Читать книгу Haunted Ontario 4 - Terry Boyle - Страница 8

~ Prince Albert ~

In Haunted Ontario I alluded to the haunting of my previous home. This is the full story:

The Orchards is a beautiful house in Prince Albert, Ontario, built by James McBrien in 1870 for his bride. McBrien was the first inspector of public schools for the province of Ontario under Egerton Ryerson. He built his home in the Cape-Cod tradition of white clapboard with green shutters and trim. It had a magnificent cabriole veranda and two-storey summer kitchen with servants’ quarters upstairs.

The McBrien family was a well-educated, artistic, musical, and spiritually active family. There was one “black sheep,” a troublesome son named Sydney who did things like sell the family chickens for money to buy himself a drink or two.

All in all they were an upstanding family, well-respected in the community; folks smiled when Major-General James H. McBrien Junior rode his horse to town to get the mail. James McBrien Junior spent some years in the North West Mounted Police and saw service in the South African War. From there he went to Australia on military service and the

Heartland, or the Orchards, the former home of the McBriens.

Military College at Cambridge, England, where he studied military technique. During the First World War he was appointed to the general staff. He was later made chief of staff at Ottawa, becoming the head of affairs in the Department of Militia and Defence. He retired as the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His sister Julia McBrien was a concert pianist who travelled to Persia and California. Another sister, Elizabeth, produced art that hangs in the National Art Gallery.

The Orchards remained in the family for a hundred years. In 1970 the two remaining McBrien sisters sold it to Joe and Dolores Victor, who sought a place to hold Gurdjieffan group-work intensives. The Victors shared a toast and sealed a deal with the elderly McBrien sisters. The spiritual history of the home was to continue.

When the Victors moved in they discovered that the house had been left completely as they had first seen it. No furniture had been removed; even the clothes were hanging in the closet. The pictures on the walls and the sherry glasses the McBrien sisters had used were still on the coffee table. It was incredible.

There was a hundred years of family history — a penny-farthing bicycle, a beautiful harp, decades of period furniture and valuables, a three-holer outhouse in the back, and an elaborate old cookstove in the summer kitchen. Dolores made herself right at home and it wasn’t too long before she discovered they were not “alone.” The elderly sisters had moved to a nursing home, but someone was still there.

Among the things that happened was the constant slamming of the hall door that joined the house to the summer kitchen. It would slam in Dolores’s face, it would slam her in the back. Her bed would shake as if it was trying to fall apart. She was a strong woman, a spiritualist and not easily intimidated — ever! She told her unseen housemates “This is my house now. You live here if you like but leave me alone. Stop slamming doors and shaking beds. I’ve had enough!”

Surprisingly, the mischievous poltergeist activity abated. Although Dolores tore down the summer kitchen and added a weaving studio, she left the main house as it was. She would say, “The studio is mine; the main house is ‘their’ period.”

Eventually, Dolores’ mother Susy came to live with the Victors. Susy was getting on; she had a hard time getting around and liked to make trouble. She also smoked. The spirits didn’t like that — or did they? Did the spirit want the cigarettes gone, or did it want the cigarettes? Sydney had been the family rebel, after all. Susy could never keep a pack long enough to smoke it. The cigarettes would simply disappear and would usually turn up in another room.

In 1976 I met Dolores Victor. I was a journalist/entrepreneur with my own magazine and I had gone to interview her for a feature article. I discovered an intriguing, delightful, and somewhat awe-inspiring woman. Together we, along with some others, gave birth that year to a school for artistic and cultural pursuits which we called “The School of Creativity.” We taught Tai Chi, poetry, watercolours, drama, and calligraphy. In 1983 courses in spirituality, healing techniques, and Aboriginal studies were added and the name was changed to the J. McBrien School of Creativity.

Delores often spoke about the frustration she experienced in the early seventies when she was redecorating. The painters quit because the lid kept being put on the paint can and their tools would go missing unless she stayed right there with them. The man repairing the stairs constantly had his hammer taken downstairs or upstairs when he wanted it left on the step. A man was frequently seen rocking in a chair on the verandah. A woman in a long gown “lived” in the blue room at the top of the stairs, which remained undecorated and unrepaired until 1980. She was also seen walking in the backyard. She resembled the photographs of Julia McBrien.

I had occasion to stay over one evening. It was my first encounter with the active spirit world there. (Little did I realize that it would be here that I would meet my life partner, Allanah, here that I would come to live, here that I would begin my career as a writer, and here that I would find material for my book about haunted Ontario). That first night I was horrified. This stately old home certainly looks the part the house in a ghost movie. Reminiscent of a Southern plantation estate, the Orchards was and still is the most awe-inspiring and architecturally divine structure to have been built in the village of Prince Albert.

That particular night Dolores had directed me to spend the night in the upstairs bedroom on the right-hand side of the hall in the front of the house. No one else was living on the second floor at the time. I remember slipping under the covers and drifting off to sleep. It seemed so peaceful. In the night I had what I thought was a vivid dream. I saw a group of people walking down the second floor hallway carrying a coffin. One member of the party was dragging his leg. It spooked me. The next morning I related the dream to Dolores. She nodded knowingly, so I questioned her. She told me that my dream was not a dream, it was something that had actually taken place there in another time. What I had witnessed was the funeral of James McBrien. The gentleman who was dragging his leg was his brother, Sydney. Sydney had injured his leg in an accident many years before.

Allanah lived with Dolores Victor from 1979 to 1993, first with her husband, John, and her their children, Jeremy and Sarah, and after 1986 with me. She has a long account of unexplained activity in the house.

“I first moved to 350 Simcoe Street in 1979. I had experienced paranormal activity there prior to that, when I helped to run an antique store there from August 1977 to 1979. Cigarettes would always go missing.

“One day in 1978 I visited my mentor-friend Dolores, because I was in a very saddened state. She had an appointment in the city, but said I was welcome to stay there as long as I wished. At that time she lived there alone. Five of us, in those days, gathered there in an alcove of the studio each morning for meditation and once a week for spiritual readings. I chose to stay there in the alcove to console myself. The tears flowed, but eventually it seemed more sensible to pray for help and I did. Almost immediately there was a ‘presence’ that filled the space, a presence of peace and love and comfort unlike anything I had ever encountered. I sat there for some undetermined length of time before I went on about my day and, in fact, my life.

“In 1979 it seemed that whenever I was alone in the house I would be followed by a heavy, persistent energy that almost felt menacing. The following year something sat on me one night in bed and made it very difficult to breathe. Dolores suggested I send the presence packing by repeating the Lord’s Prayer and telling it to go. It took three repetitions but whatever it was, it did leave.

“Objects on the refrigerator in the studio kitchen flew off on a regular basis and came close to hurting people many times. At one time that had been the location of a set of stairs to the second floor of the summer kitchen. Maybe spirits walk there still.

“In 1984 and 1986 I ‘saw’ James McBrien Junior standing in full-dress RCMP uniform on the landing above the studio. Other people have also seen him there. At that time I had not seen any photos of him, but when we bought the home in 1989 we found many old McBrien photo albums. I was astounded to find that he was exactly as I had seen him.

“Dolores passed over in March, 1989. Four of us bought the house and rented out rooms to meet the high monthly overhead. One evening tempers flared and the tension was high. We all retired at about ten o’clock. I was awakened by a loud, hollow, humming drone, sort of musical in tone, at eleven p.m. It could have been a sound in the pipes and I set out to investigate. To my surprise the sound existed in our bedroom, the laundry room below, and the bathroom above, but could not be heard anywhere else in the house. I awakened someone else, Iris, and together we proceeded to ‘sit in the sound.’ The sound was in a vertical column that penetrated the house, approximately one meter in diameter (three feet). Within the column you could not hear yourself think, it was so loud; outside the column it was still a loud, audible sound; in the hall outside the room it was not possible to hear it at all. We could not understand the phenomenon but felt that it was not threatening. We sat in it until it stopped. It lasted one hour exactly. To my knowledge it has never happened again. I have since read that this is a phenomenon that can occur where two ley lines intersect. Ley lines are magnetic lines that exist within the body of the earth and conduct current for the planet. Where they cross there are power points and phenomena occur such as power surges, trees growing in spirals, and other unusual growth patterns.

“In 1990 a friend and I were talking in the upstairs hall during an electrical storm. I was tired and we sat down for our conversation. We had no more than sat down when a round ball of light, about thirty centimeters (fifteen inches) in diameter moved in through the window, ‘rolled’ through the air down the hall, and passed through the other end with no visible effect on the house.

“We had a friend do a spirit cleansing of the house in 1991 because it was a worry for some members of the household. We were told that the spirits might go or stay as they were free to decide for themselves. I saw James McBrien at least twice more before we moved in 1993 but most of the other activity seemed to settle down. There was still a problem with articles disappearing and reappearing as well as almost audible conversations and other sounds in the hall.

“Our dogs never did go upstairs unaccompanied, and my daughter, Sarah, preferred to have a pet for company and a lock on her door.”

Music can be an expression or ordered movement of the forces of a world with which we rarely come in contact. Some spiritualists believe that all thought expresses itself through sound. People hear this sound as a lovely yet indescribable series of ever-changing chords, akin to the sound of harps or pipes. Angels are considered to be one class of spirit who are devoted to music and habitually express themselves in this way. Hindus believe in musical spirits called gandharvas, and they say that the man whose soul is in tune with music will attract the attention of angels and draw himself into connection with them. Famous composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Handel, and Mozart could hear this sound. Some of them spoke of hearing the whole of a grand oratorio, a stately march or a noble chorus in one resounding chord.

“My first experience of sound from the spirit world came in the mid-1990s, when I made a conscious choice to leave southern Ontario and move north to a secluded home in nature. Here I felt that I could be more aware and listen to the sounds of other kingdoms. One morning I awakened to the sound of music. My first thought was that someone had turned the radio on, although this was never a common practice. Then I tuned into the sound. Truly, the best way to describe it was ‘heavenly.’ Although it was faint it seemed to be coming from the second floor of the house. No one lived in that part of our home. The music was like a chorus of instruments and then it vanished. It may have lasted five or ten minutes.

“I still hear it periodically, always in the early morning hours; sometimes someone else might hear it. It stopped for a period when we were doing construction but last year it returned. It seems as though the music comes in late evening or early morning. Spiritualists believe this musical manifestation highlights the vivid and glowing life around you.

“My personal feelings about our old home are that the McBrien family were attached to this magnificent home and to the high spiritual energy. The crossed ley lines made interdimensional activity a much greater possibility.”

Today the home is in private hands. It once again houses an extended family and is yet again the home of “spirits” — the new owners have a minister among them.