Poltergeists On Native Burial Lands

This is a story I have been meaning to write about for quite some time, but somehow other stories always showed up distracting my focus away from this particular poltergeist. I cannot say whether this poltergeist still exists today as there is a possibility the building has since been torn down. What I can say is that I came upon a very intriguing story online about an old haunted farmhouse on Headquarters Road in Courtenay, B.C. The paranormal experience occurred in the early 1970s when The Comox Valley was still a small, relatively undeveloped town that was riddled with small mom-and-pop stores and locally run businesses. Here is a tale of a young woman from the 1970s as she reported to ghosttheory.com:

When I was young about 15 I moved up to Vancouver Island to be with my sister and brother-in-law, that summer. I was in love with a friend of theirs and wanted to be with him. I was losing my virginity to him around that time. They were in an old farmhouse, way at the back of the land, that house was at the ends of its days. On 40 acres.In Courtney, B.C. on Headquarters Road. I am 54 now.

It all started slowly at night with tappings on the walls outside, high up. My sister had dogs at the time, big red setters, that had too much energy and we were forever letting them in and out of the living room doors.

We all sat at the kitchen table one morning and started to talk at the same time. We had all been awake, it turns out, We all could hear the knocking around the house at night. We were all pretending to be asleep and not wanting to bother with it, but we all were awake and didn't know the person next to us was awake too, We all had one eye open, each night We were all listening to the same thing.

I was in shock, we didn't say anything for days before, and we confirmed we all listening to the sounds.

Things got stronger. One night, coming back from town my brother-in-law walked into the house and then right back out again. Saying we are sleeping over at a friend's place down the road. He wouldn't tell me what happened there. The next day in the light we were back in the place laughing about how silly this was to sleep over on a friend's floor. Later that day, my sister and brother-in-law went to town for the night.

My boyfriend and I were alone in the house for a couple of hours everything was alright. Later into the night and then the knocking started then, turn into banging faster and faster, louder and louder, around, all around us at the same time, the sound from the top of the outside walls was being banged by maybe 10 people with long sticks pounding the walls, I thought it was a joke, the night was dark with no moon, I had enough, and walk into the kitchen to look out the window and the light came on by its self, I jumped out of the room fast, and it went off.

My boyfriend ran and got a shotgun and we were going outside to get these people and I had the dogs ready by the neck now, all wild and barking to get out of the same doors. Laughing, I thought “I’ll get them, with these dogs, and we will show them the gun too. Well, I had the dogs fighting to go out, then when I opened to door, and let go for them to rush to move out, for the first time in my life, the dogs stopped at the door and wouldn’t leave the house. They always ran outside. I have never seen a dog stop stone dead in its tracks and not leave. The barking was mean now. The banging was harder all around the outer walls going faster around us.

The dog's hair went straight up. I have never seen that before, and the hair is six inches long on that red breed. My eyes opened wide. My boyfriend looked, and then we looked at each other. In horror, all of us backed up from the doors, and the dogs, and with the gun we all sat down on the couch, freaked, the sound was all around us. The dogs now whimpering.

The banging then stopped. We stayed there in that spot, not moving awake for hours with one little light on, we must of all fallen asleep at the same time. Dawn came and we awoke still holding onto the big dogs with the sunlight coming in through the windows. I was alive and happy it was daylight. I went to the door and opened it, and the dogs and I ran out. I looked for footprints around the house. There was none.

My sister came back later that morning. We tried to tell them at the same time what had happened. They had found a new place to live in town. I broke up with my boyfriend later that week, he wasn’t the man I wanted under pressure with and I went back to my mother's for the winter to go to school. It was so strange the dogs would not go out after whatever it was out there. I was a woman when I left there, that summer I trusted myself to see the truths in life. Of what I know and what happened on that night in that old house, in my guts, it was a haunting that happened in my life. I never want to go through that again.

The dogs are the ones that let me something was wrong out there. I didn’t understand, I was geared up for the hunt of the problem. Something unreal happened that night, this touched me deeply, it didn’t make sense, why the dogs wouldn’t go out, and their hair on ends, I often wonder what would have happened if we did go outside with the loud banging going on. If we didn't have the dogs there to show us, it would not a good to leave the house.

I don’t write stories, but this was important to me to try.

Karen M.

The experience that Karen reported is what we would commonly call a poltergeist experience. A poltergeist is defined as a type of ghost or other supernatural entity that is responsible for physical disturbances, such as loud noises and objects being moved or destroyed. Many modern theories point to something other than a human spirit or live human as the source of poltergeist activity, but those theories are for another time.

In this case, indeed we can see that we had a 15-year-old girl who was embarking on a sexual journey for herself that coincided with this paranormal experience. The real question is, what could have caused such unexplained noises and terror in faithful guard dogs? Could it be that Karen herself was unintentionally causing the poltergeist activity? It’s an easy conclusion to come to, isn’t it? However, when I looked further on the message boards I saw this post by another local Comox Valley resident known as Kristy.

Hello, I have been collecting ghost stories from Vancouver Island for about 10 years now, and I once lived at a house on the same road as Karen M mentioned in this story. Headquarters Road is one of the original settlement areas of the pioneers, The river intersects there, it is rich and fertile land for farming. If you do your research well, you can discover that the area is occupied by “mounds”… this was a method of burial used by Oregon, US First Nations as burial… and we have come to find it as well on that road in the Courtenay [area], specifically Headquarters road.

Now I took occupied an old farmhouse on that road, and I had the strangest experiences in my life. First multiple family members and visitors saw a lady in a blue dress walk up our stairs to the third floor, and she would be gone after reaching the top floor…

We had orange balls of light in the hallway and downstairs…

Clusters of flies by the stairwell on the second floor,

The door to the basement would shut on its own and lock!

Growling at the bottom basement stair…

Cups fly off the counter in front of at least six people.

Pictures would tell themselves and then right themselves again minutes later. You would hear the frames scrape the wall!

The smell of fireplace smoke, almost like cedar burning…

A lengthy conversation could be heard, mumbles, and men talking, around the same time as the smoke smell. We had a suite in the basement as well, I was cleaning that kitchen, and there was a window that was level with the ground outside. I watched someone walk by that window, cream-colored pants, men's dress style… I waited for someone to come knock on our door, never happened, looked down the long driveway. No oe there, it’s a rural area and there is no way someone was just happening past the home up such a long driveway and far from town.

We were in this home for years, so the vents are quite the list. This house was always active, but we never were “put out” by it. The house was huge and we had a large family and it was an unbeatable price so we stuck it through. The only time it was ever an annoyance was coming home to find the furnace “chugging away” when we always turned it off before leaving. This happened a lot and we would walk into a cooking hot house and foot another huge oil bill.

Anyway just found it interesting that someone else had an experience on Headquarters Road, even if theirs was more of a poltergiest experience. Thanks.

So, two experiences on Headquarters Road and whether or not they are linked is something we can never say with absolute surety. The first haunting was a one-time experience, of a young girl, during a summer of the 1970s where she was embarking on a first-time sexual experience. Could all these changes be linked to her experience or could it be that poltergeists are not always linked to hormonal teenage girls and this experience had nothing to do with her gender or age? The standard explanation links pre-pubescent, hormonal girls to poltergeists. Even the famous Enfield Poltergeist involved a young girl who had just entered menstruation. But as they say, correlation is not always causation.

The causes of poltergeists are many, such as the residence of the location, ouija board activity, or elemental spirits. In this case, we do know, not only from testimony from our second story but from the actual history of this area, that this location would have seen the sacred burial site of Native Indians. I had asked several people in town about where native burials were located historically and I was met with a few strange looks I will tell you! However, I did ask a woman, who will remain unnamed, that lives on the road in question and she said quite adamantly that indeed that area would have been full of ancient Indian burial sites that had gone back in history long before European settlers made way to the now Comox Valley.

The question now points in the direction of how burial sites affect poltergeist activity. It is an old theme in movies and popular culture, the idea that spirits come through ancient burial sites in the form of local Native curses that haunt the current modern culture. Could this be a reflection of the white man guilt? The burden that is passed on as the payment for eradicating a culture through colonization? Or could it be that simply put, burial grounds where intense and sacred ceremonial energies are created by the living, eventually hold energies that can create activities that affect the living in future generations to come?

When I was in Hawaii on a tour driving towards the Polynesian culture that was North of Honolulu, the tour guide told a tale about the construction of a highway overpass that desecrated ancient burial lands. Upon the initial construction phase, the bones of ancestors were discovered and there was a great dispute from local Hawaiians about the overpass construction continuing. As they continued the project, eventually the overpass had many issues, I believe it included the collapse of areas. The belief that building on the burial sites of the ancestors will affect the living is still alive and well. The overpass was eventually built, and of course, so did many other hotels, resorts, and other structures that have covered native burial sites worldwide. But do they carry a curse still in the actual structure?

Back to our little farmhouse on our Headquarters Road, a farmhouse that has likely been long torn down and replaced by a more modern homestead. I cannot tell you if this lady's story was true, and she hasn’t resurfaced to make any more statements online. We’ve reached out to her. It is, however, telling that we have another experience in a farmhouse in a later era on the same road.

I suppose the best way to know, currently is if someone, on Headquarters Road, perhaps, sends me an email, it could be anonymous, and says, Yes I have seen some strange things in my house, on this very road!