Kelowna hauntings?

It may be spooky season but there’s not many ghouls or ghost stories in Kelowna’s past, the city’s foremost historian laments.

Bob Hayes, with Kelowna’s historical society, has been asked for local ghost stories many times over the years but has very little on offer, despite best efforts.

“I’ve even spent a lot of time at the cemetery and there’s been no clanging of bells or instruments,” Hayes said. “There’s just nothing like that in Kelowna… Vernon has more, though."

When push comes to shove, however, two Kelowna tales make the cut.

It was 1918, when Hayes said the Spanish flu was going across Canada.

"It was the second wave that killed millions of people,” Hayes said.

Kelowna, it seemed, had managed to stay relatively unscathed by the pandemic, but an unexpected visitor to Leon Avenue, heralded an unwelcome shift.

The residents of what was then Chinatown reported seeing an evil spirit, in the disguise of a young white boy of about six years of age.

Hayes said the spirit was reported in the daily newspaper to have been somewhat timid and lurked around outbuildings and courts, but only after dark.

According to rumours at the time, all who saw the ghost died.

Hayes said when all was said and done, nine residents in the area died.

"Of course there was never any proof of the spirit,” he said. “But, back then, non-white people didn’t go to Leon from Abbott to Water streets.”

That, he said, made the sight of a barefoot boy, heralding the start of a deadly plague, all the more strange.

As for whether any hauntings may have followed from those felled by the flu that year, Hayes said it’s not likely.

Back then, the Chinese government had a program where they shipped back the remains of their citizens who died abroad, so they could be buried at home and their “spirits could be put to rest.”

The first Chinese person laid to rest in Kelowna’s cemetery was in 1938, Hayes said.

The second story is a little lighter in tone, but laden in local history.

People at Kelowna’s Guisachan house may have heard the clip-clop of horses and echoes of laughter when the trees that lined the walkway to the historic home were still there — they were chopped down in 2021.

The Guisachan House was built by Lord and Lady Aberdeen in 1891, but it was Lady Aberdeen’s brother Coutts Marjoribanks who called it home.

He had been sent to North America by the Scottish family in the 1880s for being a bit of a reprobate and a heavy drinker.

“He had many high society parties there and on a full moon night, long after the Guisichans left, people would say you could hear the clatter of hooves on the driveway going down toward the house, and the neighing of horses,” Hayes said.

“Then it would stop, you’d hear people getting out and laughing and going out to the party."

As for Majoribanks, he eventually moved to Coldstream, where he had a family and died years later, seemingly without scandal.

“Again, there’s no hard evidence that it was ghosts but that was a haunting place out there with those trees, before they were cut down,” he said.