Navigating Unsolved Canadian Mysteries with Kenton and Dylan – ParaGhoul Paranormal: Discoveries from the Dark
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In this episode, I am joined by two guests who live right at the crossroads of true crime, folklore and the paranormal. Kenton de Jong and Dylan are the hosts of Unsolved Canadian Mysteries, a podcast that refuses to stick to just one kind of weird.
Their show ranges from UFOs and ghost stories to missing people, cryptids, cursed treasures and the occasional bear attack. Along the way, they try to sort out what might have really happened, what is legend, and where the truth probably lives in between. In our conversation, we got into accidental podcast beginnings, a Calgary mummy hidden under floorboards, Saskatchewan UFOs, Canadian vampires, and what it is like to call up a small town and ask if the vampires are real.
If you want to check them out after you read this, you can find their show wherever you get your podcasts, visit their website at unsolvedcanadianmysteries.ca, and watch them on YouTube and social media under Unsolved Canadian Mysteries.
Interview Highlights
How did Unsolved Canadian Mysteries get started?
Dylan: “Kenton likes to talk about crazy stuff and I am good at making podcasts. Here we are.”
Dylan: “We had no intention of doing a podcast. We were just going to film one UFO story in my basement, then one turned to two, turned to eight, turned to almost three years.”
Kenton originally approached Dylan with a single story about a UFO case and asked if they could record a video. That one session snowballed into a podcast when they realized how much they enjoyed working together. Dylan already had some podcasting experience, and Kenton had the obsession with strange Canadian stories, so it turned into a very natural partnership.
What kinds of mysteries do you cover on the show?
Kenton: “Our podcast, we talk about mysteries across Canada. They venture from totally wacky UFO alien abduction stories to true crime, to monsters, cryptids, legends, whatever.”
Kenton: “We have had fairies, aliens, bears, mummies, ocean monsters. I think we have covered just about every kind of critter.”
They deliberately do not limit themselves to one genre. You will hear about RCMP manhunts and missing persons one week, and then jump to haunted cemeteries, Windigo legends or reports of lake monsters the next. They have covered Hollywood style monsters like vampires and werewolves, but Kenton is a self described cryptid hipster. He tends to avoid the biggest, most overdone topics like Sasquatch and Oak Island in favor of lesser known cases that have not been picked apart by a dozen other shows.
Can you share one of the ghost or mummy stories that really stuck with you?
Kenton: “This family, the Pierce family, get a new house. The wife says something is weird about this house. The kids say they feel like they are being watched all the time.”
Kenton: “He lifts up the floorboards and they find a body underneath. The body had mummified. It opened this whole case into a missing person from 30 years ago.”
Kenton stumbled on an old Calgary case that he had never heard of, despite the fact it made headlines at the time. A family moved into a house, felt watched, and then literally uncovered a mummified body under the bedroom floor. The skull had two holes, one likely from an impact, another likely from animals. The remains were eventually tied to a man named Thomas Hall, who had disappeared decades earlier. Kenton and Dylan walked through the timeline, the card game that happened just before Thomas vanished, and how the likely suspect was an old, very ill man by the time anyone found him.
How often do you feel like you actually “solve” a case?
Dylan: “There are so many that I have simply solved with bears.”
Kenton: “We probably got pretty close on the one about the mummy. We figured he lost a card game, they needed money, and the other guy killed Thomas and buried the body.”
Part of the fun of their show is trying to reach a reasonable conclusion, even when the official record never did. Sometimes that means applying Occam’s razor and saying it was probably a bear, not a monster, in the woods. Other times, like with the Calgary mummy, they look at motive, money and timing and land on a theory that feels solid even if it never went to court. They are careful to frame these as educated guesses, not definitive answers, especially when real people and families are involved.
What are some of your most memorable moments from the podcast?
Dylan: “Our second episode about the national park where everyone loses their head really stuck with me. Hundreds of people being found with no heads, like what happened.”
Kenton: “My favorite was probably the vampire one, because how often do you hear a vampire story in Canada. I even called the town’s historical society and asked, ‘Are the vampires real?’ and she said, ‘We do not want to talk about it.’ That was a perfect answer.”
Both of them lit up when they talked about certain episodes. For Dylan, the Nahanni National Park story, with decapitated bodies and eerie wilderness, still lingers in the back of his mind. For Kenton, the Wilno vampire case might be the most memorable, partly because it led him to phoning a small town historical society and getting a very evasive answer. It is those moments, where research spills into real life, that seem to stick with them.
What can listeners expect from Unsolved Canadian Mysteries going forward?
Kenton: “In a perfect world, we would like to put out an episode every two weeks. It is hard now, we are both busy with work, but that is our goal.”
Kenton: “We want to do more on location episodes, more Saskatchewan stories and more interviews. Once you can bring in another voice, a voice of actual authority, it makes that much more impact.”
They would love to move toward a more regular schedule, with help from their researcher and editor Christina, and they want to get back to recording in haunted or historic locations when they can make the logistics work. They are also interested in bringing more guests onto their show, especially people with direct experience of specific cases or locations. In the meantime, they keep things flexible and follow the stories that feel rich enough to explore, especially older mysteries where the dust has settled a little.
Conclusion
Talking with Kenton and Dylan felt like getting a peek behind the curtain at how a mystery podcast actually comes together. There is the fun, off the wall banter about bears and mummies, and then there is the careful, often painstaking research into old newspaper clippings, government documents and reluctant local sources.
I loved that they are not chasing headlines so much as chasing stories that still bother them, that feel unfinished or overlooked. Whether it is a UFO in a Saskatchewan field, a hidden mummy under a Calgary bedroom, or a town that does not want to talk about its vampires, they are trying to map the strange edges of Canadian history one episode at a time.
Check out their podcast, Unsolved Canadian Mysteries, today – https://unsolvedcanadianmysteries.ca/
If you could have Kenton and Dylan investigate any Canadian mystery, true crime, cryptid or haunting, what would you want them to dig into next?
