Poet and author Alan Sullivan, who also published work under the pseudonym Sinclair Murray, was born in Montreal and spent some of his formative years in Scotland. An engineer by trade, he spent several years in the Lake of the Woods district near Kenora, Ontario. His most famous work is perhaps
The Great Divide (1935), a historical adventure novel about the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. However he was also published extensively in Canadian and American periodicals, while a handful of his novels, such as
A Little Way Ahead (1929), had elements of the paranormal.
While researching Sullivan for inclusion in
The Great Fright North, I discovered his short story "The House Invisible," published in
The Passing of Oul-i-but and Other Stories (1913). In this tale, which hints of the supernatural, a man wistfully reflects on his past accomplishments while out walking one day along the shoreline of his seaside mansion. To his surprise, he comes across a deep crevasse that seemingly appeared out of nowhere; there he discovers a mansion that mirrors his own, except it appears to have weathered a century of neglect.
