A Strange Little Place: True Paranormal Stories from Revelstoke, Canada

Revelstoke, B.C., Canada, photo courtesy of Sami Lingren

Since April 2012 I've been researching paranormal stories from my hometown of Revelstoke, B.C. with an eye toward publishing them as a book.  These stories range from simple ghost stories to eyewitness accounts of unusual lights in the sky to strange combinations of the two which defy conventional explanations of both.

Just as they did last year, the Revelstoke Current will be running one of my stories a week, beginning today, in the lead-up to Halloween.

My first draft of the manuscript was completed in October 2013 and submitted to a number of publishers.  Llewellyn Worldwide, a Minnesota-based publisher of all all things paranormal, has expressed interest but requires the manuscript to be longer and so I am now back knocking on doors.  In fact, I will be in the Revelstoke area in the second week of October and if you have any experiences you would like to share, please feel free to contact me at the below email address.

The index below is not a complete listing of the stories which will appear in the final version, but represent a sampling of what to expect.

Thanks for reading and should you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me at bren(at)largelythetruth(dot)com

1. Bocci's
1. A Creeping Unease
2. A Blue Flash
3. A New Start
2. The Court House Square
1. The Girl in the Window
2. Voices in the Dark
3. The House on the Bank
3. Ghosts of the Revelstoke Hospital
4. Her Number One Fan
5. The Jealous Spirit of Main Street Cafe
6. As Far Back as I Can Remember...It Was Haunted
7. The Legends of Mount Begbie
1. The Mount Begbie Iceman
2. Watch the Skies
8. The Orange Triangle
1. "We Figured It Was Just a Trick With the Trees"
2. "Two Days Later We Heard Jets"
3. The Military Angle
9. The Pass
1. The Rogers Pass Fireball
2. Missing Time
1. Henry
10. Strange Tales of the Arrow Lakes
1. Fear on the South Road
2. Just Around the Bend
3. 'Strange Object Seen in South Heavens'
4. The Light on the Lake
11. Shadow People and "Gremlins"
12. The Girl on Highway 23
1. "There Was a Young Girl Crying For Help"
2. The Blizzard
13. The Ghost of Henry Colbeck
1. The Man in the Window
2. "There Was This Horrendous Crash"
14. The Man in the Field
15. Eyes in the Fog
16. The Graveyard Next Door
1. "There Were Voices...but There Was Nothing There"
2. "He's Looking at Me...He Looks Really Mad"
3. "Something Was Not Right"
4. "There Was a Rage in There"
17. The Haunting of Holten House
1. A Storied Past
2. Lyda 
3. Charles
4. "I Always Felt As Though Someone Was Going to Push me Down the Stairs"
5. A Territorial Presence
6. Visible Spirits
7. In Dreams

Photo Gallery: Lonesome Creepy - Victoria at Night

My contentious relationship with the sun was established on a summer day in Kelowna, BC when I was four years old and overheated to the point of having a seizure.  My memory prior to the seizure is vague; we were at the now-shuttered Kelowna Grand Prix "family fun centre" and so all I recall is seeing a row of refrigerator-sized arcade games before the brown patterned carpet rushed up at me.  However, my post-seizure memory - waking up in hospital a tub of ice - is still vivid and I have spent my life since then avoiding the possibility of a repeat performance, and thus the sun, whenever possible.  You could say I'm a bit of a night owl.

While this means I'm useless at the beach and in the early morning, it does allow me to see a different side of the world around me, a perspective my Lonesome Creepy galleries are aimed at capturing.  In this particular batch of photos, I've decided to focus on one particular location - my home of Victoria, BC.  Seeing the city at night has given me a deeper appreciation for a place many people - myself included - dismiss as picturesque but bland.

Many, if not all, of the below photos have appeared on my Instagram feed, albeit in cropped form under the tag #yyjatnight. If you're on IG, please feel free to use that tag and show off your own view of night time in BC's capital.

Click here to find and follow me on Instagram.  

All photos taken with an iPhone 5s

Legs, Eggs, and TheBesty.com

Once upon a time this blog was devoted entirely to restaurant reviews and so, every now and again, I would opine at great length on the subject of eateries in the Victoria and Vancouver areas.  One such establishment was Paul’s Place Omelettery, a Vancouver breakfast spot I wrote about on June 21, 2010 seven short months after Largely the Truth went online.  In the four years since then, thoughts of the review had drifted completely away from the waking part of my mind into the unreachable ultraviolet range of consciousness where hides such apocrypha as “where I left my keys” and “every book I have ever read.”

Then, in May, nearing the end of a road trip spanning some 2800 miles and fifteen states, I awoke in my Hyannis, Massachusetts hotel to find I’d received an e-mail from TheBesty.com.  The Besty is a new site which encourages bloggers to create and share lists of the best restaurants in their cities and elsewhere.  In February I had contributed a list of Waikiki hotspots culled from a recent visit and something about my hodgepodge of pizza joints and ice cream parlors must have caught their eye, because the email I received on that Cape Cod morning advised me a video using material drawn from my review of Paul’s Place had gone online.

That video is embedded below.  Though it may not contain every Julianne Moore metaphor I have used, it certainly has my favorite.

Thanks to everyone at TheBesty.com for reading and supporting Largely the Truth! 

P.S – Though things have slowed down for me on the blogging front you can still find me on Twitter and, my newest obsession, Instagram:

"Charlie Wenjack", by Willie Dunn

Most Canadians are at least passingly familiar with the long horror story that was our Indian Residential Schools.  For those of you not familiar with the subject, I recommend reading the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's "A history of residential schools in Canada", which does a better job of summarizing the situation than I ever could.

Recently, while discussing the issue with a friend I wanted to show them the text to singer/songwriter Willie Dunn's song "Charlie Wenjack", which tells the tragically short story of the boy of the same name.  The lyrics could not easily be found online and so I thought I would reprint it here so more people would have a chance to appreciate it.

If there's a copyright holder out there who stumbles onto this and has an issue with it, please keep in mind this is entirely to help keep a small part of Dunn's work accessible; no one's making any money here.

Wawatay News has an audio file of Dunn (who died in October 2013) singing the song, so if you'd like to listen to it while you read, click here to open that link in a new window.

The following is reprinted verbatim from my copy of Ward Churchill's "Kill the Indian, Save the Man", which, if you have any interest in learning more about the residential schools, is an excellent resource:

Charlie Wenjack

(Who died in 1966, aged twelve, running away from an Indian residential school near Kenora, Ontario, trying to get back to his father and his people)

Walk on, little Charlie

Walk on through the snow.

Heading down the railway line,

Trying to make it home.

Well, he's made it forty miles,

Six hundred left to go.

It's a long old lonesome journey,

Shufflin' through the snow.

He's lonesome and he's hungry,

It's been a time since last he ate,

And as the night grows bolder,

He wonders at his fate.

For his legs are wracked with pain

As he staggers through the night.

And he sees through his troubled eyes,

That his hands are turning white.

Lonely as a single star,

In the skies above,

His father in a mining camp,

His mother in the ground,

And he's looking for his dad,

And he's looking out for love,

Just a lost little boy by the railroad track

Heading homeward bound.

Is that the great Wendigo

Come to look upon my face?

And are the skies exploding

Down the misty aisles of space?

Who's that coming down the track,

Walking up to me?
Her arms outstretched and waiting,
Waiting just for me.

Walk on, little Charlie,

Walk on through the snow.

Moving down the railway line,

Try to make it home.

And he's made it forty miles,

Six hundred left to go.

It's a long old lonesome journey,

Shufflin' through the snow.

 -  Willie Dunn

The Thing About the Desert...Part 3

On September 24, 2013 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.  

Along the way, my friend and I decided to look into local ghost stories and ended up with one of our own.  This is the conclusion of that story.

Click here to read part 1 first

Click here for part 2

The first time it happened I only caught it from the corner of my eye.  

The Subaru’s dashboard readout had still been misbehaving, no longer even pretending it was properly calculating the miles remaining in our tank – from 600 it had counted down to 500 or so, then back up past 600 – but just around midnight the whole thing went completely blank, then flashed briefly, before going back to normal.

“Did that just go blank?” I asked.

“It did, then it flashed 1:00.” Mike replied.

“So now the clock is boned too?”

“That’s the thing," he said.  "It displayed 1:00 on the ‘miles remaining’ part.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

The Thing About the Desert...Part 2

On September 24, 2013 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.  

Along the way, my friend and I decided to look into local ghost stories and ended up with one of our own.  This is part 2 of that story.

Click here to read part 1 first
Click here for part 3

A look at Google Earth shows the area to be dotted here and there with houses but on the ground, in the dark, the turnoff to Angel Canyon Road from Highway 89, some six miles into the desert north of Kanab, felt so remote it may as well have been the far side of the moon.  After leaving the highway we followed the road down a small rise, past low shrubs and patches of scrub grass, to the start of the 350-acre Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.

Best Friends is noted as being America’s largest sanctuary for companion animals, recognized for their commitment to their “no-kill mission”; they believe that 90% of shelter animals are adoptable, or could be with the proper care and treatment.  It seemed a bit grim, then, that the sole reason we were in the neighborhood was on the off chance of seeing someone wearing a fur pelt and firing pellets of ground-up human body at their enemies, but that didn’t stop us. 

Aw, that's cute.  Now make with the evil witches

The Thing About the Desert...Part 1

On September 24, 2013 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.  

Along the way, my friend and I decided to look into local ghost stories and ended up with one of our own.  This is part 1 of that story.

If you've already read part 1, click here to be taken to part 2

Those of you who read this site regularly will recall that I don’t find the desert to be a particularly exciting place.  Apart from the odd dramatic vista and infrequent lightning storms, the many hours I've spent driving across the desert have mainly consisted of scanning radio frequencies looking for something – anything – to distract myself from the agonizing pace at which the miles on my GPS screen tick down.  Yet, like so many things I claim to dislike – CostCo, social gatherings, Las Vegas – I find myself drawn back to the desert again and again.

The reading I’ve done in “paranormal” literature since beginning to write my book of ghost stories, and - oddly enough - the blog for dating site OK Cupid would like me to believe I’m wrong, that there is a great deal more happening in the desert than I thought but it took my road trip to the Grand Canyon last September to convince me.

A Little Wrestlemania is Good for the Soul

If you grew up in North America in the 80s you know damn well who this is

That I grew up spending my Saturday mornings watching WWF wrestling is not something I advertise.   It’s not that I’m ashamed of it – I suspect that a lot of guys (and gals) my age spent their Saturday mornings the same way – but the experience, or the knowledge gained from it, is not easily introducible to an adult conversation:

 “We’re expecting our first baby!  We are SO excited!”

“Oh my God that’s great!  This is like when Hulk Hogan bodyslammed Andre the Giant at Wrestlemania 3!”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, ‘Lovely!  When are you due?’”

“We really must be going.”

High praise indeed

Consequently, I am more likely to tell someone about the times in my life I have been accosted by shadowy paranormal entities than I am to describe my heartbreak at Hulk Hogan’s momentous Wrestlemania 6 loss to the Ultimate Warrior.

Welcome to my childhood

At this point it should come as no great surprise that I am not invited to many dinner parties.