Haunted Ontario 4. Terry Boyle

      Heartland, or the Orchards, the former home of the McBriens.

      Military College at Cambridge, England, where he studied military technique. During the First World War he was appointed to the general staff. He was later made chief of staff at Ottawa, becoming the head of affairs in the Department of Militia and Defence. He retired as the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His sister Julia McBrien was a concert pianist who travelled to Persia and California. Another sister, Elizabeth, produced art that hangs in the National Art Gallery.

      The Orchards remained in the family for a hundred years. In 1970 the two remaining McBrien sisters sold it to Joe and Dolores Victor, who sought a place to hold Gurdjieffan group-work intensives. The Victors shared a toast and sealed a deal with the elderly McBrien sisters. The spiritual history of the home was to continue.

      When the Victors moved in they discovered that the house had been left completely as they had first seen it. No furniture had been removed; even the clothes were hanging in the closet. The pictures on the walls and the sherry glasses the McBrien sisters had used were still on the coffee table. It was incredible.

      There was a hundred years of family history — a penny-farthing bicycle, a beautiful harp, decades of period furniture and valuables, a three-holer outhouse in the back, and an elaborate old cookstove in the summer kitchen. Dolores made herself right at home and it wasn’t too long before she discovered they were not “alone.” The elderly sisters had moved to a nursing home, but someone was still there.

      Among the things that happened was the constant slamming of the hall door that joined the house to the summer kitchen. It would slam in Dolores’s face, it would slam her in the back. Her bed would shake as if it was trying to fall apart. She was a strong woman, a spiritualist and not easily intimidated — ever! She told her unseen housemates “This is my house now. You live here if you like but leave me alone. Stop slamming doors and shaking beds. I’ve had enough!”

      Surprisingly, the mischievous poltergeist activity abated. Although Dolores tore down the summer kitchen and added a weaving studio, she left the main house as it was. She would say, “The studio is mine; the main house is ‘their’ period.”

      Eventually, Dolores’ mother Susy came to live with the Victors. Susy was getting on; she had a hard time getting around and liked to make trouble. She also smoked. The spirits didn’t like that — or did they? Did the spirit want the cigarettes gone, or did it want the cigarettes? Sydney had been the family rebel, after all. Susy could never keep a pack long enough to smoke it. The cigarettes would simply disappear and would usually turn up in another room.

      In 1976 I met Dolores Victor. I was a journalist/entrepreneur with my own magazine and I had gone to interview her for a feature article. I discovered an intriguing, delightful, and somewhat awe-inspiring woman. Together we, along with some others, gave birth that year to a school for artistic and cultural pursuits which we called “The School of Creativity.” We taught Tai Chi, poetry, watercolours, drama, and calligraphy. In 1983 courses in spirituality, healing techniques, and Aboriginal studies were added and the name was changed to the J. McBrien School of Creativity.

      Delores often spoke about the frustration she experienced in the early seventies when she was redecorating. The painters quit because the lid kept being put on the paint can and their tools would go missing unless she stayed right there with them. The man repairing the stairs constantly had his hammer taken downstairs or upstairs when he wanted it left on the step. A man was frequently seen rocking in a chair on the verandah. A woman in a long gown “lived” in the blue room at the top of the stairs, which remained undecorated and unrepaired until 1980. She was also seen walking in the backyard. She resembled the photographs of Julia McBrien.

      I had occasion to stay over one evening. It was my first encounter with the active spirit world there. (Little did I realize that it would be here that I would meet my life partner, Allanah, here that I would come to live, here that I would begin my career as a writer, and here that I would find material for my book about haunted Ontario). That first night I was horrified. This stately old home certainly looks the part the house in a ghost movie. Reminiscent of a Southern plantation estate, the Orchards was and still is the most awe-inspiring and architecturally divine structure to have been built in the village of Prince Albert.

      That particular night Dolores had directed me to spend the night in the upstairs bedroom on the right-hand side of the hall in the front of the house. No one else was living on the second floor at the time. I remember slipping under the covers and drifting off to sleep. It seemed so peaceful. In the night I had what I thought was a vivid dream. I saw a group of people walking down the second floor hallway carrying a coffin. One member of the party was dragging his leg. It spooked me. The next morning I related the dream to Dolores. She nodded knowingly, so I questioned her. She told me that my dream was not a dream, it was something that had actually taken place there in another time. What I had witnessed was the funeral of James McBrien. The gentleman who was dragging his leg was his brother, Sydney. Sydney had injured his leg in an accident many years before.

      Allanah lived with Dolores Victor from 1979 to 1993, first with her husband, John, and her their children, Jeremy and Sarah, and after 1986 with me. She has a long account of unexplained activity in the house.

      “I first moved to 350 Simcoe Street in 1979. I had experienced paranormal activity there prior to that, when I helped to run an antique store there from August 1977 to 1979. Cigarettes would always go missing.

      “One day in 1978 I visited my mentor-friend Dolores, because I was in a very