Haunted Canada 8 Read online

  Others believe the building is host to many more lost souls who have wandered over from a nearby cemetery. Many of the bodies recovered from the sinking of the Titanic were buried in the city, and there are those who claim that some of the restless souls rise from their graves after nightfall and wander Halifax’s streets. The Halifax Club might be one stop on their eternal tour around the city. Whether or not the original general manager escorts these wandering souls — none of them members of the Halifax Club — out of the building before stabbing himself in the dining room for the umpteenth time is unknown.

  MANDY LIVES

  Quesnel, British Columbia

  It seemed like an ordinary, quiet day at the Quesnel & District Museum and Archives when Ruth Stubbs, the museum’s curator, was met by an unexpected visitor. Well, two unexpected visitors. Lisa Sorensen, who lived in town, entered Ruth’s office and dropped Mandy, an old doll, on her desk with little to no care for the antique. Lisa seemed anxious to be rid of Mandy, and Ruth got the sense that the owner was physically repulsed by the toy. Not that Ruth could blame the other woman for feeling that way; she herself felt uneasy the moment she laid eyes on the doll.

  Mandy was a little over half a metre tall and wore a white dress and matching bonnet. Her body was made of stuffed cloth but her face and hands were made of porcelain. It was believed she was made between 1900 and 1920, and time hadn’t been kind to her. Her face was severely damaged, including cracks around her right eye and discolouration around her mouth that resembled bruising. She had a realistic appearance that gave some people the impression that Mandy was more a living child — one who had been terribly mistreated — than a doll, with a smile described by many as sinister.

  Lisa told Ruth that Mandy had belonged to her grandmother, but she didn’t want her daughter playing with the doll. Mandy was starting to disintegrate, and Lisa was concerned her daughter would speed that process up and the doll would be damaged beyond repair. Mandy belonged in a museum.

  That wasn’t the whole truth, as Ruth would later discover, but for the time being she accepted Mandy and placed the doll in a clear plastic bag. Mandy had to remain sealed for forty-eight hours to ensure that her cloth body wasn’t infested by insects. When the rest of the museum staff saw Mandy sealed in the bag they admitted that they felt uncomfortable in her presence, and one woman froze and shouted, “Oh, that doll gives me the creeps!” But Mandy passed the bug test, so the next step before being put on display was to be photographed, a regular part of the process for all artifacts.

  The next day, experienced museum photographer Cookie Castle arrived to photograph Mandy. Her boyfriend accompanied her to help with the job. As they picked up Mandy and positioned her for a variety of shots, both Cookie and her boyfriend began to experience an uncomfortable feeling, not unlike the wary, unsettling sensation that had overcome Ruth the day she’d first met the doll. In fact, the longer the shoot went on, the more Cookie began to feel that Mandy was starting to resemble a real baby. Nothing else unusual occurred during the photo shoot, but bizarre events happened later that left everyone involved wondering if Mandy was upset at having her picture taken.

  After the photo shoot, Cookie hung the negatives in the darkroom, locked up and left as night was falling. When she returned the next morning, she couldn’t believe her eyes. The darkroom was in a state of complete disarray. Items had been thrown around the room and pens and pencils were scattered across the floor. It looked like a small child had had a temper tantrum and trashed the place. She shrugged her shoulders and tidied up, then got to work — she still had a job to do. But as she set to the task of developing Mandy’s pictures, Cookie heard a loud sigh right behind her, followed by a bang as if something had fallen off a shelf and landed on the floor. Cookie left the darkroom pale and shaking.

  She’s not the only photographer who has encountered difficulties while trying to work with Mandy. Ruth invited Ross Mitchell, a photographer for the Cariboo Observer, to take a series of photographs of the doll, an opportunity Ross jumped at. When he returned to his office and tried to print contact sheets of the pictures, they never emerged from the developer — they had simply disappeared somewhere inside the machine. As Ross tried to figure out what had happened, he suddenly heard footsteps on the floor directly above. Since he knew he was the only person in the building at the time, he feared that someone had broken in. So he climbed upstairs, ready to call the police, but didn’t see another living soul.

  Mandy the doll

  Another newspaper photographer, Seth Gotro of the Quesnel Advocate, had an even more difficult and creepy experience. When he set up his camera to take Mandy’s picture, the doll turned her head away from his lens so he couldn’t get a head-on shot. Seth had to request special permission to remove Mandy from her case, and when he sat her on a bed to photograph her, she appeared to grin at him with evil intent every time his flash went off.

  Sometime later, Ruth Trussler, a tourist visiting from Calgary, tried to videotape Mandy. Her camera had worked flawlessly throughout the museum, but as soon as Ruth turned it toward the doll she was overcome with the feeling that Mandy didn’t want to be captured on film or video. Before Ruth moved on, her camera began to malfunction. Oddly, it worked fine when she pointed it toward other museum artifacts, away from Mandy. And when Ruth returned home and tried to watch the tape, it became wedged in her VCR. She was never able to view her footage.

  Many people claim to have seen Mandy’s glass eyes follow them as they pass her. She has been blamed for the disappearance — and later reappearance — of many items belonging to museum staff members. At one time she was kept with other antique dolls but had to be separated and encased in glass, alone except for a small toy lamb that was placed on her lap, since people got the impression she was hurting the other dolls when no one was around. Unfortunately, even locking her in her own case isn’t always an effective way to keep her safely contained. One morning the toy lamb was found on the floor next to Mandy’s case. The most far-fetched and spine-tingling claim is that one day Mandy was accidentally dropped and real blood poured out the cracks on her head and face.

  Curator Ruth Stubbs didn’t know what else to do with Mandy, so she turned to a retired curator who was well-known and respected in the field. This man could touch antiques and get a feel for them, often accurately picking up on details about artifacts that others had overlooked. He took Mandy from her case and held her in his large, wrinkled hands for a quiet, tense moment. Then he proclaimed that Mandy had seen a great deal of abuse over the years, and admitted to Ruth that he had been overcome by chills as soon as his skin had touched her porcelain.

  Desperately needing to know more about the doll, Ruth returned to Lisa, the previous owner, to do a little digging. After some prompting, Lisa finally admitted that she hadn’t simply donated Mandy out of fear that her daughter would damage her, as she’d originally claimed. The truth was a lot more complicated, and a lot more terrifying. When Lisa had inherited the doll, she had stored Mandy in the basement. Soon after, she heard a baby crying in the middle of the night. The eerie sound was coming from her basement. But when she finally found the courage to head down into the darkness, the crying stopped and Lisa saw that one of the windows was open, the curtain blowing in the breeze. That was odd, since she was certain she hadn’t left it open. She closed the window and returned to bed. Then the next night, the exact same thing happened — the baby’s cries, the empty basement, the open window. This continued every night until Lisa grew convinced that Mandy was somehow responsible, and she unloaded the doll on the museum curator. At least she found some relief; the very first night that Lisa was free of Mandy, the baby cries stopped, and they never returned.

  Lisa also revealed that Mandy had originally belonged to a couple from England with young twin children. Tragically, the twins died of polio. Is it possible that Mandy was possessed by one of the children … or maybe even both? We’ll probably never know.

  Take a deep look into Mand
y’s scarred face and glass eyes. She — as well as a ghost or two — will look straight back at you.

  SOMETHING IN THE WALLS OF VENGEANCE HOUSE

  Yarmouth, Nova Scotia

  Early morning sunlight filtered into the bedroom and gently woke teenagers Lydia and Maria. Maria had spent the night at Lydia’s house — as she often did, since they were best friends and nearly inseparable. Lydia’s father, Captain Richan, had served as midshipman on a battleship called Vengeance, and he’d named his home and inn after the ship. Vengeance House, later known as Richan’s Tavern, was built in the late 1700s and was the first inn in Yarmouth. It also served as the original courthouse, jail and council chambers. The large wooden building was therefore always filled with interesting characters with news from afar, which made it an ideal location for Lydia and Maria to spend time together and try to overhear anything exciting that was being discussed. And so it wasn’t unusual that the girls’ sleepovers were most often in Vengeance House, instead of Maria’s nearby home.

  As they slowly woke and sat up in bed, rubbing sleep out of their eyes and stretching with a yawn, the girls began discussing what they’d seen and heard in the inn the night before. But their conversation was soon interrupted by a tap-tap-tap on the wall above the headboard. A short period of silence followed as the girls stopped talking and listened, but soon it happened again. Tap-tap-tap. They assumed it was someone in the inn tapping on the opposite side of the wall, so they paid it little attention and continued talking about the previous night.

  But the tapping followed them throughout Vengeance House. Oddly this only occurred when Maria was visiting; when she left, so too did the tapping. When she returned, the tap-tap-tap trailed the girls like a wolf tracking prey. While it began to concern and frighten the girls, others in the inn attributed the sound to rats in the walls.

  Two weeks later, Captain Richan was in bed while his wife, children and Maria were moving about the house. Although Lydia knew her father was trying to rest, she and Maria were having a lot of fun and had trouble keeping their voices down, laughing and shouting happily. Mrs. Richan yelled at the girls to be quiet, so Lydia suggested to her friend that they go up to her room where they could listen for the tapping again. It sounded like a simple bit of harmless fun, so Maria eagerly agreed and the two of them went upstairs.

  They took a candle to light their way and blew it out once they had both slipped into bed. The tapping began immediately, but it was much faster and louder than ever before. It sounded angry and threatening. Tap-tap-tap! Tap-tap-tap! Tap-tap-tap! Not only that, but the sound came from the walls, floor and ceiling — it was all around them, surrounding them, closing in on them. Tap-tap-tap! Tap-tap-tap! Tap-tap-tap!

  In a blind panic, the girls huddled together in the dark and shouted for Mrs. Richan to bring a light. Suspecting the girls were still horsing around, she shouted up from downstairs for them to stop it immediately or else suffer the consequences. But Lydia and Maria continued to scream for help, and Mrs. Richan realized they were serious — deadly serious. She ran to the room and found her daughter and her friend in hysterics, crying and screaming for their lives, so she called her husband. Captain Richan rushed down the hall, barged into the room and, after being brought up to speed on what had frightened the girls so much, listened intently.

  After a moment, he and Mrs. Richan both heard the sinister sound too.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  It was rats in the walls. It must have been. Without pausing to think of a more sensible way to deal with the rodents he was certain were the cause of the sound, he tracked the tapping to the ceiling and tore a hole in it, exposing the space above. But there were no rats. Worse yet, the tapping continued.

  Shortly after, word spread that Vengeance House was haunted by ghosts that went tap-tap-tap on the walls. Curiosity seekers came to Yarmouth from far and wide to listen to the phantoms that lived between rooms in the inn. But a guest who was living in the inn at the time, Captain Neale from Salem, Massachusetts, believed Maria and Lydia had created some sort of elaborate hoax for some unknown reason, and he was determined to uncover what that reason was. Captain Neale was an elderly, religious, intelligent man and he wasn’t willing to accept that the tapping was caused by rats or that the girls weren’t somehow behind the disturbance. Captain Neale offered a $500 reward — a small fortune in those days — to anyone who could prove how the trick was being done.

  Eager to claim the money, many tried to find the cause of the tapping, which still continued whenever Maria visited Lydia. A crowd assembled and sought ways to prove that the girls were creating it. They were instructed to sit on a bench in the middle of the room so that neither their feet nor hands were touching the floor or the walls. After a moment, the tapping began, more loudly and fiercely than the day Captain Richan had torn a hole in the ceiling — it was so loud that everyone present was concerned the walls and ceiling might crack in half. Someone suggested the girls might be knocking on the bench somehow, so they were placed on a pile of feather beds. It had no effect on the tapping, which continued without pause.

  Someone else suggested that they try to communicate with the ghosts, so the crowd devised a code that would allow the ghosts to answer some questions. Sensible questions were answered by the ghosts with more tapping, but foolish questions meant to trip up the ghosts were answered with a new sound: ear-splitting scratching, like nails on a chalkboard, that forced everyone to cover their ears. Next, doctors, ministers and lawyers were brought to Vengeance House to ask the ghosts challenging questions that non-professionals would have no way of answering, but the ghosts responded to every single one without making a mistake. There was no explanation for the phenomenon.

  A foreign captain was in town waiting for fair weather before setting sail.

  “When can I leave?” he asked the ghosts.

  No answer.

  “Am I going to die?” the captain asked.

  There was still no answer.

  Growing agitated that the ghosts had hitherto answered — correctly, no less — every single sensible question that had been asked of them but were refusing to answer his, the captain desperately spurted out a series of requests. “How many years will I live? How many months? How many weeks?”

  Silence.

  With a tremble in his voice, the captain quietly asked, “How many days?”

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  The captain chuckled nervously. Surely it was some sort of joke, he thought. But three days later, still waiting to sail, he died suddenly from unknown causes on a Yarmouth street.

  The stress caused by the ghosts began to take a grave toll on Maria’s physical and mental health. She stopped eating and lost weight rapidly, causing her to fall ill. Her family forbade her to visit Vengeance House again, fearful that spending any more time there would soon kill her. Maria stayed home, and the tapping was never heard again. With time, Maria’s health rebounded and she was soon her old self again.

  But six months later, Maria was at home talking with her family when she suddenly screamed in fright. Her family panicked and asked what was wrong. Maria jumped off her chair — a snake had twisted around her leg and was slithering along her skin. Maria fainted with terror and the snake uncoiled itself, then slithered to the floor. As it sped across the room, Maria’s family heard it make a peculiar sound, a sound they’d never heard a snake make before.

  Tap-tap-tap!

  And then the tapping snake disappeared beneath an old desk. In an attempt to catch it, the family moved every piece of furniture in the room, but the snake was gone.

  Maria eventually recovered, and from that day forward she never heard tapping — not from ghosts or snakes — again.

  FOLLOW THE LIGHT

  South Melville, Prince Edward Island

  There was a chill in the night air as Duncan Matheson travelled west along Green Road. He shivered and clutched his jacket a little tighter, trying to ward off the breeze. It was late October in 1899, and Duncan was headed
to see his brother, Robert, who lived in South Melville. Robert was sick and Duncan was overdue for a visit.

  Duncan’s buggy bounced over the road and Nellie, his horse, snorted now and again. The moon was round and bright in the sky, casting an eerie silver-blue glow on the land. The autumn leaves shimmered and danced in the breeze, rustling as if they were whispering to one another. There were no other people out on the road at that hour, but Duncan heard a fox yelp in the far distance, followed by the hoot of an owl from the top of a nearby tree.

  Although Duncan wasn’t a superstitious man or easily spooked, an odd sensation washed over him and he became convinced that bad news lay ahead. He couldn’t explain the feeling, but it was there all the same, like a weight in his stomach that threatened to pull him down off his buggy.

  He tried to brush the bad feeling away and took out his pipe. But before he could light it, something upset Nellie and she shied to the side of the road, nearly tipping the buggy over. Duncan yelled out in alarm, gripped the reins tightly in his fists and brought the horse back under control.

  They carried on a little farther down the road and the night was once again silent. There was still no one nearby and no sign of what had upset Nellie, and they travelled on in relative peace, although Duncan’s bad feeling was growing bigger. But then Nellie shied to the side of the road again, without warning or any sign of provocation. Duncan settled the horse again and felt his anger starting to flare. Nellie had never acted like that and he was upset that she had nearly thrown him out of the buggy twice in a row.