The Auroran
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Export date: Tue Apr 16 5:25:38 2024 / +0000 GMT

INSIDE AURORA: We're not alone


By Scott Johnston

We're not alone (mentally insert spooky X-files type music here).
There are dozens of locations called “Aurora” out there all over the world. There are towns in Suriname and South Africa, suburbs of the cities of Turin, Italy and Victoria, Australia, and even an island in the South Pacific.
And the U.S. is obviously crazy about the goddess of the dawn, as there are no less than 23 states with a municipality called “Aurora”.
But that's not the spooky part.
Local historian David Heard gives very entertaining “Spirit Walks” highlighting the ghosts and otherworldly goings on in our Town.
An example of this is Annie, the spirit that apparently resides in the basement of the Filly on Yonge Street. Not surprisingly, the cemetery is another locally favoured haunt of the supernatural.
But my research has shown that some of these other Auroras can give us a spectral run for our money.
Aurora, Illinois seems to have its share of ghosts, with a number of haunted structures.
Aurora, Nevada is an actual ghost town, which was abandoned in the late 1800s when the local gold mine closed. Today, there's not much of it left, as pieces have been carted away to use as building materials in other less dilapidated nearby settlements.
But that's just an empty town. Much more spooky are the Aurora Islands.
These three islands were discovered in the South Atlantic in 1762 by the Spanish ship named, not by any coincidence, the Aurora. They were spotted again several times over the following decades by other ships, but by 1856 they had completely vanished.
Were they swallowed up by the sea in some natural calamity like an earthquake or tidal wave? Did all the previous ships' crews partake in too much grog and hallucinate seeing them? Are they some mysterious landmass moving through time and space like the central island in the TV series “Lost”?
Who knows, but they've never been seen again. Someone with a flair for the dramatic has said this is “one of the great unsolved mysteries of the sea”.
On land, and perhaps stranger still, is the town of Aurora, Texas, where a UFO crashed in 1897. This wasn't just some meteor that was witnessed by someone who perhaps like the ships crews in the previous story had had a bit too much to drink.
Apparently a cigar-shaped craft slammed into the local judge's property where it took out the windmill and exploded into a zillion pieces.
Dozens of people came out to take a look at the crash site and grab souvenirs in the form of pieces of the ship, which were described as being made of some sort of strange metal.
Even more interesting, the pilot was recovered and described by the local military as “not of this world.” Whatever its interstellar denomination, he/she/it was even buried with full Christian rites in a local cemetery.
Granted, like the elusive Aurora Islands, no trace of either the spacecraft or its occupant has been identified in modern times, so the possibility this was hoax is pretty strong, but this story hasn't been completely disproven.
So the fact that we potentially have a ghost or two in our Town does not make us unique among our Aurora namesakes around the world.
But it does suggest that we're in good spectral company.

Feel free to e-mail Scott at:
machellscorners@gmail.com
Post date: 2017-08-01 20:05:47
Post date GMT: 2017-08-02 00:05:47

Post modified date: 2017-08-01 20:05:47
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