Haunted Case File: Baillie House
Baillie House offers a buffet of ghostly activities. But I often wonder if its ghosts and the haunting itself are triggered more so by the donated items than any of the previous owners. Get the scoop after the jump.
Watch Baillie House Paranormal Documentary
At A Glance
Location: Merritt, British Columbia, Canada
Built: 1913
Case type: Ongoing, multi-investigation haunting case
Reported hotspots: The upstairs hallway and staircase; the bedroom/sewing room; the basement; the first and second floors … it’s the entire house
Primary reports: Footsteps, a man carrying a dog, a woman on the stairs, a phantom doorbell, EVPs, knocks, shadow figures, cold spots, and equipment responses
Case status: Open. Merle and I filmed several unusual events, including EVPs, a hallway tripwire activation, an Onvoy tap, a Flux activation in the basement, and an SLS Kinect figure following Merle.
The People Who Lived Here
The City of Merritt dates the Baillie House to 1913, when Cosam Bigney built it during Merritt’s early growth. The house’s own history says Bigney built it for himself and a mail-order bride. She reportedly fell in love with another man on the voyage to Canada and never made it to Merritt. That’s a lonely bit of local history, whether or not you believe the house remembers Cosam’s sadness.
Bigney lived there with his business partner, Emsley Weatherbie. The two also ran a soda-pop bottling business on the property, serving local coal miners and lumber workers. After Bigney died, his nephew cared for the property. Unpaid taxes eventually brought it into the city’s hands.
In 1938, Melville C. Baillie bought the property and moved in with his wife and their six children. Melville worked as a blacksmith. His son, Melville Jr., inherited the house and lived there until 1990. The house nearly became a parking lot in the 1990s, but Merritt residents pushed to preserve it. Today, it’s a heritage site and visitor information centre.
One detail is still on my research list. Our documentary gives Bigney’s death as 1933 and Weatherbie’s as 1935. The house history page groups both men’s deaths under 1933. I’ll check that against a stronger historical record before I settle the dates.
The Stories People Tell
One of the oldest stories in our documentary goes back to a 1955 New Year’s Eve party. Children were put to bed upstairs. They heard someone walking in the hall and looked out to see a man carrying a dog. When they told the adults, they were told it was Mr. Bigney, who had been dead for about 25 years.
There’s a version of that story I keep picturing: kids peering into a dark hallway while the party carries on downstairs. The story doesn’t prove who, or what, they saw. But it tells us that people were already connecting the house with Bigney decades after his death.
Sandy, who appears in our documentary, also remembers hearing heavy footsteps upstairs while working on the books. She says the sounds stopped when she went to investigate. Later, she heard them again: slow, loud steps, like high heels or cowboy boots pacing back and forth.
Those reports fit a larger local pattern. A 2011 Merritt Herald story describes reports of upstairs footsteps, a woman moving on the staircase, and visitors who felt a presence in the house. The story locals seemed to repeat most was the phantom doorbell. The normal bell played a “ding dong,” but the unexplained ring was said to sound like Westminster chimes.
The Herald’s reporter and a Shaw TV colleague spent a night in the house to see what they could capture. Their night was mostly quiet. They heard a kitchen creak after challenging the ghosts to make a noise, but the blocks they’d placed upstairs stayed put. Their audio and video review turned up only faint bumps and creaks. I like that part of the story. Some nights the house seems to have a lot to say. Other nights, it lets you sit there listening to the old boards.
Staff have shared their own unsettling moments. In 2016, property manager Sandy Curnow told the Merritt Herald that visitors had reported seeing people she couldn’t see. She’d heard the stairs creak and had heard stories of doors slamming or a doorknob turning with no one on the other side. Even after years at the house, she wasn’t sure what to make of it.
Other Investigations
The Baillie House has drawn paranormal teams for years. A 2011 newspaper account says BC Spirits investigated overnight in 2008, using equipment and experiments that a later reporter tried to recreate. The team reportedly came away with impressions and spirit names, though those names didn’t match the historical records.
The Interior Paranormal Society also investigated the house. In 2017, its president said the team had captured a few EVPs during visits that began in 2016. The newspaper didn’t publish the clips, so I’m treating that as a record of the claim, not a chance to judge the audio myself.
Another investigation, We Want to Believe, reported knocks, EVPs, and a possible shadow figure in the basement. The investigator behind the show said he didn’t know whether the evidence was paranormal. The Baillie House’s own paranormal page also shows a figure photographed at a bedroom window and describes a powerful cold draft felt in the basement by the Paranormal Road Trippers. The page doesn’t give enough detail to pin down when the photo was taken or what the camera captured, but the stories add another layer to the house’s reputation.
Ghost Hunting with Merle
Merle and I went in with a camera, recording gear, and a plan to see what the house might give us. I spent much of the investigation filming him. That put me in a useful spot: I could watch the room, keep track of what the equipment was doing, and capture the moments we’d want to review later.
We recorded EVPs on the first floor, second floor, and in the basement. We also filmed something moving down a hallway and triggering a tripwire. In the bedroom, we recorded a tap on the Onvoy. In the basement, something seemed to move around us and set off the Flux.
The top-floor hallway gave us a moment I won’t forget. During an SLS Kinect session, something appeared to follow Merle down the hall. SLS figures can be jumpy, so I want to review the footage carefully. Still, watching that shape move in relation to Merle is the kind of thing that makes you take another look at the dark end of the hallway before you pack up.
I also ran an Estes method session there while Merle was outside. That session produced the EVP about the basement. Sitting alone with the headphones on, cut off from the room and everyone in it, is a strange way to investigate. You’re listening for words, but you’re also listening to the house itself—the little sounds around you, the pauses, the feeling of being alone in a place where people have spent decades reporting footsteps.
Our documentary shows the investigation and the captured moments. The transcript can help us find them, but the recordings are where I want to spend the real review time. I want to hear each EVP in context, see what was happening before the tripwire and Flux activations, and watch the full SLS footage. The mystery is in those details.
What Keeps Me Curious
The Baillie House has a long history, a handful of stories that have been repeated for years, and a growing collection of investigations. I don’t think every creak is a ghost. I also don’t think the quieter nights erase what other people say they experienced.
For me, the most intriguing part is how the reports overlap. Footsteps recur in the upstairs hall. People describe figures on the stairs or near a bedroom window. The doorbell story keeps showing up. Then Merle and I capture our own collection of sounds, taps, and device activations across several floors.
That doesn’t answer the big question. It gives me more to chase.
I’m saving my theory about why the house seems so haunted for later. First, I want to tighten up the history, review the recordings, and see which parts of the case hold together when I follow them back through the files. A house this old has a lot of stories. I’m in no hurry to close the case.
Sources
City of Merritt: History of the Nicola Valley — Baillie House’s 1913 construction and its place in Merritt’s history.
Baillie House: History — Bigney, Weatherbie, and Baillie family history; the house’s preservation.
Baillie House: Paranormal — The woman-in-the-window image and the reported basement cold spot.
Merritt Herald: “Midnight at the Baillie House” — Local reports of footsteps, a woman on the stairs, the phantom doorbell, and a reporter’s overnight investigation.
Merritt Herald: “TV crew coming to Merritt to find out if Baillie House really is haunted” — Staff and visitor reports, plus the planned Chronicles of the Unknown investigation.
Merritt Herald: “Haunted highlights at the Baillie House” — The Interior Paranormal Society’s visits and reported EVPs.
JoBlo: We Want to Believe investigation at Baillie House — A summary of reported knocks, EVPs, and a possible basement shadow figure.
Baillie House documentary and its transcript — The 1955 story, the investigation footage, and the recorded events.
Have you had a ghostly experience at the Baillie House? If so, tell me about it in the comments. Thanks for reading Ghostly Activities. Much appreciated and take care!
