Haunted by the gothic: deconstructing the new St. Mary's Anglican church, Walkerville, Ontario

Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942) was among the rare Gothicists who practiced both Gothic architecture and literature. He designed several Gothic-Revival churches and campuses across North America, and he wrote a book of Gothic ghost stories in 1895, calling the collection Black Spirits and White. Traditionally, scholars have assumed that the discourses of modern, Anglo-Gothic architecture and literature parted company after the 1830s. Scholars have based that assumption on two interrelated arguments. First, the Victorian Gothic novel evolved beyond the distinctly medieval; whereas, Victorian Gothic architects became rigorously attentive to structural and cultural principles of the Middle Ages. Second, and more importantly, even though architecture has been thematic for Gothic literature, scholars of the genre have concentrated on the domesticity of haunted houses. This has not been as problematic for scholars of Georgian Gothic architecture, where Gothic details plastered over domestic architecture; Victorian Gothic architects, however, expressed their principles most effectively through church building. The modern Gothic church, as the true house of God, is supposed to have exorcized any confusion with the domestic architecture of man, providing sanctuary from the haunting conditions of a secular, urban-industrial, modern world.Ralph Adams Cram complicates that assumption. In the darkest moments of his despair, Cram designed churches that were not resurrected Gothic beauties, but spectral remnants of a murdered past beyond his powers to avenge. His Gothic literature expressed that impotent horror, addressing several houses that modernity, having murdered the medieval past, haunted. So did the new St. Mary's Anglican Church of Walkerville, Ontario. Using the hauntological strategies of Jacques Derrida, this project deconstructs the Walkerville church to solicit the withered horror of a spectral hand haunting the Anglican house of God. Cram designed the Walkerville church for Edward Chandler Walker, de facto king of Walkerville, who was secretly dying of syphilis. Cram encrypted Edward's illness in the Walkerville church through the withered limb of a biblical leper. Edward's withered "hand" was then visualized through the spreading fingers of the letter "k," its grammatological mark silently concealed and revealed in the Gothick moniker that its structural, spatial, social, and semiotic languages declare to the modern world. Ultimately, the Walkerville church calls for a Grail Knight's arrival, one whose holy hand can end the suffering of the Fisher King, Edward Walker—and, by extension, a knight who might end the dark night of decadent modernity. Yet will the Grail Knight ever arrive?

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