Why I Believe in Ghosts: History of a Haunting

This may come to you as a surprise, but for the most part I consider myself agnostic. For those unfamiliar with the term, an agnostic believes that “the truth” is unknown or unknowable. This truth is usually in regards to religious or metaphysical reality, but the term can also be used in relation to other unexplained phenomena as well. Some might say that I’m stretching the term agnostic a bit here – and they might be right – but honestly I don’t care. The term makes it easier for me to express my leanings toward skepticism.

For example, as an Agnostic I may one day believe that there are humanoids from outer space visiting us in pimped out disco-like intergalactic flying saucers, or that large hairy monster-men are roaming the mountain ranges in search of non believing ATV-mounted outdoor enthusiasts, or even that there are creatures existing within the depths of our oceans, rivers and lakes just waiting to pull some unseasoned fishermen into their murky depths. Maybe I’ll be able to believe in all of these things one day. Maybe, but its not very likely.

These experiences may be completely legitimate, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not likely to believe in them unless I see them physically with my own eyes. Even then, I would likely be contemplating the more logical explanations. I would consider the possibilities of a hallucination, misinterpretation of data received through the senses, or even be considering devious trickery for that matter! If this particular “sighting” was profound enough, I would begin by reading books written by skeptics as I struggled to understand these mysteries from a more rational and down-to-earth viewpoint.

I have a hard time believing in almost anything extraordinary and sometimes even ordinary. Occasionally, I even question the most commonly accepted of truths. I question almost everything that most people would accept blindly. Close encounters with large businesses, the media, and a healthy dose of historic knowledge has reinforced my skepticism. I often wonder what a person can even accept as the truth anymore?

Ultimately, however, I’m forced to accept “facts” to a certain degree simply because they’re the beliefs that are also accepted by almost everyone else, but there’s a core of skepticism that lives within me. If I can’t measure something or touch it, I’m not necessarily convinced that it exists, has occurred, or is even real at all. In the end, however, I don’t usually care either way if its real or not. A person can get lost in conspiracy theories and become justifiably paranoid. A healthy dose of skepticism is never a bad thing as long as it doesn’t rule my life. I guess I’m just a skeptic, that’s all, most especially when it comes to those realms many call, the supernatural. It might be hard for an outsider looking in, then, to understand why I believe in ghosts.

 

My mother and sisters share my belief, that there’s at least one spirit attached to our family. Electrical appliances, lights, and the occasional faucet have been known to turn on or off. Objects have even disappeared and reappeared in separate places. Sometimes, I used to hear my name being spoken. Other times, I would feel a seperate presence in the room I was supposed to be alone in. This feeling seems familiar to me now, and I can only imagine that at one time it had just wanted to be noticed.

My mom, sisters, and I, can now talk about these experiences with one another openly as these seem to be attached to all of us despite location. What I mean by this statement is that these occurrences have taken place in many of the apartments I have lived in, my sister’s apartment, sisters’ houses, my mom’s house, three different childhood homes and many other residencies. It has never seemed to be attached to one place, like our early childhood home, for example.

Right about now you’re probably questioning how much of a skeptic I really am. Perhaps I need to explain something. I simply know that there is something. We assume it’s a ghost, because this now seems like the most logical of explanations. I use the term ghost loosely, however, because truth be told, I’m not so sure that what we consider to be a ghost is even necessarily the spirit of a deceased. The terms apparition, spirit, or ghost will be used here, simply because I don’t know for sure what this thing is. In fact, I’m not even 100% certain that there’s only one of these so-called spirits attached to us. There could easily be more. I really have gotten ahead of myself, however.

I was very young when I saw my first apparition. I had descended into the basement of our Prince Albert, Saskatchewan home to retrieve a toy. I believe I was 4 or 5. This seventies home was still relatively new then.

At the time, I didn’t understand why the room was foggy. I had a very strange feeling, yet I wasn’t afraid… at least at first.  I tried to look at that fog, which seemed to be rolling, in an attempt to make sense of what it was I was really gazing upon. The foggy image started to gather together and began to form into a pillar-type shape in the corner of the room. I became frozen as I began to experience fear. I had this feeling that if I stayed any longer, in that spot, that I would eventually see a ghostly being. I had seen enough, however. I did not want to see a dead person materializing in front of me. I fled.

I ran to my childhood friend who was playing upstairs and I told him what I had seen. He didn’t believe me, so I cautiously brought him into the basement. I was much more willing to be afraid in his eyes than to be seen as a fool or liar. Of course, there was nothing there. He did not believe me. At the time, my parents didn’t believe me either. They had not been inside at the time. The thing that still stands out in my mind was that this unexplained cloud was greenish in colour. The apparition, if you can call it that, had appeared to me as a green cloud.

If you’re curious to know, I had seen this “entity” in the basement corner closest to the power meter in the Polaroid picture above. Sometimes, when staring at this picture, I believe that I can see images that are not there. In the windows or as part of the discoloured smear at the bottom. I’m willing to believe, however, that these are figments of my imagination. They probably are.

Anyways, over the years I would shift back and forth between skeptical and gullible as other smaller unexplained things occurred. Eventually, I embraced the idea that something was around me based entirely upon these strange occurrences. I discounted that I had once seen an apparition, though. I thought that it must have been a figment of my imagination.

Interestingly enough, I later found out that other people in the neighborhood had seen things that they couldn’t explain, also making them believers. One neighbour was my mom’s brother, my uncle, and there were some strange stories coming from his place as well. An unverifiable rumor emerged. Apparently, the land had once been a Cree burial ground. This of course seems to be a recurring belief in North American urban areas where unexplained happenings occur, but truth be told, I’m not so sure that the Cree people even had cemeteries as we like to imagine them today.

Regardless, I grew up believing that something unexplained was around me. As a kid that thing was clearly defined as a ghost. I believed then that it was a dead person.

As teenagers, my buddies and I would often go to a place called the St. Louis Ghost light. This is a reputably haunted site that thousands of people have had experiences at. It became a regular hang out for us. It’s a well-documented site having even appeared on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries. I own two books Haunted Canada and Ghost Stories of Saskatchewan, which speak of this “haunted” location[i].

We spent a lot of time there. In fact, I can comfortably say that I have seen this light hundreds of times. We eventually decided that we needed to find an explanation so we tested everything. Despite what others may say, the Saint Louis Ghost Light has never properly been explained away. A similar image can apparently be recreated for a small window of time but most say it does not look the same (the attached link to the video would then be of a car very far in the distance, refracting light and driving along a road).

I have seen the Saint Louis Ghost Light during the day, looking the opposite direction (also during the day – this destroys the theory further), seen unexplained shadow figures and I have even seen other unknown lights off of the old train tracks. We shot guns at it[ii] (as embarrassing as this is to admit now) and had even tried to catch up with it on foot or in vehicles (there was no roadblock back then). The closest we could get, appeared to be less than twenty feet away from the very bright light (we were definitely messed up kids).

I’ve never stopped going there. Sometimes, when I’m back in Saskatchewan visiting, I go there still. What I’ve never gotten over, though, is the bad feeling that seems to accompany this light whenever it is present. It did not seem like the other apparition that I’d seen in the basement. Instead, this one came with a certain accompanying feeling (an external angry buzzing) that I would always become skeptical of over time. It was this feeling that became the main reason that I would feel the need to return to this site over and over again throughout the years. It was a strange thing to wrap my mind around, but it was always there when I returned.

These experiences ended up having a very positive influence on me, however. I would, over time, become more and more spiritual. I followed a path that was almost entirely shaped by these early experiences. I became open towards somehow discovering what these encounters really were. Many more occurrences took place over the years that seemed to solidify my general belief in spirits. These were many and I’m sure that I will share some of them along the way.

The Saint Louis Ghost Light seemed evil. It was mostly a repetitive or residual haunting, but it could interact with a person as well. Very often cars that had been fine would stop working and we would not be able to start them again (dead batteries). Radios would go funky. The horn or lights would go on or off. Overall, the Saint Louis Ghost Light would become a huge reason why I believe in ghosts.

These other experiences helped me to trust that the green cloud – which had begun to return – felt good. I wonder now if it had returned because I was no longer afraid of it? As strange as this sounds, it sort of became mundane. It lost its novelty. Eventually, I stopped believing it was even real.

You see, somewhere along the way I had decided that these visual experiences were some sort of internally created manifestation. I would wake up and see it, or I would be in a very calm near meditative state before it showed up. This cloud was nothing more than a hallucination that would manifest itself as I was falling asleep. It didn’t matter if I believed in spirits or not, however, because the energy attached to it seemed positive and I felt good when it was around. It could not, or would not, harm me.

I eventually concluded that my mind – like it had so many years before as a kid in the basement – was continuously creating a symbol (aka a ghost) which my logical mind needed to interpret. I enjoyed waking up to that green cloud floating in my room. It was a cool sort of hallucination that I would watch until it faded away. It hardly mattered how often I saw it, though. I knew it was a trick of my mind. I had laid the foundation for my spirituality, grown older and maybe wiser, discounted the original experiences, and yet continued to go through the movements of a believer. I would light candles and incense for “the spirits” and would even speak with them (not that they would ever answer back in the way one would think). I was merely walking upon a symbolic and metaphoric path, that’s all. It worked for me, but I knew that none of what I was seeing was real. In retrospect, this was the period in which I had lost my faith.

One night, someone else saw it as well. I was staring at this thing in my typical state of apathetic enjoyment. She asked me – in fear – why I couldn’t see “that green cloud” which was hovering nearby. I really could, though. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I had not revealed these visions to her nor could she have known the colour of the manifestation most of all. We were not drinking and we did not do drugs. In one moment I was forced to reevaluate everything that I had come to comfortably believe.

I asked my roommate at the time what he thought. I asked him specifically, because he was a true agnostic and not some sort of noncommittal like me. He suggested that we had merely had a shared hallucination. It was a solid alternative explanation, but I thought it seemed even more of a stretch than the belief that something, whatever that something was, had been seen.

The incident seemed to validate something inside of me. It was a sort of belief that I had been fighting off and on for so many years. I decided, that this cloud had to be a ghost. I had simply had that same experience that people have been describing since the very beginning of time. I had seen a ghost! More than once! Now what exactly that ghost really was would become a whole other area of interest and speculation.

It would show itself a lot less often after that. The ghost seemed content that I now believed it was real.

Since that period of my life, which was much more than a decade ago, there have been other sightings of this green cloudy mist. Most recently, Elle saw it when she was alone in my place. I had never told her of its colour either. My skeptical mind had decided to hold back this information. I felt like a detective trying to catch a serial killer by holding back that one validating clue that no one else would have ever known about: the colour. Unfortunately, I have not seen that green cloud myself for a very long time, but it is ultimately the reason why I believe in ghosts.

It has been my experience that apparitions, whatever they are, seem to simply want to be acknowledged by certain individuals. They (?) have often ceased their activities when I have said out loud, “I know that you are here.”

I have many stories of these unexplained events that have occurred within my living spaces, too many to dismiss actually. Even fifteen years ago I was struggling to reason these things away. A TV turning itself on or off might be one thing to try to explain away, a light switch physically being moved to an off position when no one is near it is something else altogether. Try explaining an item which goes missing from a place you put it in only to have it reappear in the exact same place at a later point. In this case I lived alone. No one else was there. I left the room and came back and it had returned. There was nothing else on that bench. Not even a piece of paper. I had stared dumbly at it each time I had passed by knowing that my keys had been there. It then returned back to this spot only after I had declared loudly, “I know that you are here! I need my keys back!”

These are experiences that I cannot explain and reasons why I believe in ghosts to this day. We call it a ghost. Maybe it’s something else entirely, something that I cannot even begin to understand. Whatever it is, it seems to have intelligence. As strange as it sounds, logically, the most plausible explanation to me is that it’s the spirit of someone deceased. It feels like family.

That is the most interesting part of all. It feels like family to all of us. I have often wondered if it is attached to some old item that we had carried off of that farm[iii], or perhaps, it is merely the spirit of an ancestor, one of the many tragic deaths that has plagued our family’s past generation[iv]. That, however, is a story for another day.

Next week, I’ll share some personal experiences that took place in the old Bay building located on Granville Street in Vancouver.

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