In Canada, it’s darker at this time of year. There are fewer waking hours and dusk and darkness are often inhabited by unexplained events and ghostly phenomena. We are not a superstitious people, not susceptable to assumptions of supernatural causation. But facts are facts, and we are a curious bunch. So every year at about this time we venture out, often by candlelight, in search of the truth that awaits us in the cold darkness…

The Haunted Stirling Mansion, home of Fright Night

European settlement in Nova Scotia dates back to the seventeenth century. In Canadian time, that’s a lot of history. @AuthenticCoast  and @travelbyterry have been tweeting me about an interesting Nova Scotia haunt. The DesBarres Manor Inn was built in 1837 in the seaside village of Guysborough on Nova Scotia’s eastern shore for Supreme Court Justice, W.F. DesBarres. Justice Debarres was the grandson of J.W.F. Desbarres, a military man and mapmaker who accompanied Major-General James Wolfe at the great battle on the Plains of Abraham. It is rumoured that Wolfe gave DesBarres his pocket watch at the moment of his death, and that it hung in the Manor for many years. Spooky!

Surrounding the Plains of Abraham is Québec City. As night falls, Ghost Tours of Québec guide visitors through the cobble stone streets and ancient buildings of the old city, regaling them with tales of murders, executions, mysterious sightings, tragedies and hauntings.

Mon Dieu! Tours are in English and French.

In Ontario (known before confederation as Upper Canada), Fort George is regarded by many as the most haunted place in Canada. It was headquarters for the British military in Niagara during the War of 1812, and the scene of much blood, death and suffering. Many soldiers and civilians alike are still buried on the grounds of the fort. Some people say that distant cries can still be heard there.

If you dare to set foot in the fort on a weekend in October, check out the Friends of Fort George Halloween ghost tour. This two-hour guided candlelit walking tour is conducted by Ghost Tours of Niagara.

In the Canadian Badlands of southeastern Alberta, ghost tours and other paranormal events are wafting through the mist. The Haunted Atlas Coal Mine has BIG BOO and LITTLE BOO tours into the darkest corners of the abandoned coal mine. The Medalta Ghost Hunt is a nocturnal tour through a 100 year old pottery factory led by the Medicine Hat Paranormal Investigation team. And in the normally peaceful village of Stirling, Alberta, the Haunted Stirling Mansion is one of the best-produced haunted houses I have seen anywhere in Canada.

On Twitter, the Stanley Park Hallowe’en Ghost Train is known as @Ghost_TrainYVR. This year’s theme is Circus of Disaster. @Ghost_TrainYVR has been tweeting little teasers about this year’s event. Example: “The 1st circus in Ancient Rome was called the ‘Circus Maximus’ & more than 200-thousand people came to watch the show” Here’s a review of this year’s ghost train from the Georgia Straight, a popular Vancouver area media outlet.

If you know of a ghost tour or spooky Canadian factoid, please share it with us in the comments below.

The United Nations (UN) has declared 2011-2012 the International Year of the Bat, so with Halloween just around the corner, I wanted to do this post.

Bats are the world’s most misunderstood creatures. For centuries, they’ve been associated with black magic, witchcraft and vampire folklore. But bats are in real trouble right now and desperately need our help to survive.

In North America, White-nose Syndrome (WNS) has devastated bat populations. In other parts of the world, bat habitats are disappearing. The United Nations and bat conservation groups around the world are anxious to get the word out that we need bats for a healthy world. Bats pollinate plants and disperse seed and they help control pests, with some eating half their weight in insects every night.

To understand bats better,  the UN has set up a Year of the Bat website.

Just ten minutes on YearoftheBat.org and its links and I discovered all kinds of interesting facts and figures about bats. The world’s only flying mammals represent 1200 species of bat. That’s one-fifth of all mammal species on the planet. The smallest is the Bumblebee bat, weighing in at less than a penny. The largest is the Giant Flying Fox with a wingspan of up to six feet. The Little Brown which is native to many parts of Canada and the US, eats up to 1,000 mosquito-sized insects in an hour. The Little Brown is the bat that has been most severely affected by WNS.

Here are a couple of other things I learned from YearoftheBat.org:

Golden Crowned Fruit Bat – a type of Flying Fox mega bat

Bats often sing to attract a mate or they do a fancy wing display.

Bats live long lives – sometimes twenty years or more and they only have one pup a year. Pups are suckled by their mothers until they are old enough to fly.

I found out how to remove a bat safely and humanely from a home:  http://www.batcon.org/index.php/bats-a-people/removing-a-bat.html And, I found instructions on how to build a bat house. http://www.batcon.org/index.php/get-involved/install-a-bat-house.html These houses really do work. My mother had bats roosting between the frame and siding of her home and a bat house that we posted on a nearby cedar tree eliminated the problem.

In Canada, many Ontario Parks have bat awareness as part of their natural heritage education programming. At Rock Point Provincial Park on Lake Erie, bats are a part of the park’s summer activities. At The Pinery, a provincial park on Lake Huron, the park’s Halloween weekend always includes a Build your own Bat House session hosted by Friends of the Pinery park volunteers. This year, the Halloween weekend takes place October 22-23, 2011. Reservations are required.

 It  started with  @whygocanada tweet. Julie Ovenell Carter is a well known Canadian travel writer and she tweets for WhyGoCanada.com, a Canada travel source.  Julie’s tweet read: “My favourite food souvenir from Canada? Hawkins Cheezies of course! What’s yours?…”

I discovered one on a road trip to Quebec last year.

We were with Carole and Andy,  friends from Calgary, staying at a cottage in the Laurentians. While in town shopping for groceries, we spied Grandma Ste-Catherine kisses.

Now, if you’ve ever trick or treated on Hallowe’en, you know what a Hallowe’en kiss is. Gooey, taffy-like candy and done right,  made with molasses. In my old neighbourhood, Halloween kisses were popular. They came in orange, black and yellow wrappers. They were cheap. And they were shelled out by the handful. Here’s the deal: Grandma Ste-Catherine kisses are different. They’re better, WAY better.

Bigger, softer and good.  Very good. Too good. The four of us went through an entire bag in a week. At Christmas, Glenn and I looked for a bag to send Carol and Andy thinking they’d get a good giggle. We never found the kisses

Julie’s tweet for our favourite souvenir food was my motivation to find out the story behind the kisses. My online / telephone journey took me across Canada from Vancouver all the way east to the city of  Saint John, New Brunswick and the home of the  Grandma Molasses company. Turns out it Grandma Molasses doesn’t make Grandma Ste-Catherine kisses but it does supply the molasses.

Molasses is made from 100% sugar cane juice amd has been a staple in North America for over 200 years. According to Grandma Molasses, it used to arrive in Saint John by ship in ‘puncheons’ (big wooden barrels) and was sold in bulk at local general stores. That got me to wondering if my dad’s habit of serving us toast topped with molasses on winter mornings didn’t come from his New Brunswick roots. Original Foods , a Quebec company, makes Grandma Ste-Catherine kisses. So my next call was to Original Foods, based in Montreal. Two calls later  I found out that you can’t buy Grandma Ste-Catherine kisses in Vancouver (Sorry Julie!). but Metro and Walmart sell them in stores in the  Maritimes, Quebec and Ontario.

As for Julie’s favourite, Hawkin’s Cheezies. Check this Halloween post that Julie wrote for more about them.

Buried loot at the Haunted Stirling Mansion

Halloween is big business in Canada. Just ask Statistics Canada. Every year, it releases Halloween stats that include the latest demographics on trick or treaters, the number of Canadian farms with pumpkin patches, the amount of money Canadians spend on Halloween candy and even a list of places in Canada that may give you the creeps.

Based on recent travels across the country, we came up with our own list of creepy places:

All Hallows Eve at Kings Landing Historical Settlement

Bone-chilling tales including a famous cold case…

“Lizzie Borden took an axe, Gave her mother 40 whacks, When she saw what she had done, She gave her father 41″  Lizzie was later acquitted of the 1892 double-ax murder which over a century later remains unsolved. Expect this kind of bone chilling tale and more as the “dead” gather October 29 and 30 to celebrate the ancient ritual of All Hallows Eve at Kings Landing Historical Settlement near Fredericton, New Brunswick. A mysterious soul and a headless horseman will greet you at the Kings Landing gate and escort you down a lonely gravel road to the King’s Head Inn. There you’ll join others for dnner and a night of murder and mayhem.

Haunted Stirling Mansion, Stirling, Alberta

Canada’s best haunted house:

Last June on a road trip near Lethbridge, Alberta, we stumbled across what we think is THE best haunted house in Canada. It was broad daylight when the owner gave us a tour of the Haunted Stirling Mansion. It didn’t matter. I still  jumped out of my skin when I saw a strange “dude” peeking out from a door slightly ajar. The set design in this place is so well done, my imagination ran wild. Fright Nights run October 28-31.

Haunted Atlas Coal Mine near Drumheller, Alberta

The Atlas Coal Mine:

With all the miner news of late we couldn’t resist including the Haunted Atlas Coal Mine.  It stands next to the ghost town of East Coulee, south of Drumheller, in the Canadian Badlands of Alberta. The mine’s grey-timbered tipple is creepy enough in daylight let alone at night when Hallowe’en guests are invited to explore it armed with only a flashlight. A former bathhouse has big meat hooks attached to ropes on pulleys hanging from the ceiling. Miners once used these to hang their street clothes on, above the coal dust. The Drumheller Paranormal Group thinks this national historic site is haunted. You can judge for yourself. Special Big Boo and Little Boo tours are offered October 30.

Canada’s coolest post-halloween event

Best post-Halloween event:

The Pumpkin Parade in west end Toronto’s Sorauren Park is a feast for the eyes. Every year hundreds of families bring their carved pumpkins to the park at dusk the day after Halloween. The pumpkins are then lit along a path that runs the perimeter of the park.

I’m hooked on cemeteries. They hold so much potential for great stories.

Lloydtown Pioneer Cemetery, Lloydtown, Ontario, Canada’s rebel town

My fascination started years ago on a high school exchange to Boston. I was strolling through Boston Common and the Granary Burying Ground where Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere and John Adams are buried along with “Mother Goose”. Mother Goose? What a surprise and not without controversy, and that’s what hooks me. Always more questions than answers with a good cemetery story.

There’s a family history of cemetery love. Ancestors of mine made monuments and gravestones in Quebec. One became a sculptor and made World War I memorials too. Two generations later, my mother began traipsing through cemeteries in Canada, the US, England, Scotland and Ireland and poring over town and church records long before the web made genealogy searches easier. I took a trip with her to Scotland in the 1990s. Copies of wills, ancient newspaper obits, and old letters mapped our route. We got our first hit in St. Cuthbert’s Burying Ground in downtown Edinburgh. A grave of a grandfather from way back. His epitaph read “Death is a debt to nature due that I have paid and so must you”. I never forgot the little verse and always thought it was his until I googled it today. Up popped several sites including a fascinating New York Times story on Sleepy Hollow Cemetery from 1894.

Titanic grave site at Fairview Cemetery in Halifax

Monument erected to the memory of an unknown child from the Titanic disaster

Fairview Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia is in every Halifax guidebook. The cemetery is one of three in the city that hold the graves of Titanic victims. Its Titanic gravesite has 121 graves lined in a curve on a knoll, like the bow of a boat. When we visited, stuffed animals and cards were scattered around the base of the Unknown Child and J. Dawson’s grave was covered with handwritten love letters. I wonder if Leonardo Di Caprio knows of the effect he’s had here or what the real J. Dawson buried here would think. He was Joseph Dawson from Dublin Ireland,  a 23 year old coal trimmer. The Old Burying Ground in downtown Halifax dates to 1749. This is where British Major General Robert Ross was laid to rest. He and his troops burned Washington DC in the War of 1812. And you wondered how the White House became the White House?  2012 marks the 100th anniversary of Titanic tragedy and 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. I’m betting both cemeteries will have a steady stream of visitors then.

The Old Burying Ground in Halifax

Lloydtown Pioneer Cemetery was our introduction to Lloydtown, Ontario and its prominent place in history. In the 1830s, rebels led by town founder, Jesse Lloyd and outspoken journalist/politician William Lyon MacKenzie met here and planned the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion. Every Canadian school kid has heard of the rebellion but it’s hard to believe that today’s Lloydtown was once the #2 town behind Toronto in Upper Canada. The Rebellion failed but not before the rebels had planted the seed for democratic and responsible government in Canada. LLoyd fled to the US where he died in 1838 leaving a young wife and fourteen children behind. They’re buried in the little 1834 cemetery along with other early Lloydtown settlers.

Graves at the Crowfoot Cemetery

Crowfoot Cemetery sits high above the Bow River in the Badlands of southeastern Alberta.  Below, a ridge of land stretches across the Bow underwater. For centuries, migrating herds of buffalo, horses and people crossed the river at this point. Blackfoot Crossing became historically significant over time and in 1877, Chief Crowfoot signed famous Treaty 7 here. The cemetery is the final resting place of Chief Crowfoot. Little crosses with the names Running Rabbit, Bad Boy Lepetre, Owl Child and Benedict Prairie Chick gave us a brief glimpse of Blackfoot life. Siksika Nation is part of the Blackfoot Confederacy which also includes the Piikani and Kainaiwa of southern Alberta and the Blackfeet of Montana. Down the road from the cemetery, Blackfoot Crossing opened in 2007. It is Canada’s largest aboriginal historic site dedicated to telling the story of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

Walking among the graves at Crowfoot Cemetery

After a visit to the Sedalia Coop in the hamlet of Sedalia, Alberta (pop. 18), we were on a gravel road headed for Cereal when we came across this prairie pioneer home. A plaque on one side caught our eye and we stopped to read it:

The Gray Homestead in the Canadian Badlands of southeastern Alberta

In the light of day the Atlas Coal Mine doesn't look so creepy, but at night...

Two of the creepiest places to spend Hallowe’en in Canada are Fort George in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and the Atlas Coal Mine near Drumheller in the Canadian Badlands of Alberta.

Bath house at the Atlas Coal Mine – creepy!

Niagara-on-the-Lake is said to be the most haunted town in Canada and the creepiest place in town is Fort George. Its Hallowe’en ghost tours are so popular tickets go on sale every July so, if you miss this year’s Hallowe’en ghost tours, consider a summer tour. They’re held then too. Fort George was originally built in 1796 as the headquarters for the British Army in Ontario. During the War of 1812, General Isaac Brock and his Aide-de-camp, John Macdonell were buried here following their deaths at the Battle of Queenston Heights. Later, their bodies were removed and buried at Brock’s Monument on Queenston Heights, a famous Niagara landmark that can be seen for miles.

The blacksmith shop at Fort George – photo by Joel Benard

Fort George was the scene of death and suffering. The US Army occupied it for seven months during the War of 1812 and hundreds of young American soldiers died during the occupation due to poor sanitation. Many are still buried on the fort grounds in unmarked graves. Fort George staff talk of unexplained ghostly phenomena on candlelight “ghost” tours. Is Fort George haunted or is it the power of suggestion? That’s for visitors to decide but many who take a Fort George ghost tour report seeing, feeling or hearing strange things. Fort George Hallowe’en tours run in 2009 on October 16-18, October 23-25, October 30-31 and November 1st.

Tunnel tour at the Atlas Coal Mine

From the early 1900s to 1960, Drumheller was the Fort McMurray of coal mining. One hundred and thirty-nine mines once operated in this part of Alberta known as the Canadian Badlands. The Atlas Coal Mine, now a national historic site, is the only one left. Its creepy wooden tipple is the last one still standing in Canada. It’s a favourite Hallowe’en haunt and so is the mine’s former bath house which is just as creepy. Massive meat hooks attached to ropes on pulleys are strung from its ceiling. Miners once used these to hang their street clothes on, high above the coal dust. Every year, the Atlas Coal Mine hosts special Hallowe’en tours where a visitor can explore the tipple and the bathhouse armed with only a flashlight. Tours run October 24th, 30th and 31st. Evening tours are for adults only. Participants beware. We’re told you may encounter the tortured souls of the Headless.

One of the highlights of our visit to the Canadian Badlands (http://canadianbadlands.com) in southeastern Alberta was touring the Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site.(http://www.atlascoalmine.ab.ca)  It’s managed by an amazing storyteller. In the space of an hour or so, she brought to life a wild and woolley era of Canadian history. One hundred and thirty nine coal mines once operated in the Drumheller area of the Canadian Badlands. Coal was what oil is today and Drumheller was the Fort McMurray of the 1920s.

Tipple at the Atlas Coal Mine, in the Canadian Badlands, East Coulee, Alberta

The place was BOOMING. Every language of Europe could be heard on the streets back then – Polish, Ukranian, Italian, German and more. Each mine had its own language too, with Polish spoken in one, Ukrainian in another and so on. Labour strife and the communist movement was strong and according to Linda a lot of in-fighting went on. Conservative mining companies faced off against labour groups and miners fought other miners. Fist fights broke out constantly. The wild west mentality was alive and well. One bar owner got so fed up with all the barroom brawls that he eventually drew a line down the middle of his establishment and told his competing customers to stay on their respective sides.

During Prohibition, secret tunnels and escape routes were built all over Drumheller. Bars occupied every street corner. Weekly paycheques were cashed at the bars and hotels or at brothels like Fanny’s, Mary’s and Pretty Alice’s. The brothels are long gone but some of the bars and hotels still operate. Places like the LongBranch Saloon in Drumheller and the Rosedeer Hotel in Wayne, a ghost town. (http://www.coalking.ca/people/ghost_wayne.html) Built in 1913, the Rosedeer Hotel was nicknamed “Bucket of Blood” in the coal mining era. Apparently some real brass knuckle stuff went on in its rooms upstairs. It’s all very genteel now and a great spot to stop for a beer and some Alberta beef. Drumheller’s tunnels are still around too but you won’t find them in the tourism guides.

If you’re in the Canadian Badlands around Hallowe’en, check out Haunted Atlas Coal Mine. It’s got to rank as one of the best Halloween events in Canada. The mine’s grey-timbered tipple, the only left in North America is creepy enough in daylight let alone at night. Hallowe’en is when you get to explore it on your own, armed with only a flashlight.

Bath House at the Atlas Coal Mine

The mine’s former bathhouse is just as creepy. Big meat hooks attached to ropes on pulleys hang from the bathhouse ceiling. Coal miners once used these to hang their street clothes on, high above the coal dust.

Check out the Google Map here.