Are We Scared Yet?
Insight
Are we scared yet?
Grab your Ouija boards and take a Halloween trip into the beyond through some of T.O.’s spookiest and most majestic haunts
1.Toronto Don Jail
(Gerrard and Broadview) The most notorious prison in Canada was closed in 1993, leaving a slew of horror stories boarded up inside its barred confines, including the legend of a blond-haired ghost. True believers say the spirit of the woman, who hanged herself, still inhabits the jail’s rotunda.
2. Old City Hall
(Queen and Bay) Two Star reporters eager to test the theory that Old City Hall is haunted by the ghosts of the last men condemned to hang in Canada reported “cool fogs” and “weird sounds” during a sleepover. A strange presence has also been reported by visitors in the northwest attic.
3. Church of St. Mary Magdalene
(Manning and Ulster) The Grey Lady of St. Mary Magdalene has appeared to several of the church’s choirmasters over the years. Her arrival is usually announced, they say, by a whiff of cheap perfume.
4. Hillside Church
(Old Finch and Reesor) Reports of strange noises and “screams” (peacocks from the nearby Toronto Zoo? the ghost of the young girl murdered at nearby Old Finch bridge?) continue to swirl around this 1877 church and cemetery in a remote wooded corner of the Rouge Valley that time forgot. Leaves rustle without the force of wind here.
5. Gibraltar Point Lighthouse
(Ward’s Island) The original lighthouse keeper, Radan Muller, was murdered under mysterious circumstances on a cold night in January 1815. One story says he was thrown from the top of the lighthouse and that his ghost is still searching for his body parts believed buried in the vicinity.
6. Soldier’s Memorial
(University of Toronto) Are those strange flashes of light sometimes seen through the tower’s windows an otherworldly sign of the presence of a repairman who plunged 43 metres to his death while polishing the carillon’s bells in the 1930s? Or a message from the dead soldiers memorialized below?
7. Greenbrae Circuit
(Markham and Lawrence) According to the Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society, the presence of native spirits, awakened when home construction in the mid-50s disturbed a 14th-century Iroquois burial ground, are often felt — accompanied by a mysterious smell of fish.
8. St. Lawrence Market
(Front and Jarvis) The city’s original City Hall also housed its first police station and jails, where the tortured souls of those beaten and whipped in public outside the Market are said to linger.
9. St. Michael’s Hospital
(30 Bond) Staff and former patients say Sister Vincenza, “Vinnie” to her friends, a nun who used to work at the hospital, is still doing her rounds in Ward 7b — turning lights on and off, with a black, circling chasm where her face should be. Is that a Code Blue we hear?
10. Jarvis Street Baptist Church
None of the literature we came across suggests Jarvis Street Baptist is haunted. But lore says the winged goblins adorning this church’s arches, which have to rate as the spookiest in the city, are to chase away evil spirits. Just what omens is the church hiding?
NOW | OCTOBER 25 – 31, 2007 | VOL. 27 NO. 8
http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2007-10-25/news_insight.php
Now Toronto