“Ghost Story”

They tore down her house. She disappeared for a wink and when she returned, it was gone. An empty lot, littered with wreckage from the home she had known, welcomed her like the gap in a grin left by a knocked out tooth.

So many years, so many memories. Shades of those who had gone before, of lives intertwined by blood and circumstance, bonds formed over decades—all destroyed in a day.

She recalled neighbours in the suite below her attic penthouse: the tech boys hauling their big screen TV into the yard for playoff barbeques; university students burning the midnight oil while cramming for exams. She had banged on the floor when the stereo got too loud and slammed her closet doors to let them know they weren’t alone in their space. Her favourite had been the brown-haired girl who had shyly smiled but never said a word as she passed in the stairwell.

Gone; all gone, and now where would she go?

Time has a funny way of passing. Too soon, she came back for a visit and found the gap in the street’s housing smile filled by a new construct, out of character with its neighbours and occupied by a family of immigrants, her attic penthouse replaced by a little boy’s bedroom, blue with sailboats painted on one wall.

She sat in the armchair near the window and watched over him while he slept. One night he woke up and looked straight at her. She smiled. He blinked twice, accepted her presence, and went back to sleep.

It’s not the house, she decided. It’s the people within it that make it a home.

Ghost Story (Preface)

I’ve heard it said that we don’t have history in Victoria. We have nostalgia. Whichever it is, we definitely have ghosts. I know because I lived with them at Rockland. For seventeen years, Ter and I shared our heritage suite with phantom freeloaders who probably considered us to be the interlopers until they got to know us. Okay, until they got to know Ter. She’s the more attuned of we two; I lived in blissful ignorance for almost a year before she confessed to encountering the red-haired kid the day after we moved into Number 16. Completely freaked out, I demanded to know why she’d said nothing at the time.

“Because I didn’t want to freak you out,” she replied.

I’m fairly sure my Freak-O-Meter would have hit the apex no matter when I was told, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because we’d signed a lease, but I was grateful that she had seen the little guy first. I didn’t see him until sometime later, when we got new neighbours and I spied him flitting into the kitchen from the corner of my eye. I’ll always remember the shock of that bright red hair.

There were other entities, too, though I never saw them. They felt more comfortable revealing themselves to Ter, who respectfully acknowledged their presence and went quietly on her way. As well as the red-haired kid, there was a young girl in the long dress and an older boy with dark hair. We called the three kids “Harry”, “Ron” and “Hermione” after the trio in the Harry Potter books. The house had served as a girls’ school, then a boys’ school, so we reckoned they must have been students. Some years in, we learned from a neighbour that the house had also been an old folks’ home. “That explains the old woman,” Ter remarked, at which my Freak-O-Meter spiked again.

“What old woman????”

“I don’t know who she is, but she’s pretty bitter,” was the nonchalant reply.

Yeah. Ghosts. Whether by history or nostalgia, Victoria has them.

A co-worker’s mother recently sold her house. It’s not a heritage house, but it’s the house my colleague has known for her entire life, so there was a legitimate fear that the new owners would tear it down for development since that’s what seems to be happening in this city of late. It bothers me for more reasons than the architechtural oddities popping up like mutant mushrooms throughout the neighbourhood; and while I sympathized with the potential loss of a colleague’s childhood home, I am most distressed by what happens to the ghosts.

Where do they go? What do they do? Are they tied to the structure or the land? I guess it depends on the ghost, but the conundrum sparked the writing exercise that is tomorrow’s post.

Enjoy.

Where the Heart Is

one of these things is not like the others ...

Most of the houses in my neighbourhood are near or over a hundred years old. I say “most” because a fair number of them have been torn down and replaced by what Boy Sister refers to as “chicken coop” houses – the West Coast style featuring flat roofs and no personality. They claim to reflect the environment in their slick wood façades and plate glass windows, but they actually stick out like the proverbial sore thumb among their elder neighbours. A recent trend has been to try and blend in with an arched roof and some fake Tudor accents around pseudo-mullioned windows, but really, it’s akin to setting out a plastic goblet with the Waterford.

I know the land is worth more than the structure sitting on it, but I’m beginning to resent the seemingly wanton destruction of older buildings to stuff bigger and less attractive domiciles onto property that once featured a lovely garden as well as a cute little cottage or a heritage home. I might view the influx more favourably if the new homes were multi-unit stratas or better yet, rental suites, but they’re not. Depending on the route I choose from the limo stop, I walk past at least three lots where older houses used to be, and none of the new constructs, though significantly larger than any of the original structures, appear built to accommodate more than one family and a basement suite to help the new owners make outrageous monthly mortgage payments. Worse, many single lots now feature a pair of too-big houses staring into each other’s windows, so there go the gardens for which Victoria was nicknamed.

I wonder sometimes where the ghosts go. Buildings house more than people, you know. They assume the energetic vibe of their occupants, and some of them retain that vibe long after the occupants have departed. Old buildings are particularly vibrant with the energy of their pasts. Ter and I were outnumbered by the phantoms in our suite at Rockland. That entire neighbourhood is rich with the presence of residents long past, drifting through the old mansions and manor houses that grace the tree-lined streets. It remains my favourite part of town, and I would happily return to it if I had the cash to snap up one of those crumbling old houses with their original woodwork and stained glass windows. If I had the cash, I’d buy one and restore it. I think it would thank me – and so would the ghosts.

Disheartened with the ubiquitous reconstruction of my current neighbourhood, I picked a rarely walked route home the other night. I thought that passing some less familiar houses would rejuvenate me after a particularly intense week at work. Surely, I thought, there is one street in Fairfield unblemished by new construction or a gaping hole where someone’s childhood home once stood.

A pair of teenaged boys were shooting hoops with a basketball halfway up the block. Cherry blossoms on the bubble of blooming beamed in the late afternoon sun. I noticed fresh paint on one of the houses, and new front stairs attached to another. Someone was mowing their lawn and the summery smell of cut grass blended with the salt breeze off the sea. I began to relax. My plan had worked. And then, I saw this:

*sigh*

Philosophy Quest

The PQ Team

Dude TV (otherwise known as the Outdoor Living Network) runs a bunch of those reality shows pretending to be documentaries out to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts, sasquatches, giant squids, the Loch Ness Monster, and other mythical creatures. Each program sets the scene, gathers the team, sends them into the field armed with advanced technology and eyewitness accounts, and inevitably ends with nothing conclusive. While this confirms Carl Sagan’s observation that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it has spawned a plethora of running gags and inside jokes within my immediate circle. Ter and I are always fist pumping to the self-congratulatory “Good job, bro; on to the next one!” that ends every episode of Ghost Hunters—and on an occasional Thursday, my buddy known here as Boy Sister (or “BS”, ha ha) and I embark on a coffee time discussion of our own suppositions which we call Philosophy Quest.

We debate residual hauntings versus active hauntings, past lives, future lives, time travel, the time-space continuum, extraterrestrial life and how the pyramids were built, among other mysteries that seem inexplicable but have simply exceeded the capacity of Man’s puny mind. We exchange thoughts and theories, dumb jokes and belly laughs, and I often wonder what the folks around us overhear in passing. I don’t know many people who spend time hypothesizing about what would happen if we held hands and jumped into a black hole.

I really enjoy these talks, and I believe he does, too. He’s a pretty thoughtful guy for all his typical boy tendencies. As with OLN’s Ghost Hunters and Monster Quest, however, our investigations end inconclusively, hence our program byline:

“Philosophy Quest—all the questions and none of the answers.”

Showtime at Chapters Starbucks or the library courtyard wall, Thursdays at 2:00 p.m.