“IN THE HOLIDAY WORLDS OF OLD": EERIE FESTIVE TRADITIONS

 Museum Mysteries | Jefimija Vujcic

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Even with the holidays upon us, we’re in the middle of the most horrifying time of year for students – finals season! Putting (extremely) corny jokes aside, there are probably a few things that come to mind when putting ‘horror’ and ‘holiday’ in one sentence. Perhaps one is the seasonally ambiguous classic animated film A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), a childhood staple set in the “worlds of old.” Another may be A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens, in which a grouchy old man is convinced by three ghosts to change his ways. While we will return to both these influential pop culture moments, I must first set the supernatural scene.

This time of year has long been associated with the paranormal, long before the “magic of the season” came to mean all things wholesome, baking cookies, and watching cheesy movies. Unlike in the western Christian tradition, in Slavic countries and others in Eastern Europe, the 12 Days of Christmas – or from the 10th until the 19th of January (since Christmas is traditionally celebrated for three days) – are known as the “unbaptized days.'' It is thought that in this period, the “barrier between the two worlds has fallen and the boogeymen and other dangerous creatures – vampires, goblins, fairies roam through the human realm.” Even though many traditional beliefs associated with this time are no longer practiced, Christmas celebrations in these areas are still steeped with ritual, some of which are certainly creepy at first glance. 

During the koleda (or kolianda) festival,  the koledari or carollers – one of which is the “grandfather,” another the “bride,” and various animal-human demons or those in disguise – bring luck to a village’s households by ‘chasing out demons’. It is typically celebrated in the lead-up to Christmas or during the unbaptized days in countries such as Serbia, Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia, and Russia. | Source

Other traditions of ‘Scary Christmas,’ include the following: spider decorations based on a Ukrainian folk tale, the hiding of brooms so that witches can’t use them in Norway, Krampus in Germany and Austria, and many more.

Now, the question you may be asking is where do museums factor into all of this? Should museums try to talk about this particular aspect of the holidays? Well, given that I have written this blog post, I’m sure my opinion is clear. This is a great opportunity for us to discuss some really cool concepts – including the practice of ethnography (how were these seemingly static ancient folk beliefs systematically collected) and religious syncretism. The great news is that some museums do already touch on Scary Christmas.

Source.

This topic has been taken up by Canadian museums such as Eldon House, which hosted an exhibition on the topic, the Dalnavert Museum, and the Oshawa Museum, which annually hosts a holiday event featuring the sharing of ghost stories. In pre-pandemic days, Lamplight was a truly magical event and it was always exciting to see the historical houses lit up at night; these days it takes the form of a whimsical short film. These museums all follow the Victorian tradition of the “witching time for Story-telling,” as Dickens put it in one of his many ghostly tales. 

Knowing all of this, Tim Burton’s 1993 film seems all the more clever as a way for us to look closer at this apparent mixing of traditions, or, rather, the reimagining of old customs. It also makes me wish I could have seen this 

2019-20 exhibit at Las Vegas’ Neon Museum or this one running through the new year at the Hilbert Museum in California – both featuring some of Burton’s artwork, including from The Nightmare Before Christmas!

In any case, I think museums, where the past also meets the present, are the perfect places from which to consider these “unbaptized days” and other similar holiday traditions which see the blurring of our realm and that of the ‘otherworldly’ one. As the Dalnavert Museum summed up so beautifully, this season tends to capture “memories, customs, and traces of the past – our personal pasts, our cultural pasts, and our historical pasts, all of which fuse to form the traditions that mean Christmas to each of us.” No matter what you’re celebrating, even just the break from classes, I hope it’s holly, jolly, and… spooky. 

Source.

THERE'S SOMETHING STRANGE IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD: HAUNTED WALKS, DARK TOURISM & LOCAL HERITAGE

 Heritage Moments | Madison Carmichael 

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In 2014, Victoria, B.C. proudly branded itself as British Columbia’s “most haunted city.” At a cursory glance, this seems a strange way to promote tourism; but in 2014, being spooky was all the rage, as evidenced by Tristin Hopper’s article for the National Post, wherein he declared that a haunting could make the difference between profit and bankruptcy. According to John Adams, founder of Victoria’s Ghostly Walks, the public’s taste for the paranormal saw a marked increase in 2014. Not only were places willing to admit that they were haunted; they promoted it. Ghost walk tours are now offered in virtually every Canadian city.

These walking tours are wildly popular. The Haunted Walk, a tour agency operated out of Ottawa, Kingston, and Toronto, has hosted over 400,000 guests on such tours (including yours truly!) over the past 25 years. Put “ghost walk” into Google, and you’ll be bombarded with results announcing an astronomical number of such tours all across the country, regardless of locale. 

The allure of ghost tourism has, of course, found its way to heritage work. As a result, chilling walking experiences such as those offered by The Haunted Walk bolster local heritage work through the addition of ghost stories, paranormal intrigue, and even the outright macabre to the local, historical repertoire, attracting visitors and raising much needed revenue that supports heritage work.

Guide for A Haunted Walk in Ottawa Jail. You see the spook? (Source)

Beatriz Rodriguez Garcia describes ghost tourism as the visitation of places associated with ghosts, such as cemeteries, haunted houses, castles, and historic towns. Ghost tours are structured very similarly to your run-of-the-mill tour, but they are done so in direct contrast to such tours, offering participants an alternative experience —namely, a spooky one. 

While these tours vary immensely based on location, they all have a similar structure: lantern-wielding guides lead participants along a route through a city or site, stopping along the way to tell ghostly or else esoteric stories at important landmarks. Most tours occur around evening time, as the encroaching darkness adds a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to the spooky stories. These tour routes depend on the stories they tell — some lean on existing ghost stories, but many organizations will do additional, archival research — as the tours map either directly onto the places where the events took place or nearby.

Edinburgh is colloquially considered one of the world's most haunted cities, and it certainly has a dark history to back that up. (Source)

Ghost tourism is oft regarded as a lighter form of dark tourism, which is most simply defined as tourism associated with sites of death, disaster, or difficult heritage. Dark tourism is a recent entry to the heritage industry and a highly contested one at that. Ghost tourism sits rather awkwardly in dark tourism literature, as most scholars consider it a frivolous and superficial form of entertainment. The “frivolity,” as it were, derives from the fact that ghost tours focus mostly on the paranormal, and they tend to mix entertainment, fun, and education in with the spooks. On the whole, ghost tours are an emerging, geographically dynamic form of dark tourism. 

But as with most aspects of dark tourism, there is an ethical dimension to consider. In her study of ghost tours in Edinburgh and Toledo, respectively, established and emergent destinations for ghost tourism, Rodriguez Garcia surmised that both tour companies considered their tours in the same light as any other tourist activity: an indirect means to preserve local history and, since their sites were privy to greater atrocities and more macabre stories, a means to promote awareness that would prevent such events from occurring again. The ethical issue arises from charging ticket prices for the telling of “horrible and macabre stories” in these cities, as their tours were largely related to tales of human. However, she does admit that ghost tours are mainly entertaining and perhaps a dash educational, and so as with any other service commodity, there is a fee.

This particular haunted, historic inn caught my eye on my Haunted Walk. Every time I walked past this inn after I took that tour, I thought about the ghost. (Courtesy of Madison Carmichael)

Last summer, on a lark, I went on a Haunted Walk. This was deeply uncharacteristic of me, as my threshold for ghost stories has always been very, very low. But I was a tour guide in Kingston, Ontario, at the time, so while I knew a great deal of the local history already, I was intrigued by the idea of rereading streets I’d walked for five years previously in the context of ghosts. 

This is the strength of ghost tours; they are just as enticing to locals as they are to tourists. Locals map their daily lives onto particular routes and specific landmarks. In contrast to tourists, they have an intensely personal sense of geography of a given space. My haunted walk cast all the gorgeous little historic inns near my neighbourhood in Kingston, many of which I walked by to get coffee or go to work, in a truly creepy light. 

It’s been argued that the benefits of bringing paranormal tourism to historic sites are many. Local ghost tour groups interpret historic sites as well as their ghosts, and in the process, they teach visitors about their historical significance. The intermingling of the haunted and the historical allows for ghostly reinterpretation of the site and renewed interest in its history for demographics new and old, bolstering local heritage in the process. 

The Haunted Walk proclaims that “You’ll never look at the city the same way again!” They certainly refer to the inherent spook of the tours, but ghost tours do add new context to the ordinary. And whether you believe in ghosts or not, there’s always a bit of history mixed in there to make up the difference. 

COMBINING HORROR, HISTORY AND HALLOWEEN

Program Reviews | Samantha Kilpatrick

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In search of a Halloween event to review for this column, I finally decided on 'Legends of Horror: 'Vampire Circus', presented by Captain Morgan at Casa Loma'.

While trying to summarize the experience, I kept coming back to my sister's review of Mamma Mia 2: "Do you want to see a movie musical titled 'Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again?' If yes, you're going to enjoy this movie."

Similarly: Do you want to go to 'Legends Of Horror: Vampire Circus, Presented By Captain Morgan at Casa Loma?' Do you want a fun horror romp without much history or fact? If you do, you will enjoy the experience.

My My, How Can I Resist Ya. Entrance to the experience.
Photo courtesy of Samantha Kilpatrick. 

This experience was void of guides, in cloaks and hushed voices, speaking of grisly murders a hundred years past. It was not a tale of cold spots, and mysterious apparitions, and small objects going missing. It was a carnival haunted house. One of the groups in front of us included a man who brought a rubber chicken with us, who would squeak it at his companions when they were being 'chicken'. This set the mood. It's a fun group event; horror, like joy or a bottle of wine, is best enjoyed shared.

The horror maze itself was reasonably by-the-book. The maze included flashing lights, smoke machines, actors jumping out of bushes and from behind corners, hanging 'bodies' to push past, and animatronics rigged up to motion detectors to lunge at the visitor on their way past. Themes ranged all over the place. If you want a smorgasbord of horror, with everything from Phantom of The Opera, to werewolves, to cannibals, ghosts and demon children, Legends of Horror has you covered.

One of the performers in the haunted house, juggling flaming devil's sticks. Impressive, absolutely. Scary? The jury's out. Photo courtesy of Samantha Kilpatrick.  

There were also many acrobats, I'm entirely not sure why. They veered mostly away from the 'scary circus' theme, but still included a number of incredible acrobats, some on aerial devices and trampolines. I think I spotted only one murderous clown and no allusions to any of the other traditional horror elements of the circus. The acrobats felt included to simply bring credence to the subtitle of the show this year; contributing to the production value, but certainly not the fright of the experience.

After about forty-five minutes walking through various horror experiences in the grounds, you find yourself actually inside Casa Loma for the first time. Your first glimpse inside the castle itself is a bar.

In case you wanted a fortifying shot or a meal before going on to the rest of the Legends of Horror, or just to disrupt the mood. Photo courtesy of Samantha Kilpatrick. 

The second half of Legends of Horror takes place in Casa Loma rather than just on the grounds, and it is the piece of the experience I most wanted to talk about. The second half of the trip attempts to tap into the actual history of Toronto with the exact same level of tact and production value that the rest of the house had displayed.

That is to say: costumed actors, smoke machines, special effects and jump scares, set against the backdrop of actual historical events. It was so dark in the tunnel it was difficult to take photos, so please bear with me a moment while I talk about the exhibition on display, and how it was used in Legends of Horror.

"Toronto, The Dark Side" a permanent exhibition in the Casa Loma tunnels. The tunnel is covered on both sides by photos from The Toronto Archives, blown up and sorted into different 'Dark Sides' of Toronto's past, including fires, the depression, and Toronto's first plane crash Most notably was the photos titled 'the Plague Years', which were photos of real children treated for unnamed diseases at Sick Kids Hospital- given that the photos in question were from the 1920s, typhus? Cholera? Smallpox? Just getting vaccines?

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A post shared by Legends Of Horror (@legends_ofhorror) on Oct 31, 2018 at 4:53pm PDT

Legends of Horror's Instagram post about Casa Loma, featuring their intervention in the tunnels. 

Regardless of the facts of the photos, they served as the backdrop to the same sorts of effects that the rest of the experience featured. The photo was framed by a 'cage' of plastic bars, convincingly rusted. Between the photo and the viewer, was a bloody fake body on a bed which lurched at the visitor, and a mannequin of a girl in a bloody, old-timey dress covered in sores was lit by a menacing red light. Again, I emphasize: the backdrop was a blown-up black and white photo of a children's ward at a hospital circa 1920, and the foreground was 'look at how scary sick children are.'

Photos of the aftermath of the fires in Toronto's history were subject to their own genre-appropriate treatment. Red and yellow lights, crackling sound effects, a full-body replica of a man with horrible burns.

I spent the first half of the experience wishing that the Legends of Horror would engage more with the actual history of Casa Loma, and the second half deeply regretting my wish. I'm not sure if there is a tasteful way to plug into actual lived tragedy for the purposes of provoking titillating and exciting horror for the viewer, but I am certain that this isn't it. Perhaps it's unfair to demand a haunted house experience treat historical figures with the respect they deserve. In that case, I would vastly prefer they hung sheets over the photos and had an actor with a chainsaw chase us through the tunnel. I think this is the first time that I have found historical context detract from an experience rather than add to it.

Legends of Horror was exactly as advertised: a high quality, high budget, horror experience. But it certainly wasn't a historic experience, and it didn't tap into any ghosts that may have been haunting the premises. And it was weakest when it was trying to be.

IF YOU HAUNT IT, THEY WILL COME

THROWBACK THURSDAY

BY: JOCELYN KENT

As anyone working with the public in a historic house will tell you, it is always a good idea to have a juicy ghost story up your sleeve. Hint that your site is haunted by an established figure in the historical record and, BAM, instant intrigue!

While it may come as no surprise that ghosts and heritage go so well together, they do so because both are based on modern attempts to understand the past. Since our knowledge of the past is necessarily partial, there is room for other interpretations, including the existence of ghosts.

The popularity of supernatural claims irks some cultural institutions though, especially when these claims come into conflict with historical evidence. On the other hand, others freely participate in “ghost tourism” by hosting macabre walking tours and ghoulish live performances.

Getting in touch with haunted heritage. Source.

If being a ‘ghost tourist’ appeals to you, join MUSSA in free haunted walking tour of Old Toronto on Saturday, October 31 at 2pm! Click here for more information.

For this edition of Throwback Thursday, we look back at the haunted heritage of three of Toronto's museums.

1. ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM

The ROM's east-facing facade built in 1933. Source. 

As Canada’s largest public largest museum, it seems only fitting that two different ghosts should haunt the ROM. One is credited to be the spectre of its first director of archaeology, Charles Currelly, who in his day brought in substantial collections to the museum. Although he retired in 1946, some say he never left with his ghost continuing to wander the first floor East Asian collections. The other ghost is that of a little girl aptly named Celeste who is said to sit and watch the shows in the now closed McLaughin Planetarium.

2. FORT YORK NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

Delaying the American advance on Fort York. Source.

Having witnessed to so much death at the Battle of York in 1813 alone, it’s not out of the question to imagine young militiamen haunting the fort. In addition, one the site’s more popular sightings, is that of a woman who strolls about the centre blockhouse and officer’s quarters.

3. COLBORNE LODGE

A spooky view of one of Toronto's most significant historic homes. Source.

The home of John and Jemina Howard, the original owners of High Park, is said to be haunted by the ghost of Jemina, who passed away in 1877 after a long battle with breast cancer and mental illness. In a documented case in 1969, a police officer was patrolling the park when he saw a woman through the building's second story window. After investigating, no one was found in the house. The second floor - where Jemina was literally locked up in her bedroom in the years preceding her death - is still reported to give people the creeps.

Ever experience something eerie at a museum where you worked? 

Sources Consulted:

http://www.torontoghosts.org/

http://www.insidetoronto.com/news-story/4176168-history-of-hauntings-at-colborne-lodge-resurface-as-halloween-nears/

Boyle, T. (2013). Haunted Ontario: Ghostly Inns, Hotels, and Other Eerie Places. Toronto: Dundurn.

Hanks, M. (2015). Haunted Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Ghost Tourism, Populism, and the Past. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press