Ghosts are said to be attracted to houses where there is a lot of activity. For Jim, a carpenter, and Lou, a massive renovation of their Queen Anne home on Townsend Place, in New Westminster, seems to have awoken them.
New Westminster Archives
Townsend Place:
Whatever the reason, for a few years the old house was haunted. Jim and Lou moved into the 13-room house in 1967. At that time it was 61 years old and, like an elderly person, came with a history. As Jim said the house had also “taken a hell of a beating over the years.”
The haunting started casually enough. About two years after Jim and Lou moved in, the downstairs tenant asked them about a “medicine smell.” Jim and Lou had noticed the same old ointment kind of smell, and thought it was something that the tenant was using. Sometimes, a light switch with a tricky control would switch on and off.
The ghosts:
Once, an old family friend was staying overnight. “He woke up and saw a man looking out the window and the guy disappeared when he got out of bed,” says Jim. “The dog was under the bed and wouldn’t come out.”
The friend described a middle-aged man wearing a long coat and hat that looked like it came from a very different generation.
Lou had a number of encounters over the years. She would often feel a presence that she described to a reporter in 1982 as “a whirlwind around me. It’s cold and follows me.” She once saw an outline of a woman in a long dress and often talked of a presence that sat near her on the couch. The family dog, Rags, frequently stared at something that wasn’t there.
The kids:
Jim and Lou had three boys who shared the same bedroom. One night David, who was about 10, called his mother into his room in the middle of the night. “He told her the coat hangers were floating,” says Jim.
Jim has had two unsettling experiences.
Several years after moving into the house, he was going upstairs to bed. He turned out the lights downstairs, and when he got to the foot of the staircase he reached out for the newel post. Someone or something grabbed his hand and continued to hold it as he went up the stairs. He wasn’t scared, but it was strange and he had to shake his hand free.
Jim’s only other experience happened shortly after Lou died in 1988. One night after he’d gone to bed he woke to see a white smoky shape that gave off a faint glow.
He says at no time did the family ever feel threatened by the activity.
“A psychic came through here once and said that there are no ghosts here now. But he said it’s like when you live in a house or in a neighborhood for a long time and then one day someone comes by to visit,” says Jim. “They come and they go.”
Sounds like the psychic was right: the last time anything odd happened in the house was in 1989.
For more ghostly stories check out these podcast episodes:
S1 E9 Three Ghost Stories and a Murder
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