Peachland buys ‘castle’ Eddie built
Town ends up with former home of Eddie Haymour due to tax debt, but chances of keeping it are slim
The town of Peachland has bought a castle for what sounds like a fairy-tale price of $15,792.08.
A nine-bedroom, seven-bath, 4,500-square-foot building at the south end of town, once known as Castle Haymour, was offered at a tax sale last week. Since there were no takers, the town itself was the default purchaser.
“So now we own a castle,” town finance director Douglas Pryde joked Tuesday.
Don’t look for municipal staff or town council to don royal regalia and move into the spacious structure with a commanding view of Okanagan Lake, however.
The previous owners still have one more year to make good on the property taxes, plus interest, that they haven’t paid since 2015.
Like all B.C. municipalities, Peachland every fall offers for public sale those properties for which taxes are three years in arrears.
Although the sales do occur, it is extremely rare for the titles of properties to actually change hands. That’s because of the further oneyear grace period for previous owners to redeem ownership.
Whatever the outstanding tax debt is, repaying it makes much more financial sense than losing an asset typically valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Last year, for example, the City of West Kelowna bought eight homes at the tax sale, but the previous owners reclaimed them all within the year.
“It would be very unusual if the title for this building were to be transferred to the district one year from now,” Pryde said.
But some strange things are associated with the Peachland castle, which has a current assessed value of $790,000.
It was built in 1988 by former town resident Eddie Haymour, using money he received from the B.C. government in compensation for a long saga that began with his ill-fated efforts in the early 1970s to develop an amusement park on Rattlesnake Island.
Haymour became irate with government actions to frustrate his dream. At a press conference, he vowed to “drink human blood and eat human flesh” if he wasn’t allowed to develop the amusement park.
Haymour was accused of planning to send letter bombs to then-premier W.A.C. Bennett. He was forced into the Riverview mental institution in Vancouver in 1974 and kept there for a year.
After his release, Haymour and several family members, armed with machine-guns, took employees of the Canadian Embassy in Beirut hostage on Feb. 23, 1976.
The deal for the hostages’ safe release after 14 hours saw Haymour return to Canada without being charged. He eventually received the compensation package in the mid-1980s after the B.C. Supreme Court ruled the government’s actions toward Haymour had been “highly improper if not consciously cruel.”
Haymour used the compensation to build his threestorey “Castle Haymour Fantasy Inn” at the corner of Highway 97 and Renfrew Road, with Arabianthemed rooms.
For many years, the property included a life-size statue of Haymour with its arm outstretched, pointing toward Rattlesnake Island, which he eventually hoped to reclaim. He never did.
In 1992, Haymour wrote a self-published autobiography, which he called From Nut House to Castle. He sold the property in 2003 and moved to Edmonton.
In 2013, speaking to Edmonton journalist Omar Mouallem about his father, Lee Haymour described his dad this way: “A mix of Aladdin and (Osama) bin Laden.”