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

Don't Call it a Comeback

Reading is for suckers.  Click "play" on the Largely the Truth logo below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:

It's been almost a year since my last post and you'd be forgiven for thinking I'd run out of steam. In fact there have been times in the last 9 months where I've thought that myself: thought I'd become one of those past-it types you see in coffee shops, the ones wearing skinny jeans and hoping no one notices they're twenty years older than the girl they're hitting on.

Then I snap back to reality and remember that since I never had "it" in the first place there's no way it can have passed me by. Sure, I spend a lot of time in coffee shops but only because there are fewer TVs there than in bars. I certainly don't use them as pickup joints - if I ever tried my lovely wife would tear a hole through the fabric of space and time and boil my testicles with her heat vision.

So where in the hell have I been? It's simple - last year I set two goals for myself: bench press 300 pounds and write a book. Not at the same time.  These goals, along with life and my first steady job after 4 years of temping, have eaten all the time I once devoted to making up dirty limericks about restaurants.

The Village Idiot Bar & Grill | 306 Mackenzie Avenue | Revelstoke, B.C

What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.  But just look at a rose: it’s lovely, red (I know there are other colours, but those are only for your grandmother), and it can buy you out of almost any trouble you’ve caused.  This is based on a sliding scale, from a single rose “just because”, to several dozen, “just because I crashed your car while playing slap and tickle with your sister”.  The rose is invincible to degradation, even if you call it “Duane Allman’s gangrenous foot”. 

Other things are not so lucky, and were they to have their names changed, their image would suffer accordingly.  Imagine, for instance, that during a moment of intimacy with your lady, you glance downward and ask if she wants to meet “The Ringing Disappointment”, or “Fester”.  Will her answer be a breathy “Oh yes”, or would your bed empty faster than a church pew when Father Flynn passes the plate?  If you named your restaurant “The Village Idiot”, would anyone take it seriously?

Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye

During the early afternoon of March 20 I had lunch with a friend, hunted around for a pair of steel-toed shoes and picked up a handful of CDs at Lyle's Place; it was, in short, a very usual Saturday afternoon.  That evening Nicky & I had dinner with our friends Mike & Alicia and 10:18pm were part-way in to watching a film with them when my phone rang and a very usual day became one I wouldn't forget.  When I saw that it was my mother calling from her home in Campbell River, I went cold with apprehension.  We usually speak once a week but rarely in the evening and never past ten, and I instinctively expected bad news.  Bad news didn't quite cover it.  She had called to tell me that three hours before, my uncle Jim, a fixture of my life since birth and, in the absence of my own father, someone who had come to occupy that role in my heart, had died suddenly while on vacation.  Details were scarce at this point, the only certainties being that he was gone and that his wife Susan, my aunt, was now alone in Tehachapi, California, without her husband of thirty-five years.  We didn't speak long as other calls needed to be made, and shortly thereafter my phone rang again and didn't stop until long past midnight.  One call was from my aunt Susan, who sounded frighteningly adrift when she explained that Jim had simply gone down to the pool for a swim and never come back.  The doctors initially guessed he'd had a heart attack but the final word would have to wait until an autopsy had taken place; as of this writing we still do not have a definitive answer.  She was alone but the responding officer had gone out of his way to make her as comfortable as possible and two of Jim's brothers, Dennis & Bryon, and Bryon's wife Linda, would be arriving into Bakersfield first thing the next morning.  I hope to never again hear the voice of someone I love so dearly sound so empty, and so lost.  After we hung up Nicky & I both tried to process the idea that this vibrant, loving, outgoing man was, after only fifty-five years on the planet, gone forever.  We have both lost family members over the years but never one so young, or so quickly.

Cup of Joe Cafe | #1 - 230 Menzies Street | Victoria

A close friend of mine once spent most of his time and even more of his money trying to win over the office ice queen, a tall blonde named Annette whose head was as empty as her brassiere was full.  Presents, cards & little favors, he punched all the spots on his sucker card trying to win her affections and after a series of chaste dates had gotten absolutely nowhere.  It finally ended at the office Christmas party when he found her in the stairwell frantically exchanging DNA with the copier repairman.  My friend was crushed and Annette’s explanation didn’t do anything to ease the sting:  “His name is Vincent; he has great arms AND a Mustang!  I thought you wanted me to be happy?”  For him that was the end of the office party and he left, miserable, priapic and bound for home thinking it was the end of his night too.  But then a funny thing happened to remind him of a lesson we all forget from time to time:  sometimes the things we want most have been right here all along.  Her name was Brenda and she lived two doors down.  Now and again they had run into each other in the laundry room but until this moment, when they arrived home at the same time and her smile cut through his misery and loneliness, he’d never really seen her.  Never noticed the twinkle in her blue eyes, the way she wrinkled her little nose when she laughed, or the curve of her...well, curves.  They talked until they didn’t need to anymore and my friend disappeared off the face of the earth for a while.  Once he’d come back down from the clouds he invited me out for breakfast at Cup of Joe to tell me the story, to brag more  than was strictly necessary and finally, to ask for a favor. 

Cabin 12 | 3111 Cedar Hill Rd | Victoria

Update 3/14/2012:  Hey there, loyal readers.  Cabin 12 has relocated to 3111 Cedar Hill Road near the Hillside Mall.  It's a bit of a hike but worth it for the friendliest restaurant in town.  This review refers to their former location at 607 Pandora Street but I stand by my words.


To get to the new Cabin 12 by transit take the #24 bus from downtown.  It'll let you off a stone's throw from their door.  Otherwise there are a number of buses that take you within walking distance, including the #4, 22, 25, 27 & 28.


Sometimes you just know that you're not going to like something.  In early 2005 I was going through a prolonged breakup when two close friends got tired of me drifting from room to room in my house like the ghost of Miss Haversham and dragged me to out to the movies.  Living in Revelstoke we had only one film on offer, the romantic comedy Hitch and I fought like mad against going in there; after I Robot there were a dozen things I'd rather do than watch Big Willy "Hell, yeah!" his way through more nonsense, but my friends prevailed.  

Funky, but in a good way

Two hours later I emerged from the cinema feeling better than I had in months - over the course of the film I had come to realize that I had great friends who really cared about my well-being.  That's a rare thing.  But take away that affirmation and you're left with a film that was, as predicted, absolute rubbish.  When I came across it on cable recently I felt an almost irrepressible urge to channel The King and fire my .44 into the television.  All the positive memories clustered around seeing the film couldn't change the fact that I knew I would hate it going in and felt no different coming out.  


I knew I wasn't going to like Cabin 12 because I'd heard it was "trendy", "funky", and "hip", three words that make the hair on my neck stand up, but I thought I'd give it a try - it only seemed fair.  Sometimes you just know that you're not going to like something.  And sometimes you're wrong.  I enjoyed my lunch at Cabin 12 more than any in recent memory and if this is the way that owners Corey & Dan always run their ship then I've found my new favorite restaurant.

Earls | 1199 Government Street | Victoria

There are a lot of reasons why it might seem pointless to review a chain restaurant:  the recipes are mostly the same at every location from San Francisco to Jacksonville, and, as a friend pointed out, if a formula is successful enough to generate franchises who am I to argue?  Well, over the years I've eaten at Boston Pizza, Red Robin & Ricky's All-Day Grill, and the only thing they do well is back up what H.L. Mencken said about getting rich by underestimating the taste of the American public.  The quality of a restaurant depends more on the competence of those preparing the food than it does on recipes alone so if the folks behind the scenes have as much enthusiasm for food as I do honest work then your dining experience will be as much fun as mopping the floors in an adult theatre. 

Almost any franchise that opened up in my hometown of Revelstoke over the years has either folded or maintained a consistently execrable standard, the only obvious reason being the available pool of listless halfwits willing to work for the wages on offer.  Paying peanuts will most assuredly get you monkeys.  Dan has always been a devoted fan of the Earls chain, for which I've hassled him endlessly but his ability to ignore me is almost unparalleled.  Only my wife does it better.  So when Dan informed me that Earls would be the chosen venue for his 26th birthday I figured there was no point poking fun and that inferior factory-prepared food would vindicate my snobbery.  And you know what?  The bastards made us a great meal and I barely had enough room left to eat my words.

Baan Thai | 1117 Blanshard Street | Victoria

UPDATE, September 2010:  I've returned to Baan Thai several times and had meals that are vastly superior to the one described here.  I have now happily climbed aboard the Baan Thai bandwagon.  The Baandwagon?  I'm so sorry. 

I loathe buzzwords and the way they've penetrated popular language. An afternoon of coffee and biscuits in the Shoal Point Moka House can be ruined as soon as some goon drops a phrase like "Derek, we need to drill-down and start pushing the envelope". My heart beats faster, the adrenaline flows and I swell, Incredible Hulk style, to a towering giant of rage that wants to hit Chet & Derek so hard their skin flies off. Instead I sit, eat my Hobknobs and die just a little bit more inside.

"Global village" is another one that never fails to rile me, long-hair shorthand for the way telecommunications & travel have brought the many cultures of the world closer together. Not usually mentioned is that after being brought together they're split up like British children in wartime, shuffled into unmarked van and then then co-opted by people too lazy to develop personalities of their own. Growing up in Revelstoke, B.C. where ethnic food began & ended at Tony's Roma, I never learned to differentiate between one type of food and another. You ate at Tony's because his cannelloni was legendary and it was the only restaurant in town that sold anything other than hamburgers. There was never any particular value assigned to the fact that the style of cooking originated in the ancestral home of the pompadour.

Now I walk past The Noodle Box and see crowds of surly, humorless university students tucking into overcooked Asian food prepared by surly, humorless university graduates, everyone toe-top-full with pride at their culinary diversity. I cannot prove this, but it seems unlikely that deep in the hills of Vietnam, Hmong villagers sit down at meal-time to high-five one another over platefuls of hamburgers.

And so it begins...

Hello Victoria - we're Max & Bren, and we have a few things to say about your restaurants. We're fairly recent arrivals in your fair city and have spent a not-inconsiderable amount of money in many of your eateries, some of it was well-spent, some of it was spent in the Irish Times. The end result is that we've added a few inches to our waistline and we have a compulsion to add our opinions to this swirling mess of mediocrity called the Internet. Other than one being a vegetable and the other a bunch of fruits, we couldn't tell you the difference between endive and N'Sync but we sure can tell you whether or not we liked something, why, and if a restaurant is worth your hard-earned money. We're hoping to have an update for you every two weeks and we look forward to seeing what you've got to say. Let's have some fun with this.

Let's go.