Spooktacular Tales

It would seem that every generation has its ghost story and in the community of Lumsden this is certainly true. From today’s youth to the seniors and to the in-betweeners there is a tale. The most elaborate belongs to the in-betweeners. As the story goes there is a house on 2nd Ave. that was reported to be haunted in the mid to late 1960’s by a small child that wrote on the walls. On woman in town remembered her brother telling her the story after sleeping over in the house with his friend, who’s parents owned the home. Years later when this same woman and her husband were going to purchase the house on 2nd Ave. she received several telephone calls from concerned citizens regarding the haunting. In an effort to get to the root of the rumours our soon to be homeowner decided to call her brother’s friend’s parents, who were, incidentally, also her previous employers as she had babysat in the home but doesn’t remember anything strange from her visits (bear with me, every good ghost story gets a little complicated at times). Following is what she learned . . .

The house was in fact haunted but not by a small child. The ghost was an older gentleman who wore suspenders. The home owners at the time actually saw this spirit on a couple of occasions. The young wife, in particular, remembers the smell of the gentleman. Apparently it wasn’t a bad smell, it was just the vague smell that is associated with an older person. The wife was not scared by the ghost and somehow sensed that it was a benevolent spirit. The owners of the home contacted a paranormal expert who confirmed that it was the spirit of an old man and that he was looking for something. The expert felt that when the ghost found what he was looking for he would go away.

In the early 1970’s the home owners embarked on a kitchen renovation. Under the floorboards they found some old home made Valentines that looked like they dated back to the turn of the century. That night they left them on the kitchen table and were astounded to discover that they were missing in the morning. There were times after that the wife thought she could still smell the old gentleman but she couldn’t be sure. The paranormal experts later confirmed that the spirit was gone.

Incidentally, it was her next door neighbour who revealed the true identity of the spirit. The neighbour, an “old timer” in Lumsden who had been a farmer from the area, had several old photo albums which he shared with the wife. In one old photo the wife saw the gentleman who appeared to be responsible for the haunting of her home. This neighbour went on to reveal that the home had been built on a farm in the Pense area about 1897 and had been moved into Lumsden in about 1912.

There are certain similarities in this tale that link to the urban legends of the youth in Lumsden today and to the ghost story of the older generation. First the seniors . . .

On the corner of James St. South and Qu’Appelle drive there used to be a Methodist Church. A Lumsden resident by the name of Curly Lickers, used to tell the local children that the Church was haunted. The gentleman who relayed this tale didn’t know whether the story was real or whether they had been told the tale to keep them out of the old church once it had been abandoned. He certainly didn’t remember a ghost but he also said that he stayed out of the Church.

Shortly after we moved to Lumsden my, then 16 year old, daughter relayed the tale of a haunted house just a few blocks from where the Methodist Church used to be. Apparently in the dead hour, 3:00 am, the curtains of this abandoned house are moved by what the youth believe is a small child. Could it be that the child ghost stories from the 1960’s had been reinvented and associated with the house of this legend? For the record, I didn’t know when the “dead hour” was so I “googled” the term and was surprised to learned that I was among 76,800,000 others who had searched using the same term proving that ghost stories are still as appealing to us today as they ever were. Happy Halloween!