Halloween is over. Or is it? Can it still be Halloween season a couple days after all hallows eve? Our region is full of ghosts that haunt all year round.
We were first compelled to investigate which local haunts are patronized by the no-longer-living when we heard a rumour that the women’s bathroom at our favourite local cinema was haunted.
Unfortunately, we could not substantiate this claim. But worry not, for below you will find three unique stories—with sources—that are equally chilling.
Our first story comes to us by way of Quinn Huluk, a local musician.
“I was on a late-night walk up to pioneer tower. and I it was after pretty much I think seventytwo hours of being awake, I was having a very, very restless week,” Huluk said.
Quinn walked for hours before finally reaching a bridge close to pioneer tower.
“Because it was winter and the bridge was really old, there was a loud bang as soon as I reached the center. I think it was just metal buckling, but it put me on alert,” they said.
The bridge crossed the Grand River, and he followed the path deeper into the trail. Eventually, he heard a bump in the night.
“I start to hear like rustling in the bushes and I’m like, ‘oh, great, I’m going to have to run it for like a skunk or something’. And it just keeps like pacing back and forth beside me like just brushing, and eventually, maybe 10, 15 feet in front of me I see what looks like a strangely tall, strangely shaped, naked man run in front of me ,” they said.
They describe the figure as “bent in a way that didn’t make sense—its back arched, knees kind of tucked close.”
Later, Huluk would try to rationalize what they saw.
“I think it was the front of a deer. That would explain the shape, the knees, the speed. But at the time, it looked so unbelievably human,” they said.
“If I was more of a conspiracy theorist, I’d say it was 100 per cent a Skinwalker. But I don’t think it was. I just don’t know what else it could’ve been,” Huluk said.
Ryan Leandres—the owner of the adventurer’s guild encountered a strange phenomenon by way of an artist studio.
“I was leaning against the wall [at a party], trying to look cool, and found this little hole,” he said. “Inside was a small wooden bowl of salt. So, I dug around in and found this carving of a wooden eye.”
The studio’s owner noticed immediately.
“He walked over and said, ‘Oh, you found my eye,’” Leandres recalls. “And I said, ‘yeah, what’s the deal?’,”
The owner of the studio explained that in coming years, guests would stay in a small crawlspace in the studio and would always complain about having bad nights.
“They would always feel really, terrible in the morning. They would have bad dreams; they would toss and turn all night,” he said.
“Everyone who stays there seems to be really upset about it afterwards.”
In addition to this, whenever the space was cleaned, they would end up finding strange objects. On one such night, this wooden eye was found. Eventually, the owner of the studio decided to have his clairvoyant friend stay in the room to see what this was all about.
“She said she dreamt about men in black robes performing a ritual and assaulting what seemed to be a homeless woman,” Leandres said. “When she saw the eye, she said, ‘That’s a Masonic icon. This place was probably a Masonic temple.’”
A trip to city archives proved her right.
“She told him to stick the eye in salt and leave it,” Leandres said.
And that’s what he did.
Leandres recounted another ghost story, told to him by a friend. “I worked at this big department store downtown—what’s now AOK but used to be Budds,” says one former employee. “On my second day, the manager said, ‘Have you taken her to see the Mennonite yet?’ I thought he was joking.”
They led her down into the tunnels.
“We walked for a long time through these dark hallways and ended up in this big chamber. The manager pointed his fl ashlight up at the corner and said, ‘What do you see over there?’.”
“She saw a Mennonite, man with a big brim hat it was kind of clearly ‘oh, that that looks like Mennonite’. But there was nothing casting it. No light, no projection, nothing. Just a shadow that shouldn’t have been there,” Leandres said.
When asked about whether ghosts are real Ryan laughs.
“I believe that stories are real. In a very real way. and that, uh, you know, a story is a way to change somebody’s consciousness, and at that point it’s real,” Leandres said.
“I feel like ghosts and thinking about ghosts and believing in them or not is such an intrinsic part of all human culture and all human history. So definitely yeah. In that case, how can they not be real?,” he said.
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