Contemplating the Orb
My personal beliefs in ghosts and spirits are spotty, at best. I've had some experiences I certainly can't explain (I don't remember if I've ever told the cat story here, but if not, I need to make a point of it sometime), but I've also stayed at two of the most haunted hotels in North America (the Cherry Bank Inn in Victoria, now demolished, sadly, and the Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, full story still pending my being able to write it up), and despite both of them being undeniably creepy places to wander through in the dark to the washroom in the middle of the night, in neither of them did I experience anything objectively out of the ordinary.
Either way, I still keep an open mind about it, but there are a few words which always set my paranormal scepticism on full power:
"There's an orb in this photograph."
Nevermind that a discoloured circle on a photograph can be caused by so many normal things that a paranormal explanation is not necessary, but if a ghost is going to make its presence known to people, disguising itself as lens flare seems to be a pretty lame way to do it.
That was, until last night. I think. I'm still trying to sort this out, you see.
My wife and I went on the Haunted Burnaby tour, put on by the Burnaby Village Museum.
The tour was great — comprising just as much interesting normal Burnaby history as stories of the paranormal, but that's certainly okay with me. The tour included visits to:
The Anderson House
Altnadene, also known as The Mathers House
Bell's Dry Goods Store
The Johnson House
. . . and, most significantly,
Fairacres Mansion, otherwise known as the Burnaby Art Gallery, or The Ceperley House
It was in the Ceperley House, on the unrenovated (and usually closed to the public) third floor where things got . . . interesting.
The house itself was built by Henry and Grace Ceperley in 1911. After Grace's death, it also served as a chapel and lodging for Benedictine monks, the headquarters of a bizarre religious cult, the house for a short-lived illegal SFU fraternity, and finally as the Burnaby Art Gallery.
The last time the house's third floor was used for anything productive was in 1965, when it served as living quarters for the fraternity members, and the walls still bear the garish 1960s paint jobs and some creative artwork from those residents. There's no working lighting up there, and most of the doors and other fixtures are missing. Many of the rooms have various litter scattered about. It's a pretty rough place despite the house's beautiful exterior and renovated lower floors.
The tour guide let the group roam around on the floor more or less unsupervised, with the one warning that a couple of rooms had unsafe floors, so not to enter any which had barriers across the doorways.
It was interesting just looking around, until one of the tour participants in a nearby room to me shouted, "There's something here!" My curiosity got the better of me, and I ran into the room to find her and her boyfriend, each with a small digital camera, rapidly taking photos, one after another, of an empty room.
But on the preview screens of the digital cameras, both of which I could see at the same time as I stood behind them, the room was not quite empty. On the image on both cameras, the far corner of the room included a perfectly round, uniformly silver coloured circle floating in midair.
And, with each successive photo, the orb was moving, at about a foot per second, to our right, until about 30 seconds later, after the orb reached the wall along our right side, when it disappeared completely.
I didn't know what to make of it. And I know what you're thinking, because if you'd told me this same story, I'd have a dozen different questions:
1. You had flashlights, right? Wasn't it one of the flashlight beams on the wall? — The flashlight circles were visible as well, but were very different. The orb circle was much smaller in diameter than the flashlight circles on the wall, much more uniform (no bulb anomaly in the middle), and sort of . . . opaque. You couldn't really see the wall through it.
2. Well maybe it was lens flare from a flashlight beam or flash reflection shining into the cameras? — I would think this was the most likely explanation, except it was two cameras, about three feet apart, and the orb was in the same location in both of them.
3. What about a speck of dust or a problem with the lens? — Again two different cameras, identical anomaly. It was very weird, I tell you.
4. An infrared light beam or something like that, which the cameras were picking up? — Maybe, but most infrared sources would have been drowned out by the flash, and again wouldn't have appeared opaque.
The other oddity which I and others experienced directly was an invisible ball of superchilled air (probably 10C lower than the ambient air temperature) which seemed to be making its way up and down the hallway. The first time I felt it, I assumed it was a draft (a couple of the rooms with windows had noticeable chilly drafts), until a second time when a girl just down the hall commented on it just after it had passed me. I felt it probably three more times after that, and what was odd was that, unlike a draft, which tends to move like an uninterrupted stream of cool air, moving as part of a convection current, this was an isolated ball of chilled air, with plenty of warm air on all sides of it, and no sense of an current. Just a very still, cold, clammy moving spot.
At any rate, I'm still convinced that 99% of other so-called "orbs" are simply lens flare or reflections, but I'm not sure what was happening here. I do know that if we take the tour again next year, I'm bringing my camera this time....
Either way, I still keep an open mind about it, but there are a few words which always set my paranormal scepticism on full power:
"There's an orb in this photograph."
Nevermind that a discoloured circle on a photograph can be caused by so many normal things that a paranormal explanation is not necessary, but if a ghost is going to make its presence known to people, disguising itself as lens flare seems to be a pretty lame way to do it.
That was, until last night. I think. I'm still trying to sort this out, you see.
My wife and I went on the Haunted Burnaby tour, put on by the Burnaby Village Museum.
The tour was great — comprising just as much interesting normal Burnaby history as stories of the paranormal, but that's certainly okay with me. The tour included visits to:
. . . and, most significantly,
It was in the Ceperley House, on the unrenovated (and usually closed to the public) third floor where things got . . . interesting.
The house itself was built by Henry and Grace Ceperley in 1911. After Grace's death, it also served as a chapel and lodging for Benedictine monks, the headquarters of a bizarre religious cult, the house for a short-lived illegal SFU fraternity, and finally as the Burnaby Art Gallery.
The last time the house's third floor was used for anything productive was in 1965, when it served as living quarters for the fraternity members, and the walls still bear the garish 1960s paint jobs and some creative artwork from those residents. There's no working lighting up there, and most of the doors and other fixtures are missing. Many of the rooms have various litter scattered about. It's a pretty rough place despite the house's beautiful exterior and renovated lower floors.
The tour guide let the group roam around on the floor more or less unsupervised, with the one warning that a couple of rooms had unsafe floors, so not to enter any which had barriers across the doorways.
It was interesting just looking around, until one of the tour participants in a nearby room to me shouted, "There's something here!" My curiosity got the better of me, and I ran into the room to find her and her boyfriend, each with a small digital camera, rapidly taking photos, one after another, of an empty room.
But on the preview screens of the digital cameras, both of which I could see at the same time as I stood behind them, the room was not quite empty. On the image on both cameras, the far corner of the room included a perfectly round, uniformly silver coloured circle floating in midair.
And, with each successive photo, the orb was moving, at about a foot per second, to our right, until about 30 seconds later, after the orb reached the wall along our right side, when it disappeared completely.
I didn't know what to make of it. And I know what you're thinking, because if you'd told me this same story, I'd have a dozen different questions:
1. You had flashlights, right? Wasn't it one of the flashlight beams on the wall? — The flashlight circles were visible as well, but were very different. The orb circle was much smaller in diameter than the flashlight circles on the wall, much more uniform (no bulb anomaly in the middle), and sort of . . . opaque. You couldn't really see the wall through it.
2. Well maybe it was lens flare from a flashlight beam or flash reflection shining into the cameras? — I would think this was the most likely explanation, except it was two cameras, about three feet apart, and the orb was in the same location in both of them.
3. What about a speck of dust or a problem with the lens? — Again two different cameras, identical anomaly. It was very weird, I tell you.
4. An infrared light beam or something like that, which the cameras were picking up? — Maybe, but most infrared sources would have been drowned out by the flash, and again wouldn't have appeared opaque.
The other oddity which I and others experienced directly was an invisible ball of superchilled air (probably 10C lower than the ambient air temperature) which seemed to be making its way up and down the hallway. The first time I felt it, I assumed it was a draft (a couple of the rooms with windows had noticeable chilly drafts), until a second time when a girl just down the hall commented on it just after it had passed me. I felt it probably three more times after that, and what was odd was that, unlike a draft, which tends to move like an uninterrupted stream of cool air, moving as part of a convection current, this was an isolated ball of chilled air, with plenty of warm air on all sides of it, and no sense of an current. Just a very still, cold, clammy moving spot.
At any rate, I'm still convinced that 99% of other so-called "orbs" are simply lens flare or reflections, but I'm not sure what was happening here. I do know that if we take the tour again next year, I'm bringing my camera this time....