Deborah Powell
BRISTOL – Pine Lodge certainly had a great success with their Halloween activities last October, with a very scary Haunted House path through the lodge. But when the face paint and costumes were removed from the volunteer actors and the props were packed away were there still some “real” spirits at the old hotel?
Deborah Powell
BRISTOL – Pine Lodge certainly had a great success with their Halloween activities last October, with a very scary Haunted House path through the lodge. But when the face paint and costumes were removed from the volunteer actors and the props were packed away were there still some “real” spirits at the old hotel?
This was the question in the minds of the Bytown Paranormal investigation team when they made their second visit to Pine Lodge this past January.
The Bytown Paranormal group arrived with a full kit of equipment including cameras, recording devices and electro-magnetic field detectors. They were also accompanied by Guillaume St. Pierre, a journalist from Ottawa’s French daily newspaper, Le Droit, and Janet P. Smith from the Bulletin d’Aylmer.
Dividing into two teams to better cover the large building, it was the team that ended up in a randomly chosen third floor room in the lodge that got some surprising results.
James, the investigator who is ‘most sensitive to the elements’ around him, felt a presence in the room and although no answers could be heard when questions were addressed to the presence, the electro-magnetic force reader surged noticeably at the end of each question. The temperature began to drop. The electro-magnetic readings fell to zero but the room continued to chill. James felt that it was some kind of negative force not associated with the lodge that was present and sucking energy from the room. Whatever it was, the temperature dropped from 15 degrees to -3 in a matter of minutes.
“None of us had ever experienced such an extreme temperature change during an investigation. Two or three degrees is not unusual but this was way beyond anything we’d felt before,” said Sandra Lepage, Bristol resident and member of the investigation team.
Sandra Lepage has been interested in the paranormal from an early age but it was events in her own century-old home in Bristol that led to her contact the Bytown Paranormal group and eventually become part of their investigation team.
“I really like the historical side of Bytown Paranormal,” she said. “They will do private residences but usually focus on sites like the Bytown Museum and the Carleton County Gaol in Ottawa as well as other museums and public historical buildings throughout Eastern Ontario and Quebec,” she explained.
The reasons people request the services of Bytown Paranormal vary. Sometimes it is simple curiosity and other times it is more pressing, such as a house with a front door that kept opening (see page 17) or a recent request from Montreal where a young child had become fearful of staying in her bedroom. The child’s mother had also noticed unusual things happening in the house.
