There is a legal question that haunts Canada's jurisprudence. The judicial spectre, if you will, was brought before the highest court in our country over one hundred years ago. The question is one that all our dear readers have pondered before: do ghosts exist?
Haunting jurisprudence
Indeed, in the case of Manitoba Free Press Co v Nagy (1907), the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) faced the issue of whether ghosts are real. The case was one of defamation. It all began in 1905 when the Manitoba Free Press published the following article in their paper:
“A NORTH END GHOST There is a ghost in the north end of the city that is causing a lot of trouble to the inhabitants. His chief haunt is in a vacant house on St. John's avenue near to Main. He appears late at night, and performs strange antics, so that timid people give the place a wide berth. A number of men have lately made a stand against ghosts in general, and at night they rendezvous in the basement and close around the haunted house to await his ghostship, but so far he still remains at large.”
Weird Weldon was thrilled to see such hard-hitting journalism from our Victorian colleagues. Few journalists have the courage to tackle matters of the supernatural, the paranormal, or the paralegal. Nevertheless, the owner of the property was not thrilled by the publication; readers ransacked her house, and a doctor rescinded his offer of purchase upon learning of the spirit.
In an action for defamation in 1907, the plaintiff had to prove (1) that the statement was false, (2) published with malice, (3) and that there were damages attributable to the statement. The Manitoba Court of Appeal made the following (in our opinion, narrow-minded) statement to proving the truth of a haunting:
"As to the first point, it is urged that the plaintiff has not proved that the article is untrue, and that the house is not haunted. It is, of course, impossible to prove such a matter by evidence in the ordinary way. The very nature of a ghost, as understood by superstitious people, is that of a phantom appearing at rare intervals. Unless, therefore, we hold that the Courts should take judicial cognizance of the fact that ghosts do not exist, the falsity of the statement could never be absolutely proved. I think that the members of the Court may, and as educated men should, assume that there are not such things as ghosts, and that therefore the statement is necessarily false."
Stare in-decisis
The Manitoba Court of Appeal was not convinced that it was necessary to disprove the haunting. Unfortunately, the only issue that the SCC addressed in their appeal was whether the plaintiff had demonstrated that the article was published with malicious intent. The conclusion to be drawn from this case is that the SCC, as they commonly do, has left a critical judicial question on the table of an appeal.
So, are ghosts real? The SCC did not come to a nationally binding conclusion. So, the answer is undecided—unless you are in Manitoba. Ghosts are definitely not real in Manitoba.
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