Do you believe in ghosts?
I can’t remember when my fascination with true B.C. ghost stories first began.
Maybe it was reading about Vancouver hauntings each year at Halloween, when the pages of the Sun’s lifestyle section would feature stories involving strange, unexplained disturbances in local restaurants, theatres, various recording studios and Gastown comedy clubs. These were places I recognized. Places I could conceivably visit. Places I could check out for myself.
Those stories always had the air of authenticity, it seemed to me, and were cloaked inside an aura of something secret being passed along, bringing the reader inside a formerly invisible circle, where you were bearing witness to an eerie, paranormal mystery.
Today, I’d count myself as a skeptic, but there’s something about a really good ghost story that sets your pulse racing and makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. It’s a visceral, intoxicating sensation, propelling you to seek out the scariest details.Many years ago now, I remember sitting in a darkened lecture hall in Buchanan’s B-block at UBC, perched on one of those hard wooden seats when writer Robert C. Belyk gave a noon-hour talk promoting his then-new collection: Ghosts: True Stories from British Columbia. I forget what hauntings he spoke about, but I raced out to buy a copy of his book. And when a second volume appeared a few years later, I got that one, too.
My curiosity was fanned into something approaching a minor obsession when I came across A Gathering of Ghosts (1989), a book about a real-life pair of Victoria-based ghostbusters, by Robin Skelton and Jean Kozocari.
Skelton, who has since passed away, was a prolific writer and poet, a university prof, and a practicing Wiccan. The colleagues shared a guiding philosophy and used wiccan techniques – spells, incantations, candles and charms – to perform their pagan exorcism. Together they drove malevolent, depressive, even angry spirits out of homes across the Saanich peninsula and beyond.
Skelton’s, knowledgeable charm and gifted, sensitive writing puts the book head and shoulders above most of its counterparts on the library shelf. He knows how to tell a good story.
And he admits most authentic hauntings lack the basic elements of a proper story arc, stubbornly refusing to provide a satisfying narrative. They’re incomplete, frustratingly scant on detail, and don’t necessarily provide resolution, which may explain why the vast majority of stories online are so short and feel very lacking.
I wanted to dig out my copy of A Gathering of Ghosts, but it’s squirreled away inside one of my unpacked moving boxes of books, impossible to locate for the moment.
So I did some digging online, and came up with a small list of local hauntings in my corner of the world, the South Surrey-White Rock area. They’re not that exciting, but here goes:
According to Shadowlands Haunted Places Index, the Chateau Cargill at 3550 King George Hwy is rented out for wedding receptions and other events. A number of customers have reported seeing unknown faces or figures mysteriously appearing in their wedding photos.
“Haunted Vancouver” by Marliss Weber, an old article from The Peak, SFU’s student paper, goes into detail about several infamous Vancouver-area hauntings.
I’ve actually stayed at a New Westminster hotel that’s supposed to be haunted, the story says. The Met on Columbia St. The four-storey brick building survived the devastating fire of 1886, when most of the former provincial capital’s downtown was leveled. Today, it’s a boutique hotel and pub. A manager quoted in the story says there’s a couple of spectres, a man and a woman in “old fashioned clothes”, who have appeared to guests and staff on the fourth floor, chatting by the elevator.
There’s a third ghost, dubbed George after a resident who died in the Met, who walks through walls and floats down hallways.
I’ve got to admit, I noticed nothing unusual, and I stayed at the hotel two nights in January 2007, and recently visited a guest who spent a night there in late September ‘08. I didn’t find the place eerie at all. The guest rooms all centre around a common area each floor. Maybe it’s not creepy because the interior common areas are all brightly lit.
Closer to home, White Rock’s landmark Marine Drive dining establishment, the lively, cheerfully-decorated Washington Avenue Grill, is probably the best-known local haunt-spot, a fact proudly highlighted on the back of its menu.
The 1913 building was originally home to a sawmill, then a church, a school and a bunkhouse for migrant rail workers before becoming home to caretaker Aurthur Sharpe in 1934, who is suspected of hanging around in ghostly form today.
I don’t know when the place turned into a restaurant, but contemporary reports of unexplained phenomena persist. According to various newspaper stories and TV shows on the paranormal, WAG staff have reported hearing strange noises and seeing light orbs, lights that flicker on and off, cold spots and apparitions.
I’ve dined there before but haven’t noticed anything strange, even though I’ve been hoping to!
A few years back I read about another landmark building with a ghostly visitor. It’s one of the houses on Marine facing West Beach. But I couldn’t find anything online today about that particular house, which is a colourful, two-storey home with an unusual paint job and a small front yard filled with funky decorative touches. Maybe the present owners wish to keep the home’s notoriety under wraps.
Meanwhile, the quest continues. Keep you posted…
