The house on Parry Street

How could this happen? How could this be true?

There is a street in downtown Toronto I'll call Parry Street. There is only one house on it, and the friend of a friend rented it. I'll call her Sheila, to protect her identity (and for that of the owners of the house in question, I've changed the name of the street as well). Sheila  and her husband moved in to the two-storey Victorian worker's cottage just north of Bloor Street. Then strange things started happening. There were sounds, shadows glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, bumping noises and creaks. When she was alone in the house the noises grew more pronounced and deeply unsettling.

Then, one night, Sheila found a pair of red trousers on her husband's pillow. She called to him and asked him when he'd bought them. "I've never seen them before in my life," he said.

Then, just as she was about to step into the bath she glanced in the mirror over the basin. A face was looking back at her.

Sheila was so unnerved by this growing creepiness that she actually called in an exorcist to advise her on what to do. The minute he stepped inside the door, he had an answer: "Oh we've been to this house before," he said. "You need to get out of here."

What would cause this haunting? Humankind's thirst for order in a disorderly universe makes us search for narratives. And that's how we construct the notions of ghosts and supernatural. Some peoples are better at it than others. The historian Peter Ackroyd has written a marvelous compendium called The English Ghost, in which he states that no other people on earth see as many ghosts as the English. Does that mean ghost-sighting is a cultural preoccupation and not a paranormal one? This blog seeks to find the intersection between narrative, the paranormal and physics.

I'm new to this subject, but because I'm currently living with a ghost in my house, I'm naturally very interested. In the coming months I'll describe it more in detail. Meanwhile, this blog is also in aid of promoting my new novel, Mayhem, which could can read for free on Wattpad or buy at Amazon's Kindle site.