Real Hauntings 4-Book Bundle. Mark Leslie

have revived.

One tale involving Harvey has to do with a few employees casually chatting after the bar closed for the night. In the middle of their chatter, the piano in The Saffron Room started to play. They thought that was strange, since the door to that room had been locked and there was nobody else in the building. As they went to investigate, the piano music kept playing up until the point that they unlocked the door and opened it. When they threw open the door, the music abruptly stopped and they found nobody in the room.[5]

Not much is known about Harvey, the custodian who died as a result of the burns he received in the fateful fire. But you might just see or hear a story about Harvey if you were to head down to The Werx.[6]

      Just don’t expect him to join you out on the dance floor if your favourite song pops up in the DJ’s mix.

      Winking Ghosts

      A pub located at 25 Augusta Street in Hamilton specializes in microbrewed beer. With at least twenty-two taps, it offers one of the broadest selections, from a standard core selection to a featured series of rotating brands and styles of beers. They have, over the years, served over 285 different beers produced by brewmasters from Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta, as well as selected European imports.

The atmosphere at Augusta’s Winking Judge is devoted to good beer and offers a perfect place to hang out with old friends or to make new ones. But this pub also offers something that is not on their rather broad list of available brews: for more than ten years, they have also been home to a number of supernatural visitors. More than fifty sightings of the ghost of an elderly man have been reported by staff and patrons at the place often fondly referred to as “The Judge.”[7]

The man, dressed in a dark suit and a top hat, strongly suggesting he is originally from a time long past, usually appears in the window of the men’s washroom on the upper floor. He is sometimes seen from the other windows on the main floor, but more often than not haunts the men’s washroom the way a bar-fly might haunt his favourite stool.[8]

There is nothing frightening or foreboding about his appearances. He is merely there one moment, a silent and eerie spectre, and then he disappears.[9]

Maria Italia, the bar owner, has explained that this elderly dark man, who is the most often seen ghost in the pub, isn’t the only one. Some people have experienced what they thought was a cat brushing against their legs; amused that the bar had their own resident pet, something that usually gives a place some character, they would reach down to stroke the animal, only to find nothing there. Augusta’s Winking Judge doesn’t have a resident pet — at least not one that you need to feed and clean up after.[10]

Inexplicable wisps of smoke have been seen floating up the stairs even after Hamilton adopted a no smoking bylaw for bars and restaurants, and footsteps are sometimes heard, particularly when the bar is empty and there is nobody else in the building.[11]

Italia has even recounted memories of her daughter having interesting conversations by herself when she was about two years old. When questioned about whom she was speaking to, the little girl would simply answer that she was talking to the man.[12]

      With too many nocturnal and eerie sightings and happenings at the bar, Maria and her husband, Bill Rea, welcomed a team of paranormal investigators to check things out. Covered in articles in the Hamilton Spectator, as well as via interviews with local radio personalities, the supernatural activities of this Augusta Street bar became well-known back in 2008.

The organization that the owners called in was called the Southern Ontario Paranormal Society (or SOPS), which was formed by Steve Genier in 2005. SOPS doesn’t charge for its services, which involves investigating a site with more than $5,000 in equipment to attempt to document or record what it calls “hot spots” of ghostly activity.[13]

Having spent a long night in the bar with half a dozen investigators and three “sensitives” (psychics who are attuned to feel otherworldly activity and presences), Genier recorded something that hadn’t been heard before, and it was picked up simultaneously by two independent recording devices in the basement. Slightly obscured by the hum of a nearby refrigerator, a child-like voice can be heard saying, “I can hear you.”[14]

Hamilton resident Randy Hines wasn’t surprised to learn that the pub was haunted. After reading about the SOPS investigation in the Hamilton Spectator, he contacted reporter Mark McNeil to add some history to the contemporary experiences.[15]

Before it was converted into a business establishment, the building used to be a home. Hines said that his grandparents used to live in the house from the mid 1930s until the mid 1970s and that, as a child, he always felt it was haunted. He reports having heard things such an footsteps walking upstairs and recalls being warned by his grandfather not to go up into the attic because the man, Gord, would get him.[16]

      If Gord is indeed the name of the spectral man in the dark suit and top hat, the ghost regularly seen at Augusta’s Winking Judge seems to have mellowed over time. While feeling uneasy and freaked out at seeing him, nobody has ever felt threatened by this otherworldly visitor.

      Instead, he is just there, an intriguing and often celebrated ghost who doesn’t appear to disrupt or to judge. A spirit content to mingle in a place where spirits of the natural world flow quite freely as well, he seems more inclined to linger and adds ambiance to the old Victorian building.

      The Coach and Lantern

      The Coach and Lantern British Pub sits on a busy street in downtown Ancaster amid trendy boutique shops and beautiful sandstone buildings. There is a bustle in the air most afternoons, of both pedestrians and traffic. Most people who pass the third oldest building in Ancaster might marvel at the classic stone look and front fence with wrought-iron archway that leads through to the patio and entrance, but they are likely unaware of the bloody history of this site, nor of the ghosts that roam around to this day inside.

Originally built in the 1700s, the building at 384 Wilson Street burned down and was re-built in 1823. But between those times, the land bore witness to The Bloody Assize in Upper Canada, a series of trials held during the War of 1812. During the war, a number of settlers from the Niagara and London region had taken up arms against their neighbours. Several groups were taken prisoner, and in 1814, fifteen of the nineteen people charged were found guilty — eight of them were executed in an utterly barbaric fashion.[17]

      Justice Thomas Scott’s execution order on that site included a centuries-old British-style punishment for treason. On June 21, 1814, Scott pronounced the sentence for eight of the men: “You are to be drawn on hurdles to a place of execution, whence you are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, for you must be cut down while alive and your entrails taken out and burnt before your faces. Your heads then to be cut off and your bodies divided into four quarters to be at the King’s disposal. May God have mercy on your souls.”

      The following month, the men were transported all the way down to a gallows that was located across the street from where Dundurn Castle now stands. So while they were not killed on that spot, it was near that very location where their fates were sealed.

      In