So for about three weeks now I’ve been saying I’m going to go looking for the old well in Bastion Square to take some pictures and just because I’ve lived here all my life and never seen it. Every weekend I’ve ended up with some reason why I haven’t gone. One weekend was Tourist in your own hometown weekend, and I was sick all the friday and stayed home so I’d enjoy the night at the hotel at least. One weekend I was running around buying a birthday present and do other errands. In the end I’ve never gotten down there for some reason or other. But this weekend I am.

Now the reason I want to go is because I like old places and things. It’s an old water well from when Fort Victoria was built. It’s also supposedly haunted, and I love ghost stories! There is supposedly a little native boys ghost that haunts the well. The story goes that a sailor was getting water from the well and dropped his kettle inside. Being too scared himself to go down and get it he called over a passing native boy and asked the boy to go down the well and get it. In the process the boy ended up falling down the well. I’m not sure if he died when he fell or was left to die, but so far as I know they never got him out. It is my favorite of the ghost stories of Victoria, which has many. I want to go see the well which is partially uncovered inside one of the buildings in Bastion Square. I’ll have to listen for the prisoner that haunts the alley the building is on… he was beaten to death by a guard in the prison that use to stand there.

I myself have never seen a ghost and don’t expect I will when I find the well, but all the same I find it fun! And I have a desire to take pictures of as much of old Victoria as I can before things start disappearing. I already regret never getting a picture of Memorial Arena which was torn down to build the awfully named Save On Food Memorial Center (affectionally known as the SOFA, the A standing for Arena). The field by my dad’s house, though not really an old part of Victoria since it’s not downtown and was just an empty field, is now being developed and I have no pictures of how I remember it as a child. So much is changing around this city that I feel the need to go out searching for the old things and documenting them through photos. And I figure it’s good practice too. I still don’t know much about my DSLR.

(One week until Great Big Sea! I’m so excited!!)