Ghost Stories of British Columbia by Jo-Anne Christensen

Author:Jo-Anne Christensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 1996-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Famous Hudson’s Bay Company trader and politician John Tod may have taken quite a secret to his grave when he died in 1882 . . . for exactly seventy years later, a set of human remains was discovered in the garden of his old home.

(Photograph courtesy of BC Provincial Archives and Records Service)

The pieces of the ghostly puzzle were beginning to come together. In all likelihood, it was not John Tod who haunted the house, but one of his seven wives; a native woman who was rumoured to have gone insane, causing Tod to confine her to the house. Her bedroom had been the one Colonel and Mrs. Evans called “the eerie room;” the same one in which the window had exploded outward; the same one in which the two overnight guests had seen an apparition. Apparently, that apparition had been the image of a dark-haired woman, bound in chains and iron shackles, her arms outstretched and her lips moving in a soundless plea for help.

Following the discovery of the unmarked grave, Tod House faded from the public eye. It is difficult to find any mention of it, even in local newspapers, until June of 1974, when the Oak Bay Municipal Council declared it to be a heritage landmark. The designation meant that no unapproved changes could be made to the house—but the greatest change had already taken place, more than twenty years earlier. That was in 1952, when the woman’s remains were taken from the grounds of Tod House and granted a decent burial. All paranormal activity came to an abrupt stop that day.

It was the end of the haunting on Heron Street.

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