The Stem ta Stern is a Queen Anne revival home with two guest rooms. Much of its period architecture has been preserved, including the stained glass, the front turret and the original wood throughout. Bridgetown was once a vital shipbuilding town with plenty of wealth, and the beautiful homes reflect this heritage. They also have the perfect look for a movie about a haunted house and, in the case of the Stem ta Stern, the perfect ghost.
One week after purchasing the property, the owner was awoken with a start by an odd sound she assumed was caused by the wind. She slipped out of bed and went down the stairs to make sure all was well and to get a drink of water. She passed a storage room. She paused. The air drifting under the door was unnaturally cold. And then she heard a sound that chilled her to the bone. Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. It sounded like someone was tapping on a window, and it appeared to be coming from inside the storage room.
She opened the door and entered the room. What she saw outside the window immediately caught her attention. There was a man hanging by his neck from a large tree, swaying in the wind. She jumped in alarm, but when she looked out the window again, the dead man had disappeared.
It’s suspected the man had committed suicide, but no one knows who he was or what exactly happened to him. That doesn’t stop the man from frightening guests from time to time. The reports are always the same. Late at night, the bedroom’s temperature plummets for no apparent reason. Someone issues a warning on the window: rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. But then, instead of hanging from the tree outside, the man suddenly appears in the hall or a room. His face is distorted with pain and his neck is twisted and bruised. It’s a terrifying vision that forces guests to scream and shut their eyes tight, and when the guest finally finds the courage to open his or her eyes again, the hanged man is gone.
If the reports from the Stem ta Stern are to be believed, it would appear the prettiest little town in Nova Scotia harbours a secret that’s neither pretty nor little.
THE TOMBS OF HELL
Kingston, Ontario
Throughout the year, in fair weather or foul, Kingston tourists are led along shadowy streets and through dark alleys, soaking up every gruesome detail that’s shared during one of the country’s oldest haunted walks. The tour guides, clad in black robes and carrying a burning lamp, love to chill their groups to the bone with terrifying true stories. But although it’s the job of the guides to get under the groups’ skin, one ghost is simply too evil, too malicious, to mention.
The ghost is that of George Hewell, a Kingston Penitentiary inmate who was shot to death by the chief keeper in 1897. Hewell was, by all accounts, a particularly bad seed in a jail filled with the worst criminals our country has ever known. He was so bad, in fact, that not even death could stop him from tormenting the guards and his fellow inmates.
Before it closed in 2013, Kingston Pen was the most infamous prison in Canada. It was home to such notorious criminals as Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo and Russell Williams. Opened in 1835, Kingston Pen predates Confederation and has been designated a national historic site. After 178 years it was deemed to be in a rundown state and too costly to continue operating. The inmates were moved to other jails, but the stories of the terrible things that took place within its imposing limestone walls live on.
In the early days, one form of punishment was to tie a prisoner to a post to be flogged up to forty times with a cat-o’-nine-tails, a nasty whip designed to inflict as much pain and damage on someone’s back as possible. Others were disciplined by being branded with a hot iron that burned the flesh, forever marking them as criminals. And there was no shortage of hangings on the premises. Back then an illegal act as mild as stealing a cow or forging a receipt was punishable by death.
Much of this barbaric behaviour was carried out by the first two wardens, father and son Henry and Frank Smith. Henry designed what he called “the box,” a wooden coffin that forced inmates to stand upright with no space to move a muscle. Prisoners were left in the box for nearly ten hours and were poked and jabbed by guards through the air holes. Frank allegedly enjoyed shooting at prisoners with a bow and arrow, sticking them with pins and needles as if they were human pincushions and forcibly pouring salt into their mouths.
Although the treatment of prisoners improved over the years, the dark energy created by so much hate and suffering has remained, forever soaked into the stone walls. Some have said entering Kingston Pen is akin to being forced into the tombs of Hell.
Is it the ghost of George Hewell people sense upon walking into the prison? His vengeful spirit has been spotted before. A front page article titled “Did They See a Ghost?” in the Kingston Daily News on February 13, 1897, described an eerie encounter with Hewell, who had been dead a year by that time.
With moonlight reflecting brightly off freshly fallen snow, two guards on night duty rounded a corner in the outside courtyard and saw a man in convict’s clothing step through the hospital door. The man, described as a “nocturnal visitor” who had a “strange form,” silently crossed the courtyard without paying the guards any attention. They ordered him to identify himself and explain what he was doing out so late, but the man turned and walked back to the hospital door without a word. The guards levelled their rifles to shoot and gave him one last warning. The man turned to face them, touched the hospital door and suddenly disappeared before the guards’ disbelieving eyes. They later admitted that they both had immediately recognized the shadowy figure as George Hewell. A late-night search of the prison failed to resolve the mystery.
Kingston Penitentiary
Before his death, Hewell had been serving a life sentence in Kingston Pen. He had a reputation for attacking anyone within his reach, including guards and fellow inmates. There were at least four recorded incidents in which he tried to kill other convicts, and his murderous instincts could be set off for the most insignificant reasons. He once tried to kill a man for borrowing his library book. He was like a box of dynamite ready to explode at any moment.
The story surrounding Hewell’s death is both gruesome and riveting. Early one morning he tried to throw another convict over a three-storey balcony to his death. As punishment he was confined in an isolation cell for some time and then forced to work for the rest of the day in the tailor’s shop. This was a mistake, as it gave Hewell, angered and irrational, access to a pair of sharp tailor’s shears.
With the shears concealed on his body, Hewell swore and caused a commotion from within his cell through the rest of the evening. After listening to the racket for as long as they could, the guards entered the cell to move Hewell to another location where he could be further punished. Hewell seized his opportunity and attacked the guards with the shears. Fortunately for the guards, he wasn’t able to seriously injure anyone before the warden pulled his pistol’s trigger and lodged a bullet in Hewell’s head.
Normally, a bullet to the head would be enough to kill any man, but Hewell was no regular man. For five full hours Hewell continued to swear and threaten the guards before finally succumbing to the head wound.
With his final breath, Hewell levelled a curse at Kingston Pen. He promised to return from beyond the grave to make everyone pay for killing him — even those who played no part in his death. Dying wouldn’t stop him from having his revenge.
Many eerie occurrences since the guards’ moonlit patrol have been attributed to the vengeful spirit of Hewell, a man who was never at peace. When he first arrived at Kingston Pen and passed through the front gate of the tombs of Hell, Hewell knew he was serving a life sentence. But he couldn’t have known he’d also be serving an afterlife sentence.
REBECCA’S CONCRETE GRAVE
Moncton, New Brunswick
There’s a slab of concrete on the side of the rarely travelled Gorge Road in northern Moncton. On the surface there’s nothing entirely remarkable about the concrete — it appears as if it might have been poured there quite by mistake many years ago and forgotten. A ramshackle fence surrounds the slab, protecting
it from farm equipment or snowplows. But the locals know what lies beneath it. Perhaps the only reason the story isn’t well known outside New Brunswick is because they’d rather keep the truth as deeply buried as the bones below the concrete at the side of the road.
In 1876, farm girl Rebecca Lutes was sixteen years old. Her family had been lured to southeastern New Brunswick from America with a land grant from the British. There was no shortage of farmable land in Canada, just a shortage of farmers. Many people emigrated from the States, Ireland, Holland, Germany and other far-flung countries to work the land and produce desperately needed crops. Many of the immigrants brought their superstitious beliefs with them to Canada. Misfortune, bad weather, illness — these could all be attributed to evil forces.
The summer of 1876 had been especially dry, providing little food in the fields and leaving Moncton susceptible to flash fires. A few families lost their barns and homes to raging forest fires, which only made the food shortage worse. As fall turned to winter, a new problem arose: farmers throughout the area were waking in the morning to find that their livestock had disappeared overnight. The community was desperate to find something — or rather, someone — to blame.
Compounding the situation were reports of bizarre lights floating along the roads after dusk and rumours of demonic rituals being practised deep in the woods. The townsfolk, at their wits’ end, agreed that there must be a witch among them.
The story isn’t clear on how they came to believe Rebecca was the guilty party, but it was said that she had been seen practising witchcraft and had stolen the animals herself, using their blood for sacrificial purposes in her dark ceremonies. She was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death.
One heartbreaking version of the tale claims that Rebecca was hanged from a tree on her own property as her family was forced to watch. Her body was then cut down and buried at the base of the tree. But the townsfolk feared a dead witch almost as much as a live one, so they took extreme precautions with the burial.
First, her body wasn’t placed face up as is customary, but face down. This was to prevent the witch from digging her way back up to the surface should she return from the dead. Instead she’d dig her way straight down to Hell. Second, they poured a four-block concrete casing into the hole to further prevent her from rising from her grave.
Despite their best efforts to seal her six feet under for eternity, the locals began seeing Rebecca wandering the fields at night, and these reports continue today. Sometimes Rebecca takes the form of a thick, misty cloud, and other times people see floating orbs of light that are attributed to her. The land around her concrete grave is often unnaturally cold. People have seen their breath on muggy summer days and car windows have frozen over as vehicles pass her resting spot. Fresh bloodstains often appear on the surface of the concrete grave only to fade away moments later. There’s an old abandoned church across the street, and Rebecca has been spotted peering down at the living from an upper window. But she hasn’t always been spotted alone; many have seen a black cat sitting on the concrete, both during the day and at night. When approached, the cat suddenly disappears. Some people believe the phantom feline is waiting for the day when Rebecca returns to this plain permanently.
The concrete grave remains on the side of Gorge Road to this day. Visiting it after midnight has become a rite of passage for local teenagers. It’s a story so spine-chillingly compelling that it can’t remain a secret from the rest of the country for long.
THE FAMILY THAT HAUNTS TOGETHER
Colwood, British Columbia
For most young cadets training for a life in the military, the people they fear the most are their superiors. This wasn’t the case at Hatley Castle, a mansion located on the grounds of what was once Royal Roads Military College, a naval training facility from the 1940s to 1995.
Who could be more frightening than a drill sergeant barking orders and demanding push-ups? The family who built and lived in Hatley Castle, that’s who. The family who died many years before the military college opened. The family reunited in the afterlife and none too pleased with the new tenants of their beautiful home.
James Dunsmuir was at one time the most influential and wealthy man in the entire province of British Columbia. He was born while his father (who would become a Vancouver Island coal baron) and mother emigrated from Scotland to B.C. in 1851. He stepped out of his father’s shadow to become a powerful industrialist and politician, holding the positions of both Premier and Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia in close succession. The mansion Dunsmuir built in 1908 for his large family, Hatley Castle, was designed in the Scottish baronial style, reflecting his heritage.
“Money doesn’t matter. Just build what I want,” he reportedly told the contractors. Dunsmuir, his wife, Laura, and their children (they had twelve, nine of whom survived infancy) loved their home. It’s not hard to understand why.
The mansion boasted fifty rooms on 640 acres that also had farms, a modern dairy and its own slaughterhouse. A fishing lodge was built on property along the Cowichan River. The gardens were so extensive and magnificent that Dunsmuir had to employ one hundred gardeners and groundskeepers. It was the type of home that would be hard to leave behind. For the Dunsmuirs, the act of packing up and moving on would prove impossible, even in death.
Despite the luxury in which he lived, James Dunsmuir’s final days were not happy. One of his two sons had died in 1915 when the RMS Lusitania sank and the other, an alcoholic, had left home to roam the world aimlessly, tarnishing the family’s name. And Dunsmuir’s daughters had married and moved far away, leading lives that Dunsmuir believed to be frivolous. He died in his fishing lodge in 1920. At the time of his death, he was still the richest man in the province, but in a few short years his entire fortune had been squandered by his children. Hatley Castle was sold to the government in 1940. The years between Dunsmuir’s death and the selling of Hatley Castle were harder on no one more than Dunsmuir’s widow, Laura. She had become accustomed to the elegant life she had enjoyed, entertaining celebrities and the British aristocracy in her home. She fell into depression, grew very ill and passed away in 1937.
Soon after her death, a maid reported feeling terribly uncomfortable while working alone in the house. She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her as she worked, and there were some rooms that she couldn’t bring herself to enter.
When Hatley Castle became Royal Roads Military College in 1941, the tales of peculiar incidents began to increase. Cadets were often overcome by a discomforting sensation in the middle of the night, as if they had suddenly stepped into an ice-cold spider web. And imagine waking to see an old woman staring down at you before vanishing into the night? Many cadets have experienced just that, and their descriptions of the old ghost perfectly match Laura Dunsmuir. They say she didn’t look happy to see so many young men living in her house. One night, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
A cadet who was acting as senior duty officer fell asleep but was awoken suddenly a few hours later when someone pulled his leg. He sat bolt upright and blinked in the darkness, expecting the culprit to be one of his superiors or a fellow cadet, but he couldn’t believe his eyes: it was the ghost of Mrs. Dunsmuir, hell-bent on dragging him out of his bed and out of her house. He tried to free his leg but, despite his strength and Mrs. Dunsmuir’s small stature, the spectre held onto him with an unearthly ferocity. Finally the young cadet was able to shake himself free from her cold, dead hands, and Laura Dunsmuir dissipated in the air before him. When the cadet shared his experience the next morning, he discovered he wasn’t alone — many other cadets had also been attacked and pulled from their beds by the deceased widow.
Although Mrs. Dunsmuir is the angriest ghost that haunts Hatley Castle, she’s not alone. James Dunsmuir has been seen floating through the basement walls, surrounded by bright white light, and some of their children have also been spotted. The property has now become a university, and the students enrolled there
often report ghostly run-ins with the Dunsmuirs. The family that haunts together, sticks together, even beyond the grave. The students and professors can only hope that James Dunsmuir and his children don’t become as violent as Laura Dunsmuir has proven herself to be.
Hatley Castle
HOSPITAL OF THE DEAD
Inglewood, Alberta
A bloody handprint smeared on a door, dried-up blood caked on every surface in a room and bugs crawling everywhere. These are the horrific sights that confronted an anonymous young thrill-seeker who snuck into the Charles Camsell Hospital in Inglewood late one night with her older brother and his friends. The flashlights gripped in their trembling hands did little to brighten the ghostly atmosphere of the abandoned hospital. After describing the bloody scene above, the girl could say no more, simply concluding that there are things in the creepy building that you don’t want to see. She still has nightmares about it.
She isn’t the only one to warn against venturing into the abandoned hospital. Others have reported that the floors and walls on the second floor, which used to be the hospital’s surgical ward, are covered in old bloodstains. Take a trip up to the fourth floor and you’re now standing in what used to be the hospital’s psych ward. Stay a while and chances are good you’ll hear soft screams slowly getting louder and closer. If you somehow manage to stand your ground, a teenage girl who was once a patient will slowly creep out of the shadows. Look closely at her hands and you’ll see why she’s still screaming years after her death: before she died many years ago, she ripped each of her own fingernails free from her fingertips.
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