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.
14th Annual Guided Spirit Walks – Historical Profiles
The challenge, which I always enjoy, is simultaneously selecting historic persons to include on the tour whose burials are located on an enjoyable walking tour route that also fit into the theme of that year’s tour, and whose life story can appropriately carry a relevant historical narrative.
14th Annual Guided Spirit Walks – The Source Material
It’s this imbalance of the application of justice, which runs through all the source materials – letters, diaries, court records, jail lists, summaries of convictions, and most of all, newspapers – that threads the many narratives of crime together in this year’s walks. Hundreds of pages of newspapers and handfuls of letters, testimony, and court records show us a St. Catharines that in some ways is unrecognizable, and in other ways, show us that society still has a long way to go.
What Good is History? Let us count the ways!
After another hugely successful production of our annual Guided Spirit Walks, we’d like to say a big “THANK YOU” to the many volunteers – cast and crew – who make it all happen. In case you missed the walks this year, we’d also like to share a bit about the people who are buried at Victoria Lawn that we included this year.
Another Successful Year for Guided Spirit Walks
We are so thankful to our audiences and our volunteers for another very successful Guided Spirit Walk season at Victoria Lawn Cemetery. The walks bring history to life through theatrical performances based on the histories of the folks who made an important mark in our city. Thank you also to the many folks who reached out with kind comments of enjoyment and enthusiasm! We appreciate it!
2023 Guided Spirit Walks – Meet Your Guide: Jane
The annual Guided Spirit Walks are back again this September and we’re excited to share the profiles of the historic people included this year, and our wonderful cast of volunteer performers who will portray them.
2023 Guided Spirit Walks – Dr. Chauncey Beadle
The annual Guided Spirit Walks are back again this September and we’re excited to share the profiles of the historic people included this year, and our wonderful cast of volunteer performers who will portray them.
2023 Guided Spirit Walks – Alpheus St. John
Our spirit walks often employ a few fictional characters to help advance plot or narrative and to help other characters along. Especially when we get a lot of volunteer interest, we can have a bit more fun with larger scenes, more dialogue, and more interesting characters. We’re so pleased to have some local students join us as the fictional granddaughters of Alpheus St. John. In their scene, they are particularly curious about figuring out the history of the name of St. Catharines!
2023 Guided Spirit Walks – Elias Smith Adams and Susan Merritt
The annual Guided Spirit Walks are back again this September and we’re excited to share the profiles of the historic people included this year, and our wonderful cast of volunteer actors who will portray them.
For our next character/actor profiles, we meet Elias Smith Adams and Susan Merritt portrayed by Des Corran and Brenda Schultz.
2023 Guided Spirit Walks – George Rykert
Fictional settlers, (representing real opinions from historical sources) Abigail MacDonald, Jessie Frey, and Sarah Bryan have a bone to pick with Rykert after his town plan is laid out in the most awkward and disadvantageous ways. The scene unfolds quickly into familiar rants about road quality, property development, and the beginnings of urban settlement in our town.
2023 Guided Spirit Walks – Gertrude Yale
The annual Guided Spirit Walks are back again this September and we’re excited to share the profiles of the historic people included this year, and our wonderful cast of volunteer actors who will portray them.
For our first character/actor profile, we welcome back Gertrude Yale, played by Amanda Balyk.
The 2022 Guided Spirit Walks Roar into the 1920s
As part of the Guided Spirit Walks creative team, I can tell you that our historical interests span widely, and we are always imagining up new ways to bring the stories of those buried in Victoria Lawn Cemetery to our audiences. This year, we present Roaring into the ‘20s: A New Chapter for our City and invite you into the stories of those who lived through the tumultuous period of 1920s St. Catharines. We might imagine the Roaring Twenties as a risqué period of flappers, jazz, and prohibition, and while these were dramatic parts of the era, the 1920s can be characterized by even more dramatic shifting social norms, economic and political turbulence, and rapid technological innovations. Some embraced these drastic changes as a signal of a better future, while others were apprehensive.
Tapping into Spiritualism in the 2022 Guided Spirit Walks
This year’s Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery roar loudly into the tumultuous era of the 1920s. The spirits on this year’s tour come from all walks of life; we hear from new immigrants arriving to St. Catharines to work on the construction of the Welland Ship Canal, a wealthy female philanthropist, an architectural visionary, a grieving widow, a proud wife, an unstoppable industrialist, and a journalist with a guilty conscience. While each may have little in common, the spirits are brought together, and connect to the audience, through our guide, the renowned spiritualist Jenny O’Hara Pincock.
Building an “Open” Community Cookbook
On Family Day this year, We asked visitors to share their favourite family recipes with us on what we called “open community cookbooks” and the result was fantastic! Children, parents, and grandparents brought in recipes from home, or took the time to write out recipes on the cards provided. Recipes range from the Filipino dish Chicken Adobo, the “Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe Ever”, and lots of other tasty dishes that brim with family tradition and heritage as evident from the names attributed to the recipes shared.
Family Dinners: Serving More Than Food
Family culinary traditions tie us not only to each other, but to our family heritage as well. Often, the recipes we use to prepare specific dishes for family meals have been passed down through generations. Learn why family food traditions matter.
2021-2022 Educational Programs
Ready for 2021-2022! We are thrilled to announce our 2021-2022 educational program offering. We have an exciting line-up of safe, […]
Reminiscences of 10 years of Guided Spirit Walks
There’s nothing quite like a guided tour through a cemetery. There are a lot of versions of this type of event. A spooky walk in the dark, a theatrical ‘spirit walk’ featuring actors portraying folks buried in the cemetery, or even an afternoon historian-led walking tour. Everyone has their favourite experience but it’s the theatrical spirit walk that advances important and personal historical narratives with a high return on interpretive value. The spirit walks also have the unique ability to allow us to lift the primary sources found in the Museum’s collection off the pages of the archives and bring them to life. In most cases, there may not be another opportunity to present those archival sources to the public.
STC StoryLab Presents: Scott Street Church
Day-to-day our lives may seem ordinary, but everyone’s unique experiences are what make our stories special. These stories tap into feelings of nostalgia, happiness, sadness, and more. These are the stories that help to make St. Catharines what it is today. At the St. Catharines Museum, our goal is to collect these stories and share them for generations to come.
Welcome Back to the Museum!
The St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canal Centre is very pleased to again welcome visitors safely to our facility as of Friday, July 16 at 9:00am. Read here to familiarize yourself with our updated operations to ensure all visitors have the best and safe experience at our facility.
Museum Chat Live! E610 – Play & Museum Interpretation
On this episode of Museum Chat Live!, we chat with St. Catharines Museum Visitor Services Coordinator Adrian Petry to talk about the role and interpretive value of play in museums, and to take a closer-look at the inspiration and thinking behind some of St. Catharines Museum’s play-based programs.
Mitten Tree – DIY Mitten Tree Ornament Template
Every year the St. Catharines Museum hosts our annual Mitten Tree campaign as a way to give back to the […]
Museum Classroom: Virtual Tours and Programs
St. Catharines Museum is presenting free virtual tours and programs!
The St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre is happy to offer free, private, booked virtual school and educational programs and tours.
Our engaging and experienced staff are ready to take your students on a virtual tour of our permanent galleries or behind-the-scenes in our Museum’s collection. Other fun and exciting opportunities involve programs like The Travelling Museum and Jr. Engineers, which have been modified slightly to ensure enjoyment for all your students learning from home.
Remembering Tom Hopkins
The St. Catharines Museum is mourning the loss of a wonderful and dedicated volunteer, Tom Hopkins. Tom passed away on Thursday, February 6, and will be greatly missed by everyone here at the Museum.
As a tribute to Tom, we would like to share sound clips of two of the many stories he loved to tell here at the Museum. Tom contributed these stories as part of our People and Places Exhibition Audio Guide in 2018.
Guided Spirit Walks 2019 Behind-the-Scenes: COSTUMES
In 2016, I attended the Guided Spirit Walk production “Keep the Home Fires Burning: Stories and Music from the First […]
Guided Spirit Walks 2019 Behind-the-Scenes: REHEARSALS
We are officially in Guided Spirit Walks rehearsal season! With our first week of rehearsals over, it’s time to do […]
Guided Spirit Walks 2019 Behind-the-Scenes: RESEARCH
Welcome to a behind-the-scenes look at our research and writing process, rehearsals, costumes, and much more for this year’s Guided Spirit Walks, with some sneak peeks of what is coming in September!
At War’s End: Behind-the-Scenes Part 2
Part 2 of a five-part series. Research I’ll let slip some information on how the “Working Women” scene of this […]
At War’s End: Behind-the-Scenes Part 1
Those who served in the Great War, both domestically and overseas, deserve our respect and recognition. I am honoured to be part of the process of creating the St. Catharines Museum’s 2018 Guided Spirit Walks because it means that I get to help share the stories of these heroic individuals. As the programming assistant I am helping to conduct research on our characters, to create the script, and to facilitate rehearsals. Jack Hardy acquired some valuable wisdom from his experiences and emerged from the war grateful for his successes. It is my hope that we will all be able to learn similar insight from the stories of Hardy and a variety of others who were affected by the war that ended one hundred years ago this November.
One Dominion: On the Path to Confederation
In our research, we found a handful of St. Catharines politicians and businessmen whom were adamantly against Confederation. These men were part of a movement usually referred to as the Anti-Confederate movement. Plenty of politicians across the new Dominion, now vilified by time and memory, were against a political union for a surprisingly wide variety of reasons.
Books & Brews 150
Our Fall 2017 Books & Brews series opens space for the voices of Indigenous, female, and French-Canadian authors to consider the impacts of colonization on what it means to be Canadian. The books we have selected explore Canadian-ness and the Canadian experience through the intersections of race, class, culture and identity.
aMUSE 5 – The Fifth and Final Series
The series was created in response to the idea that the Museum is viewed by many in the community as important but not a part of their daily lives. Many believe we are an important institution in the community but can’t identify what we do or what kinds of objects we have in the collection. We think its vitally important to get our collection out and seen by the people for whom we steward those very objects.
Narratives of Fugitive Slaves – Part 2
I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave. I have no opportunity to see my friends in my native land. We would rather stay in our native land, if we could be as free there as we are here. I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would end another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell, if he could.
aMUSE: Lost Architecture
The Last aMUSE of 2016 Our final aMUSE pop-up exhibition of 2016 focused on the lost and remaining 19th century […]
Caption This! Contest Wrap-up and Winner Announcement
Throughout the month of September, we’ve been inviting the public to help us co-curate our Caption This! Social Media series. […]
Books and Brews: Chapter Three
Our first Books and Brews series (and my first Book Club) came to a close with a discussion of David […]
The Emotional Power of a Spirit Walk
5 Years of Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery For a good part of a year, probably close to […]
Special Announcement: “Caption This!” Contest
We’re recruiting our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram audiences to be our co-curators! For the month of September, help us caption […]
Books and Brews: Chapter Two
Having rid myself of first-timer nerves at our first book club meeting in July (you can read about that experience […]
Diana Sweets Community Reunion
When people from St. Catharines recall Diana Sweets, they often talk about a certain feeling about the place. It felt […]
Books and Brews: Chapter One
The first meeting of our new “Books and Brews” book club was held this past Tuesday, July 19. Not only […]