Ghost Story

The following story is true and illustrates some of the failings of our day to day perspectives. We are equipped and trained to take things in nice packages. An example would be a story with the requisite beginning, middle and end. Or a picture framed by four pieces of wood. The truth of things is very different indeed, but the bulk of humanity, particularly nowadays, prefers to think only one ply deep, rather than the many that we are capable of. From time to time we are treated to or inflicted with a chance to see farther than the frames. For some few of us, this ability is standard equipment. So, I will relate to you a ghost story as it happened to me and afterwards, I will take you beyond the frames of even that story.

It was the Seventies and Disco was just starting to drown out some of the finest guitar solos ever recorded. The dancing and enthusiasm were infectious. The Late Seventies, to be more precise. I was twenty years old and ready to get my slice of the Big Pie. I married a blonde, blue-eyed daughter of a retired USAF Colonel. I had seen her face in a dream, a full year before ever meeting her. Like a flash-card held up inside of my closed eyes. When chance brought me to her house in the Nevada desert, I recognized her immediately. I'll call her B.

I had been summoned by a friend from Texas to play my guitar at his wedding in Las Vegas and was invited to stay with his parent’s while in town. His elder brother had also come in from Texas with his girlfriend. Those two took me to a huge casino one night just before the wedding. They wandered off to gamble and I just wandered around gawking at the nauseating scene.

In front of one particular display, I stood transfixed. It was a million dollars (a mythical sum in those days) laid out between two panes of glass and hung by two thin wires. I stared like a deer in the headlights as all of the human history I had learned raced through my mind.

Presently I felt a small piercing pain, like being hit in the head by a well-aimed spit ball and I dropped to the floor like a bundle of rags. On the way down, my head connected with the edge of a small table before coming to rest on the gaudy carpet. I remember falling and hitting the table edge.

The next thing I became aware of was that I was being supported by a young man and a young woman. They were keeping me upright by draping my arms on their shoulders. I had no sense of any time passing than perhaps a few seconds since falling. The couple walked me out of a side exit door and into the underground parking lot.

They asked me if I remembered who I was, who I had come with and what our car looked like. I remembered all those things perfectly and so they escorted me to wait by the car. I asked why they were being so kind and they replied that if the security personnel would have seen a long-hair such as myself drop, they would have assumed that I was drunk or stoned and I might have gotten into a difficult misunderstanding.

A few minutes later, my friend's brother and his date showed up. They asked me what had happened and I told them. On the drive back to the house, my friend’s brother kept saying that I didn't look too well and he asked if I was taking drugs. I assured him that I was not. When we arrived at the house, my friend and host, inexplicably told me that I couldn't stay there anymore. He said that he had another local friend who was also going to attend the wedding and that I could stay at her place. I was baffled and indignant, because I had been invited by him to his mother’s house.

I was driven straight away that very evening to a rambling house out in the desert. Inside was the blonde girl from my dream and she ran out to greet us. She also played guitar and sang like an angel. I was captivated. I never saw her parents around the house during the few days I stayed there. The wedding came and went. The young lady, B. and I got to know each other superficially at a party afterwards. She drove me to the airport when it was all over and we swapped phone numbers.

When I returned to North Vancouver, I racked up a massive long distance phone bill from speaking with that young lady and I sold my 1957 Gibson Melody Maker Sunburst guitar to pay it. B. invited me to return for another stay at her house. I eventually took up her offer. The house had lots of marble and many bathrooms. It was so large that a person could have remained unseen for days on end. I kept asking to meet her parents and get their approval for my stay.

She had a horse in the backyard. Four days later, I was riding her horse through the desert chaparral when I spotted a green Cadillac speeding toward the house. It was forty Celsius outside and I wasn't wearing a hat or sunglasses. I cantered up to the property and the horse broke into a gallop. I soon saw a bale of hay protruding from the trunk. B.'s father parked and went into the house through a massive sliding door, which he left open. I felt a twinge, when I heard my own father’s voice in my head, complaining about wasting the air-conditioning.

The horse stopped responding to my commands and slowed to a walk at the patio. Then it proceeded into the house through the open door and stood next to a large bar, where the Colonel stood pouring two glasses of Scotch. On the way in, midst gales of laughter from B., I smashed my forehead against the door frame. This, coupled with the transition from desert light to a dark room and from oven hot to cave cold, left me disoriented and disarmed.

"You must be Michael," said the Colonel, handing me a drink in a slightly bored manner.

Very soon after that meeting, while sitting in the parking lot of a local Taco Bell, B. suggested that we get married. I reflected for a moment or two and then drove her Daddy’s car to the big house to tell the Colonel and his wife.

After being thoroughly vetted by B.'s entire family, I was given a final approval by the Colonel and by the very next night, I was back in North Vancouver. I got my old job with my previous employer, the Keg N Cleaver Restaurant and supplemented that income with also delivering newspapers. I saved enough money to send B. a one way plane ticket and soon afterwards we were united. All she had brought was a Navajo blanket and her twelve string guitar. The Canada Customs told us that we had to be married within six months, if she desired to become a Canadian citizen.

All the legalities were eventually accomplished and we set up house-keeping in a small apartment in Deep Cove, overlooking Burrard Inlet. The wedding had been performed during my lunch-break from work by a Marriage Commissioner. It cost ten dollars. We owned two cups, two plates, two spoons, two forks and two glasses. B. couldn't cook anything but coffee and I didn't care a fig. We were happy. We got an Irish Setter and named him Strax.

One night, I was returning from work and I put my key into the lock of the street level apartment lobby door. Before I could turn it, I felt a jerk on my wrist. All my other keys tinkled on the wet pavement and I was left holding an unbroken leather thong that they had all been tied to, while the door key was still in the lock.

I gathered them up and went next door to a Greek pizza restaurant and asked the proprietor to examine the keys and the thong. He concluded that they were all unbroken. I told him what had just happened and he made the sign of the cross. One afternoon not long after that incident, I took B. grocery shopping. We entered the store and walked along the produce aisle toward the dairy section. Suddenly, a three pound package of cheddar flew off a shelf and landed near her feet. It had traveled nearly ten feet horizontally. I scooped it into the basket I carried and just shook my head.

Soon after our wedding, I went to my Boss and told him that I was married and that I wanted a career, not just a cooking job. I pointed out that I had worked at his establishment for six years and knew the business inside out. I requested to be made a Food Manager at his next opportunity. The man twirled his fingers, twiddled his thumbs, grinned and said that it might be an amusing experiment but not one that he was willing to take part in. I quit work that day.

To keep afloat, I painted, hauled bricks, carpentered, landscaped, laboured and eventually found employment at a new gourmet seafood restaurant as a Sous Chef. During my first week, I saw my old Boss among the diners. The next night I received a call from him asking for the recipe for the dish he had eaten. I told him to piss up a rope. A week later, I received another call from him.

He proposed a deal, wherein I was to work at a brand new branch location that was being built in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. I was to design the kitchen, order the cookware and furnishings and supervise their installation. I was to hire and train all the kitchen staff. I was to move to Nanaimo by a certain date, in order to be on-site during the kitchen's final phases of construction. Upon the opening of the restaurant there would be a temporary Swiss chef who would put the finishing touches on my culinary education, just prior to my taking over as Food Manager. I agreed to the deal and we shook hands on it.

In the third month of our marriage, my wife's eldest sister died from falling off the back of a motorcycle. We attended the full military funeral. B. was inconsolable. We got home to North Vancouver a few days later and the phone rang the next morning. I received news that my father's dead body had been found in the forest South of Pemberton, B. C. by a passing hiker. It circumstantially appeared to be a suicide. That Summer was difficult.

On a random Friday that same Autumn, I loaded up our 67 Beaumont Acadian and went to Vancouver Island to find rental accommodations near the new restaurant in Nanaimo. I was twenty-one years old and B. was nineteen. The date happened to be October 13, 1978. I signed a six month lease on a massive old house that day. It had a huge wrap-around porch and an expansive weed-tangled yard.

I reckoned it to be about three quarters of a century old. It appeared to be the “big house” of a neglected orchard operation from days of yore. There was a small shack on the grounds where a hermit-like welfare recipient dwelt. Up on top floor was a furnished loft, where the landlord resided. He had steep wooden steps up to a door that stood just under the peak of the roof. Most of the time he was away sleeping at his girlfriend's place, but he usually left his cat inside the loft.

That Winter started early. Our furnace’s oil tank was empty within a few days. The restaurant kitchen’s construction dragged on three weeks behind schedule and I was left with no income as a result. B. and I lived on candy bars and coffee. We wore our coats inside the house. Then it snowed and snowed. I went to the library and loaded up on books to keep us busy. They were free and it made us feel less destitute and idle. My browsing that day had ended in the occult section where I found a big stack of books on magic, the Kabbalah and such.

Soon part of each of my days was spent at the restaurant and when I began to hire and train the staff, life went from idleness in a cold house on the brink of starvation to seven fourteen hour days a week with emergency call-backs. At night I would return home to sweet B. and her spaghetti. She didn't yet know that one should drain the fat after frying regular ground beef. In the exceptionally cold house, her Bolognese sauce became a waxy tomato-scented candle within minutes. Strax loved it and the extra calories probably kept him alive.

In the blur of activity, things get noticed but not always processed. That is to say, no meaning is extracted from our experiences if we are moving too fast. The first thing I noticed was that the house was always uncommonly cold. Even after the oil tank had been replenished and the furnace was bravely humming along, there were areas in the house that never got warm. It also seemed as if the bathroom light was always turned on even though I meticulously shut it off. One night, I was semi-awakened by the sound of the bathtub taps running. I simply got up and turned them off with out processing the fact that they couldn't have turned on by themselves. One night I had an attack of hyperventilation. I breathed into my pillow to quell it.

A doctor said that I was stressing from lack of sleep, too much work, worry and a poor diet. I was otherwise fit as a fiddle. I calculated the overtime that I had worked and presented the bill to the restaurant owner. I diplomatically told him that I needed time off immediately to recuperate and would take the several thousand dollars worth of overtime in cash or in time off or a combination of those, at his discretion and at a time of his choosing.

I was emboldened by the fact that the Swiss Chef had turned out to be an alcoholic fraud who had nothing to teach me. I was immediately given three full days of rest. I checked the British Columbia Labour Law and learned that because I had been placed on a Manager's Salary and Payroll , I was not entitled to any overtime. This had not been explained to me when the deal was originally struck.

I sought advice and was encouraged to form a union. It required only two other members out of the thirty I had just hired and trained. Which simple task proved to be unobtainable. From that time, my days were numbered. Just seconds before being fired, I again quit.

My landlord told me about a brand new pub a few miles up the road that needed a cook. I went for an interview and was working again the following day. This was a wonderful relief because my lease had a penalty clause for early vacancy. My new employers were an elderly Irishman and his somewhat younger Belgian wife. I'll call them K. and H. I learned to cook traditional Scottish and Irish pub food. I was also allowed to play my guitar and sing between orders.

The place was called Piper's Inn Pub and it was on Hammond Bay Road. This is a beautiful winding road that runs north out of Nanaimo toward Lantzville. The sea is visible between the trees and in the Autumn, one sees red, yellow and green foliage punctuated by molten silver sparkles off a turquoise ocean. I looked forward to that gorgeous drive twice daily.

On the third such commute, I was driving B. up to the pub on a wondrously beautiful day and a curious thing happened. For a second that will be frozen in my memory always, I felt a strong desperate tug at the wheel of my car. The vehicle swerved sharply onto the narrow shoulder of the cliff side. I remember pulling hard with both my fists to steer out of the crash that surely would have resulted had I not been well caffeinated. There was no explanation to go with the event and it soon also went down the memory hole.

One night, soon after that incident, I received a phone call from B. while I was at work. She was frantically distraught and nearly incoherent, save for effectively communicating the necessity of my immediate return home. I could hear a horrible din in the background, as if a crew were busily wrecking the house. I told my Boss there was an emergency and I sped home. Entering through the kitchen door, I noticed two things. My elbow length hair was standing up like I was in a static electricity storm and there were yellow onions everywhere I looked. I heard B. sobbing in one of the bedrooms and Strax was wailing like a coyote.

On our kitchen table was an empty onion bag, many loose onions and a pair of scissors. Next to the scissors was a strip that had been cut off the bottom of the fifty pound bag. I had purchased the onions several days before and hung the whole bag from a large peg on the old country kitchen wall. I wondered why B. would have cut the bottom off and scattered them everywhere. I next thought of the hermit who lived in the shack beside us. Perhaps he had played a prank on B. to frighten her. I followed a trail of onions down the hallway. All the doors were shut and the round vegetables littered the way.

I opened our bedroom door and found B. huddled on the floor beside our bed with her face in her hands. Strax was cowering alongside. When I questioned B., it took her many minutes to compose herself. She said that she had been on the living room couch playing her guitar when she heard an awful rain of thuds coming from the kitchen. She went to investigate and found the onion bag cut along the bottom and the whole fifty pounds spilled onto the linoleum. On the kitchen table was the pair of scissors. She placed the onions in a heap on the table and went to check all the doors and windows. They were all were found to be locked, as was usual when I was at work. She thought it might have been a trick played by two young First Nations children who sometimes came over to play with Strax, but a search of the house proved her wrong.

She went back to the living room once she felt secure in being alone in the locked house with Strax. After a few minutes more, Strax yelped. B. looked up to see the reason and was pelted on the shoulder with a large onion coming from the hallway. Then the weird missiles flew in earnest. A barrage of onions followed her terrified flight from room to room and continued during her phone call to me. She eventually went to cower where I had found her.

As I listened to her story, my mind searched for some kind of explanation. Anything convenient. Perhaps she had scattered them herself and had made the whole story up out of frustration of being isolated. I asked her to tell me the truth. She swore it was just as she had said. We went into the kitchen and sat at the table. Then I really tuned in. A profound unnatural cold seized me and my hair rose as if some invisible hand were lifting it straight up. In that moment, I had the distinct feeling of being an intruder in a stranger's house. It was like the feeling one would get if one accidentally walked into a bathroom stall without knocking and found it occupied by three Hell’s Angels.

Then the bathroom light switched on by itself. I was “scangry.” That is, I was scared stiff and filled with righteous indignation. B. nodded with wide eyes toward the bathroom as if indicating the veracity of her story. Strax hid under the table and whimpered pitifully. I strode over to the bathroom, waving my hands through the air and trying to make jokes. I slapped off the light and returned to the kitchen. The light switched back on. I repeated my previous actions. As soon as I sat down, the light switched back on. This time the water taps all opened. I stomped into the bathroom, turned off all the taps and then the light. I stood there and watched it flip up to the on position. I turned it off and watched it again and again to be sure of what I was seeing.

As I mentioned earlier, most of what we do see is not processed and our mind fills in the blanks with what we were expecting to see. This is how a city person can walk for hours in the woods and not see a single animal. Another person attuned to the environment can see an abundance where another person will see only empty trees. When we are confronted with sights for which we have no personal precedent and no expectations of, in a situation wherein we cannot gloss over them, our minds take a lot of coaxing to accept the new input. We can feel our computer trying to place the new input into an old comfy category. We can feel our mind wobble with the effort required to create a new category, when none of the old ones prove applicable.

I experienced all those things as I sat in that cold ugly kitchen. Strax got out from under the table and walked to the living room. He stopped halfway and began to growl menacingly at the dark window that looked out onto the old porch. He was a very friendly dog and I had never heard such sounds come from him. I went in and watched him. He was tracking something that was apparently pacing left to right.

I went out onto the porch and could detect nothing. I gathered up B. and Strax and locked the place up. I walked up the stairs to the landlord's door and peered through the little pane of glass. I could see his phone was hanging off the hook and his cat was batting at it. I knocked and there was no answer. I drove back up Hammond Bay Road to the Piper's Inn Pub. I settled B. into the bar with a pint of beer and tied Strax up outside in the parking lot. I sought out my Boss, K. and told him the tale.

H. and K. came and sat with B. I returned to my work. When my shift was over, we all sat together for a chat. K. intimated that he had previously been an employee of Scotland Yard and had been attached to a Paranormal Investigations Unit. H. told us that she was a clairvoyant and well versed in this type of thing.

K. assured me that I wasn't crazy nor was B. hysterical. They told us that our dog, Strax, would be very sensitive to these disturbances and that we may have to consider giving him up, if he started to refuse his food. They suggested turning all the lights on and playing loud music as much as possible. Also to fill the house with guests. They said that we had obviously moved into a haunted house. K. and H. agreed to come over one evening soon and check out the place.

Feeling much better, we reluctantly went home. It was like being told you have cancer, but there might be a cure. We were skeptically hopeful. Over the next few weeks we tried to battle the spooks. The lights switched off whenever I turned them on. The water taps I shut off under the sink but the bath taps had no secondary valves. I phoned friends and acquaintances from the Lower Mainland to come over every week-end. Records were played constantly. In time I got used to seeing flitting images out of my peripheral vision. It became common to see objects levitate. Strax became fixated on the porch at night and eventually he stopped eating. We gave him to the children who still came in the daytime to play with him.

One weekend, I had several guests from the Vancouver come to stay at my now notorious haunted house. They were three guys and they all slept in sleeping bags in an extra room. They were extremely skeptical and this attitude lightened the atmosphere considerably. In the morning we found that the living room was awash in scattered record albums and their dust jackets. A total mess that none of us could account for. They left that day after breakfast. I was greatly saddened to see their backs.

Things escalated and a new phenomenon began. It was so precise that one could literally set one's watch to it. Each night at ten P. M., we were inflicted with the sound and the physical vibrations of two men fighting viciously up in the landlord's loft. The first time it happened, I went straight up the back stairs and pounded on his door. I could see through the window that there was no one home. The loft was a single open room with a bed, a sink, a toilet and a phone. One glace through the window revealed the whole space. Only the cat was present. I stood transfixed listening to the invisible rumbles, complete with drunken voices, yet I saw nothing.

I returned to my living room down stairs where B. sat shivering. The light fixtures were swaying and rattling. They must have been very large fellows to make such crashes when they fell. Bits of plaster rained down on the old hardwood floor. After a ten minute struggle there was a softer tumbling sound that went for about five seconds. It was the sound of someone rolling down the wooden stairs. It was so clear that I ran back to the very stairs only to find them empty. A few repeats of this was all I could take on my own. I invited K. and H. to dinner. I told them to come at about eight P. M.

They came and on her way in the door, H. looked at me and said, “This is a very busy space, Michael.”

K. concurred and they set about walking the rooms and grounds. After that, they did a session with an Ouija board. I took notes. They asked about the house, it's builder and whom was present. They told me there was a child, a little girl who wanted to play with Strax before we gave him away. It was she who had thrown the onions in a frustrated attempt to get his attention, not knowing that she couldn't be seen. It was also she who flipped the light switches and turned on the water taps. H. called her a poltergeist. It was the first time I had heard that term. H. said there was also an old man out on the porch. He had likely built the house originally. She said that there were two additional entities and that one of those was a First Nations man who had been murdered in the house! The final spirit wasn't communicating but the other spirits spoke of it.

We had a nice Shepherd's Pie with red wine for dinner. Afterwards, we all sat in the living room waiting for what we had begun to call “the floor show.” Right on schedule, it began. First the slurred drunken voices, steadily raising in volume. A shuffling of feet and the sound of a man being shoved against a wall. The house shook. I watched the light fixture and waited. I knew the play by heart. A huge crash was followed by a muffled tumbling and then silence. H. said that it was a psychic re-enactment of the murder. An emotional feedback loop.

K. became very grave and appeared to be genuinely worried. That frightened me because I was looking up to him for strength and guidance. I inquired as to his thoughts. He told me that he wasn't a particularly religious man but that he had seen enough to know that evil exists and that the devil was real. He said that something had to be particularly wrong with the physical space where the house was situated and that we should definitely get out.

H. added that in her opinion, the child was no big problem and that we could try to talk to her and tell her to move on. The floor show was a different kettle of fish altogether and much more difficult to deal with. What gave me the most concern was when H. told me in a serious tone that the old man was very wicked and not one to be trifled with. The final entity that hadn't come forward worried her the most. She warned me to tell her if we noticed changes in our own behaviour or health. I thanked them both and sadly watched them leave.

I hadn't enough money to get out of the lease and hence was bound to stay for the six month duration. I tried to stay strong and got permission for B. to accompany me every night to work, where she entertained on her guitar for free. She had been forbidden to work yet due to the immigration laws of the day.

One night I was having a pint at the bar and bemoaning my fate. A stranger sitting next to me asked if I was talking about the house on Harewood Road. I asked him, which house, specifically. He identified my house by address. I asked what he knew about it. He said that First nations brothers had rented the loft. They had fought in a drunken rage and one had stabbed the other at the top of the stairs. The victim had tumbled all the way down and was dead on the landing when the RCMP got there. My informer didn't know the fate of the murderer, but he said that the story was in all the local papers at the time that it had happened.

I was very angry about learning this. I confronted my landlord at the next opportunity and asked if he had known about the murder. He blinked, shifted his gaze and admitted that he had. I asked why in the precious hell he hadn't told me. He answered that if he had, I probably wouldn't have signed the lease. I concurred. He said that he didn't believe in ghosts anyway and had never personally been bothered by anything.

I asked him if he had ever noticed that his wall phone near the back door was perpetually off the hook. It was something I had noticed every time I tried to bang on the door to see if he was home. He said his cat kept pulling it off the cradle. I asked him if he ever heard any major noise. He replied that he had never slept there, he had always slept at his girlfriend's house.

I invited him for dinner and told him to come over about 8 PM. We had spaghetti, wine and salad. We retired into the living room about 9:30 to chat and smoke. Right on schedule, the floor show began in all its dark majesty. For the first few minutes, the landlord, who was a sports car mechanic, held his composure and literally tried to act as if he heard nothing. When the drunken swearing and plaster cracking crashes came and were followed by the fatal tumble down the stairs, he was visibly shaken.

I challenged him to sleep in his own goddamned loft, since he thought it good enough for us tenants. Thus challenged, he reluctantly walked up the empty wooden steps and put the phone back on its cradle. At about 6 A M, I was awakened by a knock on my kitchen door. It was the landlord, asking if he could borrow Strax and take him for a walk. I told him that we had been compelled to give Strax away out of kindness for that poor, sensitive creature. I asked if we were still going to be held to the conditions of his evil lease.

He said, “Yes, unfortunately that’s business.”

The remaining time spent we endured that house grew steadily worse. The aforementioned phenomena had become routine, albeit unsettling. But there was something else creeping in like dry rot. Something subtle like mould spores and potentially powerful like an avalanche two seconds before it’s triggered. I inexplicably went to a pawn shop one day and bought a thirty dollar fiddle. I play guitar and had never held a violin nor ever wanted to. My hands are several sizes too big and my fingers are like sausages. In a matter of days, I was on the old porch playing passable jigs and reels, but only when I was drunk.

I couldn't get any musical sound out of it when sober. A friend of mine came from Texas to stay for a weekend in the Summer. I came out to her car and was telling her through her open window that she would love it in Canada as there were no snakes to worry about stepping on like we had in Texas. She was a middle-aged woman and began slowly climbing down from the car.

“Damn, Mike, that's some bullshit!”

I looked down and her sneaker clad foot was poised an inch above a four foot long, black coloured snake. It slithered off and we both had a nervous laugh. During her visit, other family members came to join us. When I got my roll of film developed afterwards, all the pictures that were taken on the porch had either large black blotches or patches of over exposure, rendering them next to useless. All the pictures taken away from the house were fine. Again, we sadly watched our guests go and turned back reluctantly to the cursed house.

The absolute crux of danger came in the middle of the night just weeks before the much anticipated day of lease freedom. B. had been coming down with a flu and I was not up to par either. We were asleep in the bedroom. I was awakened quite suddenly by a powerful feeling that someone was staring at me. I opened my eyes, and in the gloom, saw B. sitting upright and leaning directly over my face. I asked her what was wrong and got no response.

When I clicked on the bedside lamp, my blood froze. Her eyes were closed and the expression on her face was a malignant grin that I have never yet seen the equal of. Her lips were stretched to an unnatural degree and her mouth was open and showing all her teeth. I grabbed her by both shoulders and shook her hard. She groggily responded and opened her eyes. She lost the foul expression and I told her what had happened. She recalled nothing about it.

The final stages of attack were increasingly focused on B. One evening she fell backwards off her chair at dinner. She was passed out cold and unaware of what had happened when I got her conscious again. Only days before we left, a reporter came from the Nanaimo Free Press and interviewed us for an article. I was assured by H. and K. that we had come very close to disaster as there was an obvious attempt at possession being made. If we had remained much longer, it might have succeeded. The final bit of ghost lore they imparted to me was that ghosts cannot cross water. I knew not why nor did they, yet they insisted it was a Celtic fact. I chose then and still choose to believe it to be true.

The blessed day for us came when we caught the ferry and went to find new accommodations in North Vancouver. I called a number about a house near the Squamish Band Reserve, just off Third Avenue on Keith Road. A man met me at the residence and showed me around. The house was wonderful, the price was right and the location was in my old stomping grounds. I asked the man if I could spend a night sleeping there before I signed the lease and told him why. He looked very sympathetic and said I could, adding that he would have taken the same precaution. I got a pizza to go, made a small fire in the fireplace and curled up on the wood floor with a phone book for a pillow. I awoke after a delicious dreamless sleep and signed the new lease paper later that morning.

I went back to Harewood Road to load up the few things B. had packed. I dropped off the accursed keys and that was that. I'll never forget the wonderful burst of life that accompanied our crossing the water on our return trip to the Mainland. B. was back to good health within a few weeks and we soon had many more adventures of a very different nature. We drifted apart and eventually got divorced. I found out that the Nanaimo landlord had placed an ad for the rental of a “haunted house” and had also doubled the rent. It hadn't take him long to get a new tenant, either.

In the decades that followed, I had occasion to go to Vancouver Island and sometimes to go to Nanaimo. I never could bring myself to go near that old house. The closest I got was about thirty years ago, late one rainy night on a holiday to the West Coast’s Long Beach. I stopped in Nanaimo to eat and I got curious. I tried to drive to the house from memory and got a feeling of real dread. I high-tailed out of the area like a spooked deer.

Fifteen years later, on another vacation, I stopped in Nanaimo for the night. It was rainy and foggy. I had been having trouble with my eyes for several days before the trip and by the time I got to Nanaimo, I was practically blind. I had originally intended to go and see once and for all if the house still stood or had been torn down. As it turned out, I could barely park the car and hobble into my motel. I got the same bad feeling as years before and wisely chose to leave.

I shall never forget those days, those experiences and those lessons learned. Sometimes I am reminded of that place by the most unexpected turns of events. For example, my mother married a man many years after the events described and once we two were conversing about Vancouver Island and Nanaimo in particular. Evidently, he had once entered into negotiations to purchase the Piper's Inn Pub long before meeting my mother.

One afternoon, thirty-four years after moving out of the Harewood house, I was surfing the internet and came upon this article which sent a few late chills up my flannels as I read it.

The Station Agent’s Rifle

“In the spring of 1948, British Columbia was suffering its greatest flooding since 1894. Dykes were bursting in the Fraser Valley and rivers were overflowing their banks everywhere in the Interior.”

“On Sunday night, May 30, 1948, the engineer of Canadian National Railways' westbound passenger train felt a distinct bump as his steam locomotive passed over the Thompson River bridge west of Deadman's Creek. When he arrived half an hour later at Ashcroft, he reported the bump to the night operator who passed the report along to the engineer of an eastbound freight train waiting at the Ashcroft siding.”

“The engineer of the eastbound freight stopped his train when he reached the bridge and climbed down out of the cab. In the beam of his locomotive's headlight, he walked part way across the deck of the steel span and saw a distinct dip in the track over an undermined concrete pier. The swollen Thompson River had begun to erode the riverbed around a huge cement pier near the eastern end of the bridge.”

“The engineer returned to his train, asked the other four crew members to get out and walk across the bridge, then climbed back into the engine's cab and slowly took his train across alone. His was the last train to cross that bridge for a year. During the night, the pier continued to lean further over and it became apparent that the bridge was soon going to topple into the river. Section-man John McLeod vividly remembers what happened the following morning, May 31, 1948, when his four-man section crew arrived by a motorized track car from Savona:”

"By this time, the pier was leaning over so bad that the tracks were almost on edge. We disconnected the rails at the east end and when the last bolt was driven out of the fish plate, the track jumped two feet toward the bridge. Now the rails had to be undone at the west end.”

“I took a track wrench and a spiking maul and a tool to drive out the last bolt and started across. The bridge was now on a 60 degree angle. I walked hanging on to one rail with my feet down on the bottom rail. When I drove the last bolt out on the west end, the track jumped three feet. Contrary to my foreman's warning, I decided to walk back across the bridge. When I got over to the other side, I rolled a smoke and took only two puffs on my cigarette when she went out.”

“The pier tipped over and the steel rails screaming like banshees whipped from each end! Spikes rained down! And two ninety-foot steel spans crashed into the river! One was carried two hundred yards downstream."

“In addition to the rails, the bridge also carried valuable telegraph and telephone wires that connected Vancouver with Eastern Canada. The taut wires had been dragged down to the surface of the river and were in danger of being snapped by logs and other debris swirling downstream. Each wire had been connected to a glass insulator mounted on a small, round, wooden bracket attached to a cross-arm that had been bolted to the bridge.”

“All of the wires had broken free except one. That one wire, still attached to its insulator connected to the cross-arm, was holding the rest down. If this one wire could be freed, then all of the wires would spring up well above the surface of the water and communications across the country could be saved. However, there was no way anyone could get out to the middle of the river to free it.”

“John had an idea. He suggested that someone take the motor car back to Savona and borrow a rifle and a box of bullets from the station agent. He would try and shoot in two the thin wooden peg that held the insulator.”

“Within half an hour, the foreman returned with a rifle and John lay down on the embankment and carefully took aim. The target was about an inch and a half in diameter. As each bullet hit the small round peg, the wood splintered and weakened. Suddenly, it broke in two, releasing all the wires into the air. The communication lines had been saved.”

“The rifle John had used was a 22 caliber Winchester semi-automatic. An expensive gun for its caliber and rather uncommon since it was fitted with a brass tube in the stock that could be pulled from the butt for reloading. At the end of the day, the gun was delivered back to Savona's CNR station agent, Robert Dillabough.”

“Fourteen years later, on October 16, 1962, at 6:45 P. M., a pretty, nineteen-year-old girl named Diane Phipps walked out the front door of her parents' house in Nanaimo and waved goodbye to her mother.”

"Don't be late", her mother called out as Diane walked toward the front gate.”

"Have a good time", shouted her father who was working in his garden at the side of the house.”

“Diane had a date with Leslie Dixon, a young man she had been going steady with for about six months. She had recently started a new job as a practical nurse at St. Paul's Hospital over in Vancouver, working three days straight and two days off, and this was her third trip back home to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.”

“Wearing a new black sweater and skirt, Diane walked to a girlfriend's house where she spent the next couple of hours visiting before her boyfriend called around and picked her up. Dixon was tall and good-looking and, like Diane, was also 19 years old. He had quit school in grade ten and was working as a service-station attendant in Nanaimo. His big interest were bowling and cars.”

“The couple drove to a gas station where Dixon bought two dollars worth of gas, then drove through Nanaimo, tooting the horn to various friends. They stopped briefly to talk with a mechanic at the garage where Dixon worked. A little after ten o'clock, they were seen by two of Dixon's friends heading down Departure Bay Road toward Piper's Lagoon, five miles north of Nanaimo. Piper's Lagoon was a favourite parking spot for young people. A lovers' lane.”

“They hadn't seen each other for a week and, as they sat in the car laughing and talking, they were unaware that a man was standing nearby in the shadows watching them. He observed them for a while and listened to Diane laugh. Then, quietly, he slipped away and returned with a gun.”

“The following morning, when Leslie Dixon didn't return home, his mother sent his two brothers, Vic and Ron, to search for him. At ten A. M. they found Leslie sitting in his car at Piper's Lagoon. His head was lying back and they thought he was asleep. When Vic shook him, he fell over. He had been shot twice in the back of the head at close range.”

“There was no sign of Diane although her purse and coat were in the car beside her boyfriend's body. The police brought in tracking dogs and called in investigators from Victoria but they were unable to locate a murder weapon or determine the whereabouts of Diane Phipps. Dixon's wallet was still in his pocket, its contents untouched. Robbery, obviously, was not a motive for the crime.”

“At two o'clock that afternoon, Darrell Morgan, a Nanaimo resident, was in a rubbish dump four miles south of Nanaimo retrieving a hacksaw he had left there on the weekend while searching for scrap metal. As he walked by a stack of old car parts, he saw two feet sticking out from under a pile of rusty fenders. He lifted a fender and saw a body. It was Diane Phipps. He fled the scene and called police.”

“Police believe the girl had been forced from Dixon's car, driven seven miles south by the killer, then murdered on a lonely bush road. She had been shot once between the eyes, then beaten with a boulder. She had not been sexually molested and the contents of her purse were still intact. Police ruled out the theory that the killer could have been a jealous lover since the couple had been going together for about half a year.”

“The killings would become known as the ‘Lovers' Lane Murders’ and created headlines in the Vancouver newspapers for the next week. The RCMP had little to go on. No motive, no weapon, no suspects. They believed that they were looking for a criminal psychopath.“

“The police received a call from a young woman living on Harewood Road, not far from where Diane's body was found. She told police that she had been watching a late night television show when a man knocked at her door about one A. M. on the night of the murder. He told her that his car was stuck in the ditch just up the road and asked for the use of her truck to pull him out.”

“The man climbed into the box of the truck and she drove a couple of hundred yards down the road where the man hooked a chain from her truck to his car. She pulled it out of the ditch and, as the stranger unhooked the chain, he told her to go home. The next day, she heard about the double murder and called the police.”

“Officers examined the piece of gravel road and noted that tire tracks had swerved suddenly off the road and hit a rock. They theorized that the driver of the car was the murderer and that Diane Phipps was still alive at that time and had yanked at the steering wheel. With a description of the stranger and of his car, they felt certain it wouldn't be long before they made an arrest.”

“The Nanaimo City Council offered a reward of $3,500.00 later increasing it to $5,000.00 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murders of Diane Phipps and Leslie Dixon. The reward was equivalent to a year's wages. But, despite the most intensive murder investigation in the history of British Columbia, the reward went unclaimed and the police were completely baffled.”

“Three months following the murders, the weather turned bitterly cold. For the first two weeks of 1963, the temperature on Vancouver Island seldom rose above the freezing mark. Lakes everywhere were frozen over.”

“On January 29, a young boy was playing on the ice on Long Lake, five miles north of Nanaimo, when he saw a gun lying in the mud beneath the clear ice not far from shore. He loosened a rock from the beach, smashed a hole in the ice and pulled out a 22 caliber rifle. Excitedly, he ran home with the gun and asked his father to clean it up and let him keep it.”

“As he wiped the mud and water off the gun, the father noted that it was a Winchester semi-automatic rifle in excellent condition. Why would anybody throw away such an expensive gun? He was suspicious. He took it down to the Nanaimo detachment of the RCMP which immediately sent it to Regina for ballistic tests. A short time later, a report came back that this was the gun that killed Leslie Dixon and Diane Phipps.”

“The police were sure now that the case could be solved quickly. They had a description of the murder suspect, a description of his car and now the murder weapon. But, a year passed and the gun's owner could not be traced. The police remained baffled.”

“On Saturday, April 18, 1964, almost a year and a half after the gun was found the Vancouver Sun published an article in its Weekend Magazine describing the murders and appealing to people across Canada for information on the rifle used in the two slayings.”

“The newspaper included, with its story, three photographs of the gun, including a close-up picture of the butt end of the stock showing where a brass tube could be pulled for loading. The gun was described as a Winchester 22 caliber, semi-automatic, rifle, Model 63, serial number 41649A, manufactured on October 5, 1940, and sold in 1942 but the purchaser's name was unknown.

“The article added, "The rifle is expensive for a weapon of this caliber and is, consequently, rather uncommon. Anyone having knowledge of persons who have possessed rifles of this description is requested to inform the nearest police department or R. C. M. P. detachment immediately. Any information offered will be held in the strictest confidence."

“The newspaper story resulted in a flood of tips. One of those tips led police to the original owner of the gun Robert Ralph Dillabough, a former Canadian National Railways station agent at Savona, B. C.”

“When police arrived at Savona, they learned that Mr. Dillabough had died ten years earlier on March 15, 1954. The disposition of his estate, including the rifle, had been handled by D. T. Rogers of a Kamloops law firm. Some assets of the estate were sold privately while other assets, including this rifle, were sold at a public auction. The auction had taken place in Kamloops on February 19, 1955.”

“The auctioneer was George Shelline, but when police went to interview him, they learned that he had been killed in an accident a year after the auction took place. They searched his records but were unsuccessful in finding the name of the gun's buyer. Once again, they had come to a dead end.”

“The police checked 60,000 vehicle registrations seeking a car described by the witness. They screened every rental car in British Columbia. They interviewed thousands of people, took 200 written statements, examined 2,000 gun invoices and sought the help of the FBI in the United States and Interpol in Europe. They toted up more detective man hours on this murder than any murder probe in B. C. history. But they still did not have a suspect.”

“So, the Vancouver Sun ran another story about the case. This time, the newspaper asked for persons who had attended the Kamloops auction to come forward. The story was carried across Canada by the Canadian Press News Service.”

“Again, police received a flood of tips. This time, one of them led to the arrest of a suspect, a 35-year-old North Vancouver baker named Ronald Eugene Ingram.”

“Ingram had formerly lived in Nanaimo and, together with his brother, Wallace, owned Parklane Bakery on Harewood Street. In early 1965, he and his wife and three children left Nanaimo and moved to North Vancouver where he was taken into custody on August 7, 1965. He had never been a suspect in the case nor had he ever been interviewed by police.”

“Equipped with a chain saw, police went to the Parklane Bakery and cut out a section of retaining wall at the rear of the building where Ingram used to shoot at rats. Slugs retrieved from the wall matched those in the murder weapon. Ingram's car was also examined and, although two years had elapsed since the murders, human blood stains were found in the vehicle.”

“Ingram was taken to Oakalla Prison in Burnaby. A few hours later, he attempted to commit suicide by plunging his head into a plugged, water-filled toilet bowl. When found by a guard, he had no apparent pulse but responded to inhalator treatment.”

“Six weeks later, on September 20, 1965, Ingram, through his lawyer, confessed that he had shot Diane Phipps between the eyes and then beat her head in with a rock. The admission was made to an all-male Assize Court jury minutes after a previous jury had found him fit to stand trial for capital murder. He was charged only with the girl's murder.”

“Following his admission of guilt, three psychiatrists told the Court that in 1962, Ingram would have been suffering from a disease of the mind. The Crown Attorney suggested to the jury that they had no alternative but to find Ingram not guilty by reason of insanity, stating that "Ingram was in such a deranged state of mind at the time of the killings, he was not able to appreciate the nature and quality of his acts and could not have formed an intent."

“The following day, a judge ordered Ingram to be held in close custody indefinitely or as Section 545 of the Criminal Code put it, "until the pleasure of the Lieutenant Governor is known."

“Ingram was transferred to maximum security confinement at the Forensic Psychiatric Institute of Riverview mental hospital then known as Essondale at Coquitlam, B. C. and remained in close confinement for the next six years.”

“In 1971, doctors considered that his mental condition had improved so dramatically that he was granted unsupervised ground privileges. In May, 1974, he escaped from the hospital but returned voluntarily after being free for four days. He escaped again in August, 1975. But this time, he was not recaptured for eight months.”

“In November, 1976, the Vancouver Sun reported that the doctors at Riverview Hospital ruled him sane and that a Provincial Review Board recommended he be released. Despite pleadings from his lawyer, the Provincial Cabinet refused to grant him his freedom.”

“I have searched through subsequent newspaper archives without being able to learn whether Ingram was finally released and allowed to rejoin his wife and family who were now living in Edmonton. Nor did I learn who, if anyone, received the reward for his arrest.”

“I do know, however, that the clue that solved this case was a rifle, the same rifle once owned by a station agent in Savona and the same rifle that saved the trans-Canada communication wires from being broken following the collapse of the Thompson River

bridge in the flood of 1948.”

-Source: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~dimcl/rifle.html

-Article by: Edward Villiers for the Savona Historical Society

I can tell the reader, that if we could perceive even a fraction beyond our usual everyday “awareness”, we would immediately see the wisdom of proceeding through our days as sober and as fit as possible. The world is much more crowded than it appears. It is the vibration of the fly on the web that calls the spider's attention.

fin