The Bottle Digger Storyteller

OLD HOMESTEADS - AND THE GHOSTS WERE MANY

By Ted Currie

You have seen these homesteads before. The bleak, dilapidated wood and brick structures, on overgrown countryside acreage, slowly eroding back into the earth from which it was inspired. And you wonder to yourself, what it must have looked like in its heyday. What it looked like with wind-blown laundry hanging off the strung line, from the back kitchen to a high post in the mowed yard. The kids. The sounds from that homestead, of resident and neighbor children playing hide and seek. Baseball in the level part of the pasture. Horse drawn wagons up and down the dusty lanes, and then the automobiles that banged slowly along the pot-holed road out front. Even when you pass by quickly in a car, and cast only a casual glance, it still impressed upon you, that it is a scene of loneliness and history. Do you also sense something else? Do you have even the fleeting thought, about the spirits that might still dwell there, loyal to the old ways and memorable times. The Easter dinners with family? Good news received at that front door, and the bad. The celebrations, the joy and then the grieving, all within its walls. Birth to death, the stories that relic of history could tell, if it had the chance. I have been invited into many of these tired and failing homesteads, by no one in particular.

The confluence of creative enterprise can be either complimentary or destructive. One strong, unabated current might over-take and snuff-out the other. Or they might just thwack into each other, like to locomotives on the same track. Which after the big bang, imposes the kind of stalemate that arises here frequently, at Birch Hollow, when I simply can't make my mind up. Should I create an art piece, a sketch, a sculpture, or start on a writing jag? Projects at this keyboard that can last for days. The ones that usually end up with me suffering from a headache, stiff neck, and frustration. But there's a source of inspiration I've always trusted, telling me that with the pain, will generate some type of positive gain.

Awkwardly, I've always been able to strike at least a half-balance. In fact, seeing the environs with an artful eye, and as a writer, has had its advantages over the decades. Feeling the presence of ghosts? Spirits? Assorted other hobgoblins and bandy-legged wee beasties? I'm always seeking inspiration, and when you open the mind's door, you just never know what might cross the threshold. Here's a little story for you, to understand my creative process, my passion for art, and my senses about what may be going on with the interrupted paranormal, of a house, a barn, graveyard or spring pasture.

Just prior to entering university, in the summer of 1974, I had begun bottle-digging. I was looking for old medicine and soda bottles, buried on the grown-over acres of long-abandoned Muskoka region homesteads. I have been a lover of old stuff most of my life but it has nothing at all to do with my family's influence. Merle and Ed were minimalists and modernists at the same time. They liked history but not the clutter associated antiques and collectibles. They couldn't have cared less for vintage furniture or valuable ornaments, and weren't particularly nostalgic, except for the old standbys of family photographs, and personal keepsakes, jewelry etc., and a few prints and paintings that had belonged to their respective parents and grandparents. We lived in a relatively modern apartment, at the time of the late 1950's, and there was nothing they had, or were interested in, that sent me in the antique direction in later years. They did take me to historic sites in Southern Ontario, and in the United States, but I was pretty young at the time to formulate much of an opinion, as to whether these were great places to visit, or just curious stops along our travels.

As I pointed out in a recent blog, on my Gravenhurst site, about my early exploration of an old estate in Burlington, that was in the final stages of demolition, and the sense of occupation and history in those sad old rooms of a once elegant house, it probably is accurate to say, it was pretty much a case of self-motivation by immersion. I found the old house alluring, and "haunted," even before I knew the implications of the word. Before I had the burden of knowledge and insight, here was a kid with eyes wide open, in a huge Victorian house, in its final days as an architectural entity, and I felt the presence of many former residents. I didn't see them. I knew they were there, and I told my parents about it later. All they could think about was that there son was a trespasser, and a thief, as I had hauled home some keepsakes that had been broken and strewn over the floors. I could have shown them teeth punctures in my neck, from a vampire, and they'd still have been more concerned about the fact I'd defied their order to stay away. Old, abandoned and falling-in buildings have always beckoned me to enter. It is a failing of mine. But I just want to look around. I've never been in one yet, that I didn't feel it was occupied, in some way, by very poignant memories…..if not the spirit-kind itself.

When I'd wander back to an old homestead, somewhere in the Muskoka lakeland, tromping around the old farm fields to find the lumped, tinny ground, of the family dumpsite, I was always influenced by the aura I encountered. I might not have got much from fields, in general, except if I caught evidence, in the grass, that a bear was nearby, but as soon as I found the old dilapidated cabin or farmhouse, mind over matter created a lot of images from the past. It wasn't a frightening experience, and I enjoyed sitting for awhile, on some old fallen log, or piece of farm machinery still stuck in the field; and quietly celebrating the lives of those who had once tilled these fields…….stoked the fire in the hearth, lit the candles on the harvest table, and served up meals to those who called this place home. In fact, I'd be working away, digging in the homestead dumpsite (long since grown over with thick sod), and swear to hearing the voices of hikers coming up behind me, and then discovering there was no one near. Many times I'd stop, believing someone was standing right beside me, and look around quickly, to find a wavering wildflower, or windswept bunch of ferns brushing together.

I had so many of these experiences, sometimes even seeing a person in the field below, or on the hillside above, when in reality I was quite isolated and alone, that I penned a series of fictional stories, for a local summer publication, that I entitled "Homestead Chronicles." It wasn't a lengthy series, and may have only run in ten or so issues of the paper, but it was full of ghostly encounters, all from those field explorations…..all of them on old homesteads, some that had their own unmarked gravesides that I was also careful to avoid with my shovel. I remember one old-timer, taking me aside, when we met in a local shop, and telling me how much he and his wife were enjoying the series, as it reminded both of them about their respective childhoods, growing up on a similar farmsteads in north Muskoka. "Ghosts? There are lots of ghosts out there; sad very sad," he told me. "There was a lot of hardship, and a lot of folks suffered a lot, trying to survive. Then there was the illnesses. You know, it wasn't uncommon to have whole families wiped out in one night of sickness. It was terrible," he told me, and I believed him. As a regional historian, by this point, I did know a great deal about those difficult homesteading years, in a very unforgiving region. I thanked him, and wrote a few more columns that year, before I was buried by new editorial responsibilities. For years after, I'd meet up with the same gentleman and his wife, and they'd always ask me if I planned to continue the series in the future. Both these folks are gone now, themselves, and I've thought many times about taking another turn at the series. It haunts me you see. And that's very real.

In essence, it was about the life of a young girl, living on an isolated homestead with her parents and siblings. But it is the reminiscences of a ghost. The writer / voyeur finds an unmarked gravesite, where a number of folks were undoubtedly buried (shape of the depression in the earth usually gives it away), and the guardian of the plot, this young lady, becomes the story-teller. This was a long way back in my writing career, and it seems very profound to me now, that I companioned with a fictional ghost to build the story-line. Truth is, I know that what was in that column series, had more foundation than the word "fiction" suggests. I'd often sit, on breaks from digging, on a similar rise of land, overlooking the original homestead pasture, and let my imagination go…….dropping all pre-conceived notions. I've never been at one of these homestead digs, that this didn't happen, my thoughts infilling quickly about the lives invested in this land, and the heart and soul still remaining, despite the clear vacancy of house and land. These were very haunted places but I never felt repelled. A wee bit nervous about coming between a bear cub and mother, but never about malevolent spirits, not wanting my intrusive digging-about. I always felt comfortable in the environs but my mind overflowed with impressions about what it had been like, in its heyday. I even had times, sitting out on grassy knolls, studying the remaining homesteads, when I would swear I was sitting beside someone……looking out onto the same scene……maybe sharing the same regret that the good old days were gone. I remember on one fleeting occasion, that I actually felt a small hand grabbing mine, as I walked over the matted grass of a spring pasture. It was the spark I needed, to create that series, I wrote about earlier……Homestead Chronicles, that very much involved the earth-bound spirit of a little girl, who refused to leave the place she had been born.

Even now, after a long, long relationship, writing about the paranormal, and reading every book I can on the subject, I can't seriously relate these impressions, to any sort of spiritual imposition. Maybe there was, and I just never recognized that detached voices, and the sensation of hands on my shoulder, footsteps in the tall grass, could be my hosts that particular day. It just never crossed my mind. I do think about it more today, and wonder if I was simply too detached myself, as I was pursuing the bottle dig, for one, and planning future writing projects, at the same time. Could it have been the result of an over-active imagination? Of course it could have been the case. Here's the thing. There are few people, who know me, or who have known me for some time, who aren't familiar with my intensity. When I work at something, I am absorbed. You pretty much have to hit me hard, to knock me off a writing project. So while bottle digging, I was always consumed to the last molecule of concentration, with getting on with the job. Finding the next great soda bottle or torpedo bottle which meant "a really good profit when sold." So for me to be aware of someone touching my shoulder, or standing beside me, during a dig, is something to more seriously consider. I can remember so many times, stopping the dig, looking up, and wondering who had just called my name, or touched my shoulder. Sometimes it could be rather startling, as I was worried about bears in the spring, smelling my bag-lunch, and potentially eating me instead. But I did very much have the feeling I was being watched by someone. I got used to it. They certainly didn't frighten me off. Not once.

When I go back and look at some of the circumstances and situations I've been in, over the past thirty-five odd years, I can look a little more objectively and sensibly at what may have been paranormal contact, that I had dismissed as an over-active imagination….or the jitters of being in the wilds with a lot of critters. Crossed paths with bears many times.

As I continue this series of columns, exclusively for the Great North Arrow, I will go back, from time to time, to places where it may have all begun…..this long relationship with the alleged spirit-kind…….that I find so remarkable and interesting……but not frightening in the least. In the past 35 years of writing, I have been consumed…..and I mean consumed, by writing what I call landscape pieces……as an artist would sketch on paint-board, a scene that seems inspirational. I've never known what exactly compels me to merge art and writing, with these landscape depictions in print, but I think it may have something to do with that early immersion, young and impressionable, and those Homestead Chronicles I started…..but never really finished. It might well be, this is, in essence, the "haunting" of Mr. Currie. Thus, I have no shortage of things to write about, when it comes to the paranormal situations I find myself in!

RICHARD KARON. On April 16th, I will commence a lengthy blog on this Gravenhurst site (search Ted Currie, Gravenhurst), on the life of regional Canadian artist, Richard Karon, who actively painted the scenes of Muskoka, Algoma, to Sudbury, and once had an art studio in the Village of Callandar, Ontario. He had many art showings in North Bay, before his permanent studio, he built, near the community of Baysville, in the Township of Lake of Bays. If you have knowledge of Mr. Karon's work in the region, or knew him personally, please feel free to contact me via, birch_hollow@sympatico.ca

See you soon.