Victoria Golf Course's 'Lady in Brown' (Conclusion)
If it really is Doris that people see, “what comes in from the dark water to meet her, no living man can say...”
The story of Doris Gravlin has travelled world-wide over the years, mostly thanks to the internet and an almost insatiable interest in the supernatural.
As we’ve seen, the finding of Victor’s body with Doris’s shoes in his pockets closed the police investigation, it being accepted that, depressed. he’d strangled her when she refused to return to him then drowned himself.
But Doris doesn’t sleep.
Within months of her death there were reports of sightings of a lone woman walking the beach of the golf course, usually dressed in a brown suit that has long since gone out of fashion. (Over the years, however, numerous witnesses have mentioned a sheer white wedding dress.)
By the 1960s, according to Occult World, increased sightings, often by young people who deliberately visited the golf course in hopes of seeing her, “began to fit a pattern... Her ghost stood looking sadly out to sea for several minutes before vanishing... She was seen floating over the shoreline, a misty and glowing apparition.
“Sometimes sightings were accompanied by sudden plunges in temperature and a cold rushing wind. It was not unusual for the ghost to be witnessed by entire groups of people...”
One Victoria psychic investigator who has authored three books on ghosts claims that, while leading a group around the golf course in hopes of sighting Doris, she felt someone take her by the hand. The touch, she wrote was extremely cold—and not that of one of her companions.
Also, despite the fact she was murdered in September, Doris has become known as the ‘April Ghost’ because that’s when she’s most often seen. Sightings usually occur at dusk, her brown suit seems to have given way to a wedding dress. Her appearances have become almost mythic: she now supposedly restricts her appearances to young people who, should they be unfortunate enough to see her, are doomed never to marry.
And she has assumed a more frightening demeanour, rushing at people with her arms outstretched or following them—when she isn’t haunting the third floor of the Oak Bay Beach Hotel which she and Victor used to frequent and where, supposedly, they met for the last time to discuss reconciliation.
Again, according to Occult World, Doris appears before guests at the foot of their beds as “a sad young woman in white” or as an invisible “presence” in hallways.
As it happens, the Oak Bay Beach Hotel Luxury Boutique Resort as it’s now marketed, was totally gutted and rebuilt in recent years. Begging the question: Has Doris vacated the premises or is she—or something—still frightening guests?
Virginia Lamkin, writing in Emadion, an Italian website devoted to the paranormal, reports that Doris has also been seen in the water but that she disappears into thin air within moments of being sighted. Or, on land, where she “looks a calm figure, quiet, looking sadly into the sea; her vision is much sharper than the night and it’s easier to see her in the morning.”
According to Lamkin, Doris appears year-round but favours late afternoons in March and wears her brown suit. Although, when seen after dark, she has a more ethereal appearance, she supposedly has left her footprints in the golf course’s sand traps and favours the beach near where her body was found.
Victoria Golf Course with Trial Island in the background. —Emadion
Golfers, by the way, are asked to ring a bell, mounted between the sixth and seventh greens to announce their presence to other, out-of-sight golfers. Doris is said to sometimes appear in answer to its ring and it’s speculated that Victor rang it on the evening of their final tryst.
Emadion also mentions her having rushed at a group of university students, white gown flowing and her arms outstretched. And a man to whom she suddenly appeared, barring his way; when he turned, she was still in front of him.
There are accounts of her manifesting herself in the form of a sudden breeze powerful enough to blow away peoples’ hats; of her upsetting motorists on Beach Drive, just inland of the golf course, by walking right through cars.
All of this sounds very fanciful—and not in keeping with what we know about Doris Gravlin, the tragic victim of murder-suicide—killed by her own husband, the father of their son.
An unidentified Emadion reader wrote to tell how, in 1965 of 1966, they looked for Doris. Not seeing anything at first they began to feel that her story was a hoax; just then “a little cloud” approached them from the beach. It transformed into Doris in a white gown that “seemed to be moving on its own”.
“She smiled at me and went right through me and it felt like I was in ice. I will never forget the experience.”
Let’s look at Doris’s a little more analytically. If, first of all, we accept that ghosts are real and she does walk the golf course where she was murdered, how to we account for the way her appearance and behaviour seem to have morphed over the decades?
From wearing an old-style brown suit, which is at least credible, and seeming to be looking for someone or staring sadly out to sea, which fits the scenario of her death, to wearing a wedding gown, rushing at people and strolling into vehicular traffic?
Are we talking of more than one ghost then?
Maybe the Lady in Brown isn’t Doris Gravlin, come to meet Victor, at all. Maybe, as has been conjectured, it’s Victor’s mother who’s still desperately searching for her son, missing those four weeks between the discovery of his and Doris’ bodies!
As for the lady in the wedding gown—your guess is as good as mine.
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The Victoria Golf Course proudly proclaims itself the oldest 18-hole course in Canada, the second oldest in North America, having been founded in 1883. Its ca 1923 clubhouse is a registered National Historic Site.
The Victoria Golf Course as it’s laid out today.
The course has been realigned three times, the current layout, dating from the 1920s. designed to preclude golfers having to hit their balls across busy Beach Drive. In October 1975, the 7th Hole, which is about where Doris’s body was found, also underwent a revamping.
“Unused rocky gorse-land,” as VGC Creens Chairman Dr. R.L. Wiggins put it, was levelled with construction fill.
The VGC doesn’t advertise their resident ghost but they’re well aware of her reputed existence. In 2018 Victoria News reporter Keili Bartlett reported that Doris, or so it was assumed, had been “playing tricks”.
As General Manager Scott Kelb explained, there is renewed interest in her story every few years: “We’ve had the odd ghost hunter come by the club but they haven’t been able to find stuff. Definitely our staff—whether they believe in ghosts or not—have...felt some kind of presence.”
A non-believer, Kolb confessed to being uncomfortable when in the clubhouse alone. “It’s an old building...so it’s got its creaks and moans.”
He has heard the bell between the 6th and 7th Holes ringing after dark but dismissed it as kids playing with it. It had become a clubhouse joke that if “things went sideways,” it was just Doris “playing tricks on us”.
Previously, another News reporter, assigned to writing something for Halloween, had undertaken a ‘ghost hunt’ to determine if any of its 660 well-to-do members was less than corporeal. But what began as something of a lark took on a more sombre tone when the reporter interviewed some VGC Clubhouse staff members who declared their experiences in the Clubhouse were nothing to laugh about.
Upon being consulted, well known ghost tour guide John Adams was serious, too, when he said, “It’s very haunted there. You may not believe. I didn’t at first but over the years... I don’t know, there’s something there.”
(Indeed, the old Clubhouse should have some great memories if nothing else, having hosted some major celebrities over the past century. These include England’s future King Edward VIII, English author Rudyard Kipling, American singer Bing Crosby, comedian Bob Hope and golfing legend Ben Hogan.)
All of them, however, according to the News, are outclassed by a woman of no public acclaim until her murder—Doris Gravlin.
The News arranged for Susanne Gilby and members of the Paranormal Victoria Investigators and Research Society (PARAVI) to conduct a ghost hunt with cameras, digital recorders and magnetic field meters. The lights were turned out, creating a sense of eeriness as they explored the building. The downstairs locker room, a warren of hallways, alcoves and cubbyholes, and spooky in the darkness, was of particular interest.
The PARAV’s medium Karen Bellas-de Zwart expressed her discomfort there, saying the room was filled with sadness and she could feel movement.
The News reporter became increasingly unnerved: “I feel the back of my neck rise. I round a corner and come face-to-face with a horrid visage that looks as shocked as I feel, my heart thumbs as I realize it’s a floor-to-ceiling mirror.”
There’s the sound of footsteps in the hallway but no one’s there, then the feeling of having walked through a cobweb, said to be a common paranormal phenomenon.
With dawn the group made their way to the 7th Hole in hopes of detecting some kind of presence by Doris but without success.
Ghost hunters Susanne Gilby and Yvonne Fried with some of their equipment. —Victoria News
The group later reports that a member heard a whispered voice and noticed ice sprinkled on a carpet hours after the Clubhouse closed for the day. The medium says something touched her hair and she was struck by a feeling of “much sadness”.
Final analysis of the tape recordings hadn’t been done at that point but a series of photos taken in quick succession showed, in a single shot, a framed picture mounted in the centre of a bulletin board where no such picture existed.
So much for the visit by ghost hunters.
What about day-to-day real life in the VGC Clubhouse? The reports of footsteps when no one else is in the building or objects moved overnight, or the foyer piano playing without human touch?
A broken mantle clock that suddenly begins to chime—when, in fact, it’s physically incapable of chiming. Vegetables that roll across the kitchen floor without visible assistance? Lights that turn on after they’ve been turned off; doors and windows that open after they’ve been closed? An adding machine that runs out of tape overnight?
The spookiest of all was the time staff members checked the tapes of security cameras and saw a “person-like glow of light” pass through the bar, pause, then vanish.
But: At the risk of looking a great story in the mouth, one might ask what these phenomena have to do with Doris Gravlin.
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Because of the many reported sightings, and the many stories that have been written about Doris Gravlin over the past 90 years, some have termed her not just Victoria’s most famous ghost but British Columbia’s.
Despite this international acclaim, one of the last persons with direct connection to Doris and Victor was also the least knowledgeable about their deaths and Doris’s fabled posthumous perambulations.
Son Walter, who was just four at the time of their deaths, had been kept in the dark by his grandparents, the Thomsons, who raised him through childhood wile operating health centres in Oak Bay then Saanich.
They gave him the name Robin Charnock (Doris’s maiden name) Thomson. It wasn’t until March 1994 that Colonist columnist Lon Wood tracked down Robin Thomson in Little Paddock on the Green, Weston, Staffordshire, England where he’d lived since 1945. Then 65, Thomson had been sent to Sandhurst Military College at the end of the Second World War by his grandmother.
In charge of public transport in the Midlands when contacted by journalist Wood, Thomson said he knew nothing about his parents’ deaths.
So Wood “faxed him a sheaf of clippings on sightings of his mother”. While not enthused by Doris’s notoriety, Thomson was, as Wood put it, philosophical: “If it’s history, it’s there and it’s not going to go away.”
But: “Not bloody likely that I’ll do a recorded tape to accompany the [ghost] tour.”
Wood’s phone call to England had been prompted by a suggestion by Dorothy Jorre de St. Jorre of Oak Bay, sister-in-law of longtime Victoria coroner Edmond Jorre de St. Jorre who, she said, had told her that ghosts have purpose in their visits: “They don’t cease until the purpose is resolved.”
Her vicarious family connection to Doris’s ghost dated back to the summer of 1982. Her teenage son Philip had been driving along Beach Drive with two friends when they saw what they took to be a ghost drifting across the road in a long white gown.
“They were scared. It was 12:20 at night; they’d never even heard of the ghost; and they thought they were going to hit her.”
They were so frightened they drove straight to Philip’s home and roused his parents, wanting to take them back to the golf course. The senior Jorre de St. Jorre hurriedly dressed and accompanied them to the 7th Tee. This time, they saw nothing although, they told Dorothy, “The air was charged with an eerie presence...”
She said that none of the teens had been drinking.
She contacted Wood after an earlier newspaper story about Doris’s ghost. “I had often wondered what happened to the young Gravlin boy,” she wrote, “and thought her appearances were for him.”
Robin Thomson told Wood that he didn’t really believe in ghosts, said he appreciated Jorre de St. Jorre’s concern, but he’d have to think about her suggestion of a visit to the Victoria Golf Course. “It was many years ago—and it’s not a legend of which one can be easily proud.”
As for his freeing his mother’s spirit, “I’d have to think about it. I’m just back from Montreal. I’ve visited Victoria in recent years—knowing absolutely nothing about the notoriety of my mother’s ghost.”
“Yes, I’d like to see the legend die.”
Which brings us pretty much up to date—for now. Twenty-six years ago, Dorothy Jorre de St. Jorre asked journalist Lon Wood, “Will the fact her son now knows why she never said ‘Good-bye’ to him help settle the matter? Or will he have to visit the 7th Tee to give her peace?”
Robin Walter Thomson a.k.a.Walter Gravlin died young, just 64, in October 1994. So far as is known he never did return to Victoria and visit the Victoria Golf Course and its infamous 7th Tee.
So: Has Doris Gravlin somehow found spiritual peace since 1996?
Apparently not.
* * * * *
Although few people likely saw the similarity, a murder-suicide in May 2014 recalled that of the Gravlins in September 1934. Neil Harvey, 59, was a nursing assistant, his wife Anne, 61, a registered nurse; both worked at Royal Jubilee Hospital. They had no children.
Saanich Police became involved when a neighbour of the Harveys told them she’d received a phone call from Neil Harvey, asking her to check on his cat. She said he’d sounded distraught and, as he rang off, said she probably should call the police.
When they broke down the door at the Harveys’ pink bungalow they found Anne, dead. Neil’s body was later recovered from the water off Cattle Point; he’d drowned himself.