Specializing in editorial, speculative and creative photography and portraits with an alternative edge.
A journey through the island's most haunting locations, tragic histories, and the darkness that makes this place home
When people think of Vancouver Island, they picture postcard-perfect harbors, temperate rainforests, and the polished charm of Victoria’s inner harbor. What they don’t see—what the tourism brochures carefully crop from the frame—is that this island has always belonged as much to shadow as to light.
As a photographer working within alternative aesthetics right here in Ladysmith, I’ve always understood that Vancouver Island isn’t just naturally beautiful. It’s gothically beautiful. The distinction matters. This isn’t darkness for the sake of darkness—it’s the art of revealing truth through contrast, of understanding that light only means something when it has known shadow.
And Vancouver Island? It has known plenty of shadow.
This is the place where Victorian mourning culture built castles overlooking the sea. Where one of North America’s most notorious occult leaders established his doomsday cult. Where the “Graveyard of the Pacific” claimed over 2,000 ships and countless souls. Where indigenous transformation stories speak of beings turned to stone, forever watching from the landscape itself.
Just as goth subculture evolved beyond its musical origins, Vancouver Island’s gothic identity transcends any single source—it’s woven through architecture, maritime tragedy, occult history, and Indigenous storytelling.
RavensTale exists here not despite the darkness, but because of it. Because this island has always understood what we’ve built our creative philosophy around: that beauty lives in the unconventional, the imperfect, the spaces between life and death, reality and myth. That the best stories are told in chiaroscuro—the interplay of light and shadow that gives form to truth.
Let me show you the Vancouver Island they don’t put on the posters.
The Castles: Victorian Excess and Eternal Unrest
Craigdarroch Castle: Built on Coal, Haunted by Ambition
Rising on a hill above Victoria like something transplanted from a Scottish moor, Craigdarroch Castle is Vancouver Island’s gothic crown jewel. Built between 1887 and 1890 by coal baron Robert Dunsmuir, this 39-room Victorian mansion was designed to be a status symbol—visible proof that a Scottish immigrant could become one of the wealthiest men in British Columbia.
But Robert Dunsmuir never lived to see his castle completed. He died 17 months before construction finished, leaving his wife Joan and their ten children to inhabit a monument to unfulfilled ambition.
The castle cost somewhere between $185,000 and $500,000 to build—over $15 million in today’s currency. Its 25,000 square feet house 17 fireplaces, stained glass windows shipped from San Francisco’s Pacific Art Glass Works, an oak staircase prefabricated in Chicago that filled five railway cars and cost $32,000 alone. Every material was imported: granite from British Columbia, tile from San Francisco, marble and Vermont slate for the exterior. To reach the tower’s top—87 steps—is to climb into a Victorian fever dream of wealth attempting to purchase immortality.
It failed, of course. Robert’s death was merely the beginning of the Dunsmuir family’s long relationship with tragedy. Family members fought viciously over the inheritance. The castle passed through bankruptcy, became a school, was nearly demolished, and only narrowly survived to become the museum it is today.
And according to hundreds of visitors over the decades, some of the Dunsmuirs never really left.
Joan Dunsmuir is most frequently reported, her apparition descending the ornate main staircase in a ball gown—always going down, never ascending. Others have glimpsed a young girl in the basement, believed to be one of Robert’s daughters who died young, standing motionless and staring at the floor. Visitors report phantom piano music, though the castle has no piano. Strange scents of burning candles. Cold spots that form without cause. The sensation of being watched from the tower windows.
In 2021, Craigdarroch Castle was named one of Canada’s most haunted places. The castle doesn’t officially acknowledge the hauntings, but that hasn’t stopped the stories—or the after-hours “Curiosities of Craigdarroch” tours that lean into the building’s darker Victorian history, exploring mourning rituals, séances, and the macabre customs that defined the era.
Hatley Castle: Where Military Meets Mystical
If Craigdarroch was Robert Dunsmuir’s dream, then Hatley Castle was his son James’s answer—and perhaps his attempt to outdo his father’s ghost.
Built in 1908 on 560 acres of old-growth forest in what is now Royal Roads University, Hatley Castle took only ten months to construct. James Dunsmuir, who served as both Premier and Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, famously told his architect Samuel Maclure: “Money doesn’t matter, just build what I want.”
And Maclure did. The result is a 40-room Gothic Revival mansion featuring an 82-foot turret, stone walls, teak floors, oak and rosewood paneling, and specially made lighting fixtures. The grounds included Italian, Japanese, and Rose gardens, a dairy, a smoke house, and hunting grounds for James and his wealthy friends.
But like his father’s castle, Hatley couldn’t protect the Dunsmuirs from sorrow.
James and his wife Laura had twelve children. Their youngest son, Jim, was eager to serve when WWI broke out. He boarded a ship for Europe—the RMS Lusitania. In 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the ship, and Jim’s body was never recovered. James was devastated, spending his remaining years in mourning. He died shortly after his son, in 1920.
The castle remained in the family until 1937, when Laura died. Her daughter Eleanor passed six months later. The estate sat empty for three years before the Canadian government purchased it for $75,000 to use as a Naval Training Establishment.
It was during the military college years that the hauntings became undeniable.
Cadets reported feeling surrounded by cold cobwebs while studying late at night. They saw a small elderly woman near their beds—sometimes pulling at their covers while they slept. Many believed it was Laura Dunsmuir, either protecting the young men from danger or trying to drive them away to prevent them from meeting her son’s fate. One cadet woke to feel his legs being pulled and saw the female ghost clearly. When he tried to escape, she held on. He swore and fled, and she vanished.
But Laura isn’t the only spirit. Cadets reported seeing a young woman wandering the corridors, sometimes weeping, before floating out a window toward the sea—a window that opens and closes on its own to this day. Some believe she’s Annabel, a young chambermaid Laura Dunsmuir had offered to sponsor for her wedding. When Annabel discovered her fiancé was already married with children, she returned to Hatley Castle and threw herself from an upper window.
Security staff at Royal Roads University still report encounters. The smell of cigar smoke when no one is present. Doors and windows opening and closing without cause. Apparitions in period clothing. The sound of phantom period music echoing through empty halls.
Hatley Castle has become famous as Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in the X-Men film franchise. But long before Hollywood discovered it, the castle was already home to something extraordinary—and something that refuses to leave.
The Graveyard of the Pacific: Where the Sea Remembers
The west coast of Vancouver Island has claimed more vessels than perhaps any comparable stretch of coastline in North America. Since 1792, approximately 2,000 ships have wrecked along this treacherous shore, earning it the name “The Graveyard of the Pacific.”
Unpredictable weather, powerful currents, dense fog, and a rocky coastline with few safe harbors created the perfect conditions for maritime disaster. Ships were pushed toward the foggy cliffs with no place to shelter from storms. The entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca became a deadly threshold—miss it in the fog, and you’d find yourself on the rocks of Vancouver Island’s western edge.
SS Valencia: A Theatre of Horror
Of all the ships claimed by these waters, none haunts the collective memory quite like the SS Valencia.
On January 22, 1906, the passenger steamer was en route from San Francisco to Victoria carrying 108 passengers and 65 crew. Captain Oscar M. Johnson had been with the Pacific Coast Steamship Company for twelve years, working his way up from quartermaster. The ship carried men, women, and children—families making the journey north in what should have been a routine coastal run.
But thick weather made celestial navigation impossible. Out of sight of land, with strong winds and currents, the Valencia missed the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Shortly before midnight, she struck a reef about 11 miles off Cape Beale on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island.
A large wave lifted her off the reef momentarily, revealing a massive gash in the hull through which water poured. The captain ordered her run aground, and she wedged into the rocks less than 100 yards from shore—close enough to see the cliffs, yet impossibly far to reach.
In the chaos, six of the ship’s seven lifeboats were launched against the captain’s orders, all improperly manned. Most capsized immediately in the pounding surf. Freight clerk Frank Lehm later recalled watching one boat’s ropes accidentally cut on one side: “Like a shot the stern of the boat fell to the water’s edge, leaving the bow hanging in the air. The occupants were spilled out like pebbles from a glass and fell with shrieks and groans into the boiling surf.”
For nearly 40 hours, the tragedy unfolded in agonizing slow motion. Survivors clung to the rigging as huge waves systematically broke the ship apart. People huddled on the hurricane deck, watching their companions swept away. Would-be rescuers watched from shore and from ships that couldn’t get close enough through the reefs and storms, horrified and powerless.
When it was over, 136 people were dead—including every woman and child aboard. Only 37 men survived.
The Valencia disaster shocked Canada into action. The government immediately began construction on the Pachena Point Lighthouse (completed in 1907) and transformed an overgrown telegraph route into a lifesaving trail with regularly spaced shelters—what we now know as the West Coast Trail.
But the story didn’t end with bureaucratic response and improved infrastructure.
As early as 1910, mariners began reporting a ghost ship along the west coast. They’d see a vessel matching the Valencia‘s description following them up the coastline until it reached Pachena Bay—where it would leap up and crash down beneath the waves, disappearing. Over the years, sailors have reported seeing lifeboats rowed by skeletons, still trying to reach shore after more than a century.
Even survivors reported something impossible: while being transported back to Seattle after rescue, they encountered what they insisted was the ghost ship of the SS Valencia.
Today, hikers along the West Coast Trail can still find pieces of the wreck embedded in the coastline near Pachena Point, about 11 miles from the trailhead. Rust-eaten metal and skeletal remains of a ship that became a legend, scattered along a beach where 136 souls met the sea.
Newcastle Island: Most Haunted Island in the Pacific
Just a short ferry ride from Nanaimo lies Newcastle Island, a beautiful provincial park that many consider the most haunted island in the Pacific Northwest—and possibly all of North America.
The island’s dark history is layered like sediment.
In the early 1800s, it served as a smallpox quarantine colony, resulting in numerous deaths. The bodies were buried on the island, their graves now lost to time and forest.
In 1887, a massive explosion trapped and killed 150 miners in the coal shafts beneath Newcastle Island. Their bodies were never recovered. They remain there still, deep in the collapsed tunnels, while the island transformed into a park above them.
But the island’s most famous ghost is Kanaka Pete.
Peter Kakua was a Hawaiian immigrant laborer (Hawaiians were known as Kanakas) who worked as a coal miner in Nanaimo. The story goes that in a fit of rage, Peter killed his wife, their daughter, his father-in-law, and his mother-in-law with an axe. Realizing what he’d done, he attempted to flee to Vancouver by canoe, first stopping at Newcastle Island to rest.
It was there he was captured. He was later hanged at Gallows Point on nearby Protection Island and buried in an unmarked grave on Newcastle Island. His last words, according to legend, promised revenge—that he would return.
Apparently, he kept his promise.
Kanaka Pete is said to haunt the east side of Newcastle Island. His ghost has been seen on the beaches at dusk. Local legend blames his unhappy spirit for the disastrous 1887 mine explosion that killed 150 men—his final act of vengeance.
People who’ve been brave (or foolish) enough to camp on the island report hearing screams and the sound of chopping late at night in the forests on the eastern side. Some visitors have disappeared after venturing to the island’s far side after dark—though whether those disappearances have natural explanations or something more sinister has never been confirmed.
The combination of the smallpox deaths, the miners trapped forever beneath the earth, and Kanaka Pete’s vengeful spirit has given Newcastle Island a reputation that far exceeds its small size. It’s a place where multiple tragedies have layered atop one another, each adding to the darkness that seems to seep from the stone itself.
Brother XII: The Occult Leader Who Vanished Into Legend
If you drive south from Nanaimo toward Cedar, you’re traveling through the former domain of one of North America’s most sensational cult leaders—a man whose story reads like gothic fiction but is disturbingly, verifiably real.
Edward Arthur Wilson was born in Birmingham, England, in 1878, into a religious family belonging to a splinter Christian sect featuring ecstatic elements like speaking in tongues. He spent his early adulthood as a mariner, eventually becoming a ship captain, traveling the world and obsessively studying religion and the occult.
In 1924, while living in the south of France, Wilson claimed to have a vision. During this moment of enlightenment, he was told he was one of the “Twelve Brothers”—living men chosen as tools of the ascended masters of a “White Lodge” to help usher in a new age of enlightenment.
Wilson embraced his new identity as Brother XII.
By 1927, he had established the Aquarian Foundation and published manifestos warning of the imminent destruction of the current social order. His message found an audience among theosophists and spiritualists across North America and Europe. Wealthy, educated, socially prominent individuals were drawn to his charismatic presence and apocalyptic predictions.
That spring, Brother XII arrived in British Columbia with his followers. Using donated funds, he purchased land near Cedar on Vancouver Island and additional property on nearby Valdes and De Courcy Islands. The goal: create a self-sufficient “City of Refuge” where the enlightened could prepare for civilization’s collapse.
One follower, Mary Connally—a wealthy North Carolina socialite—donated $25,000 (equivalent to nearly $350,000 today) to the Foundation. Others gave similar amounts, believing they were funding humanity’s spiritual salvation.
But Brother XII’s utopia quickly revealed its darkness.
He became increasingly dictatorial and paranoid, fortifying the islands and reportedly accumulating a fortune in gold coins converted from his followers’ donations. He took a mistress, Mabel Skottowe, who went by “Madame Z” (later “Madame Zee”). Together, they worked members without respite, treating assigned tasks as spiritual tests. Followers who questioned them were banished.
One man who’d been imprisoned in a cellar on Valdes Island managed to escape by rowing to Nanaimo to report conditions to the British Columbia Provincial Police. They investigated but took no action.
The true horror emerged in legal proceedings when former followers sued to recover their money. Stories emerged of Brother XII using “occult powers” to disable opponents in court—people fainting during testimony, lawyers forgetting their arguments, plaintiffs mysteriously taken ill. Whether coincidence, suggestion, or something stranger has never been determined, but the accusations terrified those involved.
Brother XII was also accused of conducting “black magic” rituals. According to testimony, he would sit in a triangle with two others, imagine his intended victim, then verbally curse them while cutting the air with his hand—a gesture meant to “sever them from their physical bodies.” He reportedly put curses on government officials and legal representatives.
When his core followers finally revolted and won their lawsuit in 1933, Brother XII and Madame Zee destroyed everything. They smashed buildings, wrecked farm equipment, scuttled the sailboat Lady Royal, and fled with what followers believed was a fortune in gold coins—possibly $400,000 or more—allegedly buried in jars throughout the islands.
Edward Arthur Wilson reportedly died in Switzerland in 1934, though some historians contest this, believing he faked his death. After all, if he could convince thousands of followers that he commanded spirits and wielded black magic, what was one more deception?
To this day, treasure hunters comb De Courcy and Valdes Islands looking for buried gold. The islands themselves are linked to persistent reports of paranormal activity. But perhaps the real treasure Brother XII left behind wasn’t gold—it was proof that even in twentieth-century Canada, on a beautiful island in the Pacific, darkness could take root and flourish in the guise of enlightenment.
The Empress: Where Victoria's Elegance Meets the Afterlife
Standing guard over Victoria’s Inner Harbour since 1908, the Fairmont Empress Hotel is the city’s most recognizable landmark—a Châteauesque masterpiece designed by architect Francis Rattenbury as the crown jewel of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s luxury hotel network.
It’s also, according to countless guests and staff over more than a century, profoundly haunted.
The most frequently reported apparition is that of Rattenbury himself. A slender man with a distinctive mustache, walking with a cane, dressed in period clothing from the early 20th century. He’s seen on the staircase to the lower lobby, in the hallways, near where his portrait once hung.
Why would Rattenbury’s spirit return to the Empress after death? The answer lies in his tragic story.
Francis Rattenbury was a brilliant British architect who emigrated to Canada in 1891 and made his name designing Victoria’s most important buildings—including the Legislative Buildings (which he completed $400,000 over budget) and the Empress Hotel. But his personal life became a scandal that destroyed his career and ultimately his life.
In 1928, Rattenbury left his wife Florence (mother of his two children) for 27-year-old Alma Pakenham. The scandal and financial problems forced him to flee Victoria for England in 1929. There, young Alma began an affair with their 17-year-old chauffeur, George Percy Stoner.
On March 24, 1935, Stoner bludgeoned Rattenbury to death. The architect was buried in an unmarked grave in Bournemouth, England—thousands of miles from the buildings that were his life’s greatest achievements.
His spirit, according to those who’ve seen it, returned to the Empress to haunt the halls of his masterpiece—perhaps seeking the recognition and praise that scandal had stolen from him in life.
But Rattenbury isn’t alone.
The most heartbreaking ghost is Lizzie McGrath, a young chambermaid who arrived from Ireland to work at the newly opened hotel. On a night in 1909, Lizzie stepped onto the sixth-floor fire escape to say her rosary, as was her nightly ritual before bed. What she didn’t know was that contractors had disassembled the platform that day.
She plunged to her death just to the right of the hotel’s main entrance.
Guests and staff report seeing a woman in a 1920s maid’s uniform on the sixth floor, still going about her duties. Sometimes she’s seen clutching a rosary. Sometimes she’s witnessed at the spot where she landed. Sometimes she simply passes through walls, solid as memory, insubstantial as grief.
Other spirits include:
- An elderly woman in pajamas who wanders the halls looking for her room—a room that was demolished to make way for an elevator shaft
- A young girl who appears in one specific room
- An Indigenous construction worker seen on the sixth floor
- A hotel employee who hanged himself, sometimes seen swinging from ceiling fixtures during the 1960s renovations
- A mysteriously helpful bellhop who assists guests with their bags before vanishing
The Empress has embraced its haunted reputation in recent years, though they don’t actively promote it. The building was designated a National Historic Site in 1981, recognized for its architectural significance and its role in defining a distinctly Canadian château style.
But for those who’ve experienced the unexplained cold spots, the phantom footsteps, the apparitions in Victorian dress—the Empress is more than just a historic hotel. It’s a threshold between worlds, where the past refuses to remain past, where those who built and served in Victoria’s golden age continue their eternal rounds.
The Coast Salish: Transformation Stories and Stone Ancestors
Long before Victorian castles and shipwrecks, before Brother XII or Gothic Revival mansions, the peoples of the Coast Salish—including the Snuneymuxw, Cowichan, and other First Nations—inhabited Vancouver Island and imbued its landscape with stories of transformation, liminal beings, and the thin places between worlds.
These stories, called sxwoxwiyám (transformation narratives), speak of a mythic time before the present age when the world was shaped by powerful beings called the Transformers—known as Qäls or Xexá:ls. Plants, animals, weather phenomena, and humans could all change form, and the landscape itself was alive with spiritual power.
What’s striking from a gothic perspective is how many of these traditional narratives involve beings transformed to stone—frozen in the landscape, forever watching, forever part of the place.
Near Yale, a hunter and his dog were turned to stone at a location called K’wŏä’lEts. At Tc’ileQu’uk, an ancestor who lost battle with the Transformers was changed to stone. At the mouth of the Harrison River, an ancestor whose daughter found the sacred Sq’eq’o mask was transformed to stone. A woman called LEqyiles, who lived on the Harrison River and harmed Mink, was changed to stone by the Transformers.
These aren’t metaphors. In Coast Salish ontology, these transformation sites are real places, still identifiable, still holding the spirits of those who were changed. The stones aren’t symbols—they are the ancestors, watching over their descendants.
The tradition also includes stories that evoke classic gothic horror: the toothed-vagina woman, cannibal ogresses like T’it’ki7tsten, the Kwakwaka’wakw Sisiutl (a two-headed serpent with a human head in the center), and shape-shifting beings that could travel between land, water, and air.
One particularly haunting Halkomelem legend tells of wolves that were once human—a tribe transformed for their evil deeds. A hunter seeking his spirit power encountered them as a fire on a mountainside, and what followed was a story of temptation, transformation, and the thin line between human and animal.
These stories aren’t “just folklore” in the Western sense. As Coast Salish cultural advisors emphasize, these narratives contain real knowledge about the world, about kinship that extends to plants, animals, rocks, and places themselves. They speak of a landscape alive with spiritual power—a perspective that feels deeply resonant with gothic sensibility’s understanding that places can hold memory, that the boundary between living and dead is permeable, that transformation is always possible.
When you walk through the forests of Vancouver Island, you’re walking through a landscape dense with these transformation stories—stones that are ancestors, trees that hold spirits, places where the boundary between worlds grows thin.
The Coast Salish understood what gothic artists have always known: that the world is stranger and more numinous than rational materialism suggests, that stories shape the landscape as surely as geology, and that some places belong to shadow not because they’re evil, but because they’re sacred.
Why This Matters: The Gothic as a Way of Seeing
When I photograph subjects here on Vancouver Island—whether for portrait work or the visual campaigns I create for RavensTale—I’m always aware that we’re working in a place where darkness has deep roots. Not the darkness of evil or nihilism, but the darkness of honest complexity. Of beauty that includes shadow. Of stories that refuse easy resolution.
This connects directly to what I explored in “Power of The Gaze“: how we choose to see and be seen, how we author our own image rather than accepting the mainstream gaze that seeks to simplify and sanitize.
Vancouver Island’s gothic history teaches the same lesson writ large across landscape and time. The tourism industry wants you to see only the picturesque harbor, the English gardens, the afternoon tea. But the truth is richer, stranger, more human.
Robert Dunsmuir built a castle to prove his worth and died before he could enjoy it. His son did the same, then lost his youngest boy to war and spent his remaining years in grief. The Empress Hotel is beautiful and haunted—these facts coexist. The ocean is gorgeous and it has claimed thousands of lives. Brother XII offered enlightenment and enslaved his followers. The Coast Salish transformation stories speak of a world where beauty, horror, power, and vulnerability exist simultaneously, inseparable.
This is what gothic aesthetics understands that mainstream culture often doesn’t: that wholeness requires shadow. That beauty without darkness is incomplete. That the most compelling stories acknowledge complexity rather than sanitizing it.
At RavensTale, we embrace the shadows—both metaphorically and visually. We find beauty in the unconventional, the imperfect, the untamed. We work with clients who exist outside the mainstream gaze, who understand that their stories deserve to be told with the same complexity and nuance as this island’s history.
Vancouver Island doesn’t hide its ghosts because they’re part of what makes this place powerful. The castles on the hills. The shipwrecks in the depths. The cult ruins scattered across forgotten islands. The transformation stones watching from the forest. All of it together creates a landscape that understands what we’ve always believed: light only means something when it has known shadow.
Becoming, Not Being
Gothic isn’t just a genre. It’s a way of seeing. A refusal to accept that beauty must be pleasant, that darkness must be evil, that complexity should be simplified for easier consumption.
Vancouver Island taught me this long before I articulated it as a creative philosophy. This place—with its Victorian mourning castles and drowned mariners, its occult history and indigenous transformation stories, its elegant hotels and vengeful ghosts—has always understood that the most authentic beauty acknowledges the full spectrum of human experience.
That’s what we capture at RavensTale when we work with clients. Not the sanitized, simplified version of beauty that mainstream culture peddles. But the real thing—the complicated, messy, shadow-inclusive version where vulnerability becomes power, where unconventional beauty is celebrated rather than corrected, where everyone’s story deserves to be told with the depth and darkness and light it actually contains.
You are not too strange. You are not too dark. You are not “too much” for wanting to acknowledge the full complexity of who you are.
You’re exactly right for a place like this—an island that’s always known shadows are where the best stories live.
The length, the uniformity, the rhetorical structure, and the absence of human texture all point toward machine involvement in the writing of this post. If a human wrote this, they almost certainly used a model to scaffold, expand, or smooth large portions.
You may not realize it, but you just gave me a huge compliment. So thank you.