For longtime residents of New Westminster, it's common knowledge the Galbraith House is haunted.
At least, that's what the current owner of the 1892 heritage home at 131 Eighth St. has discovered.
Angela Kerslake is a lawyer who has her office in the building.
She has owned the building for the past eight years and, at the request of a local paranormal investigative team, had the place checked out for otherworldly entities four years ago.
She was not surprised to hear their final report stating the house is occupied by at least one ghostly presence.
"We've never had any negative experiences here, but the general consensus is that there is a presence here," she said. "It doesn't bother me."
Kerslake said she has never experienced anything out of the ordinary in the house, but has heard several anecdotes about others who have heard or felt strange things there.
The house has had a varied and interesting history.
Built in 1892 by Scottish lumber baron Hugh Galbraith, it stayed in the Galbraith family until the 1940s when they were forced to give it up after being unable to pay city taxes, according to local historian, Gavin Hainsworth.
In its prime, the house was a grand symbol of the height of the Victorian era, designed in the Queen Ann Revival style to showcase the products of the Galbraiths' mill and lumber business.
After it was turned over to the city, it went through several hands, including the local Soroptimist Club of New Westminster, a charitable women's group, that christened it Westminster House and turned it into a hostel for military personnel during the Second World War.
After the house was converted into a rooming house, it began to fall into disrepair, and changed hands several times over the next half century.
By the late '90s, it looked like a classic haunted house, with peeling paint, falling shingles and a hole in the roof where birds would fly in to roost, Hainsworth said.
"It looked a lot like the Addams Family house," he said. "It looked like an absolute candidate for a tear-down."
When owners Ron and Marie Jang restored the building in the late '90s, they re-imagined it as a guest house.
Kerslake then bought it from the couple in 2004 and transformed it once again to be used as office, commercial and rental space.
With so many people buying and selling and passing through in the last 120 years, it was perhaps only a matter of time before paranormal investigators put the Galbraith House on their list of places to investigate for the spirits of former owners or tenants.
Peter Renn, president of the Vancouver Paranormal Society - the longest-running such group in the province - grew up in a heritage house in London, England.
After witnessing what he refers to as strange occurrences - objects moving of their own accord, noises that couldn't be explained - his curiosity was sparked and as a teenager he joined a paranormal investigative group.
"I've been doing this now for 17 years and have investigated a few places throughout the world."
By day, Renn is a project manager for a contracting company in Vancouver. By night, he's a ghost tracker.
When his team does an investigation, they use extensive, high-tech equipment to search for paranormal activity, using $20,000 worth of audio, video, photography and thermal imaging equipment.
There is no cost to the client. Renn said the non-profit society was started as a means for members to pursue something they're interested in and, more importantly, to help people deal with paranormal problems.
"We get a lot of calls from private residential cases, people that just don't know where to turn, or who to turn to," he said. "They're not sure whether they're experiencing things that are paranormal or not, so we go in there and either try give a logical explanation as to why things are happening or, obviously if things are proven to be paranormal, to document what we find for the clients."
They are never at a loss for a haunting to investigate, Renn said.
This year alone, the team has conducted about 10 investigations in New Westminster, and has been called to solve ghostly mysteries as far away as Alberta and even into the U.S.
If Renn and his team confirm at the end of their investigations that there is indeed a haunting, they present their findings to clients and educate them on how to live in peace with their ghosts.
"We don't clear any spirits or anything like that," he said. "There isn't anybody on the planet that can guarantee that they can clear spirits."
Except in a few rare cases, however, the ghosts have been peaceful and had no malevolent intentions.
"Generally the intentions of the spirits are misread through what is perceived on TV, and they're automatically deemed as negative because people just don't understand. I can count on one hand the negative ones I've come across in the past," Renn said.
From his years of investigating the inexplicable, Renn said he has found the reason ghosts stick around certain places is because they are, for various reasons, not ready to pass on.
The deceased may or may not have actually died in that location, he noted.
"They're not moving on for a reason," he said, noting it is most often because the location was the person's "safe zone" while alive - their home, workplace or other location that held some personal meaning.
Of course, there are those who are skepti-cal that the bumps in the night are anything other than human or nature-caused.
To them, Renn says, "For people to be totally skeptical and be a total non-believer, I'll say they're entitled to their own opinion, but on the same note, they should maybe come on three or four investigations with us and we can change their mind."
There are those who believe and those who don't, he said.
At the Galbraith, however, Kerslake takes a neutral view of the possibility her house is haunted.
"I'm open to the idea that there are spirits or a presence in the house," she said. "I'm not committed one way or the other."
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