Angus got up and realized that he didn’t have any feelings of anxiety. He regularly meditated, so knew the feeling of inner peace. And though he wasn’t in quite the same relaxed state, he didn’t have an uneasy feeling, certainly nothing like the previous experiences and the uneasy feelings he’d felt before, upon hearing strange noises in the house. He was simply at peace with what was there. There was no associated alarming feeling upon looking at what he describes as the hologram of this elderly gentleman.
He slowly stepped toward the figure standing in the doorway. It didn’t disappear this time. He then deliberately opened his hand, because to him that was a kind of a sign of peace. “Then I slowly put my hand through the hologram,” Angus said. “And it still didn’t disappear. It wasn’t until I pulled my hand back that it disappeared.”
When his hand passed through the figure, he didn’t feel anything: no chill, no warmth — it was as if his hand was passing through a beam of light. Angus noted that his hand had become more opaque as it passed through the body of the elderly man.
Angus and Linda talked to one of the neighbours not long after. The neighbour was a retired schoolteacher who was working around the garden and was curious about the fragrances coming out of the house due to cooking, so she offered them some herbs.
Out of the blue, the retired schoolteacher asked Angus an interesting question: “Have you heard any strange noises in your house?”
Angus said, “Why do you ask?”
“Oh,” she said. “The people who had the house before you complained that they had heard very unusual noises in the house.”
Angus asked what his predecessors attributed the noise to. She said she didn’t know, but that prior to them, there had been some weird people living in the house for about a quarter of a century. That was the end of that conversation.
A few weeks after that, Angus was speaking with an older lady who lived on the other side of them. This woman needed some consolation because she’d had a disagreement with her eldest daughter. The woman was really broken-hearted, and she looked at Angus, held up her finger, and said, “When I die I’m going to come back and haunt that daughter of mine.” Then she turned to Angus and commented that he should know something about that.
“What are you talking about?” Angus asked.
She said, “Because of the house you live in. You must have heard something.”
Not long after, Angus and Linda decided that because they did a lot of travelling, they would move into a more condominium-type accommodation. Nothing else eerie had happened to them after his encounter with the spectre of the elderly man that one night, but Angus was always intrigued and wanted to find out more about the strange house in Westdale they had lived in.
One day, he went down to city hall to search the title on the house. They let him search the title all the way back to the building’s construction, though he was still unable to determine the owners at that time. But the woman who was helping him held him in a piercing look, as if she knew something that she was keeping from Angus.
At one point, she asked why Angus would want to know this information. He made up a story and explained he was doing some research on the house. But the woman wouldn’t give the name of the original owners of the house.
“Would you mind telling me why not?” Angus asked.
She said it was usually only architects and builders who needed to have that information — it was on a need-to-know basis.
So Angus never learned more about the house of strange noises and the ghostly elderly gentleman he had encountered standing in his bedroom doorway.
But what becomes even more curious isn’t what Angus heard and saw in that house. The real question is what the city worker was keeping from Angus. What even more curious secrets were kept hidden on that house on Kenmore Street?
Chapter Twenty
Haunted Pubs
"Associate a place with drinking and late-night cavorting and you’re likely to encounter more than a few unbelievable stories. Nonetheless, Hamilton has its share of haunted drinking establishments, and not just hauntings of barflies who are a constant fixture on a corner stool.
When one thinks about a pub, restaurant, or bar, one imagines a place continually filled with people from various walks of life, each carrying their own personal baggage, whether it’s a lightly packed affair or something more foreboding and ominous. These are places where the extremes of emotions are felt, where heightened senses are played upon, and where drama can unfold quickly. The two musical extremes of wanting to party like its “1999” or drowning one’s sorrows in another round of “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” often take place in this type of setting. So is it any wonder that such activity might have a ripple effect on the cosmic aura of a place?
This chapter takes a look at a few of the allegedly haunted pubs in the Hamilton area. I have just cleaned the bar in front of you; the seat is yours if you want it. Please join me as I pull back the tap and pour you a nice cold glass of speculative wonder.
A Ghost Named Harvey
A bar called The Werx on Hughson Street in Hamilton has its share of regulars who are not all that different than Harvey. Unlike most, however, this one never leaves a tip, nor does he ever make a mess. You see, Harvey is a ghost.
Both customers and staff have seen or felt him; but they’re okay with it. In fact, Harvey is a friendly and well-accepted resident ghost. The other patrons of the bar are tolerant of Harvey — perhaps because they know what it’s like to be shunned for being different. You see, The Werx is a gay bar. Apart from a dining room, bar, and dance floor, it has a leather bar in the basement and holds leather and fetish parties once a month. The customers and staff are an outgoing, friendly, and accepting group — open-minded and happy to accept people for who and what they are.[1]
Harvey is, thus, just another visitor to their world, one who looks on from the great beyond and rarely ever causes any sort of fuss. He just shows up from time to time. Occasionally, he puts a scare into people, but mostly he just gets along and watches.
Harvey is regularly seen by customers and staff near the back of the bar and near the women’s washrooms. Sometimes his presence is merely felt in terms of an inexplicable cold brush of something moving past. Other times he has even been seen looking in a window from the alley. Of course, the strange thing about that is, based upon the height of the window, Harvey would either have had to have been standing on a step-ladder or else floating three or four feet off of the alley floor.[2]
Most vote for the latter of the two.
Staff have had encounters with Harvey where he has actually tried to manipulate objects. Harvey has been known to start up and stop the vacuum cleaner as if playing with it and testing it out. He has also been known to turn lights back on after the bar manager completes the round of turning off all the lights at the end of a night. At times, after knowing for sure that he had turned all the lights off, manager Mike Panopolous has gone back, having forgotten something, to see that the lights were back on again.[3]
Panopolous has explained that Harvey is likely the ghost of a custodian who lived in an apartment in the building where The Werx is, but who died in a fire in the back. The building at 121 Hughson, which took on various different forms over the years, housed charities, fraternities, dancers, insurance agents, and photographers. It was even once a spice factory and served as a church. In 1980 it became a bar, and in 2002, The Werx opened.[4]
And