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Ectoplasm Capital Of The World
By John Gleeson
Winnipeg Sun
11-1-3

When it comes to ghosts, Winnipeg has no peers. In fact, the city could be dubbed the Ectoplasm Capital of the World.
 
Take it from Walter Meyer zu Erpen, a Victoria-based archivist who has spent a dozen years studying Winnipeg's Hamilton collection -- photographs from seances conducted during a 24-year period at the Elmwood home of Dr. T.G. Hamilton.
 
"It's the best collection of its kind in Canada -- and I would have to say the best collection of its kind in the world," says Meyer zu Erpen, whose lecture on the subject drew a packed house at the University of Manitoba last month.
 
"I don't know of anything that compares to it. There's been a lot of research done, but nobody documented it like the Hamiltons. And I don't think you'll find the research in many cases has survived."
 
Stored at the U of M, the massive collection documents dozens of examples of table levitations, trance writing and spirits literally showing their faces in the ectoplasm exuding from the medium, usually a woman named Mary Ann Marshall.
 
The research, which started in 1918, attracted the city's elite -- doctors, lawyers, academics -- as well as international figures of the day.
 
Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attended one of the seances in 1923; in a bizarre twist, Doyle died a few years later and then "appeared" during seances in the Hamilton home in 1932.
 
Meyer zu Erpen says the high number of quality images, the rigorous controls placed on the experiments and the credibility of the people involved have erased any doubts he had when he began the research.
 
"I started off not wanting to believe in this stuff -- the ectoplasm. But if it was fraudulent, it would have had to be faked -- and faked very well -- 50 different times."
 
And, unlike ghosts visiting the living, that just doesn't seem possible, he says.
 
The Hamilton collection does not represent "proof" that the human personality survives death -- "there is no proof yet," Meyer zu Erpen admits. But it remains, after more than half a century, the best evidence to date, he says, and "a fantastic example" of survival research.
 
Shelley Sweeney, head of archives and special collections at U of M, says other paranormal experts have also rated the Hamilton collection the best in the world.
 
Sweeney confesses she finds some of the images "ridiculous," but doesn't dismiss the research. She does note, however, that the death and disappearance of so many young men in the trenches during the First World War left distraught relatives seeking answers from the spirit world.
 
The unexpected high turnout for last month's lecture on the Hamilton collection -- it had to be moved at the last minute to a larger theatre -- suggests people today are in a similar state, she says.
 
"In times of uncertainty, there is a search to know what is beyond."
 
Northern, southern ghosts
 
Like Meyer zu Erpen (and yours truly), Sweeney is a West Coast native who is also struck by Winnipeg's "thing" with ghosts and haunted landmarks. She ascribes it, in part, to the continuity of old families and "substantial older buildings."
 
"There is so much ghost real-estate here," she laughs.
 
But it goes beyond the city and "haunted" old buildings like the Fort Garry Hotel and the former downtown Masonic Temple.
 
Go to a summer backyard party in Manitoba and chances are you'll start hearing about ghostly encounters.
 
What I noticed this year, though, is the marked difference between southern and northern Manitobans when it comes to the spirit world.
 
Many southerners believe in ghosts, and some claim they've encountered the real thing. With wide eyes and deadly pauses they describe the first sightings, the fear and denial that follow, the successive sightings that leave no room for doubt -- and finally, in some cases, the much-needed change of address.
 
Even if we're talking about something less than a full-blown haunted house, the general feeling is one of "very scary stuff."
 
Northerners are different.
 
A woman from Shamattawa, for instance, told me the staff at the nursing station there have fairly regular sightings, one of the most frequent being a young boy who appears in the X-ray room.
 
The assumption is that he died there at some point, and his spirit has yet to move on.
 
"But they're not bad," the woman said in the softest of voices, of ghosts in general.
 
I have to admit, I like the northern way better.
 
 
A Curse That Made History
 
What Halloween is complete without the story of a wicked curse?
 
One of the great curses in history was uttered by a Quaker woman named Catherine Ring in a New York City courtroom in 1800.
 
New York's first big murder case had ended with the jury acquitting defendant Levi Weeks, the young nephew of a prosperous builder. Weeks was accused of strangling Mrs. Ring's cousin, the "pert and pretty" 22-year-old Elma Sands, and then dumping her body down an unused well in Greenwich Village.
 
Weeks' wealthy family hired the first legal "dream team" in American history. Along with a future Supreme Court justice, the defence included two of the republic's Founding Fathers: Aaron Burr, who later that year would become vice-president under Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, a former Secretary of Treasury and once the most powerful Federalist in the U.S. after George Washington.
 
When the not-guilty verdict came down, the pious Mrs. Ring shocked all present by turning to Hamilton and saying:
 
"If thee dies a natural death, then there is no justice in heaven."
 
Deadly duel
 
Four years later, in what Henry Adams later called "the most dramatic moment in the early politics of the Union," Burr and Hamilton were rowed across the Hudson River to New Jersey and exchanged pistol shots at 10 paces. The duel was fought over a letter to the editor in which a third party claimed Hamilton considered Burr "despicable."
 
Hamilton was struck on his right side and died the next day. Burr was denounced as a murderer (duels were illegal, and Hamilton had not even attempted to hit his opponent) and eventually fled the east to live out the rest of his days bitter and disgraced.
 
Some said Mrs. Ring's curse went beyond the two Founding Fathers, who had expertly created "room for doubt" in every piece of testimony heard at the trial.
 
Chief Justice John Lansing, who had all but told the jury they could not convict on the evidence presented, a few years later was walking to catch the night boat to Albany and vanished into thin air.
 
Richard Croucher, a witness with a history of hostility toward the victim, returned to his native England and was soon thereafter hanged for a "heinous" crime.
 
And Levi Weeks, Elma Sands' lover and accused killer, was acquitted but convicted in the court of public opinion.
 
Shamed into leaving the Big Apple, he was never heard from again.
 
Crazy as it sounds, the story is reported as sober fact by one of the most reliable popular crime historians of the 1930s, Russel Crouse, in his "high crime" collection, Murder Won't Out.
 
John Gleeson is the editor of the Winnipeg Sun.


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