Is Canada Haunted?

This Halloween, as I was lighting the candles in our hastily carved jack-o’-lanterns on the front porch, I was wondering what I would one day tell my kids if they asked me to tell them a real-life ghost story. My brushes with the paranormal have been few and far between, no doubt, but there have been a few. Nearly all – secretly – I’ve been able to dismiss using any number of rational explanations with a wink and a nod. Oddly, most have been experiences shared with others: There was that stage screw that flew in a straight line stage-left to stage-right in the supposedly haunted auditorium of Thornridge High School right before the startled eyes of myself and my friend Greg as we prepared to lock up, the only two remaining souls in the building … or so we thought!; There was that mysterious man who seemed to materialize out of nowhere before my cousin Alan and me near the old decrepit hunting cabins in Gladwin, Michigan in the November snow. (Only years later did it occur to me that he may have been … a hunter.)

Some twelve years ago, I found myself in circumstances that – at the time – seemed to warrant a bit of coming unhinged. We won’t go off into the weeds here … suffice it to say there were freight trains, lost vacations, and rubber-tramping ventures into the jungle.

One week in November, I had the crazy fool notion to point myself north and see just how far I could get. I had a map, and the vague idea that I’d like to see what Manitoba was all about. And so it was that I found myself well north of Winnipeg in what was supposedly a haunted motel -- or so the elderly-ish woman named Marge who managed the place told me. As it happens, I had a terrible time getting to sleep that night. On one occasion, I heard what was clearly the sound of something heavy falling and hitting the floor somewhere in the room, only to find nothing out of place. On several occasions, I was startled awake by what I though was someone shouting "Kevin!" I ended up walking back to the lobby/lounge area, where Marge had a happy fire glowing in the fireplace. Marge and I talked for a long time that night, and I whiled away that night partly in conversation, and partly underneath the Canadian stars.

When I've recounted this to others, they've encouraged me to write about it. The thing is, I've written about it quite a bit. In fact, I wrote this in my notebook the following night, and included it in the preface to a poetry chapbook I "published" back in 1998:

"The hotel I am staying in is supposed to be haunted. Last night I awoke with a start to the sound of a woman saying my name, to find the room empty; sub-arctic starlight gracing the room with icy silver. It seems I carry some ghosts with me; perhaps some will stay behind. Margaret, the sixtyish women who manages this place, has found me scrawling these notes as I sit wrapped in a blanket on a worn red-velvet chair before the hearth. She is a poet too, and asks me to read a few out loud. My voice rings strange against the firelight — cold and filtered through smoke; older and more sad than I have ever heard it. She listens, the words straining through days that have lacked all audible speech. She tastes each syllable, her eyes gazing off to a place somewhere far behind me, a smile spreading across her face as though she recognizes an old friend; though clearly there is no one there, in the gold-flickering doorway. When I have finished, she clasps her hands loudly together, surprising the night, and exclaims 'Wonderful! Wonderful!' Grace again in the strangest, most beautiful places. I talk with her long into the night, knowing that her eyes give such wonderful gifts; knowing that already I long to squeeze these hours into some small, antique bottle and keep it always near me."

(Why I wasn't handed the Pulitzer Prize for literature immediately upon publication, I'll never know.)

Reading that now, it's clear why I've struggled so often to capture what was going on that night and why it was such a big deal: What is lost in the whole account is the sense of grace that it left me with ... which, admittedly doesn't really make for much of a ghost story. But it isn't the "ghostiness" of those nights that is worth anything anyway: I WAS after all exhausted and sent to bed primed with stories about ghosts waking up weary travelers by shouting their names, so, yeah ... perhaps not really much of a mystery there. The supernatural aspect is much more "Holy Ghosty" in nature, I think. Now, when troubled days come, I think back to that trip and am comforted by it somehow. So here is another attempt to get at what was going on back then, so far away from home:



Remembering
The ride
Up through both Dakotas —
Hands, ears
So cold,
So set against the proud rush;
Embers on the skyline;
Red River
Everywhere that year
And embarrassed with twilight.

Unwashed, unworthy
Of that horizon,
I entered in regardless,
Underneath
Clouds belly-full with snow.

Somewhere
Against an unnamed bay,
The voice of the road
Flickered
From whisper to hush,
And American dollars
Were barely enough
To buy a haunted room
In a haunted inn in November.

Recalling
The walls there —
How they whispered
My own name
Always at the edge of sleep each night
And chased me to fire-lit places,
And warmth —
It is good to know
That name is
As familiar as it is
To wild shorelines;
Abandoned trestles;
Dead innkeepers;
Aurora.

And so, often,
I find myself
Looking north,
Humming to myself “It Is Well”
In times of trouble,
Not because it is,
But because it was,
And will be again.