When They Call, You Must Answer

Listen to this story:

You don’t have to worry.

These were the words the woman had uttered to Gary at the funeral. She’d slipped them in casually between conversations over crumbly dainties and crustless sandwiches, and they’d stirred Gary so deeply that now, over a decade later, he still could not shake the feeling that she’d somehow read his mind.

You don’t have prostate cancer.

It was this part, the second part, that had particularly taken Gary aback. Not only was it an odd introduction — perhaps the strangest follow-up to an opening line he’d heard — but the statement’s lack of randomness was disturbing. Gary had, in fact, been worried about prostate cancer. His father had been recently diagnosed; Gary feared he might have it too.

Relieved, but confused, he didn’t know how to respond. The woman jumped in to fill the silence. She was a medium, she explained — more attuned to quiet frequencies, which dance between our fingers but rarely feel our grasp. She had sensed his anxieties, but knew he didn’t need to worry. I wonder if at that point she had also sensed Gary’s ability. Can you see in others, what you know to be true in yourself? If she had sensed something, she didn’t say. 

Now, a year later and 500 kilometers north of the funeral, at the anniversary party of one of Gary’s friends in a quiet beach town, the Medium appeared as abruptly as she had before. 

I need to see you, now.

Gary and his wife Debbie were walking down to the shoreline party on Victoria Beach when she’d said it. The Medium insisted that Gary book an appointment with her. She needed to help him with something, needed to tell him what she saw. And, I suppose, she suspected Gary might have something to say in return. 

The morning after his appointment, Gary felt lighter. 

---

I’m sitting in a bright suburban living room in St. Vital, the television humming quietly as I set up my computer and notebook. Gary returns from the kitchen carrying a tray with two red mugs of coffee. 

Gary settles in the chair nearest to me, wearing a plum coloured V-neck t-shirt, an old pair of basketball shorts, and slides. Gary likes staying at home. He spends most of his days milling about or with his family. Between his sons Tom and Erik, he has six grandkids. Debbie, also retired, tends to spend her days out socializing with friends.

I’ve been meeting with Gary this way — over a cup of coffee, or an untouched platter of cookies — for the past few months. We chat about his childhood, his grandchildren, his heart attack, and his ability. Today’s the first time he’s talked about it openly. It’s the first time he’s admitted candidly that he can see spirits. To be clear, I still don’t know exactly what I should call them. When I started meeting with Gary, I’d assumed ghosts. But “ghost,” Gary explained, is a complicated word. To him, ghosts have a certain connotation — a religious one, a marker that denotes them as a force of evil or some cheap trick. “Ghost” holds a meaning that doesn’t match what Gary sees.

---

---

I’m going to call what Gary sees spirits. It’s not perfect either, but it’s more representative of how Gary describes his visions. He sees the spirits as energy — energy that doesn’t know where to go. Energy that latches onto what it recognizes, like a familiar face in a crowded square, calling out: I know you. I see you. Can you help me?

But, as desperately as he’s tried, Gary can’t seem to help them. In fact, he’s spent the last six decades wishing they’d disappear.

---

I recently read a brilliant memoir titled Crooked Teeth, which made a request of readers. In the opening chapter, it asks them to leave their assumptions behind and enter the story with an open heart. I make the same request of you now. Enter this piece with an open heart, if not an open mind. I understand that ghost stories seem implausible, over sensationalized, unreliable. We associate them with sleepovers and faces lit up by flashlights. Many of us have learned to leave them out of serious conversation. 

But the culture is shifting. According to an Ipsos poll, nearly half of Canadians (46 per cent) believe in ghosts or supernatural beings. A 2022 article published by Forbes says that supernatural experiences are becoming the norm, not the exception, and those skeptical of the paranormal are becoming increasingly open. I’m not surprised by this — while there has always been a strong undercurrent of interest in the supernatural throughout history, it has largely been pushed aside by a culture centred around science, technology, and rationality. At the same time, many of the systems we’ve been trained to rely on have been eroding. The Church is no longer the ruling force of Western society, the way it once was. People are losing faith in systems and institutions that have established the status quo, and in turn, attitudes are shifting and people are more open.

But this story isn’t really about ghosts; this story is about Gary, a man who loves fishing and spent weekday nights playing hockey, who married his teenage love and raised two children, who babysits his six grandkids and survived five clogged arteries in his heart. It’s about a man who has been seeing spirits for over sixty years, between coffees and birthdays and weddings and playdates, without ever having wanted to. Without ever having asked to. It’s about a person whose experiences would be easy to write off.

When he’s out during the day, he doesn’t turn his gaze when something catches the corner of his eye. He didn’t grow up believing in ghosts, or mediums, or Ouija boards. He doesn’t even have any way to prove things to himself. But how can you reject your own reality?

What do you do when something you never asked for keeps turning up? 

---

Before

Gary’s siblings — his two brothers and four sisters — all still live in Manitoba. They grew up in a large, two storey house on Ashburn Street in Winnipeg’s West End. It’s back in this childhood bedroom that Gary first remembers seeing things that his siblings couldn’t: a man standing in his room, reaching down to take his sister. 

Kids see things in the dark. They see monsters under the bed, and Gary had seen a man in the middle of the night. He didn’t think much of it, and of course, there were many ways to explain it: it was a night terror, a trick of a child’s imagination. But the tricks didn’t go away. 

---

---

For years, in the murky window between waking and sleeping, Gary would slowly open his eyes and be met with a face, inches from his own, peering into his eyes. Wordless. The faces were suspended in front of him, warped with the proximity of a fish-eye lens and stoic like a soldier. A floating torso, leaning in as if to tell a secret. They weren’t in black and white, but not vivid colour either. They were pastels, the colour drained but still peeking out. It’s unclear how long these moments lasted; time, in these flashes, was not linear. Seconds may have felt like minutes, minutes like glimpses. Even as he recounts the stories to me, after having seen thousands, Gary can’t be sure how long these moments are. “Time is hard to tell, because when it starts, you’re still in denial.” The flashes would end when Gary broke his gaze, and he’d be left staring at the empty space ahead.

As Gary grew older, he learned not to talk about his nighttime visitors. “For the longest time, between being a kid having nightmares, to after my heart surgery, I basically tried to forget about it, like it was nothing,” Gary told me. “I kept that to myself.” At the time, Gary had no idea what was going on, and didn’t have the words to articulate it. So he ignored it. But ignoring things didn’t stop them from happening. The faces kept returning.

They were always different — never the same person twice. Perhaps it was an elderly man, in a tweed jacket with a soft smile. Other times a young woman, with gold hoops and dark lipstick. It could be a young boy, with hazel eyes and soft freckles. Once on a trip to Arizona it had been a pair of small white dogs, whose barks had been so shrill that Gary couldn’t sleep. Thousands of spirits have visited Gary during the night and stared at him. They never explained their presence. So, Gary started asking. 

He would call out to them: “Why are you here?” He wanted to understand what they wanted, in hopes they’d leave if he gave it to them. It’s not that they seemed evil or malevolent — in fact, most of them wore a soft smile. But many of the spirits looked as if they were trying to say something, trying to communicate with Gary. Yet, their pleas were silent.

“Is it a language I can’t hear?” Gary wondered in our first interview. “There’s details — mouths, and facial expressions, and eye movements… you lock eyes with them, like you would for a personal conversation, but there’s nothing.” Some nights he’d be so frustrated he’d tell the spirits to fuck off, never come back. Other times, his wife Debbie would wake up to the sight of him shooing something away, yelling at an empty room. “It scared the hell out of me,” Debbie said, recalling one night she woke up to Gary screaming at the doorway. But it was no use. “After I made an effort, and there’s still nothing, now comes the pissed off part,” Gary told me. “If you’re going to bug me and not communicate with me, just go away. What’s the point?” 

Thousands of visitors have come and interrupted his sleep, with no explanation. If they’re going to come, at least come with a message. Fed up with their silence, Gary left a piece of paper and a pen on his bedside table. No one ever wrote.

---

Gary only cried once during our interviews. It happened the first day we sat down together, a warm day in early October when the sun still felt warm on my skin. 

After they had crossed paths for a second time, on the staircase to the beach, Gary followed the Medium’s advice: he booked an appointment with her. On the day he showed up to her house, he was skeptical: mediums were chronic bullshitters, Gary thought, experienced in providing vague generalities and capitalizing off naivety. Yet, part of him still didn’t understand how she could’ve known about his father’s prostate cancer. As he walked down the stairs to her basement, Gary devised a plan. “I was going to trick her,” he chuckled. Gary decided he wouldn’t feed into anything she said. He’d remain guarded and stoic, silent. He wouldn’t bait her, just sit back and let her talk.

While getting her things in order, the Medium explained her process to Gary: she had the power to open a door — to what, Gary wasn’t sure — and let people stick their heads in to send a message. She couldn’t control who came, but she would be able to tell Gary who they were and what they wanted to say. Still skeptical, Gary watched the Medium as she sat across from him. Her face slowly melted into a different state — her body was there but her mind seemed to have drifted elsewhere. She gazed past him, over his shoulder, while her pupils quivered rapidly from left to right. She paused. Someone had come in to say hello. 

Duke. 

She spoke the name and Gary’s heart sank. It had been nearly five decades since he’d heard it, five decades since Gary’s friend Duke had left a lacrosse match in Peguis First Nation and never made it home. He was hit by a car and died on the asphalt. Gary sat in shock. She continued: Unnur and Llewellyn. Those were the names of Gary’s grandparents. “Where would you even pull that from?” Gary sat in silent disbelief. “Who is this person?” His skepticism began to melt away. Sure, she could’ve done research on him, but to pull out those names, which had such a pointed meaning to Gary, felt unlikely. “How much work is someone really going to do for 75 bucks?”

As the appointment went on, the Medium disclosed she hadn’t yet told Gary the reason she had so urgently prompted him to see her. There was something she had seen at both the funeral and the anniversary party that she needed to help free Gary of: an entity, mistakenly attached to him. She explained: it was the spirit of a young boy, who had died in Gary’s childhood garage. The spirit was mistakenly clinging to Gary, who he thought was his brother. “It matched my life story,” Gary confessed. She was able to tell the boy that Gary was not his brother, that he had the wrong person. “Whether it’s psychological or not, I instantly felt different.” Gary’s voice shook as he stepped away from the table we were sitting at. Recounting the memory, the relief of a weight lifted, he stood up from the table and began to cry. “I just need a minute.” He walked into his bedroom and shut the door.

The Medium was the only person Gary could relate to about the spirits. He felt validated for the first time in his life. Their time together had given Gary the only sense of familiarity about his ability that he’d ever felt. Someone knew what it was like to see another frequency. He left the appointment exhausted.

---

On a snowy December day in 2008, Gary’s heart gave out. Five arteries, packed with fat and debris, had succumbed to the pressure of a quick sidewalk shovel. It was slow and subtle, without a shooting pain. There was simply an uneasiness and a slight burn that made Gary drop the shovel, walk back inside and wash down the pain with an antacid and a beer. It wasn’t until the following Tuesday, four days later, that Gary went to his family doctor and told him, “I think I had a heart attack.” An enzyme test proved he was right.

A few weeks later, Gary’s chest pain returned. His doctor opted for a nitroglycerin spray, a vasodilator to open up the blood vessels leading to the heart. He was supposed to spray under his tongue, wait for symptoms to subside, and spray again if necessary, but Gary had confused the instructions and sprayed it multiple times in a matter of seconds. In the midst of a dizzying episode, Gary began hyperventilating and sweating. Minutes later, the ambulance arrived.

This time, it wasn’t cardiac arrest — just a panic attack paired with a case of angina. But hospital tests revealed that Gary’s arteries were packed full, nearly completely blocked: he needed a quintuple bypass. 

---

The room was dark when Gary awoke in his hospital bed, not from the time of day, but from the lack of sunlight. The basement room at St. Boniface Hospital was tiny, with barely any space to hold flowers. There was a medical chart pinned to the wall and a small plastic chair in the corner. 

Gary hadn’t yet opened his eyes but could feel his hand hooked to a plastic bag of liquid. It had been hours, perhaps days since a group of surgeons bypassed his arteries. A gentle whirring of machines obstructed chatter from the hallway, leaving Gary to eavesdrop on broken conversations about his condition.

When he opened his eyes and turned his gaze straight ahead, they were standing at the foot of his bed: two young women, dressed in long, silk kimonos the colour of fresh blood. Small petals of gold shimmered down the fabric, like paper leaves so light they could float away. Gary stared at the two women, who in turn, stared back at him. Their skin was smooth, beautiful, and their eyes twinkled softly in the dark. They couldn’t have been any taller than four foot five, standing just a head or two above the foot of the bed. Gentle curves guided their lips into soft smiles. You’re going to be okay, their faces seemed to say. Gary almost said something, but he stopped himself. He knew they’d say nothing in return.

---

After

A few weeks later, Gary was back home in Whyte Ridge on a mix of pills and bedrest. As he was recovering, in-and-out of consciousness, something strange started happening: crowds of people gathered at the foot of his bed. Old women, young men, people big and small, leaning in toward him. They were similar to the spirits Gary had seen throughout his life, but this time in bunches. Before his heart surgery, only one or two spirits would visit him per night. Now, there were twenty at a time, coming in droves as Gary slipped between waking and sleeping. He wondered if it was a side effect of the drugs he was taking, or a repercussion of his injury.

Gary was enrolled in a government-funded heart rehabilitation class at a fitness complex off of Waverley Street. A group of 12 patients who had undergone heart surgery gathered monthly to work on exercises to gain back strength and mobility. Part of the process allowed patients to bring up symptoms they were experiencing and talk them through with the group. Gary decided to ask about the crowds at the foot of his bed — he minimized the extent of things, but told the others he was seeing things, glimpses of people, in his room. To his surprise, a few other participants also cited having strange hallucinations — not to the same extent — but enough to comfort Gary into believing these visions were not his visitors.

The practitioners explained they were most likely experiencing latent memories. Allegedly, patients may take in sensory information during surgery (sounds, sights, smells), which is then stored in the brain but not processed until later. These memories can come up and manifest themselves as hallucinations as patients’ bodies heal. 

In my research, there was nothing I could find with the name of latent memories. However, in psychology, there is a debate on the topic of “repressed memories.” The topic is so controversial it’s sparked what’s known as the memory wars. Joelle Hanson-Baiden, BSc., writes that repressed memories (a notion conceived by psychoanalytic scholar Sigmund Freud) are memories that we push to our subconscious and avoid thinking about, typically due to trauma. These thoughts are blocked from recollection but eventually resurface. But memory researchers disagree. Hanson-Baiden explains researchers argue that “there is no scientific evidence that repressed memories exist, whereas clinicians claim the opposite.” 

This debate highlights the finicky nature of our brains. Our memories, and even our experiences, are completely unreliable — they are malleable, yet so deeply personal, that they are unable to be proven outside of ourselves. After research on repressed memory became mainstream, so did the rate of people reporting they had trauma they’d forgotten. Critics argued people had been persuaded, tricking themselves into believing they’d experienced certain traumas. But does a fabricated memory make it any less real?

Aside from the idea of repressed memories, it’s not uncommon to hallucinate after heart surgery. An article published by the British Heart Foundation writes that nearly 40 per cent of people have some type of hallucination after large, invasive surgeries. Perhaps Gary fell into this percentile.

But, as his condition began to improve and he started to leave the house, something changed: Gary began seeing spirits in broad daylight. He first noticed it at funerals and weddings. Something about a church seemed to attract his daytime visions. At one wedding, he noticed a group of little old ladies, sitting off to the side of the church. “Why are they over there,” Gary thought, “when the ceremony is over here? Is it just me? Or is it something else?” 

Other times, he’d catch something in the corner of his eye and turn to see someone. Perhaps he was in the mall, and he’d see a man in an old suit, standing still. Staring. He’d look away, and when his gaze returned, the man would be gone. Often, at house parties or even in his own home, Gary would see someone in a reflection. He could be sitting in his dining room, and glance at a painting. He’d see a person in the reflection of the glass — not just an abstraction, but a detailed face, clothing, eyes — imposed on another part of the room. But when he’d look away and look back, there would be nobody there.

Despite having nighttime visions for nearly his whole life, these daytime encounters shook Gary to his core. They were unfamiliar and more haunting than the rest; how could he see his visitors in moments of full lucidity? Although Gary was not opposed to the idea of an afterlife, it still seemed illogical — why would he, out of anyone, be able to see spirits? Gary had a Bachelor of Science from the University of Winnipeg, and many of his beliefs and worldviews were rooted in scientific discovery and the natural world. 

Perhaps the flickers, the moments when he catches something for an instant before they’re gone, are simply his eyes malfunctioning. But why would they malfunction so often, with such a high degree of detail?

The night visions could be explained by other things, too. Gary’s visions between waking and sleeping are similar to the way many people describe their experiences with sleep paralysis. An article from Harvard Health Publishing explains that when you abruptly wake up during REM sleep, dream-like imagery may continue even if you’re awake. This often manifests itself as hallucinations, frequently taking the form of a person or an intruder in your bedroom. Perhaps these visions of people, even the crowds at the foot of his bed, are just episodes of sleep paralysis. Almost eight per cent of the general population experiences sleep paralysis — it’s not uncommon. But how would this explain what Gary sees during the day, while he’s fully awake? 

As months went by after his heart surgery, Gary continued to see people out of place. Every time he’d leave the house, he’d catch glimpses. He started keeping his head down as he walked. Seeing one of his people during the day used to be a random occurrence, but now it was a constant. Gary stopped going out with friends as often and started avoiding certain places. There was less to see when he wasn’t venturing out into the world, fewer situations he needed to awkwardly avoid. “People would say, ‘Oh, there’s ghosts in that building.’ Okay, let’s not go there, because I don’t want to see them,” he told me.

Gary began trying to hide what was going on from Debbie. Sure, she knew about the nighttime episodes, but this was different. Those could be written off as bad dreams, or sleep paralysis, but how could Gary rationally tell her what he was seeing in broad daylight? How could he tell anyone, without them thinking he was crazy? Would he be medicated? Institutionalized? Gary stayed quiet, until one night, he had such a disturbing vision he couldn’t ignore it anymore. He needed it to stop.

---

Gary opened his eyes to a dark room. It was the middle of the night, and something had woken him up — perhaps a sound from outside, perhaps nothing at all. He rolled over and froze: standing above a sleeping Debbie was a woman grinning madly. Dark hair framed her slender, pale face and her eyes were liquid black. Her tall, thin figure was submerged in darkness — black pants, a black shirt, black belt with a gold buckle. As she towered above Gary’s sleeping wife, they locked eyes. She opened her grin slowly, and black foam poured from her mouth into Debbie’s. Gary began to scream.

---

Gary booked an appointment with the Medium the next morning. He needed to make the visions stop. He’d never enjoyed his ability to see spirits, but none of them had ever had any sort of malevolent air to them. But this woman was different. Everything about her was saturated in darkness, an evilness that was new and dizzying. She seemed like she’d wanted to hurt Debbie. It was no longer tolerable. “That was the end,” Gary explained to me. “I needed to do whatever I could to get rid of it.”

Gary practised the exercise nightly. He envisioned a bubble of white light surrounding him and Debbie, surrounding his bed, like a blinding supernova. It seemed rudimentary, but he was desperate. It became part of his routine: get into bed, breathe. Picture light, slowly growing, surrounding. Breathe. Soft, milky light, all around. Breathe.

One night, only days after starting his meditations, the spirits stopped visiting. 

---

Now

Although lapses in his meditations have caused the spirits to come back, Gary has largely been able to keep the spirits at bay. There aren’t so many interruptions during his sleep, and he’s not afraid to walk outside. He quietly researches in his spare time, looking for an answer to explain what he’s spent his whole life going through. I asked him in our last interview, flat out: Do you believe in ghosts? He continued to rationalize with health concerns — it could be his eyes, latent memories. I pressed him once more. 

“I don’t know what it is, what it was,” he responded. “I don’t know for sure if it’s even real. Is it my brain? Do I have a brain tumor? You go through all those things… For me, I’ve just accepted it. It is what it is. I see what I see, I hear what I hear.” Many aspects of Gary’s life have been disturbed, though. He still avoids weddings and funerals. He doesn’t go places that are said to be haunted. Every so often, when something does flash in the corner of his eye, he chooses not to look. They’re all reminders of a part of his life he wants to move on from.

Although his wife knows much of what he’s gone through, as she was often a firsthand witness to his nighttime episodes, they’ve never directly talked about it. “Your paper might prompt some conversations and a couple of margaritas,” Debbie joked. And although Gary is opening up about his experience, he still doesn’t bring it up to many friends or family members. It feels too vulnerable, too strange, and too impossible. “Nobody can prove it. That’s the hard part,” Gary said.

---

---

But proof isn’t everything — it’s only part of it. Gary can’t prove what he sees, but he can feel it. He knows people might not believe him, might think he’s gone insane, but it won’t change things for him. And it won’t stop them from coming.

---

Even into their 90s, Gary’s parents refused to talk about death; when Gary or one of his siblings brought it up, Gary’s father would stand up, walk to the door, and leave the room. Death was taboo, an unimaginable and seemingly non-existent force, out of sight and out of the realm of conversation. It was pushed aside, until it wasn’t: Gary’s mother died last year. 

Gary told me his siblings had a hard time dealing with her passing. Despite her age and chronic health issues, their lack of exposure to death and the very topic of it left them unprepared when the moment came. But Gary felt different. Although he hadn’t been particularly close with his mother, he was close to the concept of death — a mirror had been held up to the idea his entire life, as the spirits he saw forced him to consider what came after our final moments on Earth. “My mother didn’t just die and go to nothing,” Gary told me. “My mother’s gone from here… but she’ll be back to learn some more shit,” he laughed. 

When he dies, Gary has a plan, too. He’s decided on a phrase — one he’s told only to Debbie, Tom, and Erik. He’ll use it to communicate with them if he’s sent back after he dies. If he calls to them from the other side, he’s told them they don’t have to answer. They’ll just have to feel it.