Sitting inside a pitch-black empty theatre, Leah McLean calls out into the darkness.
“Is there someone here trying to communicate with us?” she asks. “If you’re here, do whatever you can to let us know.”
A pregnant silence follows until the faintest thump interrupts it.
“Did somebody just move? Did you hear that?” McLean reacts.
It’s someone working upstairs, mostly likely.
But maybe not.
Presentation House Theatre is one of the oldest buildings on the North Shore and, according to the Vancouver Paranormal Society, likely one of the most haunted.
Researchers from the society are preparing to share the findings of their investigation into spirits who still dwell in the theatre at a one-night show scheduled for Oct. 29.
Ghosts in the machines
Searching for proof of an afterlife here on earth doesn’t involve a séance or a Ouija board. Instead, paranormal researchers prefer more sophisticated tools – night vision cameras and infrared spectrum lighting, proximity sensors that emit light if something interrupts the electromagnetic field around them, devices that scan radio frequencies for unexplainable interruptions.
The most important piece of equipment though is a simple digital voice recorder that the investigators say is capable of capturing voices that our naked ears can’t hear. More than passively listening or scanning for activity on their instruments, investigators like McLean speak out to the seemingly empty room and find answers only when they’re analyzing their recordings at home.
All of it is based on the theory that, even after a person has died, there remains a spirit that is tangible.
“We’re all made up of energy, right? And that energy of ours is housed in our body, but when we no longer have a body, we’re in a spirit form. We’re just energy,” Kelly Berge, president of the Vancouver Paranormal Society, explains.
Rather than attributing every flicker of light or bit of static on the radio to a presence from beyond the dead, they first look for corroborating evidence from their other instruments.
Other times – rarely – our own senses are enough to do the job.
Berge said she’s always felt since she was just a kiddo that there was something more beyond the corporeal. As she was peering into her closet one night when she was about 10, she got all the proof she’d need for a lifetime.
“I saw a floating opalescent skull. You know when you do that thing where you rub your eyes and you look again, and it was still there,” she said. “I never slept in that room again, but that experience stuck with me.… I always knew I wanted to figure this out.”
Typically, at least three or four of the non-profit’s team of 11 volunteers are out every weekend carrying out investigations on behalf of clients who’ve requested them. Importantly, the team never charges a fee of any kind, Berge notes.
Most of their work comes from residential homeowners who want to know what’s making things go bump in the night, but it’s the public buildings with long histories that offer the most promise.
Thanks to rumours already swirling about it in the community, Presentation House Theatre had long been near the top of the list of places that the team was itching to get into, Berge said.
Presentation House Theatre’s haunting inhabitants
The building itself dates back to 1902 when it was built as a school. It later became the City of North Vancouver’s municipal hall, a police station and jail, and offices for the city’s engineering department before finally becoming a museum and arts facility in the 1970s.
Araceli Ferrara, marketing co-ordinator for Presentation House Theatre, said she began hearing about the building’s ghosts on her first day of work, and she’s tagged along with the investigators on all of their visits.
Actors have reported feeling a strange presence while backstage. One of the technicians has heard the sound of footsteps sprinting toward him while working alone late at night. Once, after one of his gloves went missing on the job, it turned up the next day folded neatly in the middle of the set. And everyone gets “bad vibes” from the third floor, Ferrara said.
“I’ve definitely seen a few things,” she said. “I’ve never been here past midnight. I don’t want to be.”
Investigators have made five official visits to the theatre since 2023, with more planned in the future.
“Every time we come, we get more and more confirmation that there’s something here. So, we just keep coming back,” said McLean, one of the Paranormal Society’s volunteers.
Until the recent investigations, the most authoritative source on paranormal activity at Presentation House Theatre was the word of Cecil Halsey, the building’s caretaker for more than 25 years. Halsey, who sometimes slept in the 122-year-old building, was well acquainted with Frank, one of the most frequently encountered spirits there.
Berge said they found plenty of evidence that Frank is still there and that he is “kind of inappropriate.”
He likes whiskey, they learned, and among the phrases they captured him saying were “bad and beautiful” and “shut up, bitch.”
“People are usually the same personality in death and spirit as they were in life,” she said. “He’s just being a jerk. He’s being who he was in real life, but he’s not going to harm me. He’s not going to harm the staff.… It’s not like those TV shows where everything is demonic and all that. That’s extremely, extremely rare.”
That doesn’t mean though that wayward spirits can’t still send a chill down the spine of even a seasoned paranormal researcher. On their last visit to Presentation House, the batteries in the team’s cameras all died simultaneously and unexpectedly. Moments later, Berge saw an apparition in the very seats where Presentation House’s guests pay to sit.
“I saw a black shadow figure, very stark, crouch down and lean into the aisle chair, and then it was gone,” she said. “That was something that shouldn’t have been there.”
There’s also another spirit of a younger girl on the third floor, according to the team. And it appears as though there's someone new to keep Frank company: the old caretaker Halsey died in 2019, but he identified himself, albeit faintly, to the investigators at the theatre, Berge said.
I ain’t afraid of no ghosts
Whether it’s in a home or place of business, more than anything after an investigation, clients get some peace of mind, Berge said.
“Peace of mind, and (knowing) they’re not crazy. They weren’t making this up in their heads. They did experience these things, as did we, and that is a huge thing,” she said.
Knowing you have a spirit present is one thing. But ghosts, she added, are not in need of "busting." Instead, some frank communication (no pun intended) is probably what’s most needed – letting the spirit know that the living inhabitants of today have a right to be there and that everyone can coexist harmoniously.
“We’re going to give the client a tool to be strong and to take their power back in their home. And quite often, when that happens and they’re feeling more settled, the activity tends to settle down a bit,” she said. “One of the things I always say is ghosts are people too. They’re just further along in the journey than we are, but we’re going to be there someday, right? So we have to come with the utmost respect.”
Do you believe?
Running into skeptics comes with the territory, and Berge acknowledges none of the evidence they’ve collected will be enough to meet some people’s standards. But, she added, those who are committed to their closed-mindedness are robbing themselves of the possibility that there may be something else “out there.”
“You can’t certify it as haunted, because we’re dealing with a science that isn’t recognized by mainstream science, right? So the jury’s still out, because there is no definable proof,” she said. “We’ve experienced it over hundreds of investigations, but they still just make up their mind so they’re not open. And that’s unfortunate.”
And more people are closer to believing in the paranormal than might be prepared to admit, suggests Mike O’Dell, another of the Vancouver Paranormal Society's volunteer investigators.
“I know there’s skeptics out there – I’m one of them – and people who don’t believe in this, and that’s fine.… But for me, it’s when I can’t apply logic or science to something that makes me go ‘hmm,’ and if I can’t explain something, then that’s the definition of paranormal,” he said. “I would say 99 per cent of the time, it’s just an entity or an energy that wants to be acknowledged, wants to communicate, wants to say ‘Hi,’ and just wants to live in peace.”
This is a busy time of year for the Vancouver Paranormal Society. Around Halloween, people are more willing to explore the big questions that ghost stories pose about the nature of mortality. Or they just want to have some good, clean seasonal fun and have the wits scared out of them in the process.
“People, especially around Halloween, are very interested in the paranormal. They want to know if it’s true or not. They want to have that little bit of a thrill and some people may have had their own experiences,” Berge said.
Because of that innate desire to know the unknowable, Ferrara said she expects the Haunted Histories show to be a hit for the true believers, the skeptics and those caught between worlds.
“I think there’s a lot of interest in death. I know it’s macabre, but, because there’s a stigma around it, we don’t talk about it as openly,” she said. “It’s very interesting to delve into something that you don’t know.”
Haunted Histories: An Evening with the Vancouver Paranormal Society runs Tuesday, Oct. 29, 7:30 p.m. at Presentation House Theatre. Tickets are available at phtheatre.org/box-office/.
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- video by Alanna Kelly, Glacier Media
