Noisy, Friendly Phantom Haunts Verdun, QB Church
[Original headline: Ghost in the aisle]
No one knows who is haunting old Verdun church but everyone agrees the invisible resident is friendly
Old churches can be scary places at night - even more so if the house of prayer is haunted.
Luckily for parishioners of St. Clement's Anglican Church in downtown Verdun, the resident spook is friendly rather than menacing.
And according to the church vicar, Fred Tiplady, the ghost has always been heard but never seen.
"Whenever there's a noise upstairs, people say it's our ghost," Tiplady said yesterday from the Wellington St. church basement.
Tiplady had his first experience with the phantom when he was a young member of St. Clement's choir about 50 years ago.
"I was 14 or so and on choir duty by myself down here, doing my homework around 11 at night," Tiplady recalled. "I heard the noise, like heavy footsteps, and I knew the doors were locked upstairs."
When the youngster mentioned the episode to the vicar that Sunday, he was told: "Oh, that was our ghost."
Tiplady said he has since heard the same eerie noise on different occasions.
"It's usually at night and especially (audible) from the basement" of the 78-year-old church, he explained. "The ghost walks right down the centre aisle and you can hear the clunking sound."
While others have reported such audio encounters over the years, Tiplady said "no one that I know has ever ventured to guess who the ghost might be."
St. Clement's, once Canada's largest Anglican parish, is 104 years old. In 1923, an addition was built on to the original chapel constructed in 1900.
"Our ghost is in a sense jokingly thought of at times," the clergyman said. "It's a fun thing."
In a strange turn of events, however, a Gazette photographer's electronic flash that had worked fine in the basement suddenly stopped functioning once she moved upstairs into the church to take shots of the vicar.
"Technology fails, our ghost prevails," Tiplady said with a devilish grin.
• Story originally published by:
Montreal Gazette / QB via Canada.com | Mike King - Oct 11.01
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