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.