Stone tape theory. Maritime lore. Lighthouses. Bad decisions. And the Devil’s Staircase. Put them together and you get the dreary setting for a 100-minute documentary called Ghost Island.
For Nova Scotians along the southern shore, Shambro Island offers all of the above. It’s the staircase that draws many to the darkest depths of the Scotian Shelf, including investigators from Maritime Haunting and Paranormal Contact.
Director-producer Jeff DeEll, investigators Kim Moser and Adam Myles and intuitive medium Kelly Klassen washed ashore on the half-kilometre wide island six kilometres southeast of Sambro Harbour.
The idea for the team’s trip to Shambro Island came from novelist Chris Trites. While filming interviews for Paranormal Contact, DeEll spoke with the author about Dagger Woods, where a local legend tells of a man who relives a murder he committed.
As conversations about the paranormal often do, they drifted from the Hidey Hinder to the Devil’s Staircase on Shambro Island. The common bond was that Trites’ family once kept the lighthouse.
A feature grew from the rocky shores of DeEll’s imagination.
“There’s so much to it. It touches everybody in the community,” he said during a late November Zoom conversation. “A lot of what makes the folklore relevant to the folks that live there is because they live there.
“They live in a fishing village and when your family are fishermen, you have to live with the fact that they may go out some morning and not come back.”
That lore is what drew in Myles. Stories of Double Alex (Alexander Alexander), the soldier who gambled away his fellow soldiers’ dues and later died by suicide, cling to the coastline along with the energy of countless shipwrecks. Many vessels have run aground on the shoals, including the SS Daniel Steinman in 1884. Then there is the Devil’s Staircase itself. All of it has fed the island’s legends and settled into its stone foundation.
The Paranova Productions team, Jeff DeEll, left, Adam Myles, Kim Moser and Kelly Klassen.
“The big thing that struck us, and for me, was the staircase itself,” Myles said. “They claim it’s the devil’s entrance into this world on the island. He drags you down and takes the souls of the damned with him.”
To geology fans, the Devil’s Staircase is simply an intrusion dike, a formation where hot magma pushed through existing granite and cooled. Its darker colour creates the contrast and its stepped formation descending into the ocean adds to the island’s lurid lore.
The investigators knew little about the island before visiting. All they knew was they were getting on a boat. That approach kept mediums like Klassen and Moser on the outside.
“I was getting images in my head of a dark cloaked figure standing on the staircase. I saw him at the top of the staircase and then he disappeared,” Klassen said.
Stories shared from boat to boat helped shape what some believe became a tulpa, a thought form that grew as more people passed the legend along.
Klassen, an intuitive medium, connected with the island’s energy. Moser felt something different, a sensation tied to past lives on the island. It didn’t feel like an intelligent haunting but more of a residual one, even if one of the revenants was a little girl that Moser couldn’t shake.
“Once I arrived on the island, I couldn’t get the visual of a young girl out of my head. It was like she kept replaying a story through my mind,” Moser said. “She wanted me to see her excitement of going to the mainland.
“I also couldn’t shake an overwhelming feeling of an oppressive or darker energy. Spirit or collective energy, it was on the darker side, that’s for sure.”
Also appearing in the documentary is Paranormal Phenomena Research and Investigation president Elliott Van Dusen, who offers insight into stone tape theory, mimics and tulpas.
Ghost Island premiered November 29 and is available on its website, Paraflixx and YouTube.