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 – 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.
Museum Chat Live! E703- Cemeteries and Historic Interpretation
On this episode of Museum Chat Live!, co-hosts Abbey and Sara look at the development and evolution of the museum’s Guided Spirit walks over the past 11 years. To help us understand the Museum’s Spirit Walk journey, we speak to Adrian Petry, Visitor Services Coordinator at the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre. We also sit down with Guided Spirit Walk actors Ian Ashman and Kathie Leblanc to discover what is like to portray local historical figures and the impact Guided Spirit Walks has on the community.
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.
REPOST: Museum Chat Live! E404 – Guided Spirit Walks
We are gearing up for the 2020 Guided Spirit Walks season, now a virtual experience that you can enjoy from the comfort of your home!
To highlight what it takes to produce our Guided Spirit Walks program each year, we are resharing this 2019 Museum Chat Live! episode, where we chat with cast and members of the creative team about the walks. While this years’ production will look very different than previous years, we are continuing to put our all into creating a high-quality, meaningful experience for you.
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: 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 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.
A Walk Around Town – Walk C
Excerpt from “Walk C” in “St. Catharines A-Z” by Junius, originally published in the St. Catharines Journal on May 29th, […]
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 […]