Miles David Brown and the Thomson Mystery
Dave Brown, of Hamilton, was not only a well known outdoor educator in Ontario, he was an accomplished historian, book collector of considerable acclaim and had spent many years as a summer camp instructor. He was familiar with the lakes of Algonquin and his canoe had traversed hundreds of miles on these waters in quest of logging relics of which he possessed a significant collection.
Dave was a frequent house guest of hours while up on his camping excursions, and we enjoyed many conversations about nature, history and his favorite subject "outdoor education." Before Dave passed away after a short illness, I had agreed to be his biographer. His was a life well-lived, and he had so many interesting stories about people and fascinating places in this province, and oh so many adventures, that it warranted a much larger study than what I was able to provide without extensive interviews. He passed on just as we were in the planning stage of what was supposed to be a co-operative effort. While I did complete his biography it was only half what it could have been if Dave had been at my side.
I had talked to Dave many times during my early foray into the Thomson research, about whether or not the Canoe Lake Cemetery plot, that was once occupied by the deceased artist, was still "occupied," as was determined in the 1950's, during and impromptu exhumation by William Little, Jack Eastaugh and friends. The grave that was supposed to be empty wasn’t quite.....the broken sections of what appeared to be Thomson’s original coffin was found in the excavation, as were human bones. Everybody including family was surprised by Little’s revelations. I don’t believe they were happy about any of the publicity, and who could blame them. Tom had been a unique and fascinating character in life and his work was gaining huge acclaim at the time of the exhumation. It was obvious any information contrary to what had been accepted fact of his demise would have a sensational zing.
The problem with this is that shortly after Thomson was buried in July 1917, an undertaker by the name of Churchill, was sent by the Thomson family, to remove the coffin with his remains from Algonquin, to be re-buried in a family plot in the Village of Leith, near Owen Sound, Ontario. Churchill wasn’t aware at the time of his arrival at Canoe Lake, that the coffin had already been buried in the plot near Mowat, during a hurried ceremony earlier the same day. There has been concern over the years the undertaker didn’t quite fulfill the terms and obligations he was sworn. It has long been alleged that Churchill had only transported a box of Algonquin earth in the sealed metal casket, having decided not to go to the effort of digging up Thomson’s coffin....although he always denied this allegation. The metal coffin was tightly sealed and according to some witnesses at the funeral in Leith, the box had a musty odor but was never opened to confirm Tom was inside. There is another story that maintains Tom’s father insisted the coffin be opened, and it was, revealing the remains of his son. There are however, suggestions the seal was never broken on the metal casket and definitely not opened.
While we will go into this situation with more detail later in this series of columns, the "two grave" scenario, factors large in the Thomson mystery. According to Judge Little, Thomson is undeniably still buried at the Canoe Lake Cemetery. Even though forensic tests on the skull revealed it to be the remains of a native male and not those of Thomson, there are still concerns the testing did not go far enough before the remains were re-buried in the Algonquin cemetery. The plot in Leith has never been investigated.
Dave Brown was a friend to all, and he knew many folks with long histories at Canoe Lake and in Algonquin Park, from guides, Park Rangers, to cottagers. One evening shortly before his death, after asking me how my research was going on Tom Thomson, he told me quite bluntly that he had it on good and trusted authority, Thomson’s body was still in his original grave as he was committed in July of 1917. When I pressed him for more information he said he couldn’t betray the trust of his sources but said it would be hard to deny that these particular folks had a much closer connection to the circumstances of Thomson’s demise and initial burial. "I just wanted you to know that I have solid information from a number of people I have known up there, who believe Thomson was never moved from Mowat....and that the undertaker hauled back a metal coffin full of dirt to avoid digging the coffin up. To these people it’s not much of a mystery at all....he was injured during a fight, knocked unconscious, taken out onto the lake and dumped to make it look like he drowned. He didn’t. I’m telling you, he’s still in Algonquin Park....sorry I can’t help you any more than this."
Dave wasn’t a story spinner as such. He told a good story but he had the historian’s need for accuracy so when he told me this, while it wasn’t particularly useful to prove or disprove....because I couldn’t follow up with his sources (some were already deceased), it at least gave me some confidence there were dissenters who didn’t buy some of the information about Thomson’s death and burial.
I would have loved to pursue this with Dave but within weeks his condition had deteriorated and there was no chance of recovery. It is really the last full discussion I had with Dave and although it wasn’t a pivotal amount of information it at least let me know I wasn’t a fool to be following this up......as had many other researchers over the decades from Blodwen Davies in the early 1930's onward to Judge William Little and others to the present.

The Inner Storm of Tom Thomson
Note: When I initiated my research foray into the circumstances surrounding the death of Canadian artist, Tom Thomson, which commenced for me back in the mid 1990's, I had no idea that my interest in the story would be self perpetuating and offer no clear final chapter. In reality the story of Thomson has occupied my attention for more than fifteen years. Not solely the mystery of his death but his art work and life. His life is a most fascinating study. From the time I began a more intensive examination of his alleged accidental drowning, there were many splendid examples of serendipity playing a weighty role in discovery. One good source would direct to another, then another, and even unrelated sources often times provided some unexpected Thomson or Canadian art information that did influence the course of research. As an active regional Ontario historian for many decades now, serendipitous discovery is pretty much an anticipated part of the quest for information. We come to count on accidental findings to give us a hand up. Admittedly it can get a little spooky how these connections come about. For most of the first year there were few days that didn't have a Thomson intrusion in one form or another but it was all very welcome.
After my preliminary article on the death of Thomson (drowning, Canoe Lake, July 1917), carried by Muskoka Today, published in Gravenhurst, and then a larger series of columns in The Muskoka Sun in the late 1990's, I was getting help, advice and information from all over and much of it was in support of the murder theory versus the long accepted verdict by a coroner's inquiry, of 1917, that ruled Thomson had drowned. There were times during research and preparation for these columns that I very much felt the artist's presence..... as if he was as interested in my story-line..... as much as the readership was demonstrating, by offering me a plethora of clippings and personal opinions about the cold case. My wife Suzanne said to me one day that it was almost as if Tom was "sending a message from the other side." There are circumstances surrounding this story and these years of initial research, that did seem to border on the paranormal, particularly experienced on a canoe venture to Canoe Lake and a visit to Thomson's memorial cairn on Hayhurst Point. I will present the story of this unsettling traverse of Algonquin's best known lake, later in this blog collection.
This is not a story about Thomson's ghost. Although there have been sightings in the past, one in fact, by a member of the Group of Seven artists visiting the park sometime after his death. It is the accounting of an admirer's mission to shed more light on the Thomson mystery, as others have in the past......and how a wonderful artist's life, his work, and demise affected us, and other researchers intimately close to his story. My work on Thomson has been based on the utmost respect for the artist and I have never once received a penny of remuneration for any of the research and composition work I've published over the past 15 years, the last series running in Curious: The Tourist Guide, over 12 months in 2007. From the time I began working on this story in the mid 1990's, there has never been any attempt to sensationalize or to make a profit from content. It was written with the unfaltering respect and credit for those who broke trail on the research, such as Judge William Little (1970's book The Tom Thomson Mystery) and Blodwen Davies the first writer, in the early 1930's, to question the theory of accidental death versus murder most foul. It is a fascinating and compelling story....a Canadian legend that in some way or other makes it to print each year in some Canadian locale. Each year some camper will tell the story of seeing the ghost paddler on the cusp of nightfall, in that silent traverse of the Algonquin Lakes he was famous for. Most of all, it is out of a sense of awe for his art work, that I continue to find great inspiration to not only follow his canoe path but to re-visit some of the places he haunted, and depicted so powerfully on his wood panels.
The short piece you are about to read was written in the mid 1990's at a time when I had only just begun my research into his mysterious demise. I penned these observations while sitting on the shore of Canoe Lake with my family, watching a storm front-push over Algonquin. Tom Thomson would have adored the scene as it unfolded upon the lakeshore, finding a great deal of power in the confluence between the currents of air and water pounding like fist against this evergreen bordered, etched-rock shoreline. It was from our perspective, a Thomson day in Algonquin!
By Ted Currie
Each bold, smooth, wave of brush stroke, laps dark and deeply into the long furrow of emerging wake. The voyeur can feel its undertow reaching for his soul. The traverse imprints a profound and contrasting depth and breadth of shadow, paint and coloration, as impression whirlpools from the surface into the black confluence of the lake's history.
The paddle is thrust in a furious rage, deep below the surface of the boiling lake. Paint streams in a twist of art, fate and nature in a silhouetted passage across an open, mirrored universe. The manifestation upon the painter’s board began in this violation of event against reflection, as the paddle-stroke evermore propels the canoe toward the open bay.....the twisting event of storm unfurling along the horizon pines.
In this storied sanctuary, in the sage scented basin of legend and spirits, the artist finds the portal to oversee creation. A hallowed place to live and paint, one side in the actuality of Algonquin, the other in the ethereal current of ecstasy. The poet is the artist, the environs the pinnacle of enlightened observation, between realities and illusion, natural heaven and hell.
The devil stirs against a subtle divinity of calm. Above the contoured rocks on the distant shore, actuality is painted an ominous black against green. Demons generate free-will within the cavernous tomb of autumn storm, just this moment blocking away the sun. There is a threatening free-fall earthward of fear and trembling; a deep, vibrating roar beyond the jowls of stormscape. A hard, piercing, rythmic drumming of wind and rain, growing deeply fertile, fueled by the inspiration of still-warm air that spans the lakeland.
The first bite of ill-fame has clearly cut with a dagger point, across the uneven expanse of this once still life. The gale generated whitecaps rage along the blunt rock shoreline. Seeking refuge from the painter’s intent, the wind’s malevolent passion, the canoeist turns sharply back toward shore. The precarious balance between paddler and storm stages mortal and artistic co-habitation. It is the will of artist. The traverse must end. The cyclonic force at the heart of creative storm, will paint, without mercy, without apology, a soon-fatal blow. The paint-board presents this tragic wake, the biography of evasive yet found immortality.
A gallery voyeur has just taken a step-back, mindful that art and artist demand space in which to thrive. What then is this unsafe passage of imagination, but the cruel play now of creator on the unsuspecting?
This thrusting, bitter October wind pounds down against the Algonquin woodland with a brutal force, snapping limbs off the bare old hardwoods and sending the fallen leaves into a filmy crimson sheet, draping across the hazy passage ahead. The deeply rolling waves pummel the canoe, bashing against the stern, the wind and current beneath wrenching the bow toward the sawblade of rock.
It became impossible to make any progress up the shore toward Mowat. The bounce-back of waves off the rocks had become severe, and the only way to avoid capsizing, was to pull into the first shallow inlet. At times the manifestation of wind and whitecaps was so powerful that the wooden canoe seemed to lift fully into the air, a precarious, spirited flight across the peaks and valleys of this unfolding legend.
The irregular, unpredictable, violent thrusts of autumn gale, strike down upon this haunted lake with a murderous, determined, unfaltering stroke. A mournful, darkened sky tumbles along the horizon, the true rage of Algonquin storm yet to unfurl. The shrill and haunting windsong, of air current through the tight embrace of towering evergreens, enchants in a warning voice. There is no safe passage. The sharp slap and cascade of waves upon silvered rocks, the creak and groan of aged docks, holding as schooner planks in high seas, peaks the voyeur’s sense that the spirit-kind are at work, sculpting in essence the bust of a tragic hero.
Adrift in this cauldron of tugging undertow and battering wave, a tightly clenched fist of wind jerks stern then bow, inward hard against the rocks. Long canvas shards engrave windward, giving the appearance of razor-cut paper in the flight of a kite. A clench of malevolent history strikes upward against the wooden hull, now shattered and torn open violently to the flood of dark twisting current. There is an evil succession of crashing waves, a tangle of green serpents diving one through the other, in this constant, wicked caress of nature’s most evolutionary intent. Drowning in this abstraction of legend, the canoe-mate disappears into the fictional depths of our own spirit lake. The challenger of nature, the ignorant transgressor, is overcome today by manifestation of art and artist, brush stroke and inspiration.
The creator stops work abruptly, resting hand and brush on the open paint box, as if he has been suddenly disconnected from prevailing realities. It is necessary to re-acquaint with the storm’s fury, still etching across the white and black contrasted bowl of Canoe Lake. As the overturned canoe, wood against stone, bobs like a corpse in the foaming inlet below, the bare knuckle of storm-surge bashes down like a lover spurned. In the slow but profound fade of life-shade into death, at this precise moment of sacrifice, the protocol of legend has been satisfied. An ominous, transforming darkness encroaches upon the watcher’s soul; brush is returned to oil and board, as if carried by wind and wave; a spirited rush of energy from earth beneath, into conflict, toil and creation.
A poignantly haunted lakeland emerges in this new warm light exposed, over the cold clasping rigor-mortis of life imitating art.
Just when it appears a typhoon might at any moment unfurl from the deepest black of spiraling cloudscape, the trace golden lines of sun enhance in thin cuts, along the deep green and blue hollows of afternoon horizon. Striking imprints, curious painted evolutions of storm and legend, are roughly hewn from contrary environs of wild reality yet enduring sanctuary.
Suspended at this moment is a raw cocktail of vigorous inspiration and sage advisory, the firmly brushed imprint of fiction against actuality; the uncertain oblivion that exists between canoe and storm, reality and impression, and the artist at the mercy of raging emotion. A cold, wicked penetration of arctic air stabs into the flesh, while the warm intoxication of creation keeps artist at task.
In earnest devotion, and unfaltering faith, it is mindfully acknowledged by the creator, the story has been successfully composed. A re-animation of the dead, you might say. A fatal traverse of life and times, captured for posterity. The last brush stroke, an illusion, has chaptered painter within the storm. Fear and trembling, blood and soul, rock and sky, our mutual surrender to Algonquin in transition.
In the glow of a gallery light, the fury manifests anew, as if released in our presence, the passion and glory of ecstasy bestowed.
With every paddle stroke against the current, we revere the legend that brought us here. Faithful, silent witness to the spirit within the storm.
In tribute to Canadian landscape painter, Tom Thomson.

A HAUNTING I CAN’T GET RID OF - BUT WOULD KING 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. Coming soon will be a full length feature on the good Mr. Thomson’s case circa 1917-2009.

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The Antique Store Shopper Who Really Wasn't
While it might seem from the plethora of gathered stories so far that our family eagerly embraces the paranormal to the point of invention, we're still not at the point where ghostly encounters have meant anything more than a slight deviation of life's normal course. I'm reasonably sure many people have had paranormal experiences throughout their lives but opted to avoid even the most basic analysis or cross referencing, in order to authenticate the activity. I'm of the firm belief many of these experiences are a long, long way from what might be considered intrusive and frightening. Most are pretty passive events and nothing more than everso delicate messages from those who have passed. We in our house tend to be more receptive and attentive to activities surrounding us on any given day. I don't sit around waiting for something paranormal to present itself but I don't run away scared if all of a sudden a smell of lilacs or a bell mysteriously ringing goes otherwise unexplained. And we don't blame everything on the paranormal and are quick to find any other source that could explain our sensory intrusion. Quite a few are accepted but largely unexplained but always welcome none the less.
I've had exposure to strange encounters most of my life, and Suzanne has had a few but none that were the fuel of public notoriety such as to facilitate the inking of a movie deal. If you have read many paranormal stories, and are familiar with ghostly encounters yourself, our stories are about as run-of-the-mill as you can get. Nothing particularly spectacular when compared to stories about haunted castles and spiritful misty moors. Ours are really what might be expected of interesting, somewhat hard to explain encounters.....none of them threatening although possibly a tad unsettling. What we do have is an open minded approach to new and interesting things in this crazy old life. We couldn't possibly rule out the existence of ghosts or Unidentified Flying Objects or for that matter goblins, fairies, trolls, and other assorted wee beasties writers have been telling us about for centuries......we just haven't worked to disprove their existence because frankly it doesn't bother us either way. If we found a fairy in our garden we wouldn't try to snatch it up as a trophy. We'd just be delighted our garden was good enough to provide habitat.
In every single encounter we have had individually or as a family, we have never been led in that particular direction by, as an example, having just watched a horror flick, or just prior to...., reading about a haunting, or anything else that would have made us anticipate something lurking in the shadows. The encounters have all been when, as they say, we would least expect anything out of the ordinary. There had not been any stimulus to invent paranormal discovery. It just happened out of the blue or the dark depending on the time of day. Each time we have had an experience we might label in the paranormal domain, or at least close, we always try to find reasons it might have been mind over matter. And we never suggest for a moment that what we have witnessed, or sensed, is clear fact the paranormal has been at work.....because as researchers recognize, it isn't that easy to bag a photo of a wayward, passing by, or lodging-in-your-house "spirit," for proof you've been touched by the paranormal. We don't as a rule hunt ghosts or try to get rid of any we do find. Live and let haunt I hear some folks say. As historians by profession however, we cross reference fact and very often find fiction lurking within, and we adore refuting long held historical claims by applying good research skills. We've ticked a few folks off in our ballywick who preferred the old and trusted histories of the region, very much disliking those historical activists who delve too deeply. Thusly, when we put forward our tales of the paranormal, they are just that.....tales, because we can not prove beyond doubt that what we encountered is the work of the spirit-kind. It would be daft to swear on the Bible that we have been intruded upon by Catherine the ghost child. We can suspect a haunting but we simply can't offer proof beyond doubt.
One such strange but unproven encounter, that developed twice (only one of us experienced the mystery shopper), occurred once again at our former antique shop in Bracebridge. On the first occasion it had been a busy afternoon with a lot of tourist traffic passing through the basement shop. It was a strange location in many ways. Our shop was situated in a modern storefront addition that had been built onto the front of a large Victorian house that had once been occupied by the local undertaker. You couldn't get into the house from the addition and the original building had been divided into apartments. The creaking and groaning of the modified building never stopped, and it was common several times a day to hear footsteps coming down the stairs only to find no one arriving in the shop. In the early years of the store our sales desk was in a larger second room to the left, a sharp turn at the bottom of the stairs, such that we couldn't see who was coming in until they rounded the corner into the main shop. If they went straight into the room at the bottom of the stairs, we might only hear the tinkling of china or pinging of crystal, as a shopper(s) tested the wares. Lots of times we would get up and actually go to the room to see if any one had actually belonged to the footfall. We just wrote it off to a settling building and the constant pounding of heavy traffic up the main street.
Late this particular afternoon, Suzanne looked up from bookwork at the counter to see an elderly bearded man in an old coat standing a few feet in front. She was about to say "hello" to the sudden guest of the shop, when the figure simply vanished into thin air. Yet she could describe his facial features and clothing, his height and expression as clearly as you would any customer who appears at your sales desk with an enquiry or a request to purchase. Several weeks later, in pretty much the same circumstance as the first encounter, Suzanne felt a presence near the counter, looked up to see if someone needed help, and saw the same gentleman standing in front as before. She thought at first that she had been too quick to judge the gentleman's visit the first time as a ghostly encounter, due to the fact he was obviously interested in something in our shop. As she pulled up from the chair to properly address the chap, still standing within a few metres of the counter, he simply turned and vanished as quietly and mysteriously as he had arrived. It did leave my wife rubbing her eyes wondering just how the lighting in the store was creating this illusion of a short bearded man in a frock. In retrospect what she did see was not a chap from the 1990's, but someone dressed characteristic of many decades previous. It had the usual trappings of "I've seen a ghost." Suzanne was looking for another sale for the day and instead got a twice disappearing customer on the cusp of something or other. She just didn't understand the message you might say.
There are many stories about the folks who used to dwell in this particular Victorian era house, one being that a sickly relative had lived and suffered from a long and serious ailment alone in the attic, over many years, eventually passing away in that same section of the old home. Once again as historians, we have not varified this claim by a former resident. Suzanne has no doubt about the man she saw but whether it was the deceased attic-dweller, we will probably never know. I never saw the chap in my days at the store but I did hear the phantom footsteps at least once every day for more than five years. Still, it was a good location for our shop and during its run we enjoyed a pretty good volume of sales. We gave it up to pursue new business opportunities in Gravenhurst, a town ten miles south of Bracebridge but we still have a soft spot for the Birch Hollow location of once.
Woodchester Villa's Storied Past - My Favorite of all Haunts
It was in the late summer of 1977, the year I graduated from York University, in Toronto, that I decided to get involved with a move in Bracebridge, Ontario, to save an historic octagonal home built by Woolen Mill founder, Henry Bird, closely following a design put forth by American Orsen Fowler.....who believed in the restorative, health-promoting, life-sensible qualities of living within an octagon. Many folks across North America did buy into his belief and designs for better living, and there were two such examples in Muskoka, one a lakeside cottage the other Woodchester Villa, or as it was better known to the local citizenry as..... the "Bird House," in reference to the founder of the hill-top estate.
I was part of the first board of directors of the newly established Bracebridge Historical Society, and I do consider myself the chap who put forth the idea to commence the group in the first place, which after a few years of hardy labor down the road, proudly opened the newly acquired museum (in the early 1980's). After a short hiatus due to out-of-the-area employment, I returned as a member of the Board a hair's breadth into the new museum's mandate, which was to both preserve local heritage and entertain visitors. I remained at Woodchester in one capacity or another for the better part of the decade, as both the Society's President and later Museum Manager during the period of the late 1980's.
I worked many long hours at the museum and each member of our family spent their summers, during that hectic decade, tied in one way or another to the site. We looked after a lot of the maintenance issues from mowing the lawns to painting the decking, weeding the limestone walkways to running educational and entertainment programs throughout the two summer months. There was a tight budget from the beginning of the museum to the time I ended my association. We had many Strawberry Socials on the lawns at Woodchester, and two sensational "Theatre in the Round" performances, thanks to the actors connected at the time to Muskoka Festival, then operating each summer from the Gravenhurst Opera House. They did the shows for free and it helped our attendance figures which were at the time failing for many different reasons. First of all, we had few if any dollars to spend on advertising. We got by each summer on the kindness of so many generous volunteers and folks who left donations to help us offset costs.
We guided many school tours through the years, and had special open houses at Christmas and then a "Christmas in July," program for kids during the summer season. We even had impromtu musical events offered by concert and otherwise accomplished pianists who would just happen by the parlor as part of the tour.....then be unable to resist tickling the ivories.....that's right....they would just start playing and a crowd would soon gather nearby. From this kind of unexpected but always welcome entertainment, we'd range upwards to hosting the full regalia, Provincial Salvation Army Band on the side lawn. We tried everything at least once, and it was particularly tough because we suffered most of the time from too few volunteers, too much work expected of us.... and we had two tiny tots to contend with at the same time. Now try to repeat that last line fast. Talk about a tongue twister but it's all true. It was a crazy time of our lives as a family and I dare say my wife was pondering the sensibility of marrying an historian. I can remember Suzanne having to hold son Robert while demonstrating butter-making for the "Christmas in July" event. In fact, I used to set up the playpen in the museum annex, for son Robert, and I let Andrew play with his toy cars on the museum floor in the restored former Presbyterian Church, while I worked from the back office. It was a daily thing. My boys grew up in a museum. It somewhat explains their interest in old stuff now, I suppose. (The former church site by the way, is now the Chapel Gallery.....of which I helped initiate to the site in the initial plan for the museum's business upgrade from poverty status to sustainability). We worked in every area of the museum and knew it incredibly well. I used to sneak folks up to the Widow's Walk, which was accessed through a trap door at the uppermost peak of the roof, where the view to the river and main street was magnificent. I wasn't supposed to do this but I did it any way! It was an insurance issue moreso. It was safe to my standard but not by their reasoning.
Woodchester Villa had its share of curious attributes. None that were particularly troubling but it was obvious to any paranormally sensitive occupant or visitor, there was an aura, an unseen energy within which gave you the constant feeling of being watched. We weren't the first to experience these sensations, as it was noted by other residents of the property from year's past, that it was a dwelling of many strange noises and curious unexplainable occurrences. While it wasn't enough to scare any one from the building there were occasions when we all would ask ourselves, "did you hear that," "who turned the light on," or "where are those barking dogs?" I seldom if ever walked up to the Widow's Walk without feeling someone was coming up right behind me. I'd even feel a tug on my ankle but nobody else was on the narrow staircase when I would look down. It was probably mind over matter in this case because it was kind of a spooky, dimly lit part of the house to traverse in all kinds of weather and times of day.
The first documented case of unusual sounds in the house, was reported by museum staff in about the second year of full operation. Several staff members told about being in the second floor curator's office, and hearing the sound of barking dogs. The windows were closed and there were no dogs barking when staff stepped out to investigate. I had heard them as well, so I didn't have any reason to doubt that they had also heard the nearly non-stop howling and barking as if the hounds were in the house itself. I never really thought about it until the young ladies on staff, started to look for these barking dogs. None could be found. If there was barking heard in the house, by taking one step out the door at the front or back, the racket would suddenly cease. At that time nobody mentioned the "barking dogs" as being any kind of paranormal encounter. It was just annoying. In the middle of book work I'd get up and stick my head out the window, like most on staff for those years, and yell "Shut up....shut up you stupid dogs!" It didn't work. The paranormal connection came a short while later, while students who should have been at work guiding, dusting and conserving, took a particular interest in the spiritual essences of the estate. They commenced an unanticipated, unwarranted and non-sanctioned exploratory adventure to determine just how many ghosts dwelled within the octagon of Woodchester Villa. I was in for a rude introduction to their handiwork when the electronic media showed up to record the hauntings which even included what turned out to be an invented murder scenario, the students believed had occurred on the estate. It was a public relations coup on one hand, because it did get us needed publicity but the Bird family was not impressed by the suggestion foul play had occurred on the upper staircase......as the spirits had somehow relayed to the teenage tour guides. It is said a guide was threatened on the staircase by some invisible entity, and told to get out of the house. It was pretty much what I told them but I wasn't a ghost....just a pissed off public relations director trying to mend fences as fast as they were smashing them down. It began as calmly as this......
It was the same year that I was working on behalf of the Public Relations Committee, that I had my first run-in with ghosts and those who wished to identify them as unique qualities and quantities of the Victorian estate. A reporter on staff of The Herald-Gazette, of which I was editor at the time, went to do a story about the alleged haunting of the Bird House. I didn't really think too much of it, until it arrived on my desk for approval.....and as content overseer, I had to weigh content and adverse impact before I passed it on to lay-out. It wasn't breaking news or anything and it seemed harmless for a page four insertion. What I assumed was to be a light feature article, and possibly a kindly bit of publicity for a new museum, had a much more dire story-line. It seemed that in response to the annoying and ongoing din of barking dogs, which lasted a few years on and off, the staff decided this time to allow Ouiji to sort it all out. One young lady brought the board in to see if the staff could make contact with the spirits, still holed-up somewhat comfortably in the century old octagonal house. Well, one thing led to another, and all sorts of weird stuff was being reported, and what was to be a one-time feature story for the fun of it, became a lengthier series of articles......because the reporter's initial interest generated more delving, questions to the "other side," and a playfulness with the television reporter who picked up the feature story and decided to approach staff directly. It was a slow news period...you're right!
As a short sidebar to this story, I let an acquaintance of mine, during casual after-work conversation, in on the most recent debacle happening at Woodchester.....she was a highly sensitive young lady with a particular awareness about paranormal characteristics and habits, and who knew all about seances, and the inherent dangers of a Ouiji Board in the wrong hands. She scolded me soundly for allowing the girls to play around with the Board, and taking a chance that every wayward spirit, good and nasty, would feel warmly at home in these new (old) digs. I happened to mention it to her just as plain old, run-of-the-mill conversation, regarding the kind of day I was having as both a museum director and editor...... being weighed down by the chores of the day. To her it was a far more serious matter....unearthly you might say. "By using that Board you've invited a lot more spirits than were probably ever lodging in that house, to come for an extended visit, and never, never want to leave," she said with unflinching confidence that we'd made a giant welcome sign to "party-on dudes." We didn't really want a sideshow up there afterall. This female friend, who shall remain nameless, told me that one of the great faults of using such a board, is that you can inadvertently invite any old wayward spirit into the mainstream without having a chance to check credentials at the door. "You can draw in a lot of spirits you don't want in your house.....and this is their portal back into our world!" I just nodded because that's the first I'd ever heard of that particular conduit between this world and the great beyond. I don't know whether she was right or not.....but life and haunting did get somewhat more involved after the board was used....moreso than just the sound of barking dogs.
I was watching the nightly news, sipping a nice cold beer, when all of a sudden a film clip appeared on-screen of Woodchester, with a story about an unsolved mystery unfolding in Bracebridge......and it may have involved murder. What staff had been up to went way beyond the Ouiji Board and the feature story we ran in The Herald-Gazette. Now staff was investigating an unresolved murder in the house and an empty grave in the local cemetery. Geez, they were hired to work as museum interpreters and now it was turning into an episode of "Murder She Wrote." What was worse is that they started naming names, and it involved a prominent family......the first family of the house in fact, and to hear about it on the nightly news didn't amuse any of the kin who caught the reference. The story was that a young family member had been pushed down a flight of stairs, probably coming from the attic, and had been killed by the fall. It was assumed the burial plot held the secret and short of digging it up, a lot of inuendo had been cast unceremoniously around town. Just the kind of slanderous stuff that can get a museum and staff into serious legal trouble, and give a public relations director some wickedly strong heartburn. I was on the phone mending fences right away. I was having lots of meetings with lots of people, and my reporter was called in to re-assess what he had helped fan into the nightly news.
We found out that it had begun when one of the staff members reported that he had been audibly told to "get out of this house,"
by some unseen entity, as he was descending the attic to third floor staircase. A little unsettled and building on a theme already stemming up from a strong root of suspicion, the next ill conceived project was to find out if the voice and a grave marker discrepency someone else had found, added up to murder-most-foul. The bottom line here, is that there was no murder, no foul play whatsoever, and we had many apologies to bestow to family .....and a Ouiji Board to remove from the house.
It took a few years for this to blow over. It doesn't mean the house wasn't paranorally endowed, and it may have even been quite honestly interpreted that an entity within wanted the subject staff member to "buzz off," but there was no murder. No mystery. Just the life history of an old house fussing up from time to time....creaking timbers and settling ground and yes a few quality moments of barking dogs from somewhere quite unknown.
One of the most significant paranormal events came when a director of the museum, a guy who wouldn't budge for any wayward spirit, got the idea to tape-record old 78 rpm records from the parlor gramaphone so that we could play them through the day by using a speaker insert in the cabinet; the recorder actually placed in an unused bathroom nearby. So instead of wearing out the needles on the gramaphone, or stressing the critical main-spring with daily use, it afforded us a great option to bring music into the parlor by what appeared to be a whirling Victrola but was actually an extension of electronics. Guests believed it was an actual record being played and seemed to enjoy the ambience it created in the otherwise stuffy parlor.
What happened was that while the records were being recorded, some curious knocking and other noises in the house were being picked up. When he played us the tape we could clearly hear the knocking as if someone was at the adjacent door....that's how clear it was recorded. Yet he had no actual interruptions throughout the recording session over several days. He often went out of the room, even out doors while the record was spinning and despite his best efforts to identify the sources of the knocking (he heard later on the recordings), he could offer no explanation for their existence. The records themselves were fine as was the machine. He listened to all the records over again and never heard problems with the actual pressing, that would have accounted for the knocking. He firmly believed the sounds to have been external and not a technical problem with either the tape recorder or Victrola. I used to play that same tape over and over during at least three years, and I always got a kick out of hearing the knocks myself. They weren't really disturbing or unsettling but it did seem to be the case something was trying to get attention on that particular day of recording.
On another occasion I intruded quite accidentally on a conversation of a young family coming down from the second floor of the museum, in a rather animated discussion about "The Room," and "Did you get that feeling we shouldn't step inside?" I asked the guide what room the family had felt uncomfortable in, and she pointed me to the children's quarters at the right of the stairs. I wandered in and looked all about, studied the period toys strewn on the floor, as if children had just been at play, and dismissed anything paranormal whatsoever. I chatted at some length with the guides who told me that many visitors to the second floor would not go into the room, despite the fact we had taken down barrier ropes during my tenure as director manager. "They find it occupied," said one of the guides. "They enjoy looking at the master bedroom and the other exhibits in the bedroom at the front of the house but they don't like going into the children's room." We decided to do a little survey. Without telling any one about our interest in the room, and why it seemed oppressive, we jotted down remarks from people leaving the museum and asked them specifically which rooms they enjoyed the most....and the least.
We of course found that a majority of visitors that summer did not like the child's room. They said it appeared "sad and lonely," the toys being unplayed with. It was my wife's own refusal to enter the room that made me ever-more interested in finding out what it was that inspired these feelings of forboding. We tried to change-up the toy display, putting some away and tidying up the floor space to allow visitors full entrance to the room. Suzanne still felt the room was occupied and suggested it had nothing at all to do with the decor. She felt there was a strong presence of a child in the room and there was no compassion to share the toys. I have stood for hours in that room on bright days, where light was brimming into the room, and on dull days when rain splashed against the glass pane.....and never, not even for a second, did I feel unwelcome in those quarters. It doesn't mean everyone else was wrong because by averages of people avoiding it, I was the one being paranormally numb-founded you might say.
My most significant paranormal experience in that house came on the day of an open house during a Christmas in July program. Both Suzanne and I were feeling poorly that day the result of the flu, or an illness from something we had consumed, and we were painfully putting together the day's materials in order that the event could run as planned. Suzanne was setting out a massive cake in the upstair's porch area, while looking after both Andrew and Robert. Staff were setting up chairs for the band yet to arrive, and I was in the downstairs kitchen making up lemonade for the several hundred guests expected. In the basement area you could hear footsteps above but not clearly. You certainly couldn't hear anything outside because the thick stone walls insulated out the noise of the neighborhood. As for the barking dogs, you could only hear them in the upstair bedroom we used in those days as the office. In the abutting open area to the kitchen we held our regular board meetings. I was stirring the lemonade when all of a sudden I could hear a child in near hysterics, crying loudly enough to be in the adjoining Victorian-era kitchen part of the original home layout. I went running over to see if a youngster had snuck downstairs and hurt themselves by some misadventure. There was nothing. Yet I could still hear the crying. I looked out the basement door and there wasn't a sound or person visible. Back through the door it was clear again. Then I felt a cold shiver when I thought of Suzanne and the boys in the porch area upstairs. Thinking maybe one of the boys had been stung by a bee, I raced up the narrow stairs, jogged through the parlor, the hall, jostling a few volunteer helpers along the way, only to find Suzanne with Andrew on a chair, Robert asleep in his stroller, and their mother cutting the cake into several hundred squares.
"Who was crying," I asked an obviously startled wife. "What are you talking about....no one has been crying....though I feel like it," she retorted. "Where did you hear crying?" she asked. "Downstairs. I was stirring the lemonade and heard a kid crying.....I thought it was coming from the next room but it wasn't." "Outside?" she asked. "No, I went out the back door half expecting to find someone with a skinned knee but there was nothing." There had been no crying child that we could find on the premises indoors or out. But I heard crying regardless. My imagination? Even when I was moving around in that kitchen, and heading from room to room, I could hear the crying. It only stopped when I put my head out the bottom door. Once inside again I could hear the same crying. When I hit the top of the stairs to the first floor, it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. This was the first serious encounter I had experienced at Woodchester. It was a little unsettling. I thought then about the child's room on the second floor, and wondered to myself whether there was indeed an unhappy child left in that house from another era.
There were many other smaller incidents of curious nature that I encountered during my tenure as museum director and then manager but nothing that would have ever scared me from my task or spending hours working on projects within. I did feel there was someone watching from that house, especially when we were working outside. While raking the leaves or grass clippings I'd often get the feeling someone was watching out over the garden, and when I'd sneak a peak back toward the upper level of the house, I'd find everything as it should have been. No wavering curtains. No mysterious face looking out. Yet it was the one constant feeling working around the property, and even inside there seemed to be a guardian of the site, possibly the spiritual aura Fowler believed would have a place in an octagonal building. I never felt bad-will at Woodchester, and I was never told by any entity to "get out our else!" I think somehow the spirit of the dwelling knew we were kindly folks, looking after its earthly haunt, and cut us a little slack. It's possible it just didn't like some visitors and made them feel unwelcome in certain areas of the house.
I adored my years working at Woodchester Villa but after more than ten years involved with the project, and having a badly neglected young family, it was time to turn over the responsibilities to another curator and guiding volunteers. All us Curries still have a soft spot when it comes to remembering time spent at Woodchester Villa and Museum. It was an important part of our lives for many years and we will never forget its strange but welcoming aura. Make it a point sometime soon to visit this charming old hillside estate! Judge for yourself whether there are resident spirits, or not!

Woodchester Villa was a marvelously adorned haunt at Christmas-time

Shortly after graduating York University (circa 1977) with a degree in Canadian history, I moved back home from Toronto with the intent of opening a small antique business in my hometown Bracebridge. I anticipated getting involved in local heritage conservation in my spare time. I just didn’t think it would be the case I would get myself hooked into every project going....up to my eyeballs in community volunteerism. I never do anything half-way which according to my wife is also my downfall...... good in many ways....not so good in many others. She’s an expert on this because everything I volunteer for involves her......because I apparently don’t mind imposing my conundrums for her to solve. I believe in sharing, you see!
At the same time I began a column on antiques and collectables in the newly launched Bracebridge Examiner, and within months I was the project leader of a Muskoka heritage project for the local Board of Education....where we gathered interviews on tape of many of the district’s oldest citizens who had deep roots in our region of Ontario. It was a great job and the tape resource collection is still being used today as a teaching tool by the Trillium Lakelands Board of Education.
Another way of using my interest in Canadian history came in the form of the first ever Bracebridge Historical Society, of which I was a founding director, and then the restoration of the former home of local woolen mill founder, Henry Bird, the late 1800's octagonal estate on the hillside overlooking the rapids above the Bracebridge Falls. This Victorian era house based on the model set forth by Orsen Fowler, was by its octagonal nature supposed to enhance the lives of residents by promoting good health, efficient household management, air circulation, heating and of course spiritual well being. As we have heard about the healing and spiritual powers of the pyramid for example, the octagonal design was supposed to possess similar qualities and quantities. Did it? Really don’t know! But it is a spiritually enchanted dwelling place whether it is the result of a compelling design or just that it falls into the category of a regular old haunt from the Victorian era.
Later in this collection of blogs I will have much more information on my years spent operating this unusual community museum that was quite haunted but acceptably so.......having spent many, many hours alone in this house in the 1980's at all times of day and night, there is no doubt in my mind the house was occupied spiritually yet it was never prevailed with any discernable negative aura. Sometimes visitors would say they felt a presence in one particular room but it wasn’t enough to have them fleeing the site because of some horrible occurrence. I will deal with this in depth in a future column in this series of Muskoka haunts.
In the mid to late 1980's, during my term of presidency of the Historical Society, and then as an operations manager in the late years of that decade, we never let a Christmas season go by without an open house, where guests were invited free of charge to enjoy a Victorian celebration in one of the few remaining Fowler homes in North America. In retrospect it was a great commitment of time and personal effort for our family and the few hardy volunteers who would show up regularly for on-site events. Yet there was no way we could let the house down.....and this is exactly how we felt.....by not having a Christmas celebration within. It could be so easily transformed from a dark and melancholy vestige of another century to a twinkling, happy and inviting Christmas venue....with only a few trimmings of evergreen boughs and bows tied to the stair railings and door frames.
What makes this story interesting to me.....a regional historian who has had contact with many spirited places and circumstances, was that Woodchester’s unknown but active entities were pretty influential for most of the rolling year......accept at Christmas. If I was raking leaves on the sprawling grounds in the autumn, I always felt as if someone was watching me from an upstairs window. If I was making lemonade for a summer social, I’d hear a baby crying when there was no one else in the house, and in the late afternoon I could hear a kennel full of dogs barking yet when I’d step outside, nothing at all could be heard. I would be downstairs in the tiny staff kitchen and hear footsteps in the parlor above and on the staircase to the basement. No one would be there when I’d go up to check if a visitor had come early or a volunteer had entered the building. Nothing and no one! After years of this I just took it all in stride that the unexplained intrusions were simply the character of a grand old family home in the heart of beautiful Muskoka., living-on regardless of the modern day conservators. I left employ of the museum because I couldn’t stand the town’s indifference to the site not because the place was haunted that’s for sure. I would gladly take the spirit-kind over my ill-prepared, "never on the right page" managers.....who wouldn’t step foot on the museum property unless it was for a grip and grin photo for the local press.
At Christmas this beautiful old home was at its most congenial, quiet and peaceful time. On one occasion I decided to play the audio from the movie based on Charles Dickens book, "A Christmas Carol," starring Alistair Sim, and we placed the tape recorder in the small bathroom off the parlor and had a speaker in the cabinet of the old Victrola next to the grand piano. I let it play while I tended a few additional decorations my wife Suzanne had sent over as last minute inclusions to what I thought was now becoming a seriously over-decorated homestead. About ten minutes into the recording, I just had to sit in the parlor and listen to the dialogue. If there was any moment above all others at this Bracebridge landmark that was truly remarkable, it was at this point...which was by the way the last Christmas event my wife and I held at Woodchester. It was as if all at once the spirits and the lone human had settled for this gentle moment in time, strangely appreciative of each other’s company, as a general peace and calm prevailed.
I anticipated that the resident spirits of the house, which were as much its historic patina as the aging of the woodwork itself, would let me know whether my decision to run the script was in good taste or unacceptable. It was quite the opposite. I sat there in one of the big Victorian chairs, and listened for more than an hour, and felt a great peace come over the place. Whether the old haunt was satisfied with this interpretation of Dickens great work, or that we were on the cusp of another public open house to recognize its period elegance in this festive time of the year.....I don’t know.....but it is a feeling I have held these many years since....that it was a home that very much appreciated hosting events and the local citizens.
The event as usual drew several hundred visitors over the course of that afternoon, and all the cookies, the cakes and candies had been happily consumed by what I perceived had been an entertained audience. Just before I closed the front door for the last time before Christmas, knowing I wouldn’t be back until later in January, I offered my thanks for once again welcoming our event......and it’s true that I wished it and its inmates a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I felt a contentment doing so and that was all that mattered at that point in time.
It wasn’t long after that I decided to resign my position and move on with other professional challenges in Muskoka history and conservation. I did so with the same feeling of connection.....and on that last day, I slapped that front porch that I had painted and re-painted many times.....and thanked it for many wonderful years of friendship. Although I have no doubt in my mind, and by experiences accumulated over the years, that Woodchester has resident spirits.....never once did this patina of past lives make me feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. In my years of tenure I accepted them, even verbally addressing them when I sensed they were in an active state for whatever reason, and they as much accepted me as their protector for that period of our relationship. It was a haunt I learned to love and it was painful having to walk away.
I would like very much to wish all my friends and colleagues who visit this site, a wonderful winter holiday, a Merry Christmas, a safe and Happy New Year. From our homestead here at Birch Hollow, to yours, best wishes of the season. Please join me for more tales of Muskoka and regional hauntings upcoming in the new year.

The tale of "Katherine" and the legendary crooked portrait
Shortly after moving into our new and present home here in Gravenhurst, that we now officially call "Birch Hollow" (we've used this name for the past three homes but this one has more claim to the title than the others because of the birches), the strange and mysterious events of the past seemed to have hitched a ride to the new digs We didn't think it had enough history on its own, to warrant even a minor haunting. It was a newer home from the early 1980's, and to the best of our knowledge it wasn't built on a lost burial ground or place of any great historical anything. It was a typical hilly pasture for a Muskoka homestead of the late 1800's. (Of course it was part of the outer security zone of the former German Prisoner of War Camp, known as Calydor, situated on the high rocky shore of Lake Muskoka, from 1939 to 1946). The closest historical events were two German officiated funerals for two prisoners who had died at the camp during this period. Funderal processions, soldiers wearing their full regalia German military uniforms, marched up Lorne Street on the way to the nearby Mickle Cemetery. Lorne is in our backyard. But this is moot to what might foster a paranormal event in our house. In this case we believe it was our antique enterprise that may have contributed to a few extra characteristics being added to an otherwise normal family household. We aren't the first to suspect that an antique item could carry the burden of a former owner's emotional tie into a present household.
We are opposite a beautiful 20 acre urban paradise, a bogland that is full of Muskoka-style quick sand, which we were warned to be aware of on nature walks with our young lads. Apparently there have been some lost animals and family pets succumbing to the bogland's muck. We are bordered by this great natural heritage and yes we've had a few wolves and owls that added some unsettling calls in the wee hours of misty, moonlit nights. As far as a haunted house on this lovely moor, well, the only way it could possibly house a spirit other than our own, was if we brought one in with us. This brings up the point of travelling spirits inadvertently brought into an otherwise safe haven. It can inspire some strange encounters and playful actions.
As antique dealers, collectors and historians, we have, as taste would have it, always brought home curious, often grotesque pieces into our household inventory ranging from funerary pieces to old, some would say oppressively designed Victorian furniture, that always added a funeral-home atmosphere my wife Suzanne deplored. As a former Victorian musuem manager, who had to deal with oppressive feelings every day on the job, it kind of grew on you over time, and slipping down into the soft padding of an old high back chair was like dropping onto a cloud. Some people find this furniture uncomfortable but with my aching old back I found very few pieces in the museum's parlor unworthy of my much-enjoyed lounging after a long day of guiding tours.
It is known amongst some of the more paranormally sensitive antique dealers that it is possible, every now and again, to unexpectedly, get a hitch-hiker when hauling home an antique purchase. Funny thing in the fictional, entertainment department, that during the haunted house ride at Disney World in Florida,......while enroute on a track through the rooms, you will find that when you look in a mirror ahead, a wee ghostie has hitched a ride in your moving car. This is a bit of video magic courtesy the enchanters at Disney World but it's sort of what we've experienced in our years spent in the antique trade. Instead of finding a ghost beside us in the car, we usually find out later that a doll, a picture, a cradle etc., is the means of transport from estate auction to Birch Hollow.....where the fun begins in our abode. There have been many reports over the years that hauntings related somewhat to articles versus the dwelling as a source. There is what may be an urban antique legend here in Ontario, with the story often repeated in the early 1990's, about a haunted doll crib that allegedly rocked itself. It had belonged to a little Victorian era lass who perished in a house fire. When the family was being evacuated from the burning building, the little girl snuck back in and went up the stairs to retrieve her dollie. By time she got the doll and attempted to exist, the smoke knocked her unconsious. She was found in the burned-out building a few feet from the cradle which had not been destroyed by the flames. After being hauled from the ruins, the family we assume kept the piece until it finally found its way, some decades later, onto the open market. When an antique shop acquired the cradle and subsequently sold it, the small wooden piece only lasted a few weeks in the buyer's home, being brought back to the dealer for of all things....being haunted. It seemed that no matter where the cradle was placed in the home, it would eventually begin to rock as if being manipulated by the hand of a playful child. After a period of trying to find the conditions that were influencing the cradle, the family decided it was a cursed piece and something they could do without. Each time from then on that the dealer sold the cradle, it was brought back for basically the same reason.
Eventually, or so the story goes, the store owners sold it to another dealer who put a sign on the piece that it was indeed haunted but that it was definitely not for sale. Well, we think that piece continued to be sold and returned but we can't tell you where it finally wound up. Would you find it surprising that a piece of wood, the hollow of a simple cradle, could be the accommodation of a ghost? What caused the cradle to rock? Even on level ground with nary a breeze from the window, or a vibration from below to set it in motion. Well, we had our own haunted piece.......a Victorian era portrait of a little girl we named Katherine.
We had been ghost-free since our former house in Bracebridge and life in the new bungalow seemed at first to be pretty tame in comparison to the paranormal acitivities of Golden Beach. It was expected life and the paranormal mix would provide an inert situation where a strange balance would prevail, at least for awhile. We had attended an auction sale in the community of Milford Bay, near Bracebridge, one Sunday afternoon in the autumn of the year....it was probably 1992 if memory serves. It was an estate sale and there were some neat pieces. On a tight budget, everything I was interested in that day went for way more than I had to spend. Our antique business in Bracebridge was just making rent at that time and I couldn't justify going crazy on any of the items at this sale.....which were all pretty much run of the mill pictures, prints, tables, dressers, and bric-a-brack. In fact it was one of the most discouraging sales I've been to, and it didn't even help that I was good friends with the auctioneer. That should have entitled me to a few favors....for a loyal patron. He was getting big bucks for damaged items and it was obvious the visitors to the region, with deeper pockets on this day than my own, were greatly influencing the upper limits of some pretty typical antique pieces. There were about ten major items I had told Suzanne we were going to acquire, even if we had to break the bank..... and even she (the tight-fisted accountant of the family) agreed we could be somewhat flexible......we just wouldn't eat for the next couple of weeks.
I lost ten out of ten. If I bid on twenty items in that final ten minutes of the auction, I wasn't even close on 19. There was however, one break in the action, and it wasn't intentional. I got mixed up about the item being auctioned, and found to my initial chagrin that I was bidding on a Victorian portrait of a little girl "with attitude"....a pout of epic proportion captured by the photographer of the day. It was in a large plaster and gilt frame with its original glass, and it did appear to be in good overall condition. But it was not what I wanted as store inventory. I won the bid. The one thing I got all day was an item I was bidding on by mistake. Get this.....I was writing an authoritarian column for the local press about auction sales, discussing how to bid, when to bid, what not to do, auction protocol and how to weasle into the best buys for the finest items. Well sir, I was pretty unhappy about my accidental purchase, (although I never let any one know it was accidental until this revelation today) and it was a twenty dollar or so expense I greatly begrudged handing over. I mumbled and complained to myself but certainly wasn't going to admit to Suzanne that I'd goofed and bought something I didn't want. I had a parallel look on my face to the little girl I was toting. Apparently we were kindred spirits. She didn't want to sit for the photographer and I didn't want to carry home a pouting child in a frame.
She had an intense snarl etched on her face and the color enhancements applied by the photo studio did nothing to neutralize the emotion of an angry kid. With that look and the feeling of being quite stupid as a bidder, I simply didn't look at her....... and she pouted in silence for quite a few days into our impromtu relationship. Now rather than being considered a wild story teller, by confession, I have previously indicated (in other published stories about Catherine) that I very much wanted the image because I'd been short changed and beat out all afternoon at this particular sale. It was pride you see that invented that tall tale. No I wasn't interested in the Victorian portrait because I needed store inventory, and these old framed photos are notoriously hard to sell. Who wants the portrait of a kid or adult you don't even know hanging in your family room. So as far as it goes, I was stuck with the wee lady. Suzanne wasn't impressed either because money was tight then and I had purchased a DUD! nothing to help net a business profit. We certainly didn't get off on the right foot. I decided that Catherine was going to adorn an empty wall in our house in spite of it all, and it didn't matter who was unhappy about it either. Turns out the feelings were mutual and this may have sparked the incidents I'm about to relate.
Admittedly, I have a first impressions problem. I often find myself unhappy with a purchase or the quality of a piece after I've bought it at auction. I've kicked myself alot in the proverbial arse over ill-conceived purchases. After about a week of staring at Catherine leaning against the fire place, pouting defiantly back, she actually started to appeal to me....for whatever reason. After a few more days I decided to hang her above an old washstand in the area of our living room, closest to two of three bedrooms, and beside the bathroom door. We had recently purchased a nice Victorian jug and bowl set with all but one of the pieces, and Catherine's portrait above would look strikingly museum-like. Suzanne wasn't thrilled but warned me repeatedly about the importance of properly hanging the heavy frame such that no matter what the conditions nearby, whether gale-force wind or banging bathroom door, it wouldn't fall down onto the expensive jug and bowl set. Well, you know us home handy-men who aren't really all that handy at all.......being about as "handy as a foot" my wifes chortles. I believed without question the picture was up forever which is about "four weeks" for any antique dealer who changes interior decor about a hundred times a year depending on the latest acquisitions. I tested that sucker ten or more times to see if it showed any weakness on the nail pounded into a wall stud. No wobble. Perfect stability.
About a week later, when we arrived home one Saturday night after a long day at the Bracebridge shop, we found Catherine had come off the nail and wound up face-down in the middle of the floor, having missed altogether the jug and bowl set directly below. The heavy picture appeared for all intents and purposes to have been lifted off the nail and thrust down on the floor, with the portrait facing up. How she managed to fall away from the wall, with the nail still in the stud and the wire struck across the eyelits as it was when hung, is an ongoing Currie family mystery. How it then rolled into the centre of the floor is quite beyond explanation. So what does a doting owner of a Victorian portrait do? Hung it right back in the same place. A week later it fell again, this time dropping straight down onto the floor behind the washstand and jug and bowl set, without failure to either wire or nail in the wall. There wasn't even a detectable movement of the china jug and bowl set....showing no influence from Catherine's tantrum. She obviously didn't like being hung above the washstand in our living room. So how were we going to make the waif content in our modest abode?
She was thusly headed downstairs to the family room and my library-office.
A Crooked Lady and a Stint in Theatre
From the beginning of her tenure in our house, even when she was hanging prominently in our living room, she seemed determined to hang crooked in between unceremonious flights to the floor. I would straigthen our Victorian lady at least once a day if not more because she obviously knew, in a spirit sense, that I have a phobia about anything askew, from piles of books to art on the wall. I've even been known to straighten pictures as a guest in someone else's abode. So indeed it was making me mad that no matter how I fixed the wire on the back or made sure it was unmovable except in the case of earthquake, Catherine continue her taunts.
For whatever reason, and I'm not sure that it was her spirited falls that made me want to unload the picture but I finally decided to take Catherine to our antique shop in uptown Bracebridge. I hung her above my counter on the back wall of the smaller first room in the two room shop. I didn't put a price on the picture because I wasn't sure whether I should sell it, or just let her look pretty and companion the other portraits I did have for sale at the time. People regularly commented about her sad face and asked if I knew who she was, and if she had been from a local family. I had a few offers to purchase but I just could commit to a price. As I had rescued her from the auction (or at least this is what I thought I had done for a waif in distress), there was some unspecified respect and admiration for the image gained over the first year of our enduring relationship. And as I may have been on her spiritual wave length, she possessed an aura of some discontent at being on display upon a wall she didn't approve. Every morning, and I mean every single morning, Catherine was hanging crooked. I blamed the building moreso than her impish behavior because it was old and full of curious knocks, creaks and vibrations from passing traffic on upper Manitoba Street. Maybe it was moreso the vibrations of main street traffic overnight causing the tilt in her posture. Yet strangely, over the course of a business day it was never askew, as it only happened when we were not present.
After the first week, and simply adjusting the frame each morning as a matter of routine, a number of my wife's restored 1960's dolls were found toppled over when we turned on the store lights. The dolls stood on the floor, some of them being quite large, and out of ten in a line, four might have fallen-over at night. To knock over these big and heavy dolls would take a fair bit of body mass and although I suspect we had a few mice around, it didn't seem the handiwork of rodents. This went on for weeks. On some mornings there would be one or two dolls face-down on the floor, and on other days it could be five or six which would have taken a cat or larger to get behind and topple over. While Catherine remained as crooked as ever, we really didn't tie the doll incidents into the spirited child. After awhile however, with numerous investigations into what was going on here in the wee hours, we simply decided it must be Catherine crying out for attention. Once we recognized that this was a case of mischief, and asked Catherine directly why she was doing this, and what she wanted from us, the midnight follies ceased. The case of the "falling dolls" had come to an unexpected halt. Although our Catherine continued to hang askew, her activity was reduced from every day to only several times a week.
When I would answer people who asked if Catherine was for sale, I'd routinely say, "Do you want to bring a ghost into your house?" Well you wouldn't believe the offers I had to purchase that haunted wee portrait. People were mesmerized. Even when they knew it was potentially a spirit-carrying antique, they wanted to own the naughty lady. One European lady stood and stared at Catherine for a long time one afternoon, and when she turned to me I could see by the look on her face that she knew something about the child. "She didn't want that picture taken. She hated standing there. She would never look at this picture where it hung in the house," the woman whispered to me while I was adding up the price of other items she was purchasing. "It's haunted isn't it?" she asked. Even before I could respond she said "She was a powerful little soul and she's letting us know now she wasn't happy that day," which I assume was the outing to the photographer's studio. "How much do you want for it?" she asked. "I can't sell it.....I don't know why but I just can't sell it." "I'll give you five hundred dollars," she blurted, and I think she would have gone much higher if I'd given any sign of hope that I would part with Catherine. (I have never told my wife that I was offered this much money.....for fear of being fired) I told the customer the story about her little evening tricks and her falls over the jug and bowl set in our living room, and it truly pained the woman not to be able to take the child home with her. She made me promise to contact her if I ever changed my mind. She wasn't the first or last to offer considerable money for the portrait, and our store patrons seemed to quite desire a good haunting at their abodes..... instead of fearing such an netherworld intervention. I recalled how our Scottish friend had felt about unresolved, wandering spirits being invited into the house via the Ouiji Board but here were people willingly opening their homes to a spirit-child who was somewhat malevolant optioned by a host of curious tantrums. Why would they want to tend this ghost's unresolved issues? I guess it was the same as the Currie family hanging onto Catherine. There was something endearing about her pouting but don't ask me to explain.
After about six months in residence in our shop, and only requiring adjustment every third or fourth business day, Catherine had by lesser actions, apparently wound down her rebellion about choice of wall-space and company kept. A lady we knew from the local theatre company came in and asked if we would be willing, for the price of tickets to a new play being performed, be willing to loan out some of our antiques for the set of their show "Angel Street," or as it was also known "Gaslight," a Victorian England murder-mystery. It was being held in the gymnasium of a local public school, in Bracebridge, Ontario. We agreed to supply the theatre company's needs and made up a list of materials to be picked up. She asked me if "Catherine" could be part of the loan, as she would give a perfect Victorian mood to the interior design of the subject historic mansion. I was a tad reluctant but agreed on condition they looked after my precious girl. I did not mention one word about her disposition or any of her spirited activities in the past. It was Catherine's chance to travel a wee bit and get some experience-time on-stage.
On the opening night the show had run without a hitch. I am told that Catherine proved almost impossible to hang but that the stage helpers had just assumed the painting hung askew as a rule, set designers believing its askew nature looked more realistic to an old mansion anyway. So imagine this opening night scenario. At the conclusion of a highly successful first night, the cast came out to take a bow, and when one of the lead actors looked up to acknowledge the crowd, he wobbled a bit before collapsing. He had suffered a mild heart attack but survived. He was replaced the following evening by a well known Canadian actor by the name of Simon Richards. While we make no serious connection between what happened to the actor, and Catherine the portrait, it was noted that throughout the performance, Catherine was substantially askew in the facade hallway adjoining the parlor. There were doors dividing the two but when they opened by golly, there she was as crooked as a dog's hind leg. As the actor went down, there she was in the centre of attention, hanging almost directly above those who came to assist the performer. When we attended the second night of the multi evening run of the show, I was absolutely stunned when the doors of the hall were swung open by the actress, revealing my strange, curiously appointed, sad-faced little Catherine dominating the visual scene. Crooked? Of course she was!
When all the props were returned, the lady who had borrowed the pieces asked if I would consider selling Catherine. When I declined to part with her, we did have a rather insightful conversation about her difficult demeanour, not wishing to hang straight for anyone no matter how many adjustments were made to the screw in the wall or the wire hanger on the back of the portrait. She as well acknowledged that the piece definitely had some unique qualities but she refused to label it "haunted." This was Catherine's big stage initiation. There was another to come. But first, I had made the decision Catherine was going to be taken back to our home, "Birch Hollow," where we'd try to resolve some of our wall space and placement disagreements, to avoid nasty spills and pranks like hanging crooked and tossing over my wife's doll collection....which was also kept in part at home. We had already sold off the jug and bowl set so that was no longer a security issue.
The first morning after her removal for bad behaviour into my downstair archives room, there she was as askew as ever. Add to this the fact that three or so books were pulled out from the bookshelves, as if someone had been searching for a text, and just never bothered to shove them neatly back. One book had toppled onto the floor. I asked who was in my old books and of three possible perpetrators nobody had a clue what I was talking about. This went on for about a week, and there was only one day when books hadn't been similarly pulled out....close to falling but still wedged between the others on the shelf. On three occasions that week, I also had to correct Catherine's lean, sometimes to the right and then the next day to the left.
At the local department store we picked up a Ouiji Board for an impromtu seance, in part to converse with Catherine's spirit. A Scottish friend of ours, a clerk at the store, didn't really want to sell us the board, from her own fears it would bring forth some unwanted spiritual activity, and haunt us in perpetuity. It is true that Scottish lore is full of wee beasties, and ghouls and goblins.... and spirited other-sorts, so we did take her warnings seriously. But the boys wanted it, and well, we didn't really feel we could explain adequately at the time, how we could possibly be scared of ghosts......when we had stressed on so many occasions that there were no ghosts in their room or boogey men under the bed. The clerk warned us to be careful and I assumed that meant sorting the spirits, be they good or bad, before bringing them out into the world they once dwelled in life.
On our first evening in company of the board, we took it downstairs and ran a hands-on question and answer session in Catherine's honor. In fact, this is when we first found out, by the hand-spirited "guiding device" (pointing to the individual letters) that her portrait hanging askew above us, was named "Catherine." This is what the pointer identified and the name we afforded her from this point of discovery. We realized it may not have been her name at all but this is what was spelled out exactly in succession of letters. NO fudging or generalization. One letter at a time and with forceful movement.
The next morning, and for many mornings after this, the portrait of Catherine was straight and the books tight on the shelf the way I left them.
As a community historian here in the District of Muskoka, I was frequently invited to give talks on a variety of subjects at local museums. A friend who was running the Muskoka Lakes Museum in Port Carling, begged a favor when one of the planned lecturers had to cancel at the last minute. As I was writing a feature length series of columns in The Muskoka Sun about the paranormal that summer season, I suggested my topic would be folklore, ghosts etc. I decided to try something a little different on this occasion than dry old historical rehashes, and opted to take Catherine on a wee road trip to the region she was familiar....Township of Muskoka Lakes. We had purchased her from an estate auction a few miles east of Port Carling and we would be driving right past the old homestead to the museum. My wife and lecture partner Suzanne and I had a plan to set Catherine up on a large easel and cover her with a ceremonial robe so that no one could see what we had beneath. A few guests that night tried to sneak a peak prior to the lecture but we kept up security so that the unveiling would be a surprise to all.
We maintained secrecy about Catherine throughout the presentation about local Muskoka legend and lore. Every now and again I would purposely stop talking, look at the covered picture, as if I had noticed something profound happening. About the fifth time I stopped, I begged the audience to carefully watch the easel, and stop me if they saw the sheet or what was under it move. While nobody stopped to tell me it had vibrated, shifted side to side or the covering having mysteriously inflated all eyes were on that easel. When I finally ended my presentation, I asked the audience if any one had actually noticed a shift of the item on the easel or some movement of the covering. At least half those in attendance raised their hands to acknowledge something or other had been witnessed. "Well," I said, "I would like to introduce to you to an allegedly haunted portrait of a gal we call Catherine." There was one of those uncomfortable silences for any stage performer, on the verge of either hardy applause or target practice with hurled vegetables. As it turned out the audience was receptive to the story of Catherine and in fact, many folks came up after the lecture was over to actually touch the frame to make their own spiritual connection and share some of their own stories of the paranormal. It was a fascinating evening and our precious young lady once again entertained her admirers. Yet there was still some ways to go at the Currie homestead, to pacify the child spirit.
For a few weeks after her last show and tell, she would greet me in the morning a tad askew but it was down to about one day out of five and the streak grew longer. In fact it grew into years. I haven't had to straighten the wee lass in at least five years. It seems she approves of her position hanging in my history archives. I guess she's grown accustomed to her new caring family.
The story of Catherine got national exposure in a 1990's ghost story collection from Ontario, by noted author Barbara Smith. Every now and again we will get a call or letter, or a nudge from a reader on the street in our hometown, who has just finished reading about Catherine, and who wanted to let us know how lucky we are to have such an interesting house-guest.