Halloween in Oak Bayfrom first candy to last dance.

On a Sunday in February 1949, the Daily Colonist sent Barnett McKinley to the blind end of Heron Street, behind “a ten-foot cypress hedge,” to write the last chapter of what it called Victoria’s “oldest and most ‘haunted’ house.”

The house was Tod House, built in 1850 by the Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader John Tod. By then its owners called it Trewen. For years, McKinley reported, the household had put up with “strange bumps and voices” at night. One Christmas the holly was thrown down from the walls overnight. The disturbances came most often, he wrote, at “the end of each year.”

There was a biscuit barrel in an old cupboard that would swing on its hook, “sometimes for hours,” while everything else on the shelf hung still. And there was the cellar door. The owners had the latch notch filed deep and every draught stopped up, and still it would open, silently, “as though some unseen presence had just passed through.”

Only one person was on record as having actually seen anything: a small boy from an earlier family, who was whipped by his mother for telling his ghost stories to the neighbours.

Then, almost two years before the story ran, the owners decided to put in an oil-burning heating system. Workmen digging a seven-foot pit for the tank just outside the house struck human bones about five feet down, and came inside to ask for more pay. An anatomist said the bones had been buried in lime. Who the person was, the paper could not say, and the guesses it printed are the kind that tell you more about 1949 than about the dead.

After the bones were taken away, McKinley wrote, the barrel stopped swinging and the cellar door stayed shut. Mrs. Evans, the owner, seemed almost sorry that her “little ghost” had gone. She had always been, she said, “more frightened of newspapermen and researchers than of manifestations from the spirit world.”

Her husband told the paper the psychic researchers had a forecast: that the ghost would return to Trewen after a quiet spell, “more violent than ever.”