From the werewolf eating first years in the magic forest, to the tiny minotaur goring anyone who gets close to the top of Buchanan Tower, there are plenty of supernatural happenings on campus. But this case was special. It was an old one — Vanier residents have been reporting drumbeats and ghostly howls from the Fraser River parkade for years now.
No discovery is born of comfort — I grabbed my aural spectrometer (my phone with a recording app installed, for the layman) and my proton pack (notebook), and made for the parkade in search of banshees.
When I got there, a loud rattle echoing off the concrete led me to Jack Warner, Alex Ostroushko and Jerome Cohen drumming away on the top of an old traffic divider. They told me the noise is from their crew banging drums and screaming, not an overzealous poltergeist.
“[Cry Club] started with an obscure but intense feeling,” Cohen said.
“[Back in 2021] I asked my roommate and only like-minded friend in the city of Vancouver at the time, Kit [Baronas], if [we] could just bring the guitar, an amplifier and a drum [and play together].”
That was the start of UBC Cry Club — and the phantoms of the parkade.
The club’s name is a little misleading — if you come around, you’re more likely to be screaming, howling or even smashing old cymbals and water-cooler jugs. But the name has significance for Cohen and his comrades.
“The sound of crying is … ugly and unpleasant,” he said. “And I know that the sound we make here can be unpleasant and loud, and unbearable for some, but it’s crying … We all need to cry sometimes.”
Things weren’t easy in the beginning. Baronas and Cohen used to haul their instruments on the bus from Kerrisdale every Wednesday to make music for just themselves and a few friends.
“In our first two years we had no publicity,” said Cohen. “We kind of did that intentionally.”
Soon, though, people started taking notice. A Vanier resident heard their playing and offered to store the gear in his room. Those months also brought people like Warner, who bounded back up the stairs just in time to recount his first experience with Cry Club.
"You had a hospital gown on at some point," Warner said as he pointed at Cohen. "Everyone was wearing masks and wigs, and I actually thought you were being genuine and that I’d intruded on something.” Warner had wandered into the parkade out of curiosity, but he stuck around. Now he’s one of the club’s longest running members.
Warner feels the kinship created by this natural discovery process was important to the club’s burgeoning identity. “The core of that early time was people just coming by and hearing the sound,” he said. “People who would come look at us and not know what to think … then there would be the occasional person [who’d] just join in.”
These days, though, the club is more well known on campus. It has a sizeable social media following bolstered by consistent coverage from Alexander "Sasha" Slavin of YVR Underground (@yvrunderground on Instagram), a notable documentor of Vancouver’s live music scene. He’s a regular at Cry Club meetings along with his tiny stud-collared punk cat. For better and for worse, Cry Club has an audience now.
“It’s very sensitive,” Cohen said about the club’s growing visibility. “Because I know what we have here is so precious, I would never put it at risk of becoming something it’s not meant for. But right now, I think it’s safe … and it’s still free.”
While the club may be growing in publicity (of which this article is a part), its core members aren’t worried about it losing that fundamental spark.
At this point, people were beginning to show up ready to make some noise, so I stowed my phone and notebook in favor of a ball-peen hammer and a cracked cymbal and, along with some truly talented musicians holding everything together, made that parkade shake with noise. Before the night was through, my voice was fried and my mind was quiet.
So if you hear a wailing and the crash of drums one Wednesday night while strolling down Marine Drive under a clear autumn sky, don’t be afraid! That’s the UBC Cry Club, and they’d love to have you join them. If you hear it behind the hydroponics building on a Friday, you should probably run. We don’t know what that is yet, but I’d imagine it’s not great.