Haunted Canada 8 Page 4

  THE HEADLESS GHOST

  Woodridge, Manitoba

  Tucked away in the woods, one hour southeast of Winnipeg, is the town of Woodridge. People visit to cottage and camp, enjoying the isolation and natural beauty of the area. A crisscrossing network of blueberry trails snakes through the surrounding forests, perfect for all-terrain vehicles in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter. The town was established when the Canadian National Railway (CN) built tracks through the area in the early 1900s, and a ghost was created when one of the townsfolk lost his head on the tracks in the 1920s.

  A CN maintenance worker and his family were the first people to make the ghost’s grim acquaintance. They lived in a company-supplied house near the tracks just outside town, beside an old, abandoned church and a small, neglected cemetery. Late at night, after the worker and his family had gone upstairs to sleep, they always heard the dull clomp-clomp-clomp of a man’s feet walking to and fro on the main floor. Over time the nighttime noises grew louder and more unnerving, as the ghost began making a racket, hammering boards and rattling chains. This happened every single night, but the source of the sounds was never spotted.

  The worker’s son was the first member of the family to see anything unusual. He caught sight of one of his marbles shaking in its jar as if from a light tremor in the ground. And then, without warning, the marble flew out of the jar and across the room; the boy felt like his heart might follow suit and fly out of his mouth to land beside the marble that was skittering across the floor. Before he could scream or run out of the room, however, the rest of his marbles soared out of the jar, crashed on the floor, and streaked in countless different directions.

  On a cold winter night, the boy’s mother was outside taking their clothes off the line when she looked up and saw a man walk past silently. He held an old-fashioned oil lantern in front of his face as he trudged toward the remains of the nearby church, then entered it. He did not pause to greet the woman. He did not even seem to be aware of her presence, which made her feel uncomfortable and distressed. She ran inside and told her husband about the stranger. He immediately raced to the church to investigate but found it to be empty. Not only that, but other than his own tracks, there weren’t any footprints in the snow anywhere around the old building — heading neither into it nor out.

  Over the years many hunters and outdoor enthusiasts have looked behind them to see the ghost following their path. Dogs bred to hunt have run away to hide, and the canines can hardly be blamed. When the ghost raises his lantern, the light sometimes reveals a full man, but other times it reveals two legs, two arms and a torso … but no head.

  When asked who the ghost might be and how he lost his head, locals tell variations of the same story. The most commonly accepted one is that he was a well-known Woodridge man named Joe, who lived alone in the woods and made a weekly pilgrimage into town to meet his friends at the local pub. One night in the pub, tall tales were told, songs were sung, drinks were drunk and time passed quickly. Old Joe lit his kerosene lamp and hobbled back into the night, stumbling along the tracks to his house.

  The next morning, the townsfolk made a gruesome discovery. Joe’s body was lying beside the train tracks, but his head was not. It was widely accepted that he had fallen on the tracks as a train passed, severing his head clean off his shoulders. Joe’s head was never discovered, likely dragged off into the bush by a wild animal.

  An interesting thing has happened to Joe’s ghost since the mid-1900s. He’s still seen in the woods surrounding Woodridge, particularly near the train tracks. But he no longer appears in human form. Instead people spot a glowing orb that hovers two metres off the forest floor and glides effortlessly through trees, sometimes accompanied by unearthly groans and moans. The light has been known to change colour, size and brightness — one woman said it was bright enough to blind her if she had mistakenly looked directly at it.

  Journalist Jasmine Van Gerwen recalls her grandfather’s account of spotting the ghostly light as it approached him near the outskirts of town. It stopped when it was less than two metres away before continuing on its way and disappearing in the distance.

  In 1975 local resident Gary Auch was parked in the area when he happened to look in his rear-view mirror and spot the light moving up and down above his trunk.

  The most commonly held belief is that the light is Joe’s kerosene lamp, as if his body has faded away but the light source he carried on the night he met a most unfortunate fate can never be snuffed out. However, there is another theory, and it’s much grislier. A small group of locals, including Van Gerwen’s grandfather, believe the orb is Joe’s decapitated head, doomed to an eternity of floating through the woods, always in search of the body that was removed from the scene of his death nearly a century ago.

  CHILD’S PLAY

  Regina, Saskatchewan

  Lowell’s legs were falling asleep and his back ached. He was hiding in the bottom of a dusty cupboard that had sat unused in a corner of the farmhouse’s basement for a long time. It was pitch-black in the cupboard and as hot as an oven. Sweat ran down his body in thick rivulets. A spider crawled up his bare leg, but Lowell ignored it, refusing to move a muscle or make a sound. He couldn’t hear what was happening on the other side of the cupboard doors.

  By now his brother and sister were probably growing frustrated at not being able to find Lowell. They were playing hide-and-seek during a summer vacation spent at their grandparents’ farmhouse, and nine-year-old Lowell was just small enough to squeeze into the cupboard. He’d been waiting silently for a very long time. And although he couldn’t see or hear his siblings, he assumed they’d probably given up looking for him by now.

  Lowell pushed on the doors. They didn’t budge. He pushed a little harder. They still didn’t open. He rammed his shoulder against the wood, but nothing happened. That’s when he started to panic. He kicked and pounded and yelled and screamed as loud as he could manage.

  But then he heard something that made him quiet down in a hurry. It was a man’s voice, and he sounded so close that it seemed like he was speaking directly inside Lowell’s head.

  “You’re trapped,” the unseen man said in a tone that was laced with malice. “Let’s see how you like hiding now.”

  Terror consumed Lowell. Not only did he resume screaming and pounding against the doors with his hands and feet, he started ramming his head against the wood in a mad attempt to escape. Suddenly the doors opened and he tumbled out of the cupboard and into the cool air of the basement. He landed on the dirty floor at his siblings’ feet. They both looked down at Lowell in confusion.

  His sister asked how he had gotten himself into the cupboard. After Lowell explained that he had squeezed inside, contorted his body to fit and then closed the doors with his fingernails, his sister shook her head. She wasn’t surprised that he had been able to fit inside the cupboard; she was in shock that he had somehow managed to push a heavy trunk in front of the cupboard doors, barricading himself in. That’s why his siblings hadn’t bothered to look inside the cupboard — they didn’t see any way he could be in there.

  Lowell saw the trail in the dirt from the cupboard to the wall where the trunk had been moved by his siblings, but who had put it in front of the cupboard in the first place? The three children raced out of the basement and never played down there again, not even when the weather prevented them from playing outside.

  Lowell never told anyone other than his sister and brother about what had happened. By the time summer ended and the three children returned home, the event had largely been forgotten. But twenty years later, Lowell and his father were having a conversation when he mentioned that he and his siblings hadn’t enjoyed staying with their grandparents. Both of his grandparents were strict disciplinarians and his grandfather, Lowell admitted, punished them for small things and accused them of being disrespectful and lazy.

  Lowell’s father agreed that his father could be tough, but he revealed that his own grandfather — Lowell’s
great-grandfather — was really mean. To illustrate this point, Lowell’s father told his son a story. It was eerily familiar.

  One day when he was a young boy, Lowell’s father hadn’t done his chores and Lowell’s great-grandfather was irate. Fearing for his safety, the boy ran downstairs to find a place to hide. He came across the cupboard in the corner of the basement. He bent his head, crammed his body into the cupboard and closed the door behind him, but it was too late. His grandfather had followed him and knew exactly where he was hiding. The boy heard the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor and slammed against the cupboard’s doors.

  “Let’s see how you like hiding now,” the old man barked from the other side of the doors. He left his grandson trapped in the cupboard for an hour before finally releasing the hot, sore and frightened boy.

  When his father had finished telling this disturbing tale, Lowell kept his own similar story to himself — his father clearly didn’t want to discuss it any further and promptly changed the subject. But Lowell finally knew who had trapped him in the cupboard twenty years before. And he realized he was lucky his siblings were there to let him out. If not, who knows how long Lowell would have been trapped in the cupboard by the ghost of his great-grandfather, a man who clearly had no patience for child’s play.

  THE DEATH MASK

  Woodstock, Ontario

  Convicted criminal Isaiah Wright was not the type of man to frighten easily, but one night in 1903 he had more than enough reason to nearly lose his mind with fright. Wright was a prisoner in the Oxford County Jail, an old building he knew all too well. He made a habit of getting himself arrested and pleading guilty to petty crimes in order to be housed in the jail throughout the long winter months. He deeply regretted this habit the night he saw a ghost float past his cell — number thirteen — three times. It was after the third appearance of the ghost that Wright began to scream at the top of his lungs and was found in a corner of his cell huddled in a tight ball, shaking uncontrollably and muttering incomprehensibly.

  Wright wasn’t the only prisoner to see the ghost that year — many other inmates also reported seeing the ghost fly past their cells. When he was released, he informed Governor Cameron that he would not be committing any more petty crimes, nor would he be returning the following winter. Seeing a ghost in the jail had scared him out of a life of crime.

  There are a few theories about the ghost that haunts the old jail, which is now the Oxford County Board of Health building, but the most prevalent belief is that it is Thomas Cook. Large and quick-tempered, Cook had a terrible reputation in the town as a fighter and alcoholic and was generally feared by all. In 1862 he was convicted of killing his second wife and was ordered to be executed on December 16 of that year. He was to be hanged in the jail courtyard, and more than three thousand citizens attended to watch. They didn’t know it yet, but what they were about to witness would be far more gruesome than anything they ever could have imagined.

  Cook was led to the gallows at 10:55 a.m. The executioner was a man from the community, but his identity was concealed by an odd disguise that consisted of a white towel pulled across his mouth and nose, a pair of goggles over his eyes and an old white hat on top of his head. Cook broke out in prayer as the rope was slipped over his head and tightened around his neck. The lever was pulled at 11 a.m. Cook passed through the trap door, but he was so heavy that his head was completely severed from his body when the rope snapped taut. His lifeless trunk fell to the ground and his head rolled a metre away in the dirt before coming to a stop. The crowd was stunned into silence for a long time. Cook was so loathed that some spectators were disappointed they hadn’t been able to see him swing by his neck.

  Following a macabre custom of the day, a death mask of Cook’s face was made and placed near the entrance to the jail. The death mask is still there today, staring out with dead-looking eyes, downturned lips and a cracked nose.

  Cook’s body was given to his friends for burial, but someone from the Woodstock Medical Clinic purchased the remains for medical research. It is unlikely Cook would have ever consented to this, but of course he didn’t have the opportunity to object. He did not receive a proper burial.

  In 1903, around the time the ghost of the Oxford County Jail first appeared and terrorized inmate Isaiah Wright, a work crew unearthed human remains at Finkle and Dundas Streets, where the Woodstock Medical Centre was once situated. The bones were identified as belonging to Cook.

  Thomas Cook’s death mask at the Oxford County Jail

  The ghost continued to haunt the building, and a renovation project in the 1980s seemingly increased the level of paranormal activity. Ernie Hunt was in charge of the project and noticed right away that there was something very unusual in the courthouse. When he was updating the plumbing, he’d lay out all of his materials on a scaffold on the third floor before leaving for the day so that everything was ready for him the next morning … only that never panned out the way he hoped. When he’d arrive at work, he’d find all of those items in the boiler room on the main floor. No one had been in the building through the night.

  Hunt and his team converted an old chimney into an elevator shaft. Hunt decided to leave his tools and materials in the elevator at night since he could lock it up and ensure that no one could move his things. But sure enough, although everything was completely inaccessible and no one else had been in the building, he’d find missing items in the boiler room each day.

  The elevator was operated by a key, but that didn’t stop the ghost from using it to travel from floor to floor. One Sunday, Hunt and the county engineer were working late when the elevator suddenly started up all by itself, despite the fact that the necessary key was in Hunt’s pocket. As Hunt and the engineer watched in amazement — and a little fear — the elevator’s lights indicated that it opened on the fourth floor, then the third and then the second. Finally, it reached the main floor and the doors opened, but no one was inside. Hunt tried to laugh it off by joking that he hadn’t seen anyone exit the elevator. But the next day he called the technician, who informed him that what he claimed had happened was impossible — the elevator would not, under normal circumstances, open on a floor without the use of the key. But Hunt was quickly coming to realize that these weren’t normal circumstances.

  A little while later the elevator drama took a much scarier turn. Hunt’s wife and their eighteen-month-old grandson were visiting him at work when the elevator once again turned itself on and the doors opened wide. The young boy ran onto the elevator before either of his grandparents could stop him. The doors closed, trapping him inside alone. The elevator travelled up to the fourth floor, then down to the third, then back to the fourth. Hunt and his wife were on the main floor, but they could hear their grandson screaming in terror the entire time. They raced up the stairs to the third floor and managed to open the door when the elevator returned there, then frantically grabbed the terrified boy.

  Hunt was regularly overwhelmed by the feeling of being watched, and he’d often see a passing shadow out of the corner of his eye. Time and again someone would tap his shoulder from behind, but when Hunt turned around he would find that he was completely alone. And then one day when he was in the tunnels beneath the building with a couple of other workers, he finally caught sight of what he believed to be Cook’s ghost. They turned a dark corner and came face to face with the misty form of Cook’s head and shoulders, a frightening sight that disappeared before their eyes.

  Thanks to the death mask of Thomas Cook that still hangs on the outside of the building, anyone who visits the old courthouse can confront the convicted criminal turned ghost without needing to enter the tunnels. But if you need to reach an upper floor, taking the stairs would be best.

  VOICES IN THE VAULTS

  St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador

  Some time in the late 1800s, after a long, gruelling day of work, two men — both employees of Newman & Company, an import-export trade company that had been s
hipping goods since the early 1500s — decided to help themselves to a glass of Newman’s famed port wine. This was strictly forbidden — employees were not allowed to drink the product — but the men ensured that they were alone in the stone vaults on Water Street and then perused their options. They found an old unmarked barrel and figured that no one would notice if they took one glass from it. After a final glance at their surroundings, they set to work prying the barrel open.

  The moment they popped the lid off, an unearthly moan echoed throughout the tunnel. The men froze. After a moment they realized they were still alone and dismissed the sound as nothing but the wind and their nerves getting the best of them.

  One of the men dunked a glass into the barrel, took a sip of port and then passed the glass to his friend. As he enjoyed a drink, the moaning began again, louder than before. Perhaps they weren’t alone after all. Fearing that someone might catch them in the act, they decided to investigate the vaults, but after a thorough search they were certain there was no one else inside with them. They once again shrugged off the odd sounds they’d heard and returned to the open barrel, then continued to drink.

  One glass became two, then three, four and five. As he went to fill the cup for the sixth time, something unusual caught the man’s eye. There seemed to be something submerged in the barrel. He handed the cup to his friend and shook the barrel in an attempt to see what was hidden at the bottom. Moaning filled the vaults, this time so loud that there could be no mistake: the sound was not being caused by the wind.

  As panic started to seize both men, the first reached his hands deep into the port, desperate to find what was hidden there and somehow convinced that there was a connection between it and the moaning. His submerged hands touched something a little larger than a bowling ball and he grabbed what felt like short, curly bits of string. He pulled the mystery object out of the barrel and was horrified to discover he was holding a human head.