— John Robert Colombo, Ghost Stories of Canada
Foreword
I love ghost stories. And Ottawa, my hometown, is no stranger to the paranormal.
This first thing most people think of when they picture Canada’s capital city is that it’s home to the prime minister and many of our national institutions. Walk Ottawa’s streets and you’ll come across museums, galleries, the Royal Canadian Mint, the Department of National Defence, and, of course, the Parliament Buildings. Many of these imposing gothic buildings are older than Canada itself. As calm and peaceful as the city is today, it used to be a rough and lawless community. Following construction of the Rideau Canal many of the immigrant workers from England, Ireland, Scotland, and France formed gangs in an attempt to secure work. With little police presence, these gangs were largely left to their own devices and settled disputes without the authorities getting involved. As you can imagine, many of these disputes ended with the spilling of blood. So it should come as no surprise that, although Ottawa now enjoys a reputation as a safe and quiet city, there are many restless spirits haunting its streets.
The city, with its dark history hidden around every corner, is a major source of my fascination with ghosts. During the past few years I’ve spent a great deal of time researching and writing about the country’s paranormal population for Scholastic Canada’s bestselling Haunted Canada book series. I’m an advisor, writer, and researcher for Canada Post’s new line of Haunted Canada stamps. On the day the first set of stamps were released (Friday the 13th, naturally) I appeared on CTV’s Canada AM to share the stamps’ famous ghost stories, such as the ghost bride of the Banff Springs Hotel. And if that wasn’t enough, I voluntarily checked into one of the most haunted hotels in the country, Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Olde Angel Inn, and filmed myself through the night as I searched for spirits. Needless to say, I got very little sleep.
I have no doubt this paranormal preoccupation stems from my Ottawa upbringing and, even more specifically, a class trip to one of its most haunted locations, the Ottawa Jail Hostel, formerly the Carleton County Gaol.
With multiple reports of ghost sightings and a dark reputation as a site of sinister past deeds, the jail might seem like an odd location for a fifth-grade field trip. But that’s the type of city Ottawa is — none of the adults who had a hand in the planning of the trip, from the teachers to the tour guide to the parents who happily signed the permission forms, blinked an eye about sending a group of young and impressionable children to a building with an unmarked grave that’s choked with bodies hidden beneath its parking lot.
You’ll read more about the Ottawa Jail Hostel in this book, but if you ever have the opportunity to visit — or, better yet, spend a night in the hostel — don’t hesitate. Stepping through the stone archway into the jail was something of a transcendent experience for me at the tender age of ten. The guide took a morbid pleasure in sharing tales of public executions, the horrible conditions in which the inmates lived, and the stairwell that is rumoured to have been the location of secret executions — unrecorded killings that created a surplus of bodies that needed to be hidden … so into the ground beneath the parking lot they went.
Those macabre stories weren’t necessary to conjure up ghosts in my imagination — the building is creepy enough to do that on its own. And so is much of Ottawa. Take a trip with this book as your personal guide and you’ll see what I mean.
By the time you return home, chances are you’ll never view Ottawa in the same light again.
Joel A. Sutherland
A 1971 statue of Lieutenant-Colonel John By (1779–1836), founder of Bytown, overlooks Parliament, the Rideau Canal, and the Bytown Museum from Major Hill’s Park, behind the Château Laurier.
Author’s collection.
Introduction
Ottawa is a very special place to me for numerous reasons.
As an attendee of Carleton University, Ottawa was my very first home away from home — the first city I moved to when I moved away from my parents’ home at the age of nineteen.
But, most intriguingly, it was where I discovered the special magic that can happen when ghostly tales allow you to explore and better understand the history of a place.
I’ll never forget the first ghost walk that I went on. It was the one that starts on the corner of Sparks Street and Elgin, just outside D’Arcy McGee’s Irish Pub. It was a cool, late-summer evening, and there was a sense of excitement and nervous tension in the crowd of us who huddled in a group before the woman dressed in black, flowing Victorian-style robes and holding a lantern. Most of the folks gathered that evening had never been on a ghost walk before and did not know what to expect.
I expected to have chills run up and down my spine; that, of course, happened wonderfully throughout the evening. I expected to learn some fascinating and intriguing stories about ghosts in the area, unrolled in a creative and tantalizing story arc, and I most certainly did. But something else happened that I did not at all expect. Something that forever changed my perspective about the world.
I fell in love with history.
That might seem like a mundane thing to acknowledge, but it’s pretty significant. You see, growing up, history was one of the subjects I most hated in school. Okay, I was never all that good at math, but at least I could find relevance in understanding and being able to solve particular problems. History had always seemed to be taught in such a boring and disconnected way to me. It was flat, and about boring people and boring times that seemed to have absolutely no relevance to me and my life. I suppose, given that I was a teenager during much of my first exposures to history, my mind wasn’t all that open to the things being shared.
I felt that way until I was treated to the multiple history lessons brilliantly embedded within the creepy tales shared on the ghost walk of downtown Ottawa. That night, history came alive, and the tales of ghosts were made much more fascinating because of the manner by which they drifted in, spectres born from the ripples of time, from all of the interesting things that had happened here in this city I so adore.
I didn’t just learn about ghosts that night. I learned far more about the history of the city of Ottawa, of the Parliament Buildings and the Rideau Canal, not to mention details about the culture and politics of this fine city and our great nation.
Thus, when sharing ghostly tales, I’ve found it important to reach down into the depths of history and paint the scene with elements of that rich past dripping from the brush. Understanding the times, the people, and the places as they were in the past brings a richer sense of appreciation in our present.
I have tried to do the same thing in this book, as well as my other explorations of the paranormal. In Haunted Hamilton I explored a great deal about the people and times, in particular the effect that the War of 1812 had on the city and the many ghostly tales that resulted. Spooky Sudbury reached all the way back to the formation of the Sudbury Basin and the rich nickel deposits that resulted from a meteorite crash in prehistoric times. And in Tomes of Terror there was a respect paid to the magic that happens in libraries and bookstores, places that are dedicated to books — that incredible creation that so eloquently captures all that humanity itself has to offer.
Researching and writing this book has rekindled my love and passion for a city that I spent many formative years in, and that will always hold a special place in my heart. But it has also been very much a homecoming, a return to that very first realization that ghost stories and historic tales can merge in a spectacular danse macabre.
In the spring of 2015, I returned to Ottawa with my intrepid research assistant Liz to finalize research for this book,