The Mysterious Death of Elisa Lam
On the morning of February 19th, 2013, multiple guests of the Stay on Main Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles complained that their showers were not working. Instead of delivering the hot clear water they were accustomed to, the nozzles spurted a dark noxious liquid that had a funny taste. A maintenance worker named Santiago Lopez was tasked with fixing the problem. Since all the water in the hotel derived from four cisterns which were kept on the roof, the worker suspected that the issue lay therein, and climbed onto the roof to investigate.
The Stay on Main was a budget establishment formerly known as the Cecil Hotel – a name already infamous in the City of Angels. Since 1927, three years after its grand opening, the Cecil had been the site of an alarming number of murders, suicides, and unexplained deaths, some of them unusually grotesque in their nature. It had housed two prolific serial killers in the midst of their sprees – the dreaded Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez, terror of the San Gabriel Valley; and Jack Unterweger, an Austrian convicted of murder in four countries. Some said that the hotel was permeated by a sinister atmosphere – perhaps the psychic accumulation of all the suffering and despair that had been experienced there, or the energetic discharge of the dark spirits which such an establishment would undoubtedly attract. The Cecil Hotel had acquired such an unsavory reputation that some writers had nicknamed it “Hotel Death”.
On that fateful Tuesday morning in the winter of 2013, while Lopez was investigating the cause of the hotel’s poor water quality, a search was ongoing for Elisa Lam, a guest of the Cecil’s who had gone missing two weeks earlier. The 21-year-old native of Vancouver, British Columbia, was on holiday when she suddenly vanished without a trace. Of all the tragic incidents to take place at the Cecil Hotel, her disappearance is perhaps the most disturbing.
In late January 2013, Elisa had decided to take a hiatus from her studies at Vancouver’s University of British Columbia and treat herself to a grand tour of America’s West Coast – an adventure she inaugurated with a going-away party to which she invited her family and friends. She had a close relationship with her parents, and phoned them every day during her vacation to assure them of her safety and wellbeing. Travelling solo by rail and bus, she made her way from Vancouver to San Diego, California, where she visited the world-famous San Diego Zoo. Finally, she arrived in L.A.
On January 28th, Elisa checked in to the Cecil Hotel and booked a room for three nights. Three days later, on the eve of her scheduled departure, she disappeared. When her parents failed to receive a phone call from her that day, they notified the Los Angeles Police Department, as did the Stay on Main Hotel when she failed to check out.
Throughout the first two weeks of February, the LAPD conducted a search for the missing Canadian, which was supplemented by the efforts of her parents, who had flown out from Vancouver to assist the operation. Officers swept the roof and the hotel floors, but failed to find any trace of the missing woman. A canine team was brought in, but the dogs were unable to track her scent. It seemed as though Elisa Lam had vanished into thin air.
On February 13th, two weeks after Elisa’s disappearance, the LAPD released surveillance footage captured by a CCTV camera in one of the hotel’s elevators. This disturbing video was taken at the inauspicious hour of 3:00 in the morning, on the very day of Elisa’s vanishing. The video begins with the elevator door opening to admit Elisa, who immediately pushes the buttons to every floor before standing in a corner expectantly, as if waiting for someone. Several moments later, the young Canadian creeps towards the elevator entrance, then quickly scans the hallway outside before withdrawing just as hastily. The next minute of footage consists of the young woman furtively peering down the hallways from various concealed positions, cautiously exiting and entering the lift, and pressing all the elevator buttons a second time, her behavior lending the impression that she is hiding from someone or something. Near the end of the video, in what is perhaps the eeriest segment of the footage, Elisa moves her hands in an uncanny manner, first in a slow wavelike motion as if attempting to touch something that she cannot see, and then as if to perform some inscrutable manual operation, or, as some have suggested, as if conversation with some invisible interlocutor. That accomplished, she walks away from the elevator, the doors of which immediately close for the first time in the video.
Six days after the release of the footage, hotel guests began to complain of the water quality in their rooms, prompting the aforementioned Santiago Lopez to investigate. The handman climbed onto the hotel roof and opened the hatch to one of the four large water tanks that were kept there, suspecting that the culprit lay inside. Down below, in a well of murky water, floated the naked decomposing corpse of Elisa Lam.
The official police investigation into Elisa’s death concluded that the Canadian had suffered a psychotic break on the night of January 31st, 2013, and had climbed into the water tank of her own volition, perhaps in an irrational attempt to escape some imaginary pursuer. Back in Canada, she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and clinical depression, and had a history of hallucinating when she did not take her prescribed pharmaceuticals. Investigators believed that she had neglected to take her medication in Los Angeles and developed paranoia in consequence. Her resultant delusions drove her to the roof of the hotel and into the cistern, from which she found herself unable to escape. In an effort to stay afloat, she had removed her waterlogged clothing, which accounted for the nude condition in which she was found. When she became too exhausted to tread water any longer, Elisa slipped beneath the surface and drowned.
Despite this prosaic explanation for the death of Elisa Lam, internet sleuths have put forth other more sinister theories, which they claim address important questions that the police report failed to answer. Some have proposed that the young woman, in her vulnerable mental state, was lured to her death by the malicious influence of the dark supernatural entities believed to haunt the Cecil. To support their hypotheses, these theorists have cited eerie anomalies like the inexplicable behavior of the elevator, or the time at which the footage was captured, the latter being known in various folk traditions as the “witching hour” or the “devil’s hour”. Some have read meaning into the strange hand gestures that Elisa made on the night of her disappearance. Others have observed uncanny similarities between the events of her death and both the plot of the 2005 film Dark Water and a Korean urban legend known as the ‘Elevator Game.’ Others still believe that she was murdered by an especially wily killer who managed to avoid detection on camera, noting the difficulty she would have had in closing the water tank hatch behind her, and observing that the footage released by the police appears to be tampered with and missing time. For many, the mysterious death of Elisa Lam remains unsolved.
The Greyhound Beheading
On the evening of July 30th, 2008, at around 7:00, passengers of Greyhound Canada bus 1170 shuffled back to their seats after a scheduled rest stop in the community of Erickson, Manitoba. They had been travelling for about twelve hours since their early morning departure in Edmonton, Alberta, and were anxious to complete the final leg of the long journey to Winnipeg, Manitoba, blissfully unaware that they were about to witness what has been described as “one of the most horrific murders in Canadian history”. At that tiny rural hamlet at the edge of Manitoba’s forested Parkland region, a new passenger got on the bus – a middle-aged Chinese immigrant named Vince Li. A resident of Edmonton, Li had travelled to Erickson on a different Greyhound bus the day before, and had spent the night on a wooden bench beside the local Co-op grocery store. He was a tall man with a shaved head and dark sunglasses who attracted little attention from his fellow passengers. He took a seat at the front of the bus where he sat calmly and quietly, has hands resting on a backpack that he kept in front of him.
The bus made another pit stop at the city of Brandon, Manitoba, where Li left to smoke a cigarette, engaging in casual small talk with another passenger. When he got back on the bus, he decided to switch seats. He walked slowly down the aisle, looking at every passenger that he passed. At the back of the bus, his gaze fell on Tim McLean, a slight, wiry carnival worker who was returning home to Winnipeg after a gig in Edmonton. Tim, who was described by his friends and family as a genial, outgoing character, gave Li a friendly nod before putting on his headphones and leaning his head against the window for a bit of shuteye. Li took a seat beside him and withdrew a 2-litre bottle of iced tea and a roll of toilet paper from his backpack, tucking the latter under his chin as he took a sip. This unusual action piqued the curiosity of Stephen Allison, an 18-year-old college student from the Northwest Territories who sat in the seat opposite Li with his wife, Isabelle. Stephen decided to keep an eye on the stranger, unnerved by his unsettling behavior.
The sun was low in the prairie sky when bus driver Bruce Martin decided to shut off the overhead lights and turn on a movie for the passengers, pitching the bus interior into relative darkness. At a point about fifteen minutes west of the city of Portage la Prairie, Vince Li began to rock back and forth in his seat, quietly chanting something in Chinese. All the while, McLean continued to doze with his headphones on, oblivious to his seatmate’s alarming antics. Then, to the growing horror of Stephen Allison, who peered at him through the gloom, the immigrant withdrew an enormous hunting knife from his backpack. Before the student had a chance to sound the alarm, Vincent Li calmly stood up and plunged the knife into the neck of sleeping Tim McLean.
“All of a sudden, I heard a guy screaming…” recalled Garnet Caton, a 26-year-old former combat engineer who occupied the seat in front of Li and McLean and was reading a book at the time of the incident. “It was a blood-curdling scream…” he said, “like something between a dog howling and a baby crying, I guess you could say…” The involuntary shriek issued from the throat of Tim McLean, jolted wide awake by the shock of the blade.
Caton whirled around to see Li repeatedly and methodically stabbing McLean in the neck with what he described as a “big Rambo knife,” referring to the formidable Bowie-style survival knife which appears in the Rambo action films. In retrospect, Caton was struck by the coolness with which Li performed the savage act, describing his demeaner as calm and his movements as robotic.
With blood gushing from the cavity in his neck, Tim McLean jumped over his attacker and collapsed in the aisle, where Li continued his relentless assault, slamming his knife over and over into the 22-year-old’s limp form. Alerted by Stephen Allison, who had rushed to the front of the bus, driver Bruce Martin slammed on the brakes and ushered his panicked passengers out of the vehicle.
A truck driver named Chris Alguire, who had been travelling behind bus 1170, recognized that something was amiss and pulled over to the side of the highway to see if he could be of assistance, as did Bernie Scyrup, another Greyhound driver who resolved to investigate the commotion. In a later interview, Garnet Caton described how he, Scyrup, and Alguire armed themselves with a crowbar, a hammer, and a lead pipe and re-entered the bus in the hope of saving McLean’s life. To their horror, the three men found Li kneeling over the young man’s body, in the process of sawing off his head.
Although Li had been fully absorbed in his grisly task from the moment he first sank his knife into his unsuspecting victim, apparently heedless of the frantic screams of his fellow passengers and Martin’s entreaties for him to stop, he seemed startled by arrival of these armed observers. Tearing his eyes off his prey, Li glared up at the three men and lunged at them with his knife, chasing them off the bus. Scyrup managed to slam the vehicle doors on Li’s knife-wielding arm just in time, effectively locking him inside. The killer made several wild slashes at the three men before withdrawing his arm and returning his attention to McLean’s body.
Outside, on a lonely shoulder of the Trans-Canada Highway, the Greyhound’s three dozen passengers milled about in panic, some having fainted and others falling violently ill. Caton, Scyrup, and Alguire, meanwhile, continued to guard the door. In the midst of the tumult, Li approached the door again and, without exhibiting any hint of emotion, held up McLean’s severed head for the view of his captive audience. Then, gripping his gory knife with one hand and holding his grim prize aloft in the other, he paraded up and down the aisle, as if displaying a trophy.
By the time the RCMP arrived on the scene, Li had eviscerated McLean’s headless corpse, and was in the process of distributing his various organs to different corners of the bus. Rather than put an end to the desecration, the Mounties established a perimeter around the vehicle and waited for the suspect to exit. Officers watched in horror as Li devoured McLean’s eyes and a third of his heart. When they attempted to communicate with him, Li’s only response was, “I have to stay on the bus forever.”
At 1:30 a.m., after a four-hour standoff, Li smashed a window at the back of the bus and attempted to escape. Mounties took the opportunity to tase and arrest him. In his pockets, they found McLean’s ears, nose, and tongue.
Before his subsequent trial, Vince Li underwent a psychological evaluation which determined that he suffered from undiagnosed schizophrenia, and had murdered, mutilated, and cannibalized Tim McLean under the influence of a psychotic delusion. “I am the evil son of an evil god,” he told court psychiatrist Dr. Stanley Yaren, explaining that he had been commanded to kill McLean by a voice in his head, which he presumed to be of divine origin. For some time, this voice had prepared him for an encounter with an evil force that he would be required to slay, for which purpose he had purchased a hunting knife from the department store Canadian Tire. During the bus ride to Winnipeg, the voice informed him that the evil force he was required to destroy was Tim McLean. After he had killed the young man, the voice instructed Li to mutilate and scatter his body so that it could not reassemble, come back to life, and kill him. Failure to do so, Li was told, would be fatal to him and the rest of humanity.
In spite of undeniable evidence to the contrary, Li vehemently denied eating any part of his victim, apparently having no memory of this most gruesome act of his ghastly performance. Although Li cannot shed any light on the motive which compelled him to commit this heinous act, modern psychology may have an answer, which echoes the killer’s self-professed reason for mutilating McLean’s corpse. According to psychologist Dr. Sophie Raymond and colleagues in their 2019 paper for the Journal of Forensic Sciences, for a small number of schizophrenic killers, “cannibalism is a self-defense reaction to a perceived threat of destruction: survival depends on the annihilation or assimilation of the other.”
To those familiar with Manitoban folklore and the history of the region in which Li committed his appalling deed, the killing of Tim McLean evokes disturbing parallels with the legend of the Wendigo, an evil spirit which the local Cree, Ojibwa, and Metis traditionally believe haunts their ancestral land. This spirit is said to infiltrate the psyches of its victims and instill in them an irresistible compulsion to consume human flesh. Throughout recorded history, native men and women supposedly possessed by this malicious boreal demon killed and ate their friends and family in bizarre killing sprees, the last reported incident having occurred in 1878. Perhaps Vince Li’s hideous actions on July 30th, 2008, were simply the products of mental illness, or perhaps the Wendigo has returned to the northern plains.
In addition to their struggles with mental illness, Elisa Lam and Vince Li have something in common, namely their membership in Canada’s oldest and largest Asian subculture. From their participation in the gold rushes of the 19th Century to their essential role in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Canada’s Chinese community has had a major hand in the formation of the western provinces, particularly British Columbia. Entwined with their arduous history is a web of mystery, hidden away in newspaper archives and dusty history books. In this piece, we will travel back in time, digging up forgotten Chinese mysteries from Canada.
Chinese-Canadians
Some modern anthropologists have called the United States a “melting pot,” in which cultures from all over the world are melded together into a homogenous American stew. Conversely, Canada has been called a “cultural mosaic”– a collection of distinct subcultures which retain their unique identities, united only by geography and federal governance. Neither of these characterizations are completely accurate. While America undoubtedly has a strong national identity defined by rugged individualism, a love of liberty, and belief in the American Dream, its social fabric is a rich and motley tapestry woven of regional and ethnic subcultures, from New England’s Italian communities to the distinct culture of the Deep South. In the same way, while Canada is certainly a multicultural country, with diverse ethnic groups like the Kashubians of the Madawaska Highlands and the Metis of the Red River Valley, its many subcultures are undeniably bound together by a common thread of coolheaded civility, a love for Canada’s magnificent backyard, and a history defined by seat-of-your-pants improvisation.
With the exception of its many indigenous nations, Old Stock Anglo-Canadians, and the Quebecois pure laine, one of Canada’s oldest and largest subcultures is its West Coast Chinese community, itself an agglomeration of different clans, each with its own history and defining attributes. The first major wave of Chinese immigrants to disembark on Canadian shores were prospectors from San Francisco, who had abandoned the war-ravaged Middle Kingdom of the mid-19th Century for what they called the “Gold Mountain”, panning the streams of Sierra Nevada in the California Gold Rush. In 1858, when word spread of a gold strike in British Columbia’s Fraser Canyon, many of these prospectors made their way north up the coast into British territory, meticulously picking over old diggings that white miners had abandoned. In the 1880s, thousands of Chinese navvies were conscripted to labour on the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia, blasting tunnels and laying ties through the Fraser Canyon for a dollar a day. More Chinese immigrants trickled into Canada throughout the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, refusing to be deterred by a steep head tax imposed by the federal government in accordance with national anti-Chinese sentiment. In the latter decades of the 20th Century, ethnic Han immigrants poured into Canada from Hong Kong and Taiwan, driven by political circumstance. And more recently, Canada has welcomed expatriates from Mainland China, members of the Sleeping Giant’s burgeoning middle and upper classes. Today, Chinese-Canadians make up roughly 28% of the population of Vancouver, British Columbia, the largest city in the province.
The Nootka Crisis
Long before the Canadian Pacific Railway was a hazy dream in the mind of Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, before the first flecks of gold dust were panned in the Fraser Canyon, when the North Pacific was a vast mare incognitum which was just beginning to be traced by the cartographer’s pen, a small band of Chinese workers disembarked on the foggy banks of Nootka Sound, an inlet on Vancouver Island’s western shore. These labourers and artisans, dressed in the loose trousers and mandarin-collared robes typical of Chinese men of their day, their long black hair shaved and braided into the Manchurian queue prescribed on pain of death by the Qing Emperor, lie at the heart of two disturbing mysteries, one of them a historical enigma addressed in history books, and the other a dark legend buried in a long-forgotten lumberman’s memoir. To understand their story, some historical context is required.
A decade prior to the arrival of these ill-fated adventurers on Canadian shores, in the spring of 1778, Nootka Sound was discovered by the celebrated British navigator Captain James Cook during his third and final voyage to the Pacific Ocean. He and his crew were the second group of Europeans to lay eyes on the Sound, the first being Spanish sailors under the command of explorer Juan Jose Perez Hernandez, who had ventured up that misty inlet four years earlier. Cook dropped anchor within sight of the village of Yuquot and allowed his men to purchase a quantity of sea otter pelts from Nuu-chah-nulth (Muchalat Nootka) natives, the bravest of whom approached his ships in canoes. These furs were later sold for exorbitant prices at Canton, an inland Chinese trading port located about ninety miles up the Pearl River from its mouth on the South China Sea, prompting a handful of adventurous British, American, and Spanish merchants to try their luck trading along the untapped coast of the Pacific Northwest throughout the last two decades of that century.
One of these intrepid pioneers of the maritime fur trade was an Englishman named John Meares – a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy at the time of Cook’s third voyage, who would gain a reputation for employing Machiavellian tactics in his mercantile exploits in the North Pacific. In 1785, the officer resigned his commission and established a trading enterprise called the Northwest America Company. The following year, he sailed from Calcutta, India, with two ships to the coast of Alaska, where he traded with the local Tlingit natives.
Meares decided to spend the winter in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, where his ships became encased in ice, and twenty-three of his crewmembers succumbed to scurvy. He was rescued that spring by rival British traders Nathaniel Portlock and George Dixon – veterans of Cook’s final voyage also drawn to the region by the prospect of fortune and adventure, who believed they enjoyed a monopoly on the Pacific fur trade by virtue of licenses they managed to secure from the British East India and South Sea Companies. Mears promised his rescuers that he would sail directly to Macau, a Portuguese-governed Chinese sea port which functioned as a staging ground for European traders, located at the mouth of the Pearl River, leaving his rivals to conduct their business without competition. Contrary to his pledge, however, the unscrupulous mariner continued to trade with the Tlingit until he accrued a sizeable cargo of pelts. That accomplished, he sailed to the Portuguese enclave, where he purchased supplies and trading goods, and replenished his scanty crew. Among his new shipmates were fifty Chinese workers who specialized as sailors, carpenters, shipwrights, coopers, and blacksmiths. It is around these employees that revolve the mysteries we will relate shortly.
In his 1790 account of his voyage – a document which, it must be mentioned, is considered unreliable by historians on account the duplicity with which the author routinely conducted his business dealings – Meares wrote:
“The crews of these ships consisted of Europeans and China-men, with a larger proportion of the former. The Chinese were, on this occasion, shipped as an experiment: they have been generally esteemed a hardy and industrious, as well as ingenious race of people; they live on fish and rice, and, requiring but low wages, it was a matter also of economical consideration to employ them; and during the whole of the voyage there was every reason to be satisfied with their services. If hereafter trading posts should be established on the American coast, a colony of these men would be a very important acquisition.”
In January 1788, Meares and his new crew set sail for Nootka Sound. They reached their destination in May and opened a successful trade with the natives of Yuquot. The English captain later claimed that Chief Maquinna, the powerful leader of the Mowachat Nootka, sold him some land at the edge of the village, on which his Chinese crewmembers built a two-story fort – a claim which the chief later denied. Meares’ Chinese sailors also crafted a 40-ton schooner from towering fir, spruce, and cedar that lined the coast – the first non-indigenous vessel built in the Pacific Northwest. This ship was christened the North West America.
Meares was so pleased with the services rendered by his Chinese employees that upon his return to Macau, he added twenty more Cantonese labourers to his ranks. In that Portuguese port, he partnered with James Colnett, a Royal Navy officer who had served under Captain Cook, who had taken a leave of absence to trade in the Pacific Northwest. The following year, Colnett set out for Nootka Sound with the seventy Chinese, who were tasked with establishing and manning a permanent fur trading post on the land that Meares had allegedly purchased from Maquinna.
At that time, the Pacific Coasts of both North and South America were technically Spanish possessions, having been claimed for the King of Castille and the Queen of Aragon by conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa following his expedition across the Isthmus of Panama in 1513, and practically ruled by the Spanish since their 16th Century conquest of the Inca Empire. With the exceptions of scattered raids by English and Dutch privateers, the most famous among them being Elizabethan pirate Sir Francis Drake, and the most recent being Georgian Commodore George Anson, the Pacific holdings of New Spain had enjoyed centuries of peace and isolation, unthreatened by rival European powers, and thus the Spanish had little incentive to explore the rugged western shores of their New World colony north of their Mexican silver mines. In the 1770s, in response to Russian activity in Alaska, the Spanish established settlements in northerly California, and launched several exploratory voyages further north up the Pacific Coast. When they were alerted to British trading ventures off Vancouver Island, they resolved to forcefully assert their sovereignty in the North Pacific.
In May 1789, Spanish naval officer Jose Esteban Martinez sailed from Mexico to Nootka Sound in a 26-gun warship with the intention of establishing a permanent settlement in the area. Upon his arrival, he found the Sound occupied by three ships, two of them American vessels under the command of merchant captain Robert Gray, another pioneer of the maritime fur trade, and the third being one of Meares’ vessels, called the Iphigenia, captained by Scottish mariner William Douglas. Martinez encountered the Americans on their way out of the Sound and, after giving them presents of brandy, ham, and sugar, allowed them to leave. He then set his sights on the British vessel, the presence of which posed a graver affront to Spanish sovereignty in the region. In keeping with the cordial firmness which seems to have characterized Spanish naval officers in the North Pacific at that time, Martinez treated Douglas to a lavish dinner on his ship, where he politely informed the Scottish captain that he was intruding on the territory of His Catholic Majesty. He then seized the British vessel and imprisoned her crew, only to release them several days later with a warning not to return to Nootka Sound.
On June 8th, Meares’ new ship, the North West America, sailed into Nootka under the command of Captain Robert Funter, laden with furs purchased further up the coast. Martinez appropriated the vessel and absorbed it into his own tiny fleet, renaming it the Santa Gertrudis la Magna.
On July 2nd, James Colnett finally arrived at Nootka Sound with Meares’ seventy Chinese settlers, hoping to erect a permanent fur trading post near the Muchalat village as planned. Martinez seized his ship, arrested an indignant Colnett and his sailors, and shipped the prisoners south to the Spanish naval base of San Blas on the west coast of Mexico, just north of present-day Puerto Vallarta.
The Anglo-Hispanic contention at Nootka Sound touched off a diplomatic dispute between London and Madrid which nearly degenerated into a major war between Britain and Spain and their respective European allies. This conflict, known as the Nootka Crisis, was resolved in the early 1790s in three formal agreements called the Nootka Conventions.
One of the enduring mysteries of the Nootka Crisis is the fate of the Chinese whom John Meares had brought to Nootka Sound, who fell into the hands of the Spaniards. Jose Esteban Martinez, in his journal, claimed that Colnett had brought twenty-nine Chinese to Nootka Sound – a number which James Colnett affirmed in his 1789 journal – and that he shipped all of them to San Blas. Meares, however, in his 1790 memoir Voyages… Made to the North West Coast of America, claimed that he had brought fifty Chinese to Nootka Sound – a number which he augmented to seventy in a memorial presented to Britain’s House of Commons on May 13th of that same year.
Barring the possibility that Meares, for his own inscrutable purposes, gave inaccurate figures, what can account for the discrepancy in the alleged numbers of Chinese settlers brought to Vancouver Island? Meares himself, in his Memorial to the House of Commons, wrote, “Don Martinez had thought fit… to detain the Chinese, and had compelled them to enter the service of Spain.” He claimed that the Spaniards later employed the Chinese in mines built on the land that he himself had allegedly purchased from Maquinna. Other historians have suggested that the Spanish captain employed the Chinese in building a Spanish settlement near Yuquot, called Santa Cruz de Nuca, complete with an artillery battery called Fort San Miguel, and later a second fort called San Rafael, all of which were dismantled shortly after construction. Others still have proposed that the Chinese escaped their captors and were later killed by the Nootka.
The China Indian Tribe
One of the most fascinating theories as to the fate of these vanished immigrants appeared in a long-forgotten article in the June 3rd, 1905 issue of the Victoria Daily Times. The piece was written by a mysterious columnist who accredited himself “C. McK. S.,” who penned a number of articles for that publication from 1905-1907 on the subject of Canadian and American West Coast history.
The writer claimed that, in the summer of 1869, eighty years after the events which sparked the Nootka Crisis, he went on a lumber-hunting excursion up what he called the Uulachat River on Vancouver Island. Although no waterway by that name exists today, the writer’s description of the surrounding geography leaves us with little doubt that the river described must have been the Gold River, which empties into Muchalat Inlet, the latter being an eastern branch of Nootka Sound. Masquerading as a British Royal Navy officer in search of timber for spars, which he hoped would earn him more respect from the local natives, the columnist chartered a Victoria steamboat to Nootka. There, he secured the assistance of two native guides who took him, as well as the steamboat captain, Christensen, and a man named W.E. Strounch, up the river in their canoe. When they reached what is probably the Heber Canyon, they cached their vessel and proceeded upriver on foot, shouldering their blankets and provisions. At one point, they stopped to marvel at what may have been Lady Falls, which the writer designated “one of the most beautiful waterfalls to be seen on Vancouver Island.”
During their excursion, the writer and his companions came upon what they took to be a camp of Indians, whose residents fled into the woods at their approach. “Although we made many efforts to induce them to come back,” the columnist wrote, “they would not return.”
After exploring the area for some time and finding that white pine was not sufficiently abundant there to suit their purpose, the party returned down the river, stopping again at the mysterious native camp, whose occupants remained hidden in the woods.
Upon their return to Nootka, the writer and his companions learned that the strange natives who had avoided them on the river were supposed to be the halfbreed descendants of the Chinamen brought to Nootka Sound by John Meares, eking out a miserable existence in the mountainous interior of Vancouver Island. As the writer put it:
“The China Indian tribe referred to in this article on the Uuchalat River are a remnant of the China Indian tribe which originated at Nootka in 1789, and their history is as follows; Captain Meares, a traveller in furs between Canton and the Northwest coast, brought over from China a number of Chinese ship carpenters to build a vessel for him at Nootka. When the vessel was finished and launched, he named her the North West America, and she was the first vessel ever put together on the Northwest Coast.
“On his return to Canton, about one half of the Chinese carpenters returned to their homes in China, while the other half remained at Nootka and took Indian women for wives. The Chinese Indian amalgamation in the course of years multiplied so rapidly that the Nootka Indians became fearful lest they become so numerous that eventually they would be overpowered by them, and in order to protect themselves, as well as to stop their multiplication, made war on them, killing many, while those that escaped the massacre fled to the interior of the island and eventually located on the Uuchalat River, where we found their ranch.
“Some years afterward they were attacked in their new home on the Uuchalat, and nearly all of them were slaughtered, and since that time they have been wanderers in the mountains, fearing to return to their homes.”
The writer concluded by suggesting that a mysterious Vancouver Island wildman who was the subject of a number of contemporary newspaper articles – who had been spotted near Horne Lake, on the other side of the Island, the previous December, and who was supposed to have been shot on the shores of Union Bay one month earlier – might not be a feral Caucasian as was widely conjectured, but rather “one of these poor outcasts of the China Indian tribe…”
The Fraser Canyon and Cariboo Gold Rushes
In 1858, eleven years before the columnist’s alleged journey up the Gold River, gold was discovered in British Columbia’s Fraser Canyon, at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers near present-day Lytton, BC. News of the strike reached San Francisco, where many prospectors had settled in the wake of the California Gold Rush. Almost overnight, a horde of American miners prepared to set out for the new diggings. Among them were several thousand Chinese prospectors.
Starting in 1849, upon learning of the gold that had been struck in California’s Sierra Nevada, these immigrants from the East had decided to leave their homeland behind for what they called the “Gold Mountain” – a term denoting all of California. Still reeling from the moral and economic repercussions of the First Opium War with Great Britain, and teetering precariously on the brink of what would become the Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest civil war in world history, China was an empire on a dark trajectory. California, in comparison, presented a land of opportunity, where poor Chinese peasants could escape the squalor and misery of the opium-addled Middle Kingdom by seeking their fortunes in the mountains. By 1852, around 20,000 Chinese prospectors had poured into America’s West Coast by way of San Francisco and, equipped with picks and shovels, headed into the Sierra Navada to hunt for the yellow metal. When news of the Fraser Canyon strike reached San Francisco, many Chinese who had yet to strike it rich decided to relocate to the ‘New Gold Mountain’ – the rugged wilderness of British Columbia.
As had been the case in California, Chinese participants in the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush frequently butted heads with their white American counterparts. One incident of Chinese-American hostility, recounted by historian Daniel Marshall in his 2018 book Claiming the Land, occurred in 1858, when a boat captained by a white man pulled up to the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost of Fort Hope at the mouth of the Fraser Canyon carrying a large quantity of Chinese passengers. According to a Cornish miner who witnessed the scene, “as the boat with the Chinese crew came alongside of the bank, a crowd of Californians lined the top and declared that no Chinese would land there. The white man pleaded that he had been paid to transport these Chinese to Fort Hope… ‘Well, it doesn’t matter whether you are paid or not, no Chinese will land at Fort Hope. We’ll see who is going to have the say about whether Chinese come here or not. We say they shall not,’ said the California crowd.” In his 2003 book McGowan’s War, historian Donald J. Hauka included an 1860 letter penned by a group of American prospectors to British Columbian governor James Douglas, in which the writers sulkily proposing that their Chinese competitors ought to be taxed for the opium, rice, fish, and oil they imported from China.
In 1861, news of a new gold strike further to the north, in British Columbia’s Cariboo Country, was circulated by the North American press. This tantalizing intelligence prompted what was to be the province’s largest gold rush, the Cariboo Gold Rush – a stampede which drew prospectors from Great Britain and Eastern Canada, and an additional wave of miners from China. Chinese participants in this event and its easterly successor, the smaller Wild Horse Creek Gold Rush, would often pick over old diggings that white miners had abandoned. As explained by a didactic sign at Fisherville, a ghost town in B.C.’s Columbia Mountains that was once the hub of the Wild Horse Creek Rush, where the empty graves of Chinese miners can still be seen, “Chinese miners often could only secure rights on the ground previously exhausted by other miners… The sight of a Chinese placer miner patiently working with his rockerbox… would have been common to many that visited” B.C.’s goldfields long after they had been deserted by their original white claimants.
The Chinese Ghost of Hat Creek House
One eerie story to come out of the Cariboo Gold Rush centres around Hat Creek House, a historic roadhouse in Cache Creek, British Columbia, which was built in the 1860s to serve prospectors bound for Cariboo Country. At the time of its construction, Hat Creek House lay on the Cariboo Road, a wagon trail constructed at great expense at the behest of British Columbia’s Governor James Douglas, which connected the Fraser Canyon with the epicentre of the new stampede, the boomtown of Barkerville.
Today, Hat Creek House is a living history museum where tour guides dressed in period costumes take visitors on a journey back in time. Over the years, many of the museum’s staff members have had strange experiences in the historic building which have led them to believe that Hat Creek House is haunted by several restless spirits. One ghostly resident of the old stagecoach inn is supposed to be the spirit of a Chinese cook who was employed there in the late 19th or early 20th Centuries. In addition to appearing to hapless visitors and staff members, usually on the second floor and in the barn, this friendly spectre is said to occasionally move drinking glasses in the hotel bar, tug on tourists’ clothes, and audibly tread on the wooden floorboards upstairs when no one else is around. In a 2014 article for the Ashcroft – Cache Creek Journal, staff member Esther Darlington MacDonald described an especially vivid encounter with the ghost which occurred one afternoon while closing the museum, which involved phantom footsteps, a full-body apparition, and even a brief conversation. The following day, MacDonald reopened the museum to find two loaves of freshly-baked bread sitting on the worktable. The pleasant aroma that filled the roadhouse, and the residual heat emanating from the stove, told MacDonald that the loaves had been baked that morning, presumably by the culinarily-inclined spectre she had met the night before.
According to tour guide Jordan Westside, whose testimony appears in an article by Greg Mansfield for the website ThereBeGhosts.com, the Chinese cook whose ghost haunts the hotel was believed to have lost his life when he was falsely implicated in the death of a little girl who had been staying at the establishment. Legend has it that the girl accidentally locked herself inside a broom closet while hiding from an abusive relative and froze to death in the night. Blame was laid on the Chinese cook, who met his end at the end of a rope in the establishment’s barn, either by his own hand or by those of the vigilantes who accused him of murder.
The Leechtown Gold Rush
In 1864, the same year the gold was discovered on Wild Horse Creek, a 22-year-old Scottish botanist named Dr. Robert Brown – not to be confused another contemporary Scottish botanist of the same name – led the so-called Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition on a series of treks across Vancouver Island, conducted for the purpose of collecting seeds and discovering minerals. On July 13th, 1864, while tramping up the uncharted Sooke River at the southern end of the island, Brown decided to travel by canoe to the provincial capital of Victoria, about fifteen miles to the east, in order to obtain medical supplies and replace broken instruments. He left the expedition in charge of his second-in-command, a veteran of the British Royal Engineers named Lieutenant Peter John Leech, with instructions to meet him in a week and a half at Cowichan Bay, at the terminus of the trail.
On July 26th, Leech and company reunited with Brown as scheduled and reported that, on July 18th, they had discovered alluvial gold on a tributary of the Sooke River about twelve miles upriver from the latter’s mouth. The explorers decided to name this tantalizing waterway the “Leech River” in honour of the old engineer. Twelve pans of riverbank dirt yielded eight ounces of gold flakes, the prospects ranging from three cents to one U.S. dollar a pan – worth about 60 cents to $20 USD per pan today.
Brown described the development in his journal, writing:
“In the evening, Mr. Leech and the whole party at Harris’s house. He had not separated into two parties, considering, from what he had seen from the tops of the mountains that the country was not worth that trouble, and having been delayed some time by a brilliant discovery they had made: viz. the discovery of rich placer diggings upon Sooke River, and its branch ‘Leech River’. They were wild with excitement and certainly the coarse scale gold was enough to excite anyone.”
News of the discovery was promptly circulated by the local press, and before long, prospectors across British Columbia and the northwestern States, including many Chinese miners who settled in San Francisco, were abandoning their stale diggings for the fresher prospects of the Leech River. Almost overnight, a boomtown called Leechtown sprang up at the confluence of the Leech and Sooke Rivers, and by the time the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition was concluded in 1865, $100,000 worth of gold – worth $2 million today – had been wrested from the area.
The Gold Boot of Rattlesnake Dick
In addition to its auric treasures, the so-called Leechtown Gold Rush has yielded a number of fascinating folktales, at least two of which are connected with British Columbia’s Chinese community. Much of Leechtown’s colourful lore was immortalized in the various writings of the prolific T.W. Paterson, a Vancouver Island-based historian and lost treasure writer. In his 1971 book Treasure Lost & Found in British Columbia, Paterson included a tall tale featuring the outlaw Richard “Rattlesnake Dick” Barter, a reluctant prospector-turned-highwayman from Lower Canada who robbed miners and held up stagecoaches during the California Gold Rush.
In the summer of 1856, Barter and his gang robbed a Wells Fargo Express mule train in the Trinity Mountains near the Oregon border, stealing $80,000-worth of gold bullion – the most lucrative robbery yet committed in the state. The gang divided the loot, burying half of it in the Trinity Mountains, and taking the other half with them to a southerly camp near Folsom, California, just northeast of Sacramento. There, they were set upon by a Wells Fargo posse. One of bandits was killed in the ensuing firefight, and the others were captured and jailed in the town of Auburn, California. Half of the stolen gold was subsequently returned to the bank, but the other half in the Trinity Mountains was never recovered, allegedly having been buried by the dead desperado.
Shortly after his arrest, Rattlesnake Dick escaped from the Auburn jail and vanished into the wilderness of the Central Valley. He later resurfaced in the seaside city of San Francisco. According to legend, prior to his arrival in that port town, Rattlesnake Dick rode north to the Trinity Mountains and exhumed his gang’s ill-gotten gains. He proceeded to smuggle his loot to Victoria by steamer and secret it to the Leechtown diggings, where he hoped to somehow pass the bullion off as honestly-earned gold dust. The outlaw abandoned this enterprise when a U.S. marshal trailed him to Vancouver Island. Before fleeing for San Francisco, Rattlesnake Dick is said to have stuffed the gold into a knee-high leather boot, which he hastily buried beneath 18 inches of Leechtown soil, marking the cache with an inverted frying pan.
The outlaw spent the succeeding years in ‘Frisco, biding his time until the opportunity arose to retrieve his treasure. After making enemies with the notorious San Francisco Vigilance Committee, he returned to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1858 and formed a new gang, with whom he once again terrorized gold seekers from Shasta County to Nevada City. In the summer of 1859, he was mortally wounded in a duel with California lawmen outside an Auburn saloon, bringing the secret of the missing gold with him to the grave.
The fatal hole in the legend of Leechtown’s golden boot, as Paterson pointed out, is that gold was not discovered on the Leech River until 1864 – five years after the outlaw’s death. When Rattlesnake Dick was exchanging fateful lead with an undersheriff and his deputy in Placer County, the Leech River, as Robert Brown put it in his official report on his expedition, was a locality “which no white man, [and] probably very few Indians, had… reached.”
“How then,” asked Paterson, “did it become legend that Barter escaped with the loot to the tiny gold camp on distant Vancouver Island? Unfortunately, the record yields few clues. But that $40,000 in gold is buried in Leechtown, even today, is widely accepted as fact.”
The Secret Staircase
Another Leechtown legend which Paterson included in his book is the tale of a secret staircase and an underground tunnel carved from living rock, accidentally discovered by an old prospector named Ed Mullard sometime in the first half of the 20th Century. According to reporter Ted Harris of the Victoria Daily Colonist, who first heard the story from a friend, Mullard was returning to camp one autumn evening after an unsuccessful deer hunt in the Vancouver Island rainforest, somewhere between the Leech and Jordan Rivers, when he found himself descending a hidden staircase, its entrance concealed by snow and brush. Tearing aside a snarl of tangled vegetation, he saw that the steps, clearly carved from solid stone, appeared to lead to an underground gallery which disappeared into the roots of a cliff. It was evident that the passageway had lain derelict for decades. Curiosity overcoming the haunting trepidation elicited by this catacombic passageway, Mullard lit a match and ventured into the gloom, growing ever darker in the fading twilight.
The gallery was high enough to comfortably accommodate the prospector, who stood six feet tall. After creeping about ten feet down this stone corridor, Mullard discovered a beautifully-carved stone archway on the far right wall. Beyond was another stone staircase composed of seven steps, which appeared to lead to another gallery, flooded by about a foot of icy water. Mullard carefully made his way to the bottom step and peered into the stygian hall, now completely bereft of natural light. In the soft glow of the matchlight, he thought he could make out a third corridor in the distance, from which issued the sound of rushing water. Unwilling to commit himself to this more hazardous passageway, Mullard climbed back to the surface and returned to camp.
Ed Mullard never managed to return to the mysterious structure, and died in 1959, shortly after relating his discovery to Ted Harris. One of the late prospector’s friends later told the reporter that, on the day of his unusual find, Mullard had recovered several tantalizing artifacts from the floor of the flooded corridor, including an old miner’s pick, the rusted head of a hammer, a 3-inch-long gold ingot, and a handful of large and mysterious crystals.
Adding an element of the uncanny to the mystery of the hidden staircase is the fate of a Victoria-based logger, who telephoned Paterson in the 1970s. The lumberjack claimed to have accidentally discovered a mineshaft answering to the description of Mullard’s mystery tunnel years before, while felling timber between the Leech and Jordan Rivers. He had dismissed the shaft as an old and worthless relic of the Leechtown Gold Rush until he read one of Paterson’s articles on Mullard’s tale. Before hanging up, he declared that he would try to revisit the site with a friend in a few weeks, and would inform Paterson of the developments. Seven months later, not having heard from him since his first phone call, Paterson learned that the lumberjack had been killed in a logging accident on Survey Mountain, right where he claimed to have found the shaft.
Paterson concluded his piece by relating the testimony of a Saskatchewan-based dentist, who told a Victoria journalist that an old friend of his, from the prairies, once told him, as Paterson put it, “of a strange tunnel with steps carved into a mountain on Vancouver Island. From it, he had recovered several Chinese artifacts which he said he had sold to a Victoria second-hand dealer. A check of old directories confirmed that yes, there had been such a dealer in Victoria at that time. Which opens up a whole new realm of conjecture!”
Ancient Chinese Voyages to Canada
If we entertain the possibility that the mystery tunnel related by the Saskatchewan dentist might be the same secret staircase discovered by Ed Mullard, the Oriental artifacts it allegedly yielded present the notion that the underground passageway was carved from the living rock by Chinese miners in days gone by. Considering the location of the structure, it seems likely that these excavators, if they indeed existed, were some of the many Chinese prospectors who participated in the Leechtown Gold Rush. Some alternative historians, however, in light of the dentist’s testimony, might be tempted to add the secret staircase to the mystifying body of evidence indicating that Asian mariners arrived on Canadian shores long before John Meares’ labourers disembarked at Nootka Sound.
In the summer of 1882, a prospector made a fascinating discovery near a creek in Cassiar Country, a mountainous region in northern British Columbia which had been the site of another gold rush in the 1870s. While digging a shaft through soft sand to bedrock, the miner came across a cache of thirty Chinese coins about twenty-five feet below the surface. The coins were strung together, a cord having been threaded through the square holes that perforated their centres. Scots-Canadian ethnologist James Deans examined these coins shortly after their discovery and determined that they had been minted around 263 B.C. during the reign of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China.
It might be worth mentioning here that a well-known Canadian author attempted to connect this find with the equally-intriguing 1801 discovery of what were identified as copper Chinese coins in a spring near the village of Chillicothe, North West Territory. The author mistakenly identified “Chillicothe” as Chilcotin Country, located about 400 miles south of the Cassiar Mountains; in fact, Chillicothe is a historic city in southern Ohio, which served as the capital of America’s Northwest Territory in 1801.
Discounting the unlikely possibility that the Cassiar coins were brought into that northern country and buried by participants in the Cassiar Gold Rush, the prospector’s discovery evokes the intriguing idea that ancient Chinese mariners made undocumented voyages to Canada long before Spanish, British, and Russian vessels breached the waters of the North Pacific. The ancient Chinese accomplished many incredible feats of engineering during the reign of Qin Shi Huang, who had brought an end to the carnage of the Warring States period in the misty recesses of China’s crimson history, unifying the Middle Kingdom for the first time under his Qin dynasty. Among these were the construction of the massive Lingqu Canal, which connects the watersheds of the Pearl and Yangze Rivers, and the famous Great Wall of China, which sprawled across the Empire’s northern frontier, built to shield the Middle Kingdom from the warlike nomads of the northern steppes. When considered in the light of these spectacular projects, the radical concept of an ancient Chinese trans-Pacific voyage seems less incredible.
More relevant to this intriguing potentiality is a mystical quest sponsored by Emperor Qin Shi Huang in the latter years of his rein. Desperate to escape death, the self-styled ‘First Emperor’ tasked his court alchemists with discovering and retrieving herbs by which to concoct the elixir of life, a legendary potion supposed to confer immortality on those who imbibe it, which were said to grow in a distant land across the sea. According to an ancient Chinese history known in English as the Records of the Grand Historian, composed in the last century before Christ, a scholar named Han Zhong set out on this mythical errand with an impressive armada of seagoing junks and never returned. Another of the Emperor’s sorcerers, named Xu Fu, is said to have made two costly voyages into the Pacific in search of the secret to immortality, disappearing on his second expedition in 210 B.C. Legend has it that the alchemist discovered a distant land over which he proclaimed himself king. Although another Chinese history, written in the Middle Ages, identified this foreign domain as Japan, the voyages of Xu Fu and Han Zhong clearly indicate an ancient Chinese desire to discover a certain distant land across the Pacific.
What might have inspired the ancient Chinese notion that another realm lay at the eastern end of what they called the Great Ocean? In her controversial 1972 book Pale Ink: Two Ancient Records of Chinese Exploration in America, American attorney and WWII codebreaker Henriette Mertz pointed to a historic text which she regarded as proof of an ancient Chinese knowledge of the New World which may have predated the Qin Dynasty. One of the ancient Chinese classics is a geography called the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the authorship of which many Chinese historians have dated to the Warring States period. Mertz argued that the fourth section of this tome, which details the geography and mythological inhabitants of a region called the “Eastern Mountains”, was a description of North America.
The Voyage of Hui Shen
Another alleged ancient Chinese voyage to the Americas was that of Hui Shen, a Chinese Buddhist monk who, accompanied by a crew of monastic brothers, embarked on a journey to a distant domain called Fusang in 458 A.D., determined to spread the Dharmic religion to its inhabitants. The monks remained in Fusang for decades, eventually returning to the so-called “Celestial Empire,” as China was sometimes called, to tell the tale of their adventures. Some historians, most notably 19th Century American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, have interpreted Fusang as a particular stretch of the west coast of the Americas.
In his 1875 book Fusang, or The Discovery of America by Chinese Buddhist Priests in the Fifth Century, Leland included an English translation of a passage from a formal history of the Liang dynasty called the Book of Liang, completed by Chinese historian Yao Silian in 635 A.D. This passage is generally regarded as the best source on Hui Shen’s semi-legendary voyage.
According to this account, Hui Shen and his monastic brothers travelled to a land across the sea whose peaceably-inclined inhabitants relied heavily on the “Fusang tree” – a plant with sprouts resembling bamboo, which produced red pear-like fruits. The natives wove the bark of the Fusang tree into clothing, and inscribed characters on its sheets in a written language unknown to the Chinese. They built their houses from wooden timbers, and were ruled by a king named Ichi.
“The horns of the oxen are so large,” Leland translated, referring to the country’s beasts of burden, “that they hold ten bushels. They use them to contain all manner of things. Horse, oxen, and stags are harnessed to their wagons. Stags are used here as cattle are used in the Middle Kingdom, and from the milk of the hind they make butter.”
After detailing the marriage and funeral customs of the Fusang natives, Yao related a strange inland tribe described by Hui Shen, which was supposed to be composed entirely of women. Leland only recorded the first sentence of this interesting passage, dismissing the whole as “intermixed with so much fabulous matter that it is not worth translating.” Fortunately, Henriette Mertz included the remainder of the text in her book Pale Ink, which had been translated at her request by an unnamed Chinese scholar employed at the Library of Congress. In this passage, Yao Silian quoted some long-lost narrative allegedly written by Hui Shen, which follows:
“[Hui Shen] says that the Kingdom of Women is about a thousand li [i.e. about 350 miles] east of Fu-sang. The appearance of the people is neat and clean and their color is white. Their bodies have hair and the hair of their heads is long, reaching to the ground. At the second or third month they enter the water, and become pregnant. Six or seven months after they bear their young. The female chests are destitute of breasts. At the nape of their neck there is hair, and milk is in the hair at the back of the neck, and the infant is fed by that milk. Within 100 days, the infant can walk, and in three or four years is adult. It is true. On seeing a human being, the women are afraid and hide. They have a great deal of respect for their husbands. The people eat a salt plant, the leaves of which resemble a certain Chinese herb, and they have a pleasant pungent odor.”
The narrative went on to describe how, in the sixth year of the Liang Dynasty (i.e. 507 A.D.), sailors from the northern Chinese city of Jinan were carried by a strong wind to an island near Fusang. “On going ashore,” the narrative claimed, “they found a people there whose language they could not understand. The women were like those of China but the men had human bodies with dog’s heads and they made sounds like the barking of a dog. The people eat a small kind of bean or kernel. They wear clothing made of cloth. They beat down the earth and make adobe for the walls of their houses, the shape of which is circular, and the doors, or entrances, resemble burrows.”
Incidentally, this brief account of dog-headed men living on an island in the North Pacific eerily accords with an old Gwich’in Dene legend from northern Yukon Territory, recorded in 1895 by French Oblate missionary Adrien Gabriel Maurice in his book Three Carrier Myths. According to the priest’s informants, Gwich’in tradition contends that a race of dogmen “formerly dwelt very far away in the west and beyond the sea, in the midst of a very powerful nation among which magicians used to transform themselves into dogs or wolves during the night, while they became men again during the day.”
In his book, Leland made the case that the land of Fusang was really the west coast of Mexico near what is now Puerto Vallarta, arguing that the natives whom the monks encountered were really the Mexica ancestors of the Aztecs. Whether or not Leland’s interpretation is accurate, the narrative of Hui Shen is another undeniable indication of ancient Chinese interest in, and perhaps awareness of, a distant land beyond the Pacific Ocean.
The Treasure Fleet of Zheng He
A third alleged Chinese voyage to the Americas, according to some alternative historians, was performed by sailors in the fleet of Zheng He, a great Chinese admiral who served the Ming emperor in the late Middle Ages. This theory was perhaps most famously articulated by the late British Royal Navy officer Gavin Menzies in his controversial 2003 book 1421: The Year China Discovered America.
In the early 1400s, during the reign of the Ming Dynasty, China’s so-called ‘Yongle Emperor’, or the Emperor of Perpetual Happiness, launched seven spectacular expeditions, called ‘treasure voyages’, to various maritime kingdoms west of China, from the Khmer Empire of present-day Cambodia to the Malindi Kingdom of present-day Kenya. Although Chinese envoys and merchants had regularly sailed to northeastern Africa and Arabia by way of the Indian Ocean since at least the reign of the Tang Dynasty, which ruled China during Europe’s Dark Ages, the Ming treasure voyages of the early 1400s constituted the largest and most impressive Chinese ambassadorial expeditions to the so-called ‘Western Sea’ at that time.
The purpose of the Ming treasure voyages was to secure tribute from the various kingdoms that bordered the Indian Ocean and solidify China’s self-styled status as the Zhong Guo, or ‘Middle Kingdom’, around which the world revolved. In order to affect this end, the treasure fleet would carry extravagant imperial gifts to the kingdoms in question, the magnitude of its ships and the quantity of its sailors tacitly demonstrating China’s superiority to the inhabitants of these foreign lands. In preparation for this ambassadorial enterprise, the Chinese emperor commissioned the construction of around sixty colossal treasure junks, each of them crewed by several hundred to a thousand sailors. Legend has it that half the trees in southern China were felled to supply the wood for the emperor’s armada. The Yongle Emperor appointed his favourite courtier, Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch from the Mongol province of Yunnan, the admiral of his treasure fleet, and in 1405, Zheng He led this so-called “floating city”, along with about 250 supplemental warships, on its first treasure voyage to the Indian Kingdom of Calicut.
Zheng He’s treasure voyages successively inched further west, and by his seventh and final voyage, which lasted from 1431-1433, the Chinese courtier sailed as far west as Kenya, where he received tributes of gold, giraffes, and African lions from the local Malindi king.
When Zheng He returned to China after his seventh treasure voyage, he learned that his benefactor, the Yongle Emperor, had died. Yongle’s son and successor, called the Hongxi Emperor, was an isolationist who had grown resentful of his father’s expensive diplomatic endeavors. On Hongxi’s orders, Beijing mandarins, or imperial officials, destroyed all of Zheng He’s logs and records and burned the enormous Chinese treasure fleet.
Although most mainstream historians contend that no members of Zheng He’s treasure fleet sailed further west than Kenya, a tantalizing illustration and an accompanying description drawn in the margins of a 1450 map of the world produced by a Venetian cartographer called Fra Mauro hint at some sort of nautical Chinese presence in the Atlantic Ocean. The image in question is a ship bearing great resemblance to a Chinese junk sailing west from the Cape of Good Hope. An accompanying description, written in Italian, tells of a ship from the Orient which was swept into the “Sea of Darkness”, or the Atlantic Ocean, by a storm in about 1420. “Nothing but air and water was seen for forty days,” the description goes, “and by their reckoning they ran 2,000 miles and fortune deserted them.” When the storm abated, the sailors of this luckless vessel managed to make their way back to the Cape of Good Hope, completing the return voyage in seventy days.
While the illustration on Mauro’s map raises the possibility that one of Zheng He’s junks may have accidentally strayed into the Atlantic Ocean, Gavin Menzies’ theory goes further, maintaining that some of the admiral’s sailors made deliberate voyages of exploration far beyond the African continent. These epic journeys, Menzies contended, led to Chinese discoveries of South America, Australia, and the West Coast of Canada. One piece of evidence which he claimed supports his thesis is a 1513 map of the world drawn by an Ottoman admiral named Piri Reis, which the Turkish corsair admittedly based on existing maps drafted by European and Arabian cartographers. Menzies proposed that a section of the map depicts Patagonia, the southern tip of South America, which was first discovered by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, a full seven years after the completion of Reis’ map. The only way Piri Reis could have known about Patagonia, he argued, is if the region had been previously explored by non-European mariners. “There was only one nation at that time,” Menzies wrote, “with the material resources, the scientific knowledge, the ships and the seafaring experience to mount such an epic voyage of discovery. That nation was China…”
Citing other charts which he interpreted as depicting shores undiscovered by Europeans at the time of their composition, Menzies went on to propose that various of Zheng He’s subordinates made extraordinary voyages to the farthest corners of the earth, from the barren shores of Greenland to the ice-choked waters of Antarctica. One of these explorers was Admiral Zhou Man, whom Menzies submitted was tasked with exploring the Pacific Ocean west of South America. Menzies alleged that Zhou’s travels brought him to Australia, Indonesia’s Spice Islands, and back across the Pacific to the west coast of Canada. After sailing south to Central America, Menzies claimed, Zhou returned to China.
The Markings on Bad Rock
Most of the evidence on which Menzies’ hypothesis rests is speculative, including ambiguous coastlines on ancient maps, the presence of Oriental fauna on the West Coast of the Americas, and the rotten skeleton of a Chinese junk unearthed in northern California. This author has, perhaps irresponsibly, decided to add another strut to this flimsy framework in the form of a strange discovery made by North West Company explorer Simon Fraser during his famous 1808 descent of the river that would come to bear his name. In late June of that year, Fraser and his voyageurs arrived at what later be called ‘Lady Franklin Rock’ – an island in the Fraser River near what is now Yale, British Columbia. There, they fell in with a band of Upriver Halkomelem natives who drew their attention to a mysterious lithic feature near their camp.
“At the bad rock,” Fraser wrote in his journal, “a little distance above the village, where the rapids terminate, the natives informed us that white people like us came there from below; and they shewed us indented marks which the white people made upon the rocks, but which, by the bye, seemed to us to be natural marks.”
To the imaginative reader searching for evidence of an ancient Chinese presence on Canada’s West Coast, this anecdote might conjure up images of pale-skinned Han Chinese ascending the Fraser River in the distant past – perhaps members of Zhou Man’s exploratory expedition fresh from interring ambassadorial gifts of imperial porcelain in the hidden tunnel they excavated beneath Vancouver Island, or Buddhist monks led by Hui Shen in search of the hairy inland Amazons of Fusang. Eager to leave an immortal testament to their visit, these travellers inscribed an epigraph on a prominent stone. This peculiar ceremony would endure in the cultural memory of the native observers, compelling them to dub the scene of the incident “bad rock”. After years of natural erosion, the faded Hanzi characters left by the Chinese visitors, unintelligible to Westerners, may have seemed to Fraser and his voyageurs to be nothing more than natural grooves carved by the elements.
Mysterious Death on the Bedwell River
Our next Chinese-Canadian mystery brings us back to Vancouver Island, to the aftermath of the Leechtown Gold Rush.
While prospectors were flocking to the new diggings on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, whose members had discovered the gold on Leech River, prepared for another season of exploration on the island. According to historian Lindsay Elms in his 1996 book Beyond Nootka, Dr. Robert Brown was forced to relinquish his position as leader of the operation in 1865 on account of a contract he had made back in 1863 with the British Columbia Botanical Association of Edinburgh, for which he ostensibly still worked as a seed collector. Brown recommended that an educated member of his party, a former Royal Engineer named John Buttle, lead the 1865 expedition, and his proposal was adopted.
That summer, Buttle and company made a thorough exploration of the various arms of Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, with the goal of eventually making an overland journey to Nimpish Lake on the island’s northern tip. One of the western waterways they investigated was the Bedwell River, known at the time as the Bear River, which empties into Bedwell Sound. Upon reaching a fork in the river, Buttle divided his company in two, personally leading one party up a tributary known today as the Ursus River, and delegating his subordinate, a seasoned prospector named Magin Hancock, with taking the other party up the Bear River proper. Buttle ended up climbing a mountain from which he sighted a large secluded lake that would eventually be named in his honour. Hancock and his party, on the other hand, discovered what they claimed to be paying quantities of alluvial gold in the Bear River.
Buttle included this provocative information in a letter to Sir William Young, the Colonial Secretary of British Columbia, which was published in the August 11th, 1865 issue of the Victoria British Colonist. “It is Mr. Hancock’s and Forgie’s opinion,” he wrote, Thomas Forgie being another veteran of the Royal Engineer who served in the expedition, “that there are profitable and payable diggings on the river and its vicinity to employ several hundred miners. There are a number of dry gulches and creeks coming into the river which, if prospected, would pay… I should wish to be understood by the public that if they intend to come here to mine to come prepared, at least, with more than a pick, pan and shovel, for I think by the men’s report there is likely to be extensive diggings to be met with.”
Spurred by news of this new strike, Leechtown veterans who had returned to Victoria purchased fresh outfits and headed up the island’s western coast by steamer and canoe to the Bear River. To their dismay, they discovered that the rich diggings promised by the press were far less lucrative than Buttle had advertised. Dismissing the explorer’s report as a “pack of lies,” most of the prospectors returned to Victoria after about a week of fruitless panning. As an article in the August 23rd, 1865 issue of the Victoria Daily Chronicle put it, “Some two hundred men have rushed to the Bear River – or more properly, the bare river diggings – with tools and provisions, only to find themselves duped. They have returned, after spending their time and money to the extent, in the aggregate, of about five thousand dollars, having undergone hardships and privations in reaching a most difficult and inhospitable part of the Island. They were poor when they started and are much poorer now – for on reaching the place indicated as a gold field they found that the report of the place was quite untrue, and were compelled to abandon their stores and tools and return to the city.”
For twenty-two years, the valley of the Bear River – later renamed the Bedwell River – lay wild and desolate, the nearest human settlement being a Clayoquot Nootka village that stood at its mouth. In the summer of 1887, however, rumour reached Victoria that a band of Chinese prospectors were operating placer mines on the river.
According to historian Walter Guppy in an article for Victoria’s Times Colonist, one Mr. Cameron – perhaps Vancouver Island’s former chief justice David Cameron – was sent to investigate this report. He discovered about fifty Chinese miners erecting dams, sluice boxes, and water wheels on a boulder strewn section of riverbank about twelve miles from the Bedwell’s mouth. They gave Cameron the impression that they were “trying to keep a good thing to themselves.”
A brief reference to this secretive operation was made in the 1899 Annual Report of the Minister of Mines for British Columbia, in a section on Vancouver Island developments written by provincial assayer Herbert Carmichael. This passage contains a cryptic sentence alluding to a terrible fate that befell one of the “Celestials,” as Chinese immigrants were sometimes called, which prompted his fellow countrymen to abandon their enterprise.
“In the early ‘60s,” Carmichael wrote, “Bear River had a placer gold excitement, and about 12 years ago some 15 Chinamen were at work on the upper reaches of the river, washing for gold; these, however, suddenly left in a body, having been driven away, it is said, by superstitious fears engendered by the sudden death of one of their number. The workings of these earlier miners are still visible, and it is reported that they found considerable gold, but that the numerous large boulders prevented the work being profitable.”
No mention is made of the manner of the prospector’s death, nor of his companions’ notions as to the nature of the evil force that caused it. A possible clue to the miner’s fate appears in the writings of N.L. “Bill” Barlee, a historian, high school teacher, and politician who searched for a certain lost gold mine in southern British Columbia in the mid-20th Century. In an article for the 1974 issue of Canada West, segments of which were republished in Garnet Basque’s 1988 book Lost Bonanzas of Western Canada, Barlee described coming across the remains of an abandoned placer mine on Skeff Creek, BC, in the Kootenay Boundary Country just north of the U.S. border. He identified the workings as Chinese on account of the careful precision with which nearby tailing rocks had been stacked, and was puzzled when he found more evidence indicating that the prospectors had abruptly deserted the site before they had finished working it, knowing that Sinitic miners were famous for flogging their claims until the last fleck of gold dust had been extracted from the soil. “Barlee knew that the Chinese traditionally abandoned any creek where one of their countrymen had been killed, usually within hours,” Basque wrote, paraphrasing Barlee. Eyeing a series of massive boulders which lined the creekbank, Barlee theorized that one of the Chinese had perished while looking for gold beneath one of the rocks. “Undercutting and propping boulders to get at the gold underneath them is one of the most dangerous jobs in mining,” he wrote, “and although the Chinese were experts at it, they too occasionally made mistakes.” Perhaps one of the Chinese on the Bedwell River had perished while performing a similarly hazardous operation, prompting his fellows to leave the area to escape the bad luck which they suspected had caused the accident. Or perhaps there is a more sinister reason for the Chinese departure from the upper Bedwell, a mountainous region long shunned by the island’s natives for fear of the massache ikta, or “bad thing,” which was said to haunt the forest there.
The Abandoned Logging Camp on Greenway Sound
It might not be out of place here to insert another historical anecdote brought to my attention by a viewer named Karl Schmid. In their 2003 book Full Moon Flood Tide, woodsman Bill Proctor and artist Yvonne Maximchuk included a story set in the Queen Charlotte Archipelago, a desolate cluster of wooded islands situated between the northern shores of Vancouver Island and the British Columbian mainland. More specifically, the story takes place in the remote ghost town of Greenway Sound, on the northern shores of Broughton Island.
In the 1930s, Greenway Sound was home to a Chinese logging camp – the last remnant of a quartet of similar operations that had been active in the area since about 1918, three of which had since shut down. Here, a crew of between thirty to fifty Chinese-Canadian lumberjacks felled and sawed red cedar trees into shingle bolts – 1-foot cubes of cedar wood which would be transported to a shingle mill for conversion into roof shingles.
“One night,” the authors wrote, “the men and their families packed up their belongings, shot the horses, got in their boats and took off. No one ever knew why they left – it is a mystery to this day. But over the years there have been many reports of a very odd event. If you are in the sound just above Carter Pass on a bright moonlit night, you might see the huge creature that is reported to have come to the surface of the sea and roared like a lion. Perhaps the creature was the cause of their departure or it may have been simply the tedium and harsh conditions of their existence in this lonely place.”
Construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway
In 1867, two years after the Bedwell River Gold Rush, British colonies in the eastern half of the continent united into a single federation called the Dominion of Canada, which was divided at that time of the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Four years later, the Colony of British Columbia, hitherto a domain of the British Crown, agreed to join Canadian Confederation on the condition that a transcontinental railroad be constructed through the vast territory that lay between it and the eastern provinces.
From 1880-1885, thousands of labourers from the Chinese province of Guangdong were shipped to British Columbia to labour on the westernmost stretch of the promised thoroughfare, the Canadian Pacific Railway, laying ties and blasting tunnels through the treacherous Fraser Canyon for a dollar a day. Although they earned only two-thirds of what their white counterparts made, their meagre salaries were a significant improvement upon the paltry wages that could be got in Canton. These coolies, as they were called at the time, performed some of the most dangerous work on the railroad, and were frequently killed by blast debris, rockslides, boating accidents, and long plunges over the steep cliffs that line the Fraser Canyon. Illness, malnutrition, and frigid temperatures also took their tolls. By the time the railway was completed in 1885, Onderdonk estimated that at least six hundred of his Chinese labourers had perished during its construction, amounting to four deaths per every mile of track laid by the western section gangs.
Most of Onderdonk’s navvies had left their homes in China with dreams of securing financial freedom in Canada. Few achieved their goals. The costs of their initial journeys from Hong Kong to Victoria, the fish and rice on which they subsisted, the clothes they were obliged to purchase, and the accommodation fees they were required to pay were all deducted from their wages. By the time they were discharged by the CPR, many did not have enough money to buy a steamboat ticket back home. Left with no alternative, they resigned themselves to a life in Canada. Some of them settled in the coastal towns of Port Moody and New Westminster, many of them finding employment in salmon canneries. Others congregated in Victoria, joining the old gold rush veterans who had founded Canada’s first Chinatown on the northeastern side of the provincial capital. By 1885, Victoria’s Chinatown already had a sordid reputation, being a haven for brothels, opium dens, and gambling houses.
The Ghost of Chow Ah Yung
In the summer of 1889, Victoria’s Chinatown became the scene of what a contemporary newspaper described as “one of the most deliberate, atrocious, and diabolical murders ever recorded in the annals of British Columbia…” On the evening of Sunday, May 12th, at about 11:00, Officer Lindsay of the Victoria Police department was on the Chinatown beat when the urban silence was rent by the panicked shrieks of a woman. The officer followed the wails to a brothel owned by a Chinaman named Pei Zehong, where he found a prostitute named Ah Sam in a state of terror. The woman gestured to the floor of a first-story room, where Lindsay discovered the bloody corpse of a beautiful 15-year-old girl named Yao Kum whose neck had been nearly severed. The body of the deceased rested directly beneath an open window, on the other side of which lay a pool of blood.
Officer Lindsey was familiar with the victim, whom he had caught many a night with her head out the window, advertising her illicit services to white passersby. Like other residents of that house of ill repute, Yao Kum had been sold by her parents as a young girl in China and shipped to the New World, where she was forced, as one newspaper article put it, “to be the slave of the vilest of human passions.”
Ah Sam, the woman who had alerted the policeman to the scene of the crime, apparently served as a sort of madam in conjunction with brothel-keeper Pei Zehong. She claimed that Yao Kum had been the romantic interest of a young man named Chow Ah Yung (called, in other accounts, Chan Ah Hong, Ah Herm, Ah Heung, and Ah Chung), who lived on the third floor of the house next door, and who worked as a bedmaker in the nearby American Hotel for a wage of $15/month. On the evening of the murder, Chow had asked Ah Sam’s permission to marry Yao, but the older lady-of-the-night declined his proposal on account of the young man’s poor financial prospects. Yao apparently approved of her madam’s decision and told Chow Ah Yung to be on his way.
Chow took this rejection as proof of a rumour circulating around Chinatown which held that another suitor, named Ma Kei, had won the fair heart of the object of his affection. Local gossip had it that Yao had asked Ma to procure some poison for her so that she might kill Ah Sam, who had declined his marriage proposal on her ward’s behalf, just as she had done Chow’s. The scorned supplicant openly accused Yao of concocting this alleged conspiracy. In response, the indignant girl denied that there was anything between her and Ma Kei, and told Chow that if he did not believe her, he ought to bring Ma to the brothel so that she could disprove the allegation to his face.
According to Ah Sam, who claimed to have witnessed the events of that night, Chow Ah Yung returned to the house at around 9:00, accompanied by Ma Kei and another man named Si To Fat. An argument ensued, in which Yao Kum, standing at her customary spot by the first-floor window, exchanged heated words with the three men. Finally, with a warning that he would cut her head off if she persisted with her insolence, Chow stalked off into the darkness, bringing his companions with him.
Later that night, Ah Sam heard a knock at the door and asked Yao Kum to open the window to see who it was. The girl did as requested and was seized by the hair by Ma Kei, who pulled her partway through the wicket. Ah Sam then caught a glimpse of Chow Ah Yung brandishing a long curved fish-cutting knife, which he had doubtless retrieved from his home next door. Chow delivered three savage chops to the side of the girl’s neck, nearly beheading her and killing her instantly. The deed done, the two murders vanished into the night, leaving a distraught Ah Sam to draw the dead girl back inside the house.
Early the following morning, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Chow Ah Yung, who did not appear for his shift at the American Hotel, and had apparently not slept in his room. Two days after the murder, at about 5:30 in the evening, William Burnes, son of Chow’s employer Thomas Burnes, spotted the suspect descending the stairs to the cellar of another of his father’s establishments, Burnes House, a luxury inn situated immediately behind the American Hotel. Upon further investigation, William found Chow Ah Yung quivering in a coal bin, his sleeves and stockings spattered with dried blood. Tasking his brother, Thomas Jr., with guarding the fugitive, William alerted the authorities, and Chow was arrested.
In his ensuing trial, Chow Ah Yung readily confessed to committing the murder, but contradicted Ah Sam’s testimony by stating that he killed Yao Kum alone, without any accomplices. With the aid of an interpreter, he told the jury that he didn’t care whether they hanged him.
According to author John David Adams in his 2002 book Ghosts and Legends of Bastion Square, Chow Ah Yung, called “Ah Chung” in the piece, was sentenced to death, but hanged himself in his jail cell before he could be executed. Legend has it that ever since, Chow’s ghost has haunted the site of his old workplace, once the American Hotel near the corner of Victoria’s Yates Street and Commercial Alley, and now the Edwardian-style Pither & Leiser Building, built in 1900. The historic Burnes House which backed the American Hotel still stands today, and some say that the lingering spirit of the Chinese murderer clings to the ruddy bricks of that Victorian building as well.
According to author Shanon Sinn in his 2017 book The Haunting of Vancouver Island, Chow’s spirit is also said to manifest itself in Fan Tan Alley, a narrow corridor through Victoria’s historic Chinatown by which the murderer may have fled on the night of May 12th, 1889. “Local stories abound,” Sinn wrote, citing Season 3, Episode 3 of the Canadian TV series Creepy Canada, which first aired in the summer of 2006. “People hear footsteps behind them when no one is there,” he wrote. “At other times, an invisible force shoves them. Tour guides and writers have said that other people have also claimed to see a young Asian man covered in blood. There is a long knife in his hand. His face is twisted in agony. For a moment he is there, then he flees, fading as quickly as he has appeared.”
The Chinese Head Tax
To many British Columbians at the time, the brutal murder of Yao Kum was simply an affirmation of what they had long maintained – that Chinese beliefs and values were so foreign to those held by white Canadians that the Celestials who had streamed into the country to labour in the goldfields and on the railway would never be able to assimilate into Canadian society. Thus, many asserted, Canada should not accept any more Chinese immigrants into the country, and the Chinese who had already settled in Canada should be denied the right to vote. Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, had articulated this sentiment in a parliamentary debate in the House of Commons on May 4th, 1885, declaring, “Of course we ought to exclude them, because if they came in great numbers and settled on the Pacific coast they might control the vote of the whole Province, and they would send Chinese representatives to sit here, who would represent Chinese eccentricities, Chinese immorality, Asiatic principles altogether opposite to our wishes… If they were allowed in British Columbia, they would swarm over there in large numbers, and we would have an Asiatic population, alien in spirit, alien in feeling, alien in everything, and after they attained formidable proportions in their numbers, you could not keep them out.”
In an attempt to discourage Chinese immigration, Canadian Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act in the summer of 1885, which placed a head tax of $50 on all Chinese immigrants who entered the country – a fee which was increased to $500 in 1903. In spite of this obstacle, Celestials continued to trickle into the Great White North throughout the latter decades of the 19th Century and the early decades of the next, finding employment in existing establishments, or opening up their own restaurants, laundries, and groceries. Chinese immigration was halted completely in 1923 with the passing of what is known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented the Chinese from immigrating to Canada entirely. This piece of legislation would remain in place until its repeal in 1947.
The Ghost of the Chilliwack Museum
At least a few of the Chinese immigrants who came to Canada in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries are said to still linger in spirit at the sites of their old British Columbian haunts. One such locale is the Chilliwack Museum in the city of Chilliwack, British Columbia, between the Fraser Canyon and Vancouver, which once functioned as the community’s town hall.
One night back in 1928, so the story goes, a local man named Wilfred Garner was arrested for drunkenness and locked up for the night in a small cell in the town hall basement. As Garner drifted into a stupor, he was joined in captivity by a Chinese immigrant, incarcerated for possession of opium. When the two inmates were left alone, the despairing Chinaman slipped the trouser belt off his sleeping cellmate and used it to strangle himself to death.
Years later, Garner’s cousin, Samuel Roy Cromarty, was hired as the custodian of the old town hall. Many a lonely night, while he mopped or swept the halls of the historic building, the doors of which he had carefully locked, Cromarty heard inexplicable sounds, like footsteps pacing the floor above him, and the openings and closings of doors. Whenever he investigated these commotions, the janitor confirmed what he already knew – that he was the only person in the building.
Cromarty eventually came to believe that the old town hall was haunted, and suspected that its ghostly inhabitant was the spirit of the unfortunate immigrant with whom his cousin had once shared a cell.
“I still think my little Chinaman is here,” he said in an interview for the Chilliwack Historical Archives, his testimony appearing in Jo-Anne Christensen’s 1996 book Ghost Stories of British Columbia. “At least that’s my opinion, and I’m gonna stay with it.”
Ghost of the Chinese Hitchhiker
Another strange story which Christensen included in her book takes place in southern Vancouver Island, in a district between Victoria and the municipality of Sooke known as China Flats. Local legend has it that the area was named for a Chinese couple who farmed there for decades in the first half of the 20th Century.
One night in the early 1940s, the farmer’s wife fell gravely ill. The farmer knew that his wife would die without the assistance of a doctor, but since he didn’t own a vehicle, he headed up the road on foot, hoping that a passing motorist might take him into town.
There wasn’t much traffic at that time of night, and the few cars that passed through China Flats flew by the desperate farmer, their occupants either being unwilling to stop for him or unaware of his dire predicament. After several failed attempts to flag down a vehicle, the Chinaman stepped out from the darkness into the headlights of an oncoming truck, praying that this bold action would force the driver to pay him heed. The farmer was struck and died at the scene.
“This was a compound tragedy,” Christensen wrote. “When the police officers who investigated the accident went to the farmhouse to deliver the terrible news to the man’s wife, they found that she, also, had died, for want of medical attention.”
Ever since, motorists travelling through China Flats at night have experienced the strange sensation of being joined in their vehicle by an unseen presence desperate to attract their attention – a feeling so strong that some drivers have reported being too afraid to hazard a glance in the rearview mirror. Others have purportedly slammed on their brakes to avoid hitting the dark figure of an Asian man who left the shadows of the ditch to stride out in front of them. When they got out of their cars to investigate, they found themselves alone on the highway.
“Perhaps,” Christensen suggested, “her husband thinks she is still in need of a doctor, and is still trying frantically to find some help. Or perhaps he haunts the road as revenge against the motorists who refused to stop for him. Whatever the reason, many decades later, the Chinese Hitchhiker is still trying to catch a ride.”
The Ghostly Woman of Ashcroft
Another of British Columbia’s alleged Chinese spectres is the frightening phantom of a woman whose story appeared in Robert C. Belyk’s 1997 book Ghosts II: More True Stories from British Columbia.
The source for this tale is John and Janice Bradley, a couple from Vancouver who made a road trip to the city of Kamloops, BC, one evening in the spring of 1975, in order to visit John’s brother, Dave, and his wife, Judy. At that time, the convenient Coquihalla Highway had not yet been built, and the only road from Vancouver to Kamloops was the Trans-Canada Highway, which ran through the treacherous Fraser and Thompson Canyons, following the route of the old Cariboo Trail.
“Although there was a chill in the air,” Belyk wrote, “it was a beautiful night for a romantic moonlit drive. They reached Hope a little before midnight, and took the north fork along Highway 1 that follows the eastern edge of the Fraser Canyon. They had planned to stop for the night at the small town of Spences Bridge, beyond the end of the canyon, but in the few motels scattered along the highway, all the lights were out. John and Janice had little choice but to push on to the junction town of Cache Creek, where they were sure a motel room would be available.”
Sometime after 1:00 a.m., the couple approached the lonesome turnoff to Ashcroft, a desert town nestled in an arid bend in the Thompson River, where a handful of derelict shacks leaned drunkenly, apparently in an advanced state of decay. Suddenly, a diminutive form rose in the glare of their vehicle’s headlights. Standing on the side of the road was what appeared to be a short woman facing in the opposite direction whose straight black hair whispered of Asian descent. Her outfit was unusual, consisting of dark pants that terminated at her calves, a white blouse with puff sleeves, and a dark vest. Janice was struck by the fact that, despite the chill of the night, the strange figure was not wearing a coat.
The woman walked with an unusual gait, taking short, elegant steps with her elbows bent. Suspecting that her car might have broken down, Janice rolled down her window and asked John to slow down so that she could ask the woman if she needed help.
Upon being addressed, the woman turned her head in Janice’s direction, revealing a hideous countenance on a face as white as porcelain. Terrified, John stepped on the gas just as the figure vanished into thin air.
“The following day,” Belyk wrote, “Janice phoned the Ashcroft detachment of the R.C.M.P. to enquire if there had been an accident along that section of the highway. Nothing had been reported to the police. Still unsettled, she asked the clerk whether there were any Oriental families living in the area. No, came the reply, not for some time. Once, though, the woman said, there had been a number of Chinese people living on a few farms, but the old dwellings had long been abandoned and were falling down. They could still be seen beside the highway.”
Other Chinese Mysteries from Canada
British Columbia is not the only Canadian province endowed with strange stories associated with the Chinese-Canadian community. In Edmonton, Alberta, the apparition of a Chinese servant boy clad in a black silk uniform materializes from time to time in a stately old home a few blocks west of the downtown core. He seems to be especially active during garden parties, during which he can blend in with guests.
The lady’s washroom of the Bowman Arts Centre in Lethbridge, Alberta, is said to be haunted by the ghost of a young Chinese girl, thought to be a tragic remnant of the building’s former days as the Bowman School, in which abuse is said to have occurred.
In the early 20th Century, when anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant in Canada, and the federal head tax made immigration prohibitive, illegal Chinese immigrants and labourers fleeing discrimination are said to have taken refuge in the tunnels beneath Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Local legend says that this same underground labyrinth was later employed by Chicago gangster Al Capone as a bootlegging base during American Prohibition.
And a restaurant in the heart of Toronto, Ontario’s Chinatown, which initially served as a Chinese morgue, is said to be home to a host of malevolent spirits, purportedly drawn there by the building’s morbid past and particularly bad feng shui.
These mysteries surrounding the Chinese-Canadian community are more than mere myths and legends – they are windows into the history of a determined people who overcame natural and social obstacles as they wove themselves into the multicultural tapestry that is Canada. Their historic struggle is perhaps best articulated by historian Lily Chow, who seems to have done more to preserve the story of the Chinese in Canada than the whole of Canadian scholarship, in her 2000 book Chasing Their Dreams: “The strength of conviction and perseverance of the Chinese immigrants shines through the hardships they had to endure… Chinese people often say, ‘If you break open the silver we earn, you can see drops of blood [inside].”
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