Grim Undertakings At Old Anglican Church
by Lois Legge
A group of Halifax shadow chasers wander around an old church and hope to make contact with Dean Llwyd.
The Cathedral Church Of All Saints
Halifax, Novia Scotia, Canada
People usually come here because of the Holy Ghost. Tonight, they’re just looking for ghosts. And the atmosphere is seriously spooky even though the spirit of the hour is nowhere to be seen.
Rob Fader and his fellow paranormal investigators have set up video cameras, voice recorders and electromagnetic meters inside the Cathedral Church of All Saints, looking for an apparition that’s said to haunt the halls, altar and pulpit of this nearly 100-year-old Anglican church in the heart of Halifax.
It’s the latest in a long line of ghostly quests for these amateur sleuths, members of Grim Undertakings, a group Fader founded in 2002 after coming across other ghost research sites on the Internet. Since then, they’ve checked out supposedly haunted houses, haunted restaurants, a haunted island and now this haunted church.
Actually Fader, his fiancée Alison Knott and fellow Grim Undertakers Matthew Hughson and Dwayne MacLeod have camped out here before (it’s a first for newcomer Rebecca Young), hoping to encounter the spectre of the Very Rev. John P. D. Llwyd, Anglican dean of Nova Scotia from 1913 to 1933.
Since he died (in 1933 or 1934), the story goes, he’s been seen and heard inside the church multiple times by everyone from ministers to congregation members. One former minister reportedly looked him in the eye before the dead dean vanished.
The members of Grim Undertakings think they’ve heard, though not seen, the late dean, whose black and white portrait hangs in a hall in another building, connected to the church by a breezeway. The dean’s arms are folded, his eyes downcast in a melancholy expression.
Hughson, a heritage interpreter at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, recalls sitting in one of the pews last summer, listening to rain pounding on the majestically arched stained glass windows and waiting for the priest to show. He didn’t.
But at one point, the 23-year-old recalls, a ray of light streaked from the pulpit and danced across the church’s high altar. MacLeod saw it too. And some of the others speak of a crashing noise emanating from the altar, followed by what sounded like running footsteps — caught on tape.
But while group members have opened their minds to this and other ghostly phenomena, they stress that they don’t jump easily to such conclusions, always trying to find alternative explanations for what they’ve seen or heard.
It’s easy, though, to see how imagination takes flight in a place like this, on nights like this, with people who talk of the dead and their earthly visits.
Fader starts the still, humid July evening by taking a visitor through the cavernous, pitch-black basement. His tiny flashlight partially illuminates the musty, cobweb-laced maze as the floor boards above creak with age. Or is it something else?
“I’ve never heard of anything happening here,” he says reassuringly, his steps crunching on the concrete, dirt and crushed rock floor, his light glancing off old pews and dusty mist in the air. “Where it’s dark, it’s creepier. . . . Now, I mean, I don’t mind because, of course, if something did come out at us down here, it would be scary, but we shouldn’t run because it’s very rare that a ghost will actually harm you. It happens but it doesn’t happen a lot. I mean they’ve been known to throw things at people and that sort of thing.”
OK. Probably best to move on.
And he does, trying one door that won’t open, walking through others leading to storage rooms or creepy corners in the bowels of the church. At one point, a loud bang shatters the quiet.
Fader doesn’t flinch. “That was probably nothing,” he says. “We can test that later.” And he does, on the way out and up, concluding the noise came from a door — that he’d opened before — slow to slam.
Although it smells much better, things are just as eerie in the church’s sanctuary, especially as the light of early evening fades. Fader and friends become shadows in the twilight, and darkness drains the stained glass windows of their iridescence.
The researchers — not ghostbusters they stress — wait and watch. And when waiting and watching, things otherwise overlooked sometimes become clearer — like a spotlight on the high altar, which suddenly flashes on.
“It’s flickering” says Hughson, who became fascinated by ghosts when his mother, then a social studies teacher, brought home a National Film Board production called Bluenose Ghosts. “It flickered for a bit,” adds Young, whose interest also grew out of spooky stories heard in childhood.
The members discuss possibilities. Perhaps the lights are on a timer. Perhaps, they’re motion-activated. A timer wouldn’t make sense, a puzzled Young reasons, since when Fader flicked off the switch earlier, both spotlights on the altar went out at the same time. For now, the light remains an unsolved mystery.
And the group prepares for a more direct way to draw out the ghost of Dean Llwyd, who Fader says was hit in the leg by a car just outside the church and died of blood clots a couple of months later.
Knott — “here because I love the man, and the man loves ghosts” — heads toward a piano at the back of the church, where she will play, again and again, the old hymn Come Down, O Love Divine.
“For some reason, when this hymn has been played in the past, things happen,” Fader had explained earlier. “The collection plates, the big brass ones, have seemed to shake, not from a tremor, just actually by themselves. There was an experience . . . where one of the organists was playing it . . . and they watched Dean Llwyd come out of the vestry.”
Tonight, the ghost will need more encouragement.
Fader, a hotel concierge who says his quest for the truth keeps his hobby going, climbs the steps to the pulpit, where a tape recorder has been strategically placed.
“Dean Llwyd, are you here with us tonight?” he says into the darkness. “If you are, could you please give us some sign of your presence?”
Silence.
“Dean Llwyd, could you knock on something like this?” he continues, rapping the pulpit “So we know that it’s you.”
“Dean Llwyd, could you maybe touch one of us so that we know that you’re here?”
All is (almost) quiet.
As these and other questions echo through the sanctuary, tapping sounds — soft as someone tiptoeing in slippers — come from the church’s locked front door. At first, only a couple of people notice. But soon, everyone can hear the sounds. Hughson approaches with a flashlight, sliding his hand along the bottom and sides of the door, checking for wind that might be responsible for the whispery ticks.
But the air is still and soon, a large white tarp next to the door draws interest. Perhaps the plastic is just settling, creating the spine-tingling wisps of sound. But one wonders too, just what lies beneath that ghostly covering.
Fader checks — just a few chairs and a prayer table.
The researchers soon recheck all their equipment and do what they often do on such outings — leave the room for an hour and let the various recorders record. Sometimes, they say, voices or noises turn up on tape when people aren’t there or even when they are — what they call “electronic voice phenomenon” — sounds audible only on electronic equipment.
Fader and the others have heard such disembodied voices — a whispered word like “Yes” or “Wow” on Devil’s Island for instance — while going through hours of tape, which they each analyze independently before sharing their observations so as not to influence one another.
They document their investigations on http://www.grimundertakings.ca
Dwayne MacLeod, who also takes hundreds of still photographs during the group’s adventures, is intrigued by such findings though not convinced of anything otherworldly. Short of a ghost reaching out and touching him, MacLeod says, he’ll remain the group’s biggest skeptic.
“I’m waiting for evidence for myself. I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts but I don’t not believe in them,” he says.
But for now, “hanging out in creepy old buildings — it’s fun.”
