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Whitby Ghosts
For Paranormal Frontiers - By Brian Baker
October 2003
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We would like to thanks Brian for allowing us to reproduce this article here (easily, one of the best we've seen!) and recommend highly that anyone interested check out Paranormal Frontiers in The Window. We hope that Brian will continue to work with us at the Toronto and Ontario Ghosts and Hauntings Research Group for years to come! One of our favourite people and we wish Brian and Paranormal Frontiers all the best!
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Right in my own town there is a land rife with rich history and the makings of great legendary spectral tales of hauntings. Whitby, Ontario is situated approximately thirty kilometres east of the concrete metropolis of Toronto, and is quite the comforting bedroom community that is blooming into one of the most residentially industrious regions in all of Canada.
I have spent a great deal of time and energy in this town. Becoming both a teenager and an adult over the span of fifteen years since arriving here in 1988 from the other side of the GTA. Now, I felt it only pertinent to explore the historical relevance that many residents of the community fail to overlook when they reside in a town that has great, rich accounts of the past.
In every paranormal investigation, there is not initial trip to the building that is ‘haunted’ nor is packing up of the ‘proton packs’ and ‘ghost-busting gear.’ Like any historical research it takes a trip to the local library, or in my case a trip to the local archivist, where one Brian Winter provided a plethora of filing cabinets in a small air conditioned building in downtown Whitby, filed with retyped accounts from days long since passed.
The Whitby Archives was where I began my research of the five legendary buildings in Whitby that have absorbed the stories of the people that walked their halls through the hundred of years of time. These buildings are just like any other in every town, but their history is what keeps them independent and individual.
In order of their celebrity status in the community the list is the Whitby Junction Railway Station, followed by the Ontario County ‘House of Refuge’ the private residence of one former sheriff of Ontario County (Durham Region), Trafalgar Castle, and finally the most active and productive haunt in all of Whitby the Ontario County Courthouse (a.k.a. The Whitby Centennial Building).
Special thanks go out to Brian Winter of the Whitby Archives, Colin Cockburn and Kim Baker, Trafalgar Castle, the Toronto Ghosts & Hauntings Research Society and John Robert Colombo for providing information in the writing of this ‘Paranormal’ investigation.
Whitby Junction Railway Station - Now situated on the Northeast intersection of Victoria Street and Henry Street by Port Whitby, the current art gallery was once stationed at the Byron Street, Henry Street and baseline crossing, back in 1903, where at present the east end of the GO Transit platform is. The present home of the salvaged railway junction, the art gallery, was moved from its original in 1970.
Now, there isn’t exactly a chilling ghost story that fills the halls of the art gallery, but the historical tale behind the building, if anything, has the origins of one good start of a ghost story, and begs the question, as the Whitby Archivist Brian Winter asked me, do ghosts haunt the building of the event, or the land where the event occurred?
The story commences in the early morning of December 11, 1914, where one Billy Stone, who was merely 21 years of age, was working as the night telegraph operator at the Whitby Junction Station. His job was quite tedious, basically recording the passing of every freight train, and at 12:37 am, from the silence of the night the sound of a gun being shot came from the ladies’ waiting room. The bullet caught the young Stone death. While fighting off his finality, Billy Stone called the operator to get the Police Chief. The operator asked him who did it; Billy’s last words were that he didn’t know who shot him, but to get the Chief quick.
Upon arrival at the scene of the crime the Police Chief Charles F. MacGrotty, discovered that there was no sign of an altercation, nor was there any attempt at a robbery. Billy Stone’s body was not covered in blood, but there was a bloody handprint on a cabinet in the room. There was no blood on Mr. Stone’s hands. The bullet that killed the young lad, was a .38 special, that entered his chest cavity and into his heart.
If there is a story as tragic and unresolved as this in Whitby that deserves visitation from the grave it is William P. Stone. A young man shot by an unknown assailant in the abysmal night, all alone watching the freight trains go by.
Ontario County House of Refuge - Another building that went up in 1903, the High Street Manor, as it is known as now, sits at 300 High Street as a renovated apartment complex. This was the actual building that sparked my interest in the history of Whitby, as my one friend pointed out as we left another friend’s one night, that the inside of the building reminded him of the mythical Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining. Come to think of it, the faux candle lighting, the Victorian door trimming and the ivory wainscoting adds to that atmosphere of a deranged Jack Nicholson running around looking for his son, spouting Big Bad Wolf, Johnny Carson and Eva Marie Saint lines.
However, the High Street Manor was originally a home for those who were less fortunate in Whitby, housing people suffering from the various causes of ‘pauperism’ of that time period. This included alcoholism, ‘weak mind,’ improvidence, blindness, old age, ‘idiocy’ and epilepsy. A localized fire that started in what used to be the sauna in 1972 damaged the building. In 1973 the old building was purchased by one Steve Agh and converted into luxury apartments by 1977.
According to my friends that live in the building, the spirits of the people who reside in the building have made their presence known, but are reportedly benevolent. In the past, the property owners had to fight with the town to procure burial plots. The cemetery plots that were acquired ended up being at both Union Cemetery in Oshawa and Groveside in Brooklin, but these were all nameless burials. It could be that spirits of the people who died at High Street Manor are hoping that their burials are marked?
Private Residence of Nelson G. Reynolds - Built in 1874 the former second home of the Sheriff of Ontario County is now a school located on Byron and Dunlop Street just a block or two down from the centre of Downtown Whitby. Built as a smaller replica of his first home, Trafalgar Castle, this was where ‘Iron’ Reynolds spent his last days, bed ridden after a stroke in 1876. He past away in 1881 when he was 66.
The Honourable John Ross appointed Nelson Gilbert Reynolds to the position of Sheriff of Ontario County. This officer experienced many interesting moments in Canadian history including the William Lyon MacKenzie revolt in Toronto in the chilly month of December 1837. He also chased after American "Patriots" who were apparently planning an invasion. It was almost as if ‘Iron’ Reynolds was Ontario’s version of RCMP Officer Sam Steele or the real Canadian hero.
The tale of spectral visitation behind this renovated school on Byron and Dunlop, which was first converted from a residence to a restaurant in the 1970’s by one Peter Solyom, takes place in 1977. Apparently taken from a newspaper article, Solyom, alone in the building, heard strange voices coming from the building. The voice was later to be known as the deceased Sheriff Reynolds who revealed the history of the house. Several other voices came into the fold, including an old distiller during the prohibition period named Harry Hatch; both spirits were looking for people. According to the spirit of Hatch, one Al Capone had visited the building to purchase to bootlegger’s liquor business.
As of current, nothing paranormal has occurred at the Byron and Dunlop establishment since it has been turned into the school.
Trafalgar Castle - The feature in so many major motion pictures, and Whitby’s call to Toronto’s Casa Loma, Trafalgar Castle is quite the epic piece of architectural design. Built by Sheriff Nelson G. Reynolds in 1859, and designed by architect Joseph Sheard in complete Elizabethan style, it is the most well known part of Whitby. According to the school, the receiving hall is some 105 feet long, great for anyone interested in a game of football, if it has a vaulted ceiling of course.
After Sheriff Reynolds sold the land, all 9 acres of it, and the building to the to the Methodist Church they turned it into Ontario Ladies College on August 20, 1874. Nelson Reynolds remained on the Board of Governors at the school until his death in 1881.
This is a school that has gone through so many renovations and has suffered four fires from 1912 to 1975. Another intriguing bit of information is the H. A. Massey donated $10, 000 in 1895 to the College and was later elected to a seat on the board.
Now a ‘castle’ without a ghost is like a railway car without an engineer, so, even though the staff at Trafalgar Castle does not account for such accurateness in the ghost tales, but there is one involving an elderly woman and one of caretakers.
Apparently, the elderly women came to Trafalgar Castle wanting to see her granddaughter who resided in Room 232, the most common of rooms in the hauntings. The caretaker took the woman to see her granddaughter, but when he turned around, the woman had vanished.
Ontario County Courthouse - It has come a long way since the days of old Irish inspired ghost tales that spoke of a man that took the form of a black dog and had eyes of red flame. Sounds almost like Spring Heeled Jack or the Devil had made an appearance in the Town of Whitby, taken right from the newspaper The Whitby Chronicle on July 31, 1873.
The Whitby Courthouse, by far the most active, electrically charged battery in Whitby has had at least a few people who could tell you something spectral about it. Even when I had my brief stay at the Whitby Courthouse Theatre which was originally put in 1967, and used on a regular basis in 1973, I had some the different tales told to me and was taken on a tour of the building before the recent renovations that happened in the past year.
The tale of ghostly visitations occurs in the renovated theatre, which used to be the old courtroom where apparently a relative of a man on trial was pacing the halls anxiously awaiting the verdict. When the judge spoke ‘guilty,’ the man shouted the words ‘you must right the wrong’ in reply from the balcony not knowing that he was about to fall to his death. From that point on people have seen lights go from the balcony to the specific seat in the arrangement ‘G10.’ A frock coat and top hat man has been seen about the grounds and building as well
Now the building has a fresh new look on the inside, but it makes one wonder, with every renovation, what new ghosts the changing around of the interior has stirred up?
Brian Baker
©1997-2005 - GHRS - Ontario 100632991
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