by Jim Chliboyko

Approaching the Irving House from
Royal Avenue, where the home has sat
for 131 years, one is immediately
taken in by the unremarkable sur-
roundings. The former “King of the
River’s” showhome is dwarfed by
neighboring apartments; workmanlike
buildings which might have been
inspired by the German Blandhaus
school of architecture. And the washed
out, ‘paint-by-numbers’ facade of
rambling St. Mary’s Hospital, lying to
the West, doesn’t really provide much
atmosphere, either.

These “buildings” do have their
purpose, though. Their ugliness turns
the word “conservation” into an
imperative. They emphasize the
presence of #302, Royal Avenue, New
Westminster, as an oasis of craftsman-
ship and class on an otherwise
Legoland-like stfetch of road.

Perhaps, the landmark is an oasis for
other things, too.

Dare yourself to climb the steep
grades of red brick alleyways to the
south of the house, and you can almost
picture ancient New Westminister. The
sloping area is dotted with old
churches and homes that were elusive
enough to have escaped the Great
Bulldozer Attack of the 1970s. Though
there still are a lot of boxy buildings
behind the Irving House (it shares a
back alley with a series of large
rectangles, and directly behind the
house is the turquoise archive building
which brings to mind the image of a
swimming pool turned inside out),
there are some gems hidden back
there, too, with whitewashed walls or
made of sturdy brick.

Most impressive, though, when
coming up from downhill and from the
south, is seeing how the Irving house
looms proudly over its corner, Royal
and Merivale. Even when comparing
its grey wooden frame to the pink
skyscraper next to it, the Irving House
somehow seems a little more powerful
than it does from the Royal Avenue

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side, and a little meaner, too, as if it is
thinking about taking one of its giant
neighbors down at the knees.

Archie Miller has the New West-
minster archivist and Irving House
curator for more than 20 years, and has
been a New West resident all his life.
In that time, he has had a chance to get
to know his city, with all its peculiari-
ties and peccadilloes. Though his job
title includes nothing about things
supernatural, he has inadvertently
become a bit of a city hauntings
curator, as well. For that part of his
job, he couldn’t have a better address.
Miller actually lives in the house. This
is the house in which William Irving
died.

Though he has a lot of
visitors who experience
both vague and more
dramatic otherworldly
sensations, Miller’s best
testimonial is his own.
Irving House weirdness
was confirmed for him
years ago upon the
photogenic main
staircase leading up to
the second floor bed-
rooms. “I was going
upstairs... and I definitely
felt something coming
down. To this day, I
know that someone or
something was on the
stars.” Millerbad fet fF...
compelled to even flatten #%
himself against the wall
as the thing passed him
on the way down.

Then there was the intruder.

One night, at two or three in the
morning, Miller’s sleep was inter-
rupted by footsteps coming from
upstairs. “The two of us (Miller and
his dog) heard this pacing. It wasn’t
just someone in the yard, or on the
verandah. You get to know an old
house, and I knew that the footsteps
were coming from inside the house. It

 

   

by Elijah Bak

What frightens you? What strips
away your thin veneer of courage and
exposes your vulnerabilities? Debt?
Death? Divergence from the norm?
Divorce? Dracula? Of course not
Dracula. It would be irrational to be
afraid of monsters anymore. We live in
the clear light of late twentieth century
scientific inquiry and know that of all
the things we need to be or should be
afraid of, boogeymen aren’t among
them. Financial, environmental and
biological disasters loom large in our
sights now. To admit to ourselves that
we are still capable of being frightened
by fictional beings is in a sense, a
surrender of our adulthood. Yet, aren’t
we excited or aroused by certain forms
of fictional titillation? Don’t we get
indignant when fictional brutes carry
out atrocities on screen? In what ways
are our reactions to these artificial
stimuli intrinsically different from our
reactions to the beasts and phantoms
of popular and classical fiction?

They differ in one key way:
regarding sex or violence between
“real” people we are not required to
suspend our disbelief to the same
extent as we are for the creatures from
our subconscious (eg. Dracula). I find
it mildly absurd that people are able to
completely surrender themselves to the
childish fantasy of a film like Star
Wars, where spaceships bop around
the galaxy in a matter of hours and
make alot of noise in the process.
Whereas, in a film like The Haunting
(1961, Robert Wise, dir.) the audience

Francis has
not seen, felt
nor heard
anything

ghostly in her
time at the
house. Except

was there.” Miller’s dog even corrobo-
rated Miller’s creeps; the ears went up,
the hair was up, and the fangs were
bared, Miller said. “I was just about to
turn the dog loose, when the sound
suddenly stopped. The dog calmed
down, and changed his expression
completely; ‘let’s go play.’” Though
this was before the house had the
sophisticated security system it has
now, Miller thinks that the intruder,
was maybe not an intruder at all.
Though the sound did stop, he didn’t
hear the source of the sound leave.

Of course, as a prominent Lotusland
museum, the Irving House has a lot of
visitors. And a few of them are, as
Miller puts it, sensitive. There has
been a fellow who saw the vague
image of a man, and many women
who have seen the vague
images of women. One
little girl asked her mother

“why is that man on the
bed when we’re not
allowed in the rooms?”

Though there didn’t seem to
be anyone in the room, the

bed’s coverings had been
disturbed.

Also exhibited are
usual characteristics
ascribed to haunted

houses, cool gusts of

air and odd smells, but
Miller says that these
things are not uncommon things in old
houses: “A house’s odors change with
the seasons.” Hearing the sound of
rustling skirts, though, is pretty
atypical in heritage buildings, espe-
cially when there seem to be no skirts
obviously present. This is something
that happens often on Royal Avenue.

Then there are the people, like one
woman not so long ago, who had to
leave because there was just too much
sensation in the house. Though she
was overwhelmed, she did have the
courtesy to phone Miller back the next
day to reassure him that what she had

is never given a tangible proof of
anything and is required to use its
imagination in lieu of special effects.

The popularity of the supernatural
as a sub-genre of horror fiction has
declined radically in the last 25 years.
The main consumers of this genre are
pre-teens and teenagers. At this age we
are still able to connect the unreal with
the possible. As time progresses it
seems that the mental pathways that
govern this sense of the other become
atrophied. Just take a poll of a horror
film audience. Mainly you’re dealing
with the relatively modern school of
“splatterpunk” (as typified by writer/
film maker, Clive Barker) or its
twisted halfwit progenitor the “slasher
film” (typically littered with the
murders of couples engaged in pre-
marital sex).These people don’t want
any subtlety in their story telling. I
believe this goes to the argument that
fear in its most primal sense is only
truly dealt with in the open space
created by a legitimately inquiring
mind that isn’t bounded about with
hard opinions. Those who judge fear
as the tension before the commission
of a brutal slaying aren’t interested in
FEAR. They’re operating on a
primitive level of stimulation and
release. Much like the consumers of
pornography whom they have much in
common with.

Too often fear is disregarded as a
simple reaction to external stimuli.
The German philosopher Martin
Heidegger posited that in the state of

felt was not evil, only that it was
intense.

Valerie Francis, Museum Opera-
tions Co-ordinator is a skeptic.
“Maybe they don’t like me,” she
posits. “I’m the worst person to talk
to.” She’s used to dealing with the
press. “Every year, we get Utv.,
CBC, the local papers down here,”
she says, a testament to the imagina-
tion of the media.

Though aware of years of stories
and whisperings, Francis has not
seen, felt nor heard anything ghostly
in her time at the house. Except for
one incident.

Francis went to the house to pick
up the mail on this particular day, a
day on which the house was closed
to the public, when she heard
something upstairs. After a few
minutes of listening to the sounds,
Francis became a little worried.
“Here it is’, I said to myself, ‘here
is my ghost,’” said Francis. “I crept
up the stairs to see what was up
there, and when I was just about to
say ‘William Irving, is that you?’, I
heard a woman’s voice say ‘Are you
coming to check up on me?’”
Francis had forgotten about the local
artist that had been locked inside the
house to do a painting of one of the
rooms.

Though the house is only open on
the weekends in the winter, Miller
and his staff are looking forward to
freshening up the place with their
annual Victorian Christmas exhibi-
tion at the house. If you have the
courage to check it out, you can. It
begins in early September, and runs
until Twelfth Night, “sometime in
January,” Miller says. The exhibition
will feature musicians and decora-
tions and if you’re lucky maybe
you’ ll find yourself drinking eggnog
beside Cap’n Will himself. Phone
521-7656 for more details.

Kim Alscher Photo

anxiety, which he defined as a fear of
nothing, we come into contact with
the nothing (given that all of the
universe is the something). And that
in the state of anxiety we actually
discover our Being, as the experience
of our Being held out into the
nothing! Scary stuff, kids, indeed!
(On the subject of Heidegger, trying
to read any of his essays outside of a
class on the subject will induce a level
of existential fear paralleled only by
reports of government cutbacks!)

Fear is routinely subjugated to the
administration of fight or flee
impulses, but as in the case with
Heidegger, it can elevate our thought
and through this the quality of our
existence (although the rest of the
world hasn’t exactly caught up with
his thinking yet). Authors ranging
from Edgar Allan Poe to Franz Kafka
to William S. Burroughs have all
employed fear to stimulate their own,
and therefore our own, investigations
into the more uncomfortable corners
of existence.

The current state of fiction dealing
with our fears or FEAR itself is in
sorry shape. Thankfully we have a
vast resource of literature, film and
painting that illuminate the dim
recesses of our collective uncon-
scious. “Do not go gently into that
good night.” But if you must, then
carry a bright light. And keep an eye
peeled over your shoulder... .

 

Eric Milner Photo (

¢

Spooky Stuff October 29 1996 3

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