The Good Haunting in a Sad Circumstance Started My Antique Preoccupation - A Lifetime of Meeting The Most Endearing of Spirits

 

Photo by Suzanne Currie

     It was a gradual escalation of courage over several years. The young kid kind of hubris that inspires reckless behavior and its related calamities. We were good chums but we were bad news in the neighborhood, and we both had a penchant for turning a calm situation into a serious event requiring a significant intervention by inadvertent witnesses. On this first foray up the hill from the ravine where we played most days in our strained childhoods, we waited for our opportunity to return to civilization just up the hillside. We were pretty sure it was a setting that was relatively adult-free this particular summer afternoon. Ray Green and I had to make our way up the substantial overgrown path on hillside, from the wonderful old jumble of gnarled old hardwoods and strangling vines, on the upper side of the ravine, on the Torrance Avenue side, where Ramble Creek babbled on its snaking sunlit way to Lake Ontario.

     There was a once elegant estate on the well treed hillside, and at one time we supposed the estate stretched well into this hollow of landscape, as evidenced by the still standing latticed shelter at the halfway point up the hill. It had benches built into the hollow of the tunnel like structure, and we had often arrived at this point just to sit and watch the amazing number of birds that flitted about in the overhanging hardwood boughs. It was a most beautiful and tranquil place where you could still hear the trickle of the tiny cataracts of the creek below, blending with the most haunting rush of warm air through the canopy of leaves and the lattice work of the shelter.

     On this occasion, Ray and I managed to climb the full pathway to the still neatly manicured lawns mottled with late afternoon sunlight and soothing shade in pockets down the declining landscape toward treed border. We had not seen a soul at this property for months that year, although we knew someone was tending the modest gardens and mowing the extensive lawn. It had been used, I believe, as a sort of boarding house for seniors prior to this, but I stand to be corrected. I have looked for old photographs of what the house had looked like in its heyday, but I've never found a single image to validate what Ray and I would eventually investigate by a sort of open-door entry that met us one day a few months after this particular visit.

     Sensing that there was nobody residing at the property at that moment, which could have changed by dinner time, we took the opportunity to snoop around the grand house, and looked through the windows, as the curtains were pulled open. There was furniture inside and books on shelves, but it did appear as if the house was void of residents. The door was securely locked, because we tried it and a second door around the back, but we were not successful in gaining entry. As we did rather believe in ghosts, mostly in the form of "Casper-like," we peaked our curiosity many times, looking through the glass, and playing up our suspicions curious vapors were misting through the large parlor and in the hallway adjacent. We were maybe seven years of age so our knowledge of the paranormal was pretty weak, and the inventory of ghosts we had encountered to that point in life, is what cartoons and Walt Disney may have offered us as television entertainment. It didn't stop us from sharing with our mates that we had come in contact with a number of ghosts who scared us right of the property. In retrospect, I believe it was the loud voice of a neighbor property owner, who did more to scare us away than the influence of made-up ghosts.

     It was quite some time later, the autumn season I believe, because the lawns were covered over in fallen leaves of the former season, when I found myself with time on my hand, coming up the Torrance hillside on the way home from Lakeshore Public School. I saw that the front door was hanging open and so were many of the windows in the front. There were a few chairs out on the verandah that hadn't been there before, and evidence in the driveway that some large vehicles had been there sometime that day. Well, an open door for an insatiably curious kid like me was too much to thwart with sensibility. Ray wasn't with me, but I thought that I could get a preview of what opportunities were unfolding, so that I could drag him down the hill later that evening. I felt my heart beating heavy in my chest, but there was no way I was going to miss taking a step inside this alleged haunted house, as a sort of "I did it before you," opportunity. We were very competitive with each other throughout our youth.

     I made it up the few stairs to the verandah and then onto the front door, that was fully open, as if by intent to welcome the neighborhood folk to visit. It was obvious something dire was happening to this neat old house and it didn't look like the plan was to restore it to a former elegance. The first sensory welcome, was the wafting scent of old varnished wood, and a mustiness of an environs that had been shut-up for long and long. There was still a lot of furniture in the downstairs main room, a parlor and a larger living room, or so I seem to recall after all these years, and the light coming through the windows gave the dust swirling about a distinction of history I clearly had misrepresented earlier as ghosts on their travels.

     The high ceilings made the rooms seem cavernous, enhanced of course, by the fact there was not a single picture or ornamentation hung on the walls, the curtains had been removed on some of the larger windows, and the remaining furniture was low and void of tall cupboards except those that had been built in, and difficult to remove in one piece, as if they had been free-standing flat-to-the-walls.There was a tell tale echo of my footfall, even with my running boot hitting the still shimmering bare hardwood floor. There were the unsettling creaks and groans of an old house adjusting to the infusion of outside atmosphere, that autumn day, as the woodwork adjusted I suppose to the increased humidity, and the subtle autumn breezes sweeping up from the lake. I stopped many times during that exploratory visit, thinking someone was coming down the stairs or coming along behind me through the still open front door. There was a haunting feeling that hung over me from the time I stepped up onto that front porch, that never left me during the half hour I wandered on the first floor, room to room, front of the house to the back. I didn't touch anything or pocket a single artifact, although I wanted to jam my pockets full. I knew that my mother Merle would give me a lot of grief if I came home with pockets jammed with broken bits of china and old glass, or a myriad other things that begged to be scooped up as resident treasure. I had long believed I had been a pirate in a past life, because of my love for adventure and treasure seeking. I even had a half dozen souvenir treasure maps in my bedroom acquired from various cereal and junk food companies as purchase incentives. So I was familiar with the pirate code. On this mission I kept the peace so as not to get into any trouble. But my mother later heard from neighbors that little Teddy had been where he shouldn't have been, and that landed me into trouble I'd hoped to have avoided. Such was the legacy of the young antique hunter out on the hustings.

     I was coming home from school one afternoon, kicking a can I'd come upon, when I witnessed a most horrible sight up on the shaded hillside of the old estate. I was the witness to the end of that elegant relic of our town's history, as the claw of a machine of destruction, pulled the final wall of the structure down into the massive pile of brick, wood and glass on the front lawn in a most awe inspiring crash into its own reality of oblivion. The soul of this former family residence had been exposed and released into the cold autumn air, and all the precious memories of which I could only imagine as a wide-eyed disappointed kid, were gone forever. The ghosts who may have lived there contently were cast out as if they were vagrants lodging where they weren't welcome. They had always been welcomed and nurtured in fond memory by the living, who once occupied the cavernous rooms of what must have been a wealthy estate. The old house was being torn down I was told, to allow for the building of a twelve floor apartment building, quite out of keeping with the charming nostalgia of the neighborhood of Torrance and Harris Crescent where I lived in the adjacent Nagy Apartments. I felt heartsick to see this destruction, and had so desired a chance to revisit the house with my mate Ray to check out a most friendly haunt with the most accommodating spirit residents as hosts.

     I have visited hundreds of abandoned houses and homesteads particularly in the Muskoka region, where as an historian, I researched the life and times of the first wave of homesteaders lured to the district by the offer of free land grants in return for transforming the landscape into productive farms. It was this exposure over many years that more than any other influence, pushed me into a more aggressive approach to preserving antiquity beyond just writing about it for local publications. I became enthralled with the hard quantities and qualities of history, mostly Canadian in the form of what is called "Canadiana," and after attending a few introductory auction sales to settle estates, I found myself smitten by the fact I could acquire and preserve in part, what I had seen destroyed when that lovely and pleasantly haunted Burlington home was destroyed that autumn day. The sadness I felt at this loss of architecture and family story, rebounded in full bloom for me, when I found great satisfaction attending these exciting sales, and winning bids on what I felt were important heirloom antiquities that might otherwise have been purchased by less capable stewards; and ruined by rough handling and disrespect for the place they may have had as witness pieces. I became fascinated by this reality, that these old chairs, desks, harvest tables, side boards and flat-to-the-wall cupboards had been witnesses to much of the legacy of the residing families; at special occasions of the year, such as Christmas and New Years celebrations. I felt that by preserving these larger and more substantial pieces of furniture, for example, that I was saving important ingrained heritage, and it's exactly the same emotion I have today when exposed to the potential of purchasing an antique piece that has provenance neatly attached. It's why I became an antique collector and dealer, and yes, it did begin as an outreach from the natural heritage of the Ramble Creek Ravine, and the unfortunate exposure, as a keen child witness, to the destruction of something I believed was a wonderful piece of human-made art, that took the role of residence for many contented souls over the century.

     Idealistic? Overly nostalgic? Obsessed with the spirit of things? I was indeed. And that is what these blogs will highlight from this point. Hope you like adventure and old stuff.