SURREAL TRAPDOOR: Asbestos Snow

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY…NOT!!

My friend, TOpoet and I share a fascination for life’s oddities. He pointed me to this horrific product that was released to unsuspecting consumers in the late 1920s and finally discontinued around 1941. You could sprinkle this sh*t throughout your house  and on your tree for Christmas and bonus – it wouldn’t catch on fire.

For generations, asbestos, a naturally occurring fibrous mineral, was thought to be a miracle product. It stood up to weather (asbestos tiles), it had great insulating properties (pipe lagging) and it was fire-proof (coating on steel beams). Too bad this innocuous fluffy grey material kills you! 

Asbestos does you in in one of three ways: asbestosis, lung cancer and worst of all, mesothelioma, a cancer of the pleura. Mesothelioma, a 100% fatal disease, is only caused by asbestos. Electron micrograph images show the hardy little microfibers spearing your cells and your DNA. It was the cause of death of Hollywood star, Steve McQueen, who was exposed to it when he worked in the shipyards during WW2. 

According to Snopes, asbestos snow was used in the 1939 classic film, “The Wizard of Oz”. Remember the scene where Dorothy and her friends are awakened from the Wicked Witch of the West’s spell in the poppy field by a snow fall? Yep, that’s asbestos snow! 

Warning: vintage decorations with “snow” dating from the 1920 to 1940s may contain asbestos. Better living through chemisty – NOT!

Be sure to check out TOpoet’s blog at TOpoet – views, reviews, music, poetry and pics

 

 

 

 

 

URBAN EXPLORER: What’s Inside the Chrysler Building?

low-angle photography of white concrete building tower
Best skyscraper in NYC!
red and blue abstract painting
Urbex!

The Chrysler building is my favorite New York sky scraper. What’s not to love about its stainless steel roof and Art Deco perfection?

And the fact that its observation deck  on the 71st floor has been closed to the public adds to its mystery. What’s inside that steel dome? A secret nightclub? The most exclusive penthouse condo in NYC?

Visitors to the Chrysler Building are actively discouraged. Ten years ago, we were able to walk into its beautiful Art Deco lobby for a look-see, but on our first visit after COVID, we were summarily chased out by the security guard! That, of course, piqued my curiosity even more. 

Beautiful lobby of the Chrysler Building

To my surprise the answers to the Chrysler Building’s mysteries popped up on the internet and we can visit inside its stainless steel roof -virtually – thanks to urban explorer, Moses Gates, author of Hidden Cities. (Eat that Book!)

Walter P. Chrysler, famed auto magnate, wanted a personal monument to himself. The building was completed on May 28, 1930, according to a design by architect, William Van Alen. Somewhat foolishly, Van Alen never signed a contract with Chrysler, who refused to pay him, accusing him of shady dealings with the building contractors. Van Alen sued and did get his money eventually but the fight ruined his reputation and he never worked as an architect again. (Sound familiar?)

Then as now there was a lot of dick-waving: to own the tallest building in the world and to make them taller with spires. The Chrysler Building’s 61 meter spire, made of special stainless steel,  was hidden inside the building and installed as a crowning touch. For about 11 months, it was the tallest in the world until the Empire State Building surpassed it.

Walter Chrysler kept his own office and apartment in the building though apparently he didn’t use either much. He like to boast that he had the highest toilet in the world.

Walter Chrysler’s potty

Interestingly, the other private apartment in the Chrysler Building belonged to a woman, photo-journalist Margaret Bourke. Despite her wealth and fame, she had to have the lease to her 61st floor apartment co-signed by Time, Inc. because she was female. Here she is astride one of the building’s gargoyles. She had a remarkable career as a war correspondent  and adventurer. (Read more about her here.)

Margaret Bourke and gargoyle

At the behest of Texaco, Chrysler installed the Cloud Club, with three exclusive dining rooms – and a speakeasy – on floors 66 to 68. The Cloud Club  lasted 40+ years until the late 1970s when it was demolished for office space.  That was much longer than the celestial-themed observation deck on the 71st floor, which was shut down in 1945.

Celestial-themed observation deck

But there was a way, you could see NYC from the top of the Chrysler Building: you could go to the dentist! From 1962 to 2012, Dr. Charles M. Weiss ran his dental practice, mostly located on the 69th floor. He was known as The Dentist in the Sky and was an innovator in dental implantology. 

The Dentist in the Sky

But what about inside that glorious stainless steel roof? Are there hidden speak-easies? Secret apartments for mistresses? Who better to ask than urban explorer, Moses Gates? Here’s the YouTube video of his visit INSIDE the stainless steel roof.

It’s a dizzying climb with a spectacular forbidden view of NYC, but the inside is underwhelmingly functional, with concrete beams, ladders and steel walkways. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SURREAL TRAPDOOR: Who was Mo Hayder?

Mo Hayder, the author

 

 

 

 

 

 

About 25 years ago, I picked up, Birdman, a new crime fiction book that was getting a lot of buzz: I would soon regret it. Sadly Birdman is one of those few books that despite excellent writing and a gripping narrative I simply found too intense to finish. It’s not every day when frank torture porn and SM hit the main stream, but when they do so successfully, it can mean mega sales and mega bucks. (Think 50 Shades of Grey…)

Birdman, the debut novel of author, Mo Hayder, was described by its publisher, Transworld, as one of the most powerful and violent books they had ever come across. (I can’t disagree.) Released in December 1999, it became an international bestseller. Hayder went on to write another 10 novels, many of them bestsellers and many nominated for the prestigious CWA Dagger awards. Her seventh book, Gone, won the Edgar Award in 2012. As of 2021, her novels have sold more than 6.5 million copies.

So who was Mo Hayder? What lay at the heart of her dark, violent fantasies?

Hayder was born Clare Damaris Bastin on January 2, 1962 to John Bastin, an astrophysicist (!) and Susan Hollins, a teacher. She was blessed / cursed with knock-out good looks and left home for the big city of London before age 16. By 1982, at age 20, she’d won the Miss Nude Beauty Pageant and been a “Page 3” topless model in the notorious British tabloid, The Sun.

She turned to acting under the stage name, Candy Davis and became – you’ll never guess – secretary Miss Belfridge in the longstanding British sitcom, Are You Being Served?, which ran from 1972 to 1985.

Candy Davis and Nicholas Smith, the bumbling manager

One of the running jokes of the show was that “young” Mr. Grace, the elderly owner of Grace Brothers department store, always had a gorgeous secretary and/or nurse who was the near-death of him. By today’s standards, that humor seems sexist and crass, but at the time, audiences enjoyed it. 

Hayder joined the show in 1983. By then the actor who played “young” Mr. Grace had retired so she became inept manager, Rumbold’s assistant instead. She remained a regular cast member  until the show ended in 1985. Here’s a clip of her performances from YouTube.

It seems Hayder’s acting career never materialized after that. She married briefly in 1985 then at age 25, in 1987, she moved to Tokyo, Japan. There she appears to have had an adventurous, perhaps a risky, life, working as a waitress at a nightclub and as amateur filmmaker. What happened in that span of 14 years until she emerged as one of crime fiction’s darkest authors in 1999? That, too, will remain a mystery. 

In 2021, Mo Hayder died  young at age 59 of Lou Gerig’s disease.

 

SURREAL TRAPDOOR: THE DAY THE SUN WENT OUT

When my husband, Ed and I learned that a total eclipse would pass near Toronto on April 8th, we got excited. After all, we’re Trekkies and space nerds. The next total eclipse near Toronto won’t take place until 2106, so if we didn’t see this one, it was now or never.

Toronto would only view a partial eclipse. I’d witnessed one once before in the 1990s. A business friend and I broke away from our lunch near Yonge and Bloor and rushed out for a look, allowing ourselves only 1 or 2 second glimpses so we wouldn’t burn out our retinas. At the max of the shadow, all went still. Traffic stopped. The only sound was birdsong: very cool.

Back then Ed made a pinhole camera for our daughter for them to watch the moon cross the sun. Now, 30 years later, he made another and ordered safe viewing glasses from Amazon that resembled retro cardboard 3-D movie glasses. Fingers crossed they worked!

Dorky but it works!

To see the full eclipse meant a drive to Hamilton or Niagara Falls. News reports said The Falls were expecting 100,000+ people so we opted for Hamilton. Somewhere on Hamilton Mountain surely we’d find a spot.

Getting there proved to be a challenge. Sadly the news reports weren’t wrong. Highway 407, the toll road, looked as clogged as Highway 401 at rush hour. Time was running out and we were beginning to lose hope when Ed remembered that the path of the total eclipse passed through Burlington.

We turned off the 407 and raced down to Burlington and Lake Ontario. Not too much traffic, thank God. We parked on a residential street and made the long walk down to the lakeshore, armed with our safety glasses and trusty pinhole camera. Bolstered with refreshments from Tim Hortons, we found a spot in Spencer Smith Park right next to the lake near a large hotel called appropriately enough, The Waterfront Hotel.

How Canadian!

Spectators were in a festive mood.  Hotel staff were giving their outdoor cafe patrons eclipse glasses. They continued to hand out glasses to the nearby crowd  – even to drivers who’d slowed down and parked to view the spectacle.

The beginning

Then we waited – and waited.  It started slowly with a tiny edge of dark crescent. Overall daylight stayed bright.  Yet incrementally over the next 20 minutes, the light dimmed to the level of a cloudy day.

“Maybe this is as good as it gets,” my husband mused. Indeed during the partial eclipse many years ago the noon day light dimmed to early twilight.

Then it happened: the moon moved over the sun and we saw the corona. A few seconds later, the light went out. Exactly that: midnight! All the night lights of the city came on: the streetlights, the restaurant and store signs. The sun was gone – snuffed out.

The corona
The Brant St. Pier in Burlington, Canada at night (Stock photo, my camera didn’t work.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And it got cold. All I could think of were those retro science documentaries we’d seen as children: all life comes from the sun….No kidding. How long would it take for the earth to cool down to the Absolute Zero of outer space?

The light comes back.

Then the moon moved away and the light came back. Spectators cheered and applauded. For a short time, a warm camaraderie shared by tiny denizens on Earth.

THE TITANIC and ME

On April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank on her maiden voyage 430 miles off the Newfoundland coast after colliding with an iceberg. Of the 2224 passengers and crew on board, more than 1500 died. To this day, it remains the deadliest sinking of an ocean liner or cruise ship. 

I grew up hearing a lot about the Titanic disaster from my father, who claimed that he’d been taught dinghy sailing by the surviving First Mate.  That might have been Charles Herbert Lightoller, who was actually the Titanic’s second officer

Now my dad notoriously got facts wrong, so I can’t guarantee that his claim wasn’t pure wish-fantasy. But if Dad was indeed shown the ropes (literally) by Lightoller, he had reason to be proud, because Lightoller was a hero. He made sure that women and children got in the lifeboats first and managed to save his life and the lives of fellow crewmen by climbing on top of a capsized life boat and getting everyone to balance it.  He went on to serve in the Royal Navy in WWI (twice decorated) and in WWII, while in his sixties, he sailed his personal yacht to rescue servicemen from Dunkirk!

The Titanic remained lost beneath the waves while I grew up. Excitingly, on September 1, 1985, a few days before my daughter was born, Admiral Robert Ballard and his team located the wreck, 12,000 feet down. They’d previously searched for two lost nuclear submarines and discovered that they had both imploded from the immense pressure of the water.  Ballard located the submarines by their debris fields and this is how the Titanic, too, was located. (See map below.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rediscovered, the Titanic looked incredibly creepy. It had broken in half, as reported by many eye witnesses – and it had hit the ocean floor with immense force. We can related to objects falling through air; it’s a stretch to imagine an object as large as the Titanic falling through water with the consequent damage. Mercifully all biological materials, including human remains, had vanished. The iron hull, too, was dissolving due to deep-sea micro-organisms, resulting in eerie, melting rusticles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think it’s prophetic that my daughter, Claire, was born so close to the Titanic’s discovery. We share the same fascination with its story. Watching the documentary, Titanica, together at the Ontario Place Cinesphere is one of my cherished memories.

Titanica was a joint Russian-American expedition. (Remember those sunny days when shared economic prosperity promised to save the world?) We learned more about the immense pressures at depth and the perils of submersibles, including the hyper-oxygen atmosphere. Even more importantly we learned about technology-induced hubris.  No one believed that the Titanic could sink: the number of lifeboats was reduced so as not to spoil its sleek look. The passenger list was crowded with names of the rich and famous. Sound familiar? 

So what destroyed the Titanic? The ice berg did not rip a huge, entrail-spilling gash in its side. Rather it bumped the side of the ship, popping out the rivets to create a modest looking bulge that let in water.  The design of the ship’s interior worked like an ice cube tray, allowing water to flow from one interior compartment to another, dragging it down.  

Which brings me to the most recent Titanic disaster. On June 18. 2023, Oceangate’s Titan submersible was bringing  billionaire, Shahzada Dawood and his son, Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet and adventurer, Hamish Harding, down to view the wreck. It imploded on descent, killing everyone on board in milliseconds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Titan was being piloted by OceanGate CEO, Stockton Rush, who had a history of flouting conventional designs and safety rules. The body of the submersible was carbon fibre, which, as any cyclist can tell you, is extremely light, strong…and brittle. One hairline crack would have been enough to cause the implosion. Also Rush did not equip the Titan with an emergency locator beacon and used an Atari (?) game controller to steer the vessel. (Really??) Criticisms of his design were dismissed as a “serious personal insult”.

When I studied industrial health and safety, I learned a concept called the Heinz Rule: how many close calls do you have before you get into a serious or fatal accident? The answer is surprising. Intuition says 3 or 4 times, but in fact, it’s more like 200 to 300 times. Small wonder Rush felt he was invulnerable and above mere mortals. 

We all know how that worked out…

 

SURREAL TRAPDOOR The Riddle of Julian Sands Part 1

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with people who mysteriously disappear, especially those who get lost in the wilderness. On January 13th, British actor Julian Sands was reported missing by his family. Sands, an experienced hiker and mountaineer, had set out alone for the San Gabriel Mountains , 50 miles northeast of Los Angeles.  He never returned. On January 18th his car was located near Mt. Baldy , one of  his favorite trails.

Julian Sands

Julian Sands is/was 65 years old and made his home in North Hollywood. His break-out role was in the British period piece, A Room with a View , which coincidentally starred Helena Bonham Carter as an ingenue -before she found her goth persona and her partner, Tim Burton.  Sands continued to work in many diverse films and series, including The Killing Fields, The L Word, Smallville, 24 and even Dexter! 

How could he simply disappear? How could a seasoned climber come to grief?

Dr. R. J. Koester

For answers, I looked to my friend, bear biologist, Sarah Poole. She told me about search and rescuer, Dr. Robert J. Koester, who’s an expert in understanding the behavior of lost people.

Here’s what I learned from his video, which you can watch here on YouTube.

 

      • It is very easy to get lost. Dr. Koester describes a case of an experienced 65 year old hiker who had a habit of walking 80 steps from the trail for a washroom break. (That’s right, eighty not eight!)  Her skeletal remains were found two years later.
      • Lost people DO tend to wander around in circles. People wander in random patterns and can travel great distances. They are often found far from the area where they were supposed to be.
      • Lost people tend to travel downhill rather uphill. People believe that down is  safer and that they will be more likely to find help there. Sadly that is not necessarily true.
      • People get lost by making a mistake. At first, they believe their instruments or maps are faulty so they can travel a significant distance before they realize they are lost.
      • People get an adrenalin rush when they discover they are lost. This is a normal physiological response. The worst thing one can do is to panic. The first thing to do is to calm down; a simple drink of water can be enough.

So what happened to Julian Sands? The San Gabriel Mountains are about an hour’s drive from LA, stretching between the city and the Mohave Desert. Winters are wet and snowfall can be heavy.  Ice-climbing and snow trails are popular with mountaineers and Baldy Bowl is a favorite. This is where Sands was headed.

 

Mt. Baldy

Mt. Baldy’s real name is Mt. San Antonio. At over 10,000 feet, it’s the highest peak in the mountain range.  Winter climbing on the Baldy Bowl requires ice axes and crampons with ascents of 45 to 50 degrees. Rockfalls and avalanches are common. This January severe storms in the area led to extremely dangerous avalanche conditions and search and rescue operations had to be curtailed. Julian Sands remains missing.

Not long after, a number of bogus reports surfaced, claiming that Sands had been spotted alive and well.  Unfortunately, this is a common scenario, born of romanticism and desperate hope – and perhaps too much bingeing on Netflix.

One hiker, 75 year old Jin Chung, was rescued from Mt. Baldy around the same time after he went missing for two days. He’d gone off on his own leaving his  two hiking companions on another route. Fortunately, after they alerted search and rescue, Chung was found with only mild injuries.

As Dr. Koester warns hikers: tell people where you are going; take emergency survival supplies with you and never hike alone.

More to come in Part 2!

SURREAL TRAPDOOR: Attack of the Mushroom People – Part One

Our cottage, like nature itself, suffers waves of infestations. At one time, a neon-green grass thrived under the pine trees. We called it “glow grass”. It was the only plant I’ve encountered that grew unrestrained in soil rendered acidic by pine needles. This fascinating weed inspired my thriller, Glow Grass, a finalist for the CWC Best Novella award.

Our glow grass has vanished in recent years. The tall trees and thick bush plus the wet summer created a dark moist environment conducive to…mushrooms!

Looking out our bedroom window I spotted orange dots all over the grass. What a pretty autumn flower, I thought. Venturing outside I found a fairy ring of strange yellow mushrooms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ee-yuck! I am not a mushroom fan. As a child, I was warned over and over that all mushrooms were deadly poisonous. These yellow guys did not look at all like the benign grocery kind.

Thanks to the Fount-of-all-Knowledge, i.e. the internet, our daughter identified them as most likely  Amanita flavoconia or “yellow dust” mushrooms, which are common in the northeast American states. And yes, they are TOXIC. Great.

Amanita…why did that name sound familiar? Because it sounded like the biological name for the  Destroying Angel, or Amanita bisporigera, one of the deadliest mushrooms around! These nasty little buggers can mimic the benign and tasty puffball in their early stage before they blossom out into the parasol shape in the picture.

two beige mushrooms
Avenging angel, nasty piece of work

They contain a poison called amatoxin, which interferes with messenger-RNA and causes irreversible liver and kidney damage within hours. As little as half a mushroom cap is fatal.  Victims have been saved by intensive medical intervention which included hemodialysis, swallowing activated charcoal and IV penicillin. Some medical evidence suggests that extracts from the milk thistle may work as an antidote because they destroy liver toxins.

Better to know and avoid! But let’s not stop there.

At the age of 8, I lived with my grandmother in Sweden for nearly 18 months. My uncle, Robert Syk, a polymath, who had successful careers as a architect, musician and literary author, had a passion for mushroom picking. (A popular pastime in Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltic countries.) On walks through the woods on Muskön (Musk Island), he taught my cousins and me which ones were safe to bring home and eat – and more importantly – which were not. The most dangerous mushrooms he showed us was the deadly toadstool, otherwise known as Amanita muscaria or the fly agaric.

macro photography of red mushroom
The deadly toadstool!

Swedes have a thing for toadstools which show up in pictures, design images even as Christmas decorations – no doubt due to their beautiful red and white polka dot motif. Many years later I read that Russians actually EAT toadstools. Boiling them twice weakens their toxicity and removes their psychoactive properties. I guess those long winters are pretty harsh and when you’re looking at starvation but …holy ergot!

Yes, readers, it turns out that the fly agaric has hallucinogenic properties, much prized as an entheogen by the indigenous people of Siberia and the Sami, the Arctic people of Scandinavia. In other words, to open Huxley’s spiritual doors of perception.

Argh! Do not eat! 

The orange mushroom infestation exploded over the weekend, sprouting up all over our grass made swampy by the heavy September rains. Fortunately by Thanksgiving, they were gone. What next, I wonder.

 

 

 

SURREAL TRAPDOOR: Abandoned Buildings in Your Neighbourhood- Part 2

In January I blogged about the ivy-drowned mansion near our cottage  which was later salvaged…sort of.

Small town “haunted” mansion

But do such houses exist in Toronto? Yes, they do! And I’ve learned to spot them.

The obvious clues are boarded up or broken windows, wildly overgrown gardens, leaking roofs and guttering.  Though occasionally these signs can apply to a fully inhabited, sadly neglected house!

More subtle signs appear for vacant homes: usually the overgrown garden is a giveaway. No obvious cars, a sheen of dust on the windows, a dispirited ambience…Though someone somewhere is keeping up the basic maintenance to avoid destruction.

Water, sun and nature move swiftly to claim back the planet.

What fascinates me are the reasons why the house stands deserted. There are stories there. Did the owner grow too elderly or infirm? Turn away from the world because of heartbreak? Was there a family dispute? A lingering estate problem?

And what of this strange sight, spotted on a winter walk?

 

Has the hoarding become so extreme that it’s spilled onto the veranda? Or did someone clear it out for the junk removal service?

Definitely a story here!

 

 

 

EAT THIS BOOK: Forgotten Writer #5 – Lia Matera and Star Witness or UFO’s and Me

As a kid I was space mad. I longed to become an astronaut or an astronomer. And while I was growing up, sightings of UFO’s were prominent in the news.  I became convinced that space aliens were visiting  our planet.

Maybe that’s why I have fond memories of Lia Matera’s thriller, Star Witness, the fifth book in her Willa Jansson series. The book opens with a hit-between-the-eyes description of a horrific road accident: a sporty Fiat has dived into the roof of an old Buick, squishing the driver. The owner of the Fiat, Alan, has vanished. When the police locate him, he claims he was abducted by aliens. They’re the ones who dropped his car on the Buick!

It falls to grumpy lawyer, Willa Jansson to defend Alan and his incredible alibi. But delving into reports of UFO’s and encounters of the third kind, her skepticism dissolves. Holy Cartman’s anal probe!

Matera did a deep dive into UFO’s and weird encounters and included a listing of books and videos at the end of Star Witness. In her foreword  she describes how  her personal skepticism took a journey much like Willa Jansson’s.

Even today in Canada, we have firm believers in UFO’s. (Check out the meet-ups in Toronto alone!) Many years ago, I met and chatted with one of BC’s leading UFO believers thanks to my friend, retired filmmaker, Chris Windsor.

Chris had studied film making at UBC while I slogged away at my doctorate in organic chemistry. His student film, Roofman, was a huge hit with audiences at the university. That success and his talent landed him a job making industrial training films in Alberta. Mind-numbing and soul-destroying to be sure, but at least he was earning a living in his chosen profession.

In his spare time, Chris began working on a documentary about UFO’s.  By then I was living in Victoria and writing my PhD thesis. Out of the blue one afternoon, Chris phoned. Would I help him out on a film shoot? He and his cinematographer were in town to interview the President of BC’s UFO Society.

Boy that was a hard choice – cranking out dry scientific prose or skiving off with two friends  to explore UFO’s. Hell, yes!

The three of us headed off in Chris’s car to interview the UFO President at his house in a rural part of Vancouver Island. He turned out to be a  kindly middle-aged man who lived in a tidy, respectable middle class home: he looked and acted like our dads though if memory serves, he did don a tinfoil hat.  And his belief in UFO’s was absolute.

I’ll always owe Chris for that amazing life experience. I don’t know what happened with his UFO documentary, because shortly after that I handed in my thesis, graduated and moved back to Ontario.

So what happened to Lia Matera and Chris Windsor? Lia Matera , herself a  lawyer, was chief editor of the Constitutional Law Quarterly and a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School, when she took up crime writing. She wrote the Willa Jansson and Laura Di Palma series of crime novels, twelve books in all, plus a dozen short stories. Her work collected several nominations for leading awards: the Edgar, Anthony and Macavity. She won the Shamus award in 1996.

Matera wrote from 1987 to 1996 then very little thereafter though Ellery Queen Magazine published her chilling tale, “Snow Job” as recently as 2019. Did she go back to law? Did she retire? The crime writing world is poorer for it!

Chris did go on to make a feature film, Big Meat Eater, a horror comedy that was released in 1982.  It got favorable reviews and was a finalist at the 1983 Genies  for Best Original Screenplay, but it never became a huge hit.  Chris told me that unfortunately, as a Canadian film it was eclipsed by the American film, Eating Raoul, another horror comedy about cannibalism.

Andrew Gillies, Chris’s star in Roofman and Big Meat Eater went on to have a long career as a stage and film actor, with roles in The Virgin Suicides and Orphan Black. 

Sadly, Chris left the film business. He may simply have burned out. To learn about the arduous art of film making, read his excellent article in the Georgia Strait here. He now lives in Asia where he has worked for many years.

VALUE: So what’s my used paperback copy of Star Witness worth on Abe Books? About $2 to $8US.  It doesn’t appear to be available in Canada

BOTTOM LINE: Keep. In honour of UFO’s!

 

 

 

 

 

 

SURREAL TRAPDOOR: Abandoned Buildings in Your Neighborhood – Pt. 1

ABANDONED

I’ve always been fascinated by abandoned buildings. Arrested in time, they are living ghosts, hoarders of stories.  I’ve always imagined them to be located on windswept hills, next to crumbling seashores or hidden in industrial wastelands, not lurking in my neighborhood.

To my surprise, I’ve now run across several abandoned buildings close to home. I’ve even learned how to spot them. (Stay tuned, that’s for Part 2.)

About a year ago, a visitor to our cottage told us that they’d discovered a “haunted house” on their walk through town. Following their directions,  I found it on my next morning run.

On first approach…

The house at first glance seemed to be an older Victorian whose owners loved ivy-covered walls.  But a closer look revealed a seriously deteriorated roof and a badly overgrown garden. The kingdom of plants had taken over.

Definitely some problems

 

 

What is hidden upstairs?
Vandals

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A danger in  being abandoned is vandalism – those who seek to destroy for the pure pleasure of destruction. Worst of all is the onslaught of natural elements, water being the most lethal.

I couldn’t help being curious about the reasons behind the house’s deterioration. An official notice was posted close to the “no trespassing” sign. Perhaps the inhabitants grew too elderly or too poor to maintain the house. As per COVID, one day would slide into the next, each as unremarkable as the other until decades had passed.

I spotted signs of an attempted clear-out. Was there a forced eviction? Two of these sad signs below.

Sad carpet
Lonely chair and bed spread

 

 

 

 

 

Over the summer, I observed  attempts to clear and/or repair the house, apparently by someone working singlehandedly.  Not much progress as you might expect for such an overwhelming task.

This summer, a year later, curiosity led me past the haunted house again. Massive changes had happened: the ivy was gone, the extension had been demolished and the entire garden had been ripped out. Nothing was left but an empty purged shell.

Which is the real ghost?

Before and after