Inuit Noise Ghost: Canadian Halloween Monster from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day

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The Noise Ghost is an Inuit poltergeist (Poltergeist, German ‘noisy ghost’), an arctic auditory phenomenon of incorporeal guile. This unseen, unbodied noise ghost may announce his haunting visitation by curling around a northern house on a cold quiet night and emitting a small, high-pitched hissing. This spectral whisp seeks to dehouse you. Then, outside, after toxic cold cracks your bones, the noise ghost will jab its snout into your chest cavity, thrusting deep and red to gnaw your ribs and suck the gelid marrow from its osseous encasement.

Now the unhuman hiss whistles through ice chinks and drills into eardrums as the noise ghost hovers, waiting to envelope you in its sonic coil and madden you, long before relieving dawn may come.

The noise ghost circles the igloo and, always the constrictor, wraps the fragile ice in singing folds of death. The hiss susurrates, skitters about the room, swooping on the face of a screaming terrified child. Its high buzz mingles with gasping whispers and low, obscene, anticipatory gurglings as of a meat-lusting animal in full slobber. Sometimes you can see the raw noise itself, curling impudently in the cold air.

Swirling closer and closer to the frightened people inside the house, this evil noisemaker shrieks as if inside your very heart. Should you run jabbering and drooling fear, out, out into numb white death? No. Abide a moment and wait out the terror; then wise elders who know the ancient apotropaic words will drive the monster away and silence the noise ghost. This time.