Читать книгу Real Hauntings 5-Book Bundle - Mark Leslie - Страница 37

Radio is synonymous with disembodied voices, those almost-spectral companions whose words accompany us when we wake up, perhaps on our commute in to work, throughout our work and leisure days, or our car rides. Along with us no matter where we roam or what we are doing, they are welcomed into our lives; a part of our rituals, there like the most reliable of friends.

Sometimes, though, there are other voices on the radio. So what happens when the disc jockeys and radio station personalities encounter an equally pervasive presence, something seen, heard, and felt in eerie glimpses, odd sounds, and chillingly unexplainable cold spots?

Rather than “turning up the volume,” as a DJ might do upon putting on a new hit, they might, instead, call in an exorcist.

Which is exactly what happened in 1978 at CHOM-FM in Montreal.

CHOM-FM’s station slogan is “The spirit of rock.” For a while, one might have forgiven the DJs if they replaced that with the phrase “the spirit of the departed” instead. We are referring to the deceased, rather than the retired, such as Robert Wagenaar, who in the fall of 2017 decided to hang up his headphones after forty illustrious years on the airwaves, most of them at CHOM-FM. An unforgettable presence (whose moniker, “Tootall,” was based on the man’s tall stature), he became synonymous with classic and progressive rock music in the city for more than one generation of Montrealers.

In his decades of working at the station, Tootall regularly encountered such rock legends as Kate Bush, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, Supertramp, and Genesis. But he also, on a fittingly dark and eerie night in the 1970s, bumped into a ghost who had been seen roaming the building.

In a 2014 Montreal Gazette article, writer Mark Abley reported a conversation that he had with the legendary broadcaster, who described a time when the station moved from 1310 Greene Avenue to a beautiful old three-storey greystone across the street at 1355 Greene.

That was when the eerie encounters with a ghost began, described by many eyewitnesses as a man wearing a green top, in various locations on and near the third floor. The apparition was sometimes seen walking up the stairway in the middle of the night, when the station was relatively deserted. Others claimed they saw the haunted eyes of the man staring back at them from a mirror in the bathroom on the third floor. DJs were left confused over how their turntable’s arm was, for no discernable reason, “skipping merrily” back and forth over an album all on its own.

In the Gazette article, Tootall recounted a meeting with a radio announcer who had just finished his stint on the overnight program. “He was seriously pale and shaken by the strange events that had happened on his shift,” Tootall said. “I believe water taps were being turned on and off, and [my] coffee cup kept mysteriously emptying.”

Quite often, the ghost was associated with a feeling of intense cold, centralized near the music library on the building’s third floor. A look into the building’s history might explain a bit about this reported phenomenon that was so well-known that the radio station was featured in an August 1984 article in the National Enquirer entitled “Radio Station Spooked by Tormented Ghost.”

The beautiful old building that was serving as the station’s new location came with a tale of tragedy, according to Rob Braide, program director at CHOM-FM, who was a guest on the “Ghostly Radio Tales” episode of the Radio Stuff Podcast, hosted by Larry Gifford, in October 2017. In that episode, Braide shared some of the tales he had heard over the years, as well as a tragic story about a suicide. A homeowner, a man who was apparently distraught and going through an unpleasant and messy divorce, descended into alcoholism and eventually took his own life with a shotgun in the back bedroom on the top floor of the building — a space that eventually became the music library next to the studio.

The man was apparently wearing a green sweater the day he died, which may explain why the colour green was a common element of the spectral image sometimes seen sitting in the announcer’s chair at the console in the station. Braide said that morning show host Daniel Richler (son of Mordecai Richler) “was completely freaked out by the whole thing and … ended up … leaving [partially] because of it.”

Braide also said that some people claimed that they had seen a head on the top of the vending machine and two feet sticking out of the bottom. But he suggested that this particular vision might have more to do with the smoke of a green plant regularly associated with a rock musician’s lifestyle.

Despite the tragic and violent end of life of the building’s previous owner, the ghost itself wasn’t seen by radio station staff as evil. “It was never considered a malevolent figure,” Braide explained. “He was just kind of there.” But that presence was enough to prompt radio station personnel to seek the services of an exorcist.

Tootall explained that in 1978 the office manager hired a psychic and pictures of Jesus were hung in various locations in the building to see if those actions would help to chase the spirit away. That same year an exorcism was staged in an attempt to finally rid the building of the CHOM-FM ghost. “That was something else,” Tootall told reporter Bill Brownstein of the Montreal Gazette.

Of course, not all of the stories associated with the ghost were eerie and unexplained. One of the most memorable frights, Braide explained, were just the result of bad timing, or perhaps perfect timing, depending on your perspective. One night, a pair of priests, a woman considered the “den mother” of the station, and the owner’s son were in the music library performing an exorcism at midnight. Braide and other employees knew to stay away from that area so the group could complete their task. But later on, in the wee morning hours, Braide needed to enter the library to retrieve a Pink Floyd record. He figured that they would have completed their ritual and left hours earlier; but when he burst through the door, they all screamed and jumped out of their seats. It turned out they were in the middle of using a Ouija board to try to communicate with the dead man’s spirit.

Everyone who came through the station always mentioned the ghost. It simply became a part of the legend of a station that Braide describes as “a great piece of Montreal culture and a legacy of a radio station that meant a lot to a lot of people.” When the station relocated down the street to its original location a few years later, the staff held a tongue-in-cheek “Ghostbusters” party to say goodbye to their spectral companion. And that is when the stories of the green-topped ghost seemed to fade, much like the fleeting image of the apparition itself.

However, if you were to go to CHOM-FM’s current building and speak with staff from the radio station who had the pleasure of working with Robert “Tootall” Wagenaar over the years, they are likely to tell you that, even though he is now enjoying the disappearing act that comes with retirement, they are very likely to still feel his spirit ever present in that hallowed radio studio.