Eve Lazarus
Earlier this month, St. John Alexander invited me to hang out at Overlynn, a Burnaby mansion for a CTV news Halloween segment. I spent an amazing Saturday with St. John, Greg Mansfield and Amanda Quill—two experienced ghost hunters.
Listen to Cold Case Canada podcast Episode 34
Charles Peter:
As the history geek in the group, I discovered that Overlynn, which is in Vancouver Heights, is part of North Burnaby.
As Chef Jean-Francois Dube discovered in 1999, North Vancouver’s Pacific Starlight Dinner train was haunted
In 1997, I was the Vancouver Correspondent for Marketing Magazine and one of a few dozen media invited along to launch BC Rail’s Pacific Starlight Dinner Train. It was a fantastic night, beginning with a musical send-off from the old North Vancouver station, great food, a stop at Porteau Cove and free booze all the way up and back.
Halloween is my favourite unofficial holiday of the year, so it was especially rewarding to end Season 2 of Cold Case Canada with a Halloween Special. I reached out to five fabulous story tellers to tell me their favourite ghost stories—stories that take place in some of Metro Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods.
October is women’s history month, and I can’t think of anyone more inspirational than Ivy Granstrom: Queen of the Polar Bears
This story is from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
Meet Ivy Granstrom:
Ivy Granstrom participated in 76 consecutive polar bear swims.
In 1965, Rene Castellani, a 40-year-old radio personality decided to murder his wife Esther with arsenic-laced milkshakes so could marry Lolly, CKNW’s 25-year-old receptionist. The couple had an 11-year-old daughter called Jeannine, who became the collateral damage in one of the most sensational murder cases of the 20th century.
This podcast episode is based on my book Murder by Milkshake: an astonishing true story of adultery, arsenic and a charismatic killer
Audio clips from CKNW’s Owl Prowl, 1961.
On April 28, 1947, Trans-Canada Airlines Flight 3 took off from Lethbridge, Alberta on a routine flight to Vancouver. It never arrived.
Rice Lake:
A couple of Sundays ago, my friend Virginia and I went for a walk around North Vancouver’s Rice Lake. We stopped to pay our respects at the two boulders near the entrance.
In 1957, the PNE prize home, at 1,444 square feet, was one and a half times the size of a normal house.
Story from: Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the city’s hidden history
1957:
In 1957, things were a lot less complicated. People went out to movies and drank Nescafe in the kitchen.
The first PNE was in 1910, and, not surprising, a lot of things have changed since then. Some things will be missed and others not so much. Here are 10 things you won’t be seeing this year.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
1. A brill trolley bus
Unless it’s taken out of a transit museum, you won’t be taking a brill trolley bus to the fair.
