The Oaken Snuggery Part 15

 

Photos by Suzanne Currie

THE OAKEN SNUGGERY - PART 15

BY TED CURRIE

     Suzanne was going through my ghost archives this afternoon, and reminded me, in a phone call earlier, that she had found the black and white photograph I had taken of “Animal” the cat, back when I lived in the former home and medical office of Dr. Peter McGibbon, of Bracebridge. It was my first and only photograph of a ghost, or at least part of one. It was back in 1981 when I was residing in an upstairs apartment in the McGibbon house, on upper Manitoba Street, opposite Memorial Park. It is gone now and has been replaced with a modern office building. I lived in the one bedroom apartment with Animal the cat, a stray that had been dumped off at the former Herald-Gazette office, on Dominion Street. And when I suggest it was dropped off, it was actually tossed out of a moving car, while a reporter and I stood out front of the office, thinking about heading over to the local press club for a pint of ale. It all changed when Animal arrived on the scene rather unceremoniously, but without injury thankfully. I decided to become a pet owner, and as I was without any other encumbrance than rent and monthly bills, it seemed reasonable that I could support a kitten.

     Animal, after it had been in the apartment for several months, developed a keen interest in the doorway between the open kitchen / living room, and the bathroom; and the doorway at the back where it connected with the attic on the way up, and the kitchen of the apartment on the first floor. When we arrived at the McGibbon house to set up an antique shop in 1977, I lived in the bottom apartment where we had our store, and we also were entitled to use the attic as the main renters of the property. I had a ghostly encounter coming down those same stairs one evening, when in a dark passage way, I literally walked through a white cloud of chilled, misty air, which I believe now was the spirit of a recently deceased individual who had once lived in the house many years previous. I found out three days later, that the fellow had crossed over at the same time as I encountered the mysterious vapor. I found this out when the family of the deceased showed up in my antique shop to see the old haunts where their uncle used to reside. They had just attended his funeral at the parlor next door to the house.

     Where Animal used to situate herself at about seven o’clock every evening, in the doorway, was about fifteen feet from where I had witnessed the stairway ghost that night. After several months of watching Animal head off to the doorway at 7 p.m. I arranged with a darkroom technician at The Herald-Gazette, of which I was editor, to set my camera with a motor-wind and a bulk loaded black and white film, with a pre-set flash unit mounted to the side, to take a number of images of the cat in the doorway, to see if anything else shows up on a negative. Of a large number of photos banged off with the motor-wind, there was only one that showed a distinct yet small cloud of vapor in a direct line from the cat’s turned head, to the corner of the doorway, at about the five foot level of the opening. The photo technician attempted to prove that the smudge of grey vapor was actually a camera lens flaw, but in examining all the other frames, there was simply no evidence of such an imperfection with the glass such that it would only show up on one negative. We studied that image for hours,  drawing lines from the cat’s head, and eye, to the vapor hovering above, and it was obvious Animal was attracted to the nightly visitation, a ghost possibly of a former resident of the house. The visitations continued every night, and the cat always attended the visiting entity. If it was a ghost, it certainly wasn’t threatening or in the least frightening. It was just a daily apartment inspection by the paranormal. I must have passed muster because it didn’t complain about my housekeeping.

     It had been three full days without so much as a spirited rap upon the door, without anyone there to enter. I had not heard a phantom footfall up the stairs, or heard children playing in a house without such intrusions, and there had not been the slightest scent of lilac, which seemed, for most of my stay here at the Oaken Snuggery, the harbinger of the wafting presence of two young ladies desperate for attention. Suzanne, my research assistant working from our home at Birch Hollow, in Gravenhurst, has not found anything factual to identify the bodies buried in the long-overgrown pioneer cemetery, on the ridge of topography above the hollow where the pond reflects silver and black at this time of the very early morning. This isn’t uncommon in regional history, because there was necessity to have a burial ground once settlement began, but it wasn’t for some time later that church and public cemeteries were established as part of community life and, yes, death. In the case, for example, of Diphtheria, it was often the case that half of a large family could be wiped out in one night of raging illness. There was with this, and influenza during outbreaks, where the bodies were buried late in the evening, or in the hours after midnight, to avoid public participation. As these bodies were highly contaminated, and others could be adversely affected even at funerals, undertakers from the closest villages, would send grave diggers with the funerary staff, to bury the body, or bodies, quickly, quietly, and often in graves dug on homestead properties when no other sites were available without prior arrangement. As well these cemeteries, mostly for family members, were not registered at the time, and this is one of the problems for those interested in ancestry research. There are hundreds of burial sites like the one at The Oaken Snuggery, where the names of the deceased are absent from memorial stones, which of course, were most often wood markers that long ago rotted away, and disappeared into the forest floor. As well, these deaths weren’t reported in the legal sense, as a registration of the deceased for municipal record, or noted in the closest census, in the 1860’s, when the first homesteaders arrived here, on this grant land situated north of Bracebridge, Ontario, in the then hamlet of Rose Hill.

     I have had my doubts that the cemetery was going to hold the clue as to the haunting developments at the Bosevelt family’s charming early 1900’s farmhouse, turned into an attractive, well appointed Bed and Breakfast operation still in its first year of active business. The spirit occupants of this house, who enjoy strolling about the property as well, are not quite as pleased about the early success of the business, and have been turning up at curious times, to confront Bed and Breakfast guests, and on occasion, letting the Bosevelts know, and intimately so, that they would like the house to return to its former use. As a family home I suppose.

     It was on a walk down the country road that connects the Bosevelt property to the rest of the world, when I again found the girls at play amongst the overgrown evergreens on the far side of the drainage ditch that keeps the lane from being washed away during the spring melt. I was wandering along the dirt road with nary a serious thought in my head, but a song in my heart, when I suddenly became aware that I had, without knowing it, walked into a shroud of blinding mist. I went from having the sun rays warming my face and hands, to feeling as if I had dropped from space into a cloud, but it had all happened on a bit of old country road, within earshot of the place I was temporarily residing. It was a truly strange moment or two, and all I could do at the time, was to stop walking, and try to understand what had just enveloped me. Was I having some eye problems all of a sudden? A stroke? A seizure while still standing apparently? It had a distinct musty odor to it, and it seemed similar in character and wafting content, to walking in a lowland being freed of its snow canopy, and watching the swirls of mist rising up from the ground, and blowing across the landscape. Only this mist had stopped over me, as if I was the wind-break, yet there was no wind at this moment. Not the slightest breeze. It was still and sunny, and here I was inside a grey cloud that smelled like earth. Wet, springtime earth. It was eerie and a little frightening for those few seconds of blindness, where I could not see the sharp rays of sunlight breaking through the pine canopy, blotching down on the still wet roadway.

     As it had suddenly arrived for my displeasure, the vapor soon passed over me, and light returned to my eyes. I turned around quickly, so as to see the mist traveling on its way down the laneway, but there was nothing visible. It had dissipated as soon as it had passed over me, leaving no evidence upon me, other than a troubling recollection, of another spirited moment at the Rose Hill property. Yet almost immediately after this brief encounter, that probably could be explained by someone familiar with atmospheric phenomenon, in the spring of the year, I lost the sensation of earthiness, and inherited a sensory perception of, once again, a lilac bloom in an area where there were no such bushes, and if there had been, April was too early to host any blooms on the existing trees. I believe the children have once again, after a brief hiatus, decided to re-visit the writer-in-residence, to impress the voyeur that there is an unspecified amount of property heritage, that has never been documented. Or, I just had an immersion in spring time enchantment, here in the rejuvenating woods of South Muskoka. I carried on my morning hike a few miles more along the winding country road, and very much enjoyed the sights and sounds of this grand emergence of roadside ferns, the hardwood leaves in advanced bud, and the greening-up of the field and lowland grasses, contrasting against the dull brown and black shadows of the half-fallen rail fences weaving along the former farm properties; graced occasionally by a hundred feet or so of rock fences, three feet high, reminiscent of the back-breaking work of the homesteaders, trying to clear enough farm land to plant a crop. Then there was the evidence of border stump carcasses, pulled from the earth by man and beast, to then be pushed aside to line the fields, as a reminder of how near-impossibly it had all been in those first years of clearing the land of natural obstructions. Many homesteaders died as a result of this exhausting labour, and it should be no surprise that these pioneer cemeteries were required, being so isolated in the wilds of a then sparsely populated region.

     I returned to the Oaken Snuggery an hour later, and sat close to the rock fireplace, to enjoy the warm comforts of the hearth, and related my paranormal experience to Mrs. Bosevelt, who joined me just then, with a pot of tea and a freshly baked muffin. New guests were coming later this afternoon, so she was building a supply of baked goods for dinners today and tomorrow. I was the beneficiary of her kindness as a sort of freeloader taste-tester. There was nothing paranormal about this quiet time at hearthside, and the good company of Mrs. Bosevelt, interested to know more about the ghosts of old Rose Hill and The Oaken Snuggery.

     Paranormal events and intrusions such as what have been happening at The Snuggery can be quite unsettling. Yet in more than forty years of hunting and gathering information on regional ghosts, and such, I have never been truly frightened by an encounter such that I felt it prudent to run away, or seek some kind of spiritual protection, such as a cross or a Bible. I have usually calmed to the situation by trying to address the entity, although in almost all cases previous, the conversations have been one sided. But it hasn’t stopped me from trying to engage them anyway, and possibly they understand that I mean them no harm, or plan to host an exorcism to remove them from their old haunt. I find them fascinating such that I enjoy encounters, or at least most of them. The Bosevelt’s ghostly inhabitants are a bit more rambunctious than others I’ve come to know across Muskoka. I want to learn more about them, and I’m beginning to think they intend on giving me the inside scoop, to borrow a reporter’s mission to get all the poop on a big story to “scoop” the competition. I think a lot of writers on the paranormal would like to have the opportunity I’ve been afforded by the Bosevelts, here at The Oaken Snuggery.