calgaryherald - According to Chip Coffey, the Banff Springs Hotel is a lively place for the dead.While Fairmont may not be putting this in its brochures, it seems those long held theories that the 123-year-old historical building is a hotbed for ghostly activities are true.
Coffey, the bespectacled medium and psychic from A&E shows Paranormal State and Psychic Kids, was in the hotel for only 15 minutes Sunday afternoon when he claims to have sensed no less than three ghosts milling about amid the chattering mob of movers, shakers and wannabes attending the Banff World Television Festival.
One was a woman, perhaps the famous bride who died on her wedding day and is said to haunt one of the hotel's many stairwells. Her name, Coffey has determined, was Christina and she was pregnant when she died.
"Not one life but two were lost at that time," said Coffey, in an interview with the Herald in the lobby of the Fairmont Banff Hotel. "With me being here, she felt very comfortable is saying, 'It's not a stigma anymore, so I will let you know I was pregnant. And the only two people who knew at the time was my mother and my husband-to-be.'
He also saw a man who he believes may have been Sam McAuley, the devoted bellman whose ghostly figure is said to haunt the hotel on a regular basis since his death in the 1970s.
The third was a little boy named Jack. He just wanted to hang.
"He's been around and pretty active and hanging in my room," says Coffey on Monday afternoon. "I do a show called Psychic Kids and I work with a lot of children. Children in particular feel comfortable, in spirit, to be chatting with me. The boy identified himself as Jack -- he's blond, he's about six to nine years old. He showed up in my room first and came through last night on the ghost walk."
Coffey, who was at the Banff World Television Festival for a panel discussion about paranormal TV shows, was enlisted to lead a private ghost walk around the premises alongside some VIPs. That's when he met Christina again, and Sam. The hotel's famous "hidden room" on the eighth floor is apparently haunted by ghosts of sheepish workers, who hang around as a sort of penance for mistakes in construction that required the room to be hidden in the first place. During his short stay in Banff, lights have mysteriously turned on in his hotel room, his computer rebooted by itself and his tour manager claimed some sort of presence was tapping him on the shoulder Sunday night.
"There's history," says Coffey about the hotel. "There's a lot of people here celebrating good times, maybe some bad times. There's people who are here with a lot of emotional events occurring. There were a lot of things that were heightened emotional events. Plus all the people here are very excited to be here. It's very open and your people are networking and having a good time and they're open and expressive emotionally. That really does attract energy, also. Our heightened excitement might heighten their excitement for trying to communicate."
The great-grandson of Native American medicine woman Minnie Sue Morrow Foster, the 55-year-old New York native says he has always been psychic, but admits his peculiar talent for having dead people talk to him was something he discovered by accident 10 years ago when a co-worker's dead brother started chatting him up in Atlanta, Georgia. By 2007, he was called to take part in A&E's Paranormal State, then called Paranormal U. He would later appear in Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal, making him one of the more recognizable faces in North America's fascination with all-things creepy.
Whether it be Ghost Hunters, Ghost Trackers or the History Television's Nostradamus Effect, television is cashing in on a renewed interest in the unexplained.
"There's a worldwide interest in spiritual and paranormal topics," Coffey says. "From the aspect of people looking for valid answers about the afterlife: Is it real? Does it exist? Within history, there have been these resurgences like the whole spiritualist movement in the late 1800s. Sometimes there is some correlation to world events. After 9/11 people, in my country, we were talking about spirituality and searching for answers. I think tough times can lead people to seek answers. We seek out faith and spirituality in tough times, and forget about our faith and spirituality when things are going well."
Of course, Coffey acknowledges there is always going to be some skepticism about his activities, not only as to whether the powers he claims to have are actually real but also about how he has managed to turn them into a rather lucrative business for himself.
But Coffey himself is arguably a skeptic, at least when it comes to showing reverence to some of the end-of-the-world scenarios that are linked to the paranormal or spiritual worlds.
The Mayan calendar, for instance, supposedly suggests that the world will end in Dec. 21, 2012, a prediction that has sounded alarms in some circles. Coffey, for one, doesn't buy it.
"People ask me what I'm going to be doing on that day," he says. "I'm going to be doing light Christmas shopping. I think the Mayans got tired and said, 'We've been doing this calendar for six weeks now. Let's stop. Let's go sacrifice somebody. Let's have a feast and sacrifice a virgin. Anything other than this calendar. I'm tired of this.'
"That's my crazy sense of humour that often comes out when I talk about topics," he explains. "I think we take some of this stuff so seriously."
NOTE: For those who are fans of Chip Coffey, I received a tweet from Chip last evening...he is in the Tampa area filming the 1st episode of 'Psychic Kids' third season...Lon
Psychic Discovers Hotel's Spiritual Side
