship of one of the many powerful spirits said to haunt that unearthly country.

Writing-on-Stone owes its name to the many petroglyphs and pictographs carved and painted on sandstone walls throughout the area, most of them inscribed by long-forgotten native medicine men. The most complex of these – and one of the Park’s only petroglyphs not sequestered in the Archaeological Preserve – is the so-called ‘Battle Scene’, located at the end of the Hoodoo Trail. This glyph depicts over two hundred and fifty characters, including a hundred and fifteen warriors armed with bows and muskets, and seventeen horses, some of them hitched to travois. This scene depicts one of the most decisive victories of the South Piegan Blackfeet – a bloody conflict known as ‘Retreat Up the Hill Battle,’ fought on the banks of the Milk River just east of the park in the fall of 1866. Incredibly, according to Blackfoot tradition, the ‘Battle Scene’ was carved before the battle took place by some mysterious prophetic artist, warning the Blackfeet of what to expect and foretelling their victory.

Premonitions in Nova Scotia

As we have explored in previous pieces, the folklore of Atlantic Canada is replete with tales of ‘forerunners’ – mysterious sounds which are retrospectively determined to be omens of disaster. Nova Scotian folklorist Helen Creighton included many tales of these paranormal warnings in her 1957 classic Bluenose Ghosts, some of which we will reproduce here. One of these stories, set in the community of Jordan Falls, at the southern tip of Nova Scotia, begets the cheerful notion that mysterious omens of impending doom might actually be helpful warnings, the heeding of which allows for the averting of said disasters, rather than gloomy foreshadowings of some inevitable predetermined fate permanently etched onto the unchanging fabric of time.

“At Jordan Falls,” Creighton wrote, “the story is told of a vessel that was supposed to sail out of Shelburne with a crew of eighteen or twenty men. One Ephraim Doane was lying in his berth when he heard the mainmast fall. He got up to investigate and found the mainmast intact, so he took this as a warning, and the vessel sailed to Boston without him. It was December 1888 and there was a great gale. The ship was lost off the New England coast with all hands, but the man who had heard the mainmast fall was spared.”

Creighton heard a similar story from the widow of a sea captain from the town of Liverpool at the southeastern end of the province. One day, while in his cabin preparing for a voyage at sea, the captain was struck by a stack of papers hurled at him from across the room. Turning around, the sailor saw a man-sized blaze of fire burning in the center of the room. A voice issued from the inferno, telling him that if he sailed in that ship one more time, he would be lost at sea, but if he heeded the warning, he would live to be an old man and die at home in his bed. The captain promptly resigned his post, to the bewilderment of his crew. A new captain was appointed, and the ship set sail, to be lost with all hands somewhere on the Atlantic. “After that,” the widow said, “he sailed on ships all over the world, and it was just as the voice said. When he died, he was an old man, and he died at home in his bed.”

Creighton’s third tale about a useful forerunner featured a French-Canadian sailor from Pubnico, an old Acadian village at Nova Scotia’s southern tip. One day, while embarking on a ship at Shelburne Harbour about 37 kilometers northeast of his hometown, the sailor saw a vision of his mother, who implored him not to sail. “It was so vivid,” Creighton wrote, “that he jumped overboard and swam to shore. On that trip, the ship was lost, and all hands perished.”

Creighton included many more forerunner tales in her book in which the mysterious warnings failed to prevent the disasters they foretold. One of these is set near the village of Petite Riviere, on the eastern shores of Nova Scotia, just south of historic German-Canadian settlement of Lunenburg. “If the young man in our next story had been of Scottish instead of German descent,” Creighton wrote in her introduction to this tale, “he might have been better prepared for the following tragedy. He was coming from Petite Riviere to his home at Broad Cove one foggy night when he saw a woman alongside the road and, as he described it, she was a mass of fire. One night shortly after that, when his mother was going to bed, he heard her scream. He hastily flung open her door and found her a mass of flame. He tried to save her and was badly burned, but his help was too late. The lamp she was carrying must have overturned and set fire to her night clothes.”

Creighton went on to relate two more forerunner stories with unhappy endings. In one of them, a woman saw the apparition of a strange man, whom she took to be a physician, standing in the doorway of her home. Two weeks later, her husband broke her leg, and was treated by the very doctor whom the wife had seen in her vision. Another story which Creighton recorded tells of a fisherman who saw a strange shapeshifting shawl in the ocean, which sank when he tried to retrieve it. Three days later, his wife died in childbirth.

The Gift of Foresight

For most of the characters in these stories, paranormal warnings of disaster are rare once-in-a-lifetime occurrences. There are some Canadians, however, who seem to be blessed or cursed with the gift of foresight who, whether by dint of some mysterious genetic trait or by the will of Providence, are regularly bombarded with hazy snapshots of the future, the windows of their minds randomly thrown open onto the murky train tracks of time. One of these was the late James H.P. Wilkie, a renowned Scots-Canadian psychic who died in 2007. Another was the so-called witch of Plum Hollow, Upper Canada, whose story we may explore in a future piece.

The career of another Canadian clairvoyant is summarized in the 1879 book History of Leeds and Grenville, Ontario, From 1749 to 1879, by Theaddeus Leavitt and E.A. Turner, the former, incidentally, being an authority on the witch of Plum Hollow. The brief biography of this singular psychic was reprinted in an essay on the folklore of Ontario’s Oxford and Waterloo Counties, near the city of Kitchener, written by Canadian archaeologist William John Wintemberg and published in the 1888 issue of the Journal of American Folklore. “At an early date,” Leavitt and Turner wrote, “there lived in the vicinity of Kilmarnock, on the north side of the Rideau River, a man by the name of Croutch, who claimed to have the gift of foresight. Many old and respected settlers believed that he received warnings of the approaching death of any person who resided in the settlement. According to the testimony of his wife, who bore the reputation of being a Christian woman, Croutch would frequently retire to bed, where in vain would he seek slumber; restless and uneasy, he would toss from side to side, at times groaning and muttering names of the departed. Do what he would to shake off the mysterious spell, in the end he was compelled to submit. Rising, he would quickly dress himself, take his canoe and paddle across the river, where he declared he always found waiting a spectral funeral-procession, which he would follow the graveyard, where all the rites and ceremonies would be performed. Croutch, having watched the ghostly mourners fade away, would then return home, retire to rest, and sink into a profound slumber. It was always with the greatest difficulty that Mrs. Croutch could ever elicit from her husband the name of the party whose death had been heralded. It is related of the late Samuel Rose, that upon one occasion [when] he was in the company of Croutch, in crossing a common both saw a light. Croutch exclaimed, ‘Did you hear that cry?’

‘No,’ replied Mr. Rose.

‘Oh,’ said the fatalist, ‘it was the cry of a child,’ the name of which he gave. In a few days, the child breathed its last.

‘Upon another occasion he predicted the death of a man named McIntyre. Colonel Hurd, of Burritt’s Rapids, informs us that he knew Croutch and that far and wide he was regarded with terror by the children, who had learned from their parents his supposed power of communing with the spirits of the departed.’

According to a brief article in the December 1962 issue of Fate, another Canadian clairvoyant – a nameless fortune teller – told one Alfred Kasprick, a young dairy manager from Neepawa, Manitoba, that he would be lucky to reach the age of thirty. Kasprick himself had a deep and unaccountable fear of the date Friday the 13th, and always took pains to avoid taking risks on those inauspicious days. On Friday, April 13th, 1962, while driving on a lonely highway, Kasprick’s car lost control and rolled into the ditch. Two days later, at the age of 30, he died of a fractured skull.

Another tale of Canadian clairvoyance hidden away in the pages of Fate was written by Curtis Fuller and printed in the April 1954 issue of that publication. This story involves the disappearance of a 60-year-old Toronto-based physician and outdoor recreationist named William Fleming, who disappeared in the bush near Parry Sound, Ontario, on the shores of Georgian Bay, in November 1953. “Fleming had been hunting partridges,” Fuller wrote, “and his body was found with a shotgun wound in the left breast lying against boulders in Thirty Dollar Rapids in the Magnetawan River.

‘Discovery was made by members of a family search party, led by the widow, following instruction of a clairvoyant. The widow’s sister reported that the clairvoyant had told her three different times that the missing man would be found dead in the water. Another clairvoyant had told a relative that Dr. Fleming’s body would be found dead of a gunshot wound and that he was even lying ‘clutching his chest.’’

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