High Park Toronto - The Man In Black

I've recently moved back to Toronto, from England, and have discovered your site. It is very nice and is missing something I, and many of my schoolmates, had repeatedly experienced years ago in High Park. When I was a young lad I used to jog in High Park in the late evening, and early morning.

My route used to take me through the Howard Park entrance, which it seems has been closed, when I don't know, and take me down to Spring Road to High Park Avenue, and back around Parkside Drive. Sometimes, at night, I would reverse the route and leave via the Howard Park entrance. On the road, leading out of the park, sometimes I would encounter an elderly "Gentleman" as he appeared to be,(no pun intended!) who dressed always in a black with a three quarter length trench coat, a more German style, and a black Derby. This was in the early to mid 70's, and men dressing in this manner was still relatively common. I must have seen this man around 20 to 30 times, and thought nothing of it. It was usually around 9 to 10 o'clock at night. It wasn't until I was talking to my mates on the rugby team, when I realized that this "Gentleman", may be in fact a ghost.

After talking to my mates, I realized that I always saw the man at the same exact spot every time, roughly 100 feet from the streetcar loop. More strangely, all my mates, when asked separately, said they had seen the man in black at the same exact spot in the park. The odds against this being a coincidence are astronomical to say the least.

After talking to my father, an Oxford educated man, who always had an explanation for everything, gave me a blank look. It seams that HE had seen the exact same man, in the park, 15 years earlier, when he first moved to Toronto, and the High Park area. After hearing that I started jogging up and down Indian Road at night. Even 30 years later I still have reservations about that stretch of road in High Park, not because of fear, more a sense of leaving the old man alone, and in 'Peace'.

Funny I know, however I don't want him following me home, for I have heard stories in Britain about that sort of thing happening. An interesting post script to my story, my nephew, a young lad, was telling me, without knowing of my experiences, a story about him and his mate bicycling throughout the park at that same stretch of road, came upon an "old fart" as he put it, dressed like he wandered off the set of an old movie from the 1920's. I, and especially my father, never told my sister about the man in black, so my nephew it seems is now the third generation in my family to see the man in black.

Has anyone else seen him?"