Way back in the Dark Ages, 1977 to be exact, I completed a three-week-long blitz of dozens of southern mainland B.C. ghost towns while researching a never completed series of books on the subject.
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There was an old house in Victoria West, immediately beside Tillicum Road and just a block or so shy of the Burnside Road intersection, that my mother would point out to me from time to time. The fact that she repeated herself told me that she had reason to remember it well. Once operated as a Relief store, it was where, as a child, her parents, armed with a relief voucher from some government agency or church, had bought her a “new” Christmas coat.
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I’ve never been able to quite believe in UFOs (flying saucers). Or Sasquatch. Or ghosts.
Mind you, I’ve wavered a few times, if only briefly; sometimes from reading or hearing particularly credible news reports or solid firsthand accounts of alleged sightings. Mostly, my skepticism has come closest to losing its resolve after
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This grisly tale of Victoria’s ‘Pest House’ was originally set down in print more than a century ago by Victoria journalist and politician D.W. Higgins. By then Higgins, who’d come to B.C. for the Fraser River gold rush, was retired and enjoying the role of raconteur in a weekly article in the Colonist.
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