Real Hauntings 4-Book Bundle. Mark Leslie

damaged from the impact. Splinters and screams shot into the air, the terrifying soundtrack of mayhem audible to people in the village below.

The lights on the passenger cars went out as passengers were flung forward from the impact, some of them tossed out into the winter night. Chaos ensued in the darkness as fire broke out on the demolished rear car. Passengers were trapped in various locations of the wreck, and for several hours nearby rescue workers who arrived at the scene and medical personnel who happened to be on the train set about tending to the injured. Due to the almost complete darkness, the rescue efforts went to those whose groans and screams of pain could be detected among the wreckage.[7]

      Either side of the tracks was littered with injured people and dead bodies. In an article published in the Hamilton Spectator on December 31, 1993, Brian Henley wrote, “What followed was a hellish scene. Pandemonium broke out as surviving passengers crawled from the wreck, steam pipes burst scalding the trapped, and the right-of-way was littered with the bodies of the dead.”

      Stan Nowak, president of Dundas Valley Historical Society, similarly describes it in a November 12, 2004, article published in the Ancaster News as a “grisly scene of horrible death and suffering,” with many passengers “trapped inside the twisted wreckage of the rear cars.”

Edward Lynch was arrested and charged with manslaughter for his involvement in the accident. In January of 1935, after a great deal of confusing and conflicting testimony, the jury found Mr. Lynch not guilty.[8]

      During that fateful night, Hamilton’s old CNR passenger station on Stuart Street was used to hold and transfer patients to the hospital on Barton Street. An article in the Hamilton Spectator at the time described the site as resembling a clearing station behind the lines following an engagement in the First World War. Rumours continue to spread about the basement of the Dundas District School being used as a morgue to house the dead, despite assurances from groups such as the Dundas Historical Society that it is a myth.

      Certainly, due to the chaos and confusion in the dark that night, some of the real facts might never be known, and it is entirely possible that, even for a limited time, the basement might have been used in this manner. But even if it was not, many experts in the field of supernatural investigation would agree that the proximity of the location might be enough for the intense experience of pain, suffering, and horror to leave an indelible psychic impression that continues to be felt at the location of the school.

      Something, after all, has to explain why so many people have experienced strange and unexplainable events at that site. Something has to be behind the eerie noises, banging on lockers, and other poltergeist-like occurrences reported there.

      An October 29, 2004, story in the Ancaster News by Erin Rankin entitled “Hair-Raising Local Legends Live On” spotlights strange things happening through an interview with Peter Greenberg, who was a principal at the school for five years.

      Greenberg shared a story of when he came to work in the vacant school early one Saturday morning and the security guard warned him that someone might be inside, because the motion detector had gone off. The building was searched but nobody was found. Shortly after he had started working on some paperwork, he heard locker doors banging and clanging. Believing that vandals had indeed broken in, he called the police and immediately left the building.

      When the police arrived, Greenberg went back into the building with one of the sergeants while the other officers waited outside. The thought was that the two men’s entrance would frighten the kids out of the building and the awaiting officers outside would catch them.

As Greenberg and the sergeant approached the third floor, they could hear a crashing noise echoing through the halls; it sounded as if things were being thrown around and glass was being smashed. But when they got to the third floor and opened the door, the noise suddenly stopped, nothing was out of place or damaged, and there was no sign of any mischievous kids on the premises.[9]

      One wonders if the banging and crashing Greenberg and others have heard might have been audible psychic echoes of the tragic events that occurred on that fateful December night in 1934.

Greenberg also spoke about custodians at the school who told stories of having left work undone only to return some time later and discover it had been completed. He also shared the fact that most of the custodians refused to go to the third floor after dark.[10]

      He was referring, of course, to the legends of a former custodian by the name of Russell and a bizarre promise or pact that was made.

In 1954 there was a group of five men who worked quite closely as custodians at the school and shared convictions about being hard-working and dedicated to their tasks. Russell was the name of the man mostly responsible for maintaining the third floor of the building. He took great pride in keeping fastidious care of the school and his area in particular — offering the service, cleanliness, and attention to detail that one might expect in the parliament buildings, a mansion, or a palace.[11]

Russell, however, was as known for his perfectionism and attention to detail as he was for his fondness of jokes and playing pranks on his fellow workers, and he developed quite the reputation to that end. It was Russell who suggested that he and the other four make a simple pact: whoever died first would keep up the fun by coming back to haunt the school and prove to the others that there was indeed life after death.[12]

      As it turns out, Russell was the first of the group to die and to, naturally, have played the role as set forth in the pact.

      In an article in the Hamilton Spectator in October 2006, Suzanne Bourret interviewed two custodians at the Dundas District Public School, Veronika Lessard and Tony Vermeer, who shared their experiences. They mentioned having the ominous feeling of being watched as well as having heard voices and seen strange shadows moving while working in the supposedly vacant building.

      Lessard, who worked at the school for more than six years, shared the story of how one evening she had left a bucket of water on the third floor before heading down to the first floor to have supper with the other custodians. When she returned, the entire floor had been washed and the bucket was still in the spot she had left it.

      She also spoke about a time when, during the March break, she was up on a ladder, cleaning some lights, when she heard the clanking of keys. She had thought it was Tony setting out to tease her. (They both had been familiar with the legends of Russell.) She called out for whoever was there to show himself, and the shadowy form of a tall, lanky man jingling his keys passed by the door and offered her one of the biggest smiles she’d ever seen, before walking out of the room and vanishing. “I’ll never forget that sight,” Lessard said, believing that what she had seen was the ghost of Russell himself.

      One evening both Lessard and Vermeer were leaving the otherwise vacant building when they heard the voice of a little old lady calling out from upstairs. From the top of the darkened stairway, they could hear an old lady calling out, “Help me!” They knew enough not to go back and instead hot-footed it out of the building: one of Russell’s favourite tricks on his co-workers had been to imitate the cries of a helpless woman or child in order to get them to rush over to help, only to laugh at them for being tricked.

      Vermeer spoke about seeing five ghostly figures walking down the back stairs as well as a night when he continued to hear footsteps coming from the floor above him, but whenever he went upstairs nobody was there, and the lights, which had previously been turned off, were back on again.

      One time, Vermeer was working in the basement mopping the floor when suddenly he wasn’t able to move the mop. “It was like someone was standing on it,” he said. He then asked the invisible entity to get off his mop. The mop became unstuck and he then finished the job