Lunenburg - Castle on the Hill (Nova Scotia, Canada)

The school on the hill is called Castle on the Hill and isn't from a horror movie, but was built in the 1890s. The style is called Capenter Gothic, because Lunenburg was built of wood, not stone. This has something to do with the town's history. May I digress?

Lunenburg was founded in 1753, and the name certainly goes back to King George II of Great Britain, as he was Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Previously, the town was called Mirliguèche by the French-speaking Acadian inhabitants, which was a French spelling of a Mi'kmaq name whose meaning is no longer known. The town was settled by Protestants, mostly from the Palatinate, Württemberg, and Switzerland; according to the English article, 1,400 people, and according to the French article, 2,700 people. The original plan was to farm there, but even though the surrounding area had already been cleared by the Acadians for this purpose, success was lacking. The population, consisting of entire families, adapted and became fishermen and boatbuilders. Boatbuilding has survived to this day, but fishing is more of a part of tourism. The first houses were log cabins, but later a form of wooden construction developed, so that later the Castle on the Hill and churches were also built this way.

I mentioned horror movies above ... hmm, former students swore the school was haunted. I don't think that's surprising, since the building is surrounded by a cemetery on three sides. Here, I'm referring to Feng Shui (風水), which normally bores me with the energies that are supposed to flow there, but on the other hand, Feng Shui always ensures that buildings, for example, blend aesthetically into the landscape. This leads to a feeling of well-being in the landscape and the house. Therefore, according to Feng Shui, it would be completely unacceptable to integrate a house into the cemetery like this. The idea of hauntings in the Castle on the Hill probably has something to do with psychology on the one hand. I always find it frightening when the windows of a retirement home overlook a cemetery, although one could argue that this would fulfill a memento mori. On the other hand, we also know that sick people recover better if they look out into a park than if they look out onto a parking lot, a highway, or a cemetery. I don't have any current evidence for this, but I've read that once. Back to hauntings: a wooden house creaks. This has something to do with the fact that temperatures change very quickly, for example, when the sun is shining; and the wind has a completely different effect on a wooden house than on a stone house. It's also important that the boards be able to move against each other because of the temperature differences from summer to winter. In the past, Japanese wooden buildings were even artificially bonded with metal to reinforce this effect, so that one couldn't be attacked unexpectedly because of the alarming squeak. Today, the school has been converted into a conservatory, and I was just thinking about once hearing a beautiful recording from a historic room. The audience was completely silent, but you could hear wood cracking, and I imagine that sunlight shone in somewhere, causing the noise.

Whether haunted or not, the visit is worth it. You do have to climb the hill, though.

Links and Annotations:
I have thoroughly read and evaluated the German, English, and French Wikipedia articles.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunenburg_(Nova_Scotia) 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunenburg,_Nova_Scotia 
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunenburg_(Nouvelle-%C3%89cosse) 

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