About a year and a half ago, I had an idea I’ve been unable to shake. What if The Haunting of British Columbia: Sea Lore and Ghost Stories had an accompanying tarot deck?
The book itself is ambitious. It will be like the folklore publications from a hundred years ago. Not comparable to modern ghost story collections. In the narrative, I am not searching for answers. Only stories. Of mermaids and monsters and haunted vessels and beach-shrieking apparitions. Of UAPS and Sasquatch encounters and Indigenous beings too frightening to name. I’ve traveled the coast from Point Roberts at the American border to the Naas Valley near Alaska and have visited countless communities and archives in between. I’ve interviewed witnesses, scoured hundreds of books, thousands of newspapers, and an insane amount of online posts. Most of the accounts and tales that will be in the Haunting of British Columbia are unknown. They were forgotten over time or have only been shared by small, local groups of people.
Unlike American States, foreign countries, and the East Coast of Canada, British Columbia has never had its own collection of coastal lore. So it will be an enigma to publish this work in an era where people rush to create content or use A.I. to scrape anything already available online. The Haunting of British Columbia will be different. It will be thick and it will be authoritative. Yet it will not read as academic.
Those who have followed me since the early 2010s know this site began as a study about the folklore of Celtic trees and supernatural beings (hence the “living library” name). In the beginning, I mostly focused on the Ogham, a system of divination that some propose can be traced back to the druids. Offline, I have read the Druid Animal Oracle cards and other forms of divination since I was a teenager. A practice that has followed me throughout my adult life–even when I was private about it.
My first tarot deck was gifted to me in the 1990s. Like everything else, I only half believed–both then and now–in the power the cards had to see possible futures. But tarot reading is a practice that requires suspending disbelief, practicing storytelling, and appreciating small details in art.
I have always loved the lore associated with tarot cards. Such as how your first deck must be a gift, how the 9 of Pentacles grants wishes, and how the Spirit Halloween Tarot deck is cursed. Some decks are even folklore themed.
At some point, I learned that several comic artists and illustrators have created their own tarot decks and that many artists I know have aspirations of doing so themselves.
What if, I asked myself, I made my own deck based entirely on the supernatural stories I’ve uncovered across B.C.? A deck that still conforms to the Rider Waite Smith tarot imagery many of us already know and love? It would be dark, haunting, and beautiful.
Of course, there are a lot of illustrated decks out now–including by A.I.–that are obvious money grabs. People draw The Hanged Man as an executed person or The Devil as representing something more nefarious than addiction. They don’t understand in order to make a cool deck that is also functioning you have to know the cards and be a card reader yourself.
With this goal in mind, I’ve started to post YouTube “collective” tarot readings using some of my darker decks. I’ve also recorded videos at haunted locations and have even read cards for a paranormal TV crew on film for an upcoming series. I’m not sure which of these videos I will release or when. Becoming a tarot reader has included an uncountable number of readings for friends and, over the last year and a half, strangers. Sometimes for pay or trade. I’ve taken multiple online courses and am studying books constantly. As part of my growth as a reader, I will now be sharing tarot videos at least once a week until my deck is complete. While the book is almost finished, the deck is still years away and will be released later.
Feel free to join me on this journey as I post regularly again (a note about the long pause is at the bottom of this post). Sharing these videos here as well is an experiment, as I’ve mostly kept this site active as an archives for researchers and for people who enjoy my books and art.
Enjoy the tarot readings. I’m excited to share them and hope you will find them entertaining if nothing else. Without further ado, here’s my most recent video from Tofino, British Columbia.
*If you’ve read this far, you’ve likely been with me for a while. I’d like to apologize for not sharing more content from the Haunting of British Columbia as I’ve been acquiring it. Unfortunately, almost every post here and on X (when it was Twitter) was stolen by a handful of bloggers, podcasters, and authors. The way I see it, if I spend money and time to travel for long stretches, conduct countless hours of interviews with people I had to track down, or put my body, my car, and my relationships through hell in order to visit remote locations, then other writers should have to do the same. That, or they should state openly that my research was their source. I registered The Haunting of British Columbia as a legal business name to protect myself against someone who planned to use it.
There is now also artificial intelligence. Anthropic took the entire already-pirated version of the Haunting of Vancouver Island without consent to teach “language learning” to their A.I. model (being Canadian, I did not get a payout). Online article generators scraped my posts as well. I need to keep the stories from my upcoming book–as cool as they are–offline for now.
