Footsteps, shadows and the unexplained: Inside Atlantic Canada’s haunted stories

Charley Burke thought her son was talking in his sleep.

Riley, then three years old, had been asleep when she last checked on him.

Later that night, Burke heard him talking from his bedroom.

She went in.

Riley was sitting upright in bed, fully awake. He pointed toward an empty corner of the room and told his mother to leave.

“’Get out, I’m learning with my friends,’” Burke remembered him saying. “I look, and there’s nothing there, and I was like, ‘OK, bye.’”

The next morning, she asked who the friends were. One, he told her, was “Grampy.”

Burke’s father had died shortly before Riley’s first birthday.

Today, Burke is unequivocal about the more than 100-year-old P.E.I. home where she grew up and now lives with her children.

“Is it haunted?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, 100 per cent,” she answered.

She said Riley has described deceased relatives he never met and knows details about her father’s life that she believes he had no way of learning.

“He knows things about my dad that he shouldn’t know,” Burke said.

There are other things, too, she said. Doors slam. Footsteps cross rooms when no one else is home. Lights flicker for reasons Burke said electricians have been unable to determine.

The lights have particular meaning for her.

Months before her father died, the two were watching television when a light flickered.

“’When I die, I’m going to come back and flick the lights just to torment you,’” he told her.

About six months after his death, Burke said the hall lights began flickering when they had not before.

“So, the only explanation is ghosts… I just blame my father,” she said. “It’s the easiest thing to do.”

Stories like Burke’s can easily be reduced to a question of belief: ghosts are real, or they are not.

But a person can hear footsteps in an empty room whether or not a ghost made them. A light can flicker. A shadow can appear in the corner of someone’s vision. A child can describe someone no one else can see.

The experience and its cause are two different questions.

So perhaps the more revealing question is not whether ghosts exist, but how people decide what counts as evidence when something happens that they cannot explain.

For Elliott Van Dusen, that distinction is the foundation of an investigation.

Van Dusen founded Paranormal Phenomena Research and Investigation, a Nova Scotia-based non-profit, nearly three decades ago. A retired RCMP officer, he said his interest in paranormal claims grew alongside an earlier fascination with criminal investigations, cold cases and unexplained events.

His organization does not seek out buildings simply because they have a haunted reputation, he said. It responds when people ask for help, conducts interviews and then decides whether a field investigation is warranted.

“When somebody contacts us, even if they’ve told us like, ‘Hey, I’ve seen a ghost walk down my stairwell,’ we don’t automatically assume that the house is haunted by a ghost,” Van Dusen said.

“We go into the house with a completely open mind.”

That means first looking at what else the house, or the human body, might be doing.

Old pipes can knock. Animals can move inside walls. Heat pumps, drafts and changing temperatures can produce noises or movement. Van Dusen said his team also checks electrical sources and considers whether environmental conditions or perception could account for what someone experienced.

Some of those checks can uncover real hazards.

Carbon monoxide — an odourless and colourless gas produced by fuel-burning appliances — can cause headache, dizziness, weakness and confusion and can be fatal, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health also lists hallucinations among possible symptoms of exposure.

Other proposed connections are less certain.

Van Dusen pointed to research by the late Laurentian University neuroscientist Michael Persinger, who studied whether weak, complex magnetic fields applied around the head could induce the sensation that another presence was nearby.

But the findings have been disputed. A 2005 double-blind study published in Neuroscience Letters attempted to replicate the effect with 89 participants and found no evidence that the magnetic fields caused the reported experiences. Instead, measures associated with suggestibility predicted who was more likely to report them.

Researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London, tested the idea another way. According to a 2009 study published in the journal Cortex, researchers constructed an experimental “haunted” room and had 79 participants spend 50 minutes inside while exposed to infrasound, complex electromagnetic fields, both or neither.

Many participants reported unusual sensations. But those experiences did not correspond with whether they were actually exposed to the manipulated environmental conditions. The researchers concluded suggestibility was the most likely explanation for their findings.

For Van Dusen, those uncertainties are a reason to investigate rather than begin with an answer.

The process is less about finding a ghost than trying to eliminate other possibilities.

“Sometimes when we go through all that and at the end of the day we’ve ruled everything out, there are sometimes we walk away from a case saying, ‘Yeah, we couldn’t explain this,’” he said.

Van Dusen estimates about 10 per cent of the cases his organization investigates end that way.

“I would consider a haunting to be a repeated occurrence of paranormal phenomena,” he said.

One of the first homes to leave him with that kind of uncertainty was in Kentville, N.S.

The family reported apparitions, shadows and pennies repeatedly appearing around the house. During the first investigation, Van Dusen’s team set up cameras and monitored access to the rooms.

He said a penny later appeared at the base of a camera tripod in an area investigators believed no one had entered.

They returned with a larger team.

That night, one investigator reported seeing a little girl standing on a bed.

“He said she looked as real as you or I did,” Van Dusen said. “She wasn’t semi-transparent or semi-translucent. Literally looked like a little girl standing on the bed.”

When the team entered the room, Van Dusen said it felt unusually cold, and an electromagnetic-field meter was producing readings they could not immediately account for. Later, he said, the readings stopped and the room returned to its previous temperature.

For Van Dusen, those observations still did not turn “unexplained” into proof of a ghost.

“There was no doubt in my mind that that house certainly had things that we couldn’t explain that I would call paranormal phenomena,” he said.

That distinction, unexplained rather than proven supernatural, is where his approach differs from how others make sense of similar experiences.

Caleb Acorn, a 22-year-old P.E.I. artist and tattoo artist, also believes he lives in a haunted home. Unlike Burke, he actively goes looking for evidence.

“I’ve always just been so fascinated with wanting to know if it’s really real,” Acorn said.

“I need to prove to myself, to show myself that it’s real or if it’s not.”

Acorn investigates purported paranormal activity with a small group of relatives and friends. They have bought equipment commonly used by paranormal enthusiasts, including a spirit box, a device that rapidly scans radio frequencies.

Acorn said he was initially skeptical of it. He wondered whether the words he heard were simply random.

Then, during a session at his home, he held a can of Pepsi and asked what was in his hand without naming the object.

He said the device produced the word “pop.” When he asked its colour, he said he heard “blue.”

“To me, that made me kind of believe, ‘OK, I’m actually having a conversation with something,’” Acorn said. “And it’s not just random words getting thrown into a generator and spinning it out. I’m asking a question and it’s replying.”

For Acorn, that exchange counted as evidence.

But he also said he wants to be able to reach the opposite conclusion.

“I’d love to come over and hang out and see if there really is anything or if I could even debunk it,” he said. “Say, ‘No, it’s just this.’ Or say, ‘Yeah, I think you do have a spirit.’”

His own belief is also rooted in experiences he said were harder to dismiss.

While in high school, Acorn visited an abandoned former amusement park in P.E.I. at night. Inside one building, he said he began hearing sounds like glass breaking and objects being thrown. His friend standing nearby did not hear them.

As Acorn left the building, he said he saw a shadow-like figure nearly seven feet tall leaning around a doorway.

“I panicked, but held my ground because I didn’t want my friend to know I was freaking out,” he said.

Acorn said his friend then told him he had seen the figure, too.

For more than a year afterwards, Acorn said he had nightmares about the shadow and sometimes thought he saw it in hallways at home.

“I thought I was going insane,” he said.

He sought therapy as well as support through his faith and Indigenous community.

“I went to elders, I went to churches, I did everything I could, and after I fully blessed myself really, I stopped with the nightmares,” he said.

His interest in the subject continued.

At his family home, where he has lived for about 13 years, Acorn said the family hears footsteps and knocking and sometimes finds cupboard doors open. He believes the presence could be a former owner of the house.

“It’s my home, but it’s also his home,” Acorn said.

Van Dusen’s work raises another possibility: once someone believes a place is haunted, the belief itself can influence which later events begin to look like evidence.

His organization has been involved in research around what has been called “Haunted People Syndrome.”

According to a 2022 paper published in Frontiers in Psychology by psychologists James Houran and Brian Laythe, the proposed model examines people who repeatedly report apparently supernatural encounters. The researchers suggest unusual perceptions may be interpreted through existing paranormal beliefs and then reinforced as additional experiences accumulate.

The model is a research hypothesis, not a clinical diagnosis or an established explanation for purported hauntings.

The paper also acknowledged Van Dusen for referring the case examined by the researchers and sharing material from an earlier investigation.

“If somebody is living in a haunted environment for a while, they may start to attribute every little thing that happens to them to being the paranormal,” Van Dusen said.

A glass moves in the sink. A floor creaks. A light flickers.

“Oh, no, must be the ghost,” he said.

For Van Dusen, considering that possibility does not mean dismissing the person or assuming nothing happened.

A case his team handled remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the difference.

A woman in Ontario contacted the organization after an experience in her bedroom left her frightened and struggling to sleep. She later reported feeling as though something was again crawling onto or sitting on the edge of her bed.

Unable to travel during lockdown restrictions, Van Dusen’s team arranged for her to position a laptop in the bedroom and record herself sleeping. Investigators reviewed hours of footage on several different nights.

They found nothing unusual. The woman, meanwhile, told them she was sleeping much better.

“I almost wondered if there was a psychological component to that,” Van Dusen said. “Just like she felt like, ‘Hey, there’s these guys that specialize in this. They’re taking care of me. I feel safe. I can get some sleep.’”

When the sensations later returned, they repeated the process.

Again, nothing appeared on the recordings.

“Nothing happened. Nothing was caught on film. She felt great,” Van Dusen said.

The case did not establish what caused the woman’s original experience. It just related to the possibility that an experience can be frightening and consequential even when an investigation finds no evidence for the explanation a person fears.

Sometimes a strange sound may be an animal inside a wall. Sometimes a physical hazard such as carbon monoxide can alter perception. Experiments suggest expectation and suggestibility can also shape what people report experiencing.

Then there are the cases Van Dusen said survive those checks.

Not proof of a ghost. Not proof that someone imagined what happened.

Unexplained.

Some stories may eventually have ordinary explanations. Others may be shaped by expectation, perception or belief. Van Dusen said his team can account for most of the cases it investigates.

Then there is the roughly 10 per cent he said it cannot.

Burke has decided what the footsteps, voices and flickering lights in her home mean.

Acorn continues looking for evidence that will satisfy him.

Van Dusen is more comfortable stopping before an answer the evidence cannot support.

“It’s really trying to sort out what are they really experiencing versus what are they attributing to the paranormal,” he said.