Sylvia Shults is the author of several books of paranormal nonfiction, including Gone on Vacation: Haunted Zoos, Museums, and Amusement Parks, the award-winning Days of the Dead: A Year of True Ghost Stories, and Grave Deeds And Dead Plots.
Sylvia sits in dark, spooky, haunted places so you don’t have to. She has spent the last twenty-five years working at a public library, slowly smuggling out enough words in her pockets week after week to build a book of her own.
She lives a short, ten-minute motorcycle ride away from the haunted asylum that features in so many of her books. She considers it the highest privilege to share the incredible, compassionate history of the Peoria State Hospital.
Festival Presentation
The title of Sylvia’s talk is “The Donnelly Murders.”
The shocking murders of the Donnellys left a stain on Canadian history that hasn’t faded, even in the present day. On the night of February 3, 1880, long-simmering resentments boiled over into violence. When the sun rose the next day, five people were dead in two houses, one of which was in flames. A mob of thirty-odd men had descended on the elderly couple, James and Johannah Donnelly. And not one of them was ever found guilty of the multiple murders, even though there were several eyewitnesses. How did this happen? We’ll take a look at the events of that night, which were decades in the making.