Paranormal Feature

April 13, 2011

The paranormal activity occurs nightly.  Showers turning on and off, doors closing, footsteps in the halls and banisters shaking… There are seven bedrooms in the house, but the entire family sleeps in one room for safety.  The night is never silent and these occurrences are becoming mundane.

This isn’t Transylvania; this isn’t an American TV show or a ghost story from a remote town.  In fact, it’s closer to home than one might think. 

Shawn Chiasson, now living in Oshawa bought his house because it is haunted.  The Farewell house was one of the first houses built in the city.  Florence Carswell, a two-year-old girl and her father, Edward, are still assumed to be responsible for the haunting. The team from the TV show Rescue Mediums have gone into the house to investigate, and allege that Edward Carswell is the gate keeper of the spirit portal located in the basement.

In spirit of sharing his experiences, Chiasson started a blog on Facebook describing significant events.  He posted about S.C.O.P.E (South Central Ontario Paranormal Enthusiasts) visiting his house.  They conducted an investigation and installed cameras, and actually captured a photograph of a reflection of a little girl seen in the mirror. 

CHAPS (Canadian Haunting and Paranormal Society) recorded the voice of the little girl talking, as well as a man asking to be left alone.  Neither of these voices belong to anyone in the house.

“It still sends shivers down my spine,” says Chiasson, “it’s freaky but exciting at the same time.  I don’t want to get rid of the ghosts.  It just proves that there is a spirit world.  There’s more than just the living.” 

While some people are living it, many people are left to wonder how to explain the unexplainable.

 “You might ask, is this stuff true?  Can this be proven?  Ultimately the answer is no.  It may be a disappointing answer, but there is no scientific way to prove the paranormal,” says Dr. Greg Kelley, Folklorist.  He has dedicated his life to searching and collecting information on anything and everything out of the ordinary.

“Paranormal means other than normal.  Humans have a fascination with finding what is outside the normal realm and something that violates the normal events of our lives, something out of the ordinary, and we’re just fascinated with that.”

                                                                             

I never thought of Toronto – and even Canada for that matter to be a place of ghosts.  It always seemed like an American phenomenon, or one so out of reach that it can’t really be explained because there’s no chance of encountering it. 

Then I started looking around.  A Google search produced pages of results: ghost tours, videos, stories, etc.  The top hit was The Toronto Ghost society website which has dedicated endless pages online to stories of paranormal activity right in the city.  While even that was tough to handle, my heart skipped a beat when I saw my area was on the list too. 

According to the TGS, the Frog and Firkin at Yonge and Sheppard, a pub I’ve gone to several times, has a problem keeping cleaning staff for more than two weeks at a time because of frequent ghostly encounters.  Close to ten people have posted stories on the Toronto Ghosts website describing their experiences.  Right away, I looked at the place differently. Most of the paranormal activity happened in the bathroom, where people have gotten the feeling of being intently watched, or heard the toilet flush twice without anyone touching it.  One story described a woman seeing a man walking towards the women’s bathroom a little ahead of her.  She expected him to turn around and bump into her, but he never did.  By the time the woman got to the bathroom, the man was nowhere to be found, but she felt a presence the entire time.

I was scared to go back to the pub myself, but for the sake of research, and not without two friends, I did.

Beyond the front door there are two entrances: one to the pub, and one leading down to the bathroom.  With more reserve than I actually had, I went downstairs.  The brick walls were painted white, and the whole area was eerily quiet.  The bathrooms were tucked away in a corner and the rest of the basement was dim, empty space.  We walked softly, holding our breaths the entire time.  We checked the stalls, looked around, and listened to anything out of the ordinary.  We didn’t feel a presence, didn’t see or hear anything, but my heart was pounding the whole time.  I couldn’t wait to get out of there – I really didn’t want to push my luck.  The basement was creepy enough that even thinking about a ghost would be enough to make someone nervous. 

Upon getting a table upstairs, I asked a waitress if she knows anything about the haunting.  She laughed knowingly, “Let me level with you,” she said, “I’ve been here for three years, I’ve been alone here countless times, and I’ve never heard or seen anything actually happen.  Neither has anyone else who works here.”

Aleisha Learoyd, a 20-year-old student, said she felt the presence of ghosts in both of the last two houses she’s lived in.  She currently lives in Thornhill and frequently experiences brushes with the paranormal. 

“I was sitting in my living room watching TV and had all the windows closed,” she recalls.  “I was about an hour into my movie when a candle sitting in a glass holder flew about a meter and a half across the room towards me. It was clear that it didn’t fall because nothing knocked it over and it traveled such a great distance over top of the table in front of me.”

She remembers a night when she heard her father scream in his room.  She says she ran over to see if everything was okay, and heard her dad say he saw a little boy standing by his bed. 

Once the initial shock wore off, Learoyd called the ghost Beth, and attributed all the odd things that happen around her house to Beth’s mischievous ways. 

            Kelley says personal experiences contribute greatly to how people experience and interpret the paranormal. “If someone has a disposition to believe in the supernatural, then they will interpret the world through those lenses,” he says. “That’s not right or wrong – if someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts sees something unnatural or unexplainable happen then they just try to explain it by other means.”

Torontonians everywhere could be encountering paranormal, whether it registers as suspicious or not.  The amount of literature surrounding the it is baffling, but what is most shocking is that ghosts are alleged to populate our very own Toronto.  A place that is safe, modern and lively feels like no place for the dead.  Canada itself, with its vast plains and rich culture is apparently hiding a layer only visible to those willing to look for it.  Every little region hides little dark secrets, which subconsciously we are dying to figure out.