A Haunting in Ottawa

Ed. Note: I warned you all there would be more.

If anyone ever tells you that Ottawa, Ontario, Canada - our Nation's Capital - has a night life, they are either liars or their idea of 'night life' is vomiting outside the faux-Irish pubs in the Byward Market. Rest assured, Ottawa's sidewalks really do roll up once the Peace Tower clock strikes 6pm.

So there we were - myself, my wife, and my youngest kid - in Ottawa on a July evening wondering what we could do to pass the time once the Sun disappeared. By chance, I spied a brochure in our hotel's lobby that provided the answer: Ghost Walk!

For the timid and the uninitiated, a Ghost Walk is a basically an escorted night-time walking tour through an old neighbourhood. Along the way, your escort (typically clad in a black cape and carrying a candle-lantern) will stop from time to time to act out a spooky tale ripped from the pages of the town's history. I've noticed these things popping up in many old Canadian cities: Ottawa, Quebec City, Halifax, Kingston - even here in my sleepy London, Ontario environs.

I'd actually done one of these Walks several years ago in Quebec City with my oldest kid in tow. It was a foggy night in one Canada's oldest towns and we had a blast (that's another story), so I figured that shuffling down the dark alleys of our Nation's Capital should be good for a fright or two (beyond seeing one of those Byward Market dandies hurling up their Guinness).

I made the necessary reservations for our chosen evening with Haunted Walks. It turned out they were offering 2 different tours: one that was a standard walking tour and one called 'Ghosts and the Gallows' that would concentrate more on Death Row in the historical Old Carleton County Jail. The decision to take the Gallows tour was easy - it had a disclaimer that it was not suitable for young children. That said to us that the joint would be full of ghosts!

Because luck is always on our side, the horrific rainstorm that swept through Ottawa that day blew itself out early enough that our Gallows tour was still a go. We met our guide, Maura, at the appointed place shortly before 9pm. While there were literally dozens of people who'd shown up for their Ghost Walk, it turned out that they were all there for the 'standard' Walk - creampuffs all. In contrast, the Gallows tour would only include 7 brave souls, including ourselves. Luckier yet, 4 of those souls (another family) ended up cancelling at the last minute (creampuffs perhaps?), so Maura would be giving the Crazylegs-Clan-Minus-One a private tour!

During our short jouney from the shadow of the Parliament Buildings to the Carleton Jail, Maura stopped a few times to spin a spooky story. While she gave it her all, it was a little bit of an odd experience. Number one, she was performing for an audience of 3, and I felt the weight of responsibility to 'ooh' and 'ahh' with a little extra gusto. Number 2, for all of its age and significance, Ottawa has a lot of modern buildings and they just don't provide the right atmosphere (compared to someplace like Quebec City).

Maura leads the way to the Other Side.

Awkwardness aside, walking up to the big doors of the Carleton Jail provided ample atmosphere and the promise of spooks inside. By reputation, the Jail is supposed to be one of the most haunted buildings in North America. I'm guessing there are many old buildings with the same designation, however. While the Jail actually serves as a youth hostel these days, the upper floor containing the jails has been preserved as-is and is off-limits to guests according to some rather impressive padlocks.

Up the stairs we went, where Maura produced a ring of keys to let us into the off-limits jails. Our first stop was the jail cells, where Maura would relay a number of ghost stories - many of them involving Hostel guests attempting to spend the night in the cells and losing their nerve before dawn. The best story - and I hope it's true - involves a few German guests who, upon complaining to Hostel attendant about the lack of ghostly goings-on, were treated to a coin mysteriously levitating in front of their eyes for a solid 5 minutes before falling to the floor.

Inside the Carleton Jail front doors...

...and up the dimly-lit back stairs.

The first thing that struck me about the jails, besides the obvious fact that they are extremely cramped, was the silence. With the 4 of us standing at the end of the cell block, the silence seemed like it should be anything but silent. It was the kind of hissing silence that played tricks on your ears and made you think you heard the whispers of the poor bastards that might have called the place 'home' for awhile. 

Maura left us alone for a moment while she went to unlock the doors that would later take us to Death Row. We tried to take a few touristy pictures inside the cells, but the lighting was too dim for the camera to properly focus. After a few nervous giggles about our photographic skills, Maura called us to come through the door. I lingered behind for a few moments longer, running my camcorder with an embarrassed hope that maybe I'd capture something from the Other Side - just like on the ridiculous 'ghost hunting' shows that populate the 3-digit channels on my TV. I will admit that the hairs on the back of my neck did stand on end and I was quick to re-join our little band of ghostbusters down the hall.

Alone in the cells awaiting my Casper encounter.

Death Row is a handful of cells apart from the main cellblock and separated at one time by a set of 2 heavy iron doors. I say 'at one time' because the doors have since been removed by Hostel staff. The story goes that the doors were notorious for slamming shut on their own, often with people dangerously close to being hurt. The final straw came when a Ghost Walk escort had her finger crushed in the doors, which prompted the doors to be removed. Adjacent to Death Row is a plain wooden door that hides what is today a storage room but, back in the day, was where the executioner would emerge when the Gallows were in use. Maura told stories of mysterious noises - talking, thudding, etc. - eminating from the behind the doors. We heard nothing, of course.

Death Row!

The executioner's door.

Having seen the cells, we made our way to the Gallows. I'm not sure what I expected, but the Gallows are easy to miss. It is basically a closet-sized room tacked onto the side of the building. There is a noose, a lever, and a trapdoor that opens 3 stories above terra firma. Maura's story at this stop involved the hanging of a fellow who protested his innosence and spoke a curse to the ground below his noose. According to Maura, there are dozens of instances of Walk guests who, when standing on the ground below the Gallows, have endured spontaneous nose-bleeds - not quite a pox on their houses, but a curse nonetheless. In case anyone is wondering, we had no such affliction. 

As a post-script to the Gallows, Maura pointed out a more informal gallows in the same stairwell, where it is thought (but not proven) that the old-time jail guards may have carried out their own sentences out of sight of the offical Gallows. We were told that, sometimes, Walk guests get an irrationally uneasy feeling when passing this way.

The Gallows awaits another deserving crimnal.

A more informal place to string a rope.

By 10:30pm we had seen what Maura wanted us to see and followed her back to the Byward Market, which Haunted Walks' office calls home. Predictably, they have a small gift shop and, predictably, my son bought a book. We bid our good-byes and thanks, and picked our way through the street people and the tipsy revellers that populated the streets between Maura and our hotel.

As a post-script to the story, I was quick to inspect my video footage on our return home to London a few days later. While my rational brain knew there would be no extraordinary audio whispers or unexplained balls of light chasing through the cells, my more imaginative grey matter hoped otherwise. Alas, there was nothing, not even a technicolour puddle of Guinness for shock value.

30 Days of Fallout

Ed. Note: My family and I recently spent a few days on mini-vacation in our nation's capital of Ottawa. What lies below is a shameless exploitation of that trip - largely intended to fill space here for a few posts. This is the lowest form of blogging, of course: the sharing of vacation stories and pictures. You've been warned, etc.

If Ottawa is the town that fun forgot, then Carp, Ontario is the town that history (almost) forgot. Nestled outside Ottawa's city limits sits the unfortunately-named Carp, and outside Carp's boundaries, in the guts of what was once a gravel quarry, sits a remarkable piece of Canadiana lovingly called The Deifenbunker.

The Internet can provide you with all all sorts of facts and figures about this love-letter to the Cold War, but the Deifenbunker's salient facts are these: At the height of the Cold War, Canada's Prime Minister, John Deifenbaker, commissioned a nuclear fallout shelter to be built at CFS Carp near the nation's captial (other, smaller facilities were built across Canada). Dubbed 'The Deifenbunker', the Carp facility was built to withstand a near-miss nuclear explosion and safely house 500+ staff (including the government of the day) for a period of 30 days. It was (wrongly) believed that 30 days would provide sufficient time for the threat of nuclear fallout to dissipate to safe levels, allowing the bunker's occupants to emerge into a Brave, New World.

Operating for decades with an average contingent of 200 staff, the bunker was decommissioned as an active military base in 1994. By 1995 (or thereabouts) it re-opened its doors as a not-for-profit museum dedicated to the history of the Cold War. And in July 2011, with my wife and son in tow, I took a trip through the blast doors into the dimly-lit tunnel where 1963 would be waiting.

The entrance to the place is noteworthy insofar as a heli-pad might be noteworthy. Beyond this piece of tarmac, there sits a modest garage building large enough for a single truck to park inside and unload without prying eyes watching from the outside. But once inside that garage, things get ominous. Behind a large double-door lies the blast-tunnel - the only way in and out of the facility. And at the end of the tunnel sits the heavy metal doors that mark the portal back to a time when 'duck and cover' was a familiar phrase.

A chain-link fence and a heli-pad?

A non-descript garage, or is it?

Into the blast tunnel!

And down we go...

Through the blast doors we entered what could have been any circa-1963 government building - hallways painted in neutral colours, function--but-boring furniture, signage that meant nothng to the unbureaucratic mind. The only hints that something else was going on was the lack of windows and the unavoidable showers that awaited all who stepped through the blast doors.

Once inside, the Deifenbunker is a essentially a small town built as a 4-level office building underground. There's a fully functional hospital, communications rooms, meeting rooms, offices, personal quarters - all designed to keep government running and all vaguely based on the lessons of submarine layouts. Every piece of furniture, every piece of equipment, every well-labelled room - functional, non-personal. The place spoke in steady, measured tones that it had a purpose and that purpose would be met.

Everything non-descript.

The hospital could handle any medical need except heart or brain surgery.

The 'war room' keeping time where time passes quietly.

The Prime Minister's office (never used, of course).

There were a few features that I did not expect to see (and yet made abundant sense when I saw them). The cafeteria and common room was specifically designed to help ease the stress of the 24x7 rotating shifts within the Bunker. The walls have a bit of colour. There are tables and chairs for playing cards, etc. A billiard table sits near a small library. And on one wall is a photo-mural of some generic Rocky Mountain vista - intended as a reminder to everyone in the room what they were working to preserve.

Canada's own CBC Radio has a small studio 'down there' - intended as a conduit between the government-in-hiding and whoever was left on the surface (provided they still had radios). The final oddity; down at the lowest levels of the Bunker sits a Bank of Canada vault where, presumably, a little bit of seed money would be stored to keep the country financially solvent.

There's more to see down there, of course. And I was surprised at how freely one could roam the lonely hallways on all 4 levels. While guided tours are free and available in both official languages, one can also simply grab a map and audio guide and poke around at a personal pace. Oddly, the Bunker offers children's birthday packages and even runs a Summer day-camp.

So if you ever find yourself rolling through Carp, Ontario and feel the ground start to rumble while mushroom clouds lazily rise into the heavens, you'll know where to go.