Victoria Golf Course's 'Lady in Brown'
If it really is Doris that people see, “what comes in from the dark water to meet her, no living man can say...”
In my day, I doubt there was a teenager growing up in Victoria who hadn’t heard of Doris Gravlin.
Neither by name nor detail, but if you’d mentioned the ‘ghost of the golf course,’ they’d have known what you were talking about and where.
Why? Because they’d have at least once, with their friends at night (not always at Halloween, either) tried to see the ‘Lady in Brown’. It was, perhaps still is, a rite of passage for the young and adventurous in Victoria.
I did my bit several times by both night and by day but, alas, I never did see her although many have claimed to have done so.
So who was Doris Gravlin and why does she still walk, if indeed she does, the wind-swept and craggy shore of the Victoria Golf Course (aka Oak Bay Golf Course) so many years after her death?
I first learned of her when working as copy boy at the Colonist.
In those days, the old city editor’s logbooks with their handwritten assignments for reporters were still tucked away in the library/morgue that, previous to their merger, was shared by The Daily Colonist and the Victoria Daily Times. I came upon them in my routing through the files in search of stories to write about.
As it happened, in Doris’ bizarre case, the Colonist had a firsthand link with Victor: her husband of seven and a-half years had worked as the paper’s sports editor for 10 years, until 1934.
The seaside Victoria Golf Course. —Emadion
English-born Doris (nee Charnock) Gravlin was pretty and 30, with the typical wavy mid-length coiffure of the day. Born at Manor House, Blackborn, Lancashire, she’d come to Victoria with her parents 22 years before and was working as a sales clerk when she met and married Victor Raymond Gravlin, then became a private nurse upon their separation.
She first drew public notice on Sept. 29, 1936 in a front-page story in the morning Colonist.
Her parents, Charlotte and her stepfather Robert Thomson with whom she was living with her four-year-old son Walter, had reported her missing the morning after she’d left her job as a private nurse in an apartment building on Beach Drive.
About 8:00 p.m. Tuesday the 22nd, she’d said she was going out for some fresh air and would be back shortly but hadn’t returned.
The B.C. Provincial and Greater Victoria’s four municipal police departments were called in. Their investigation soon determined that husband Victor was also missing after leaving his parents’ home on Oak Bay Ave. about 8:30, the same evening. The last reported sighting of the couple was at about 8:45 on Foul Bay Road near Runnymede Ave., walking southward.
The various roads mentioned in the story; Newport Ave. merges with Oak Bay Ave. just beyond the map at the top left.
Just 15 minutes later, according to an unconfirmed report, a resident on Newport Ave. heard a scream coming from the golf course but didn’t report it.
Police immediately mounted an intensive search, bringing in a bloodhound from the Mainland and enlisting a Boy Scout troop to scour the waterside. Hundreds of posters were circulated, describing Victor as being about 135 pounds, of medium build and of “nervous temperament”.
Doris was said to have auburn hair and large brown eyes, and wearing a knitted dress, blue coat with silver buttons and a grey hat. (We’ll come back to this outfit in due course.)
But it was a week before, on the afternoon of September 28th, caddy John Johnson, while searching for a lost golf ball, found her body concealed near the 7th Fairway in some brush in a clump of trees near the water’s edge of the golf course.
Doris was 500 feet east of Beach Drive where it cuts through the golf course and 300 feet south of Babbacombe Road which led (it no longer shows on the map) to the craggy shoreline. Marks on her neck and body indicated that she’d been strangled during a struggle and her hat, coat and shoes were missing.
A coroner’s inquest ruled that Doris had been strangled by a “person or persons unknown” and Vancouver’s renowned forensic pathologist J.F.C.B. Vance was called in. The case was made somewhat more difficult by the fact that her body had been dragged from the beach where she was killed to where it was concealed.
A warrant was issued for Victor’s arrest but, despite the wanted posters, an intensive search of Greater Victoria and, presumably farther afield, there was no sign of Victor. Had he, as some suggested, fled the Island by dressing as a woman in Doris’s hat and coat?
Vancouver forensic pathologist J.F.C.B. Vance at work in his lab. —Courtesy Eve Lazarus, author of Blood, Sweat and Fear
The answer came a full month after the discovery of Doris’s body. Norman Le Poidevan, using a boat to look for lost golf balls, found Victor’s body tangled in a kelp bed by the 9th Tee, not far from where Doris was found. In his pockets were Doris’s shoes.
That solved the case as far as the police were concerned: murder-suicide.
* * * * *
Initially, theirs had been a happy marriage, blessed by the arrival of son Walter in December 1930.
But that began to crumble, particularly in 1934 when Victor, who at 37 was six years older than Doris, “was taken ill,” as the Colonist vaguely accounted for the absence of its longtime editor of sports. Formerly athletic, the Victor who came out of the hospital was said to be a shadow of his former self. Of nervous temperament, as described by police, and weighing only 135 pounds, he couldn’t have been much sturdier than Doris.
But, instead of resuming residence with Walter and Doris, who’d gone to work as a private nurse, Victor moved in with his parents. His illness, if unofficial but informed sources are to be believed, was his drinking which had, in fact, cost him his job at the newspaper because of its Jekyll-Hyde effect upon him.
Hence their marriage’s failure after several attempts to reconcile.
Whatever the case, this much is known of Doris Gravlin’s final movements. On the evening of Sept. 22nd she left her place of employment as a private nurse on Beach Drive. She was going to meet, it has been surmised, Victor (at the Oak Bay Beach Hotel or near the golf course) in response to his impassioned pleas to make a last effort to reconcile their differences.
(The timeline that has them meeting at the hotel would seem to be a stretch as Doris set out at 8:00, Victor left his parents’ house at 8:30, and a scream from the golf course was heard between 9:00-9:30.)
When next the Colonist made mention of its former sports writer it was to report that he and Doris had been missing “from their respective homes” for five days and were being actively sought by the police. Then came discovery of the bodies and, officially, the case was closed.
It was her mother, we may assume, who decided to have Doris cremated, something not then done on the Island, so her body had to be shipped to Seattle for the purpose. Her ashes were later interred in the cremations section of Royal Oak Burial Park where, it was generally assumed, she’d take her eternal rest.
But that’s definitely not the case if you believe in ghosts...
This brings us to the Victoria Golf Course’s numerous reported sightings of a woman who’s been seen walking along the beach, apparently looking for or waiting for someone. She remains fully in view as she comes nearer then simply vanishes before the eyes.
Is it poor Doris Gravlin, come yet again to meet with Victor and, sadly, murder?
It’s interesting to note, in light of these “sightings,” that Doris is said to have been dressed in a blue coat with silver buttons and a grey hat when she left her place of employment. So much for the ‘lady in brown’? Or the lady in the white wedding gown whom we’ll meet shortly.
Years ago, a lifetime Oak Bay resident who’d known Doris told me that, besides being pretty, she’d stood out because of her eyes, one blue and one brown. According to my informant, she had $500 in her purse when she was killed.
Why she’d been carrying such a substantial sum in mid-Depression is anyone’s guess. To get Victor to go away?
Almost half a century go, the late Times columnist Arthur Mayse described one of the most detailed accounts of an alleged encounter with the female ghost on the golf course by a man who was spin-casting from a rock shelf at dusk.
“What alerted him, he could not recall; but he turned his head and saw a woman in a brown suit standing on the foreshore of the little cove in the lee of the point. She was only a few yards away; he could see her in sufficient detail to note that her suit was somewhat out of style, and that her face was sad. Neither spoke. The fisherman tried a few more casts, while the woman stood motionless, gazing out across the darkening water.
“‘Then,’ he later declared, ‘she suddenly hurried down as if she were going to meet someone, and on the way, she vanished. I saw her just kind of melt into thin air.’”
Did the Woman in Brown, Mayse wondered, find what she was seeking? Was she really a ghost? If so, he concluded, “what comes in from the dark water to meet her, no living man can say.”
(Next week: Conclusion)