April ghost – the sad story of Doris Gravlin

The story I’m about to tell you is that of a young woman, Doris Gravlin, whose spirit appears at the Victoria Golf Club in Victoria, Canada. The club, founded in 1893, sits on a rocky point overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, in the municipality of Oak Bay.

The story

Doris Thomson was born in 1906 in Blackburn, Lancashire, and emigrated to Canada as a child with her parents. Like her mother, who worked at a private hospital, she became a nurse, and in 1930 she married Victor Gravlin, a sports reporter for the local Colonist newspaper. They had a child.

Unfortunately, Victor fell victim to alcoholism and in 1934 the couple separated. Doris went to work as a private nurse for a wealthy lady in Oak Bay.

Despite the separation the two still cared for each other and Victor often tried to reconcile. In mid-September 1936 he delivered a letter to Doris, whose contents were never known: it probably asked her to meet him to talk about their relationship.

On the evening of 22 September, at about 7:45 pm, Doris went out for a walk, and shortly after Victor left his parents’ house. A witness saw them together on Runnymede Avenue, near the golf course. After that, nobody ever saw them alive again.

The parents of both alerted the police, who immediately began searching, helped by some volunteers.

Five days later Doris’s body was found by a caddy, John Johnson, who was looking for a ball in the grass along the shore near the seventh hole. She showed signs of beating and strangulation, was barefoot and lay next to a large stick.

Victor’s body was found exactly four weeks later in the sea, caught in kelp off the golf course, with Doris’s shoes still in his coat pockets. The inquest closed the case as a murder-suicide.

Victor had probably failed to convince Doris to get back together and, in a fit of madness, killed her and then took his own life.

The ghost

By the following spring many people claimed to have seen a woman by the sea who vanished after a few moments.

Doris appears as a calm, quiet figure dressed in white, looking sadly out to sea; she is seen far more clearly by day than at night, and is easiest to spot in the morning.

There is no precise place or time when she appears, but she seems to prefer spring, hence her nickname, “the April ghost”. In the 1960s sightings increased, especially by young people who went to the golf course at night just to see her, and some describe sudden drops in temperature and a cold wind accompanying her appearance.

Historian John Adams, who has run ghost tours in Victoria since 1970, considers her the most frequently seen ghost in the area. Tours don’t go onto the course, because of the danger of flying golf balls, but drive along the coastal road telling her story.

Sources

• British Columbia Golf, Canada’s Most Haunted Golf Clubs
• Oak Bay News, Ghost at Victoria Golf Club
• Occult World, Doris Gravlin
• BC Living, Victoria’s Most Haunted Places