This is part three of a three-part series on the research and scripting of the annual Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery. Make sure to read part one of the series and part two of the series to learn more about the source material and historical folks featured this year’s walks.

Now in its 14th year, the annual Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery are an excellent way to experience historical narrative lifted off the written page. It’s traditional (and sometimes required) for the writer/director to offer thoughts and perspective on the intentions and research behind the stories of the annual production.

My goal with the script this year was to bring to light some of the injustices that people of our city experienced in the 1850s. The stories from that time, when compiled together, often give me a sense of a town struggling with a “Wild West” complex. Drunkenness is rampant. Jails are full. The scales of justice seem unfairly tipped in favour of the elite.

We often struggle with the injustice we witness daily and so too did our forebears.

Our annual walks aim to engage the audience in historical narratives through theatre. It is nice when those narratives are enjoyable. The other element of the walks – and of all our historical interpretation at the museum – is to inspire and provoke. Our portrayals of folks buried at the cemetery often bring light hearted tales with a few laughs. This year, other emotions come to the fore and that presented new acting challenges for our volunteer performers. There are a few comedic elements, but playing the emotion and allowing the audience feel the feelings these characters might have felt is core to this year’s performance. It should inspire the audience to see and feel the parallels I identified between 1850 and 2025.

The folks in the 1850s are very forthcoming with their feelings about justice and the complications of crime in their society. The sadness and frustration is everywhere in the source material. It’s clear that those responsible for delivering justice were aware something was amiss both in society and in the court’s ability to respond to crime. The criminality, too, of substance abuse, was clearly something society was desperate to solve. Several local temperance societies, for example, were founded in the 1850s. It is trendy Victorian social activism, but their founding is before national organizations like the WCTU (Woman’s Christian Temperance Union) swept across the continent and later sowed the seeds of prohibition in early 20^th century. These organizations were equally concerned with the impact of intoxicating liquors on the individual and society at large. They identified the pernicious problems of addiction and the more obvious and immediate weekly violent and deadly riots. Overcome with concerns and without many solutions, the reliance on temperance societies (for example) reveals an inability to “do anything” about the volume of crime they witnessed.

Through examining the lives and contributions of the folks portrayed on the tour and through the source material foundational to the script, it’s both fascinating and tragic that justice was so imbalanced. To show just how imbalanced it was, included on the tour is a scene in which the Police Board, chaired by Mayor Thomas Burns, delivers sentencing for petty crimes, as recorded on the court records found in the Museum’s collection and in the newspapers. Comparatively, someone receives 24 hours in jail for stealing a set of dominoes, while another, charged with assault, is set free with a warning “man to man.”

Further complicating matters is the introduction of regular policing in St. Catharines in this period. The growing pains of a new police force trying to keep up with every crime is common theme in the source material. The thread of this year’s tour – the disappearance of Michael O’Meala – is weighted against public drunkenness, theft of milk, murder, theft of schoolbooks and supplies, not paying taxes, “hookin’ peaches,” and selling bad meat at the market. The response by society, police, and the justice system is all similar: harsher punishments.

The mixture of these crimes is congruous to how they’re presented in the source material, as well. The material reveals a preoccupation with the definition of crime and criminal. Yet the preoccupation did not give them any solutions and since they didn’t know what to do with crime and criminals, and its increasing volume, they leaned on default punishments like jail and heavy fines which had yet to be proportional to the crime. The press was no better: minor and major criminal events were sensationalized by the newspapers and it can be difficult to tell if the press was exploiting these events for their own gain, or to make the victim or criminal the butt of some cruel joke, or both.

While the justice system has improved markedly since the 1850s, it’s common to feel overwhelmed by the uncertainty how to tackle chronic issues, like addiction, and how we treat people struggling with addiction, in our society. I certainly do not have the answers, nor did the folks in St. Catharines in the 1850s who you’ll meet on this year’s tour. By bringing to light just a handful of these stories, I hope to provide a moment of reflection on the experiences of the past which may – you never know – help us contribute compassion and understanding in our time in society today.

As always, tickets are selling quite quickly, and you don’t want to miss out. Avoid disappointment and purchase your tickets today. Visit our ActiveNet page for all the details.

Adrian Petry is a public historian and Visitor Services Coordinator at the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre, and has researched, written, directed this year’s walks (along with many others).