Haunted Canada 8

by Joel A. Sutherland

  SKELETON PARK

  Kingston, Ontario

  It was a gorgeous summer afternoon and a man who lived downtown beside McBurney Park was grilling hot dogs and hamburgers in his backyard. He’d invited his friends over for a barbecue. His dog was digging a hole beside the fence nearest the park but no one paid the canine much attention — the sun was shining, everyone had a cold drink and the conversation was lively. The sounds of children laughing and playing in the park competed with distant lawnmowers and music streaming out of a radio. It was a good day to be alive.

  But then the dog ran to the patio table where the man and his friends were sitting down to dinner. It had something in its mouth, and it was wagging its tail proudly. As his friends were taking their first bites of the burgers and hot dogs, the man asked his dog to drop whatever was concealed in its mouth. And then, as happily as if it had just fetched its master’s slippers, the dog spat a mouthful of bones on the ground. Bones from a human hand.

  Needless to say, the group quickly lost their appetites, and the man put his house up for sale shortly thereafter. Had he known the history of McBurney Park — or, as it’s more commonly known, Skeleton Park — he wouldn’t have been so surprised that his dog had dug human remains out of the backyard.

  The site of the park was originally a cemetery called the Upper Burial Ground, which opened in 1819. Although it was one of Kingston’s largest cemeteries, it filled up very quickly when epidemics of typhus and cholera hit the city hard in the 1830s and ’40s. It reached capacity in 1864. It didn’t take long for the cemetery to fall into terrible shape. Local farmers allowed their livestock to wander through it. Families picnicked and children played in it. And vandals knocked over and broke headstones. The state of the cemetery was so bad by 1893 that the city decided to close it for good and turn the land into a public park. The first step was to transfer the bodies to other locations, but two macabre discoveries were soon made.

  First, many of the bodies were only buried thirty centimetres below the surface of the ground, probably in an attempt to bury the infected dead as quickly as possible. For the same reason, authorities found mass graves where corpses had been piled one on top of the other; one such grave even contained eleven bodies.

  Second, quite a few coffins were completely empty or filled with rocks. In the late 1800s, Kingston was home to a group of grave robbers known as the Resurrectionists, criminals who stole bodies from cemeteries, morgues and funeral parlours and sold them to Queens University medical students for dissection.

  Exhumation of the cemetery in McBurney Park

  The city had removed only a few hundred bodies when the park construction project was shut down. Families were expected to pay for the removal of their dearly departed, but most couldn’t afford the expense and the city couldn’t cover the entire cost. Then concerns arose that digging up the bodies of people who had died from diseases would spread the infections. In the end, the city decided to move forward with plans to turn the cemetery into a park, even though several thousand corpses were still resting in relative peace in the ground. The remaining headstones were knocked flat and dirt was poured over the area, then covered with grass seed. With so many dead lingering beneath the park, it’s little wonder that it’s haunted by lost, angry souls.

  Roughly two hundred years after the cemetery first opened, two young female students moved into an apartment on Ordnance Street, which borders Skeleton Park. They hadn’t heard about the park’s reputation nor what it had once been. On the day they moved in, one of the students was returning home from class and was surprised to see row upon row of headstones in what she had thought was a park. They were in terrible shape, many knocked over and crumbling, and the large cemetery was filled with an unnatural grey mist that was oddly localized to that area. It wasn’t until she passed by the next day and saw the park that she realized what she’d seen the night before was a ghostly image from the past.

  The paranormal activity soon bled into their apartment. They felt unusual chills and the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped whenever they were alone. Whispers cut the silence in empty rooms. A heavy candle centrepiece flew off the kitchen counter and shattered. When one of the students returned from classes one day a heavy set of footsteps charged at her from down the hall. The phantom feet stopped right in front of her, stamped once loudly, then were heard no more. Friends saw scary sights in the apartment, like a couch cushion being pressed down as if by an invisible body, and a hovering shadow that glowed blue and seemed to be watching the living with wicked intent.

  Just when things seemed like they couldn’t get any worse, they did. Both women started dreaming of an evil man who tried to take control of them while they were asleep. One particularly terrifying night, both women woke up at the same time and rushed to each other’s rooms. They met in the hallway — one had heard the other choking and gagging, while the other had heard the sounds of a violent struggle. But neither could recall having been attacked.

  They couldn’t stay in the apartment alone any longer, so they begged and pleaded with their friends to stay over. Some agreed, but no one could stay long. One friend saw a black shadow drift down the hall toward him in the middle of the night. Another friend saw a couple dressed in old-fashioned clothing standing at the top of the stairs as soon as she walked through the front door, and she promptly turned around and left.

  A third friend said she’d try her best to help. She claimed to have some paranormal abilities and had contacted spirits in the past. She’d never set foot in the apartment before and, as fate would have it, that wasn’t about to change. The night before she had arranged to visit, she dreamed that she was in the apartment, but she wasn’t alone. A tall, intimidating man was with her, and he gave off the same overwhelming sense of evil the two women had felt in their apartment. The friend called to cancel and was able to describe the apartment exactly as it appeared, despite the fact that she had never seen it with her own eyes.

  Having tried everything they could think of to deal with the problem, the two women were at a loss. They soon moved out of the haunted apartment and found a new place to live on the other side of the city. And who could blame them? Corpses aren’t supposed to rise out of their graves, but around Skeleton Park, the dead rise far too frequently.

  THE DROWNED MAN

  Quebec City, Quebec

  It was meant to be a joyous party, a time to celebrate the recent successes of Atkinson, Usborne & Co., a shipping company that transported lumber from Quebec to England. But when a guest showed up unannounced and uninvited, the party promptly died.

  It was the mid-1800s and George Usborne was enjoying the extreme wealth that being one of Quebec’s leading lumber barons afforded him and his wife, Mary. They lived in a huge stone mansion named Wolf-field Cottage on St. Louis Road in Cap-Rouge, now part of Quebec City. The mansion was located on one hundred acres of waterfront land that was landscaped with beautiful and sprawling gardens, contained a private park and overlooked the St. Lawrence River.

  Originally an English sea captain, Usborne came to Canada in 1820 at the age of twenty-four and immediately joined the shipping business, which eventually led him to the lumber business. In those early days, Usborne was an honest man who ran his business by the book. But the more money he made, the more money he wanted to make. And he began conjuring up ways to increase his fortune. He decided that if he were to load the timber on the decks in addition to the hull of his ships, he would be able to transport twice as much lumber in the same amount of time, thereby increasing his profits. This was an incredibly dangerous proposition. During a storm there would be a great risk that the square timbers — which could weigh up to a thousand kilograms each — might slide across the deck, killing anyone unfortunate enough to be in their path, and possibly even capsizing the ship. The men protested, but Usborne had made up his mind and refused to budge on the issue. His ship decks were from then on loaded with lumber.

  Before long Usborne’s wealth grew
rapidly. But then tragedy struck.

  The party George and Mary threw to celebrate the success of Atkinson, Usborne & Co. was held in the ballroom of their Cap-Rouge mansion. In attendance were some of the wealthiest people from across the province. The women were dressed in expensive clothes from London, and everyone enjoyed the finest wine from Paris. Following a grand feast of the most elegant and rich cuisine of the day, the revellers took to the dance floor as the band played late into the night.

  Suddenly there was a knocking on the riverside ballroom door. Even over the lively music and the merry conversations, it seemed as loud as nearby thunder, and the sound echoed throughout the ballroom. The band stopped playing, the dancers stopped dancing, and every pair of eyes — George’s and Mary’s included — slowly turned to stare at the door.

  But it didn’t open.

  The couple crossed the dance floor and, after a brief pause, opened the door.

  A man stood outside on the doorstep. He was alone. He was also dressed in seaman’s clothing. Oddly, he was soaking wet and water was pooling around his feet, but the night sky was clear. Odder still, his head and shoulders were covered in seaweed. It looked like he’d been dragged several kilometres underwater at the bottom of the St. Lawrence before being flung out of the river to the very spot where he stood.

  None of the party guests, nor the Usbornes, could move or talk. Everyone stood and stared at the mysterious, ill-looking man in silence.

  The man raised his arm and pointed at the dead centre of Usborne’s chest. Before Usborne could demand to know what he wanted, the man opened his mouth as if to blame Usborne for some heinous wrongdoing. But although his lips moved furiously, no sound escaped them.

  And then, before everyone’s eyes, the man vanished into thin air. Usborne looked at the doorstep where the man had stood. There on the ground was the pool of water that had run down the man’s body.

  Not long after, Usborne was informed that one of his ships had been wrecked the same night that the man had knocked on his door. He and his wife both knew that the man must have been the ghost of one of the seamen who had drowned as a result of Usborne’s greed. Two more ships were also wrecked, and Usborne soon went bankrupt. He and his wife remained in Quebec City for several years while Usborne attempted to get his business back up off the ground to no avail. It was a stressful time in their lives, but not only because of their financial situation. The same drowned man who had interrupted the party and looked at Usborne with hatred in his waterlogged eyes appeared in the same spot precisely one year later. Once again he opened his mouth and pointed at Usborne as if to cry out an accusation before disappearing. And he returned every year from that day forward with clocklike precision, even after the Usbornes moved out of their stone mansion and left Cap-Rouge to begin a new life elsewhere. Despite the fact that Usborne moved away, it’s said that the ghost of the drowned man has refused to leave Cap-Rouge and can be seen once a year looking lost, angry and utterly dead.

  THE HILLTOP GRAVE

  Glacier Creek, Yukon

  The Frenchman had worked for the mining company at Glacier Creek, near Sixty Mile River, for only one month, but he knew to stay far away from the grave on the hill — especially after nightfall. It was a remote location nearly one hundred kilometres west of Dawson City, the nearest town. If something went wrong — and many, many things went wrong near that cursed grave — help was very far away.

  And yet one night the Frenchman stayed out a little later than he had intended before seeking shelter for the evening. It was the final night he spent in the area. Something happened to him between nightfall and 3 a.m., at which point he fled in terror.

  At first none of the other miners had any idea what had happened to make a grown man leave his job in the middle of the night. But then word began to spread that the Frenchman had seen something — well, not something, but someone — flying through the starlit sky. It was the ghost of a man trailing a tattered blanket behind his floating corpse, moonlight reflecting brightly off his pallid skin. No one was surprised by the claim and everyone knew exactly who the spectre was. There was a rumour that when John Stockton, the man buried in the grave on the hill, had died, the ground had been too frozen to dig very deep, so his body had simply been wrapped in a blanket and buried half a metre down.

  That might explain why the grave is covered with a mound of large rocks. Since John’s body couldn’t be buried at the standard depth, rocks might have been placed on top to keep wild animals from digging him up. But others think the rocks serve a different purpose and were placed there to keep John from rising from his grave. If that’s true, then the rocks aren’t very effective.

  Very little is known about John Stockton. He arrived sometime in the early 1900s when the Klondike gold rush was still in full swing and the Yukon was filled with miners and prospectors looking to strike it rich. John filed six claims along the creeks and streams near the land where his grave rests today. He was a solitary man who lived alone in a cabin in the woods and would offer a quick “good morning” to anyone he passed on the trails. Although he was a quiet man in life, he has been anything but in death.

  Soon after John died in 1944, his claims were purchased by a new miner who recruited many men and set up a fairly large-scale operation. But unexplainable things started to happen. Bad things. The men quickly became convinced that the site was cursed and that John himself was committed to ensuring no one else got rich off the land he had once owned.

  No matter where the men placed their lunches at the beginning of their shifts, they would often return later to find all the food had disappeared. Dry land suddenly and inexplicably turned into mudholes large enough to swallow tractors. If they didn’t get stuck in mud, the camp vehicles regularly became inoperable due to parts that went missing for no reason. One day in the early 1980s, a man named Jim Ostrowalker was dismayed to find that one of his backhoe’s tires had gone flat, and he had a feeling he knew who was responsible. He walked up the hill, sat down beside the grave and said, “This isn’t the kind of help I need, John.” By the time he returned to his backhoe, the tire had been fixed and inflated. Ostrowalker was the only person there, and the backhoe had been out of sight for only a few minutes.

  One of the most annoying problems to plague mining companies in Glacier Creek was the heavy rain that began at 3 p.m. nearly every working day and forced the operation to grind to a halt. The miners described the phenomenon as being weird and unnatural, and they had a gut feeling John was somehow to blame. The rain seemed to fall only on John’s old claims and didn’t occur on non-working days.

  People felt eyes on their backs and heard feet walking behind them on the trails John once traversed, but when they turned around no one was there. They also heard John opening and closing doors and cupboards in the camp trailers.

  John Stockton’s grave

  Most, if not all, of the miners who have worked in the area over the years have seen the ghost somewhere in camp. Ostrowalker says he saw John fifty or sixty times in the course of one summer. He’d be hard at work when he’d look up the hill and see John standing beside his grave, silently looking down at the operation and perhaps planning his next disturbance. And his efforts have been successful, regularly sending mining companies farther down Glacier Creek where, the owners are happy to discover, none of the same odd problems follow.

  Even though John’s desire to have his land remain undisturbed should be abundantly clear, there are still those who attempt to seek him out to get some answers. When author Shirley Jonas travelled to Glacier Creek to research his life, she found it difficult to uncover information. After straightening the rocks of his grave she took a walk along Glacier Creek and then stopped, looked back up the hill and, perhaps overcome by a touch of frustration, said, “What do I have to do to find out more about you, John?”

  Unexpectedly, a voice answered: “Leave me alone!”

  Shirley spun around and looked for the source of the response, but no one was there
. She was alone.

  But in reality, she wasn’t alone. Not truly. Anyone who travels to Glacier Creek will be shadowed by the ghost of John Stockton.

  NEVER EVER COME BACK

  Stony Plain, Alberta

  It was early in the morning when a staff member at the Stony Plain Multicultural Heritage Centre picked up the phone and immediately heard the nearly unintelligible mutterings of a frantic woman on the other end. It took a long time to figure out that the woman who had called was a local artisan and instructor who had led a class in the building the previous evening. Something had clearly upset her a great deal — the staff member got the impression that the instructor had been attacked by some stranger.

  “I’ll never ever come back,” the instructor said with grave seriousness. The instructor had trouble finding the words to adequately describe what had happened.

  She had been attacked in the building by someone who was decidedly dead.

  The class had taken place in a room on the main floor that was filled with period furniture, artwork and antiques in order to resemble a settler’s cabin. The instructor had a lot of equipment to set up for the class and it took her three trips from her car to bring it all inside. The class went off without a hitch, but things took a dark turn after all the students had left. The woman, now completely alone in the building, was packing up her items when she felt the temperature in the room suddenly plummet. The air became colder and colder, so cold that it felt like she was standing in the middle of a walk-in freezer.