Ghost hunters to check out Billy Bishop Home and Museum
Group asks permission to set up equipment in historic building after hearing of unusual occurrences there
Posted By Doug Edgar
A Barrie-based group of paranormal investigators is going to try to find out if Owen Sound’s Billy Bishop Home and Museum is haunted.
There are stories of unexplained occurrences at the national historic site, including at least two encounters with what has been described as a girl dressed in Victorian garb, said museum manager Mary Smith.
Some staff are uncomfortable working at the museum — the boyhood home of First World War flying ace and Victoria Cross winner Billy Bishop — at night.
Jeff Ostrander of Jeff’s Paranormal Investigations said he and probably half a dozen others will set up equipment to monitor and record goings on in the building this weekend.
The investigators approached museum officials after hearing stories about the building, Smith said. It won’t cost the museum anything.
“Jeff asked if we’d be interested and we said why not?”
Smith said she’s never had any paranormal experiences in the house, but was present when someone else reported seeing a small girl in Victorian dress in the pantry during a Victorian Christmas event in 2001.
“He came out and he was in a little bit of shock. I asked what was wrong and he said ‘when I walked in there, out of the corner of my eye I saw a little lady,’” she said. “When he turned his head to look at her she disappeared.”
In a separate incident, a visitor returned to the museum to ask if there had been a little girl in a costume there earlier.
“He explained that he was in the dining room of the museum and he looked and she was standing there near a mannequin that’s in a maid’s costume, and looked up at him and smiled at him,” Smith said.
The man didn’t think about it at the time, but asked his wife if she liked the little girl in the dress. His wife’s reply was “what girl,” Smith said, so the man came back and asked staff about it. They checked and found none of them had a girl at the museum that day.
Smith said she doesn’t know about any little girls dying in the house, but she noted there was an older Bishop brother who died before Billy was born. She believes he died of tuberculosis at about the age of seven, likely at the home. She noted young children’s clothes in Edwardian and Victorian times would look feminine to a modern observer.
“Jeff and his group might have other possibilities,” she said.
There are also stories now being compiled about the building, including a knife that got moved across the kitchen and a door that would repeatedly close overnight.
Figuring out if there are straightforward explanations for such phenomena is a big part of what Ostrander does.
The project at the Bishop house will start with videotaping Smith talking about what’s gone on at the museum. They will then map and photograph the building so they know the location of things such as windows, vents and wiring that might affect their instruments.
They will set up a base in an area where no paranormal activity has been reported, from which their equipment — video cameras, sensors to take remote temperature readings and equipment to measure changes in electromagnetic fields — is monitored and recorded.
“I guess generally speaking, when a ghost enters a room it has to change the environment. People report cold spots . . . all of a sudden a perfectly charged battery will die,” Ostrander said.
They may also investigate electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, by asking questions and listening for a response or reaction. Another possibility is to set up a “trigger object,” or something meant to attract a spirit, perhaps a ball or toy in this case since a child has been reported.
A psychic is also part of the team coming to Owen Sound.
“Hopefully she will be able to give us some impressions of who is in the house,” Ostrander said.
Quite often their efforts find nothing out of the ordinary and Ostrander said that could very easily happen in this case.
It’s crucial to know the environment to be able to exclude normal explanations. For example, children’s voices may be coming from a nearby yard. Maybe a strange noise is something like the furnace turning on.
“I’ve been investigating private homes and businesses for almost 10 years and each one is a new learning experience,” he said.
Objectivity and an open mind are important to Ostrander. Most people are raised to discount what they can’t explain, but others become convinced a building is haunted and that becomes their explanation for everything unexpected that happens there.
“Once you get the suggestion that your house is haunted, you start blaming everything on the ghost,” he said. “If there’s a bad smell in the basement, maybe there was a water leak . . . if there are electrical problems, maybe it’s too many things plugged into a power bar.”
A few years ago his own children’s toys started running on their own in the basement — but it was because the batteries were running down.
“These are all things that you have to kind of look for,” he said.
Still, he’s found things he can’t explain including a sighting of what he thinks was a ghost at Battlefield Park in Stoney Creek.
“I had seen what I believe was a grey apparition hunched over, kind of running across the field,” he said. Another person told him she saw the same thing.
“It made me feel good, that I wasn’t completely crazy,” he said.
He and his group are also doing a series of investigations at Alliston’s Museum on the Boyne. Four of five monitors recently shut down one at a time and despite taking some equipment apart and checking it, no explanation has been found.
Ostrander has been pursuing paranormal phenomena for about 10 years. He doesn’t charge for his services.
“We are a very serious group and we try our best to document paranormal activity,” he said.
