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By Daniel Cumerlato and Stephanie Lechniak

Hamilton: A Town of Character, Communities, and Creepy History

Hamilton is our home. Both Stephanie and I were raised in the city. I am originally an east-ender and Stephanie is a Mountain girl. We were from two different worlds, but we are both Hamiltonians. Everything about who we are started here, in the Ambitious City we call home.

Hamilton has long been in the shadow of Toronto. Perhaps for a few years back in the 1850s, Hamiltonians thought they would surpass Toronto, but the idea quickly faded into the dust of modernism. Since the late 1800s, we’ve tried to be a big city, with big city dreams, but in the end the citizens decided there was no use fighting. We are a town of character and communities.

It’s this character that gives the city its appealing history; a history connected to its ghosts.

We first got into the paranormal, ironically, while living in Toronto for a year. For fun, we bought a fifty-cent Ouija board from a garage sale and contacted the dead with our first-ever taped session that same night. The board didn’t move much, but afterwards, when listening to the microcassette recorder, we found a very clear EVP (Electrical Voice Phenomenon, or ghost voice). When we asked, “Spirit, are you there?” a breathy voice, distinct and loud, as if located right up against the microphone, had answered — yes.

We posted this experience on the Internet and were contacted by some TV producers. Nothing came of the EVP, but it was during this interview that we first heard about the notorious “murder house” in Hamilton. The producers freely talked about the ghosts, legends, and violent history of this mysterious house on Hamilton Mountain, but didn’t tell us the address, for fear we might use it before they had a chance to. A couple of days later, we were standing in front of Bellevue Mansion, the murder house, located at the west end of Concession Street.

I was never much of a history buff as a child. To me, history was a subject in school, not something you could experience in person. After returning to Hamilton with Stephanie, this all changed.

We took many pictures of Bellevue. After staring at the pile of pictures and all of our research, we decided the story needed to be told. So began Haunted Hamilton. Bellevue Mansion was demolished about a year later in the dead of night by a greedy landowner. Our pictures of the house were the last ever taken.

We were hooked. Stephanie and I set out to discover as many historically haunted locations as possible: the Custom House, Hermitage Ruins, Auchmar Mansion, Whitehern Mansion, Albion Falls, and of course Dundurn Castle were all places we would visit over the next year. It was during this time that Haunted Hamilton transformed into a public hub for ghost stories, but also a place for celebrating Hamilton’s unique history, which complements the many ghosts who haunt it. Our past is not a story of success through white-collared games, but instead the blood and sweat of blue-collar workers. This gives the city a rough exterior and the permanent role of underdog.

Our stories are infused with romance, mystery, and intrigue. Our history is bred in violence and pioneered by fighters who envisioned a city while staring down at a jungle. We’ve experienced war, murder, and mobsters — all the while trying hard to compete with the growing demands of an emerging nation. Nothing stopped, the city formed, and it’s that determination that gives Hamilton its ghosts.

Our many years of ghost-hunting experience have changed the way we look at history. The many paranormal occurrences we have already experienced seem like an open invitation for even more strange happenings; as if the ghosts are talking about us behind our backs, saying, “Those guys are in the know, let’s talk to them” and giving us a personal connection to the past.

We would become ready for them, especially on nights before an investigation. One such night, before investigating a four-year-old townhouse, stays with us.

I was sleeping and Stephanie was in the living room. It was near Christmas, and we had our tree set up in the dining room. Stephanie heard squeaking noises and watched our two cats run over to stare at the tree, just before it fell against the window. When Stephanie checked the base, she saw that the four large steel bolts had come loose all by themselves.

She ran into the bedroom and told me the entire story. After calming her, we both went to sleep. That same night, I had two vivid dreams. In the first, I saw Stephanie turn around in bed and start talking to me in a foreign language. To this day, I’m not familiar with what language was spoken, but I’ll never forget the strange way she was smiling at me.

The second dream had me walking into an empty bedroom with the lights on. The curtains were open, exposing the large windows, and — in the reflection only — I could see a tall man standing on the bed, wearing a long coat with a wide-brimmed hat covering his face. This would be my first meeting with “the Jesuit,” a ghost we would all be familiar with by the end of the investigation.

At no point during this experience did we see a physical apparition while awake; however, we know fully this was a ghostly experience.

In the over ten years of running Haunted Hamilton, Stephanie and I can claim only one time each when we actually saw a ghost. This does not include hearing footsteps on the second floor, feeling the presence of something not visible to the naked eye, capturing an orb, or having something disappear; what I’m talking about is the experience of a visual manifestation of a spirit.

For me it was at the Hermitage Ruins in Ancaster. We were finishing up the Ghost Walk, when I walked around the ruins to tell people it was time to leave. After clearing the side wall of the ruins, I saw two people walking away from me. I called to them but neither stopped. I called a second time, and both of them walked into the forest. I ran quickly, only seconds behind, to an area covered with bushes and many tripping hazards. I shone the flashlight into the woods to find that both people had vanished.

For Stephanie, it happened while cleaning up after a Ghost Walk at the Custom House in Hamilton’s historic North End. Sitting in the main lobby, she was carefully scraping wax off of a table, when she heard footsteps. She looked up to see nobody was there, but the footsteps continued as if an invisible person were walking down the middle aisle toward her. She froze, afraid, staring out over the rows of chairs into the empty gallery. Then, for just a split second, a woman appeared, sitting properly stick-straight in one of the aisle chairs. She was looking directly at Stephanie. Then, as fast as the woman appeared, she was gone.

Stephanie and I have always considered ourselves journalists in the field. We never become too much of a believer or a skeptic when it comes to the unknown.

Believe too much and you’ll find amazing amounts of unproven evidence. Believe too little and you’ll never see or experience anything. Stay on the fence to watch the expert psychics, mediums, scientists, and photographers do their trade in the most haunted locations, and you’ll end up with an amazing view from the sky, looking down to find common factors.

Failing that, there’s always a great ghost story as a personal link to history. It’s something to experience and never ignore, something to revel in and enjoy, and something, if you’re lucky, that just may scare you.

Daniel Cumerlato

Founding Partner of Haunted Hamilton Ghost Walks & Events

Of Notepads, Haunted Houses, and Thresholds to the Unknown

From the moment we stepped through the threshold, we knew our lives had changed forever; we entered the Bellevue Mansion as kids, merely nineteen and twenty-one years old, yet emerged over a decade later as grown adults, in our thirties, still fascinated with the unusual and things that go bump in the night. That beautiful, sunny day in September of 2000 was a special moment in time — a day when we learned how to appreciate history and the abundance of it right here in our own backyard.

Now, twelve years later, we fondly remember back to when we first began Haunted Hamilton. The Bellevue Mansion was our inspiration at a time when our eyes were closed to the world of the paranormal. I was attending a new media design school in Toronto, and Daniel was working the daily grind at a computer company as an IT analyst.

Our weekdays were pretty hectic, and one early Saturday morning we decided to go to some garage sales. Oddly enough, we had found ourselves at an old funeral home in downtown Hamilton that was having a community sale in the parking lot outside. And there it was ... an old, beaten-up Ouija board from the 1980s. We dusted it off and asked, “How much?” The old man at the table was eager to give it to us for only fifty cents, so we happily paid and left with what that we thought was only a cheap board game.

Several weeks later, we finally pulled the board out and gave it a whirl, but we were both unsure how to use it. The only experience I had was as a little girl, playing with my girlfriends at a birthday party. So when Daniel and I first placed our fingertips on the planchette, we weren’t sure what to expect.

After some jokes and silly comments, the board started to work! The planchette started pointing to letters and numbers not making any sense at all, until it began to spell out, U R A HAPPY COUPLE. At that moment, I began to cry, and Daniel just looked at me in shock. We both had a strong trust in each other, enough to know it wasn’t a joke and that neither of us had spelled it out intentionally.

A few months later, we decided to step it up a notch. We rested a microcassette recorder (yes, it was that long ago — before there were these fancy digital ones!) on the table beside the board and started to communicate. Our first question was, “Is there a spirit present?” and the planchette pointed to the word YES. It was an all-around successful session, so we closed it off by saying goodbye to the spirit, then sat back and rewound the tape.

There it was ... something that opened our eyes and solidified our view of the paranormal. It was a life-changing moment. After we had asked if there was a spirit present, we clearly heard a voice responding back into the microphone, loudly whispering yes-s-s. From that moment on, we were hooked. We were hooked, intrigued by the strange, the unusual, and most of all, by ghosts and spirits on the other side.

And this is what eventually led us to the “murder house” in Hamilton, where our story truly begins, standing at the precipice of this enormous, empty edifice known as Bellevue, with the sun peering through the cracks in the plywood that blocked the windows. It was almost beckoning, welcoming us to enter; we both felt a strong sense of purpose just being there.

With my dad’s trusty 35mm camera around my neck and several rolls of film on hand, we ventured into the Bellevue Mansion. Along with a historical write-up, the photos I snapped would become the very first article on our newly designed website, which we called Haunted Hamilton.

Strangely enough, here I am countless years later, looking for a notepad to write my thoughts down for this foreword, when I find an old, dusty notebook in my cabinet. I start to flip through the pages and realize it is our very first notebook, where we penned our dreams, hopes, game plans, and ideas for Haunted Hamilton. The interesting part? Not much has changed. Even when we were kids, we were still passionate about the wondrous history of our city. It was over a decade ago when we wrote about the need for restoration, preservation, and educating Hamiltonians (and tourists alike) about this unique city of ours — the Ambitious City, as it was often referred to as over a hundred years ago.

This old notebook couldn’t have been found at a more perfect time. Reading through the pages reminded me of just how far we have come and in what ways, how we still feel so compelled to share Hamilton’s unique stories and tales with everyone.

From the Dark Lady, who famously haunts the old Custom House on Stuart Street, to the legend of William Black, the lonely coachman whose spirit still wanders the woods at the Hermitage Ruins in Ancaster, Hamilton is alive with ghosts from the past. A decade’s worth of research isn’t enough. There is still a world of stories, legends, and folklore waiting to be told. This book is your ultimate guide to uncover the unique and historically haunted treasures in our city: read through it, learn, explore, and get up close and personal with the ghosts of Haunted Hamilton.

Stephanie Lechniak,

Founding Partner of Haunted Hamilton Ghost Walks & Events