A Strange Little Place

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Brennan Storr, author of A Strange Little Place.

If there is such a thing as a reluctant paranormal investigator, I am that; you will never catch me hugging up on a Ouija board or wandering an empty house at night asking the ghost of someone’s grandmother to “knock twice for yes;” but, to my great chagrin, weirdness still manages to find me.

Prior to starting work on my book A Strange Little Place, I was a lapsed Catholic turned budding Atheist horror movie buff who liked to tell ghost stories at parties. Some of those stories had been passed down by my mother’s side of the family, others I’d heard, and almost all of them came from my hometown of Revelstoke, Canada. I didn’t particularly believe them, you understand—after all, between terrorism, iPhones, and climate change there was no room in the world around me for ghosts and goblins—but they were entertaining. In April of 2012 I decided to see if there were enough around town to make up a book.

Two months into researching my book, however, I was attacked by shadow people—an experience I would rate as 0 stars if TripAdvisor would return my calls.

Less than a year after that incident I discovered the office building where I worked was haunted by some kind of shadow presence that waxes and wanes with the time of year and doesn’t particularly like me staying there past 11pm. Then, while on vacation, I was exorcised by a homeless shaman for whom I had purchased a cup of coffee.

In the four years since deciding to write A Strange Little Place, I have, despite my attempts to live the incalculably boring life of an office manager, personally experienced enough weirdness to ruin whatever Atheist aspirations I may have had. Not that I believe in God, necessarily, but when you’ve seen darkness take on physical form it’s hard to continue banging the “meaningless universe” drum. And yet, as much high strangeness as I have personally experienced, it is nothing compared to what I managed to uncover about Revelstoke.

It turns out my hometown is home to more paranormal activity than I had ever imagined—more than 75 years of UFO encounters, missing time, Sasquatch sightings, lake monsters, phantom music, shadow people, gremlins, and straight-up haunting—making me wonder if my reluctant encounters have been entirely by chance or a byproduct of growing up in the Canadian equivalent of Twin Peaks.

Whatever the reason, something tells me A Strange Little Place will be the first step in an even stranger journey; I invite you to pick up a copy and join me.

Our thanks to Brennan for his guest post! For more from Brennan Storr, read his article, “The Most Haunted Place You’ve Never Heard Of: 3 Places to Explore in Revelstoke.”