Walking With Ghosts in Haunted Vancouver
By Robert Scheer
I had walked past the place hundreds of times without
knowing that so many people had been killed there. A block south of Vancouver's
Maple Tree Square, Gaoler's Mews is one of the highlights of the Ghostly Gastown
walking tour, led by Mark Thomson each Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday night.
 Gaoler's Mews, Mark explained,
was the site of Vancouver's first jail, and public hangings were held there
during the last quarter of the 19th century. The first to be executed was Stakia,
a Salish native (whose name translates as "wolf") who killed a man by splitting
his head open with an axe. Stakia was captured, convicted of murder, and his
life was ended by a hangman's noose in Gaoler's Mews.
Around the corner, at 217 Carrall Street, is the Irish
Heather. Located on the site of Vancouver's first police station, the pub was
described by Mark as "very haunted." Its washrooms were once jail cells, and
patrons occasionally report hearing ghostly sounds of slamming doors and
clattering chains.
Blood Alley, the tour's next stop, may have been named
because of the many butcher shops once located there, but a lot of human blood
was also shed on its cobblestones. Blood Alley was a popular path for shipyard
workers, returning to nearby hotels from the docks. And, especially on paydays,
it was also a handy place for robbers to lurk with their knives at ready,
willing to cut the throats of anyone who didn't give up their money fast enough.
 How true are Mark's ghost
stories? Well, a member of one of Mark's groups, a clairvoyant, went into Blood
Alley and immediately ran out again. He crossed the street and waited there
until the group came back out. He said that the psychic energies in Blood Alley
were too powerful for him, and he had to leave.
The five-block area along Cordova and Water Streets from
the old Canadian National Railway station to Maple Tree Square may include some
of the most haunted real estate in Canada. When Mark decided to create a walking
tour of Vancouver's Gastown area, he went into all the shops and asked the
people who worked in them if they had ever had any supernatural experiences.
Mark was surprised, not only by the number of paranormal happenings described,
but also by the similarity of the events.
Many ghosts are invisible, but a common trait of the ones
that have been seen is a poor sense of fashion. Again and again, people reported
seeing a peculiar man wearing out-of-date clothing, visible one moment and then
suddenly gone. A man wearing a bowler hat was observed in the hallway of the
Bodega Hotel. At first the woman who saw him thought he seemed a bit strange,
but when she watched him pass through a solid wall, she became so upset that she
soon moved out of the building.
 Another incident involved the
manager of the card shop in the Hotel Europe, at 43 Powell Street. She was
looking into a convex security mirror when she saw an eccentric looking man
wearing strange clothes. She walked over for a closer look, but he’d vanished
into thin air.
 An invisible ghost may be the
reason why one office has remained vacant for many years. Located directly
across from the Steam Clock and above the Water Street Cafe, the fourth floor
suite may look empty, but workers in offices next door say they often hear the
sounds of furniture being moved and even the rattling of chains.
Nearby, in the Dominion Hotel, a night worker, cleaning up
after the pub had closed, was startled when glasses, hanging above the bar,
suddenly began swaying and clinking together. Then one of the glasses up, hung
in the air for an instant, and then crashed to the floor, as if it had been
thrown by a poltergeist.
A security guard in the old Canadian National Railway
station heard an unusual noise in a seldom-used store room. He went in to
investigate but saw nothing unusual -- until he turned around to leave. That's
when he realized, to his terror, that all the desks in the room had been moved,
blocking his access to the door.
Why does the Gastown attract so many strange happenings?
According to legend, Mark said, the area was cursed by First Nations spirits,
angry at having their land taken away by European settlers. But that theory
doesn't seem to explain the haunting of the Dominion Building at 207 West
Hastings Street. When it was built in 1909, it was the tallest in the British
Empire, but today the 13-storey building is said to be haunted by the ghost of
its architect who fell—or possibly threw himself—down the stairwell to his death
during the opening celebrations.
IF YOU GO
The Ghostly Gastown tour operated by Vanroutes, has been in
existence since October, 2004.
Tours start at 8:00 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
Admission charge is $15 per person.
The tour's assembly point is the "angel and fallen soldier" statue, east of the
old Canadian National Railway station on West Cordova at Seymour Street.
Website:
www.vanroutes.com
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