It’s Earl, Elizabeth. Are you there?”

Earl—about 40, lean, clean-shaven, and sporting a tattoo of a clown on his right forearm—is holding an electromagnetic field reader, or EMF, about the size of a TV remote. When its arrow starts darting across the peacock’s tail of fluorescent bands in its display, he’ll know how much invisible, possibly ghostly, energy pulses through the dimly lit Resto Urban, a pasta place on the Bedford Highway, just outside Halifax.

Resto Urban sits next to the Sackville River where, legend says, a woman drowned herself in the late 1870s. Every so often, “Elizabeth” makes her presence felt at the handsomely appointed premises, typically after hours when the patrons have long gone.

“Once, I was just by myself in the kitchen cooking,” recounts the restaurant’s co-owner and head chef, Ryan, a powerfully built guy in his mid-30s. “I thought I saw my mother-in-law walk around the corner. I waited for her appear on the other side, but she never did. There was nobody there. The kitchen door was still locked.”

Another time, “I saw one of our young cleaners come around the same corner. So I said, ‘Hey, how are you?’, and went about my business. Then, after I thought about it, I realized it couldn’t have been her because she was running late that day. I came out to the dining room and my heart was racing. I called my wife and I was like, ‘I just need you to talk me down’….That one freaked me out.”  

But that was years ago. Elizabeth, it seems, is overdue. And, tonight, as the light grows long against the tract houses and strip malls that pepper the western horizon, the question hangs in the summer air like a pledge: Is she planning to return, and just maybe freak us out a little, from her place in the shadows beyond the veil? Earl calls to her in the darkness, “We don’t mean any disrespect.”

To be precise, “we” are Earl Lattie, founder and principal investigator of Paranormal Investigations Nova Scotia of Truro; his friend and colleague Darcy O’Neill; restaurateur Ryan Hayes; professional photographer Bruce Murray; and me, a 61-year-old grandfather who ought to know better.

Or, maybe not.

Fascination with the paranormal is one of those preoccupations that never seems to get old, no matter how stolid, settled, or rational we might believe we are. It also doesn’t seem to run according to type. Websites are full of tales about close encounters with the spiritual kind, told by accountants, lawyers, homemakers, teachers, ministers of the cloth… journalists with master’s degrees in creative nonfiction.

This seems particularly true of Atlantic Canadians, whose villages, towns and cities have been around collecting graveyards, abandoned roads, and broken-down sheds and shacks for hundreds of years. It’s hard to imagine armies of the dead marching through ultra-modern Pearson International Airport looking for half-caf double lattes (well okay, it’s not, but that’s a different story).
The point is, no matter who we are or what we do in real life, we love our ghost stories; even more if there’s an outside chance of nailing down Casper for a convo or two.

And so it is that the five of us—grown men with mortgages and lawns that need mowing—are hunched over Earl’s so-far dormant K2 Metre, eagerly looking for signs of a spook. “Just because something happens that you can’t explain, doesn’t mean it’s a ghost,” he cautions, scrutinizing his device, which, he notes, anyone can get on Amazon for about $90. “You can’t rush to conclusions.”

In fact, managing expectations is one of Earl’s constant workplace challenges. “Not everything’s haunted and not everything is paranormal,” he says. “A cell phone signal is enough to send the arrow on this meter shooting all over the place.” That said, he adds: “I think some people are more in tune to [the supernatural] than others. I don’t know if everyone is born with the gift, but some people are certainly more able to nurture it. Maybe, they just didn’t grow out of it.”

He might certainly hope so. With COVID-era social distancing rules in retreat, his business is picking up. He and his handful of colleagues currently conduct ghost hunts all over Nova Scotia, including Fortress Louisbourg, with whom they enjoy a “good working relationship,” according to one Parks Canada official.

Earl says, “At Louisbourg, we’ll book 100 people for an event, and an event will usually fill up within five or 10 minutes of being promoted. It’s high demand. There’s a waiting list. We’ve also just done filming in New Brunswick with a major TV production company from Toronto. I’m not at liberty to talk about that yet.”

Ryan, too, sees the pragmatic advantages of Earl’s “special” services. Hauntings (or reports thereof) are simply good for business in this corner of the world. Consider Halifax’s 5 Fishermen restaurant. “Many of the staff are so used to odd occurrences that they wouldn’t even bat an eye when a glass flies off a shelf with no one near, or when cutlery on a table shifts, then falls to the floor by itself,” states the write-up on its website. “So the next time you’re [here] enjoying a wonderful evening of dining and you hear a crash, have no fear—no one will blame you.”

Ryan laughs despite his “experiences” or, maybe, because of them. “I’m a bit of a skeptic, myself, so I’m glad there’s people out there who, you know, try to prove me wrong.” Adds Earl: “At some point, Ryan and I are going to sit down and work something out for the restaurant—maybe a special meal and then a ghost-hunt afterward.”

Boo! Cha-ching.

Meanwhile, we’re still waiting patiently (or not) for Elizabeth to join tonight’s party.

“Hi, Elizabeth, this is Darcy. It’s my first time here. If you could come close, it would really make me happy knowing that you’re here. I know it’s probably scary with all these people around. But I swear to God, none of us is going to hurt you…Come close to me. Touch my shirt…How many female spirits are here?”

Almost imperceptibly, the monitor blinks once.

“Yeah, I see that,” Darcy says calmly. “I see that little flash of green. All you gotta do is come a little closer. I’m just here to talk to you.”

Nothing.

Darcy, a big teddy bear of a man in his late-30s, met Earl—who was dating his wife’s cousin—about 12 years ago. When he learned they shared an interest in the paranormal, he reached out. “I got into this at a very early age, probably 10 or 11 when I started seeing things that I couldn’t explain,” he says. “One night really sticks out in my mind and probably will till the day I die. My mother and I were at a stop light in Truro when all of a sudden, it just seemed like everything stopped...no traffic…no noise…. That’s when we saw my grandfather walking in the cemetery across the street. My grandfather had died four months before.”

Even so, Darcy wouldn’t say he’s indubious. “I’m a believer to an extent,” he says. “I’m a believer because I believe that something is going on. I don’t believe I know what that something is. If all this is happening, I want to know what it is and why.”

Earl unpacks a similar origin story. He, too, was about 10 or 11 when, he says, “I felt that the house where I grew up in east Hants County had stuff happening—like lights going on when we knew that we had turned them off. It caught my interest and from there I read local authors and stuff and became fascinated.”

Again, though, he’s not entirely guileless. “I’ve always liked skeptics,” he says. “I think they tend to keep us honest. I mean, when you think about it, why isn’t everywhere haunted? Some people like Darcy and myself might have been encouraged as children to talk about this kind of thing more and, you know, embrace the gift.”

Of course, but have they ever seen anything that even a mundanely-endowed (i.e., “normal” ) person would describe as an indisputably “Holy S**t” moment?

“There was this one time in the north end of Dartmouth, and it was the only time I strongly recommended to the homeowners that they leave their house,” Earl says. “Darcy and I walked up to the second floor, and we felt like there was literally not enough air to breathe. We made a pyramid of some play blocks in the toddler’s room to see if something might happen. We turned our backs to go downstairs and immediately heard a huge crash behind us. The blocks hadn’t just fallen over—they were scattered all over, right to the other walls.”

Darcy’s got one, too.

“One time, we were up in Amherst doing an investigation,” he says. “Two of our group’s other members were in the basement and one of them is saying something like, ‘Man, I don’t think there’s anything here, it’s so quiet.’ Later that night, we’re reviewing the audio tape, and we can clearly hear a woman’s very softspoken voice saying, ‘and you take care.’ Now, that’s what we call a Class A EVP—you know, electronic voice phenomenon.”

In the basement, eh? Is that where the good stuff happens?

We’re in Resto Urban’s cellar now, and I can feel the walls closing in. Earl’s left his tabletop DAS REM POD ATDD Radiating EM Antenna Paranormal ghost hunting device (retail value: $365) upstairs on a sideboard. Here, he’s running his EMF and digital recorder, and fiddling with something called a “spirit box” on the theory that Elizabeth might want to hitch her vocalizations to its random AM/FM radio static between snippets of “You’re having my baby” by Paul Anka from the local easy-listening music station.

Lattie, his colleague Darcy O’Neill and Resto Urban co-owner Ryan Hayes prepare to peek behind the veil

Earl calls out, “Elizabeth, can you tug on my shirt?”

Suddenly, I notice a slight drop in temperature.

Darcy turns to me. “Did you feel that?”

Bruce nods and takes a picture.

Ryan says, “You know, it’s funny, but that freezer over there against the wall? It’s actually named ‘Elizabeth.’”

We turn our heads.

“Oh yeah,” he continues, “we name all our freezers so we can tell which one to go to when we want to get something specific. I forget what’s in ‘Elizabeth’, though.”

Earl looks pensive. “You know, we are getting some radio down here, but I’ve heard a couple of things that really don’t sound like radio. They sound, uh, lower.”

We look at our shoes.

If Elizabeth was planning to make an appearance tonight, it seems she’s had second thoughts.

“So,” Ryan says finally, “you guys want a beer or something?”

I’m on the highway heading home. I should be bored.
I should be disappointed. I should be angry for ditching my lawn mowing to go off gallivanting like some adolescent on the last day of summer camp. I should be thinking that that was an hour-and-a-half of my life I will never get back.

But I’m none of those things. I heard four great ghost stories from a few gents who, if nothing else, know how to spin a fine yarn. So what if Elizabeth was a no-show? Was I really expecting her? Besides, maybe she found more enlivening company amongst her pals in the afterlife. Emily Dickenson? Virginia Wolfe? Oscar Wilde? Plato?

I’m thinking about writing all of this down as soon as I get home, which is up the road just apiece. I’m thinking about the Bedford Highway, which has never seemed so dark and long. What’s that in the crosswalk ahead?

Did I leave the lights on in my office—the one in my basement, next to the freezer. I’ll check when I get down to work. Or, maybe I’ll grab a cup of tea and watch an episode or three of Supernatural.

Yeah, maybe I’ll do that instead.