There is an afterlife for Brennan Storr’s homage to his hometown Revelstoke, British Columbia.
The Victoria resident’s book A Strange Little Place, which was originally published in August 2016 by Llewellyn Worldwide, went out of print in April 2022.
Storr, one of the founding members of The Ghost Story Guys podcast with Ian Gibbs, had the rights returned to him and he could “do with them as he wished”.
“I sat on it for about a week,” he said, in a late October phone conversation.
He said he spoke with his new co-host, Paul Bestall about what to do. Bestall suggested Storr reach out to Shannon LeGro at Beyond the Fray publishing because she was a close friend and helped inspire Storr and Gibbs to launch Ghost Story Guys.
“Without Shannon inviting me on her show, I wouldn’t have been kicked in the butt to get out a podcast,” he recalled, during a late October phone conversation. “She said (Beyond the Fray) would love to publish it, and she asked if I wanted to do anything with it.”
Storr had written the book in the infancy of his writing career, and his focus was to readdress the tentative nature of his voice in the book, brighten up the language and perhaps add a few more stories.
The second edition’s result was a collection of 40 tales of hauntings, cryptid sightings, and UFO reports from the city that sits nestled in B.C.’s interior and on the Trans-Canada Highway.
Some were collected from archives, which were just around the corner from Storr’s home, and other tales were collected through an online website (hauntedrevelstoke.com) set up in 2020 to collect witness testimonies.
Most of the stories were fresh, and others were to set the record straight on often reported on occurrences at public places, including the Victorian-style bed and breakfast with arts and crafts accents on 1 Street West.
“The only stories that most people are aware of are Holten House, and even that there was a lot of bad information floating around,” he said. “I’m lucky enough that my apartment is a five-minute walk away from the provincial archives, so I spent a lot of time going through old newspapers, birth certificates, and death certificates and I ruled out a lot of crap when it came to Holten House.”
Forty stories is a lot for such a small location, but Revelstoke fits Destination B.C.’s ad campaign slogan, “super, natural B.C.”
Storr laughs at that but adds there are many theories as to why there’s so much activity in the community calling Rogers Pass home. He affirmed that he doesn’t have an explanation, and anyone who does know, to him, is trying to sell something.
“I genuinely don’t know,” he said. “I know that Revelstoke is crisscrossed with underground streams. Some people believe that is relevant because of the pull of water. I know that the Columbia River is believed to be a part of it.”
In his chapter on the Arrow Lakes, he posits a theory that there are legends that are set south of the city where rivers meet, and that those locations are home to alleged spiritual significance.
“It’s really hard to say,” he added. “But it’s weird. I’ll you that much. I can’t say why, but I can say it is strange.”
The second edition of A Strange Little Place is available to buy on Amazon.