| abstract | - Isn't it strange, how small towns seem to attract ghosts? Well, perhaps that's not the case. Maybe big cities have just as many if not more ghosts around but it's only in small towns where people speak enough to each other that such tales are able to work their way around. Alliston, Ontario, Canada is a small but lovely town. There's a lot of history there, from a small section of rail road tracks dating from the time the town was founded over 100 years ago to a museum that has records of just about every house in the area. If you ask some of the locals, they might tell you tales about certain houses. Little, odd tales. For example, there's one house with a servant staircase that was boarded up years ago because a man hung himself there after his son went crazy. They had to board up the staircase because people using it kept seeing him there, swinging from the ceiling. Another story tells of one house where a rocking chair on a back porch rocks by itself, sometimes with a spectral old woman sitting there. As locals might tell you, when the people who lived in the house tried to dig up the ground behind the house to build that porch they found bones. They thought they were the bones of someone's pet... until they found old, worm eaten clothes nearby. Then there's the house that once held the first veterinary clinic in the town. What is currently used as a shed used to be the building where operations were performed. They say that animal ghosts can be seen and heard around there, dogs and cats and the like. Some locals might even claim their own homes to be haunted. Just little things they can't explain. Objects appearing or disappearing, or relocating without anyone around. Children's fingerprints appearing on mirrors despite no children living in the house. A shower curtain that moved when no one was behind it. A ghostly whisper, or footsteps heard when one knows one's self to be alone. That one chest of drawers that came with the house, that one day was discovered to have the word, or the name, "Grace" written one hundred times on the wood underneath one of the drawers. Sometimes however there is no particular tale to a place. There will be a house or a building that simply looks abandoned and when you ask a local they will only say it's been like that for a long time. They don't know if anyone has ever lived there, but there surely isn't anyone living there now. And yet, in such a lovely, charming, happy town as Alliston, why would there be that random empty house sitting between two with thriving families? What's more, if it really has been abandoned so long, how is it in such a town where everyone speaks so openly... how is it in this town, no one knows why the building has been abandoned so long? In some ways, this lack of knowledge makes the journey past such buildings more unnerving as the mind begins to come up with its own explanations. And it is possible that all of these explanations are still far off from the real reasons why no one has even bothered advertising the empty house for sale. Many people choose to go to the Alliston museum to ask about houses before they purchase them, just to learn of any history that the realtor might not have mentioned. 76 Victoria Street West is not a house. Rather, it is a space reserved for a possible store from strip of stores in what is akin to a down-town area for Alliston. In such places stores may come and go regularly, and surely there isn't much reason why 76 Victoria Street West should be any different, as it isn't that much bigger or smaller than any of the others in that strip of stores in Alliston, Ontario that come and go with the wind. Unlike other empty spaces in this strip, there is no sign on it or any advertisement anywhere stating that the space is available for rent. And for as long as anyone can remember, even as other stores have come and gone, that store has remained completely empty. Nobody seems to know why.
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