High Tea and Higher Spirits

High Tea and Higher Spirits

I'd thought I'd write about ghosts, with the most spookiest time of the year approaching. Since I'm writing a new book series that starts in Victoria. You know Victoria, BC, more English than the English. And more haunted than your average graveyard on All Hallow's Eve. Don't believe me. Well listen to these tales and I'll have more next month.
The Fairmont Empress has several ghosts frequenting the building. As early as last year two contractors quit during the new renovations when they heard noises in a empty suite next to them. Both swore they saw a figure hanging from a rope. The figure was a man that hung himself, in that room several decades ago. 
There's reports of a woman that knocks on doors, and is seen trying to get into rooms. Apparently a former cleaning maid, still making the rounds after she passed away. Her name is Lizzie and she fell to her death near the front entrance from the sixth floor. During the early years of the hotel when another tower was being added the staircases were temporarily taken out. She hadn't noticed and was found dead. Sometimes she's also seen laying content on the ground holding her prayer beads.
Then we have Margaret from Calgary, who lived in the hotel back in the fifties, when the hotel was nearly empty in the winter. So she stayed there for months on end. Did everything on a set precise schedule and time. When she didn't show up for tea at her set time, someone went up to her room and found her passed away in her bed. It soon became to be known as the unrentable room, with people claiming the TV channels would switch on their own, lights would turn off and on. And some swore the sheets would pull down by themselves. It was soon converted into a storage area and all was quiet. Until the hotel decided to add a new elevator several years later to go to a higher set of floors. Quickly the reports of lights dimming, knocks on doors and a elderly lady asking for directions began afresh. 
Then there's the builder of the hotel himself, Francis Rattenbury. Who also built the legislative buildings, the Lake Louise Hotel in Banff, among other great buildings. He received little or no recognition for his grand structures and after leaving his wife for a much younger lady, he was found bludgeoned to death by her younger lover. Sir Francis was buried in a unmarked grave and his ghost is often seen near his picture by the front entrance.
 I guess while the guests often return, so do the departed for another cup of the fine tea and great scones. 

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If I've grabbed your interest, try my authors page on facebook. 

https://www.facebook.com/FrankTalaber/  

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People have asked who the heck is Frank Talaber and what’s his writing style?
I usually respond with; mix Dan Millman with Charles De Lint and throw in a mad scattering of Tom Robbins. 
PS. He’s better looking than Stephan King and his romantic stuff will have you sobbing and gasping quicker than Robert James Waller.

His novels transcend the boundaries of urban fantasy, science fiction, crime, mystery, thriller, spirituality and comedy. He also writes in the genre of romance, mystery romance, thriller romance and sexy erotic romance. 
With a knack of bringing the BC west coast to life he was born on the wild Canadian prairies but immigrated to the cedar forests of coastal BC. Mated to a mad English woman, from gypsy ancestry, him not the wife. In the early hours of morning, when only cats stir and raccoons fear to tread he is writing, creating or making coffee. Stranger ways exist in the backwoods of Borneo, Australia or the American Bayou. But not here in the country of Bigfoot, Timmy’s and hockey. 
Or as he also often says; you don’t have to be mad to be a writer. But it helps. A lot.

"After being stranded twenty kilometers from the nearest road at the tip of Rose Spit, Haida Gwaii, and having to push his spanking new SUV a few kilometers along the beach before the tide came in and we ran out of booze, my first reaction on being asked to write a back cover blurb was, “over my dead body." Some people will do anything to get an endorsement.” 
Susan Musgrave