The Summer Savary Islanders Imported a Ghost

In the summer of 1986, as Michael Jeffery packed his family into their yellow Volvo for their annual jaunt from Vancouver to Savary Island, he added a special delivery: a ghost, sealed in an envelope.

Jeffery, a lawyer known for taking on quirky side quests, had been on a mission to find the right spectral match for his island neighbours’ castle-like cottage. He’d been corresponding with psychic researchers for months.

The Jefferys’ cottage in the θatɛq area of the island was next door to their good friends the Boags.

When Brian Boag quit smoking in the late ’60s, he saved up $700, enough to buy a property on Savary Island and begin building the Princess’s Palace. Brian and Rosemary Boag were both teachers and had time in the summer to add to the palace, an ode to Brian’s infatuation with castles and a nod to his English roots.

With its steep gables, leaded windows and handful of gargoyles, the palace, to Jeffery at least, looked like the kind of place that should be haunted.

So Jeffery sent a letter to the Society for Psychical Research in England, wondering if it would be possible to acquire a ghost. The society wrote back, thanking him for his interest.

“But then said that they were not in the business of providing or supplying ghosts,” his son Stephen Jeffery recalls. The society no longer has a record of their correspondence in its archives, and told The Tyee it’s unusual to relocate a ghost.

“Alleged ghosts are generally place-centred (though well-known ones are often claimed by a number of locations), so it is surprising to hear of one being imported from one country to another,” Tom Ruffles, a member of the society, said in an email.

“What the mechanism would be to allow the transportation of a ghost to happen is a puzzle,” he added.

Soon, however, another letter arrived for Jeffery from England. According to Ainsley Bouveur, the Boags’ daughter and the princess of the Princess’s Palace, a woman named Edwina Longhorn reached out about a lost soul who needed a new residence. (The Tyee was unable to track down a psychic by this name.)

That lost soul was the ghost of Adrian Marsters. Though his name doesn’t appear on a list of the crew, Longhorn told Jeffery that Marsters had been the boatswain on board Capt. George Vancouver’s Discovery. He had, Jeffery was told, been part of the crew who “discovered” Savary Island in 1792. This assertion is repeated in Ian Kennedy’s 1992 book Sunny Sandy Savary.

In 1816, Marsters retired to Devon, England, and lived out his days as a bachelor. It’s said that, after he died, he never left. Folks swore they could still hear his boatswain pipe and said it brought good luck.

By the 1980s, however, Marsters’ home was set to be demolished to make room for a motorway, the letter writer said. Marsters’ spirit, already bodiless, would be homeless too.

Until Savary invited him back.

A dramatic return

Dramatic weather greeted Marsters’ return. Kennedy’s Sunny Sandy Savary describes it as a “frightful, gale-driven night.”

Bouveur remembers boats capsizing and dragging anchor out front. Savary Island is not protected from the wind across the Strait of Georgia, and summer evenings can have “not even a breath” of a breeze or whitecaps and blowing wind, she says.

The Jefferys invited their island friends over to witness Marsters’ release. A cast of neighbourhood characters gathered around: the Johnsons, the Fishers, Will Thomson and more. Brian Boag broke the wax seal on the envelope and found instructions accompanying Marsters.

The welcoming party “was the talk of the summer,” Jeffery’s son Stephen says. His father, whose other “unique projects” included a wine importing business, supplied the beverages. They lit a bed of coals across the threshold of the Princess’s Palace, and Boag read a welcome. The envelope was thrown onto the coals and, with a flash (or sparks, depending on who is recounting the story), smoke drifted through the cottage’s open French doors.

As the smoke drifted upstairs, into the house’s tallest tower, where the family stored their water tank, Bouveur heard a thump, thump, thump.

Was it the ghost, or her dad? She still wonders.

“It was very exciting,” Stephen says. “It was like something out of The Lord of the Rings.” At 12, he’d recently started being allowed to take friends fishing on the Jefferys’ aluminum boat on his own. In a few years, they would ditch candy runs to Lund for wild plans to buy booze and stash coolers in crab traps, out of sight of grown-ups. They would suntan and listen to music on the AM radio. But in ’86, Stephen still believed in magic.

After Ian Kennedy wrote about the importation in Sunny Sandy Savary, the Boags’ abode was renamed the Ghost Cottage. The story began to attract curious visitors.

‘Something odd, a little bit peculiar’

Sheldon Heppner, who painted the Ghost Cottage’s new sign, says he “thought it was fabulous” when his neighbours invited a ghost home. Heppner’s Whispering Surf gallery is located just down the road from the Ghost Cottage.

Though he hasn’t had any encounters with Marsters, Heppner thinks Brian and Rosemary Boag believed in the ghost.

“My feelings would almost be hurt if I thought they were just bullshitting me,” Heppner says.

Bouveur, who’d come along to visit Heppner, laughs. Her father’s side of the family had a few psychic connections, she says, though her mom was a bit more of a cynic.

In the 40 years since the Jeffery and Boag families invited a ghost to Savary Island, Stephen says, every now and then, there’s “something odd, a little bit peculiar.”

Bouveur’s daughter, nine-year-old Lindsey, says doors in the cottage open on their own and the radio turns itself on in the mornings before anyone’s gone downstairs.

It’s the same radio Bouveur and Stephen listened to as kids. “The sound of it is horrible, but I like it,” Bouveur says. “It just reminds me of Savary. You can’t quite get it clear, but you can still hear the music.”

On certain nights in the right conditions, Stephen adds, his family thought they could hear Marsters’ boatswain whistle. Bouveur used to lie awake listening for signs of the ghost.

“There’s haunting sounds” on Savary, Stephen says. “You hear the wolves [on Hernando Island] cry on a calm night. Their voices echo across the channel.”

When Bouveur and her daughter arrived this July for their annual visit, the radio’s batteries were worn out and the cottage’s solar panels weren’t working properly. Lindsey thinks Marsters left the radio on all winter. In the evenings this year, they’ve had to light the dining room with an old kerosene lamp — the new oil lamp from Canadian Tire wouldn’t catch.

Though Bouveur is more skeptical of spirits, she says the family has been chalking up mysteries around the cottage to Marsters’ doing.

“I like to think if it’s a ghost, then it’s a friendly ghost. No reason not to be, if you lived on Savary Island,” she says, laughing. “I think I’d be pretty happy if I got to stay here forever.”