In this video Craig Spence, Mid-Island Focus Editor, interviews Shanon Sinn, author of The Haunting of Vancouver Island.
Gord Barney’s ghost didn’t have quite the dramatic flare of Macbeth’s Banquo, who took the seat of honour at his Lord-and-murder’s table, drawing the culprit’s terrified denial, “Thou canst not say that I did it; don’t shake thy gory locks at me!” Nor did he respond to the specter’s appearance with the bulldog suavity of Winston Churchill, who, emerging from a bath during a post-war visit to the White House, was surprised by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, and is reputed to have said coolly: “Mr. President, you seem to have me at a disadvantage.”
But the Nanaimo retired logger still has a pretty good tale to tell. He had deked downstairs during a friend’s house party to ‘drain my bladder’, but when he looked into the nether bathroom mirror, a withered crone glared back, threatening to scare more than the piss out of him. “Get out of my house!” the hag shrieked, convincing Barney to evacuated the loo as quick as he could. “I was shocked,” he said. “The music from the living room was blasting, but I heard those five words so clear I’ll never forget them.” He ran upstairs, where he complained to the party’s hostess. “Well that’s not very nice,” she grinned. “I’ll have to have a talk with Lucy when I see her again.”
Barney’s is not an isolated story. The Mid-Island has more than its share of ghosts, poltergeists and monsters according to many people who make it their business to track them. Nor was Lucy atypical.
She was well known in her household. Her favorite trick was stealing soothers, which the family had to replace for their infants at an alarming rate. But she was also known to filch cutlery, cigarette lighters, even a bag of marijuana that had been stashed on the premises. Said Barney, “Ramona (not the hostess’s real name) swears she saw the old lady in the bathroom one day and her image just faded into the mirror. Another time she saw the old lady in a dark blue print dress walk into a closed closet door and disappear. The Browns were never frightened of her .”
Just what had spooked Barney that day will never be explained. The house where his friends lived has been sold and the property is slated for redevelopment as a seniors’ home. “So maybe Lucy will have lots of people to look after when the new facility is finally built and she can move in,” Barney said wryly. Whatever she is, and whoever she was, there’s no doubt though, that the phenomenon named Lucy was real. Even if she was the collective figment of Barney’s and a whole bunch of other people’s imaginations, she was real.
Shanon Sinn, whose newly released book The Haunting of Vancouver Island, was released just in time for Halloween, would likely agree with that assertion. Researching the book, he has visited haunted places up and down the Island, tracking manifestations from its spirit and cryptozoological worlds. Nor is he alone in his fascination, on one memorable day his web site – livinglibraryblog.com – topped 7,000 hits by people looking for his descriptive list of haunted places (do a search on the site for ‘haunted places on Vancouver Island’ and you’ll find it).
But still, he defines himself as a skeptic, as do many who investigate ghost stories. His belief in hauntings is solid in the same way as a gothic arch: half of him is fascinated and wants to believe; the other insists on a reasoned challenge to every encounter; the result is a structure that relies on a certain inner tension to stand firm. “I’ve had my own experiences during my lifetime, but I’ve always been more skeptical at the same time,” Sinn said. “I think it was Fitzgerald who said the sign of intelligence is to be able to have two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, and that’s kind of the way I try to approach this.”
Studies show upwards of 40 percent of people believe in the paranormal, and about 25 percent of people in the US say they have actually seen a ghost. Whether you believe that to be a case of intense paranormal activity, or a desperate psychic need for humans to believe in the paranormal, those kinds of stats are important. “There’s never been any scientist that I am aware of that’s ever said people aren’t having these experiences. The only question is what they are.”
There are some certainties about ghosts, though, Sinn says. They manifest in just about every culture and religion, and ‘as far as we know’ have done so for all of recorded time. “So we all have these ideas of the spirit existing beyond our body, and in some ways I wonder if that’s a lighter way to look at our own mortality; and in another way I wonder if it’s because we’ve all had these experiences across the world from the beginning.”
Simon Fraser University professor Dr. Paul Kingsbury, who has been studying paranormal interest groups and the people who join them for more than two years as part of a four-year project, sees an ongoing trend of believers in the paranormal coalescing into communities where they can share ideas and stories.
“They’re seeking answers, and also forming communities with like-minded people,” he said during an interview last March with Michael Enright on the CBC’s Early Edition. Kingsbury attributes heightened interest in spooky things in part to television shows based on paranormal themes, and to the ‘popular culture’ of the Internet, which facilitates sharing and coming together.
Believers and investigators of the paranormal become engaged in a search for objects that are beyond the scope of ‘scientific experiment and the laws of nature’, and part of that fascination is the mystery. “It’s the perfect object of desire. It’s always out of reach in terms of a blurry image, a strange sound, a cast of a footprint in a forest, so it always incites desire and it’s forever out of reach so people are propelled by the paranormal object,” Kingsbury said.
There’s nothing like a good ghost story to heighten the bonds of friendship around a campfire. Perhaps that explains in large part the reason people in the Mid-Island and throughout the world love a good, hair-raiser, especially on the last day of October, when even deniers let down their guard and welcome the tribes of trick-or-treaters to their doors.
Notes:
- Shanon Sinn’s The Haunting of Vancouver Island is available at locations listed on his web site.
- Good Barney’s book Camp Inspector can be purchased at the Nanaimo Historical Society.
