The Mumbler

Here's what I remember. I remember plans being made in the driveway and the thrill of anticipation. I remember Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" playing on the radio as we wound our way up the Sea-to-Sky highway. I remember a crackling fire in the fireplace, as soothing a sound as you'll find in this world. I remember hiking and exploring. I remember letting my friends go alone. I remember a soft voice when nobody was speaking. I remember terror. I remember the Mumbler.

"The sun shining at this time for a few minutes afforded an island which, from the shape of the mountain that composes it, obtained the name of Anvil island."

~ from the journal of Captain George Vancouver, June 14, 1792

On a small island in Howe Sound named Anvil, my grandfather built two cabins, both nestled (one above the other) under the shoulder of a Bible camp. The one down by the rocky beach was for him; the one above, on a steep rise, for his sister Jean.

The cabins in Winter

Anvil Island seems to exist in two different worlds. In the memories of many, it's sunshine. Its warmth and brightness can make a person glow for long afterwards, almost like the effect of radiation in a comic. In the real world, it's an island of cold dark shadows, moist with the memory of rain that never quite goes away, surrounded by mountains that steal most of the few hours of sunshine that might persuade its dank forest to surrender its water to the sky. Around some 90% of its shoreline bare cliffs plunge directly into glacier-fed, mercury-stained waters. It looks less like an anvil than a grotesque molar, lonely in the mouth of the sound. Welcoming, it is not.

Ah, but it is well-loved, despite its somewhat fierce mien. As a child, it was my real home. Civilization was a baffling, noisy and unfriendly place. As a teenager, I merely waited out the school year to return to it for those blissful few weeks of socializing that made sense to me. It was in that between time of adolescence that I went there and finally saw past the brightness into its dark, dark shadows. Something was there, looking back at me.

It started with some hastily-assembled plans. My grandfather, imaginatively nicknamed "Grampsy", was heading to his cabin for a weekend in the Spring. I think it was in May but it might have been as early as April. Somehow, I included myself in his plans and also managed to include my two best friends: John and Dennis. We were fifteen years old and occupied a social space between cool and nerdy, leaning toward the nerds. (Other peoples' opinions of our standing may vary.) Our plans for the weekend included playing board games; drawing comics and reading books; and hiking.

The hiking was mosttly off-the-path - blazing our own trails, thank you very much. A nice feature of Anvil is that it's almost difficult to get lost. Most of the island is a steep slope, so you can usually see out. And if you can see out, you can get your bearings. All the surrounding islands and mainland mountains are easy to recognize, especially if you've lived a large part of your life on the island, as I had.

And so we found ourselves in Grampsy's Ford Escort*, snaking up the Sea-to-Sky highway, with Tears for Fears playing on the radio (until Grampsy turned it off) and the cool breeze threatening to make our best efforts to style our hair even more of a wasted effort. Life was good. A quick ride across Howe Sound to the island in the Blue Falcon - the name of our boat - and we could set up in the cabin as the sun went down. Turn on the propane for the fridge; light a fire in the fireplace; make a quick dinner of hot dogs; play a game or two of Stock Ticker before choosing our bed spaces; read a little before bed; fall asleep to the sound of the crackling fire in the cabin and the waves sorting pebbles outside.

Life was very good.

In the morning we had some breakfast and made plans for our hike. The Bible camp has a trail that goes straight up the mountainside to a nice big bluff that sits above the camp, looking out on the sound and its islands. It's like 45 minutes of stairmaster. They painted its face with a white dot and called it the White Spot. That's all well and good, but that's their trail and their destination. We wanted our own! So the plan was to follow their trail about a third of the way - to where a stream intersects the path - and then strike off on our own. We knew from past hikes that we could find the source of the stream, a natural spring where water bubbles up out of the ground. We also knew there were many other nice bluffs in the general vicinity. We wanted to find one.

So up the mountain we went past the stream to the spring. We looked up. It was like one of those scenes from a movie. We stood in a darkened valley, the trees a natural parasol that kept the sun off our heads. But right above us loomed a cliff and at the top we could see a bluff glowing in the sunlight. It was a beacon and it was calling to us.

We heeded its call and split up. John went to the right, I went to the left, and Dennis went straight. Some time later I found myself on a bluff; the wrong one. I had gone too far. We called out to each other and I managed to make my way down to the bluff we had been looking for, down where my friends had already spent a few minutes laughing at me. It was perfect; just big enough to relax on; limited view of the camp; great view of the sound. We had everything we wanted and we had it all to ourselves. It's possible nobody had ever been there before. Maybe not likely, but possible.

On our way back down for lunch, we cut straight across the mountainside to the camp's trail. Now that we knew where it was in relation, the actual trail would make it much easier to get to our bluff. Lunch was eaten. A game of Stock Ticker was played. More plans were made. We wanted to mark it, but not with something as obvious as a white dot. We wanted to use something that could be seen if you were looking for it, but not obvious. Red. Considering the natural colour of the rocks, red isn't so wrong that it catches the eye. We didn't have any paint, but the camp did.

Before setting out on our adventure of unofficial borrowing and ascencion, I started reading the book I had brought with me. And so when it came time to go I begged off, saying that I wanted to keep reading but I would meet them as they came back down in the field that the camp uses to play sports. It sits right at the base of the trail, the farthest point up that the camp officially goes to and the largest flat area on the island. Everything else is a slope, whether it's the gentle slope upon which the camp and cabins sit or the steep grind (or cliffs) of the rest of the island.

The field is still and calm and quiet when the camp's not in summer mode. Forest runs all the way around it, with the exception of the trail down to the camp and the trail up the mountain. The only thing that can be seen from the field is the mountain, rising up from the forest; bright and strong in the sunlight, dark and oppressive in the dusk.

That's what I found waiting for me when I arrived. On Anvil Island in the spring, dusk comes early and fast. The last glow of the day was fading and the shadows were growing. We were alone on the island but for the camp caretaker. There were no sounds. Not many animals make their home on the island. My uncle and his friend had apparently killed off most of the squirrels a few decades earlier. There were a few mangy deer whose populations would wane and pulse as disease ravaged them or didn't. The silence could be so absolute sometimes that I swear I could feel it. This was one of those times.

I waited, alone. No light pierced the line of trees around the perimeter of the field. I waited some more, feeling uneasy. Gaining confidence from a lack of patience, I started up the trail. At the point where gentle slope becomes stairmaster, I paused and called their names. I listened.

I heard something. Someone? Nobody was there.

In a soft voice, coming from nowhere, a man was speaking. Mumbling. It was loud enough to tell that it was a man's voice and he was speaking English. It was quiet enough that no particular words could be discerned. It wasn't the sound of someone yelling far away. It sounded close, within a hundred feet. It was a voice; it was a man's voice and there was nobody there.

I quickly returned to the field. The centre of the field, to be precise. I stood dead centre and kept an eye on everything that could be seen, which was rapidly becoming nothing.

The good news was that I could no longer hear the voice. The bad news was the sun would soon be down completely and my friends were somewhere up a mountain with a disembodied voice - one that didn't even have the courtesy to speak clearly! There was nothing to do but wait. Some fifteen minutes later, my waiting came to an end. My friends exited the trail out onto the field. At a dead run. As they passed me, they spoke a single word: "RUN!"

I did. I caught up to them. We didn't stop until we were back down at the beach by the cabin.

Dennis and John

"What is it? Why were you running?" I asked.

With eyes mostly white they turned to me. John said, "As we were leaving the bluff, we heard a voice. We couldn't hear what it was saying. Every time we stopped, the whole way down, we heard it."

My blood turned cold. He went on.

"The same voice, the same volume, no matter where we were. I couldn't make out any words..."

"I could," said Dennis. "I heard 'kill you' in there somewhere."

I told them my own experience, which didn't help any of us to feel any better. We were terrified. We built a fire on the beach and stood around it, brandishing driftwood sticks like swords. I don't remember going to bed that night or even our return to the city. My memories end at the fire on the beach.

Three explorers

Looking back 25 years later, all I have is a few memories and lots of questions. What was it? Why us? The question I find most interesting, though, is: why was it so frightening? If we imagine for the sake of argument that it was a ghost, why should we be so afraid of it? If it had the power to do anything more than babble, it didn't show it. Hell, Saturday Night Live's masturbating zombies are more frightening than that. A ghost that can't even talk loud enough to be heard should have an easier time finding a home in a comedy than a horror film, and yet we were all terrified. Why? Even if you add in some vague spiritual power, all it did was mumble. A fart would have been worse! Lord knows mine are...

Anyways, that's my ghost story. It's not much, but it's mine, and it's true. Something that sounded very much like a man speaking quietly was near me in the dark forest. At the exact same time, it was farther up the mountain terrifying my friends with the same bizarre technique. We never heard it again. We had never heard of it before. We know of one person who has heard it since. Other than that, it remains a mystery. Perhaps the Mumbler feels he's said what he has to say.

Hey, nobody ever said ghosts are all competent. If they are in fact the spirits of us humans, why should we expect them to be?

* I think it was an Escort. This was back before the Europeans redesigned it to be good. Grampsy used to claim it was a great American-made car whose value made the Japanese cars seem cheap and pathetic in comparison. Then he got into a little fender-bender and it was written off due to its terribly low value. Unlike the Japanese cars. Oops.

Here are some interesting links where ghosts and auditory illusions collide. The first is on infrasound, which can affect our brains - amplifying emotiotions and altering what we see. The second is a video of talks on how trustworthy our ears are not. They not necessarily directly related but they are interesting and worth keeping in mind when trying to understand what we've heard.