Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2024

The Secret Life of Canada. Season 6, Episode 18. Crash Course: I see dead people (in Winnipeg)

SOUNDCLIP

[old news clip]

REPORTER: The Mother Tucker's Restaurant in Winnipeg is in an old Masonic Temple built in 1895. Many of the employees believe the place is haunted.

EMPLOYEE: You'll seal one floor off, come down, and start doing your security check on the next floor. And you’ll still hear footsteps, or you'll hear sounds on the floor above you. And you know that you've gone around and checked all the doors and the building is secure and there's no one above you, yet you still hear the footprints and you, you still hear the pitter-patter of feet. Many times we've come in, the tables, the sugars have been scattered around. The salt and peppers have been moved. The napkins have been used. The cutlery is all over the place. Just as though somebody had a party of their own the night before after everybody had left.

FALEN JOHNSON: Hey, Leah.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Hey, Falen. So, it's that time of year again. Your favourite, and my “I'm fine with it, I guess” time of year, which is...

FALEN JOHNSON: Halloween!

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: That's right. And as I walk the line between ambivalence and fear, over, quote-unquote, "spooky season" -- I hate that term by the way -- I figure that we should bring in someone more enthusiastic about all this creepiness and who has some ghost history for us. That is producer extraordinaire Eunice Kim, everyone. Eunice Kim.

FALEN JOHNSON: Hooray!

EUNICE KIM: Hi, Leah and Falen!

FALEN JOHNSON: Hey, Eunice! Okay, so I'm really happy you're here. I love my ghost stories, I love my spooky things. And so what is this ghost story that you are bringing us today?

EUNICE KIM: Okay, so today I wanted to talk about how Winnipeg became known around the world for communicating with the dead.

[Dramatic music]

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Woo! Okay, got my holy water. I'm creeped out already. Let's go. Let's go.

FALEN JOHNSON: [laughs] I'm already excited about this.

[Music box tune]

EUNICE KIM: So in the mid-to-late 1800s, there was a big boom in what's now called the modern spiritualism movement. So attempting to talk to ghosts was the hottest new trend sweeping across North America and Europe. All kinds of people -- so aristocrats, politicians, artists, scientists -- they would invite mediums to hold séances in their dimly lit parlors. Which honestly sounds like a solid Friday night to me, I'm not going to lie.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I agree. Yes.

FALEN JOHNSON: Absolutely. It sounds like hanging out with like, a bunch of people dressed like Stevie Nicks, and I am down for it. [Leah-Simone laughs] Okay. So, and mediums, we should clarify, are people who claim that they can communicate with the dead through a ritual called a séance.

EUNICE KIM: Yep.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. So, why the sudden explosion of spiritualism at this time? Like, what was the appeal?

EUNICE KIM: Yeah, so there were a few different reasons for that, right? So, the American Civil War ended in 1865, which resulted in a catastrophic loss of life. The majority of fallen soldiers died really far from home, and they remained unidentified, a lot of them. So their loved ones were never able to give them a proper burial. So that's where mediums came into play. They were somehow able to give these families and loved ones closure. And on top of that, this was also a period of rapid change, right. There was the Industrial Revolution, and with that came a mass migration of people leaving rural areas for urban centres. And social structures were shifting at the same time. So people kind of wanted to quell their anxieties and try to make sense of their changing world.

FALEN JOHNSON: Wow, that is, like, all super interesting. So you could consider spiritualism as a byproduct of all of these events happening in the time that people were living in.

EUNICE KIM: Exactly, yeah.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah, it sounds a lot like the times we're in right now. [FALEN: Mm-hmm.] But, like, how does Winnipeg fit into all of this?

EUNICE KIM: Yeah. So spiritualism took off in the late 1800s, but it was still going strong by the turn of the century. And, you know, like most things, it had naturally made its way to Canada. And there it saw another rise in popularity after the First World War.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Right.

EUNICE KIM: I'm sure you can probably guess why.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah, most people were losing their loved ones. Lots of death. Yeah.

EUNICE KIM: Yeah. So, an entire generation of young men was wiped out in the First World War. And after the war, the 1918 flu pandemic happened. And there were also epidemics of cholera, tuberculosis and smallpox.

FALEN JOHNSON: Yeah. So there was a lot of death at that time.

EUNICE KIM: And with death comes grieving, right? So people were still turning to their mediums in the hopes of connecting with their deceased loved ones. But by this point, there were institutions dedicated to studying paranormal phenomena by carefully documenting those, you know, gatherings, those séances. And there was one place in Winnipeg that became a hub of this kind of research. And it was all thanks to a guy named Dr. Thomas Glendenning Hamilton, and his wife, Lillian.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Ooh, I love a triple name. [laughter] I think people with triple names actually have higher IQs, I've heard, or something. Anyway. So who, who were [EUNICE: That's a fact.] these folks?

EUNICE KIM: Yeah. So T.G. Hamilton -- or T. Glen, depending on who you asked -- he wore many hats. He was a physician, a teacher, a lecturer, a politician. His wife was a trained nurse. And together they ran a private medical practice in their home, which came to be known throughout Winnipeg as 'Hamilton House.' And his medical practice was his main gig, but he spent a lot of his spare time doing something completely different.

FALEN JOHNSON: I'm going to guess: T. Glen -- rap artist? [laughter] Okay, now--

EUNICE KIM: Maybe.

FALEN JOHNSON: What was his side hustle? What actually was it?

EUNICE KIM: I don't know if it was technically a side hustle, unless a side hustle involves Ouija boards and trying to photograph ghosts. [crosstalk]

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Oh, the Ouija.

EUNICE KIM: I don't know if that's very lucrative.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Well, you know, for those who don't know, a Ouija board is, it's a board, it's like a wooden board, usually, that has the alphabet and other symbols and signs on it that some people believe can be used to communicate with the spirits of dead people.

FALEN JOHNSON: Yeah. And if you don't know what a Ouija board is, I'm really sorry you were never invited to sleepovers in elementary school. [Leah-Simone laughs] Anyway. So, okay. T.G. was a doctor by day and a ghost whisperer by night.

EUNICE KIM: Oh, yeah. So, he would dabble in things like telepathy and table movements. Which is kind of the same concept as a Ouija board, but with a table that appeared to tip or receive knocks in response to questions.

[sound of knocking]

EUNICE KIM: But some sources suggest that it wasn't until a family tragedy in 1919 that he started taking his research more seriously.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. And was this, did this have to do with the pandemic or the war?

EUNICE KIM: Yeah, so his three-year-old son, Arthur, died of the flu, and his only daughter, Margaret, would later recall how much she was affected by Arthur's death. Quote, "Dad's grief was profound. I remember being in wonderment as I watched my father cry. He asked the question, 'Does my child survive?' He wasn't sure for a long time."

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Mm, that's sad. So he could have turned to spiritualism as a way of processing his grief like many others did at this time.

EUNICE KIM: Yeah. So apparently T.G. and his wife, Lillian, actually dedicated a room on the second floor of their house, the Hamilton House, to conduct paranormal research, or what they'd call psychical or psychic research. So they would hold séances there themselves, several times a week, with one or two mediums present. It was like they had their own in-house medium. They treated the room as a laboratory where they could have controlled conditions that would leave no margin for error or fraud. Or so they said.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay, so what kinds of precautions were they taking?

EUNICE KIM: This is kind of creepy, but, so the séance room--

FALEN JOHNSON: Oh, I'm here for it. [chuckles]

EUNICE KIM: Yeah, let's get to the creepy stuff. The séance room would be locked and sealed shut between sessions or sittings, which is what they would call them, and the keys were given to participants who didn't live in the home. And the mediums and guests were searched before entering the pitch-black room, and all the participants would hold hands throughout the entire sitting.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: And what would they be doing in these sessions?

EUNICE KIM: Yeah, so they did experiments with telepathy, telekinesis, and table levitations. So a lot of, like, floating tables and chairs, like Beauty and the Beast style. Uh, [Falen laughs] T.G.'s research, [laughs] T.G.'s research became so popular that people from around the world would visit Winnipeg to take part in these sittings. And among them were Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and Arthur Conan Doyle, who were both huge believers in spiritualism.

FALEN JOHNSON: Right. Yes. And Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, if listeners aren't familiar.

EUNICE KIM: Yeah. So he was like the poster child of spiritualism. He wrote about his 1923 visit to Hamilton House in one of his books, actually, because he was so moved by it. And in that, he recounts witnessing a table flying into the air. Leah, could you please read this passage he wrote?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: "One moment it was quiescent. A moment later it was like a restless dog in a kennel, springing, tossing, beating up against the supports, and finally bounding out with a velocity which caused me to get quickly out of the way. It ended by rising up in the air while our fingertips were on it and remaining up for an appreciable period."

FALEN JOHNSON: Like, you lost me at dog.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: [in posh British accent] The hounds of the Baskervilles...

[laughter]

FALEN JOHNSON: No, but that does sound scary. Like, if that did happen, that sounds scary.

EUNICE KIM: Yeah, so, [LEAH-SIMONE: Yeah, it does.] during these sittings like this, like the one that Leah did an excellent job, just-- I felt like I was there. [Falen laughs]

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: [in posh British accent] I was doing my Prince Charles. [Falen and Eunice laugh] It was kind of like a prince. They talk like this. Okay.

EUNICE KIM: Yeah, so during those sittings, mediums would, like, go into a trance, and they would convey messages to the participants either vocally or through handwritten notes, or objects like Ouija boards or ringing bells. But what made the Hamilton's research so unique was their use of photography. This is really creepy, but they had over a dozen cameras lined up on one side of the room, in this pitch dark room, facing the mediums. Um, I have these photos for you guys. Can you check them out and describe what you see?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Oh.

FALEN JOHNSON: Oh... Oh, boy.

[Jumpscare music clip]

FALEN JOHNSON: Ah!

[laughter]

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Wow.

FALEN JOHNSON: I mean, okay, some of them look like just really intense sneezes. [laughter]

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Mm-hmm. [crosstalk]

FALEN JOHNSON: Like that third one?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: You know what, I can see-- it's, it's a lot of, of, like, white, smoky, maybe kind of milky substance around their faces. Some have little [Falen chuckles] faces inside it. In this time period, I could see how people believed it and thought it was real. But in a 2024 lens, it looks, um, it, it looks very fake.

FALEN JOHNSON: It looks like they're sneezing out, like, a twin that they ingested while in utero. [Eunice laughs] That's how I would describe this. [laughs]

[crosstalk]

EUNICE KIM: Okay...

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: [indistinct] disgusting. But you're right.

EUNICE KIM: The listeners-- Yeah, that's for the listeners right there. So that white mass, Leah, that you talked about or that giant sneeze. Um, so that substance that's coming out from this medium's, like, face, that's called ectoplasm or teleplasm.

FALEN JOHNSON: Ectoplasm, okay. So, I am not a scientist, but isn't that the name of the slime in Ghostbusters? That's, like, that's, that's a real thing.

EUNICE KIM: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, I didn't know this either, but ectoplasm is a well-known concept in spiritualism, actually. So, it was supposedly this mysterious substance that would appear to spew out of mediums' bodies during a séance, usually from their mouths, eyes or ears. Like you see in these photos here.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Ugh, that's nasty.

FALEN JOHNSON: Not... Yeah, I'm not taking the bait on this one, Eunice.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Gross.

EUNICE KIM: Yeah, so ectoplasm, it was believed to be a physical manifestation of the spirit they were communicating with or their energy. Right. It could only be seen in the dark -- hence the pitch-black room -- and it would disappear moments later.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Okay. So the Hamiltons were trying to capture all this kind of body snot on camera using flash photography.

EUNICE KIM: Yep. So...

FALEN JOHNSON: Body snot.

EUNICE KIM: Body snot. That's...

FALEN JOHNSON: I love it.

EUNICE KIM: ...delish. Mm mm mm. So they would capture hundreds of photographs over the years using that setup, with, like, a dozen cameras lined up. And some of the ectoplasm would actually have little faces on them of, you know, supposedly of the spirits that they were speaking to. So Arthur Conan Doyle paid them more visits in 1932, two years after he died.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Ohhhh.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay...

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Okay. Very, very strange.

FALEN JOHNSON: Yeah. And so, I mean, this is... this is some impressive vintage Photoshop here, these images. Um, because I'm... I want to believe Eunice, but, you know, I have to be a little bit skeptical. But did people actually fall for these?

EUNICE KIM: I mean, it's hard to tell. Right? Like, spiritualism had as many non-believers as it had believers. I mean, Harry Houdini was famously, like, on a warpath to debunk spiritualism. And there are so many other mediums who would go to great lengths to deceive people. So the frauds would use everything from invisible ink and hidden contraptions to cloth stuffed in their mouths. Which is what you were saying before, that it kind of looks like cloth.

FALEN JOHNSON: Ah. Okay.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: And what about the mediums T.G. Hamilton worked with? Were they being accused of being fraudulent as well? I mean, what was happening with them?

EUNICE KIM: No. So, their work with T.G. was really well-respected, and their séances were highly sought after by some of the most prominent figures in Winnipeg -- like lawyers, politicians, clergymen. And apparently the mediums and the guests were never paid for their work. So that ruled out the idea of them being incentivized for making stuff up. And records also suggest that they were disrobed -- which is a very fun word, disrobed -- and given a new change of clothes before entering the room. So the mediums couldn't hide anything on their person. So that kind of rules out the idea that they were, like, hiding cloth under their armpits [FALEN: Yeah.] or something. And even the film plates were inspected before and after developing them.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay, so this, like, sounds like it really adds some legitimacy to the research. And how long were they doing this work for?

EUNICE KIM: Literally until the day he died. You know, they say if you love something, you know...

[Leah-Simone laughs]

FALEN JOHNSON: Do it till you die.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: If you love something, do it until you fall over. Yeah.

FALEN JOHNSON: Yeah. I plan on dying eating a grilled cheese sandwich.

[laughter]

EUNICE KIM: Me too. But mac and cheese. [Falen laughs] Yeah, so T.G. Hamilton, he had a fatal heart attack at the age of 61 in 1935. And his wife, Lillian, continued his research for about another decade following his death. And in 1979, their daughter Margaret donated those ectoplasm photographs to the University of Manitoba, along with thousands of other materials, including research papers, notes, transcripts and letters. And they call it the Hamilton Family fonds. And that material has lived in the Archives and Special Collections department ever since.

[Music box tune]

EUNICE KIM: For anyone interested in seeing these photos and records, the university actually digitized thousands of them and made them accessible online.

[Music box tune fades up then ends]

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Okay, so T.G. was a man of science, but he believed in ghost communication as well. But people took his work seriously. But, but looking at some of these photographs, they do look painfully fake. I mean, like, this one looks like she has torn up pieces of, like, tissue stuck up her nose.

FALEN JOHNSON: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

EUNICE KIM: Yeah.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: So I'm just wondering, like, who was in on it? That's what I want to know.

EUNICE KIM: Yeah. Yeah, I know. They look really fake. I mean, according to documentation, like, no one knows if it was a ruse and if T.G. was in on it himself. But what we do know is that other mediums did have tricks to make it seem like they were connecting with the other side.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Right. Like the invisible ink and stuffing cloth in their mouths that you mentioned earlier.

FALEN JOHNSON: And I mean, maybe it's just like another one of those weird bygone era things that can't be explained. You know, people have all kinds of bizarre beliefs throughout history, right?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah. You also mentioned that the Hamiltons put Winnipeg on the map when it comes to paranormal research. What does that mean?

EUNICE KIM: Yeah. So over the last few decades, the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections has grown into a massive repository of all things paranormal. You know, thanks in part to the work that Hamilton did. And in 2009, a very famous Canadian donated their family archives -- Peter Akroyd, the father of Dan Aykroyd.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Ohhh.

FALEN JOHNSON: Whoa.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Dan Aykroyd from Saturday Night Live and The Blues Brothers. Also Driving Miss Daisy -- he got nominated for an Academy Award for that one. And the creator, of course, of Ghostbusters.

SOUNDCLIP

[clip from Ghostbusters movie]

DAN AKROYD: [as Ray Stantz] I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension.

BILL MURRAY: [as Dr. Peter Venkman] That ought to do it. Thanks very much, Ray.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Falen, you were just talking about Ghostbusters.

FALEN JOHNSON: Right! Yes. And I, I, I... oh my -- Guys?

LEAH-SIMONE AND EUNICE: What?

FALEN JOHNSON: Did I just conjure Dan Aykroyd?

[Jumpscare music clip]

[laughter]

EUNICE KIM: I think you might have found a new calling.

[Falen laughs]

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: He's not dead, though, so... [crosstalk]

FALEN JOHNSON: Oh. Yeah.

EUNICE KIM: That's true. It still counts. It still counts.

FALEN JOHNSON: Hm. Okay. Makes sense.

EUNICE KIM: You're a baby medium. We'll get you there. So Dan's a big paranormal guy. I don't know if you guys knew this. I think it's a very well-known fact. He's really into all things paranormal. But so were his father, grandfather, and great grandfather, Dr. Samuel Augustus Aykroyd. So it goes way back. [FALEN: Whoa.] Yeah. So in the '90s, Dan's dad Peter, he found an old rusty trunk that had been locked up for decades. And it was full of his--

FALEN JOHNSON: Oh, I love this already.

EUNICE KIM: So this old dusty trunk -- it sounds like a movie, right? So, it was full of his grandfather Samuel's detailed journals about the séances that they would host in their family farmhouse, which is somewhere in Ontario. And Peter ended up writing a book based on that material that he found and their family history, and then he donated all of that to the university. And that is where the idea for Ghostbusters came from.

LEAH-SIMONE AND EUNICE: Okay.

FALEN JOHNSON: Ohhhh snap. That's amazing. Okay, I need to go to Winnipeg. I need to go to Winnipeg.

EUNICE KIM: [laughs] Just for the ghosts.

FALEN JOHNSON: Because that's, that's really cool. Just for the ghosts. So that's four generations of speaking to ghosts in this [EUNICE: Yeah.] family.

EUNICE KIM: It's really intense. So Dan, he's often joked about how he's carried on "the family business," he likes to call it. So he grew up learning about psychic research and paranormal stuff through magazines that were scattered around that old farmhouse where those séances would happen. And he would listen to stories of these sittings and spirits from family members.

SOUNDCLIP

DAN AKROYD: I basically became really aware of it when I heard a story by my uncle, uh, dad's brother, Maurice. And he was a classic, cock-of-the-walk, Canadian alpha male, man. You know, get out of the way. You know. I mean, he was sitting there with a, with a rye, and, and I asked him about the séances. I said, you know, did you ever participate? And he said, well, when I was four years old, in Westmount, there was a séance going on, and I walked into the room and I looked up and I saw a trumpet flying around the room, speaking. And as soon as I walked in, the trumpet fell to the ground and the séance stopped, and everybody was mad at me because I'd broken...

HOST: [laughs] Right.

DAN AKROYD: So coming from him, I started to, to believe that there really might be something there.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Okay. So Ghostbusters is basically a documentary is what we've learned here. [Falen chuckles]

EUNICE KIM: Yeah. You can call it science non-fiction... That's so bad. But [laughs] I'm running with it. [Leah-Simone laughs]

FALEN JOHNSON: Ohh. Ohh. Ohh.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I like that.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. So, I'm going to watch Ghostbusters and I'll take some notes and...

EUNICE KIM: Report back.

FALEN JOHNSON: Yeah. And see if I can--

LEAH-SIMONE AND EUNICE: Yeah, we don't, we don't have to wait. If it's a documentary, we can watch it right now. It's relevant to what we're doing, in the middle of the workday. It's work research.

FALEN JOHNSON: [laughs] Yeah, we'll all watch Ghostbusters.

EUNICE KIM: Yeah, let's go watch Ghostbusters.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Okay, let's do it.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song clip of "Ghostbusters" by Ray Parker Jr.]

TRANSCRIPT: The Secret Life of Canada, Season 6: I see dead people (in Winnipeg)

Crash Course on Winnipeg Spiritualism

Social Sharing