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A Westdale Ghost

In the course of my research for this book, it was inevitable that people who found out what I was writing wanted to share their personal experiences. While I heard so very many interesting tales, there was one in particular that caught my interest. I think, perhaps, it is because of the approach I have taken with this book.

Yes, this is a book of ghost tales: true encounters with the supernatural. But I have done my best to look into the details in question, to seek out as many sources as possible, and to try to understand the “spooks” from a historical perspective. I make no claims of having any sort of unbiased approach, nor a supposed journalistic integrity in the way the tales have been written. But I did my best to stick close to the facts, and, where the facts were light, I believe I have tried to ensure that there was a balance in the presentation of the stories.

To that end, I share this story of a colleague I worked with at McMaster University. When he learned that I was working on a book of ghost stories for Dundurn, he offered to tell me a tale over coffee. Something happened to him several decades ago that still sends shivers down his spine.

When he told me the tale, I, too, experienced an eerie chill, and even as the story was unfolding, I knew it was something I wanted to include in this book.

This gentleman is an academic — a multi-disciplined, highly educated person who carefully thinks things through. He is a person I have never seen jumping to conclusions, and who approaches every task in a careful, methodical manner. He is not the type of person to get easily excited about something, nor to put much stock in things without carefully applying the scientific method — a handy fix-it sort of person who was known for carefully making things better; several people who worked with him on campus nicknamed him MacGyver. For that reason, I’ll call him Angus, as this was the first name of the character made popular in that 1980s ABC television show.

At about the same time that Richard Dean Anderson was playing Angus MacGyver, my colleague Angus and his wife were living in an apartment in the older section of Hamilton. They found that the space wasn’t large enough for them, so they got a house in Westdale. Their first couple of nights after moving in, there were some unusual sounds accompanied by the odd feeling that they were in kind of a strange place. “Usually when you move in to a new place you feel somewhat unsettled,” Angus said. “But I had never felt uneasy like that before.”

Angus and his wife, Linda, just shrugged that uneasy feeling off as “new move in” jitters. They reasoned that things hadn’t been put away properly, most of their belongings were still in boxes, and it would take time to settle in and for the feeling to pass.

One afternoon, Angus was doing some work at home and thought he’d throw some clothes down the laundry chute; it was one of the older homes that had a chute from the top floor down to the basement. “That was when I heard these creaking noises down in the basement coming from up the laundry chute,” he said. Angus described the noises as reminding him of the sound a person would make walking on the stairs.

Angus thought it was really unusual, since there was nobody else in the house, and immediately suspected that someone had gotten in and was snooping around. “My initial impression was that someone had been walking down the stairs, which was enough to make me uneasy because the doors were locked and there was supposedly nobody in the house.” So he quietly went to the basement and things seemed very normal — nothing was out of place and there was nobody to be found.

In the manner that people rationalize things to themselves — particularly things that don’t make sense or fit into the world as most people know it — Angus decided that it must have been something else he had heard, most likely noises that had carried in through the laundry chute from somewhere outside.

So he went back upstairs and resumed working. A little later, he heard a somewhat similar noise again, but more remote. This was likely because the laundry chute was closed. So he repeated his performance of walking downstairs cautiously. “And of course,” Angus said, “there was nothing there the second time, either.”

Two or three months passed, and Angus was working late one night on the main floor; he had been sitting in the living room with a notepad, sketching out some ideas for a project he was working on. Linda, who worked in Toronto and had a long commute ahead of her in the morning, had already gone to sleep. So when he heard the familiar creaking of footsteps coming from upstairs, he immediately jumped up to investigate. But again, he found nothing, and Linda was still sound asleep in her bed.

This repeated auditory phenomenon became a common occurrence. It continued like that for some time, almost to the point that Angus and his wife had gotten used to it.

But, just as Angus was settling into a routine that incorporated the noises, something more startling occurred. One night, he woke up and saw what he described as a hologram of a male standing in the doorway to his bedroom. Startled, Angus sat up, leaned forward, and tried to look closer to see what it was — he was convinced it was some sort of trick of the moon shining in and bouncing off a reflective surface of some sort.

But the instant he was up it disappeared.

Angus became determined that he was going to have to be more alert in the future so that when he woke up he didn’t move, but merely opened his eyes to check things out first so as not to startle or disturb whatever might have been in his doorway.

It was about a week later that Angus woke up again in the middle of the night; this time for some inexplicable reason. There hadn’t been any noise or other physical disturbance — he just woke up. This time Angus was disciplined enough not to toss the blanket aside and sit straight up, and when he looked out the doorway he saw the hologram again. It didn’t seem all that three-dimensional, and it wasn’t casting any sort of light, but he looked at it for a moment, just taking it in. That’s when he very carefully slipped out from under the covers and got out of bed. The human figure standing in the doorway remained where it stood.

Upon closer inspection, he noticed that it was the size and shape of a man somewhere in the range of five and a half to six feet tall. There was no motion of arms, or any effort to make a motion or a step. The clothing the man wore wasn’t distinct — he was non-descript and seemed relatively modern or contemporary. And though Angus couldn’t see any lines on the man’s face or any other distinguishing features, he had the impression that this was an elderly man. The figure wasn’t hunched, but it wasn’t standing erect like a soldier.

Angus got up and realized that he didn’t have any feelings of anxiety. He regularly meditated, so knew the feeling of inner peace. And though he wasn’t in quite the same relaxed state, he didn’t have an uneasy feeling, certainly nothing like the previous experiences and the uneasy feelings he’d felt before, upon hearing strange noises in the house. He was simply at peace with what was there. There was no associated alarming feeling upon looking at what he describes as the hologram of this elderly gentleman.

He slowly stepped toward the figure standing in the doorway. It didn’t disappear this time. He then deliberately opened his hand, because to him that was a kind of a sign of peace. “Then I slowly put my hand through the hologram,” Angus said. “And it still didn’t disappear. It wasn’t until I pulled my hand back that it disappeared.”

When his hand passed through the figure, he didn’t feel anything: no chill, no warmth — it was as if his hand was passing through a beam of light. Angus noted that his hand had become more opaque as it passed through the body of the elderly man.

Angus and Linda talked to one of the neighbours not long after. The neighbour was a retired schoolteacher who was working around the garden and was curious about the fragrances coming out of the house due to cooking, so she offered them some herbs.

Out of the blue, the retired schoolteacher asked Angus an interesting question: “Have you heard any strange noises in your house?”

Angus said, “Why do you ask?”

“Oh,” she said. “The people who had the house before you complained that they had heard very unusual noises in the house.”

Angus asked what his predecessors attributed the noise to. She said she didn’t know, but that prior to them, there had been some weird people living in the house for about a quarter of a century. That was the end of that conversation.

A few weeks after that, Angus was speaking with an older lady who lived on the other side of them. This woman needed some consolation because she’d had a disagreement with her eldest daughter. The woman was really broken-hearted, and she looked at Angus, held up her finger, and said, “When I die I’m going to come back and haunt that daughter of mine.” Then she turned to Angus and commented that he should know something about that.

“What are you talking about?” Angus asked.

She said, “Because of the house you live in. You must have heard something.”

Not long after, Angus and Linda decided that because they did a lot of travelling, they would move into a more condominium-type accommodation. Nothing else eerie had happened to them after his encounter with the spectre of the elderly man that one night, but Angus was always intrigued and wanted to find out more about the strange house in Westdale they had lived in.