While many towns, cities, and villages have stories of a haunted house, land, or road that are duly regarded with varying degrees of awe by inhabitants there are no records in Daly House of any suspected hauntings in the Westman region. What we do have is a building that is nearly 140 years old. Over the years many visitors have asked us the question “Is it Haunted?”.
This is the question that made us wondered why we’re so fascinated by the idea that an old house might be haunted? Also why do we want to be frightened in a haunted house at Halloween? Well, the reason all relates back to those peculiar Victorians.
The people in the Victorian era from 1837-1901 has some truly strange practices by today’s standards. They regularly took photos and posed with deceased family members as a way to commemorate the memory of the dead. This unsettling practice was called post-mortem photography.
A less macabre but just as creepy was the common Victorian practice of hanging a framed coffin plate of a loved one on the walls of their home as a keepsake.
Another bizarre practice from the era was the movement called Spiritualism. Spiritualism was the practice of communicating with the dead through a medium at a séance. The movement attracted people from various classes including Queen Victoria and Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. At the same time gothic novels such as Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and of course the spooky writings of Edgar Allen Poe became popular with the public.
When the Victorian era ended the gothic architecture, literature, and obsession with death fell out of favor. What remained was the period’s architecture including their mansions. These structures by the mid-20th Century would become the perfect background for horror films (the Bates house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) or slasher flicks (think Halloween or Nightmare of Elm Street), and theme park attractions like Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.
So for half a century, Hollywood has told us that old houses are creepy and thus influenced is the tradition of wanting to investigate a haunted house for a good scare on Halloween.
So do we think that old houses might actually be haunted or not?
Well, the houses in Brandon’s downtown residential area including Daly House contain many features typical of a haunted house.
We don’t know if any of them are haunted but perhaps Daly House is. In 2020 the museum was investigated by the paranormal team of APTN’s The Other Side.
Sorry, we’re not giving away any spoilers! But if you want to “see” what paranormal experiences we had during the investigation the new season of the show premiers October 27, 2021 on APTN. However, you don’t have to wait for the Daly House episode entitled “They’re Watching Us” to air. Visit the museum and find out for yourself.
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