House has chilling history
Fifty years ago, families and journalists were sure farmhouse in Sunnylea area was haunted
While you might never have heard of the “Etobicoke poltergeist,” there was a moment in Toronto history when this mischievous ghost was something of a local celebrity.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the spookiest episodes ever committed to local lore, and this apparent haunting at a hulking clapboard farmhouse in Etobicoke’s Sunnylea neighbourhood has still never been properly explained.
Whatever ultimately was responsible for the creepy happenings, natural or supernatural, it succeeded in eventually driving two families out of the house.
“The house was definitely haunted,” says John Downing, then an assignment editor at the Toronto Telegram who spent several nights at the “ghost house” in the company of Telegram reporter John Gault and got to know the fraught families who lived there very well.
“Gault and I, to this day, believe there was something there.”
Downing, now 82 and retired after an illustrious journalism career that saw him leaving the Telegram to serve as one of the first editors of the Toronto Sun, initially became interested in the story because he lived — and still lives — a few blocks away from the house in this affluent, leafy Etobicoke neighbourhood not far from the sprawling Park Lawn Cemetery grounds.
The residents of the upstairs flat in the house, Newfoundlanders Roy and Carol Hawkins and their three young children, were tormented by bizarre happenings — unexplained footsteps in the attic, disembodied screams and maniacal laughter, and sudden dips in temperature.
In one chilling incident, the house cat, Fluffy, had been flung against a wall by an unseen force. These events prompted the family to move in downstairs with Carol’s parents, Albert and Sarah Cracknell, and their daughter.
Downing and Gault thus occupied the top floor for a few nights in May of 1968, sprinkling the floors with flour and rigging up “a network of strings attached to little bells” to satisfy themselves that no human pranksters or invading animals were skulking about. It wasn’t long before they, too, heard mysterious footsteps walking in circles in the attic. More alarmingly, on several occasions they experienced the temperature indoors suddenly plunge down to freezing “so you could see your breath and then you’d hear the furnace come on.” A pair of ministers from the Star of Progress Spiritualist Church, the Rev. Tom Bartlett and his wife, Pat, were invited to perform an exorcism in the attic, during which Downing says “a strange brown blob started bouncing around” in the darkness. The two newsmen were also there on the night, chronicled in the May 9 edition of the Toronto Star, when “more than 200 rowdy youngsters and morbidly curious adults” titillated by rampant local media coverage of the bizarre goingson converged on the property shouting “for the ghost to show itself” and had to be dispersed by police.
Downing recalls inviting the young constable left to stand watch outside in for a hot drink during the wee hours; the nervous officer declined an invitation to venture up into the attic and check it out for himself.
“Oh, it was quite famous,” Downing says of the ghost, which merits its own entries in author John Robert Colombo’s books Haunted Toronto and Mysteries of Ontario. “Half the neighbourhood wanted to lynch me for ruining real-estate values, and the other half would corner me at neighbourhood parties and ply me with beer and talk to me by the hour.
“What made the whole thing very credible was the young couple living on the second floor who moved out as a result of all this and went to live on the first floor, they believed that the ghost didn’t happen and if you believed in ghosts you were either crazy or mentally ill. So it really bothered them. This changed their lives.”
The Hawkins and the Cracknells eventually fled the house for more peaceful digs, for a time leaving the late Archie Nishimura — then a young English teacher living in the basement apartment — as the sole tenant.
His son Richard, an Ottawa lawyer, says he often heard stories about the haunted house from his dad while growing up.
“The people who were living there were genuinely frightened,” he says. “That was about a year before he got married and I’m pretty sure that my mom was pretty scared to go to that house, too. I doubt she ever stayed overnight when he was living there.” Nishimura never encountered the poltergeist himself, Richard says, despite conducting his own amateur paranormal research with flour and strings strung with bells with a friend over a couple of nights. And the ghost appears to have moved on as quickly as it went.
The house’s current owners declined to participate in this piece, but they did say they’ve never experienced anything unusual within its walls. Perhaps that exorcism worked.