The House of Ghostly Stories.

By Colleen Kelly

Although ghost stories are not themselves a Jungian concept, the imagination and access to the supernatural through myth and story is tenant of analytical psychology. We all have our myths. Personal myths, family myths, even cultural myths. My experiences of the supernatural are relevant to me and my family. All of us are open to beliefs of the unexplained and perhaps that is why we have all had these otherworldly experiences. These stories make sense to us in light of what we accept as truth, reality and the world of possibility.

My grandmother’s house is located in the city of Brantford, Ontario. She was a single mother of three, who left her father’s farm after he died and bought a house of her own in the 1940’s. Her husband had died many years before and she now had to support her three sons and herself. My grandmother was a musician and devoutly Roman Catholic. The house was large and served as a rooming house to men during and after the war. She filled it with heavy antique furniture and large religious pictures which graced the rooms with 12 and 14 foot ceilings. After she passed away in 1964, my parents now newly married, moved into the house and it still remains with the family to this day.

While growing up at 10 Palmerston Avenue, there were a number of curious and disturbing experiences. The house was rambling with additions connected to the original Canadian Gothic structure. It was built in the mid to later 1800’s and had 3 owners previous to 1940, when my grandmother purchased it. My earliest memory of my own experience with ghostly energy was about the age of 3 yrs. I remember telling my mom that “they were coming” one Friday evening as she was putting groceries into the trunk of our car. My mother didn’t understand, and I was not able to explain it to her, but I was frightened. As I started to fall asleep that night I saw sparkling lights and then I remember seeing miniature people all around me. There was a small police officer and a small lady and they both floated around my bed-I remember them being friendly, laughing and talking to me and I remember wanting them to go away. But they stayed until I fell asleep.

A short time after this my mother recalled her experience of sitting alone in the kitchen at the table, sipping a cup of tea. The French door into the breakfast room was closed and the back door was locked. Suddenly to her amazement, the rocking chair across the room began to slowly rock. She was stunned as she looked at the moving chair. Then she recalls the chair rocking faster, for close to a minute before slowing down and then stopping. In her telling of the story she recalls feeling terrified and was afraid to move.

The large country kitchen was definitely a hot spot of activities over the years. In the 1940’s and 50’s my grandmother hosted informal parties where musicians would play and there was much singing and dancing. It even served as the dance floor for my own sweet sixteen party years later. As a child I remember feeling “spooked” as I would do homework at the kitchen table. The room was surrounded by large sunny windows looking out into the deep back yard with 60 year old apple trees and towering maples. At night, when you looked into total blackness there was the feeling, the undeniable feeling that someone or something was out there looking back. Many a night, I would be so filled with fright that I would leave the room.


Animals were another curiosity for us at the house as well. There was plague of distemper that cursed the house for several years beginning in the 1970’s. Tiger had been inoculated as a kitten so she never came down with the deadly illness, but every other cat that came to the house died with in a short while, after arrival. After Charlie, Morris and then Sam became infected, after each arriving from the pound, my parents announced-“Sorry, no more cats”. Since Sam had been with us for several months and he had just wandered off sick and died, my brother and I were heart broken. We prayed nightly for his return from the end of November and through the month of December leading up to Christmas. The original house had a small basement cellar that was accessiable only from the outside, porch of the house. Actually, a border had rented a room in the cellar at the time my grandmother had owned the home. The cellar was a dark, scary place and I was terrified of going down into it.

On Christmas morning, we came downstairs early to open gifts. A blanket of white snow covered everything as it had been snowing all evening and the snow had drifted up on the large covered side porch. As we opened gifts, we heard what could only be described as a cat, “mewing”. We looked for Tiger, but she was asleep in the kitchen. We looked outside at the porch but there was nothing, no footprints or paw prints for that matter. Finally, as we listened we heard the sound coming from the vent to the furnace room, in the cellar. Reluctantly, my father who was in no mood to find Sam, the sick cat locked downstairs went to investigate. To his dying day, my father maintains he had nothing to do with what was to follow. My dad went outside to the porch and down into the dark cellar. He opened the door to the furnace room, where the border had slept for those years during the war. Sitting there alone, next to the furnace was a tiny white kitten. He brought the kitten up and knocked the snow off his feet, looking completely dumb-founded and slightly annoyed. He blamed my mother who flatly denied placing the kitten there. However, we were delighted as kids because it didn’t matter to us where the tiny fur-ball came from. He clearly belonged to us now and that was a most memorable Christmas. Snowball, as we called him, lived a long, long life.

In 1976 my brother had a fish tank in his bedroom above the dining room. On one evening, the family was down stairs watching television when suddenly, there was a loud crash. What followed could only be described as a torrential down pour of water into the closed off room, with glass doors. We jumped up and ran upstairs to see the tank turned upside down in the middle of the bedroom –it made no sense to us. My father was too baffled and stunned to be angry, or to question my brother who had obviously been watching the television with him. This was in spite of the thousands of dollars damage to the plaster ceiling, the furniture and the antique carpet below.

Over the years there were many, many stories related to this house, however this one had the deepest impact on me personally. In April 1978, I was 13 years old. My parents were going through many struggles in their marriage and I recall a lot of arguing going on at that time. I recall it was Easter Sunday in the afternoon and there was a loud argument in the kitchen. My mother went upstairs and slammed the door and my father lay down on the sofa in the living room. In an angry voice he announced “there would be no Easter dinner.” My brother left and I went upstairs to my room and began to cry. As I cried, I sat on my chair and I began to talk to the statue of the Virgin Mary, next to my bed. She was placed on my nightstand beside an alarm clock. The alarm clock was that kind of digital clock that would make a clicking noise every time the digits flipped to the next minute. I began to pray and I pleaded with Mary. I asked her “Mary, would things ever get better?” “Would my life ever get better?” I was very upset, but what happened next stopped my tears in an instant. As I pleaded and cried I remember hearing the clock digit turn and click and at that same moment. The painted eyes on the statue opened and looked right at me. The eyes were like a doll’s eyes. They were large and a brilliantly bright blue, with thick black eyelashes. They were alive and other-worldly and they looked at me for several seconds before closing again.

I can only describe myself at that moment as in a “state of shock”. I immediately stopped crying and I was frozen with fear and was to terrified to move. What would the statue do next? Would it look at me again? Was I in the presence of GOD? I didn’t know and couldn’t make sense of it so I sat there with my eyes fixed on the statue, afraid to breathe. I sat for a couple hours as the room began to get darker. Eventually, I found enough courage to get up and leave. I found my coat and went out into the neighborhood to find my brother. It would be another ten years before I could share that story with someone else.

The house has recently been upgraded and made into apartments, but it still belongs to our family. Before construction began in 2006, I went home and spent several months with my mother at the house. My father had died that previous spring. One September afternoon while watching television together, my mother and I jumped from our chairs as we heard steps come up the side path towards the back of the house. We both headed for the kitchen as we heard the back screen door open, and the sound of the metal door knob turning on the door. When we walked into the kitchen, there was no one there. Someone should have been there! We both had heard it. I immediately ran through the house following the side path looking through the windows and then, to the front door to see if I could see someone on the property. But there was no one. When I opened the front door and stepped onto the sidewalk, I could see no one walking down the street.

The years in this house were filled with both happy and sad memories, but there was always a real “energy” to the lives lived there. Now, the building is barely recognizable as a newly painted apartment house. Many of the trees have been cut down, but an archaic, knotty, apple tree still survives at the back of the property. Crouching and bending with strong fat limbs, giving blossoms and apples with each season.

As people look out at it through those sunny windows, the tree looks back at the people on Palmerston Avenue.

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious

By SARA CORBETT
Published: September 16, 2009
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.


Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.

Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.

THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.

Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration — a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.

Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung — who regarded himself as a scientist — is today remembered more as a countercultural icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung’s ideas laid the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets — the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes — have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream psychology.

A big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a booming laugh and a penchant for the experimental, Jung was interested in the psychological aspects of séances, of astrology, of witchcraft. He could be jocular and also impatient. He was a dynamic speaker, an empathic listener. He had a famously magnetic appeal with women. Working at Zurich’s Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, Jung listened intently to the ravings of schizophrenics, believing they held clues to both personal and universal truths. At home, in his spare time, he pored over Dante, Goethe, Swedenborg and Nietzsche. He began to study mythology and world cultures, applying what he learned to the live feed from the unconscious — claiming that dreams offered a rich and symbolic narrative coming from the depths of the psyche. Somewhere along the way, he started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors and empirical scientists.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NEXT PAGE »
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 20, 2009
An article on Page 34 this weekend about Carl Jung and a book he wrote about struggling with his own demons misspells the name of a street in Zurich where, before it was published, the book was held for years in a bank safe-deposit box, and a correction in this space on Saturday also misspelled the name. It is Bahnhofstrasse, not Banhofstrasse or Banhoffstrasse. The article also misstates the location of Bollingen, the town where Jung built a stone tower as a summer residence. While it is on the north shore of Lake Zurich, it is south of the Jung family home in Küsnacht.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 4, 2009

An article on Sept. 20 about the publication of Carl Jung’s Red Book misstated part of the name of the Swiss bank where the book was kept for many years. It is the Union Bank of Switzerland, not United.