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The Ghosts of Dundurn Castle

A renowned and much-discussed figure of Canadian history, Sir Allan MacNab was a confident and charismatic man. Even at the age of twenty-eight, he was said to be a man to follow and watch.[1] With societal eyes cast upon him from such an early age through the height of his career in politics and as an important entrepreneurial figure in Hamilton’s history, it is no wonder people are fascinated with his home.

The building and estate MacNab left behind, as was the intention from their inception, inspire awe. Set atop a gorgeous series of fields, gardens, forests, and rolling grassy hills, against a stunning backdrop of Lake Ontario, the Dundurn Castle estate is as fascinating as it is beautiful. The grounds and adjacent Dundurn Park are home to receptions, weddings, and corporate events; it has even hosted royal visits, such as that of Charles, the Prince of Wales, and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, in 2009.

But when the sun goes down, the shadows creep and spread, giving the Regency-style villa an entirely different look and feel. With the grounds lit by a full moon hanging low in the sky, just to the side of the pillars of the castle, one begins to ponder the many mysteries and tales surrounding Dundurn Castle.

T. Melville Bailey, a local historian, wrote in 1943 that the tales of secret tunnels extending from Dundurn Castle across the grounds were as old as the castle itself. “But,” he notes, “like the ghosts that sit in the castle when the moon is high — we have no positive proof of their existence.”[2]

A lack of physical proof, however, doesn’t stop the mind from racing or the heart from skipping a beat when experiencing something at Dundurn Castle that defies explanation.

Looking back upon the history of the building, its occupants, and the many alleged occurrences on the grounds and adjacent to the property over the past two centuries helps to cast a light into those dark corners, but perhaps doesn’t fully satisfy the mind. The rich history of Dundurn Castle leads to more speculation, further enigmas, and even more possibilities that it is indeed haunted and by more than one ghost.

Dundurn Castle is one of Hamilton’s most easily recognized landmarks. A National Historic Site, it was designed by Robert Wetherall, an English architect, and built around the brick shell of Colonel Richard Beasley’s colonial home. Often considered Wetherall’s masterpiece, it was constructed over a three-year period and completed in 1835.[3]

Dundurn Castle is a historic neoclassical mansion that was completed in 1835. It is 18,000 square feet (1,700 square metres) and took three years and $175,000 to build.

Courtesy of Peter Rainford.

The gardens, grounds, and many unique and unusual buildings made Dundurn one of the finest estates in the province at that time. Dundurn is Gaelic for “strong fort” and the residents of Hamilton immediately nicknamed it “castle.”[4]

Sitting high over Burlington Bay, and seen as people enter or exit Hamilton via York Road, Robert Wetherell meant for this stunning Italianate building to be viewed from the water. The goal was to design and build a house that would not only demonstrate Sir Allan MacNab’s wealth and importance but also to make a mark on the colonial society, both in his day and in the years that followed.[5]

MacNab’s house was “a statement of an age that was already passing”[6] — one in which eighteenth-century aristocrats designed, constructed, landscaped, and furnished homes that conveyed their families’ prestige to the community. Similar to the newest homes in Britain at the time, Dundurn was designed to be looked upon as well as to look outward (particularly across the bay). The ground-floor windows could be swung open and stepped through for easy access to the manicured lawns.

The home itself was relatively narrow, considering that the building was constructed on top of Richard Beasley’s earlier home (he was a fur trader and one of Hamilton’s first residents). This was an intentional statement by MacNab, implying that the future was firmest when built upon the past, and it affected the layout of the interior of the home — something that is not evident when looking upon the building from outside.[7]

Today, Dundurn has been restored to the year 1855, when Sir Allan Napier MacNab (1798–1862) was at the height of his career as a lawyer, land owner, railway magnate, and premier of the “United Canadas.” More than forty rooms of the seventy-two-room castle have been furnished, and costumed staff guide visitors through the home, richly illustrating the life of a prominent Victorian family and contrasting it with that of their servants.[8]

MacNab was born in Niagara-on-the-Lake and arrived in Hamilton from York in 1826, beginning his career as a lawyer. That same year he lost his first wife, Elizabeth Brookes, and raised his two children, Robert and Anne Jane, as a widower. In 1831 he married Mary Stuart and had two more children, Sophia and Minnie. During the construction of Dundurn, in 1934, MacNab’s son Robert fatally shot himself in a hunting accident on the grounds of Dundurn.[9] Later, in 1846, Mary died of consumption. Outside of her deathbed room, a cool chill and mysterious breeze that blows out candles continues to mystify visitors and staff.

According to the tour guides at Haunted Hamilton, an employee of the castle who was performing a last-minute check before locking up one night encountered an eerie sensation in Mary’s bedroom. Alone in the room, she was surprised to hear something: “I was putting out a candle when I heard the sound of a singing voice. At first I thought: Oh, doesn’t that sound nice.” But then she wondered what it was and where she could be hearing singing from. After all, there was no radio playing, nobody around, and the sound definitely wasn’t coming from outside. “It wasn’t frightening,” she said, “but it was not explainable. It was just a couple of phrases of singing and it took me by surprise.”[10]

In 2000, Hamilton Spectator reporter Paul Wilson wrote about the 1999 wedding of Carol and Jim Forrest. Shortly after their ceremony, Carol, Jim, and the wedding party went to the grounds of Dundurn Castle to have their wedding pictures — hundreds — taken professionally. When the photos were delivered a couple of weeks later, Carol and Jim weren’t sure what to make of one in particular: visible immediately behind Lloyd, Carol’s brother, is a pale, grey face.

Attempting to investigate the mysterious wedding guest, Carol took the photograph to various photo shops, Dundurn, an occult store, and a Caledonia psychic. The psychic told Carol the name of the extra guest was Sophia, who felt such spiritual energy and comfortable to be overseeing the wedding.[11] Local historian T. Melville Bailey reported that a Sophia was married in Dundurn in November of 1855, moved with her husband to England, and lived the rest of her life there in luxury, never returning to North America.

Of course, there are those who speculate that spirits don’t necessarily have to haunt the place where they died and can linger behind or return to visit a place that held importance to them in life. So there is the possibility that Sophia, who was married in the castle, returns as a spectral guest to look upon weddings and bestow a positive omen on the festivities.

Apart from his many prestigious roles, MacNab was also a carpenter, stage actor, military officer, and baron. Eclectic in his ways, he was sometimes seen as a man of dual personalities. He displayed an intense degree of power and wealth yet died almost without a penny in his pocket. He was seen as a compassionate and kind employer to his servants yet was a ruthless and threatening businessman.

It has been said that one of Sir Allan MacNab’s hobbies was playing the bagpipes; not just inside the home for his family but also sometimes outside in the middle of the night — on the roof. One can imagine the haunting droning of the bagpipes in the thick dark of night, echoing off the moonlit structures and nearby cemetery tombstones.

In many historical accounts, MacNab is often overshadowed by contemporaries such as John A. Macdonald, even though he played a significant role in laying the foundations for the industrial growth in Hamilton as well as for prosperity in much of Southern Ontario.

MacNab died on August 8, 1862, at Dundurn Castle.[12] He was originally buried that same year on the Dundurn Park grounds between Dundurn Castle and what is known as Castle Dean, on the corner of Locke and Tecumseh.[13] In 1909 MacNab’s body was removed and taken to Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in West Hamilton. His grave was left unmarked until 1967, when the Canadian Club of Hamilton placed a bench and grave marker there.

Due to the huge amount of debt that MacNab died with, the property was mortgaged to pay off his creditors, and the castle sat empty for several years before becoming an institution for the deaf in 1866. It was then purchased in 1872 by Donald McInnes, who moved his family in after making some minor revisions and repairs to the estate.[14]

In 1899 McInnes sold the castle to the City of Hamilton and it became a museum. In 1967, for the Canadian Centennial year, three million dollars was spent restoring the castle to the state it was in when Sir Allan MacNab inhabited it.[15]

Constructed of stone, a “mystery building,” with a small pagoda-like upper level and topped with a circular cap and column, exists at Dundurn Park, just east of the castle. Nobody knows the actual purpose for which it was built, but historians feel that it might have been a boathouse, an office, a theatre, a laundry, a summer pavilion, or a chapel. Urban legends posit that many underground tunnels lead from the castle to other buildings on the estate, one of them coming through this mystery building.[16] , [17]

The site itself, even prior to the castle being constructed, is not immune to the possibility of ghosts. Many Hamilton residents stricken with cholera during their passage overseas were housed in — and died in — plague sheds across the street from where the castle now stands. And in 1812, eleven men (American sympathizers during the war) were publicly gutted and hung for treason.

All of this aside — staff and visitors alike feeling cold chills, witnessing apparitions gliding through rooms of the castle and in the moonlight yard, reporting various objects being moved around — the castle and its grounds continue to exude a sense of enigma and mystery.

And if you visit Dundurn today, you’ll see that it stands, like its original owner, not just as a beacon of a significant time in Hamilton history but also as an acknowledgement that some of our most interesting pieces of history remain unsolved puzzles.