Victoria's Most Haunted

by Ian Gibbs

  In 1909, the first of many renovations began. One of the first things that happened was that all of the drainpipes and fire escapes were removed so construction could begin on the exterior masonry and painting. If this had occurred in modern times, there would have been warning signs on the fire escape. There likely would have been bars across the door and everyone would have known there was nothing waiting to catch them on the other side. Unfortunately for our friend Lizzie, no such precautions were taken.

  At the end of a long busy day, before she got ready for bed, Lizzie, a devout Roman Catholic, picked up her rosary and headed for the fire escape like she did every day. She pushed open the door, took one step forward, and fell six floors to her death.

  Lizzie landed just to the right of where the main entrance to the hotel is now, in the back right-hand corner of the courtyard. She often appears where she fell, dressed in her black and white maid’s uniform and clutching her rosary. Lizzie rushes from that corner and into the wall of what is now the entrance area. People have said that they have seen her lying there, quite content, quiet, and at peace. Lizzie is also sometimes seen going about her duties. Hotel guests will see a chambermaid walking along the hallway on the sixth floor, which has now been turned into guest rooms, and will call after her, perhaps to ask for more towels or have something done with their room. The front desk has gotten used to receiving phone calls from disgruntled tourists who say things like, “It’s all very well to have chambermaids dressed in period costume, but if they’re not going to do their job, what is the point?” The front desk staff then tries to smooth over the situation and sends up a real-life room attendant, but they don’t go into a lot of detail about who the mysterious and possibly deaf chambermaid might be. By all accounts Lizzie is at peace; she smiles at people as she passes them, and nods her head. It is nice to think that a chambermaid from 1909 who could have easily been forgotten is still remembered and is still a part of her beloved hotel.

  DURING A RENOVATION in 2016, two painters, one of whom was named Troy Reid, were working on the second floor. They were in separate rooms, but they each had the door to their room open. They both heard a noise at the same time and looked out their doors to the hall, where they saw an Indigenous construction worker running quickly down the hallway. They stopped what they were doing and stepped into the hallway. The pair was concerned because there had to be a good reason for any construction worker to run down a hall. There could be a fire or a flood or a gas leak; when someone runs on a renovation site, you really do want to know why. They tried to follow the man, but the hall was a dead end. There was nowhere the man could have gone. They walked to the end of the hall themselves to make sure all of the doors were locked and no one else was there. They looked at each other and asked, “Did you see that?” Troy and his partner both agreed they had. Was it a construction worker from a long-ago job who never got to complete his work? Did he attempt to run from what eventually killed him? Troy later discovered that it was indeed the spirit of a First Nations worker. One had been killed in a renovation back in the 1970s on the same floor they had been working on when he fell out a window he had been repairing.

  IN THE 1950S, the Empress Hotel was mostly empty during the winter. There were no direct flights to Victoria, and there were not yet daily ferries between Victoria and mainland BC in the winter, making Victoria a bit of a “ghost” town during the cold months. There were certainly ways to travel here but it wasn’t as easy nor was the transportation as frequent as it is now. To help fill the vacancies, the ingenious managers of the hotel decided to drop the rates and advertise a winter stay at the Empress to people living in other parts of Canada. As Victoria gets very little snow, this was an attractive prospect for anyone seeking to escape snowbound homes. Margaret, a woman from Calgary, particularly enjoyed coming to Victoria for the winter and made a habit of doing so every year. She would lock up her house just after Christmas, travel to Victoria, and then remain at the hotel until April or May. She became such a well-known visitor that the staff knew her by name. Margaret was a very ritualistic person. She stayed in the same room each year. By this point in the hotel’s history, the sixth floor had been converted from staff rooms into guest rooms and Margaret’s room was on the sixth floor on the far left-hand side of the hotel, in the tower that had been added in 1929.

  She also steadfastly maintained the same schedule each day. Margaret could always be relied upon to show up for afternoon tea at four o’clock. One afternoon, Margaret did not come down for tea. When evening fell and she still hadn’t turned up, a manager went to check on her, wondering if perhaps she was ill or if she had gone out (which was highly unlikely). He knocked on the door three times without any response, so he used a passkey to enter the room. There he found Margaret in bed; she had obviously laid down for a nap before tea time and was never going to wake up.

  Hotels do not close a room simply because someone has died in it. They will clean the room, flip over the mattress, and rent it out as soon as it’s ready. Most of the time, this is not an issue; however, sometimes hotels end up with an interesting phenomenon known as “the unrentable room.” It’s what the hotel industry calls the overflow room. The only way this room is rented out is if nothing else is available in the hotel. Margaret’s former room became the Empress’s unrentable room. Anytime that room was rented out, it usually ended up being more of a headache for the front desk than it was worth.

  One couple who ended up in this particular room was a middle-aged husband and wife from Manitoba. They had come to Victoria for an anniversary celebration. They were enjoying their visit immensely, but the wife, tired from her wanderings around the city, decided to take a little break before going down for dinner. She climbed into the bed and turned on the television. Suddenly the channel changed. Grabbing the remote, she changed it back to what she had been watching; within a few minutes, the channel changed back again. Frustrated, she gave up and read her book instead. After dinner, the couple retired for the evening. They tucked themselves into bed and turned off the lights. Just as they were starting to drift off to sleep, they heard footsteps very close to the bed. Then the bathroom light flipped on, but no one was there. The husband and wife looked at each other. It was one of those are-you-seeing-what-I’m-seeing moments of disbelief, but it was clear the bathroom light was on. Then they heard water running in the sink, and then the toilet being flushed. The bathroom light clicked off, and the sound of shuffling feet came towards the bed. To their horror, the couple felt the covers pull back and something cold climb into the bed with them. At this point, they got up and requested another room.

  Eventually, as the style and tastes changed for guests, the hotel realized the two large storage areas in the towers above the sixth floor had the finest views of the Inner Harbour. It seemed ridiculous to store old furniture and things that the hotel no longer required in a space that could fetch a premium. By this point, the entire hotel staff knew about the overflow room. They also knew about the ghost that had been seen in the 1960s in the storage area, where one of the former employees, having lost his job, had hanged himself from a rafter on the eighth level. But once the hotel management realized they could convert the storage spaces into luxury accommodations, to be christened the Gold Suites, they quickly started to plan.

  The main problem with the conversion was that the elevator in the hotel only went up to the sixth floor. No hotel would ask guests who are paying for the most expensive rooms to carry their luggage up two flights of stairs, so the Empress decided to add an exclusive elevator to take guests from the sixth to the seventh and eighth floors. This led to the conundrum of where to put the elevator, but the ingenious managers soon found a solution. Why not kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, and turn the unrentable room into a private elevator for the Gold Suite guests? The room was taken apart; the wall was removed and the elevator was installed. The management congratulated themselves on not only getting rid of the unrentable room but also creating more reven
ue for the hotel with the Gold Suites.

  But if the managers thought they were getting off that easy, they were mistaken.

  Not long after the elevator was installed, more guests on the sixth floor began experiencing a strange phenomenon. Imagine: you are getting ready to go to sleep, then you hear a light, timid knocking at the door—not a commanding I’m-here-from-the-front-desk sort of sound, just a tapping that is barely audible. When you open the door, you find a nice old lady standing in the hallway—which feels unnaturally cold—in her slippers and her robe looking confused. When you ask this lady how you can help her, she says she is terribly sorry to bother you, but she is unable to find her room. She tells you her room number and then, as most people would, you offer to help her find her room. She follows you down the hallway making small comments and apologies. You can hear her shuffling behind you, and when you get to the place where her room should be, you realize there is no room there: it’s merely a boutique elevator. You turn to speak to her to suggest that perhaps she has forgotten her room number or has it wrong, but to your surprise, she is no longer there. You know without a doubt that you heard her shuffling behind you, but she has vanished. Unfortunately for the hotel management, rather than getting rid of Margaret, they have instead set her wandering, perpetually seeking a room to which she can never return.

  ANOTHER GHOSTLY ENCOUNTER was shared by a young couple who were on their honeymoon in the 1980s. They arrived at Christmastime, and as anyone in the hotel industry can tell you, hotels are usually understaffed at Christmas. The couple checked in on Christmas Eve. There was no one to take their bags, but they didn’t mind. They simply started hauling their luggage to their room. As they approached the elevator, a porter came seemingly out of nowhere. He was dressed in a red jacket and blue pants that had gold braiding down the side; his nametag identified him as Bill. Bill was an older man, and looked as if he may have enjoyed a drink or two, but he happily took their bags to their room. The couple walked into the room ahead of him. When they turned around to tip him, he was gone, but their bags were at the door of their hotel room. The couple was puzzled and wondered why he hadn’t waited for a tip. Aware that the hotel was short-staffed they finally assumed he’d been called to help out elsewhere. They put the money for his tip aside, intending to take it down to the front desk to ensure Bill received it. The next day was Christmas, and they forgot to leave it at the desk in the midst of the holiday and their time together.

  Again, on Boxing Day, the hotel was quite empty of staff and the couple didn’t think of it. On December 27, as they were packing to leave they came across the envelope with Bill’s tip in it. They went to the front desk and asked if they could leave the envelope for the porter named Bill who had assisted them on Christmas Eve. The front desk clerk apologized, but informed the couple they didn’t believe anyone named Bill worked at the hotel. The young couple insisted that Bill had kindly helped them on Christmas Eve when there weren’t any other porters around and they wanted to ensure that he got their tip. The front desk clerk, hoping to help out in any way, called the captain of the porters to come and assist the guests. The young couple told the man, who wore an entirely different uniform than Bill’s, what they were trying to accomplish and why. The captain of the porters, dressed in an entirely different uniform—olive green, no hat—looked a little confused and asked, “What did he look like?” The couple described Bill, saying he was older and had a rather red nose, but he was helpful and very pleasant when he took their bags to their room. The captain looked uncomfortable and then explained that there had been a porter named Bill, but unfortunately he had passed away many years ago when the captain himself was a junior porter. Bill most certainly enjoyed a drink or two on a regular basis and, unfortunately, his health was poor. Bill had passed away one day while working at the hotel. The young couple thanked the captain. They left the tip with him, but took away an amazing story of a paranormal encounter.

  If your bags are taken to your room as you check into the Empress, maybe look twice at who is carrying them. Is he wearing the customary modern uniform of the porters, or does his outfit look like an old-fashioned uniform that may have been seen a number of years ago?

  FRANCIS MAWSON RATTENBURY was a well-known architect responsible for many of Victoria’s most iconic buildings and homes, including the parliament buildings and the Steamship Terminal, directly across from the parliament buildings.

  When Rattenbury was a young architect, he won the competition to design the parliament buildings. With such a large commission under his belt, he was soon in high demand to design many other buildings in Victoria, including the Empress. Many adjectives can be used to describe Rattenbury, but confident is probably the kindest.

  Rattenbury, as it turned out, was not a very nice man. He was the most celebrated architect in Victoria during his era, the 1890s to 1920s, partly because his wife Florence, or Florrie, as she was called, was beloved by anyone who met her. Where Francis could be cold and dismissive, Florrie was attentive and kind, always going out of her way for someone in need or someone who needed cheering up. Francis, on the other hand, could be counted on to only do what was right for him and him alone. When Francis was in his mid-fifties, he met a woman named Alma. At twenty-six years old, Alma was fun and flashy; she played the piano with enthusiasm and skill, and was a good-time girl of the highest order. Francis told Florrie that he needed a divorce because he had fallen in love with Alma. Florrie refused to give him a divorce on the grounds that she would be humiliated and ruined in the eyes of everyone in the community, but he didn’t care. Francis flaunted his affair with Alma. He moved into a hotel room with her and took her to all of his social events, leaving his wife at home, alone and isolated. As an added act of spite, and to encourage his wife to give him the divorce he so sorely wanted, he had the power and heat turned off at the home they had shared, leaving his wife and two children in the dark and the cold. Francis’s treatment of Florrie was so horrendous that his friends and former clients shunned him. They turned the other way when they saw him coming, and all of his invitations to Victoria society events dried up.

  In 1925, Florrie finally agreed to grant him a divorce, if for no other reason than to protect her children and be rid of him and his cruelty. Francis thought his life would return to normal but not only had his social life become non-existent, his architectural business had as well. Finally realizing he had effectively destroyed his life in Victoria, he moved back to England with Alma in 1929. That same year, long-suffering Florrie died.

  In England, Alma found herself in a situation she had not bargained for. Rather than enjoying the pinnacle of society, she found her life revolved around an increasingly elderly gentleman. Alma was bored and she tired of living with him. Francis and Alma had hired an eighteen-year-old chauffer named George, who, by popular reporting, was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. In the early hours of March 23, 1935, Francis Rattenbury was discovered in a gruesome state. He had been so severely beaten about the head with what appeared to be a carpenter’s mallet that part of his skull had detached from the back of his head. He died a few days later. Alma confessed immediately, but George told one of the housemaids that he had in fact been the one to deliver the blows. Both Alma and George were taken to prison and subsequently tried. Alma was acquitted, but young George was sentenced to death. On the day she was acquitted, Alma went to a riverbank and stabbed herself six times in the chest and threw herself in the water. A capital punishment sentence did not, of course, mean that George was immediately put to death; there were appeals and appeals of the appeals to get through first. Ironically, only seven years into this process, George was released to join the army and fight in the Second World War. Upon his return, he married, had a child, and lived a pretty quiet life.

  In the meantime, it appears that the spirit of Francis Rattenbury has come back to the place of his greatest glory: the Empress. Rattenbury can often be seen loitering around the stairs where his picture hangs, as if waiti
ng for passing guests to notice him and heap praise on him for what a wonderful job he has done on the hotel. Perhaps he’s waiting for someone to recognize him and invite him to an event. He also appears in the basement around the washrooms. His appearance is more common when there is regular traffic. You might suppose he is interested in speaking to people, but as soon as you look at him and try to speak, he disappears or walks into a wall where once there was a door.

  The sheer number of ghosts who have remained at the Empress says a great deal about its beauty, style, and ability to build loyalty. If you are privileged enough to stay within its walls, keep your eyes and ears open. You may have a chance to interact with more than just the employees still on the payroll or your fellow guests.

  THE BEDFORD REGENCY HOTEL—THE CHURCHILL AND GARRICK’S HEAD PUB

  THE BUILDING THAT is now the Bedford Regency Hotel has certainly seen some changes since it was built to house the local newspaper, the British Colonist, in 1873. When the newspaper left the property in 1898, it was bought by Mr. Thomas Hibben and his partner, Mr. Bone. The duo purchased the two-storey building with plans to turn it into a book and stationery shop. In 1911, Mr. Hibben hired architect Thomas Hooper, who incidentally designed many other haunted buildings in the downtown core, to add three storeys to create an office building. This office building was a great idea at the time, and it aimed to attract the lawyers and law firms that were flocking to be close to the Supreme Court of British Columbia courthouse in Bastion Square, which had been built in 1889. The board of trade had also built a new office in Bastion Square that was intended for all of British Columbia. Bastion Square was the place to be and the newly improved Hibben-Bone Block was in a perfect location to capitalize on that fact.