For most people, Gastown’s Salmagundi West offers a step back in time. The space is stocked with antique jewellery, Victorian photographs, and artifacts from all over Vancouver's past. It's a gateway to what used to be.
But for Patricia Cosgrave, it's a space inhabited by spirits and wandering ghosts. It's a portal to another dimension.
“As soon as I get in here, the energy completely changes,” she says. She’s staring down the basement hallway, but not looking at anything in particular. Instead, she seems to be looking through something.
Cosgrave, a medium, professional psychic, and part-time employee of Salmagundi West, says she’s clairvoyant, clairsentient, and clairaudient. That is, she can see spirits with her “third eye”, feels spirits around her, and hears messages from them. Often when she walks down this hallway, she feels a tingling down her body from the crown of her head down to her toes.
Today, she’s picking up something different.
“All I hear is this name,” she says, as she makes her way back upstairs. “Morrie. Morrie. Morrie.”
“Morrie” is far from the first paranormal encounter reported in the building. The first time Cosgrave came down here, she saw a saw a row of young men dressed in century-old clothing, all sitting down in their work boots as if they were waiting for something. Ghost encounters are so commonplace that shop owner Anne Banner called on paranormal investigators Vancouver Spooks to see what they could find.
However, Kati Ackerman Webb, founder of the real-life Ghostbusters, turned up no solid evidence during her two-hour investigation in July. No discernible voices were recorded, no clear images of floating orbs captured on camera. Nothing.
Then again, ghosts are difficult to prove.
“I think there’s something here,” Webb says, who provides her services free of charge. “I can’t find anything concrete at this point, but I think there’s something here.”
Webb says that whenever she does an investigation, she’s often “visited” by the spirit or spirits the night before.
It didn’t happen this time though: Instead it happened the night after.
Webb was visited by an Asian man with a “bushy” moustache and bowler cap. He was bleeding from his forehead.
Cosgrave has never had contact with this Asian man before, but she’s had contact with plenty of others. For some reason, Salmagundi West attracts spirits, most of which, she says, are simply passing through.
“I’ve experienced entities around me in [the store],” says Cosgrave earnestly. “I’ve spoken to them.”
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The store occupies the eastern, triangle-shaped corner of the J.W. Horne block on Cordova Street. The building was one of the first brick buildings in Gastown, built in 1889. Banner inherited the store in 2012, after the previous owner, Lynn Brown, passed away in 2012.
Since then, Banner has curated an eclectic inventory. Sock puppets are lined up next to Mexican death skull candles. Books are stuffed on bookshelves with no regard for genre or size. There’s a cabinet dedicated to Pez dispensers. There are phrenology models, mid-century telephones, Victorian jewelry. Replicas of human skulls. Ragtime music playing continuously on the speakers.
"It’s a very magical store," Cosgrave says. "The first time I was in there, I was like, ‘It’s the magical emporium!’ The potential of this store could go beyond anybody’s expectations, I can feel it.”
The store attracts devoted customers. It also attracts eccentrics, like the grown man dressed as a baby, diaper included. Or the fellow with the obsession with View-Masters. It attracts the sort of people who tend to believe in the paranormal, or who are at least open to the possibility of its existence. They’ll often stop and listen to Banner recount her stories…
…Like the incident of the Victorian love note bracelet. Banner brought it in to the store and put it in a case downstairs. The next morning, when she opened the case, she felt an intense blast of cold air blow all over her. The case is against an interior wall, nowhere close to a fan, window or anything that could easily explain the gust.
Another time, a customer witnessed a spirit, dressed in a black dress with her hair worn in a bun, standing in the back corner of the basement, pleading with the customer to find her photograph from in the store so she could be immortalized in a painting. The customer didn’t look for the photo because, as Banner recounts her saying, “I didn’t want to take her home with me.”
Or when a brass kettle that had been hanging by a fishing line from the ceiling crashed to the floor, nearly crushing Banner and three other people. She thought the fishing line had snapped, when she investigated, the line was intact.
“It was like the screws had been undone [from the ceiling],” Banner says. “So that freaked me out. That could have killed us.”
She describes herself as a “believer”, though she admits she’s not in tune “with that stuff.” It’s clear she likes the idea of her store dwelling with lost souls. There’s a hint of amusement when she recounts these stories. She appears equally at ease discussing her dogs as she does discussing how objects often disappear and move around the store without explanation.
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And then there’s Gerald. Both Banner and Cosgrave believe the spirit of Gerald Giampa, Lynn Brown’s former partner, haunts the basement. He was a fixture at the store before he died of a stroke in 2009.
Giampa, a typologist and printer who invented the Bodoni 26 type face. In the late ‘70s, he owned Cobblestone Press and published books by Ezra Pound and George Bowering, among others.
By all accounts, his relationship with Brown was dysfunctional. An addict, he’d often do drugs and hide the needles in the ceiling of the storage room. Banner, who found the syringes years later whens he took over the store, says Brown was open-hearted by nature, accepted his flaws and stayed with him for years, until he passed away.
Now, it appears he's lingering in the storage room.
“He didn’t want me there. It was very interesting,” she says. He appeared as though he’d been hanging around that room for some time. He seemed discontent, like he needed help moving along.
It’s not clear whether Gerald’s responsible for all paranormal encounters in the store, but Cosgrave believes his presence is at least partly responsible for the dark or negative energy she says is inhabiting the back room. She and Banner believe it has to do with how he lived his life.
Banner says, “I mean, obviously someone that’s like that, heavily addicted to drugs and is abusive, and not a good person – my understanding of the afterlife is things don’t change much. They stay that way, right?”
Cosgrave says that ghosts and spirits are often attached to objects, which could be one reason Salmagundi West, with its unique inventory, could be attracting so many.
She says, “The things we bring in to that shop. They all have energy attached to them, and some of the items come with a lot of light and love. Some of them might not. We don’t know the history of these items.”
She says she feels there’s a reason she was brought to the store. Some guiding force that’s showing her something, and the store is an integral part of that. Part of it might have to do with clearing Gerald from the store – something she’s been afraid to do so far.
“Part of it is to lighten the energy, I feel,” she says. There’s a karmic thing there. I haven’t figured it out quite yet.”
(All photos by Rob Newell)
