GOOD GHOSTS WHO HELP HUMANS REALLY EXIST THOUGH "DEBUNKED" BY BLIND "SCIENCE"

FROM CANADA.COM
Sunday, October 27, 2002 Staffer Marisa Murdocco of the Gallery at Ceperley House has encountered a few ghostly presences at the old former mansion. Former owner Grace Ceperly has been seen and heard in the Ceperly Mansion to this day. (Les Bazso, The Province) They hang out in our art galleries. They roam apartment complexes, cruise our roads and make the occasional rounds on our hospital wards. We are, it seems, awash in ghosts -- lending new meaning to the phrase "Super Natural British Columbia." As Halloween looms, tales about spirits, spectres, poltergeists and phantoms seem to materialize out of nowhere and float into opportunistic newspaper stories like the following ... Perhaps the most publicized haunting in B.C. concerns a ghostly patron of the Burnaby Art Gallery, previously known as Ceperley House and Fairacres. Built by wealthy real-estate tycoon Henry Ceperley in 1909, the huge Tudor-styled mansion near Deer Lake, which once served as a temporary Simon Fraser University dormitory in the mid-'60s, seems to have become a permanent frat house for restless spirits. Ghosts in white dresses. Eerie chanting. Chilling presences. They've had them all in the mansion. Gallery staffer Marisa Murdocco has worked at Ceperley for the past four years, and says she has had more than one strange encounter. Most unnerving, she says, were the phantom phone calls she received as the gallery receptionist about two years ago. "I would get these phone calls but there would be no one on the line," says Murdocco, a 39-year-old mother of two. She says the switchboard call display would show that it was an internal call, but coming from a room in the gallery that was empty. "It was from a phone that wasn't even connected," she adds. Murdocco even called Telus to look into the phantom calls, but the phone technicians were baffled. She says one night the same phantom calls came -- "It rang about five times in a row," Murdocco says -- again showing an internal, yet disconnected, line. Murdocco says she had had enough. "I just said, 'I know you're here but you're really starting to get irritating, so please stop,'" she says. "And they did." On another occasion, Murdocco says she heard some faint sounds -- a kind of music, she thought -- but couldn't locate its source. "I listened throughout the gallery and even went outside, but the sound was only heard from inside the small office I was in," she says. Murdocco talked to a gallery security guard and asked if he could hear anything in the office. Yes, chanting, he said. "And that's exactly what it was," says Murdocco. "It was so faint I hadn't realized it before, but it definitely was chanting." Murdocco, who says she hasn't encountered anything unusual for about two years, says another staffer who was leaving her job at the gallery admitted as she ended her last shift that she had once seen "the ghost of a monk." "She said it had happened a while ago but she didn't want to tell anyone in case they thought she was crazy," Murdocco says. She says the chanting and the spectre of the monk might be due to the mansion's previous incarnation as a monastery. Certainly, the house has had a storied past. After Ceperley's wife, Grace, died suddenly, the house was sold and subequently became, in succession, an annex for Vancouver General Hospital's tuberculosis ward; a residence for a strict order of Benedictine monks; and a home and school for an unorthodox religious cult called Temple of a More Abundant Life. But it was in its most recent incarnation as an art gallery that the close encounters began. Soon after it was converted in the late '60s, a night security guard first reported seeing the spectre of Grace Ceperley upstairs, wearing the standard-issue long, flowing white dress. Other staffers at the gallery reported similar sightings; one female employee even tried to talk with the apparition. Another refused to work in the gallery at night after encountering "something there that was not of this world." - - - Another spine-tickler that has entered the pantheon of B.C. ghost stories is the Phantom of the Burn Unit. According to Robert C. Belyk's Ghosts: True Stories from British Columbia, veterans of the old Vancouver General Hospital burn ward, since demolished and replaced, used to relate a story about a young man named Douglas who was burned terribly along with 16 others in an explosion at a Vancouver grain elevator during the mid-'70s. Apparently the man -- popular among the nurses for his dogged will to live -- suffered greatly for months but seemed to be making progress, when he announced to a nurse he was "very tired" and suddenly died. Soon afterward, his room and the ward became a kind of Sixth Sense showroom. Nurses reported seeing vague shapes moving around the empty bed. An orderly saw bed sheets being turned aside. Many in the ward later said they witnessed an apparition comforting some of the more critical patients. In one case, a critically burned female patient on the ward told of a young man who had visited her on the ward. This surprised the attendant nurse, since no one outside the patient's family was permitted on the ward. When asked who the visitor was, the patient replied, "He said his name was Douglas." - - - Anyone who has ever cringed through a late-night horror flick should know by now: Never, ever, build anything using recycled headstones. Alas, as revealed in Margaret Read MacDonald's Ghosts of the Pacific Northwest, that rule was overlooked by the owner of a Coquitlam apartment building in the mid-'80s who assembled a new walkway using 130 old grave markers salvaged when the Woodlands School for the disabled turned its small cemetery into a park. Faster than you could whisper "poltergeist," paranormal events began unfolding at the apartment complex. Channels on residents' TV sets changed spontaneously, bedroom lights turned off and on without explanation and mysterious footsteps echoed throughout the building. The children of one family in the complex reported seeing faces pressed up against windows, as well as beds that would suddenly shake. Another resident said she saw a figure outside her bathroom wearing a robe with "red scribbling." She had no face. - - - Lastly, this urban legend arrives, one that has circulated on the University of B.C. campus for years and that many UBC alumni swear is a genuinely and authentically true fact. It concerns commuters along University Boulevard who encounter a young female hitchhiker in the glare of their headlights on a dark and stormy night. She has no coat on over her dress, and her long black hair clings limply to her pale, anxious and -- of course -- beautiful face. When the driver stops, she climbs in the back seat, always trembling, and wearily offers the address to her on-campus home. She informs her Samaritan she's had a row with her boyfriend on the way to a dance and angrily jumped out of his car and started hitchhiking. Arriving at her home, the driver turns around to say goodbye, but the back seat is empty. She has vanished. The driver goes up to the house, knocks on the door and explains what has happened to the middle-aged man and wife who answer. He describes the girl and asks if she has perhaps slipped in the back way. They tell him his description is indeed that of their daughter, but that she was killed the year before in a car crash on the way to a dance. © Copyright 2002 The Province.

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