B.C. has its fair share of spooky locations and stories.<\/p>\n
Every community has its own spooky stories to entertain the public during Halloween. Words of those who have seen them, rumors and legends add more flavour to the holiday.<\/p>\n
Black Press Media spoke to Nicole Kilburn, an anthropology instructor at Victoria’s Camosun College to look at these ghost stories from a cultural prespective.<\/p>\n
“Let’s call them ‘restless spirits,’” Kilburn said.<\/p>\n
“In a North American cultural context, we are taught to not believe in ghosts and they are bad. But, they are accommodated in lots of different cultural contexts and are often associated with somebody experiencing what could be called ‘a bad death.’”<\/p>\n
A bad death, as Kilburn explains, could include dying young or in a violent fashion.<\/p>\n
“Most of them haven’t had an opportunity to say goodbyes or have unfinished businesses. There is something keeping them from transitioning into becoming an ancestor. They are stuck.”<\/p>\n
According to Kilburn, there is quite a bit of death anxiety in the colonial Victorian cultural perspective. In a modern world, she says we are not very well equipped to consider the inevitability of mortality.<\/p>\n
“We use a lot of euphemisms for death like ‘I lost someone,’ or ‘someone passed away,’” Kilburn explained.<\/p>\n
Halloween traditions have roots in different actions people took in the past to deal with ghosts. For example, the North American tradition of carving pumpkins has European origins, where people once carved lanterns out of root vegetables such as turnips to ward off spirits.<\/p>\n
The idea of the undead arose when graves were reopened during plagues that haunted Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.<\/p>\n
Halloween offers an opportunity to dive into the uncomfortable topic of death, and in Victoria, there are plenty of tales and rumoured hauntings to dive into.<\/p>\n
“People need to look at this big scary part of our reality more straight on. It creates an opportunity to change the relationship we have with death,” Kilburn adds.<\/p>\n
“We enjoy a good scare. And this time of the year creates great excuses to flirt with scary things, and death is one of the scariest.”<\/p>\n
This beautiful coastal Victoria Golf Club is home to one of B.C.’s best-known tragic figures.<\/p>\n
Known as the “April ghost,” the spirit of Doris Gravlin is said to haunt the course. In 1936, her body was found near the seventh tee after she was murdered. Her husband Victor’s body was found washed ashore, and the case was ruled a murder-suicide. She is often seen as a pale apparition wandering the fairways, frequently referred to as “the lady in white” or “the April ghost.”<\/p>\n
“Her death checks the boxes of a “bad death,” said Kilburn. “I don’t necessarily need to believe in ghosts. I can understand how that person’s spirit potentially would be less settled compared to, say, my grandmother who died at 95 and had the opportunity to say goodbyes and was ready to go.”<\/p>\n
According to Kilburn, the recipe for a “good death” is being reassured that they are not going to be forgotten.”<\/p>\n
“We need to remember that the spirit of a recently deceased person is also grieving, not just us.When they face a bad death, they don’t want to leave their family, home and things. These emotions of restlessness can make them restless and lash out.<\/p>\n
“There need to be protective rituals that are called defensive mourning to protect the living from those emotions.”<\/p>\n Nicole Kilburn is encouraging a deeper look at the concept behind ghost stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":130,"featured_media":159291,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-regional-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"web1_251030-vne-restless-spirits-victoria-kilburn_1\"](\"http:\/\/interior-news.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/16\/2025\/10\/web1_251030-vne-restless-spirits-victoria-kilburn_1.jpg\")
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