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Feature - Giving up the ghosts

"From ghoulies and ghosties to long leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, good Lord protect me."— Old Cornish prayer

Most people like to think of hauntings and mysterious events taking place in distant places, not in their own backyards.

But in the fall of 1999 four roommates learned that Whistler is no stranger to the weird and unexplained.

They moved into a Whistler Cay house built around 1970, expecting a warm friendly home and refuge from the icy winter.

Instead they found themselves spooked by the sound of footsteps running across the roof and chilled by draughts they couldn't explain. They fought an on-going battle with the fireplace which refused to hold a flame no matter what kind of wood they used or how lovingly they tended the hearth.

Then there was the constant problems with the furnace and the space heaters. You would think someone didn't want them to get comfortable. Maybe that someone was the ghostly figure, darting and dark, occasionally glimpsed by the thoroughly spooked tenants.

Once, while chatting in the kitchen with friends, the tenants saw a cutting board move two feet along the counter before crashing to the floor.

Each of the roommates also had their own experience with the resident ghost cat. Often glimpsed out of the corner of the eye it was heard meowing and jumping onto beds purring. Some even swear they felt its invisible body rub against their legs.

By early spring the tenants couldn't take it any more. They moved out, leaving the house to its own devices. There haven’t been any long-term tenants for some time.

The hauntings are not confined to homes in Whistler.

A clerk at a store in Town Plaza recalls a spooky feeling near closing time one day. She heard what she thought were the footsteps of an approaching customer. The footsteps stopped beside her. But when she turned to address the customer no one was there. And then she found someone had locked the door.

A few days later, while working alone in the same store, another employee heard footsteps. She turned and glimpsed a man wearing a blue blazer. But by the time she got out from behind the counter to help him he had inexplicably vanished.

Both employees were haunted by a mysterious chirping toy bird in the store. It was heard to chirp even when no one was near it. Sometimes, when employees were in the back room and the bird was out front and there was no one else in the store, it would start chirping so loudly it sounded like the bird was right up against the employee's ear.

Apparently the Whistler Creek Lodge ghost has some friendly competition.

The Whistler Creek Lodge ghost is named Bill, a logger trapped in a vortex between life and death.

The south end of Alta Lake, near the Whistler Creek Lodge, was a logging camp in the early part of the last century. A rough and tumble era, there was a lot of drinking, violence and pain in the camp, according to psychic Diane Mills.

"It's not this actual building that Bill is trapped in, it's this area, there was something here before," Mills said when she visited the lodge a few years ago.

Stories of an old man who was seen occasionally around the lodge have been passed down from guests to housekeepers and former employees. One housekeeper reportedly saw someone walk down a hallway, turn a corner to an area that had no exit, but when she investigated no one was there.

Mills also reported a conversation with the ghost of a prostitute who lived near the loggers camp, between Alta and Nita lakes. She died at the hands of a man with a dark beard and a big, black hat.

Ghosts aren't the only mysterious happenings in the Sea to Sky Corridor. For years the Mutual UFO Network has told us this area is one of the busiest areas in North America for sightings.

One local photo shop even had a customer return to ask for an explanation for the motion-blurred metallic disc above Rainbow Mountain which appeared in one of their snapshots. Maybe it was a problem with the film development that created the disc, or maybe it came from another world.

Then there are the hundreds of sightings of "dragons" in local lakes.

In the 1900s prospectors and natives often told stories of seeing baby dragons in One Mile Lake near Pemberton.

More recently, Lil’wat elder Grandpa J claims to have seen an Ogopogo-like creature rise out of the slippery green waters of Lillooet Lake as he paddled his canoe.

Just to be safe he offered the Lake Spirit some tobacco, and then paddled home as quickly as possible.

Back on land, many people have reported Sasquatch sightings in this region. The area between Harrison and Bella Coola, including Lillooet and Squamish, has the second highest number of reported sightings of the creature in North America.

In May of 1991 two roommates decided to take their first hike of the season after a long cold winter in Whistler. They rode their bikes to the parking area on Cougar Mountain and then set off along the trail toward the Ancient Cedars.

As they hiked they decided to cut deeper into the woods and climb up a ridge in search of a bird's eye view of the famous trees. They came across a ravine running parallel to a ridge. In this mud-filled hollow were clear, very large, footprints. The tracks continued for at least 70 feet and at one point cleared a chest-high fallen tree without changing stride.

The footprints were at least 16 inches long and were so clear that cracks and wrinkles from the creature’s skin were imprinted in the mud.

The trail was so fresh the roommates, one an amateur anthropologist, thought the creature who made it might be nearby. They set of for home with plans to return and cast the footprints as a souvenir but a torrential rainstorm dampened their plans.

About four years ago a Whistler couple spotted a tall hairy creature walking distinctly upright just south of Nairn Falls as they drove toward Pemberton at about 4 a.m. The creature paused, looked toward the headlights then, in one stride, stepped up the four-foot embankment and disappeared into the woods.

The couple noticed that a branch directly behind the creature's elongated skull was at least eight feet off the ground.

Local natives know the location of the sighting well and claim it is a known Sasquatch migration trail.

Documented sightings of Sasquatches in the corridor go back to at least 1964, according to newspaperman John Green, whose book, The Sasquatch File, is available at the Whistler Public Library.

In the winter of 1964 he tells of a Vancouver man and his wife who followed huge tracks in the snow just north of Squamish. The naked footprints were half as long again as his size 12 rubber boot.

In the winter of 1968 a North Delta man found a line of tracks 16 inches long and 6 inches wide with a 40-45 inch stride in fresh snow near Lillooet.

Just a few months later the owner of a cabin in the Cheakamus Valley found five-toed tracks in snow 17 feet deep. He was travelling by snowmobile but calculated that the stride was about six feet.

In April of 1969 men working on a ski development in the Callaghan Valley found several miles of 14 inch tracks with a 30 inch stride. It appeared the maker of the tracks had been striping spruce buds off the trees and eating them, said John Wilson of North Vancouver.

Today a majority of anthropologists have begun to accept that something real lies behind all the stories.

The myth of the Sasquatch is accepted by most First Nations people in North America and has even been incorporated into their folk lore. Like the wolf, bear and raven, it has become a spirit guardian to many.

It is believed this shy brother has his own migration routes, hunting grounds, and camps, and his life has been adopted into folklore wherever tales of hairy men are heard.

Most people still have a tendency to dismiss things they can't readily explain or even refuse to repeat their tales for fear of ridicule.

But if you look closely you can see that strange occurrences happen all the time, all around us.



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