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

Midnight at the Waffle House, Part 2

Click here to catch up on part 1

The first Waffle House was opened by Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner in the Atlanta suburb of Avondale Estates.  The two men had met in 1949 when Rogers, at the time working for the national restaurant chain Toddle House, had bought a home from real-estate agent Forkner and the pair became friends.  Rogers, who had grown tired of miserably toiling away in other people's restaurants and decided it was his turn to make someone miserable, sold Forkner on the idea of starting their own diner and, in 1955, Waffle House was born.

Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner. I don't dare make jokes about either.

Another soon opened in 1957, by 1960 there were a total of four and though it has never grown to Denny's-level ubiquity, Waffle House has become a fixture along the highways of America’s southeast.

On that night in Austin, heavy construction along Ben White Boulevard meant the access road leading to this particular Waffle House was reduced to a miserable dirt path in a dark gap between streetlights and consequently it took Mike and me two passes before we could find the thing.

Just up the road sat a Denny's, it's gleaming, modern interior a beacon of hospitable sterility, with a driveway plainly visible from the road; in comparison, Waffle House looked like an old screen door banging in the wind at the end of a donkey track.   However, by this point we had invested so much time in trying to get to Waffle House that giving up wasn’t an option and had abandoning the vehicle across three lanes of freeway and walking been the only avenue left to us, we would have seriously considered it.

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.