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mary.mowat
mary.mowat
From netcom.com!csus.edu!csulb.edu!nic-nac.CSU.net!usc!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!alpha.epas.utoronto.ca!epas.utoronto.ca!sztybel Tue Jun 7 15:30:05 1994
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From: sztybel@epas.utoronto.ca (David Sztybel)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories
Subject: The Ghost of Mary Mowat
Date: 7 Jun 1994 02:38:31 GMT
Organization: EPAS Computing Facility, University of Toronto
Lines: 95
Message-ID: <2t0mj7$4b@alpha.epas.utoronto.ca>
NNTP-Posting-Host: epas.utoronto.ca
I would now like to post a ghost story that I was told by a friend,
who experienced the haunting in question. My friend, like me, is a
university student pursuing philosophy, and lives a couple of hours
away from me by train. She seemed completely sincere in telling me
this and her account was corroborated by her father, mother, and one
of her friends who also encountered an unaccountable presence in the
midst of this haunting. The setting is in London, Ontario, a small
city in the southern part of the province. Here is the story itself,
with my friend's name changed in order to protect the privacy of her
and her family.
Cat Robertson is the name of my friend. Her father is a manager of a
local grocery store, and came to befriend a client of the store, Mrs.
Mowat. As Mr. Robertson was a kindly fellow, he assisted Mary Mowat
on occasion when she needed it. The woman was elderly, and was living
with a sister who was older. When the sister passed on, Mary came to
depend more and more on Mr. Robertson. She felt alone in the world
without him, as she was otherwise bereft of family, at least in that
part of the world. As time wore on, Mary fell ill. Gravely ill. Mr.
Robertson was at her deathbed, and she specifically instructed him
that she had left her old house to him and his family in her will, and
the Robertson family was to live there after Mary's death. Mr.
Robertson agreed.
Mary died, and an inspection of an old grandfather clock in Mary's
home revealed that the hand stopped at exactly the time of the woman's
death. This was remarked to be odd, but nothing much was made of it
at the time.
As things developed, Mary's old home went uninhabited. As later events
unfolded, however, it became evident that where the Robertson's were
living was not to be inhabited by them alone. Several incidents,
suggestive of a full-scale haunting, lead me to believe that the
Robertsons themselves were haunted by the spirit of Mary Mowat.
Haunting of persons is much less common, supposedly, than haunting of
dwellings, but this appeared to be just such a rare case.
My friend Cat was almost in her mid-teens at the time, and remembers
being terrified of being alone in the house. She would be in her
room, and hear footsteps out in the hall, and finally a knocking at
her door when she knew that no one was home. She would hide in the
closet in terror until her family came back home. Others in the
family could hear the sound of voices coming from other rooms, as
though a television set were playing on a low volume setting. The
words were not quite audible. Whenever a Robertson would go into the
room from whence the sound seemed to emanate, however, silence would ensue.
Not all the strange sounds were unaccompanied by other strange
phenomena. A heaving and rumbling from the basement prompted one of
the braver Robertson's to rush down to the basement, where the sound
seemed to come from. Arriving in the laundry area, the Robertson was
astonished to see that the washing machine was now in the middle of
the laundry room, whereas it had not been before. It would seem that
the rumbling sound was the machine being moved, by some unknown
entity, across the floor.
And the movement of objects did not end there. Cat's boyfriend at the
time, call him Fritz, appeared to be an object of displeasure for the
spirit. One time when he was visiting Cat, a nearby chair was seen by
many to be flung through the air at him, hitting him. Objects from a
basement room were found upstairs, although no one had moved them.
Such occurred even when this room was locked. Perhaps the most
astonishing transsubstantiation was observed when an object, which
someone lost while touring eastern Canada, appeared in the Robertson's
midst. They were bewildered. But it did not end there.
Some friends of Cat, against her wishes, conducted a sitting with a
ouija board, in order to determine what was behind these strange
occurrences. The board became active, it seemed, but the message
received did not seem to make sense. The participants (Cat was not
among them) asked who was present (besides the living). The board said:
MMVMOM.
Only later did Cat and her family realize that this represented the
initials of the dead woman's family: Mary Mowat, Violet Mowat, and
Oliver Mowat. The last two named were Mary's older sister, and
younger brother, who perished in the ditches of World War One.
Many of the ghostly effects that the Robertsons experienced were
downright eerie. A statue of a blacksmith, a likeness of a man
who inhabited the site of Mary's home early in the century, when that
part of London was still young and rural, was among the objects
inherited from Mary Mowat. Its eyes once glowed red. Cat's brother
claimed he saw slime dripping down a mirror, and then disappear when
he did a double-take. The mother of the family recalls napping in her
room, lying on the bed, and hearing someone open the door, enter
the room, and then lie down beside her. She assumed it was her
husband. Mrs. Robertson rolled over and opened her eyes. She
screamed. It was a corpse that she saw lying beside her.
One day, Mrs. Robertson, the only one ever to see a spectre, saw an
apparition of Mrs. Mowat while in the upstairs hallway. The ghost was
standing at the top of the stairs, gazing towards the front door.
Finally, the Robertsons did move into the Mowat residence, and all
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