Читать книгу Real Hauntings 4-Book Bundle - Mark Leslie - Страница 25

Haunted Pubs

"Associate a place with drinking and late-night cavorting and you’re likely to encounter more than a few unbelievable stories. Nonetheless, Hamilton has its share of haunted drinking establishments, and not just hauntings of barflies who are a constant fixture on a corner stool.

When one thinks about a pub, restaurant, or bar, one imagines a place continually filled with people from various walks of life, each carrying their own personal baggage, whether it’s a lightly packed affair or something more foreboding and ominous. These are places where the extremes of emotions are felt, where heightened senses are played upon, and where drama can unfold quickly. The two musical extremes of wanting to party like its “1999” or drowning one’s sorrows in another round of “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” often take place in this type of setting. So is it any wonder that such activity might have a ripple effect on the cosmic aura of a place?

This chapter takes a look at a few of the allegedly haunted pubs in the Hamilton area. I have just cleaned the bar in front of you; the seat is yours if you want it. Please join me as I pull back the tap and pour you a nice cold glass of speculative wonder.

A Ghost Named Harvey

A bar called The Werx on Hughson Street in Hamilton has its share of regulars who are not all that different than Harvey. Unlike most, however, this one never leaves a tip, nor does he ever make a mess. You see, Harvey is a ghost.

Both customers and staff have seen or felt him; but they’re okay with it. In fact, Harvey is a friendly and well-accepted resident ghost. The other patrons of the bar are tolerant of Harvey — perhaps because they know what it’s like to be shunned for being different. You see, The Werx is a gay bar. Apart from a dining room, bar, and dance floor, it has a leather bar in the basement and holds leather and fetish parties once a month. The customers and staff are an outgoing, friendly, and accepting group — open-minded and happy to accept people for who and what they are.[1]

Harvey is, thus, just another visitor to their world, one who looks on from the great beyond and rarely ever causes any sort of fuss. He just shows up from time to time. Occasionally, he puts a scare into people, but mostly he just gets along and watches.

Harvey is regularly seen by customers and staff near the back of the bar and near the women’s washrooms. Sometimes his presence is merely felt in terms of an inexplicable cold brush of something moving past. Other times he has even been seen looking in a window from the alley. Of course, the strange thing about that is, based upon the height of the window, Harvey would either have had to have been standing on a step-ladder or else floating three or four feet off of the alley floor.[2]

Most vote for the latter of the two.

Staff have had encounters with Harvey where he has actually tried to manipulate objects. Harvey has been known to start up and stop the vacuum cleaner as if playing with it and testing it out. He has also been known to turn lights back on after the bar manager completes the round of turning off all the lights at the end of a night. At times, after knowing for sure that he had turned all the lights off, manager Mike Panopolous has gone back, having forgotten something, to see that the lights were back on again.[3]

Panopolous has explained that Harvey is likely the ghost of a custodian who lived in an apartment in the building where The Werx is, but who died in a fire in the back. The building at 121 Hughson, which took on various different forms over the years, housed charities, fraternities, dancers, insurance agents, and photographers. It was even once a spice factory and served as a church. In 1980 it became a bar, and in 2002, The Werx opened.[4]

And it seems as if the tenants of The Werx have revived.

One tale involving Harvey has to do with a few employees casually chatting after the bar closed for the night. In the middle of their chatter, the piano in The Saffron Room started to play. They thought that was strange, since the door to that room had been locked and there was nobody else in the building. As they went to investigate, the piano music kept playing up until the point that they unlocked the door and opened it. When they threw open the door, the music abruptly stopped and they found nobody in the room.[5]

Not much is known about Harvey, the custodian who died as a result of the burns he received in the fateful fire. But you might just see or hear a story about Harvey if you were to head down to The Werx.[6]

Just don’t expect him to join you out on the dance floor if your favourite song pops up in the DJ’s mix.

Winking Ghosts

A pub located at 25 Augusta Street in Hamilton specializes in microbrewed beer. With at least twenty-two taps, it offers one of the broadest selections, from a standard core selection to a featured series of rotating brands and styles of beers. They have, over the years, served over 285 different beers produced by brewmasters from Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta, as well as selected European imports.

The atmosphere at Augusta’s Winking Judge is devoted to good beer and offers a perfect place to hang out with old friends or to make new ones. But this pub also offers something that is not on their rather broad list of available brews: for more than ten years, they have also been home to a number of supernatural visitors. More than fifty sightings of the ghost of an elderly man have been reported by staff and patrons at the place often fondly referred to as “The Judge.”[7]

The man, dressed in a dark suit and a top hat, strongly suggesting he is originally from a time long past, usually appears in the window of the men’s washroom on the upper floor. He is sometimes seen from the other windows on the main floor, but more often than not haunts the men’s washroom the way a bar-fly might haunt his favourite stool.[8]

There is nothing frightening or foreboding about his appearances. He is merely there one moment, a silent and eerie spectre, and then he disappears.[9]

Maria Italia, the bar owner, has explained that this elderly dark man, who is the most often seen ghost in the pub, isn’t the only one. Some people have experienced what they thought was a cat brushing against their legs; amused that the bar had their own resident pet, something that usually gives a place some character, they would reach down to stroke the animal, only to find nothing there. Augusta’s Winking Judge doesn’t have a resident pet — at least not one that you need to feed and clean up after.[10]

Inexplicable wisps of smoke have been seen floating up the stairs even after Hamilton adopted a no smoking bylaw for bars and restaurants, and footsteps are sometimes heard, particularly when the bar is empty and there is nobody else in the building.[11]

Italia has even recounted memories of her daughter having interesting conversations by herself when she was about two years old. When questioned about whom she was speaking to, the little girl would simply answer that she was talking to the man.[12]

With too many nocturnal and eerie sightings and happenings at the bar, Maria and her husband, Bill Rea, welcomed a team of paranormal investigators to check things out. Covered in articles in the Hamilton Spectator, as well as via interviews with local radio personalities, the supernatural activities of this Augusta Street bar became well-known back in 2008.

The organization that the owners called in was called the Southern Ontario Paranormal Society (or SOPS), which was formed by Steve Genier in 2005. SOPS doesn’t charge for its services, which involves investigating a site with more than $5,000 in equipment to attempt to document or record what it calls “hot spots” of ghostly activity.[13]

Having spent a long night in the bar with half a dozen investigators and three “sensitives” (psychics who are attuned to feel otherworldly activity and presences), Genier recorded something that hadn’t been heard before, and it was picked up simultaneously by two independent recording devices in the basement. Slightly obscured by the hum of a nearby refrigerator, a child-like voice can be heard saying, “I can hear you.”[14]

Hamilton resident Randy Hines wasn’t surprised to learn that the pub was haunted. After reading about the SOPS investigation in the Hamilton Spectator, he contacted reporter Mark McNeil to add some history to the contemporary experiences.[15]

Before it was converted into a business establishment, the building used to be a home. Hines said that his grandparents used to live in the house from the mid 1930s until the mid 1970s and that, as a child, he always felt it was haunted. He reports having heard things such an footsteps walking upstairs and recalls being warned by his grandfather not to go up into the attic because the man, Gord, would get him.[16]

If Gord is indeed the name of the spectral man in the dark suit and top hat, the ghost regularly seen at Augusta’s Winking Judge seems to have mellowed over time. While feeling uneasy and freaked out at seeing him, nobody has ever felt threatened by this otherworldly visitor.

Instead, he is just there, an intriguing and often celebrated ghost who doesn’t appear to disrupt or to judge. A spirit content to mingle in a place where spirits of the natural world flow quite freely as well, he seems more inclined to linger and adds ambiance to the old Victorian building.

The Coach and Lantern

The Coach and Lantern British Pub sits on a busy street in downtown Ancaster amid trendy boutique shops and beautiful sandstone buildings. There is a bustle in the air most afternoons, of both pedestrians and traffic. Most people who pass the third oldest building in Ancaster might marvel at the classic stone look and front fence with wrought-iron archway that leads through to the patio and entrance, but they are likely unaware of the bloody history of this site, nor of the ghosts that roam around to this day inside.

Originally built in the 1700s, the building at 384 Wilson Street burned down and was re-built in 1823. But between those times, the land bore witness to The Bloody Assize in Upper Canada, a series of trials held during the War of 1812. During the war, a number of settlers from the Niagara and London region had taken up arms against their neighbours. Several groups were taken prisoner, and in 1814, fifteen of the nineteen people charged were found guilty — eight of them were executed in an utterly barbaric fashion.[17]

Justice Thomas Scott’s execution order on that site included a centuries-old British-style punishment for treason. On June 21, 1814, Scott pronounced the sentence for eight of the men: “You are to be drawn on hurdles to a place of execution, whence you are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, for you must be cut down while alive and your entrails taken out and burnt before your faces. Your heads then to be cut off and your bodies divided into four quarters to be at the King’s disposal. May God have mercy on your souls.”

The following month, the men were transported all the way down to a gallows that was located across the street from where Dundurn Castle now stands. So while they were not killed on that spot, it was near that very location where their fates were sealed.

In 1832 the building was re-built for George Rousseaux, and in the 1870s it became the Old Union Hotel. It was converted into apartments in the 1950s, and in 1980 it was converted yet again, this time into a restaurant.

The original owners of the restaurant had experienced a resident ghost, who they described as an old man in his sixties, slouched over as if he was working in a field. Believing him to be a farmer or caretaker who had died in one of the fires that destroyed the original building, the old man’s stance, when seen, made complete sense to them. Wearing a plaid shirt and burlap pants, the ghost is said to have also worn a haggard expression on his face.

Those first owners of the pub, which was originally known as The Coach and Lantern English Pub (new ownership brought a slight modification to the name, substituting the word English with British), were allegedly frightened to stay in the building alone at any time of the day or night.

Bob Conway, the more recent owner, encountered a different ghost even before he purchased the restaurant he would reopen. When the bar was closed, Conway moved behind the counter in an effort to teach himself the art of pouring a beer from the tap. When he looked up from his task, he saw a man sitting in the bar, wearing a pair of old-fashioned green overalls. The man quickly vanished from sight.[18]

Conway reports that a waitress also saw a man lingering near the end of the bar one evening after the bar had closed. When she spotted him, he turned and headed down the hallway as if toward the washrooms. She followed him, but was shocked to note that he had simply vanished upon entering the hallway. He was nowhere to be found.[19]

Once, Conway said, a woman was feeding her grandson in a room upstairs. They were by themselves, enjoying a quiet moment of child and grandparent bonding, when the distinct voice of a man over her shoulder stated, “What a beautiful baby!” Startled, the woman turned to find that nobody was there.[20]

Local psychic and clairvoyant Michele Stableford reports having seen the same man that Conway did on one of his earliest visits to the pub. She had been sitting with a friend at one of the tables when she spotted a man in green coveralls walking across the room. The man turned, glanced at Stableford, and then continued walking across the room and through the wall. Stableford, who has become used to seeing extraordinary things her entire life, said she also received a distinct impression of the letter J upon seeing the ghost, believing his name might perhaps be John.[21]

Another time, a waitress spotted a man sitting at a table and turned to retrieve a menu to bring over to him. But when she looked back his way, the man had simply disappeared.

Bob Conway reported that more than one staff member has quit after an encounter with the supernatural in his pub: one cook was scared off by the constant approaching rush of footsteps in his direction. A dishwasher left after exclaiming that he simply could not take it anymore.

Conway, a friendly fellow with a cheerful attitude, doesn’t come across as a man haunted by terrible things. He accepts the supernatural occurrences in a somewhat jovial manner and smiles when welcoming in the regular groups of ghost hunters he says like to come out on Friday nights to “have a little fun upstairs.”

“Before I bought this place, I was very skeptical about ghosts and ghost stories,” Conway said; then, with a shrug, he continued, “I’m a little less sceptical now.”

The folks from Haunted Hamilton often suggest The Coach and Lantern as a good place to get great food and beer — and to enjoy the friendly staff and atmosphere of the 175-year-old building — before heading out on their historic ghost walk of the nearby Hermitage ruins.

The pub, which proudly boasts free Wi-Fi and fantastic live entertainment on its web page, makes just a small reference to the legends of ghosts and the fact that there’s often something more in the air than the sounds of a great local band or the unseen signals of a wireless internet connection.