The Captain’s House: A Halloween Ghost Story

This story appeared in Sensational Victoria “Ghost Stories from the Capital.”

Captain Walker Residence:

When Sandra and Larry Gray bought the house on Heritage Lane, they didn’t know this 1915 beauty came with a few ghosts. The Californian-style bungalow was built for Captain Robert Walker. Walker had worked for the Mitsubishi Steamship Company in Nagasaki, where he met his wife Sato and had nine children. Sato died from heart disease at age 36 in 1894.  In 1908, Walker left his four boys to run the family business in Japan and took his five daughters to live on Vancouver Island.

In 1928, he sold his house to Helena Von Holstein-Rathlou, the wife of a Danish count. She ran the 10-acre property as a hobby farm until 1942.

The property was subdivided over the years and sold to Sandra and Larry Gray in 1990. The Grays ran a bed and breakfast for 20 years and Larry wrote a book about their experiences in 2010 called A Heritage Gem.

The Ghosts:

Over the years, the Grays and their guests have seen apparitions and sensed a presence. Sandra has woken to the sweet smell of cigar smoke several times. It stopped only after she sat up in bed one night and said: “Captain Walker, there’s no more smoking in this home. Thank you very much!”

Sandra used to hear a voice calling when she was home alone. Both she and Larry have heard people come in through the front door and go up the stairs, and when they go and look, nobody is there.

“We have one area that we call the lobby. It’s a central hall, and out of the corner of my eye, I would catch a glimpse of somebody’s heel or their pant leg as if they had just left the room,” she says.

Another time Larry was home alone working in his office in the basement when he heard the back door to the kitchen open and then close. He heard a woman’s footsteps cross the oak kitchen floor and then walk down the hallway to a bedroom. When he went to look, no one was there.

The Shadow People:

Larry calls these sightings “the shadow people.”

The Grays were quite used to serving guests their breakfast and hearing about their sightings during the night.

In 2000, a Japanese lady in her 30s was spending several months in the house while she studied English. She told the Grays that a woman holding a little girl’s hand had visited her main-floor bedroom during the night. The woman touched her face and told her “Don’t worry, everything will be all right, dear” and then she vanished.

Another time, two women were staying in adjoining bedrooms, and one woke during the night to see a ghost dressed in a long white nightgown floating by the bed. When she turned on the light, the ghost disappeared.

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