Grave Beliefs: Stories of the Supernatural and the Uncanny among Canada’s Great War Trench Soldiers

The Great War’s No Man’s Land and the trenches that faced into it, with destructive weapons ruling the space, created a dislocated environment that spawned stories of death and haunting. The Canadian soldiers’ belief systems were robust and varied, but some men embraced the magical, uncanny, and supernatural to make meaning of their war experiences. An attempt to locate and situate these “grave beliefs” within soldiers’ narratives brings to light an understudied aspect of the cultural history of the war.