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UPDATE as of October 27th, 2000
Old Fort York is where we held our successful Anniversary Party of October 21st and boy did we get some new material...
James Waugh of Jessup Food and Heritage shared his own story about the first blockhouse where, while closing the fort down for the evening, the heavy door on the second floor slammed shut behind him without human assistance. This is NOT and easy trick and requires quite a bit of effort to close normally but it effectively shut him out of the building.
Matthew Didier and Jennifer Krutila also ran into the "door slamming ghost" while visiting the site one week before the Anniversary Party for TGHRS. They were in the officer's quarters at about 4:45pm on a Sunday and had just sampled some Derby Biscuits when upon walking out of the kitchen and into a sergeant's quarters then to the East doorway, the kitchen door slammed tight behind them. Upon investigation, they found that indeed, there was no one in the building.
We also recently received the following e-mail...
"My husband and I have been 'running our dog' at old Fort York for years. In 1998, my husband was standing there alone and my dog had run off chasing squirrels when he noticed a man wearing dark greenish clothes standing watching him about 50m away.
The man was leaning against a tree just watching him. Well this unnerved my husband so he looked over to our car to make sure that no one was breaking into it. There was no one at the car and when he looked back at the fellow who was staring, there was no one there! This really irritated my husband because he thought that something odd was going on.
He walked briskly to the tree and realized before long that there were no footprints in the snow where the man should have left some! He looked up into the tree and all around but nothing. Needless to say, he came home immediately.
It's not like my husband to make up a story like this to scare me. It hasn't happened since but it certainly changed our skeptical minds about ghosts. Very frightening."
UPDATE: March 31st, 2003 Another staff story has been told to us.
One night, while one staff member was closing and locking up the fort, they noticed after heading towards the front gate (canteen) that there was a light coming from the officer's quarters.
Assuming they had left a light on, which is odd as there are no lights in the upper parts of the officer's quarters, they made their way back to the building to extinguish the light source.
As they approached, they saw in the windows near the quarters what appeared to be an entire dinner party moving about in silhouette through the windows. By what we heard, this staff member was clearly able to make out the shapes of men and women moving about the dining room table through the windows and as they approached, this "apparition" seemed to get fainter and fainter as did the window's light source until, once they had arrived at the door, the light was gone as were the "phantom" diners.
The staff member simply turned and left the fort.
The report above has not been 'substantiated' as such and is left for you to decide on it's veracity. It came to us "third hand" from another person who has worked for the historic sites in Toronto but did not come from the 'witness' themselves... although, if the witness would like to contact us, they're anonymity is guaranteed and we would like to hear their own version of this report. Please e-mail us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.