Shanon Sinn is a nonfiction and fiction writer and the author of the BC and Amazon bestseller, The Haunting of Vancouver Island. The book became an instant classic when it was first published in 2017. Sinn is currently working on a sequel to The Haunting of Vancouver Island that will navigate beyond dry land and into ocean-based ghost stories, folklore, and “sealore” of the BC coast.

We emailed him a couple weeks before Halloween in hopes of getting an interview. As the Island’s ghost guy, Shanon is busy this time of year and was kind enough to spare a moment to chat.

When we spoke, Sinn was working on a presentation for an Island-based historical society. That presentation, suitably, was about the history of Halloween on Vancouver Island. Here he is discussing that story:

Shanon: I have clippings from digitized newspapers starting from around 1864. In them Halloween is mentioned as, “people from Scotland will remember the old holiday back home.” Halloween starts appearing more often towards 1888.

It was clearly a cultural holiday. It’s Scottish and Irish, and there were so many Scots on the Island. Over time, Halloween started to become mainstream, like everybody celebrating it, not just the Scottish people. Then it started to take on some of the characteristics we recognize today.

The old stuff, that was more about pranks and apples—apples were pretty big. Candy was not really a thing. It was pretty late, around 1950, where you started seeing ads with candies with actual images of Halloween on them.

It’s interesting how it evolved. What we’ve got going on today is pretty extreme compared to how it started.

Dave: When did you start to notice the holiday become more commercialized?

Shanon: It happened gradually. In 1884 there are concerts starting to happen. And by 1888, people are being warned about their gates because people would steal gates or move them. That was a huge prank. There were some great articles in Nanaimo’s newspaper about it.

Between 1890 and 1899 was the era of pranks. [Pranksters] would tie a secondary rope to the church bell, hide, and then start to ring the church bell. Of course, people would think it was a ghost until they figured it out.

From 1900 to 1908 socials and concerts became more common throughout B.C. The ads in 1902 and 1903 for men’s clothing had Jack O’ Lanterns with top hats on them. Or whatever they called them at the time, fedoras. (They weren’t quite like the old Victorian top hats.) There are a couple of more ads in the early 1900s listing apples or postcards for sale, and stationery and stuff.

1909 was the first Halloween feature I found that was almost a full page with images of witches and all that stuff plus more clothing ads. In 1919, there was a Halloween Chiclet gum ad. It’s interesting because it says, after the party, after people have eaten their apples, and after people have socialized, pull out Chiclets. So, it’s clear there wasn’t a bunch of candy before this moment. Because it’s only an after-the-event thing they are trying to promote.

In the 1930s, there are Halloween movie ads in the Province newspaper for Dracula and Frankenstein. During the Second World War, they talk about candies not being plentiful. I looked into the back story of that, and it was the sugar rationing that was going on. Around 1948, the newspapers start to show more photographs of children in costumes.

There was a lot of cultural insensitivity, as well. For example, a 1950 clipping from Vancouver Sun talked about having a “Halloween hobo party.” It shows kids dressed up as people experiencing homelessness. It says you can have an open fire and roast stuff—that wouldn’t fly today.

Then in 1955 to 1962 Halloween becomes more commercialized with brand targeting in newspapers across the province. It went from the store itself having an ad to the actual brand. Coca-Cola having a Halloween ad, for example.

I’ve put a lot of work into this presentation. I’ll have 90 images to show them. That’s going to be the bulk of my presentation. But because people expect it, I have a couple of ghost stories to share, as well. Otherwise, people might be disappointed.

Dave: Totally, you’re Vancouver Island’s ghost-story teller in a lot of ways. In research for this interview, I came across previous interviews you’ve done. One of the things that really struck me was how you say ghost stories are teachers of history. I’d like to ask you more about that. What’s the most important revelation in your eyes that you came to understand about Vancouver Island history during the research for your book?

Shanon: Well, that’s a big question. First of all, when I was researching the White Lady of Thetis Cove, which is connected to the Four Mile Inn in Victoria, I found so many historical inaccuracies both on their website and by people writing about its history. That made me stop. It would take me a whole day to do the research for one paragraph, because I had to have the evidence to back up what I was saying.

For example, for the main family that lived there, Peter and Elizabeth Calvert, everyone said they had met on the Norman Morison, which is basically Vancouver Island’s Mayflower. This version of the story is in historical books and is very prevalent. When I looked at the records though, he wasn’t even on that ship, and she was two years old when it arrived.

That chapter set the tone for my book as I had to use sources and say things like, “according to this record,” or “according to this book.” Otherwise, I might not have even written the book this way. So, that was really eye opening. The Victoria area is riddled with these inaccuracies in ghost stories.

The second thing I was going to say about this has to do with the slandering of a man named Richard Johnson. He was an officer of the Black Pioneer Rifles, and they were discriminated against. [Johnson] spoke out against this, so he was an early civil rights advocate for Victoria. The freed slaves here were being treated like garbage. There are records of people throwing stuff at them in the theaters, and it’s just horrible to read.

So, the [Black] community was kind of forced out of Victoria. The Pioneer Rifles were disbanded, and, a few years later, [Johnson] passed away in Metchosin. He was buried at the old cemetery in Victoria.

But the story today has been changed since. He has a pseudo name. They call him Richard “Soap and Suds” Johnson. They say his apparition appears and pretends to cut his own throat. He basically chases white teenagers around. When people tell this story, it’s problematic because he seems to be amped up as scarier because he is non-white.

Also, people never talk about all the civil rights things he was doing and that he was a leader. Plus the suicide didn’t happen because they had the ceremony at the church.  But the fake story is that he killed himself because Victoria disbanded the Pioneer Rifles.

It was really eye opening and I was just like, this isn’t cool. It’s something that really stuck with me. Here, this guy lived this exemplary life and he’s just being slandered, right?

So, it’s kind of like a historical teaching. It seems wild to me there are certain events that happened, that over time would have probably been forgotten, definitely forgotten by the general public. When ghost stories are looked at more critically, it brings up all sorts of issues at the time to do with, you know, what was going on with governance of Indigenous people and non-white people and so on.

Dave: Totally. And yeah, ghost stories seem like a really good example of that happening. I think criminal stories are also a common one, where just because there is a horrendous crime involved, people remember it more. Often the stories get over sensationalized.

That brings me to something I noticed you mention in the Hepburn Stone story you wrote recently. There are writers from early BC, especially B.A. McKelvie, a prolific writer and editor in the early 20th century, that took so many leaps with the truth in his stories.

Shanon: Yeah, definitely. Another big one I’ve come across is D.H. Higgins, who was an early Colonist, editor. He wrote a couple of books like The Mystic Spring and The Passing of a Race. When you look at his stuff, it’s the same thing. He’s twisting details and making these giant leaps. I recently read a book by Peter Johnson that says [Higgins] was pretty much responsible for getting some Hesquiat Indigenous people executed because he made up these stories that they raped a shipwreck victim from the John Bright. It was horrible. Higgins was a big name in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Dave: The power these people had to sway public opinion was tremendous.

Shanon: Especially then when there was only one news source. I find a lot of them did step into the ghost story world too, like B.A. McKenzie and Higgins. Another more modern one is Robin Skelton, who was the founder of UVic’s creative writing program. He’s like super revered but some of the ghost stories he tells, again, the history is completely made up.

When he wrote about Brother XII and about their land, he said it was an Indigenous sacrifice place and that they would do body dumps of slaves there. Super, super racist, and this is the 1970s and 1980s. It’s not even that long ago.

He’s well known for one of his books, A Gathering of Ghosts. It has a chapter in it called “The Indigenous Inheritance.” He actually says that white people are the strong race. The whole chapter is about all these places that are haunted because of Indigenous history.

I’m just like, man, how is this mainstream [narrative] still being accepted today? Like I mentioned before, the problem I have is that some of the people involved in the paranormal community are actual historians, and they’re not challenging this stuff. So, they’re kind of perpetuating these myths that are harmful to whole groups of people. It’s not flattering when Indigenous people are villainized or when a haunting all of a sudden has a made up Indigenous graveyard attached to it or whatever.

Dave: Very interesting. I’m amazed so much can be gleaned from our local ghost stories—good and bad. Unfortunately, that’s about all the time we have today. Thanks so much for speaking with me!

You can read more about Shannon Sinn’s work on his blog. Keep an eye out for his forthcoming Haunting sequel. Vancouverislandhistory.com will be providing updates on its release.

Lia has a PhD in Archaeology from Simon Fraser University focused on ethical issues surrounding the display of human remains in museums.

Before that, she completed a Masters in Paleolithic archaeology, studying Stone Age hunters and gatherers in Europe.

Dave: Thanks for doing this interview, Lia. First off, what does a curator and collections manager do?

Lia: I’m responsible for the collections and the archives. So, for their safe keeping and management. I also took the lead on updating the permanent gallery exhibitions over the last year. So, getting a sense of the history of this area, and trying to distill it down to what people can actually take away from one museum visit, and where we can delve into more detail.

Also, we started working with the K’ómoks First Nation on telling their stories, which weren’t really featured in the museum in the past. And that’s an ongoing project that we’re going to continue working on with them, telling stories they want to share with the museum, in their own words.

Dave: What first sparked your interest in archeology?

Lia: I got into it by studying anthropology, which is the study of different cultures, and I became interested in the more concrete material evidence side of things. I’ve always been interested in where we come from. I started out thinking I might go into astronomy and then got into anthropology and human evolution.

From there, I wanted to end up in a museum and focused on museum ethics to get there.
I think it’s always fascinating to pull things out of the ground and the last person who touched it lived 1,300 years ago, or maybe 150,000 years ago if it was a Neanderthal. That connection between the past and present and visualizing what the world would have looked like has always been fascinating to me.

Dave: Funny that your other choice was astronomy. It’s similar in the way where you are gazing thousands of years into the past.

Lia: Yeah, kind of big, big picture questions.

Dave: What has been your favourite project at the Museum so far?

Lia: The exhibition redesign was a dream project. We got to start from scratch, but took a lot of the stories that were in the museum already and presented them in a new way. It’s really unusual for a museum to be able to redo everything at the same time so that it’s a cohesive, flowing narrative versus different exhibition topics and styles being added over the years.
The visual and object-focused exhibits, and experiential exhibitions were pretty exciting to work on.

Dave: Beyond your work at the museum, what’s the highlight of your career so far as an archeologist?

Lia: I’ve found it really rewarding working with the K’ómoks Nation. We’ve been meeting with them over the past year through the museum, and before that I was working with them through SFU. It’s really exciting to do work that a community cares about, and I think the enthusiasm is contagious on both sides of projects we do together.

Apart from that, I’ve really enjoyed excavations in Europe at Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites. That’s when Neanderthals were in Europe and modern humans first joined them in Europe. That was my favorite time period [with questions like] what happened to some of our closest cousins, the Neanderthals, when humans and Neanderthals overlapped.

Dave: What did your collaboration with SFU and K’ómoks First Nation entail?

Lia: It was a field school. So, teaching undergrad students archaeological field methods and things like how to go about setting up an archaeological excavation, following research goals set by the Nation, and ethical issues in archaeology as well. We were excavating locally and finding materials dating back to about 1,300 years ago.

Dave: On the scale of finds? Is that a big deal?

Lia: Yeah, it was really exciting. I’ve always been really into symbolic behavior and what elements of it actually remain in the archaeological record. When I was studying Paleolithic archaeology, I was studying the origins of symbolic behavior in some of the earliest cave art and figurines that have been found in Europe, around 40,000 years ago.

I’ve always found that kind of thing fascinating, then especially so in the context where there are living descendant communities, and you can see the impact your work has on the people and there’s also oral history that you can look into and historical records that give a more complete picture of what might it might mean versus artistic or spiritual depictions from 40,000 years ago.

Dave: What’s your favourite display that’s at the Cumberland Museum?

Lia: I’d say the mine right now because it’s an immersive exhibition, with sound effects and flickering lights. That was one of my favourites to do. The replica mine has been in the museum for years, but we reinterpreted the objects and presented the story in a bit of a different way, focusing on human stories, and added interactive telephones so you can listen to audio from coal miners recorded in oral history interviews.

Dave: Last question, what are your hopes for the future with your role here?

Lia: I’m really looking forward to doing more community engagement with exhibitions going forward.

We have a traveling exhibition coming to our museum from Vancouver, hopefully—it’s not confirmed quite yet. It’s an exhibition about Chinese Canadians told through food culture: about Chinese Canadian experiences, diversity of cultures, connections with others in Canada, as well as ties back home to China. I think that’s going to be really exciting. Cumberland had a large Chinese Canadian population in the past, and we’ll be talking with a committee of descendants from the local Chinatown about how to tell their stories.

I’m also excited about continuing to work with the K’ómoks Nation going forward. It’s really rewarding to be talking about these things with people who it really matters to, and you get mutually excited and even more passionate about the project.

*The Cumberland Museum and Archives is open Tuesday to Saturday 11a.m. to 4:30p.m.

Dave: You received an award of recognition from the British Columbia Historical Federation last year for your 25 years of service advocating for Nanaimo heritage and history. Congratulations!

In your acceptance speech, you said “Nanaimo has an endless supply of research subjects. Everything from coal mining and geology to labour history to class conflict and social aspirations, to its relentless reinvention of itself over time.”

What are some examples of Nanaimo reinventing itself over time?

Christine: First Nanaimo was purely resource, almost exclusively coal-mine based and everything that was built around it was to support that coal mining.

By the time that petered out, Nanaimo realised it would have to have something else as an identity. So that shifted towards the “Hub City,” a distribution centre based on the economy being driven by industries like Harmac [a paper mill].

And then it decided, like all communities did across the western world, it would be really touristy. It’s just that Nanaimo has left a bit of a wake of debris in its place.

And now I’m not exactly sure what it is. And I notice when tourists come here, they can’t get a bead on Nanaimo. It has a very intangible quality. It feels like 12 towns, not one cohesive town.

And part of that is the function of history. It was literally different towns and only got knit together fifty years ago, legally. North Field, Wellington, Chase River those were all distinct communities.

In other places that has turned out to be a good thing. You can go to New York City and there’s little Italy and Chinatown and it doesn’t feel like that’s a bad thing. It feels like it’s rich and diverse.

Here it feels like there’s something not quite right. You hear a lot of nastiness directed at various neighbourhoods [from locals] that I always find always appalling. I wasn’t used to this kind of dividing line between lower class and upper class. It’s something really out of date.

So, Nanaimo has reinvented itself, but every time it did that it seems to have been really big on just demolishing everything before it to where we have this really spotty housing stock.

The big fear for a long time was that people get off that ferry and either go straight up to Strathcona or down to Victoria. They weren’t staying here. They’ve always been kind of desperate to think of how they can make people stay instead of making the town and keeping or reinventing or reusing some of the buildings.

A place like Nelson, that people praise, has a cohesive downtown. That’s because they didn’t have any development pressures. So, in a way having nothing economically for a long time was a good thing.

As the economy boomed, Nanaimo reinvented itself to be something else. They seem to have knocked so many things down here and just demolish, demolish, demolish. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The city has a heritage register and we have to keep on updating it, not because the building went in a fire, but because we demolished it.

We would have had a much more attractive overall area if things looked lovingly preserved as opposed to just a lot of empty parking lots. It’s not very welcoming.

Nanaimo doesn’t feel hooked together. And maybe that will change in time. It maybe just hasn’t come into itself. Now I see it’s being filled in with some infill housing and that’s good because it’s better to have a good new piece of architecture sitting there than a parking lot with garbage floating around in it.

Nanaimo has this lack of self confidence. Or it doesn’t really like itself. I’ve been told many times that there’s a hangover from it’s coal mining population. You can feel some sort of discontent or indecision baked right into the landscape.

I sound really cynical, but it has these great bones. It’s a beautiful waterfront.

Dave: To me Nanaimo seems like the Gotham City of Island cities. It’s got that dark side to it.

Christine: It feels that way to me when I’m walking around, and that’s not just recent. It’s always felt that way.

Dave: I don’t see it necessarily as a bad thing. It’s just got that edge to it which would be a hard thing to exploit for tourism.

Christine: It is what it is too. It seems like it doesn’t know who it wants to be, and it never quite makes it there. Even with the best intentions and a whole whack of community people that work on these things and go to these meetings and have ideas.

Dave: It keeps the history interesting.

Christine: It does. It keeps us on our toes because we have to constantly update, change our descriptions, and keep on top of it. For me as an archivist, or anyone here who’s a historian, it’s an incredibly rich town because it does have an incredibly bizarre topography, weird places filled in, lots of 5-way stops.

The whole initial town [the hub], there’s only two of these in Canada. Guelph has one very similar and that’s it. And this was a deliberate attempt, ironically so, to make Nanaimo “city beautiful” in 1862. That’s really early, way before Vancouver was really thought of.

Of what architecture remains, it does have some really beautiful things. It’s got an interesting social and cultural history. Always had a lot of community groups and a lot of entertainment—there still is.

You could go out almost every night to some professional or amateur play or music. Politically it’s got not only some great characters like Frank May, but it has an interesting labour history similar to Cumberland in some ways, just slightly longer.

It’s got a lot for historians to draw on. You would never ever run out of topics here. And every time I think I know something I am proved wrong. People always think history is this solid thing, but history is never ever finished, ever. We keep on getting more records and think, “Oh, I got that entirely wrong.” We have to update and revise all the time.

There’s something to be said about history being so fluid. Everything we think we know will morph into something else because we learned more in the meantime.

Dave: One of those fluid history moments is research you did back in 2015 about the Black community in Wellington. Jimmy Claxton, the first black man to play organized white baseball in the 20th century, is one of the most well-known Black Canadians in history. But you always believed the Claxtons couldn’t have been the only black family living in Wellington in the late 19th century and uncovered the community of 60-70 people there.

Why does this community and Black History interest you?

Christine: I wouldn’t say that I had the interest before, except that the Wellington neighbourhood association at that time and the city and the African Heritage Society wanted to do a plaque in Wellington, and they wanted to include Jimmy Claxton.

I said, “well, hold on a second.” The city has a plaque policy where you don’t just focus on one person. You do the whole community and then you can do a sidebar about that one person.

It was a good opportunity to do a plaque about the whole Wellington community. I wanted that plaque to comply with that policy but also to do that research that is hardly ever done thoroughly.

I started to do some research and found his parents and more about them. I found some neighbours and it just grew and grew and grew until I ended up with 70 people. I’m really glad I did it.

The plaque is still not up because they can’t find exactly the right place to put it. Whatever, that’s fine. I don’t even care about the plaque anymore. I’m glad that information is out there.

It’s a way of saying there’s not just one history. There’s a million of them.

I was shocked by the response to the story. It’s a CBC podcast. I didn’t know that until way after. Obviously, there was some interest in knowing who else was there. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/hidden-history-of-african-american-settlers-in-wellington-b-c-uncovered-1.3114170]

Dave: For 2015 you were on the leading edge of this sort of discovery of minority communities.

Christine: At the time I wasn’t even really thinking about that. I was thinking, “I better have a good plaque and it better be true and it better be true to our policy,” otherwise our policy means nothing.

I had all these people contact me and it was just so amazing. There was obviously some sort of thirst for it. Who knew I was on the cutting edge? I really didn’t know.

I’m thrilled to have done it because now it stands until someone corrects that or adds to that. Then it might morph again into an even bigger community for all I know. It’s great when people can use your work as a foundation stone.

Dave: Let’s jump to 2020. In the midst of the pandemic, you said there was considerable urgency to record and preserve what was going on in Nanaimo “on what may be the most important material we, as organizations, ever collect.”

What was the response to your goal to archive Nanaimo’s pandemic experience?

Christine: People who were particularly vulnerable, I could not get them to talk. I got one lady and that was it.

I have a girlfriend who’s 39 and has two little kids and she just cried and cried and cried. She promised me she would interview again and again. She said “I can’t even talk about it. I was so scared for my little girls.”

We probably should have waited to even start it. Remember there was that little period when it was really awful then it seemed okay for while and then it went back again? We should have gone when it seemed okay.

The woman who started the hearts in the window thing, she’s from Nanaimo. I didn’t know that, and I had real trouble connecting with her.

I had two lawyers. I had some teachers. I just could never get it up to completion. And the difficulty by then, six or seven months in, I was starting to get a little depressed about it. It’s hard to put your heart in it when you’re thinking, “this sucks.” 

I have an immune compromised daughter, so I was worried about that quiet a bit too. It just didn’t gel for me, and I’m not pushy enough to insist that someone do it when I could tell they didn’t want to do it, you know?

I did also get a letter from someone who didn’t want to talk face to face. It was all maybe just all too sad at the end of the day for me.

Dave: And what are you doing with the material you did get?

Christine: I have one longer interview recorded on zoom and been asked not to release that for awhile. We will archive it with a restriction not to use until a later date. The guy who wrote the letter, I would catalogue like anything else.

We might still pick it up, but right now my first priority has been trying as best we can to serve the public in not really great circumstances.

We can’t let people in who refuse vaccinations and honestly, I find that really hard. They are long-time visitors, and I have to tell them they can’t come in. I found that really awkward and distressing. It’s been as weird for me as it has been for customers.

Yesterday on my drive home, there were two people dressed in pure white coveralls, wearing masks and they had signs that said, “Pay taxes and die.”

You see these hallmark slogans like, If we don’t know the past, we can’t plan our future. Is that true? What did we learn from racism? What did we learn from war? We just make the same mistakes, and I was starting to feel like that again.

When people started to push back [against mandates], it was really hard to come in here and think that [the work] was important, because here I am sitting on my history chicken eggs all loving and people aren’t learning a damn thing.

I had a real loss of faith of humanity over the last year of covid. I came every day, but there were some days I thought, “what was the point of me doing all this work if nobody really cared about it?” Why bring forth the Black community, just so people could throw things at them, even metaphorically through history?

Then about six months ago I decided to go back to my normal cheerful self.

Dave: What does an archivist’s work look like in the future?

Christine: The internet has fundamentally changed things. In good and bad ways.

In the bad way is that just going on google and getting one result is not doing research. You should evaluate sources on the internet in the same way as you would do if you were sitting in a library. Reading one article isn’t even research. The way people use that word is loose. 

On the other hand, if you can get original documents like census returns and stuff, it’s the best thing ever, especially during the pandemic for people who couldn’t go out but even before that.

The internet is the best research and the worst. But it has fundamentally changed things. Archives now have to have a social media presence and need to have the same care for those photos or maps that you would have as if you were handling them in person. I think archives need to plan their social media plans a lot more.

And plan for people having different expectations. In the future people will be hardwired to expect and answer very quickly from the internet. They’re not going to want some old lady fussing around trying to find something. That won’t work anymore.

They will not only expect you to find it right away, but have it sent to you right away. If you’re going to survive as an archive, you’re going to have to think differently about how you deliver records.

Dave: This has been great, Christine. Thank you for your time!

Dave: Why did you start the blog?

Dalys: I wanted to have a platform for my writing in a little bit longer format than what I felt was appropriate on Facebook. I do maintain a Van Isle History Explorer Facebook page. And shorter things, I might put them on the Facebook page, especially things that maybe I have accompanying photos for. But I wanted to have a space for longer format things that were really text driven.

Dave: Have you had good feedback from the blog?

Dalys: I’ve had some people leave comments, and it’s been really nice, especially on the piece, “The Wellingtons of Nanaimo,” about the different Wellingtons around the Nanaimo area. People seem to really like that one.

Dave: What’s “The Wellingtons of Nanaimo” piece about?

Dalys: There’s Part 1 and 2 of that blog post. And Part 1 is called “Old and New,” because there were two iterations of Wellington relatively close together. It started in one place and then the townsite really ended up developing in a second place.

And then Part 2 is “South, East, West, North, and South Again,” because there are different areas around Nanaimo called South Wellington, East Wellington, West Wellington, North Wellington, and then a separate South Wellington. So, the South Wellington of today is the second South Wellington, and that’s actually where I grew up. Which is, if you’re familiar with where the Bungee Zone and WildPlay Element Park is, that’s South Wellington.

Dave: Can you tell me about your plans for a longer project?

Dalys: Yeah, I thought it would be something for the blog, but then it evolved into something much, much longer. It’s about bottles, like soda bottles from Nanaimo. My dad’s a bottle collector and the catalyst for [starting the project] was that my husband dug up a couple of old bottles in Ladysmith, and I was kind of comparing what he had dug up to what my dad has in his collection.

And then I started researching the bottles and then it just it snowballed. I ended up putting together a little booklet. All together I think it’s about 45 pages.

Dave: What does the book cover?

Dalys: I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Rumming bottle. It’s got a crossed pick and shovel on it. It’s very iconic for Nanaimo because those are miners’ tools. W.E. Rumming had a soda company in Nanaimo. There used to be several of them. It’s just kind of something that’s gone by the wayside now with the big giants like Coca-Cola and Pepsi taking over the whole market.

But in a different time, there were more independent bottlers locally. I kind of trace back what was going on and then try to situate the different bottles through time.

Dave: Cool. Super interesting.

Dalys: I learned a lot. Bottles were originally hand-blown. Each was unique. Then they started being made by machines. And I started to learn this one is made by a machine versus this one, that’s blown in a mould.

There’s no book really like that out there for this area that I’m aware of. I think people would be interested. Rumming sold one bottle that had really iconic imagery embossed right on the bottle: the crossed pick and shovel, but you also see ones with the Bastion on it. It was iconic and had that local feel. All from a local company, and people like that stuff, right? 

And I think it’s starting to come back a little bit, like Phillips Soda Works in Victoria is now bottling soda on Vancouver Island. Now there’s all kinds of flavoured sodas and things like that. People are starting to maybe break away from the big names a little bit more, which is kind of nice. Maybe there is hope yet for independent bottlers to find a little slice of the market.

Dave: What interests you about exploring history physically?

Dalys: I’m a big reader and also enjoy reading with my kids, who are seven now. We will read some history-related books that are tied to the area and it’s really neat to go out and visit that place, especially if there’s something tangible still there to look at. It really connects you with history and helps you to visualize a little bit easier what the past was like. 

As an example, there’s a young adult novel called Trapped by Coal, which is set in Extension, and we read it with the boys and then we did kind of a two-part trip. We went to Extension and there’s a little miners’ park there. We also went to Morden Mine, where the headframe and tipple still stands.

It’s one of the only tangible things from the coal-mining era that you can visit and look at. That was really interesting, it’s really meaningful for the boys to see what we read about. 

Dave: What do you hope people take away from your blog?

Dalys: I think the biggest thing for me is the idea that if I can inspire other individuals or other families to get out there and explore Vancouver Island or Vancouver Island’s history in a way that they might not have done before, that’s great.