I Found Out the Truth of the “Most Haunted House in Canada”

“There’s a boy here, of course.”

It was my first day. I’d been hired to help with the holiday-season rush at a small historic house museum located in a tiny nature preserve tucked alongside a Toronto expressway. That morning, as the city was hushed by the year’s first snowfall, I took the subway and a bus and then walked down a steep hill, half slipping on the slick pavement. I arrived, eventually, at Todmorden Mills Heritage Museum and Arts Centre, home to a weathered nineteenth-century brewery, a paper mill, and two small historic houses, one yellow and one grey.

“A boy? Like . . . a ghost?” asked the other young woman who’d been hired at the same time as me.

The staff member training us nodded. “That’s right. A little boy sitting on the fence swinging his legs. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned, he wasn’t there.”

“Could it have been a real little boy?” I asked. “Who ran away?”

“Absolutely not.” The staff member leaned over the antique printing press she was demonstrating, slotting lead type into place.

“I told you, he disappeared. I also saw a man in Victorian clothes once, looking at me from the archives.” She pointed up at a paper-jammed loft space above us. “He was gone when I turned on the lights. There are definitely ghosts here.” I exchanged a glance with the other new girl.

As I locked up the grey house one night, my heart started to pound. Nothing had happened, but as I moved from room to room, I was filled with the sense that someone was watching me. I pulled the last shutter closed and stood under the single remaining lit bulb. “If you’re there,” I said out loud, “leave me alone, please.” The frightened feeling flowed away in a rush, like water going down a drain. I flipped the last light switch and left, locking the door behind me.

Afterward, whenever someone mentioned ghosts—which was often—I had advice to give. “You have to ask them to leave you alone. They will. Just ask politely.”

My experience had been just that brief sensation of being watched, and now I didn’t feel the presence of ghosts at all. And, honestly, I sort of wanted to. Even though I wasn’t experiencing eerie encounters, others certainly were. Visitors to the museum asked me about ghosts on an almost daily basis. They didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t tell them much beyond my own brief sensation of haunting and what I’d heard from other staff. They’d happily take the opportunity to tell me about their own ghost experiences, or those of their friends, or just tell me what they generally thought and believed about the supernatural. I’d never talked about ghosts so much in my life.

Ghosts have been with us for at least 3,500 years. And in all that time, human interest in them has never waned. A few months after I began working at Todmorden Mills, a newly hired manager called me in for a meeting so we could get to know one another. We chatted about our backgrounds, our skills and interest in museums, and of course, ghosts. I told her about my very vague feeling of being watched in the grey house and about the stories others had told me. She nodded seriously. “So . . . have you heard about Mackenzie House?”

I had. Mackenzie House and Todmorden Mills are both operated by Toronto’s municipal government, along with eight other history museums. I’d heard of Mackenzie House but had never visited. The new manager seemed excited to tell me about it. “It’s considered the most haunted house in Canada. Do you know why?”

I shook my head vigorously, wondering how a place could be categorized as the most haunted. How did you measure haunting? “Back in the fifties,” she began, “when the house became a museum, a husband and wife were hired as caretakers. They actually lived in the house, slept there. One night, the wife woke up and saw a woman leaning over her bed, staring right at her. After a few minutes, the woman disappeared. The next night, the wife woke up again, and the woman was there again. But this time, the woman did this . . .” Maintaining intense eye contact, my manager leaned in and pinched me lightly on the arm.

I yelped, more in surprise than pain. “The ghost pinched her?”

“The ghost pinched her,” she confirmed, nodding. “After that, the woman refused to sleep in the house, and there were no more live-in caretakers.”

“But is that true?”

“Yup. It was in the media at the time, and it’s in the museum’s records.”

That part was true, sort of. Ghosts aside, Mackenzie House is a small yet fascinating museum in Toronto’s downtown core. Located at 82 Bond Street, just a short walk from the city’s famous Eaton Centre, it was home to William Lyon Mackenzie, a fiery nineteenth-century journalist and politician, and his wife, Isabel. Mackenzie’s life was one of considerable drama and adventure. At various points, he was exiled, imprisoned, led the failed Upper Canada Rebellion, and was elected the first mayor of Toronto. He is such an interesting and influential figure in Canadian history that there are two separate museums in Ontario dedicated to telling the story of his life (the other being the wonderful Mackenzie Printery & Newspaper Museum in Queenston, Ontario).

Mackenzie occupied the house on Bond Street for only about a year before his death in 1861, though Isabel lived there for another twelve. It’s a row house, narrow and tall, comfortable but somewhat cramped. It was saved from demolition in the 1930s, when Mackenzie’s grandson, William Lyon Mackenzie King, was the prime minister of Canada. Mackenzie House is an excellent example of the kind of modest, middle-class homes that are so rarely preserved.

What Mackenzie House lacks in size, it makes up for in notoriety. The house tops lists of haunted locations and is often referred to as the “Most Haunted House in Canada” or the “Most Haunted House in Toronto.” In 2018, a local news station produced a segment about the house, titled “Is This Toronto’s Most Haunted Home?” In the clip, a pair of costumed historical interpreters show a news crew around the house while telling a story nearly identical to the one my manager told me. Except in this version, the couple are named as Mr. and Mrs. Edmund, and Mrs. Edmund is slapped by the ghost, not pinched.

When the house was donated to the city in 1960, the inventory of belongings included “one ghost.”

The interpreters also explain that, while they’ve never seen a ghost themselves, there are stories circulating of people hearing footsteps on the stairs, ghostly hands playing the piano, and the antique printing press operating by itself late at night. They go on to say that when the house was donated to the city in 1960, the inventory of belongings included “one ghost.” An archdeacon was brought into the house to perform an exorcism, and the whole thing was televised.

The media aren’t the only ones leaning into the story of Mackenzie House’s ghost. The City of Toronto’s municipal government is typically a staid institution, but its official website page for the museum states: “Rumoured to have its own resident ghosts, Mackenzie House explores the border between rebellion and respectability, life and death. Are you brave enough to discover all this for yourself?”

The idea of a haunting so real and well documented that even City Hall officially acknowledged it was fascinating to me. I had to know more. I went looking for the original media reports about the Mackenzie House ghost, or ghosts, hoping for more details.

What I found was a number of stories from Canadian newspapers, all from 1960, all telling similar—but not identical—versions of what I’d heard. The Montreal Gazette claimed that two separate caretakers and their families were driven from the house by ghosts but didn’t name them. The Saskatoon StarPhoenix reported only one caretaker couple, identified as Mr. and Mrs. Alex Dobban, not Edmund. The Dobbans lived in the house only for a month before they were driven out by fear, the paper claims, but in that time, they heard footsteps on the stairs, the antique piano played itself, and the Victorian printing press ran not once but for three nights.

On March 30, 1961, the CBC ran a TV segment about Mackenzie House on the program Toronto File. In the grainy black-and-white footage, bespectacled host Ed McGibbon interviews author and broadcaster Richard S. Lambert, a noted paranormal enthusiast of the era. Lambert worked extensively with the CBC and wrote Exploring the Supernatural: The Weird in Canadian Folklore, the first book to study paranormal phenomena significantly in Canada. The segment has a delightfully camp quality. Lambert leads the reporter around Mackenzie House, indicating the portraits of William Lyon and Isabel Mackenzie and declaring that she has an “odd” face and her husband a “fierce” mouth. Bob Edmunds, the son of the former caretakers, is interviewed in front of the house. He repeats, rather cagily, the story about his mother being slapped by Isabel’s ghost, before adding that “some people believe in something, others don’t.”

What interested me even more than the TV segment, however, was an article from the same period. On June 25, 1960, a headline in the Toronto Daily Star read: “Ghost Ghastly Hoax Typewriter Squeaks.” The article alleges that the Mackenzie Homestead Foundation, the group working to restore the house and turn it into a museum, admitted to the newspaper that the ghost story was a hoax. With great embarrassment, the foundation explained that all the ghost activity reported elsewhere, including the footsteps, the eerie piano concerts, and the self-operating printing press, were part of a story cooked up by the foundation and another Toronto daily newspaper (not named) to drum up interest in the house and promote tourism.

The foundation’s officials were apparently dismayed to see that the story instead became a media sensation. The article even featured an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Dobban, standing in the house under a portrait of William Lyon Mackenzie, huffily denying contributing to the ghost stories or leaving the house due to a haunting. The Toronto Daily Star also reported that a thorough investigation failed to find evidence of another set of caretakers frightened away by spirits and declared the whole thing a “ghastly hoax.”

The debunking didn’t seem to matter at all . . . and the story acquired a momentum of its own.

So how is it that a ghost hoax thoroughly debunked in 1960 was still reported in the press in 2018? The answer is that, incredibly, the debunking didn’t seem to matter at all. Just two years after the Star’s report, on March 8, 1962, the Globe and Mail ran a story about Mackenzie House that repeated every detail of the alleged haunting, including the footsteps, the piano, and the printing press, and added the bit about the caretaker’s wife being slapped by a ghost hovering over her bed. The Globe breathlessly described the ghost’s “stern visage” and the “ringlets about her neck” and noted that the caretaker’s wife was left with “two welts” on her cheek after the supernatural assault. It went on to describe two sets of caretakers, who complained about apparitions in frock coats and “spectral women who flitted about the house.” The article even included an interview with the supposed former caretakers, who are unnamed in this version.

The home of Toronto’s first mayor was now firmly established in the public’s mind as a haunted house, and the story acquired a momentum of its own. A bizarre newspaper article from the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph on December 12, 1968, titled “School Teaches Witchcraft in Grade 8,” tells the story of a young Toronto schoolteacher who visited Mackenzie House and experienced “chills, apparitions, and unworldly music.” The teacher apparently shared this experience with her students. The whole class, the article claimed, became obsessed with ghosts and began studying them, going so far as to hold a seance to try to contact the spirit of Isabel Mackenzie, staging a play about beheadings (I should be clear here that neither Isabel nor her husband were beheaded, but this seems like the kind of thing 1960s tweens would do), and planning a class trip to Mackenzie House to experience the haunting themselves.

Museum professionals are an earnest bunch. We have dedicated our careers to not only learning the truth of history but communicating it to others. And so, I’ve found it frustrating throughout my working life when I uncover a piece of misinformation that has somehow been repeated over and over again as fact.

The haunting of Mackenzie House is especially maddening because the misinformation isn’t accidental or the result of a mistake; it’s a deliberate hoax, engineered for publicity. But the persistence of the Mackenzie House ghosts in media and culture suggests something important about ghosts and museums: visitors are deeply invested in ghost stories.

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When I’d first experienced the feeling of being haunted in the grey house at Todmorden Mills, I’d politely asked any ghosts present to leave me alone. And for many years, they complied. That sensation of a presence, of something watching me, of a ghost in the room with me, never returned.

Then, in 2010, my mother died. She had been ill with cancer for years, so her death wasn’t unexpected. And yet, it still felt sudden, taking us by surprise on a sunny afternoon in October. I rushed back to Thunder Bay to be with my family.

And that night, for the first time in a long time, I slept in my childhood bed. I fell asleep quickly, exhausted by bereavement. But some hours later, I woke suddenly, in the dark. There was no confusion; I remembered immediately where I was and why I was there. I glanced at the digital clock next to my bed. It was 3:00 a.m. exactly. This was an unusual time for me to be awake, but there was no feeling of grogginess. I was wide awake, and what I felt more strongly than anything was my mother’s presence.

I felt my mom in the room with me, as strongly and clearly as I would feel the presence of a living person.

It is a difficult feeling to explain, though I’ve come to understand that this sensation is something many people experience. Although I couldn’t see, hear, or otherwise sense my mom in any way, I felt her in the room with me, as strongly and clearly as I would feel the presence of a living person. And as strange as the feeling was, it wasn’t alarming or unsettling. In fact, I felt more at peace in that moment than I had in many months.

And so, without much thought, I turned on the light next to my bed and started talking to her. For about half an hour, I just spoke to her quietly, as though she were there next to me, telling her what had happened since she’d passed, and how we were all doing. It was a sad conversation, but somehow it comforted me deeply. Eventually, the feeling of her presence dissipated, and I was filled with the sense that I was once again alone in the room. And so, I turned out the light and went back to sleep. In the morning, I didn’t tell anyone what I’d experienced.

The next night, I woke up again, this time at a couple of minutes past three. The sense that my mother was there in the room with me had returned, but this time it felt fainter, less clear. I spoke to her briefly and then simply sat with the sensation of her presence, quietly comforted by it. And then the presence faded once again, and I was alone. And that was it. The next night, I slept through until morning, and the feeling of my mom in the room never returned. Something had shifted, if only inside of me, and she was truly gone.

Research suggests that these experiences are a surprisingly ordinary part of life. The Journal of Affective Disorders found that 30 to 60 percent of subjects had experienced at least one episode of seeing, hearing, or feeling the presence of their dead loved ones and that the odds of having such an experience increased the longer a couple were married. And although many of these episodes occur soon after a death, they may happen years or even decades later. Many so-called sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased, or SEDs, are even more vivid than my experience. People may physically see their loved ones, hear them, or feel their touch. A particularly common experience is spotting the face of a dead friend or family member in a crowd of people, despite knowing they cannot possibly be there.

Researchers emphasize that although these are sometimes described as hallucinatory experiences, they don’t necessarily indicate an underlying mental illness. Rather, sensing the presence of the deceased appears to be a normal and healthy part of grieving. These experiences may reflect a brain in the process of adapting to a new reality in which a loved one is no longer present. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that these moments are less common if someone has been physically close to a loved one when they die or has seen their body.

Humans have been searching for ghosts for thousands of years. And while we never seem to find the conclusive proof we seek, we find instead a deeper understanding of our world or a sliver of comfort in the face of the truly incomprehensible. We look for ghosts because we want to be haunted.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from A Ghost in the Room: Supernatural Adventures in Historic Houses by Ann McDougall, published by Tidewater Press.