Keeping stories alive before they become ghosts themselves

“It would be really cool to have a ghost follow you.”

      These are the words of Malcolm Kelly; a journalism teacher at Centennial College who is working on a historical fiction piece, who now believes a ghost is attached to him because of it.

      Almost at the halfway point with 74,000 words, Sprog is Kelly’s fiction in the works. The term “sprog” refers to rookie bomber crews. This book is about the bomber crew, 419 “Moose” Squadron that flew the Halifax bomber, K-Kite, and crashed in early 1945 in a Norwegian lake. This is a historical fact, as all (except one), died of exposure on the lake.

      “The last thing Lloyd Wright said to me was, ‘please don’t touch the aircraft,’ because the oil of the hands is very bad for the skin of the aircraft.

      “So I walked up to the side of the aircraft and I don’t know why…I closed my hands and put my hand right on the aircraft,” Kelly said.

      Kelly visited the RCAF Museum in Trenton, where the revived K-Kite (the last of it’s kind in the world) was on display. It was there that Kelly met with Wing Comm. Lloyd Wright is one of the members of the Halifax restoration crew and flew Halifax bombers himself. Kelly thinks that when he touched the aircraft, that’s when the ghost attached itself to him.

      Especially because Wright said to Kelly, “[I] just had the strangest shiver that went up my spine when you did that.”

      This isn’t the only reason, however, that makes Kelly think he is attached. Kelly opened the RCAF book of remembrance that has profiles on approximately 9,700 airmen who died in the Second World War.

      “The book is about this thick…and hard cover,” Kelly said, showing how thick with his hands about a foot apart.

      He put his hand down on what seemed to be a random profile but turned out to be John Moose Fulton’s entry. Fulton was the commanding officer of 419 “Moose” Squadron and that was the crew that Kelly had already chosen to write about.

      “I thought well that was really weird because I had already researched about Fulton,” he said while lamenting the one to 9,000 chance he had of this happening.

      Fulton died, shot down of the North Sea.

      Kelly told the story of how he had the honour of being able to sit in the pilot’s seat of the K-Kite and look out the window, thinking that the last person to have flown that aeroplane, died. He had another moment then.

      “All of a sudden, for absolutely no reason, I said out loud, ‘don’t worry, I will.’

      “My new ghost I just picked up…the ghost must have said to me, ‘you make sure you write about us properly.’”

      According to Kelly, he was sitting in a McDonald’s on Eglinton Avenue, waiting for his car and about the start writing another piece of his book. His habit is to write the date above each blurb.

      July 15, 1941.

      He looked up and there it was, across the street. A big sign read, 1941 Eglinton Avenue East.

      “Now I’m thinking, this is getting very, very strange,” he said.

      They just keep coming. The last story up Kelly’s sleeve is enough for anyone to do a double take and really start to wonder if these events are really coincidental.

      There is a character in his book with the name of Claiborne Berry Taylor. He comes from a small town in Texas and Kelly came up with this character’s name by giving him the last names of the three founders of this small town.

      “This is completely off the top of my head,” he said.

      Then he met a woman. She used to have a double act with her sister as performers during WWII. She talked about a man who is still alive and flew the Halifax bomber. His name?

      Claiborne Berry Taylor.

      David Gower is a psychotherapist and works with Skeptics Canada. Skeptics Canada is an organization that dedicates itself to research into supposedly paranormal activities and offers scientific reasoning.

      “We don’t deny someone’s experiences. We give them an alternative explanation as to what their experience is,” Gower said about people who believe in the paranormal.

      Gower says ghost stories are like performances. The storyteller is the performer and people are entertained. He said that the stories are real while hinting the ghosts might not be.

      He quoted John Robert Colombo, a Canadian author who wrote about many of Canada’s ghostly tales. Colombo’s famous line mirrors Gower’s thoughts:

      “What I believe in is ghost stories.”

      Gower, although a member of a skeptical organization, has had his own experiences. He wrote a two-part essay called, Growing up in a Haunted House. The house belonged to his grandfather.

      “[There were] many wonderful, frightening experiences,” he said.

      He doesn’t believe these experiences were ghostly in nature.

      Reanna Maharaj had her own experiences to share. One of them was waking up to paralysis with the inability to scream and seeing an unidentifiable being standing over her.

      Gower described this as the hypnogogic state of sleep where someone is in the process of waking up and is caught in that place between sleep and consciousness. The body goes through a certain kind of lock-down at this time, like paralysis, as a method of safeguarding while waking up.

      According to Gower, believing in the paranormal or dreaming about passed loved ones is like an “emotional investment.”

      “People are dreaming about living and dying all the time,” he said.

      If the skeptics aren’t denying Kelly’s stories, then they are real. They are real to Kelly and to anyone who will believe them. His book will come at a time to round up the lives of the perished airmen in what seemed to be an equally perished plane that sat around 600 ft. at the bottom of a lake in Europe somewhere. It took about seven years to find this plane, bring it up and put it back together in a museum. Not to mention, buying a bomber’s tail from a woman in Northern Scotland who was using it as a chicken coop.

      Kelly doesn’t know who the ghost is or what its motives are, but he does seem good-natured about it.

      “It doesn’t bother me that I have a ghost following me around…the ghost is welcome to come along for the ride.”