Grim Grinning Ghosts – Victoria [08/12/2011]

In case anyone who reads this wasn’t aware: My hometown is haunted.

This doesn’t come as much of a surprise to a lot of people, but in my line of work – you run into a lot of people who don’t know local history. When I’m off the ships though, I work as a tour guide for the local walking tour company that handles the more grisly side of Victoria’s history.

Usually I end up keeping this to myself. Not really on purpose, just another way that I separate my shipboard life from my shoreside one. But the fact remains that Victoria is extremely paranormally active, and the fact also remains that I know more than a little bit about the whys and the where’s of it. When – for a reason I can’t remotely remember – the topic of ghosts came up during my (now traditional) nightly late-night pasta indulgence with the ship’s party band, I mentioned my “other” line of work…and watched as the eyes of the band lit up.

“Seriously? You do ghost tours?”

“Yeah…you want one?”

So I sent a few emails back and forth to my boss back home, who agreed to loan me the use of the office keys and microphone for the night, and once again picked up the black cap and cane to lead a group of uncertain people through the backalleys and dark shadows of the city of gardens.

It’s always a challenge for me to do a tour for my friends. Those of you who are performers will probably understand the whys of that. Performing for a crowd that’s all people you know – in my case all people you see every day, adds an extra level of pressure somehow. You can’t skate by on the fact that you’ll never see these people again. You want to give them your best work. This often can backfire, and you end up stammering and forgetting your lines. So when I get out there, I usually find myself completely divorcing from my knowledge of the audience (except for remembering where I can sneak in ship-related references, and when I have to prune out local references that no one would get etc etc. )When you’re tour guiding, you learn to basically act on the fly – trimming and adding things as necessary, we were running behind on time – though I didn’t realize just how close of a shave it was actually going to be – so I had to dial back a few things that normally would have been kept in.

It’s an interesting experience watching people watch you in a different context for the first time. These people are some of my closest friends on board, but they know me as ship-board me. They know I sing, they know I dance – because they’ve seen it, and they’ve heard it – but they’ve never actually seen me work. When I’m in tour-guide mode, I’m working. I know that route, I know it like the back of my hand, I know how to draw people in and how to make them jump if necessary. I can tell off a passing drunk without breaking the train of thought of a story. After doing the job for four years, I’ve become very good at it.

One of the few things that I really truly pride myself on to be honest.

In truth the history of Victoria isn’t nearly as pretty as the city itself. Botched hangings, people being buried alive, throats getting slashed. The otherworldly residents of my hometown have good reason not to always be exactly chipper.

Because of a misjudgment in timing (mine, not theirs), I had to miss the last story on the route. Which is supposed to be the finale (since we tell it inside a haunted building). I had intended to impart it over dinner at some point this week, before two of the band members debark in Seattle, but dinner conversation lately always gets taken up more by things that make us laugh, so, since most of the people who came on the tour with me also glance here once in a while: word for word from my own script:

To really finish up about the Maritime Museum I have to take you on a bit of time travel. Imagine that none of the buildings surrounding this square are standing. It’s not even sunrise yet, but the boomerang saloon that stands where the parkade is now is doing a fantastic business. They’re selling beer, sandwiches, coffee, they are – I kid you not – renting out space on their roof. It’s almost a party atmosphere, the noise would have been incredible. But when the sun came up – you could hear a pin drop in that square. And everyone craned their necks, to try to catch a glimpse of the executioner.

That’s right. Public hanging day in Victoria, big ol’ party bring the kids.

But you’re never going to figure out who the executioner is, you see he always wore a black hood to conceal his identity. Behind him came the priest, and behind him came the prisoner, flanked by gaurds and chained at wrist and ankle. They would mount the newly erected gallows – it was considered very bad luck to use the same gallows more than once – and the executioner would step forward and break the black seal on the death warrant to read it aloud. The priest would then step forward to recite the Lord’s Prayer, and the men in the watching crowd would remove their hats. Despite the fact that this was a criminal, it was a man who was about to lose his life – he deserved at least that final respect. At a random point in the priest’s prayers, the executioner would put his hand to the bolt, pull it – and down the prisoner would drop.

You could hear the snap of his neck echo off the surrounding buildings it was so quiet.

In the ensuing silence the executioner would step forward one more time, and in his loudest possible voice ask:

WHO CLAIMS THIS BODY?!

Three times he would ask. Hoping, that this time, this time there would be someone in the crowd – friends or family of the victim – to claim the body and give it a decent burial in pioneer square. Sometimes that happened, but most times? These were mining men. They didn’t have any friends – and if they had any family chances are that family wanted nothing to do with them, not after this. Those men were buried without marker, or ceremony – wrapped in quicklime to expedite the process – under the hard packed earth, of the very jail yard they had just died in.

And forgotten.

The building that currently houses our Maritime Museum was originally constructed as the city Courthouse. And when they built it they gave it every advancement they could think of for the time – but what they did not do…was remove one…single…body.

The bodies of all those men are still there. Embedded forever in the mortar and stone foundations of the museum itself. And if that isn’t reason enough for the building to be the most haunted in the city I can give you one more. We know that at least two of those men, were native boys – they didn’t speak a word of English, and they were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Their bodies – and their ghosts – are there as well.

Minus the stories about the office itself – which lose all their impact when told of context. There you have it. At least I’ve yet to stoop to quoting the Haunted Mansion at the end of the tour, though I’ve been tempted to on occasion:

“Hurry ba-ck, hurry ba-ack…don’t forget to bring your…death c certificate”