Читать книгу Real Hauntings 5-Book Bundle - Mark Leslie - Страница 60

One security guard working in a city hall building on Elgin and Lisgar was not able to return to work due to the debilitating nightmares he experienced and another security guard refused to work the night shift after each experienced a terrifying run-in with the building’s ghost.

And the ghost, who seems to think the building is still a school, rather than the location that houses Ottawa’s mayor, appears to be there to teach a thing or two to the local municipal leaders.

The Gothic Revival Heritage Building at 195 Elgin, which is now a part of Ottawa City Hall, was originally built in 1875 as Ottawa Normal School, part of Ontario’s normal school system of teacher’s colleges that had been set up by Egerton Ryerson (the same Ryerson that the Toronto University is named after).

In 1953 the school was renamed the Ottawa Teacher’s College. In 1974, after it was decided that Ontario’s teacher’s colleges would merge into the university systems, the college joined the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa, and the building was sold to the federal government in 1978.

The Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton purchased the building in 1986, and it was renamed the Heritage Building, which houses the mayor’s office.

When the building was a teacher’s college, the front section of the building was where the teachers went to class and took courses, but farther back down a long hallway was a “model school” where the student teachers taught real students in an actual classroom setting.

Ottawa Normal School was designed by architect W.R. Strickland and built by J. Forin. Designated as a national historic site in 1974, the building is recognized as a significant example of Gothic revival architecture in Canada.

James William Topley, 1893.

One of the earliest instructors at the school was a woman by the name of Eliza Bolton, who taught some of the very first kindergarten teachers from the 1880s. Bolton retired in 1917, but not before she was responsible for making a change to the school policy that required a single teacher to have to supervise two classrooms. This new rule meant that teachers would have to constantly move back and forth between two different classrooms.

Some believe that Bolton’s change to the system might be what prompts her ghost to continue to move quickly about the building, between various rooms, opening and closing doors.

In 1998 a security guard working the night shift alone in the Heritage Building spotted her down the end of a hallway that runs the length of the old model school. Wearing old-fashioned clothing, the woman was coming out of one of the classrooms and headed for the classroom directly across the hall. The guard called out to her, asking her who she was, and she stopped, turned toward him, and looked him straight in the eye. Then she quickly turned around and headed back into the room she had just left.

The guard ran after her, but when he entered the room he found it completely empty — the mysterious woman had disappeared. There were no other exits from the classroom other than the doorway he had just passed through. He left the classroom confused and wondering if he had been seeing things.

Then, later on during his shift, when he passed a display case in the lobby, he spied a photograph from the old teacher’s college and recognized the face and style of the woman he had seen disappear into the classroom earlier that evening.

This guard refused to ever work the night shift alone again.

In the past several years, security guards have had so many encounters with a ghost that they believe to be the spirit of Eliza Bolton that they have started to tease and play practical jokes on one another. They have been known to hide their walkie-talkies in various spots in the building, setting them off in order to scare rookie guards, and also to place a life-sized cut-out of a woman dressed in old fashioned clothing in various dark corners and doorways in order to surprise or startle one another.

But not every startling incident is caused by fellow employees.

On a particularly hot evening in July of 2001, a guard nearing the end of his shift was walking through his final rounds and headed up to walk through the attic. When he arrived at the attic he immediately felt that something was wrong. During the hot summer months the attic was normally stiflingly hot, and on a night such as that one it should have been almost unbearably stuffy and hot. But he found the attic was extremely cold — startlingly cold. As he walked through a fog began to appear, and in it was the glowing figure of a woman wearing old-fashioned clothing.

“Get back to class,” she said to him in a soft yet stern voice.

The guard ran as fast as he could out of the attic, but he didn’t stop to enter a classroom, as she had suggested. Instead, he ran straight out the first set of doors he came to, eager to put as much distance as he could between himself and the terrifying apparition he had seen.

The guard eventually quit his job, sharing that he had continued to have terrifying nightmares about the experience.

Although there are plenty more recent ghostly tales involving this building and encounters with the ghost of Eliza Bolton, there are some that aren’t all that new, having been shared for generations.

During my research I found a story published in the 1916–17 Year Book of the Ottawa Normal School. While I’m not sure if the story is meant to be fiction or a documented true tale, it is certainly intriguing to read the words of students and their perspective on just what this ghost could be. Of course, in their case, the ghost isn’t that of a teacher but that of a student.

The Ghost of the Normal School

By R. Pearl Chamney and Myrtle H. Adams

I had often heard of the Ghost that haunts the Normal School, but being somewhat of a sceptic, doubted its existence. Several students have declared that a shadowy apparition has been seen by some of their number, flitting in at the door at the back of the gallery room, gliding down the steps, and disappearing in a mysterious manner. Now, the time was when I myself would have laughed at these affirmations and I would in my innermost thoughts have considered the propounder of such as fit to rank with the common multitude and as having no place whatever in the cultured halls of the Normal School. But even we who pride ourselves on being proof against all superstition are likely to have our firmest ideas uprooted, and thereby to become susceptible to ghostly visions.

I was busily engaged one evening after school in the laboratory on the “Verification of the Law of Inverse Squares.” Absorbed in my work I became utterly oblivious of the passing of time. When I had worked for what seemed to me a very short time I glanced casually at my watch and was startled to find by the pale glimmer of the candle which I was using that it was already past eight o’clock. A feeling of dread crept over me at the thought of being alone in this great building.

Although I tried to assure myself that I was not in the least frightened my heart beat a little more rapidly as I crept stealthily toward the door of the laboratory. Suddenly a cold chill spread over me and I began to shiver. This indescribable feeling grew so intense that when I reached the door my teeth were chattering, my knees were shaking (as no Normal students ever did when called upon to teach), and my fingers were so numb that I had difficulty in forcing the doorknob to yield to their grasp.

The story of the Ghost of the Normal flashed before my mind in its most dreadful aspects, but knowing that fear is an emotion unworthy of any Normal student, I attempted to drive it from me and vainly endeavoured to recall the “Three Level Theory” instead. I finally pulled the door open, and, horror of horrors! what a ghastly apparition stood facing me! My hair stood on end, my flesh began to creep, my knees knocked together and my teeth chattered. I realized now that the legend of the Normal ghost was only too true. The Awful Thing stood in the pale yellow glimmer of the moonlight that struggled in through the partly shaded window of the little laboratory. It glared at me from the depths of its greenish eyes. It clasped in its claw-like fingers a number of books, which I recognized as similar to those used in our class-rooms.

“Who are you?” I asked, with all the decision I could muster.

“I am the ghost of one long gone before,” was the reply in sepulchral tones. “Once I was a happy Normal student like you, but ambition sealed my fate. I hoped to write text-books on Psychology, History of Education, Geography, Science, Music, Art, Hygiene and Grammar, and incidentally to discover scientific truths, write stories and travel in foreign lands, but, alas! my brain refused to sustain the pressure. I come nightly to haunt these rooms and continue my scientific researches. Take warning, fair student, Ambition’s debt is dearly paid.”

I was glad that I had not attempted to combat my ghostly visitor, for I am told that physical forces do not avail in the presence of such supernatural beings, but that it is more effective to appeal to their intellect.

Before the Awful Thing had ceased my temperature had dropped considerably from ninety-eight and three-fifths degrees. Such an unnatural condition caused my whole body to tremble. I was about to fall prostrate, when lo! the horrible apparition began slowly, slowly to fade away. Under the hypnotic spell of the late spectre my eyes remained glued to the spot where it had stood, but in the pale moon-light all that I saw was that gruesome skeleton which we use in our hygiene class.