A Preamble Tale

Our family has been Ontario's Algonquin Park campers for many years. Since our boys were in their early teens, we have canoed on many of the fabulously scenic park lakes..... but our favorites have always been Canoe Lake, Tea Lake and Rock Lake. As an ongoing researcher somewhat obsessed with the alleged drowning death of Canadian artist Tom Thomson, I have spent my vacations close to Canoe Lake (for study) where his body was found in the early summer of 1917. I believe it was murder. I will deal with this down the road in my blog collection.
One evening at Rock Lake, as my wife and son Andrew were sitting down at the campground's beachfront, adjacent to the famous Booth Trail, they watched in the low light of autumn dusk, a man walk through the shoreline area, down onto the beach, stop momentarily, and then walk into the water. He hadn't taken many steps into the lake when he simply vanished. A ghost? An apparition? A message to the living from someone who has passed? Who can say?
It was only a short time before this holiday weekend for us, that a gent had perished in a canoe mishap a short distance from this camping area, being found on the other side of the bay several days after he went missing. Could it have been the image of the chap repeating the events of that fateful night. This is an example of the kind of encounters our family has had, and never discounted, over the past twenty five years. We don't over analyze these events and we certainly aren't frightened when something similar happens in our day to day activities. We are open-minded to such interactions but we don't make any attempt to draw spirits into our domain, or hope to make any particular connections with the other side. If it happens, well, it happens, and we appreciate the opportunity to experience something a tad outside simple explanation.
Our many parallel encounters certainly won't make the next thriller movie out of Hollywood and I don't believe there's one story here that would be the spark for an author to embellish into fiction. These are just honest, non-sensational recollections of personal experiences with unknown entities that may abut or prutrude a tad into the true definition of paranormal. Yet the fact of their commonplace may validate your own encounters that you may or may not have dismissed as something unworthy of after-thought. Then this is for you......not stories to frighten.....rather accounts to enlighten. Please read on!

The author's old haunt
I graduated York University in 1977 with a degree in Canadian history, and was eager to latch onto any historical project that would employee an obsessive guy like me. In that same year and wishing to stay around Bracebridge for awhile, I commenced planning for the soon to be established Bracebridge Historical Society, with the idea of saving a late 1800's octagonal estate overlooking the cataract of the Bracebridge Falls, called Woodchester Villa....or as it was best known, "The Bird House," the family name of homeowner and woolen mill founder Henry Bird. Working to create the historical society gave me the opportunity to work alongside Canadian author Wayland Drew, (Superior: The Haunted Shore), who at the time was teaching at Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School. Of the many talented writers I have had association with over the past 30 years, it was Wayland who pushed me hardest and the furthest to carry on with new writing challenges. I would have given up years ago if not for his encouragment. For a wannabe writer/historian fresh out of university. without a clue what the profession actually meant in suffering and prosperity, Wayland Drew was the perfect mentor at the most vulnerable time.
Jamming everything I could in to my post graduate enterprises, my family began Old Mill Antiques, a small gift and collectable business located on upper Manitoba Street, across from scenic Memorial Park.
The early century (early 1900's) three story brick home, on upper Manitoba Street (north) had been built earlier in the century for Dr. Peter McGibbon (former M.P. for Muskoka). It was a beautiful family home and medical office, with a carriage house tucked in behind the attractive but overgrown gardens, with several large maples on the property, the remnants of Mrs. McGibbon's flare for landscaping. When our family moved into the house, the building had been transformed into a number of apartments above a commercial bottom floor. We took over the bottom section which included enough room for a good sized shop and an apartment in the back. A plus of course to a fledgling writer /old book collector, was that there was a back staircase which led to a huge attic. The narrow, creaky stairs one level up connected with a locked door to a second story apartment rented to a young couple we seldom saw or heard. The large front window of the attic looked down on Memorial Park and in the winter it afforded an amazing vantage point, to watch citizens and school kids trundling through the newly fallen snow from the night before. It was an amazingly bright room despite the fact it only had one window. The only other was one on the upper level of the staircase which was too small to offer much light to enter the large rectangular room.
I set up a small office desk in front of the front window and that's where I spent many nights holed-up, working well into the morning hours, pounding out short stories and historical essays, and my early work as a starving poet. You could not have asked for a more inspirational place to write and I went through many typewriter ribbons during that prolific period, which probably has not been equalled since.
Despite the reality it was a positive, inspirational place to work, there was however, a strange and unsettling aura prevailing in the room that became more pronounced at certain times of the day. Frequently it was in the late afternoon as the winter sun was growing weaker that a curious melancholy came over the space, which I attributed to the subtle change of illumination. Then in the hours after midnight, I could feel very much isolated and cold, as if I was looking at the world below as one would watch the settling of a recently agitaged snow globe. I would never have thought initially, the mood of the long attic room had anything to do with the paranormal. It was just a room that seemed to be sensibly disconnected from all else, which for writing was the perfect distance from actuality for the watcher above, recording his home town's actions and reactions. The attic had a moodiness that changed rapidly and I always believed it was, in all cases, related to the brightness factor. In the evening by lamplight, it had a welcoming, warm feeling about it but during the day, depending on the time, it could prove to be dank and forboding, despite the initial appearances of being light and cheerful upon entry. There was a presence in the room most of the time and there was always a noticeable characteristic of unresolved history, an aroma, sounds, voices from somewhere that I always discounted because it was an old house with some aches and pains in its roof and walls.
I can remember a number of times feeling a cold chill of air and pondering to myself whether it was the failings of an old house or a ghost passing by, yet not dwelling on the paranormal for more than a momentary consideration. I've never been scared of ghosts so it wasn't a bad feeling or one that made me feel in any way uneasy. My work at the typewriter was progressing well and judging by the volume of finished projects, it had been the most accomodating location I'd ever worked in......and strange aura or not, this attic above the town was suited to my historical overviews. In fact, the first unofficial meeting of the Bracebridge Historical Society was held in the attic early in 1978.....and while only several members bothered to show up, it was the engaging spark of a new movement in the community straddling the 45th parallel of lattitude.
When the young couple in the apartment below found a better suited rental unit across town, it afforded me another level of the house to explore. At that time there were quite a few rental options in town so it did take quite awhile to find a use for the single bedroom unit. In fact my parents eventually took it over and we were able to expand the shop into another big room in the lower portin of the home. At that time I kept the back portion which offered a kitchen, bathroom and small bedroom. Plus I still had access to the attic. With this second floor apartment unoccupied, I used to leave the back door abutting the narrow staircase open, with the bathroom light on to help me navigate up and down late at night. I had navigated it several times in the dark by railing but had nearly fallen a couple of times; having the light made the climb much safer.
When I came down the stairs for the last time, usually just past midnight, I would stop off at the second floor apartment to switch off the bathroom light. I'd been doing this for about a half year and although your eyes had to adjust to the now dark staircase, the light below did illuminate at least three quarters of the decline. On one winter evening I followed an identical protocol. It was after midnight, and I had just turned off the main attic light on the wall, at the off-kilter doorway leading to the staircase landing. This was precarious because of the poor light. You might say I had to walk toward the light from this point! I walked slowly down the steps, being able to see reasonably well from the upward glow of the bathroom light on the second floor. When I arrived at the second floor, and having just turned off that light, I took the same small steps, very slowly out onto the landing for the final flight of stairs which led to my kitchen. The kitchen light illuminated about ten of twenty remaining stairs.
When I made my way onto the small platform of the second floor, no more than one step through the doorway, I had walked from total blackness into a cloud of brilliant white light. It felt like an immersion into a cold mist and there was a distinct musty aroma connected to whatever it was I had witnessed..... and I dare say, fully experienced. I stopped immediately for fear that I would not make the next step, and fall down the remaining section of winding stairway. It was a sensation like none other in my life. It lasted only a few seconds but its passing left a lifttime impression. I remember standing there stunned by what had just passed over me, too unnerved to do anything but hold onto the door-frame in case whatever it was came back. My eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness once again, and I decided to move down the staircase slowly. When I got to the base I sat down on the bottom step in total awe of an experience I was pretty sure was supernatural. As I sat there in shock, there was a substantial gust of cold wind that blew down on my back, strong enough to move my hair..... and penetrating enough for me to feel the chill through my thick winter sweater. Considering it was a frigid winter night, and in this old house the hot air was pushing up from the clanging oil furnace in the basement, pulsing through the many vents in the lower units, there wasn't much chance cold air was going to push down those stairs at my back. It would have created an in-house thunderstorm with this collision of the hot and cold. I stood, slowly turned and looked back up the staircase, and I was trembling at the very idea I had met up face to face, body to body with a ghost.....one that had apparently taken the liberty of returning to tap me on the shoulder to reinforce the significance of the impromtu meeting.
I never spoke a word of this to my parents the next day. The subject never came up and rather than being called a "nutter" I just decided to leave the matter alone. I still went up to the attic at night and worked but if I was anticipating another cloud walk, it wasn't about to happen. What did occur to validate my experience came several days later while I was working in our antique shop. A group of well dressed older people came into the store and were thrilled by the fact they could get into the house and look at some of the rooms....which I initially thought was just a group of architecturally keen sightseers. It was a fascinating house afterall with many built in cupboards and a tiny office-libary that at one time looked out over the sprawling gardens. When one of the vistors started explaining to the other where certain pieces of furniture had been, when she used to call in at the house as a child, I knew there was a little more depth to the visit. When I got a chance to visit with the group for a moment, one of the ladies explained that a family member who had once lived in this house, had only recently passed away, and they had just moments earlier come from the memorial service at the funeral home next door. As it turned out,.....and I never said one word about experiencing anything, they pinpointed the death to within minutes of my experience on the back staircase. At that moment, yup, I felt a cold chill run up my spine...., not because there was ghost in the room but because it was pretty obvious I had inadvertently, on that particular winter night, participated in one of those final jaunts of the spirit-kind through what it recalled of the material world. It wasn't a fearful situation and no harm was done to the witness but just the same, it was then thusly validated.... "I saw what I saw." But in fact, I'd known this only moments after sitting on that bottom stair and recollecting in detail what would make such a cold, misty illumination in a nearly blacked-out staircase of an old and lived-in house? A ghost might? What do you think?
This story was originally published in one of John Robert Columbo's books on paranormal encounters in Canada, back in the mid 1990's.
I have thought about this many times since but now I adamently believe the sensation of that mist-on-the-staircase did have a parallel with another supernatural....unexplained encounter in my life, which I recorded earlier in this blog-collection. It was curiously similar to the sensory experience I had in the company of my guardian angel (real or the fabrication of a fevered wee lad)....the one strangely met as a child, while living in an apartment complex in Burlington, Ontario. Whether I was actually in the company of an angel or it was an illness-generated experience, possibly a fever induced dream,...... regardless of the preamble, I so poignantly remember the cool nirvana....the almost floating sensation, of being in company with my heavenly messenger. It was as much the same aura. A feeling being evoked of peace and contentment. I wasn't nervous within.....but rather beyond and without its presence. I only became unsettled when analyzing what had occurred. Being amidst the vapor was kind of neat.....nothing that would frighten anything or anyone. But as soon as I reminded myself that such things could be considered "ghosts," well, that fanned the flames of imagination.
The McGibbon house was haunted. There were so many events that we just took the interventions in stride, and talked kindly to the occupiers. If it was indeed the McGibbons, then it was haunted by the finest citizens of the old town because they were revered by all....their work on behalf of the community was legendary. As a doctor at the new Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Dr. McGibbon was a key component to its survival through amazingly difficult years of under-staffing and under-funding. He had served with the 122nd Muskoka Battalion before its transformation into another regiment during the First World War, and Mrs. McGibbon was involved in many community groups helping improve life and social/cultural enhancements at home. During the period Peter McGibbon was the Federal Member of Parliament, it is said that Sir Arthur Meighen would often escape the controversies of The Hill, as member of the Opposition (and short lived Prime Minister), and stay with the McGibbons in this same house which afforded me so many prolific writing days up in that apparently quite haunted attic. I have heard the story several times from those who knew the McGibbons, that when their young daughter, and only child, became ill..... and after some time succumbed, her father, a well travelled and experienced doctor, fell into a deep depression because he could not save her life. It is said he never fully recovered from her death. What I believe adamently is that there were many strong emotions having prevailed in that house over the decades, from intense and strong-willed residents and patients, and it had carried over as a prevailing patina or aura that you felt upon entering through the front door. It didn't make you feel as if you should turn and run out...... yet it subtly made you aware this was an historical, storied residence harboring many important family and community milestones, like another house I was involved in at the same time, known of course as the Bird House, but officially as Woodchester Villa and Museum.....a story I would like to relate later in this collection of blogs on Muskoka ghosts and haunts.
When my parents and I decided to close up the antique shop, simply because of job offers that had unexpectedly arrived for my father, at a lumber company in Parry Sound, Ontario, and for me at the Muskoka Lakes-Georgian Bay Beacon (newspaper), in the Muskoka hamlet of MacTier, I took over their second floor apartment (the one with the spooky back door onto the stairs), turning over downstairs to a health food shop that kept me in fresh bread and wonderful cheese for years. In this tiny apartment which still offered an amazing view onto the park across the street, my cat "Animal" and I had many paranormal encounters. At certain times of the evening which may have been two or three times, spaced an hour or so apart, Animal would run to the doorway leading from the kitchen to the tiny hall that led to both the bathroom and the back stairs....my favorite spot for meeting up with curious wayward vapors. The cat would sit on the floor and look up at the door frame as if he saw something at the top. It was always the same place and for a long time I assumed it was a mouse moving around inside the wall. When it persisted, I just had a hunch there was something more to this nightly event, and prepared to take a photograph of the doorway the very next time it happened. I had my camera's motorwind juiced up and lots of film. I lowered the lights in the connecting livingroom but the hallway itself was dark.
Right on the button, Animal awoke from a sound sleep on the sofa, and wound up sitting in his usual place, on the linoleum floor looking up at the door frame or possibly the corner wall. I set myself up carefully so as not to disturb cat or entity but "Animal" was too intent on meeting the intruder, to worry about me clanging camera equipment. I started firing off flash enhanced shots on the approach and took all different angles of what I perceived to be the cat's subject area of focus. After I'd spent 24 shots, I stopped and stared awhile myself and watched the cat slowly turn away, trot off and jump back up on the couch to resume its nap. It was always just that matter of fact.....and it happened frequently. I hoped to have got some photo-evidence of action in that doorway, and just what, if anything, the cat was watching on those brief but timely vigils.
When my newspaper colleague developed the negatives, he printed a number of images off one particular frame that showed a definite white mist exactly where the cat was watching. I had several of these printed up (I have them somewhere in my archives but can't find them at this moment) and asked him, as a professional photographer, to determine if the white mist could be a lens flaw, or light flare caused by any number of light bounce-back scenarios. He assured me that what appeared as a whisp of smoke was not a flare, a flaw or a manifestation of the darkroom development. It appeared for all intents and purposes that I had got a legitimate image of something that was invisible to me but quite attractive to Animal the cat. And of course what makes this a tad more interesting, is that it was occuring nightly within a few feet of where I had experienced first hand, the wee white mist of a departed former resident. Was I nuts? Possibly. It did make living in the old house quite interesting.
The former McGibbon house offered a plethora of paranormal encounters and events over my years spent there from 1977 to 1983 give or take a few months. All the residents at one time or other had strange encounters and although they were slightly more reserved about proclaiming the estate to be haunted, it was obvious the house had some entertaining and a few annoying quirks for all the residents. There were hundreds of occasion when I'd here footsteps right up to my door and hear the door handle rattle. When I'd go to see who had arrived, there would be nothing but air and a view of the carpet covered stairs....which was interesting in itself considering the footsteps always seemed to sound as if they were on bare wood as they probably were in the early days of the house.
It was not uncommon to hear your name being called and frequently I'd run over to my neighbor's door on the same second floor level, to ask what she wanted. "I didn't call you," she'd reply. "It must have been the ghost." It's funny how after awhile, what would make good copy in a book about ghosts, like this blog-site, becomes quite commonplace. There were so many sounds, door rapping, window knocking, things being hidden and moved, dark shadows moving in the lower hall and sundry other footfalls and door knob rattling that we just considered and weighed for posterity, the most aggressive intrusions...... and well, pretty much blew-off the rest as the character sounds of an old house getting older. Still, the most relevant point of all, to each person who dwelled there, was that it was a friendly, welcoming abode that meant no harm to anyone. I would have stayed there in perpetuity except that with a new bride and a family on the way, more space and a quieter neighborhood was deemed more appropriate. I can never forget the goodwill bestowed upon me by this former doctor's house/office in uptown Bracebridge....long since torn down in favor of a new office building and apartments. I've often wondered whether or not the paranormal occupants stayed on in the new digs or left with the rubble of a once grand estate.
I owe much of my early accomplishments in writing and the study of regional history in Bracebridge and Muskoka, to those early years cradled by this inspiring homestead, which gave me an insightful yet practical vantage point to watch the comings and goings of the old hometown. I can remember on one occasion, shortly before I moved to my wife's apartment a few blocks away, standing in the late spring evening on the front walk, looking up at the attic window where I had once worked late on enticing, warm evenings as this......and I could have sworn on a Bible, I saw the silhouette of a person in that exact same position....just as I would have been viewed by any pedestrian passing by the house. Yet there was no one in that attic. No writer. No poet. No resident. Possibly it was my own spirit staying behind in kindness, committed to a cherished place on earth. Maybe it was just a wee fluster of an over-active imagination. Still, after all these years, I can not pass the site of this grand old estate built by the McGibbons, and not think kindly of the good old days spent in its comforting embrace, writing about my hometown well into the wee hours of yet another night well spent.