GHOSTS AND GRAVES
New tour takes guests to sites of ‘death and destruction’ in Windsor
It’s gruesome, grisly, and generally unsettling — exactly what you’re paying for.
Encore Productions of Windsor, best known for its Rum Runners Tour, is getting into the “dark tourism” business for Halloween with a new treat for thrill seekers called The Spirits of Windsor. Highlights of the three-hour bus tour include suicide, angry ghosts, and mass unmarked graves.
“Pretty gruesome, but these are the kinds of things people are looking for on this type of tour,” said owner Mark Baker. “It’s a fairly new area of tourism called dark tourism, where people purposely go to places where death and destruction have occurred.”
The next tour is Tuesday night, with more to follow Nov. 2, 9, and 16. You can book tickets at spiritsofwindsortour.com. Tickets are $49 including tax.
Baker said they’re almost sold out, so if you can’t book online, you might be able to squeeze in by calling 519-990-5379. He said there will be additional tours in early 2019.
“What makes our tours unique is we do them in the form of travelling plays,” he said. “We have costumed actors and actresses that take part in the tours.”
The tour includes a stop to learn about a ghost at the Canadian Club Brand Centre, and a visit to the gravesite of Edward Chandler Walker and his wife Mary in Walkerville.
To take the edge off, some alcoholic spirits are mixed in with the undead ones. Passengers can sample whisky from Wolfhead Distillery while at the Olde Town Bake Shoppe in the McGregor-Cowan House on Sandwich Street.
“There’s a number hauntings that have been reported there,” said Baker.
You might want a drink after stops along the Detroit River where passengers will hear about First Nations burial grounds, and some of the many distraught souls who took their own lives. “They claim that in the 1930s, it was so bad that some of the industries further down river, the water intakes were clogging up with bodies of people that had jumped off the Belle Isle Bridge,” said Baker. That’s not even the most gruesome part of the tour. Baker said that honour goes to the mass unmarked burial site where 16 unfortunate Norwegians were buried in the late 1800s.
They had come from Norway for a new life in the United States. When they arrived by boat in Montreal, many were already sick. The weary — and impoverished — travellers were corralled into a boxcar where all but two young children died en route to Windsor. “When they opened the boxcar, the bodies fell out,” said Baker. Railway executives didn’t want to pay to bury everyone, so they had a hole dug outside what was then the Walkerville train station at Devonshire Road and Riverside Drive.
“They dug a big hole, put the bodies in there, covered them with lime and covered it back over,” said Baker. “That’s where they rest today.”
Pretty gruesome, but these are the kinds of things people are looking for on this type of tour.