The Oaken Snuggery Part 10

 

Photos by Suzanne Currie

THE OAKEN SNUGGERY - PART TEN

BY TED CURRIE

     In my early years in this history - antiquing thing, of which I have now spent most of my life, I spent a great deal of my free time, wandering the back roads of Muskoka, looking to find, and obviously explore, abandoned farmsteads. I did, if opportunity presented, poke around in the dumpsites each homestead possessed, some having as many as five, depending on how long the home and farm were occupied. But truly, the most interesting aspect of visiting these over-grown former homesteads, most having had their buildings destroyed by neglect and the imposition of the rolling year, especially the winter snow load that most often broke the backs of these log cabins and simple frame farmhouses. I have had many strange moments alone, or so I thought when I entered the half-fallen buildings, when all of a sudden, I would get a clear message that someone else was in the same place, just not in the physical sense. There were times when I could have sworn I heard someone else breathing close to me, or whispering something or other, yet I wasn’t able to find the source. I remember on one beautiful spring day, on a property just off Golden Beach Road, settling down to eat my lunch, on a slight ridge of topography bordering what appeared  to have been, at one time, a significant pasture for cattle or sheep to graze. Sitting on a fallen birch, I could see the remnants of the old log house through the canopy of overgrown pine and cedars, the roof line showing a substantial degree of collapse, with the brick chimney crumbled down tot he roof line, broken pieces and dust coloring the old shingles. The sun was bright, and set in a magnificently clear blue sky, and the warmth on my shoulders was soothing. I had been digging bottles all morning at a dumpsite behind the homestead, and I was feeling pretty good about the blue sealer jars and cobalt blue flasks I had found, with two rare torpedo soda bottles, which might sell, when cleaned up, for a hundred dollars each.

     All the while I had been sitting there, looking out over this emerging spring paradise, with its colorful pioneer lilacs, and early wildflowers, I would suddenly turn after hearing footsteps coming from behind; or when I thought I heard children laughing or someone talking but, upon turning, finding no one present. I stood up, brushed the crumbs of my sandwich off my trousers, took a final swig from my canteen, and turned to tuck my lunch-ware back into my pack. I took one last look out upon the pasture, before departing, and offering a silent farewell to what I knew was a very haunted place, I headed back to my car parked just up the road toward Bangor Lodge. I had only taken a dozen steps, before I felt a sensation in my left hand, outstretched at my side. My right hand held the strap of the backpack, while the other was strung over my shoulder. I thought my hand might just have fallen asleep, as they say, while I was sitting on the log having my lunch. I tried moving my fingers and shaking my hand, but to no avail. It was as if something was squeezing my fingers tight, as the tips, as one might feel when a child’s hand tries to grasp an adult who is leading the way. It was an eerie experience, because it didn’t pass quickly, and I felt it get tighter on my fingers, and it additionally felt as if I was pulling something, or in this case, someone along the pathway back to the roadway. I stopped in my tracks, and tried to life my arm, but the weight upon it was much to great, and I began to think I might have suffered a stroke, yet there was full feeling in my limb. I stood there for a few moments trying to regain strength and independence in my hand, and to free my arm from whatever was weighing it down to my side. It was then that I felt several tight squeezes, before the release, where once again my arm was unencumbered, and my fingers free from the squeezing sensation. It certainly seemed as if the spirit of a wee person, a child from antiquity, had been holding my hand, seemingly to stop me from leaving the property. I felt a sudden wave of melancholy, and for a matter of seconds, I spotted several strange misty shapes blowing through the pasture, as if small whips of wind-borne smoke from a fire. There was no fire. There was no wind. Might it have been the ghostly images of several children who once played in this same pastureland, on days just like this, when this farmstead was a going concern. It was as if they had invited me into their own private history, to see what their lives here had been like a century or more before. I never forgot this strange moment when I may have met, and connected with a past life, when all I had been looking for that day, were a few old bottles from the farm dumpsites. Random meetings of this nature represent a majority of ghost sightings and interactions however, and we are only being human to experience a temporary panic and fear, before we realize that these spirit-wanderers mean us no harm.

     Before breakfast, with it being such a brilliantly illuminated morning, after the wild weather of the night before, I decided to take a walk around the property to investigate a few more realities of the substantial acreage, once part of a free land grant in the late 1860’s to an emigrant family.  There was something stranger than the haunting about this property and I’ve made a few calls to my wife Suzanne, at home, who is a Cracker Jack researcher, specializing in local history and family history and not just our own. The first situation was to prove or disprove the existence of the homestead cemetery, which the owners, the Bosevelts, claim, is occupied by up to five former residents of the property who were never identified on a memorial tablet or individual stones. It’s likely there were wooden crosses or plain markers on the graves, that simply rotted away over the years and were never replaced.

      Suzanne is going to do a property search, beginning with the 1878 Guidebook and Atlas, that contained township maps showing property ownership up to and including that time period. Working on the names of the homesteaders listed on the map will help her then check it out using an ancestry service, that has proven itself time and again, to be the dividing line between what was fact, and what became, over the centuries, not much more than folk history and plain old hearsay. But we needed to know who was occupying those graves and both how and when they passed away. Many who perished in the early years of pioneering in Muskoka, were indeed buried without paperwork, so to speak, and without registration, their remains will continue to surprise home builders pushing development further into the hinterland where they rural homesteads existed.

     The morning was cool but showing great spring-time promise. The heavy rain during the later part of the storm has etched away some of the packed dirt pathways up the hillside, rising about the pond, looking quite murky and muddy at present, and there are still visible trickles of water coming down the slope to drain into the pond. Thus explaining its brown hue on this bright sunlit morning. I remain fascinated about this story about the pioneer cemetery, and would very much like to have this information available as soon as possible, because I have a hunch that whoever is occupying those graves, beneath the lilacs, has contributed to the haunting of my client’s Bed and Breakfast, here in the ghost hamlet of Rose Hill. Yet, this is the easy way out for a researcher, to blame it all on the obvious deceased, because it seems the convenient fit, to have earthbound spirits wandering about the countryside they knew in life, and visiting the charming Oaken Snuggery to unleash a little bedlam on unsuspecting guests. I just wasn’t convinced however, that it was going to be as easy to attribute, as the Bosevelts have already committed, in their minds, simplifying it all because of cemeteries always being haunted. Right? They told me about a friend of theirs who had been walking with a friend on the outer edge of a municipal cemetery, late one evening, when the two of them noticed up ahead, a woman in a white Victorian dress, attempting to step over a portion of wire fence, that had fallen due to a broken post. The woman was struggling to free the hem of her dress from the wire, and the two passersby called to her, asking if they could be of some assistance in freeing her from the entanglement. She vanished almost instantly, although they both agreed that before she vanished, she had taken a look back to see who was calling her. This was their evidence that a cemetery was a gathering place for ghosts, and to be honest, I had to agree that if any place in a community could be legitimately called “haunted” it would be a church or public cemetery. A graveyard! I think it’s generally accepted by the citizenry, that if one goes on a late night walk in that particular area, it shouldn’t be any surprise should such a mysterious man or woman, or child, show up in a vaporous form, and travel about the markers, looking for a way out. I’m pretty sure that if I was a resident of one of these graveyards, I’d be quite eager as a wayward spirit, to get out and attend my more pleasant haunts, known during my mortal travels about town.

     When I arrived back at The Oaken Snuggery, breakfast was just about to be served, and as the Bosevelts were outstanding culinary artists, there was no way I was going to be tardy for this special event of the day. Several new guests had arrived later last evening, and I hadn’t yet met them, but that was about to be rectified. After a few pleasantries, and discussions about the storm the night before, we sat down to a most enjoyable breakfast with all the country trimmings, I might add, and I was starting to feel as a freeloader, because I was coming up with very little information about the resident hauntings that had been plaguing the “Snuggery” pretty much since it opened for business. It’s not as if I didn’t have some useful material to work with, but to date, after a week, very little serious evidence, that would allow me to write the story that would make sense of the spirited intrusions, whether a practical joker, an adult, or more, or a mischievous child, or more. I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t have this wrapped up inside a month, and, just for the record, I have refused on three occasions, Mrs. Bosevelt’s idea of introducing a Ouiji Board, between her, Mr. Bosevelt, and me. There is the potential with such boards of inviting undesirable spirits into the mix, with those who are specially invited. I don’t think we need to wrestle with any more ghostly beings at this point, to make things more difficult instead of lessened, which after all, is what the Bosevelts would like, in order to continue running their Bed and Breakfast business as a profitable enterprise. Some patrons have already had negative reactions to some of the alleged ghost sightings, and mischief, leading to their early departure from the inn.

     After breakfast, Mrs. Bosevelt asked if I could join her in a small meeting room just off the great hall, as they like to call it, where there is a guest lounge that looks out over their version of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. She said that one of the incoming guests last evening, had found a strange item in the rain water gathered along the stone walkway at the front of the farm house. She had wrapped it in a small portion of tissue paper, and when she unfolded the corners, I was stunned to see what was resting in the palm of her hand. There were two badly eroded tiny silver crosses, without their chains, that were fused together likely by the fact they had been compacted together for many years. The guest claimed that she could see the sparkled in the runoff water, probably cast down by the yard lamp positioned a few feet away. When I took the two crosses, as one, from her outstretched hand, it didn’t take long to ascertain that they were fused together by corrosion, or a thick bond of earth acting as a weld. What was obvious however, was that these crosses were held together because they had been forged into this strange union, metal on metal, for whatever reason or misadventure, by a substantial heat source. Possibly a fire. The fact that it all of a sudden turned up due to a heavy rain, where many torrential rains and spring run-off have occurred before, does seem a tad odd, but then there may also be a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why it exists, and who may have dropped it on the way in or out of this dwelling place. Recently, or in the chronicle of days of this Muskoka homestead. I asked Mrs. Bosevelt if she minded me keeping the curiously linked crosses in my room for the time being, as I wanted to find out if the alleged ghosts of this abode, might wish to re-connect with the crosses, if they had a link to them in their mortal existences. Or, did they have a hand in revealing this odd icon, making sure it would be found by a passerby sooner than later.

     I needed to talk to Suzanne about what her research had turned up, if anything, because the oddities were starting to add up, and the discrepancies were making me suspicious about the collision of facts with fiction, reality with folk lore. There was much to learn here beyond the occasional spirited intrusion pretty much commonplace to old residences like the Oaken Snuggery.

     I can remember the first old abandoned house I entered, without permission, experiencing the profound sense of sadness and loneliness, as if the resident spirits were trying to impress upon voyeurs like me, how tragic it was that the building was to be demolished. It was in Burlington, Ontario, back in the very early 1960’s, and the huge old Victorian era house was situated on the chestnut tree lined hillside of Torrance Avenue, a block from the lakeshore. I was with three mates that afternoon, and we were able to pass through a tiny slit between the door and the frame, giving us access to the huge main room of the house, that sill had quite a bit of furniture left inside, including dinner ware still on a dining room table. Of course it was spooky. That’s why we were there, or at least part of the reason. I had walked by the old house daily since I began school and Lakeshore Public three blocks away. I was fascinated by it, and the way it was set so respectfully into the hardwoods on the hillside, above the ravine where I used to play almost every day of the week. I knew from what my parents had been talking about at the dinner table, that the estate was being demolished and the property bulldozed to facilitate the construction of a twelve story apartment building. I would have preferred keeping  the house, and abandoning the apartment project, but, gosh, I didn’t know anything about development economics.

     On the day we snuck into the old house, I confess that each one of us took some souvenirs, such as knives and forks off the dining room table, and a few knick knacks that were strewn about the hardwood floors, and left unceremoniously on the seats of chairs and in corners of the room, taken off larger built-in shelving units. But all the time I was in the house, which was probably about an hour, the place was speaking to me but not in a conversational way. I was learning about its history by sensory perception, and I knew full well, the former residence was still occupied by something; but seeing as I had little knowledge of what constituted a “haunting”, I just assumed the imagination my mother said was “over active,” was just doing it’s thing. In retrospect, from all these years later, I’m reasonably confident it was my first paranormal, psychic experience, and those I was sensing, were obviously ones who had resided there once, and had crossed over years earlier. I remember so vividly the day I came home from school, climbing up the Torrance hillside, only to find the house a pile of bricks and wood, with a tractor hovering over the death scene. I did relate it to a “tragic” circumstance, because the house, in my opinion, as young and inexperienced as it was, felt the residence had still been occupied by entities. I felt terribly sorry for them, to thusly be homeless. Where would ghosts go when their haunt is destroyed? Might they have stayed around to then haunt the apartment building that replaced the house? I will never know. What do you think?