Both patrons and staff have shared stories of being shoved or pushed by unseen hands, and some have reportedly fallen sideways over the banister. In each case, the person who fell claimed the sensation of unseen hands pushing them. Members of the Haunted Walk of Ottawa shared that a woman who had been on one of their tours claimed that exact thing happened to her before the tour guide had a chance to share any stories about the building. The unseen presence responsible for these actions has also knocked trays mysteriously out of the staff’s hands.
Three Haunted Walk tour guides on Elgin Street, uphill from where they share tales of the Grant House.
Courtesy of Haunted Walks Inc.
Restaurant staff have also reported several occasions when, after they had closed for the night, they heard the sound of laughter echoing in from the empty piano bar, or their name being called out when there was nobody else around.
There was one particular table on the second floor that seemed prone to icy cold breezes, and objects on the table were reported to have moved entirely of their own volition. Cliff Scott, the author of Ottawa Stories: Trials & Triumphs in Bytown History, mustered the courage to sit there with his wife for dinner one evening. Scott reported feeling nothing other than a little bit of trepidation, as well as the eyes of the other patrons, who were likely all there waiting to witness something supernatural.
The second floor seems to be at the centre of the ghostly tales. And whispers are still shared about the spectral image of an elderly man seen sitting at a second-floor window well after the restaurant was closed and all staff had gone home.
Among the most eerie of incidents to have been reported at 150 Elgin when it was Friday’s Roast Beef House are the stories of staff and guests, who described hearing the odd sound of some unseen person breathing heavily right next to them. The combination of wheezing and hacking cough is a consistent description, which ties in quite interestingly to the fact that Sir James Alexander Grant had been a sufferer of severe asthma for most of his life.
Stephen Beckta, the aforementioned restaurateur and owner of Beckta Dining & Wine, has begun the latest chapter of this historic building on the solid footing of creating something new and unique while taking great care to both respect and preserve history. “This is a legacy project that will outlive us by far,” Beckta said in an interview with the Ottawa Citizen.
Beckta and Peter Weiss, project manager for PCL Construction Company, put together a time capsule, which includes a history of the legacy building, an outline of the design of the twenty-three-storey tower that now adjoins the building, an historic letter from 1932 that was found in the home, and one of the crested Grant-family glasses that Beckta drank champagne out of while celebrating the pre-opening of his gorgeous new restaurant. The capsule is sealed in a back wall of the building with a glass plaque, visible from the Winter Garden atrium that connects the historic building to the newly constructed tower. Etched on the glass is a line from the late Bob Marley: “In this great future you can’t forget your past.”
“I told Dr. Grant that we were going to take good care of his house,” Stephen Beckta said in an interview with Danika Grenier, digital content manager of Ottawa Tourism. “And ever since then, everything seems to have been going swimmingly. So if there is a ghost, he likes us in this space.”
The Normal School Ghost
One security guard working in a city hall building on Elgin and Lisgar was not able to return to work due to the debilitating nightmares he experienced and another security guard refused to work the night shift after each experienced a terrifying run-in with the building’s ghost.
And the ghost, who seems to think the building is still a school, rather than the location that houses Ottawa’s mayor, appears to be there to teach a thing or two to the local municipal leaders.
The Gothic Revival Heritage Building at 195 Elgin, which is now a part of Ottawa City Hall, was originally built in 1875 as Ottawa Normal School, part of Ontario’s normal school system of teacher’s colleges that had been set up by Egerton Ryerson (the same Ryerson that the Toronto University is named after).
In 1953 the school was renamed the Ottawa Teacher’s College. In 1974, after it was decided that Ontario’s teacher’s colleges would merge into the university systems, the college joined the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa, and the building was sold to the federal government in 1978.
The Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton purchased the building in 1986, and it was renamed the Heritage Building, which houses the mayor’s office.
When the building was a teacher’s college, the front section of the building was where the teachers went to class and took courses, but farther back down a long hallway was a “model school” where the student teachers taught real students in an actual classroom setting.
Ottawa Normal School was designed by architect W.R. Strickland and built by J. Forin. Designated as a national historic site in 1974, the building is recognized as a significant example of Gothic revival architecture in Canada.
James William Topley, 1893.
One of the earliest instructors at the school was a woman by the name of Eliza Bolton, who taught some of the very first kindergarten teachers from the 1880s. Bolton retired in 1917, but not before she was responsible for making a change to the school policy that required a single teacher to have to supervise two classrooms. This new rule meant that teachers would have to constantly move back and forth between two different classrooms.
Some believe that Bolton’s change to the system might be what prompts her ghost to continue to move quickly about the building, between various rooms, opening and closing doors.
In 1998 a security guard working the night shift alone in the Heritage Building spotted her down the end of a hallway that runs the length of the old model school. Wearing old-fashioned clothing, the woman was coming out of one of the classrooms and headed for the classroom directly across the hall. The guard called out to her, asking her who she was, and she stopped, turned toward him, and looked him straight in the eye. Then she quickly turned around and headed back into the room she had just left.
The guard ran after her, but when he entered the room he found it completely empty — the mysterious woman had disappeared. There were no other exits from the classroom other than the doorway he had just passed through. He left the classroom confused and wondering if he had been seeing things.
Then, later on during his shift, when he passed a display case in the lobby, he spied a photograph from the old teacher’s college and recognized the face and style of the woman he had seen disappear into the classroom earlier that evening.
This guard refused to ever work the night shift alone again.
In the past several years, security guards have had so many encounters with a ghost that they believe to be the spirit of Eliza Bolton that they have started to tease and play practical jokes on one another. They have been known to hide their walkie-talkies in various spots in the building, setting them off in order to scare rookie guards, and also to place a life-sized cut-out of a woman dressed in old fashioned clothing in various dark corners and doorways in order to surprise or startle one another.
But not every startling incident is caused by fellow employees.
On a particularly hot evening in July of 2001, a guard nearing the end of his shift was walking through his final rounds and headed up to walk through the attic. When he arrived at the attic he immediately felt that something was wrong. During the hot summer months the attic was normally stiflingly hot, and on a night such as that one it should have been almost unbearably stuffy and hot. But he found the attic was extremely cold — startlingly cold. As he walked through