Content Warning: This piece mentions suicidal thoughts and depression.
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PART I: UNITY
The world changes, but I do not. On either side of me, people paved paths they use to pass me, find me, leave me. They ride in mechanical vessels that whirr and purr in my ears, the ebb and flow of a distant shoreline I will never see.
August 2021
The spider stares back at me.
She is perched on a plank of wood above my head — a doorway. Her bulbous black body wriggles as she weaves a web. Then she jumps.
She swings back and forth before my face. We are eye level.
“You going in?”
I tear my gaze from hers.
“Yeah,” I whisper, but I don’t move. A cacophony of crickets calls from the long grass that surrounds Union Point Church like an emerald moat.
Dave and I aren’t that close. We became friends when I worked at Boston Pizza for a year and a half. Most of our memories smell like marinara sauce and grease. But I’d gotten stood up by some guy, and when I texted Dave to complain about it his response was simple:
“Wanna go to a haunted church instead?”
And I like simple things almost as much as I like haunted things, so I said yes.
There is a crunch of dry earth as Dave steps beside me.
Dave looks like lumberjack had a baby with a garden gnome. He has on a dark green flannel and heavy, steel-toed boots. His beard, which is neither red nor brown but somewhere in between, sticks out every which way like a dead dandelion. He is all witty remarks and easy grins. He is all comfort.
Dave brushes the spider aside like a curtain.
“After you,” he whispers back. There is no one else around — it’s just us, standing on a patch of land between two highways on the outskirts of southern Manitoba. There is no need to whisper, and yet we both are, perhaps as some kind of respect for the bodies that dwell in the graveyard behind the church we are about to enter.
“Come on,” says Dave.
I duck beneath his outstretched arm and step into darkness.
At a glance, Union Point Church is just that: a church. Plain and simple.
It’s made up of three sections: the double-door entrance, the sanctuary, and the graveyard. Travellers tend to squat inside for shelter from the wind, where there are 14 benches lined in rows of six and eight with an aisle between them. It’s made largely of wood — a sturdy fortification that is maintained by Scott Parker and his family.
It stands poised between two highways — you’ve probably seen it heading down Highway 75 to the American border.
It has a Gothic design — all pointed edges and narrow windows. A steepled bell tower with no bell reaches up to the sky like a pale hand.
Union Point Church burned down in a fire in 1939 and was rebuilt in 1940.
The graveyard behind it seems precariously placed, almost as though someone tossed a handful of stones at a patch of grass and decided to place the graves there. But these graves saved the church from being demolished in the late 1980s.
In the end, it is just a church.
But look a little closer. There is no vandalism. No spray-paint. Nothing. Even though it is, for the most part, abandoned.
Look a little closer, squint your eyes, and you’ll see the church for what it truly is:
An echo of the past.
I wasn’t always alone. I had friends. Three of them, in fact. They were called School, Hall, and Post Office. They are all dead. You tore them down to make way for your paved pathways. I am all that remains.
August 2021
A shaft of light pierces the gloom.
I hold onto my phone so tightly that my knuckles are bone white. I lift my phone higher, using it as a makeshift flashlight.
Fractions of the church appear. A bench. A chancel (the stage where musicians play, and pastors pray; the place where God is worshiped). Above it, two signs are hung. They are so white, they seem to glow, even in this oppressive dark.
They read:
THE LORD IS
OUR REFUGE
AND OUR
STRENGTH,
A VERY PRESENT
HELP
IN TROUBLE
O WORSHIP
THE LORD
IN
THE BEAUTY
OF
HOLINESS
“Are you scared?”
I shrug. “Not really.”
A half-truth. Though Dave and I are here because of rumours of ghosts, the church itself isn’t frightening — the silence is. The walls and insulation within them drown out all the sound from outside. As cars whizz past, they almost sound like waves on a beach. The quiet seems to amplify everything else. Our footsteps are cracks of thunder, our whispered voices are spoken into microphones.
There’s a table beside me, to the right of the door. I run a finger along the edge, creating a line in the fine layer of dust that covers it like a sheet. Then I notice the notebooks.
There must be at least 20 of them. They sit in two clear plastic bins, both of which are full.
I feel Dave come to stand beside me. He peers over my shoulder. “What are they?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him.
The notebooks range in size and colour. Some are small enough to fit in my pocket. Others are the kind I used to take notes in Grade 12 Biology.
I pick one up — a larger one. Green. I take a moment to flip through its pages.
“It’s a diary,” I say.
In the left-hand corner of each entry, a date is written.
My eyes settle on one entry, dated March 7, 2010.
“Today was started very poorly but the end turns out great. I am with the one I love. The love of my life, whom I will never leave. I plan on getting married to her here in this church.
Forever hers,
Johnny.”
And then, just below it, there is another entry from the same year, 23 days later.
“I just stepped in with my friend to see this gorgeous church one more time before my wedding. I plan on getting married here on Saturday, April 10, to the love of my life, Johnny (see above).
I love you sweetie!
P.S. We’re practicing walking down the aisle with my song right now :). “
I look up, and I see a ghost. Of course, she’s not a ghost. She is merely a memory — an echo of a past I’ve never seen.
The woman is rosy-cheeked from the cold and from her heart that thrums with anticipation. She is not in a wedding dress — not yet. She’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Her hands are clasped together in front of her chest, holding a phantom bouquet. A melody rings out through the church.
I blink.
Another car whizzes past, but quickly the sound gets loud again, rushing through the floorboards beneath my feet like blood in my ears.
Dave asks, “What’s that?”
It gets closer, closer, and then, it stops.
In an instant, a blinding light illuminates the church. I hold up a hand to shield my eyes.
“Is someone here?” I ask.
Dave shrugs. We peak our heads out of the doorway. A black truck has pulled up beside Dave’s red one.
“Now, I’m scared,” I say.
“It’s fine,” Dave says. “Don’t worry.”
The truck’s headlights dim. Dave steps forward, and though I hesitate, I eventually follow.
The windows are blackened, so we can’t see anyone inside.
I’m definitely scared now.
Dave lifts a hand to wave. I step closer to him. My heavy breaths unfurl into the air like ink into water — it’s gotten colder since we’ve been inside. Frost collects on the bladed edges of the long grass. The crickets have gone quiet.
I hold my breath as the window rolls down. A voice emerges.
I’ve almost died twice. One time, I did. I remember the fire licking at my fingertips — the pain was white-hot. I creaked and I cracked and I turned to ash. I was reborn a year later.
“Hey, y’all ghost hunting?”
Almost instantly, the tension goes out from my shoulders. I am a blow-up toy stuck by a pin.
Dave’s laugh — a bit shaky with an undertone of relief — tells me he feels the same.
“Yeah, man. Shit, you scared us.”
“Sorry about that,” says the man in the truck. He steps out. He’s tall and lanky, kind of like a scarecrow. His voice has the easy drawl of someone who grew up in the South. “I’ve driven past here a bunch of times and I’ve always wanted to go in but I never have.”
Dave steps toward him with his hand out. “I’m Dave.”
The man takes it. “I’m Brandon.”
“And this is Margaret,” Dave says, gesturing to me over his shoulder.
“Hey.”
Brandon gives me a nod. “Hey. Can I join y’all? I have a few EMF readers in my trunk.”
EMFs read electromagnetic field levels. Some people think you can measure if a ghost is near you because they’ll emit some form of energy. I don’t know if I believe it, but Brandon certainly does — he has three of them at the ready.
Dave sends me a questioning look. I shrug. He turns back to Brandon.
“Sure,” he says.
We didn’t find any evidence of ghosts at Union Point Church, but we did find connection with its previous visitors.
Brandon, Dave and I read the journals and the names on the gravestones, until the cold and our exhaustion tugged us home.
As we part ways, Brandon exchanges phone numbers with Dave and me.
“Let me know if y’all wanna go ghost hunting some time,” he says. Then he gets in his truck and vanishes into the night.
My chest is tight as Dave and I drive home, and I don’t know why. Looking back at this night now, perhaps it was some subconscious foreboding of the months ahead — months that would become tarnished by fear and isolation.
I didn’t know what was about to happen. All I knew was I had found a connection, and it felt good; it was a good thing, to not be alone for a little while, even though the little while didn’t last.
PART II: SOLITARY
People come and go. They ebb and they flow. They never stay for long, but they are never gone long either. They come fresh-faced. They return grey and wrinkled. But they’re never really gone, and I am never truly alone, for they leave echoes of themselves on paper and in my heart.
January 2022
The world is blanketed in a thick layer of snow. It’s cold — a bitter cold that seeps beneath my skin as Dad and I half-walk, half-jog to the little white church. I’m not too keen on freezing my ass off in this frigid weather, but Dad said I needed to get out of the house, so here we are.
We reach the door. The handle gives beneath my hand.
“It’s always just unlocked?” Dad asks.
“Yeah,” I say as I step inside. “I guess so people don’t break a window to get in.”
As I enter Union Point Church for the third time, I feel decidedly unholy. I’m not really one for religion. I used to attend services with my mom and dad back when they were still together. We would sit on hard wooden benches for two hours every Sunday, submerged in the smell that all churches seem to omit: coffee-breath, Styrofoam, and mould. But my parents split, and so did my relationship with God.
The sign that once hung above the stage lays broken on its back. It looks, I think, like a corpse. I imagine someone ripped it down and broke it over a knee. There is a perfect line drawn through the word “strength”.
The fracture is fitting.
I don’t have any semblance of strength left after these last few months, since I visited the church for the first time. Despite the cold, our world is on fire.
My eyes slip closed.
I can feel the flames. They nip at my toes and lick at my fingertips. They crawl up the walls of the little church and gnaw at the wood. I breathe in through my nose and taste ash on my tongue. I breathe out smoke.
A week earlier, I’d been on calls with Manitoba crisis lines searching for a way to live. I don’t want to die, but this doesn’t feel like living; this in-between.
I’d call it limbo, but again, I’m not one for religion.
I told my mom about the calls, and she’d been so worried she phoned my dad (if you have divorced parents that don’t get along, you know this means she was really fucking worried).
“I think you used up all your joy when you were a kid,” she told me. “I’m sorry.”
That’s the thing about my mom. She’s always apologizing for things she shouldn’t apologize for; she’s always sorry for what she can’t control.
“Why are you sorry?” I remember asking.
I was in one of my spells of sadness. One of the worst things about depression is it begins brief but can quickly swallow you up. When I was younger, there seemed to be lapses of my life when time didn’t exist. Didn’t pass. Didn’t move. Or it moved too quickly — I’d blink, and days were gone. I got older, time passed slower, my heart turned sadder, and then it wasn’t days missing but weeks. Months.
“I brought you into the world, and you’re miserable. So, I’m sorry.” It wasn’t condescending, the way she said it; it was a fact, and we both knew it.
But I’m not depressed now — this feels at the same time bigger and smaller than that. It’s deeper, this hopelessness.
“Why do you like this place so much?”
I open my eyes.
Dad is gazing up at the stained-glass window near the door.
His shoulders are up to his ears — it seems even colder inside the church than outside of it. My dad is all grey. His hair, his pants, his gloves. This suits him, I think, because he often tries to play the medium in family disputes — or sometimes in political ones.
I remember the last time I was here, back in August, there was a stillness to the church that I liked. A quiet. A pause. But the stillness has turned to numbness. Life has turned to death. Whatever I found here before is lost.
But I at least want to give my dad an answer, so I say, “The journals, I guess.”
And because my dad always wants to understand the things he doesn’t (like my low days), he walks over to the little table and snatches up one of the journals.
He hums as he reads, and then he passes the book to me.
The date reads Oct. 7, 2011.
“I used to stop here for a little solitude when I would come home from visiting mom and dad. I would write in the book and give thanks, particularly for parents which I now do not have. Unfortunately someone decided to “take” the book. Sad. On my way home now from visiting my sister and brother. Lovely visit.
Pat.“
And that, I think, is why I like this little church so much.
It gives space to loneliness. It allows it to exist, to breathe, to be felt. And perhaps we leave it feeling a little less alone.
“I’m cold,” I tell Dad. “Let’s go home.”
The world changes, but I do not. People change, but I do not. I’ve burned. I’ve drowned. I’ve been torn in two. But I stay, and I wait, for the time I will see you.
I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I do believe people can be haunted.
Haunted by the living and the dead. The things we’ve said and things we haven’t.
Our hauntings can divide us. Or, they can connect us.
My friendship with Dave was solidified at the supposedly haunted church. I met Brandon — who I never would have met otherwise — at the supposedly haunted church. I finally got out of the house, after weeks spent rotting in my bedroom, because of the supposedly haunted church.
I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but if I did, my belief would be something like this:
Ghosts, or spirits, or whatever you want to call them, are traces of people and places and events that have happened or will happen, and we are merely experiencing them now at our point in time.
They are ripples of the past and the future, and they can miraculously connect us to both.
They are echoes.