By David F. Rooney
Whether you’re sitting around a fire or are curled up under the covers there’s nothing quite like a ghost story. They intrigue us and send a little of frisson of fear shivering up the backs of our necks.
How much do you dare read before you go to sleep? Do you even dare go to sleep? Or do you tremble when you hear something breathing ever so lightly under your bed?
I love good ghost stories, especially true tales about places I pass every day… or night.
Revelstoke has its share of haunted houses. And local boy Brennan Storr knows them intimately, having collected a spine-tingling selection of supernatural tales of terror, in his just-released book A Strange Little Place: The Hauntings and Unexplained Events of One Small Town.
This an excellent read that introduces the reader to a Revelstoke where the paranormal lurks just beneath the thin skin of its everyday exterior.
Storr has spread his stories across 255 pages organized into 33 chapters
“The stories told here all make sense within established paranormal frameworks; that is to say, all of the activity here has, in one way or another, been reported by reputable sources in other places,” Storr says in the introduction to A Strange Little Place. “I have done my best to weed out the jumped-up horror-movie nonsense some people tried to pass off as their experiences.
But why would the paranormal affect this particular corner of the world? It is a common theory
among paranormal researchers that some places are permanently more ‘active’ than others, though no one can quite agree on why. Some believe the answers lie within the bedrock of haunted locations, that certain stones record emotional energy, energy expended by the generations of people living above it and essentially ‘play it back’ to those sensitive enough to see3. Others think there are invisible nexus points between thus and other dim4nsions and it is the comings and goings of inter-dimensional beings that make up what we call paranormal activity.
“Personally, I have no idea what makes a place haunted, though in the chapters to come I make one or two guesses. But whatever it is, Revelstoke has it, in sometimes terrifying abundance. After reading this book, I suspect you will agree.”
This is an excellent read about eerie local phenomena that I doubt you’ll be able to resist. And if you do hear something scraping and muttering beneath your bed — don’t look!
A Strange Little Place: The Hauntings and Unexplained Events of One Small Town, by Brennan Storr, published by Llewellyn Publications, 255 pages, $18.50
You can find A Strange Little Place: The Hauntings and Unexplained Events of One Small Town at Grizzly Books. Author Brennan Storr will be at the shop on Saturday, August 27, for a book signing starting at 11 am.
