A HAUNTING I CAN’T GET RID OF - BUT WOULD KIND OF LIKE TO
I’ve been writing about the paranormal in the Muskoka district of Ontario, since the early 1980's, during the period I was editor of The Herald-Gazette, in Bracebridge. Members of the writing staff always like to have three or four meaty features "in the bag" (composed and ready to use) just in case the ad reps made some last minutes sales, and the pages of the weekly edition were bumped up. Even four more pages could swallow all our reserve copy. I was never very good writing under the gun, especially with a production manager breathing down my neck..... so I was a big believer in banking editorial copy just in case.
I used to delve through the archives downstairs to find story ideas, and there were always lots of out of print Muskoka books to tap into for history-based features. So from my first years in the local news business, when having a lot of surplus copy available made your stock rise, I kept about a half dozen lengthy pieces on-tap. Many of these explored Muskoka mysteries and legends, and did delve five or six times a year on a paranormal event past or present. With the help of an expert photographer, Harold Wright, one of the finest artists I’d ever been professionally associated, we offered Herald-Gazette readers a full page collection of photographs and feature articles regarding local haunts. I think it was about 1981 if memory serves. Harold was able to do a time exposure of a little girl walking across a room, behind a table, and it was a dynamite image to catch readers’ attention. Of all the published work regarding the paranormal here in Muskoka, this feature earned me the most response. More than a few thought I was nuts to attach my name to the "belief in ghosts" thing, yet I never once confessed, at least in the early going, to actually believing in ghosts. It’s one thing to have a sighting and to relay this message but another thing to adamantly confess to "Yes....I do believe in ghosts for sure, for sure!"
Over the years I’ve talked to many people who have had substantial encounters yet they have made it clear....."I don’t believe in such things." Odd? Not really when you think about the stigma associated then (1980's when I began my research) and even now to being one who openly believes in ghosts and their kind.......it’s to be expected someone at home or work will use "nutter" and your name in the same sentence. My wife and I both find that younger folks today are more interested in the paranormal, and as a teacher she is often asked to reflect on ghosts and such......after of course students have read about her encounters with the other side published nationally in Barbara Smith’s book on Canadian Ghosts. The book became available here in the local grocery store and that’s where young staffers were getting hold of the story, and identifying their Mrs.Currie as the story teller. Hers was the recollection of Herbie the ghost-child of Golden Beach Road. Suzanne doesn’t really like to re-tell the story, because she was troubled by it for many years. I found it more fascinating than disturbing but I understand her reluctance to delve into it all again.
I’ve never worried about it frankly because some very significant scholars and researchers, and well versed individuals over hundreds of years have attached their names to widelyl known sightings and experiences. I have many antique and out of print books telling of these amazing ghostly interventions misting forth from castle towers to haunted rectories and chapels. There are thousands of tales of haunted hotels and mansions, ghost-dwelling gardens and forests, spiritually inhabited cemeteries, opera houses, theaters, industrial buildings and the halls of universities and museums. To worry that an individual in my ballywick thinks I’m odd for confessing a relationship with numerous spirited entities doesn’t phase me one bit. As for those who don’t believe in ghosts but have made their sightings known regardless, well, that’s just the kind of information about the paranormal I seek out most aggressively. From a purity level, when I find someone who accidentally came upon a spirit in passage, a ghost standing in a hall, beside a bed, or on the stairs of an old house, and then disregards it as anything particularly serious.....I want to hear as much as possible because it will usually be void of emotion and embellishment.....because afterall, they don’t believe in ghosts; or so they say! They’re going to give me the straight goods without any reason to elaborate or inflate the story.
As I have lived and worked in many locations that were considered "haunted" by something or other, I do suffer from an "amalgamation" syndrome, I believe, and it tends to manifest in reaction at least once a month in a most peculiar way. While I don’t spend every day writing about ghosts, or researching the paranormal, I do spend a lot of time thinking about the many roads and curious places I’ve visited in my life.....call it a foible of the historian/author who finds pleasure in the days of yore more stimulating than the relative commonplace of modern times. The problem I have created in part, is that of pulling composites of these places and circumstances together without really appreciating the snap-back human nature I was tickling. In other words I have arrived, I believe, at a subconscious reckoning of all places....an emotionally contracted, yet awkwardly put together Frankenstein model of all the curious, haunted places I have visited thus far in 53 years. So according to my dreams in analysis, I have defined a location, a nicely contoured and garden-rich property, a Victorian era building which is usually a house, with interior features that are borrowed and spliced into the dreamscape reminiscent of about ten old houses I’ve known intimately. For example, I will dream about a building that for all intents and purposes appears to be the former McGibbon House on Manitoba Street, in Bracebridge, Woodchester Villa (Bracebridge), a family cottage on the shore of Lake Rosseau near Windermere, houses on Ontario Street, Golden Beach Road, Quebec Street and another location on Dominion Street. When set in one of my repeating nightmares, the property is always roughly the same.....there are sprawling lawns and beautiful gardens and the aura is late Victorian. But it isn’t one identifiable property that would let me say...."ah, yes, it is the McGibbon house or Woodchester Villa. It’s all a composite but the grounds are the combination of only several properties unlike my collage impressions of the haunted house, which is composed of numerous architectural details, of many houses and buildings I have been associated over the decades, here in central Muskoka. And although I can honestly claim to be unafraid of paranormal situations and encounters, at least so far in this mortal coil, I do acknowledge that these particular nightmares are in full terrorizing regalia. But there are other common aspects to the events. There is never any conclusion, which is pretty normal as nightmares range, and I’m always the aggressor, trying to rid the building of an attic-dwelling entity that is both unpleasant and dangerous. And I’ve always got this itch to piss the entity off, and I’m no sooner in the house than I’m starting the battle for willpower supremecy. I begin with a pretty good crowd of other folks at the beginning of the dream but finish with nary a soul anywhere near. I have that affect on people in real life.
The nightmares don’t relate necessarily to any research or writing jag I’ve been occupied with at the time, and although I might have had weeks of work to feed the dream-void, I have never been able to link my day-job in this case, to a seeded paranormal-themed dream-state. I can’t recall one of these nightmares that came after writing about the paranormal yet in the memory bank I suppose it’s logical to assume the perceptions and information within, can by the brain’s mischief, be utilized during the period of greatest requirement.....the construction of a really good nightmare to scare the crap out of the unsuspecting sleeper....ME!
The nightmares began about a decade ago and have repeated many, many times since with only small variations. I have no idea what precise involvement seeded and nurtured the repeating theme of the nightmares, and there hasn’t been anything particularly earth shattering in that decade to blame for these oft repeating and unsettling visitations. I will wake up in fear that the end is near......as anyone startles back to recognition they’ve just then been part of a full-fledged incident of night-time terror. I’m anxious, sweating, actively seeking an explanation in mind and by scanning my physical surroundings, with some trepidation whether it was an encounter of a dream state or it was as real as my racing heart beat.
They all start the same. There will be a lead-up scenario that will not resemble anything more than a run-of-the-mill visitation, meeting of friends and associates, in a mundane, non-exciting environs most of which is pretty much an insignificant backdrop. Within a few interesting scenes no better or worse than a made for television movie, I will somehow encounter "The Building." It is most often a house but not always. It is however, always three stories, four including the Attic which is also a constant in these nightmares. As an example, the foyer and initial identifying features usually appear antiquated and cluttered, with large Victorian parlor chairs and massive sideboards, similar to what I used to deal with as museum manager at Woodchester Villa (Bracebridge) every working day. In the dream state there is an oppressive feeling I sense just stepping into this hallway which always has association with an old and steep wooden staircase. There are rooms to the right and left of the staircase but once the decision is made, in the dream haze to climb up toward the attic, there is only one room having importance and that is at the top of the stairs....that attic .....where a particularly nasty and quite invisible entity is holed-up. I have just experienced a huge shiver just thinking about the fear opening that attic door and looking into the dimly illuminated room, expecting the full wrath to bellow forth from that unhappy, rather nebulously appointed beast within.
For whatever reason my mind places me as the conqueror of all evil spirit-kind, which I don’t understand, I do not enter any of the composite buildings of which I have spoken, without full knowledge I’m about to antagonize the wee beastie upstairs. What makes this quite strange on top of all the other weirdness I’m about to relate, is that I do not at any point have a plan to physically oust the paranormal quality and quantity from the attic should I prevail. I will however, attempt to beat the crap of it with my mind. If I win, well, this just simply doesn’t come up in the run of the nightmare, so I really never have any thought of how the entity will be finally cleansed from the house....or just left as an ugly clump of paranormal in the corner of the attic. Before the first step up, and with several folks around me, some I know and others I don’t care to know, I begin concentrating on what I know will anger the lodger most. I start taunting it with a mental push and shove that will eventually become a storm of mind on mind fisticuffs. At first I’m really just toying with the entity to see if I can get a response, which sometimes results in a cold, gusting and loud retaliation that gets my attention.......and the message sent that it’s going to be a long and nasty battle of willpowers.
The closer I get to the upper section of staircase, the more intense my ambition to obliterate the unkown but powerful attic dweller. And as I intensify my focus on what lurks behind the door, the creature roars like nothing I’ve ever experienced or heard.....at least beyond this dream state. It is terrifying yet I can’t stop challenging it until I finally crash through the attic door, confronting the enemy like Hollywood’s "Shane," pounding his way to justice at the expense of every thug in the bar-room. And when I get a glimpse of the spirited force I’m planning to reckon with, it is like the image of the all and powerful Wizard of Oz, and instead of charging ahead....well, I’m staggered by the (always in color) spiritual spectacle. It is amazing to see this manifestation rising from a back wall into a most ominous and unclenching force, as if I was at the ground zero of an F-5 tornado. The point is that I only reach this pinnacle of confrontation, in the attic, once out of every for or five nightmares of this same composition and character. I usually don’t get all the way up the stairs before I awaken in a bath of sweat.
There are a variety of other scenarios that take place around the subject property....stories within stories you might say. It will be well removed from anything spooky at all and then for some unexplained reason the whole mood of the situation will evolve from a pleasant, non-threatening dream to the confrontational "Please excuse me....I have an attic to clean out," emotional roller-coaster. One minute I’m wandering through a beautiful Victorian inspired garden, actually enjoying the scent of many wonderful flowers, and then the next reality is that I’ve entered the house and spotted the staircase where evil apparently always lurks.
As a partial explanation I did have a number of events at Woodchester Villa that did place stairs as the divide between safe passage and the unexpected. In the early years of museum operation, particularly the period of the early to late 1980's, we suffered many false alarms due to the gnawing activity of squirrels in the attic area of the restored octagonal museum building, otherwise known as the "Bird House." There are other stories in this blog collection related to my days at the museum. Well, apparently, the coating on the wiring had a licorice-like taste and it greatly appealed to the critters on cold winter nights when there was nothing else to consume. We would get a call from the alarm monitoring company and meet up with an officer from the Ontario Provincial Police to search the buildings for a potential intruder. There were many late night trips over to Woodchester where we would have to conduct a room by room search, up to the attic, hoping quite frankly to find the house unoccupied. It wasn’t until the alarm wiring was changed that the squirrels stopped their dining habits. So I had more than a few tense moments with officers searching Woodchester, and going up the stairs quietly always seemed so much more dangerous and threatening than searching rooms on the level. I was always looking behind me as if to expecting the intruder to attack from behind as it was where we were most vulnerable. I have had many other staircase incidents in old houses, one actually that involved a paranormal event (documented in this blog series - see McGibbon House), so I can see how this staircase fixation may have been seeded decades ago as being somewhat precarious....no matter what the building.
So there I am "mind-fighting" this paranormal entity which is bigger and more determined than me, and the wind is howling, hair and fur flying, and the ghostly-mortal combat at its peak, and bloody hell......I wake up having done nothing more than earned yet another stalemate in the life and death struggle for attic supremacy. Crazy or what? It will take me about a half hour to settle down after I awaken but once I do slumber again, there is no chance I will revisit the attic in question for a re-match until many weeks and months later.
I think what is so unnerving about the nightmare, is that I truly believe I have the power to battle evil by thought process and rigorous contemplation.....concentration focused like a laser beam on the enemy. Maybe as a writer, and a long time editorialist for the local press, I started to believe my arguments were on the cutting edge of truthfulness, that could penetrate even the hardest shell of my adversaries. Possibly. Yet when I start each quest to oust the rogue entity, I know in advance that at best I’m only going to stir up complacency.....letting the alleged attic beast know I’m a die-hard trouble-maker....which is pretty much my reputation as a regional writer/historian. I usually have to stir the pot awhile before I hear the first sabres rattling above, and long before I get to the attic region of the building, the howling wind and roar of anger hits me on the bottom stairs and continues the bluster all the way to the top. I very seldom catch the creature off guard. It has happened in a few nightmares but it’s not typical. I’ve never been hurt by the entity and I guess it’s safe to say I haven’t hurt it either. Yet we still feel obliged to duke it out.
The fact that I am never successful in ousting the paranormal entity, and I’ve never actually been defeated myself, leaves me pondering the eventual outcome if the nightmares continue. And while I’ve never once recalled saying to the beast "The power of Christ compels you," it’s pretty much that kind of thing I’m blasting forth in these mind waves, and it’s exactly what antagonizes my opponent most. We’re not arguing about housekeeping matters here, or who left the pizza box and crusts on the stairs. We’re determining which creature is the strongest, and there just isn’t a conclusion that makes me feel at all content. Yet I believe that in one of these nightmares, there will be something more conclusive...either I’m going to fob this spirit off to another dimension or it’s going to liquidate this intruder. Who knows? I’ll keep you posted on any new nightmares I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing.
When I talk to my wife about these dreams she doesn’t seem all that surprised. "Well, Ted, you sit here amidst thousands of books, scribbling notes till after midnight, read about ghosts, hauntings and murders and watch movies about the paranormal.....it is more likely an oddity why you don’t have ten times more nightmares than you do!" Suzanne is so sensible about these things. She’s right of course. But it’s what historians and writers do.....can’t see myself changing habits on the off-chance I can reduce my nightmares from attic attacks to triple bogey scenarios on the dreamland golf course....or something like that.
What I’m pretty sure of, is the unfinished nature of my research and the ongoing requirement to re-visit many more attics in old buildings, to square off against my rather nebulous, mystical but all powerful arch rival..... will require the "kicking of each other’s arses" for some years to come. Maybe I’ll sort it out eventually and confront the entity with something more effective than mind-waves. Maybe not. I guess it’s an occupational hazard of delving into the expansive, complicated, perilous dimension of the paranormal. Yet truth be known, I’d much rather live with the frequent nightmares than abandon this most fascinating research.
THE WRITER-ADMIRER AND THE SERENDIPITOUS, STRANGE AND ONGOING RELATIONSHIP WITH THE MYSTERY OF TOM THOMSON
There is a lot to appreciate about serendipity and the researcher/ historian and discovery. In the mind-science realm, much of what we consider to be messages from the spirit-kind, are potentially no more than accidental and coincidental occurrences carrying along a theme of interest. For example, it is known that many of the world’s great discoveries, from medical cures to the landmarks reached by the legends of exploration, had helpful, somewhat accidental, serendipitous interplay.....one discovery, influencing the founding or location of something else.....strangely related but an unexpected find at the time. In my own research work it is pretty much a constant, so much so that I look forward to each prevailing discovery to have great influence on my next most significant gain or enlightenment. I’m seldom disappointed.
When I first turned on to the mystery of Tom Thomson, an artist who helped inspire the future Group of Seven Canadian artists, it was only several weeks into the project.....as a reasonably seasoned historian and researcher, that coincidences started happening all over the place.....and the more I reached into the musty old files containing information on his alleged drowning death in Algonquin Park, during the summer of 1917, the more I became convinced this would be the one project that would be a work in progress for the rest of my life. That was in the mid 1990's, and now in about the 13th year, and many published articles later, I’m nowhere near what I feel is the point of completion. And while there were many, many gains made by serendipitous discovery, there was a nagging and altogether strange sensation that Thomson wanted something more from me.....to keep up the questioning in the public’s mind about his murder. From the first day of research it was clear that the theory of accidental drowning was ill-founded and should never have been allowed to stand. In my opinion, a murderer succeeded in proving that "dead men tell no tales." Until that is..... pesky researchers refuse to accept what history presents as fact and take what ever serendipity wishes to contribute.....to prove or disprove accepted thought. Following are formerly published columns written several years ago, regarding the Tom Thomson mystery, presented by "Curious: The Tourist Guide." It was singularly the most well-read and responded-to series of columns I’d ever written. They are not ghost stories as such but if it is possible for a spirit to reach from the beyond, I have no doubt Thomson’s memory was causing this itch.....and one discovery of inconsistency led to another, and it did become a story about an investigation that was corrupted from its commencement in 1917.
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