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Feb. 15, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:11
Edition 519 - Mark Leslie

Mark Leslie - based not far from Hamilton, Ontario on his real-life ghost quest in Canada and the US...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, as I record these words, the snowflakes are falling in London Town and you don't get much snow here, but other parts of the country have got a lot of it.
And it's damn cold for us.
That's the weather report.
I'm counting off the days here.
You know, I've said before, it's just like the kids' advent calendar at Christmas, where you open a little door, it takes you a little bit nearer to Christmas Day.
I just think every day I wake up in the middle of all of this nonsense that we're going through right now.
And I think to myself, well, spring is coming quite soon.
But of course, if you live in the southern hemisphere, it's completely the other way around.
Thank you very much for all of your emails and communications.
I had great feedback, quite rightly, about Lionel Friedberg.
What an amazing man.
Chris, for example, longtime listener, first-time emailer in Los Angeles.
Thank you for what you said, Chris.
Loved that show, but a lot of people did.
He just resonated with you.
And that was the longest podcast that I've ever done with Lionel Friedberg.
And I still want to talk with him again.
Some great emails lately from people like Danielle.
Thank you for yours.
James and many others who enjoyed the podcast and were fascinated, as I was, by Florence Deshangy on the disturbing and mysterious story of Flight MH370.
And also there was Steve who got in touch, I think, a day or two ago, reminding me of some of the scenes from Fargo, which I think I mentioned on my radio show.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work on this show.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
Above all, thank you to you for being part of this.
Very, very important.
If you want to get in touch with me, you know what to do.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link, and you can send me an email, guest suggestion, shoot the breeze, do whatever you want to there by following that link.
And if your email requires a response, then it will get one.
But please know that I do see each and every email that comes in, which is more than can be said for many mainstream media outlets, we have to say.
Well, that's a whole other story.
For a whole other time.
Now, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained is Mark Leslie in Canada, an interesting man who's written quite a lot of books about ghosts and paranormality and The Unexplained.
There's a great title.
So I thought it would be quite nice to catch up with somebody in Canada at the moment.
We'll talk, amongst other things, about his work on haunted hospitals in North America generally, and also some of the haunting and ghostly stories from Canada, which may not make as much in the way of sort of headlines as stories from the United States.
So I thought we'd connect with Canada on this edition of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for the nice things you've been saying about the show recently.
You know, I'm working very hard to make sure that we have a bank of guests and that this show keeps rolling on.
I've been churning out more podcasts over this last year than I've ever done.
And, you know, since I've been working here at home in all that time, I've sort of got a little production mill going.
You know, I've got everything in its place and a place for everything, even though it is sort of organized chaos.
So, you know, it's one of those things.
But sometimes, you know, I stop talking and there is total silence.
You know, working and living on your own is something else.
But you probably know that if you're in that situation yourself.
But hopefully, we will gain our freedom before very long.
All right.
Let's get to the guest on this edition of The Unexplained then, Mark Leslie in Canada.
Mark, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Oh, I'm glad to be here, Howard.
Thanks for having me.
Talk to me about where you are, Waterloo, Ontario, then.
At the moment, I'm recording this on a day when we have snow.
They're talking to us about temperatures going down to as low as minus four, minus six Celsius.
That's in London.
That sounds pretty bad to me, but I'm guessing for some of you guys in Canada, that's just a walk in the park.
Yeah, we've been averaging between minus 10 and minus 13.
That's without windchill for the last month.
Day month.
Not daytime.
Daytime, it gets as high as minus eight.
I think it was, I was just out there.
I think maybe it was about minus five, but with the windchill, it felt more like minus 10.
Jesus.
I'm never, ever going to complain again then.
I promise not to complain about this because you would see this as springtime.
Okay, well, that's the weather talk done then.
There you go.
International weather sharing.
People love to hear these things.
It's very unusual for us to get snow here in London, but I know not so unusual in Canada.
I love to listen to the radio stations in the far north of Canada, and they talk about temperatures that just seem to be ridiculous to me.
But that's a whole other topic.
Talk to me about you then.
How would you describe yourself?
I describe myself as a book nerd because I've always been interested in reading.
I've always been interested in writing.
I would describe myself as a chicken, maybe one of the biggest chickens you'll ever meet.
I'm terrified of the dark.
I'm scared of most things, which is probably good because I write both fiction about scary things and nonfiction.
So I think I was maybe born to share those fears and explore the unknown.
Yeah, I mean, I heard this on one of your other interviews that you did somewhere else that I was using for preparation, among other things, that you said that you almost fell into this real-life paranormal genre.
It isn't something that you automatically would have considered and you just happened to find yourself, I think, changing location and getting into it.
Yeah, so it was interesting.
I was always interested in writing what I describe as Twilight Zone style fiction.
So that what if, speculative fiction, like what if something weird was true?
What if, you know, monsters were real?
What if there was a ghost in my house or any of those things that usually look towards the darkness?
Okay, or what if there was a global pandemic that kept us all at home for a year?
Oh, no, that happened.
I mean, imagine if that happened.
What would we do?
So I was interested in fiction, and it wasn't until I went on, well, I'd gone on a couple of ghost walks, and I was never all that fascinated with history.
I always thought it was boring because, you know, I was like, well, it happened in the past.
Who cares?
Like, you know, standard teenage, self-important, you know, the age that you go through.
But when I was on a ghost Walk in Ottawa, our nation's capital, I realized that history could be fascinating because of the ghosts.
And so that connection was made for me.
It was like history came alive because we were talking about the people who lived here before us and the things they built, which was cool in and of itself.
But then you can't tell a good ghost story without history.
And so that kind of sparked it.
And then a few years later, when I moved to Hamilton, Ontario, I thought, well, what better way to get to know the city by first going to as many bookstores as I could?
That's a thing I do.
But then also going on the ghost walks and learning about the local history of Hamilton.
And that kind of is what kick-started the desire to want to write a book about haunted Hamilton, about the ghosts of that city.
Now, I have a habit of listening to international radio stations.
I've been doing it for as long as that's been possible.
First of all, by shortwave, Radio Canada International, and now, of course, on the internet, I can listen to all of your local stations.
And I listen a lot to stations out of Hamilton and the CBC there in particular.
And the view I get of Hamilton is that it's a nice place to live, but it doesn't ever sound like a hotbed of paranormality, is it?
Yeah, it's actually a wonderful city to live in.
I lived in there for a number of years, over a decade.
But it is.
There's some fascinating ghosts in the Hamilton area.
So when you look at where Hamilton is situated, just around the Great Lakes, it's pretty close, maybe about an hour and a half drive from Niagara Falls, the border to the U.S. There was a lot of the War of 1812.
Now, if I was talking to an American audience, they would go, what war?
I've never heard of that war.
Because usually the wars you lose, you don't remember very well.
But that was the Stony Creek Battleground battlefield.
And there was a lot of that activity took place in that part of Canada at the time.
And so many of the ghosts in the Hamilton area come from that time period, including the Stony Creek battlefield, where there's legends of being able to see and hear in the foggy dusk soldiers moving across the field where many of them died.
But yeah, there's so many interesting connections.
I had no idea there was such a thing in Canada.
I know about Cloden here, which was Scotland, England.
I didn't know that there was conflict between Canada and the U.S. Is that right?
Well, it was Britain and the U.S., but us being a Commonwealth country, we fought alongside the British.
So the British won, but Canadians helped.
We were working together as part of that Commonwealth nation.
And even one of the most haunted locations in the downtown area of Hamilton is the Armories, which historical armories named after John Foote.
And not only do they have ghosts of soldiers that reported are there, but there's ghosts of animals, including horses.
Now, that's unusual, isn't it?
So the cat.
And the cat as well.
Do people hear the cat?
The horses?
Do they see the cat and the horses?
A lot of times it used to be where the stables where the horses were kept and haven't been for 80 years.
But you hear them.
You hear them walking at night.
You hear them neighing at night.
You can sometimes smell that.
Now, some of that smell is still embedded in the brick itself.
Yeah, so you hear the soldiers marching.
You hear barked orders in the middle of the night.
And you hear the horses, according to some of the legends that are associated with that building.
Wow.
So these are scenes from history replaying, almost like the stone tape theory.
It's a recording that carries on on a loop, and sometimes it's more audible and visible than other times.
What do you think causes that?
Well, I've got a few different theories of ghosts and what they could be.
And that's a common one, right?
It's like the, I think of the old cathode ray tube.
And it's like this impression that something so dramatic or so important or so prevalent or emotional resonated so powerfully with that space that it left an impression, like an impression of an image that was frozen on an old television tube.
And even though things have moved on and you're watching other shows, you may still see the ghost of that image.
So that's one of the impressions, right?
That tape you talked about, where sometimes it's just this impressionist ripple-in time space.
Other times, I wonder if it is the, when you think about actual spirits that are, you know, bound to this earth and haven't been able to move on to the afterlife.
And I wonder about certain people having the ability to sense, to see, to hear, to smell otherly world things like mediums and things like that.
In the same way that a wine, I could never pronounce the proper wine, starts with an Semelier or something like that.
They can taste a wine and detect notes of walnut and jasper and vanilla.
And I go, it's sweet, right?
And so I often wondered if sometimes some people are more prone to or more in tune with another dimension or another plane or even another time period, you know, theories of time.
And that could come back to the sort of the idea of it being a film reel that's just playing over and over again on the same time period.
So I keep, I continually, because I'm always curious and I'm always trying to understand why ghosts exist in certain places and why some people see ghosts and other people don't.
And I'm always looking.
You know, obviously never found real answers.
I've only found more questions and speculation.
And I think I really enjoy that speculation.
Now, Canada is a, I've never been to it, but I've got Canadian friends and I love what I hear about Canada.
You know, I used to do a certain amount of broadcast assistance for Canadian radio stations.
They'd phone me up at weird times and they'd say, hey, Howard, it's so-and-so here from Bell Canada group of radio stations.
There's a royal birth there, Howard.
Would you report that?
So I've got a connection with.
I like Canada.
I like Canadians.
I've never spoken with a Canadian that I didn't like.
Okay, so that tells us something.
But the view we have.
I don't spell things properly like you do.
That's another topic for another time.
But the one thing is that the impression we get of Canada is it's a nice place, okay?
And that people are fairly balanced about stuff, you know, even when they're tested as people are tested now.
Canadians are probably pretty balanced on the whole.
And we see these videos of Canadians having disputes on the road and they get out of the car and they say, you are right.
Yeah, I'm fine.
And off they drive, you know, whereas here they'd be, you know, knocking seven bells out of each other.
So I suppose what I'm getting around to is that in your experience of looking into this stuff, are the ghosts of Canada any more benign, do you think, than elsewhere?
Do you get ghosts that cause disruption?
Oh, they disrupt a lot because they apologize profusely.
But no, yeah, I think even my own impression of Canada is it's a nice place, it's a quiet place, it's a boring place, which is probably why I thought history wasn't interesting.
I remember it wasn't until I was watching an old TV show with Howard Hussman, and he played a teacher, and he talked about Sir John A. MacDonald, Canadian prime minister, our 10th prime minister, and how he spoke to his dead mom through his dog and communed with ghosts.
And I was thinking, what?
I had to watch an American TV show to find out something really interesting about Canadian history that nobody talked about in our classes.
But yeah, you're right.
There is a stereotype or there is an impression that Canadians are nice and maybe we've got hockey and poutine and little things like that.
But I mean, have you seen the Canadian goose?
Like, that's a vicious animal.
It's a wicked animal.
I know all about it.
Yeah, but actually, I'm sorry I'm taking you even further down the rabbit hole here, but we had Canada geese in a park very close to where I'm situated.
And I bet you they're violent in London too, right?
They come surging at you.
But if you just stand your ground and I just tend to look at them and say, come on now, are you kidding?
And they stop and walk away whenever I do that.
So I think a lot of it is bluster.
Now, look, Canadian ghost stories, people want to hear stories.
So I thought what we would do is you've done a lot of work on haunted hospitals.
We'll talk about that last.
And we'll talk about some other cases here, if that's all right with you.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, I'd love to.
There are apparently a multitude of stories about, and I wouldn't have known this had you not told me beforehand, Canada's 10th prime minister, a man named William Lyon Mackenzie.
Apparently, this guy was fairly openly, or we know about it, it must have been fairly openly, connected with paranormality, which is unusual, I guess, in the time this man must have lived.
Yeah, I mean, there were contemporaries at the time, Houdini, Mark Twain, etc., that were very interested in the paranormal.
And one of the reasons why we know so much about him is because he kept journals, extensive journals that he wrote in every day, like a diary.
And they're now obviously public record and they're on display.
And he was very open about communing with the dead and doing seances and regularly meeting with mediums and fortune tellers and palm readers and everything.
So he was absolutely fascinated.
This was originally written in a 1976 book by C.P. Stacey.
It was called A Very Double Life, The Private World of Mackenzie King.
And a lot of that book explored some of the darker things that King was involved in.
Now, King himself, of course, when he died, there was this beautiful estate in the Gatineau Hills, which is across, it's in Quebec, just across the river from Ottawa, from like the parliament buildings in Canada.
And the Mackenzie King estate is allegedly haunted.
One of the most fascinating stories I remember was a woman who was sharing an experience when they were going up in the 60s to go up into the hills and recite poetry because this is a beautiful park.
And it's a national preserve, basically, a national park, beautiful park.
And there was a thunderstorm and they were basically the flashes of lightning were just kind of lighting up the sort of the ruins of the old estate.
And she remembers distinctly, even though it was pouring rain, no one would be out there at all, seeing this figure lighting up that seemed to be standing in what used to be a doorway.
But it would flash on and then it would be there every second or third time that the lightning flashed.
And they weren't sure if that was Mackenzie King himself, but a book came out in, I think it was 1954.
It was a couple years after Mackenzie King died, where this author alleged to actually have conversations with the ghost of the dead prime minister.
And of course, it wasn't taken seriously at the time.
When this book came out in 76, it was explored again.
And it was part of the research to say, was it possible that King being so fascinated with wanting to commune with the dead, why wouldn't he want to commune with the living after he himself was dead?
And I'm thinking, okay, this was the leader of our country.
You know, his faces on the money, so many different things in Canada are named after him.
And you think, wow, this is a person who would have seances and engage in paranormal ritual.
And you wonder, were decisions made?
Well, no, that was exactly what I was going to say, because we all heard the stories about Ronnie Reagan, you know, when he was president of the United States, was a great believer in astrology and allegedly would sometimes be guided on doing things, him and Nancy, by astrology.
So I'm wondering whether this guy who was your prime minister, I think, that was like early 1900s, 1920s, sort of?
Yeah, yeah.
It's 1930, 20, 30, in that era, in that era, yeah.
Yeah, so I'm, you know, I'm wondering if he was sort of using this to aid his decision making.
and if he was, and people knew about it, how on earth was that how on earth in the climate that would have pertained at that time, how would that have been possible?
Well, well, here's the fascinating thing, and this is something I learned only after doing research for Creepy Capital, which is a book of ghost stories about Ottawa in particular, is I go through a lot of really old newspapers, like online access to either Microfiche at the library or online access to old newspapers.
And around the turn of that century, you know, from the late 1800s through early 1900s, there were columns in the newspaper dedicated to ghost stories, dedicated to true ghost stories.
It was like a section of the paper, you know, the sports business, you know, culture and lifestyle.
And then there was like paranormal and ghosts.
There were actual columns and dedicated, because I would just find paper after paper after paper that there was just, that's all that they focused on.
They shared, well, these are the ghost stories that have been shared in the community.
And so many of the tales that I was able to gain access to came from these old, old newspaper accounts because it was maybe it was a little more common to talk about those things than it is today.
Well, I think in the United Kingdom, it was a sort of gentlemanly pursuit at that time.
You know, we'd had people like Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a member of the Society for Psychical Research here and a leading light of it and various people like that.
So maybe that's all this was about.
But from what I've read, William Lyon Mackenzie King, his estate, there are many reports of hauntings or rather ghostly apparitions and strange noises and that sort of stuff, so much so that it's a tourist attraction almost for that reason.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Even the local ghost walk group, the haunted walks group from Ottawa, they actually have a special Mackenzie King Estate tour.
And I've been up there.
Actually, I was up there years before I started doing haunted research.
But of course, you can't help but, you know, when you're there, you're reading things and you're hearing stories about some of the alleged things that took place there.
And one of the reasons that they believe there's a lot of paranormal activity there is that's where he did a lot of his, let's say, recreational enjoyment of paranormal phenomenon.
He also collected architectural ruins from locations around the world and assembled them there at that estate.
So every time I can't help but think about artifacts from Europe, which has a much longer, richer history, and taking them to a younger, at least from a Western standpoint, a younger society for Canada, and can't help but wonder if some spirits may travel or come along.
Well, indeed, if he was importing them.
That's an interesting thought.
So quite a character.
And again, something I knew nothing, and I'm sure most of my listeners, other than those in Canada, would be unaware of this, which is also allegedly.
And one of the things that you've researched in Canada, and I tend to think of the Titanic as being a British and United States story, but of course it's much more than that.
We know that.
There is a connection between a hotel in Canada and the Titanic and ghosts.
What is that connection?
Tie that together.
Yeah, so the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, which is right beside the parliament buildings and looks very parliamentary in its architecture, and which it was done on purpose, was a luxury hotel that was being built.
And the owner, who's also responsible for several railroads and a lot of big things that were being built in Canada, Charles Melville Hayes, now he was in London, England, attending a meeting,
Grand Trunk Railway's head office, and he had booked a trip back to Canada aboard the maiden voyage of this luxury steamship in order to get back to Canada for the grand opening of the Chateau Lauré, which was his prize, his baby, his big, big project.
And I have stayed there.
It is a gorgeous, gorgeous hotel.
Of course, as we know, the Titanic didn't make it.
And he gave up his spot because he was privileged.
He had a spot on one of the life rafts.
But he and his assistant made sure that the women in their party and the youth got their spots and they went down with the ship.
And so one of the ghosts that allegedly haunts the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa is Charles Hayes, Melville Hayes.
And the thought, the romantic notion is that he never made it to the grand opening, but he eventually made it back and is still there.
And that's why his ghost is allegedly seen roaming the hallways.
It's this sadness that he never actually got to celebrate that great moment.
And what do people report at the Chateau Laurier?
So some people have reported seeing him, either sitting in a chair in the front lobby, walking by a man in the hallways, and only afterwards seeing there's a picture of him down in one of the back hallways behind the front registration desk, and then walking by and saying, oh my God, that looks just like the guy I saw.
Those are a lot of the reports where people, because you don't usually know how most historical figures looked because they're not well known, not like a Hollywood star or something like that.
And it's kind of like, oh, my God, the guy I saw looked just like so-and-so.
Some of the other ghosts just haven't been identified.
And so when it's an unidentified ghost and it's just things moving about, sounds, hearing sounds of footsteps, hearing mumblings of like as if somebody's talking to themself while they're moving down an empty hallway.
You don't know, is that Hayes or is that some other ghost?
So some of them are very distinctively, oh my God, that looks like it was him.
And other ones are indecipherable, not sure what the source is.
Now, as part, Mark, of my meticulous preparation for these conversations, I had a look for, whenever I talk to anybody about ghosts, I try and find lists.
And I found a very prominent list of the seven most haunted sites in Canada.
And at the top of that, and I would never have thought it would be one of these buildings, but it is.
At the top of that list is a prison in Ottawa, which is said to be, reputed to be, by reputation, Canada's most haunted site.
Talk to me about that.
Oh, and here's the really cool thing about this.
Now, I'm sure it's not right now because of COVID, but it was Canada's old Carleton County Jail, which basically housed you get thrown in there.
It was partially for mental illness, for pickpocketing, for murder.
It didn't matter.
Everyone just got mixed together.
And what's the creepiest part about this haunted building, and I can share some of the stories, is that it was a youth hostel.
So you could stay there for $20 a night and you would be staying in an old converted prison cell.
And I have to tell you, when my partner Liz and I were going, we were visiting Ottawa.
We stayed at the Chateau Laurier.
We wandered around till 3 in the morning in the hotel just to get a feel for what it was like when no one was around in the hallways.
And I was terrified we were going to see something.
She was hoping we would see something.
We didn't.
But then we went on the tour of the jail.
And she says, oh my God, why didn't we stay here?
And I was like, you stay here.
I'm going to be sleeping in the hotel across the street.
And it was funny.
I was, even though the Chateau Laurier was allegedly haunted, I didn't feel anything freaky.
I didn't feel anything spooky.
But the thought of sleeping in one of these old converted jail cells after hearing the stories of the ghosts, the many ghosts, including a vampiric ghost.
I was like, no.
There's a ghost that drained, there's a story about this ghost that drained the energy of this boy.
And it was just like, it was kind of like the psychic energy of him, not his blood, but that when he was staying in a building attached to the prison, that he was getting sick and they couldn't figure out what was wrong with him.
He had no energy.
He was like, like, couldn't figure it out.
It was only after they moved away that they suspected that it might have been this vampiric ghost that sometimes was seen in the in the hallways and in the and in the underground of uh the old carleton county jail and were there any stories all of these prisons i know around the world they all had a a death house uh you know for executions which i'm sure they did in canada as they did in this country as they did in the u.s yeah any stories around that yeah yeah so
So Thomas Darcy McGee, there was one of the famous murder in Canadian history where he was tried and hung in that building.
And part of the tour of the building shows you where the galleys were, where they actually, because, you know, there was public executions.
And it was like they would open up these big shutter doors and people could be lined up on the streets to watch the hanging.
And he was he was charged and he forever claimed that he was innocent, but he was charged with shooting a political figure in Canada in the head and killing him.
And when he was hung, he cursed the ground.
He said he cursed the ground because of the fact that that he was innocent and claimed his innocence up until the very last second.
He never, never said that he was guilty.
And so they believe that he may be part of the cause.
Why this is such a building?
Now, the other thing, too, is a lot of they didn't necessarily give proper burials to murderers and people that they hung.
Sometimes they would, especially when they had no family, when they had no one to claim the body, they would just bury the bodies right on the ground.
And so they did do excavations to remove many of the bodies, but they're not sure if they've got all of them.
And so that's one of the reasons why they believe that this is a haunted building.
One of the other ghosts that just terrifies me to think about is there's on the fourth floor on the woman's washroom is this woman without a face who has been seen by multiple people.
Where you hear crying, you go into the washroom, there's a woman like she's looking in the mirror.
And when she turns to face the person, her face is just like a complete flat blank, which just kind of, you know, that kind of scares me a little.
I would definitely be hitting the road if I saw that.
Exactly.
Like, I'm not going to stay here anymore.
But you reminded me when I was looking at the list, the prison, the bodies were buried in what is now the parking lot there.
Yeah.
And they found, I think it was off the top of my head, it was like more than 100 bodies there.
Yeah.
And that's when they did, when they were doing the renovations, that's when they removed a lot of those bodies.
But like, did they get them all?
How deep did they go?
But people keep wanting to go and stay there, don't they?
Yeah.
And it is, I mean, come on for, I think it was $29 a night.
It's probably as high as $39 a night now, but, but it's quite a fascinating.
And so, so Liz doesn't believe, like I believe.
So she, she's not as frightened of things like that.
So she was really interested in staying there.
And I seriously said, yeah, you stay here.
There's no way I could sleep in this place.
Although it was fascinating.
It was really interesting.
But just the, because it's, you know, it's converted jail cells and you still have, you know, you still have, it still looks so much like it did back in the day.
Because they've, they've, they've upkept the, the historical aspects of the building because it is it is a sight to see when you think about you know when you think about the history and you go back to the history of how hospitals and prisons and and and asylums were all kind of like this melting pot, where just you threw in hardened criminals with pickpockets and people who really should have been in a hospital because they needed to be treated for mental illness.
So, just it was kind of like a lot of the reports that I read going back where it was a hell on earth.
That was some of the best ways that people could describe it because you could go in for a misdemeanor and come out basically being a broken person because of the atrocities that you suffered there.
Well, the justice system was not then as it is now, and that goes for both sides of the Atlantic, we have to say.
Earlier this year, I recall probably the end of last year, a story from a place called Picton about a theater.
You might have come across this one.
I think there was a story about a haunted theater or the theater.
No, there was one story about a haunted theater in Canada, I remember doing, and another one about a theater that was looking to acquire a ghost.
That's right.
It wanted somebody to nominate themselves, and I think pay a certain amount of money and suggest themselves when they die to be the ghost for that theater, to be the nominated ghost, which is a great bit of publicity.
But Canada seems to have a good line from what I'm reading in haunted theatres, doesn't it?
Yeah, there are several theaters in Canada with hauntings.
Hamilton, Sudbury, Ontario, where I grew up.
And even I was being interviewed by a paranormal group, oh, God, it was about a year ago for their podcast.
And we met in an old theater probably about, it's about an hour's drive from Waterloo in the more rural area.
And that was the first time I had ever experienced seeing the light spheres.
And this was fascinating because I've always thought, well, you see the little orbs of light.
I was thinking, well, that's got to be like moisture or dust molecules, right?
Because I am often looking for scientific explanations for phenomenon because I'd like to approach it with an open-minded skepticism.
And he opened his phone and he showed me, and I have a skeleton I travel with, Barnaby.
Not a reality plastic skeleton, but that's part of when I do book signings, Barnaby's there or when I'm on location hours.
That's a new one on me, of the man who travels with a plastic skeleton called Barnaby.
Okay.
But, you know, if you see me doing a book signing at a bookstore and you see a guy sitting there with a skeleton, you either know don't make eye contact with the crazy man.
He's not in your cup of tea, because if you're looking for a nice, you know, Bridgerton romance kind of story, you're not going to get that.
It was definitely a gimmick.
And it's kind of like, well, a lot of people will go, oh, I think I'm going to like what his book's about.
And it's also a great icebreaker when you think about it.
But Barnaby was sitting in the, we were sitting on the stage.
We were setting up the equipment to record.
And then the one guy opened his phone.
He said, look, there's orbs.
And me being very skeptical, I looked and I went, well, and I looked.
And so orbs to me would always be like dust particles that just get catching the light or moisture in the air or whatever.
And usually are captured only on film.
And what I saw through his phone was these streaks of light shooting up from the ground behind Barnaby where he was sitting and going up to the ceiling, like straight, like they were like laser shots.
And of course, the skeptical in me goes, yeah, it's an app on his phone.
I've got apps where I can pretend that there's ghosts if I look through a filter on it, right?
And so he's just goofing around.
So I opened my iPhone and I opened up my camera app.
And sure enough, on mine, I was seeing the same streaks of light.
And I'd never seen that before and I'd never seen it after.
And I probably spent hours researching to see what scientific phenomenon could cause these weird streaks of light shooting straight up.
Not straight, but it was sort of on a on a diagonal angle.
And I still can't figure it out.
And it was just bizarre.
Yeah.
And it was, cause I was expecting, oh, you're going to see a little, you know, a dust particle that gets caught in the light or whatever.
But it was just this weird thing.
And I was like, well, was there some sort of electromagnetic thing that our phone, that our cameras were picking up?
Like, what was that?
And that's what fascinates me is I still can't figure out.
But again, that was in an old, it was a movie theater in, yeah, probably just half an hour north of Guelph, Ontario.
Right.
Well, I think that's worthy of some more research.
Now, you wrote a whole book that got a certain amount of acclaim, I think about three years ago, about haunted hospitals.
And I know that you've continued the research into haunted hospitals.
Yeah.
And haunted hospitals, of course, are places or hospitals are places where the entire drama of human life is played out.
You know, people are born there.
People get sick and get cured there.
And sadly, people die there.
Of course, they do.
So all human life revolves around hospitals and their sites.
And of course, techniques in the past were not as good or humane, perhaps, as they are today.
So I would think, and you would think I know, because you wrote the book, that hospitals would be, and asylums and places of that nature would be absolute spawning grounds for ghosts.
So I want to talk through with you some of the cases that I know that you've done.
One of them is a place that's got a fantastic spelling and pronunciation, the Trans-Allegheny Asylum.
Now, that's not in Canada, is it?
No, it's in Weston, West Virginia.
And it is beautiful because this is one of the few places I actually had the good opportunity to visit.
Now, it was actually, I visited it after the book was published because you can't always get to them before a book is published.
A lot of the research is done.
A lot of the research is done through books, through articles, through first-person accounts that are shared.
But yeah, this is in Weston, West Virginia.
And it's this, oh my God, is this mansion-sized, gorgeous, beautiful, old building that was a lunatic asylum.
And again, Liz and I had the opportunity to go on a 90-minute tour, and the tour was specifically about the criminally insane and that sort of wing of that hospital.
I mean, it is an astonishing building, I think, from the 1860s.
And when you look at pictures of it, it looks like Versailles, you know?
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
Like, we got there early.
And so probably about an hour and a half before the tour started, because we were on our way through town.
We're just kind of heading back home.
And so we got there early and we had a chance to kind of walk around the entire building and the grounds and trying to peek in the windows and stuff before they even opened for the day.
And it was just fascinating because this is the place where I think Lily was one of the ghosts that was the one that fascinated me the most in the research.
And she was a little girl who allegedly haunts the building.
And again, in one of the wings, the sound of giggling children and playing children are sometimes heard when nobody's around in this abandoned building.
And Lily is allegedly a child who died there who would appear either in the washroom or she would be heard playing.
You could hear a ball rolling.
And every once in a while, she's alleged to be one of the ghosts that moves a wheelchair around that one of the tour guides was sharing with us.
Now, I took a really wonderful picture of one of the wheelchairs like in the middle of the hallway because I put it in the middle of the hallway and took a picture because I thought it was creepy looking.
And I was just terrified the whole time that, like he said, sometimes when you turn around and you see you left it in the middle of the hallway, but it was like up against the wall.
We didn't see that, fortunately, because I probably would have jumped out a window.
But yeah, her playing ball with visitors where sometimes a ball would roll out of a room and into the hallway and then you'd go in there and there would be nobody there.
That's something that occasionally would happen at that location.
Right.
And there's also, is this the place that you talk about that has a door that if you knock on it, it knocks back at you?
Yeah.
It's astonishing.
That was freaky.
And fortunately, there was a rational scientific explanation for it.
But the tour guy did not explain it to us right away.
He basically walked up to this one door and, you know, and he banged on the door.
And then within probably a second and a half, there was this rough rustling banging up against the door.
And Liz and I jumped back.
And then he said, he explained it was bats.
Then there was a there was a, I don't know what you call, not a Warren.
What do you call a group of bats?
Well, it's basically, it's like a colony, isn't it, I suppose?
Yeah, a colony of bats that were, I mean, I'm displaying my lack of education here.
There's probably a formal name.
I'll look it up.
Yeah, I have to look it up.
But that doesn't take away from the other stories of this place.
And it is a, you know, you look at it, and on a dark night, that place would look like something out of the Adams family, an astonishing building.
Another place you went to is the Waverly Institution in Kentucky.
And it seems to me that this place is a gift that keeps on giving because there's a, I mean, there are shadowy figures.
I mean, the ghosts are so familiar there, are so regular there, that some of them have even been given names.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so the Waverly Institution is where there's a lot of shadow people, a lot of different shadow people, which is kind of, you've probably heard and spoken about shadow people on numerous different occasions.
They're just the weird, wispy shadows that you see.
But yeah, what are some of the other?
I'm trying to think of the Timmy is the ghost on the third floor.
I've got a couple.
There's one they call the Creeper and another one that's like a great big blanket, a great big dark blanket that you talk about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's one of the shadow people.
They're just like this big, dark, foreboding presence.
It was called Big Black.
That's right.
Yeah.
It probably has been described as the world's largest shadow person, which is just like this impenetrable darkness that would sometimes, according to eyewitnesses, just consume and fill up an entire hallway.
Flashlights can't even penetrate it.
And yeah, the creeper, the creepers, I mean, the name itself was just kind of eerie, but the creeper was just another type of shadow person that was like a humanoid that would sometimes be seen creeping along sides of the walls.
It would sometimes be seen jumping out from other shadows as if it was part of the shadow and then it wasn't part of the shadow.
And then I think Mary is one of the most fascinating ghosts there.
And this is a nickname that was given to one of the ghosts.
And there's this famous picture where you can actually see a woman as if she's standing up, like almost like she's tucked up against the wall.
And it looks very much like this old photograph of a woman named Mary who allegedly died in that hospital.
And this was a photograph that was like, I think it was 2006.
It was somebody who had, again, one of the things that happens in these old abandoned buildings is people will often break in or sneak in after dark.
I think there was, I don't know if you've seen American Horror Story, the second season, which was about the asylum.
It opens up where they're breaking into this asylum.
And I was like, no, you don't do that.
You don't go into those old abandoned asylums without a tour guide because something bad's going to happen to you.
And you say that a lot of the stories that you garnered for the book on hospitals, you managed to get from like TV crews who were checking those places out, who were not part of tours, but they were people who'd gone to make programs about those things.
And you say that you got some stories from those people.
Yeah, so some of them, there's a hospital in near Vancouver in British Columbia in Canada.
And that must have been the site of X-Files and supernatural and movies.
It's probably been used in 50 or 60 different movies and TV shows anytime they want an old Victorian style hospital, and a lot of times, a lot of the ghost stories will come out of after, because again, if you've ever been on a movie set, you know that they set up and they often stay there, especially if it's a remote location.
They'll stay overnight or they have to, you know, they'll just sleep in their, in their vans or they'll stay there so that they don't have to commute back into the location to get an early start in the morning.
Or the crews are doing work and moving things and doing the set dressing.
And that's when in one of the stories, they were moving some furniture up onto the second floor.
And that's when they felt someone shoving them as if they didn't want them to come up the stairs.
And obviously it was the shove of a hand that they couldn't see, but it was right there.
So those are some of the things that happened.
And there was ghostly dogs in one of the hospitals.
I think this was in the Vancouver hospital, where somebody was terrified as he saw this dog running at him and leaping into the air, and nothing was there.
He was terrified.
He thought he was going to get torn alive, but it was like a specter.
It wasn't actually something that was physically there with him.
You say that you've also, or you're interested in, haunted hospitals in different parts of the world.
I don't know if you know about one that I'm very familiar with because my mother, when I was a little kid, got treatment there.
I was born and brought up in Liverpool.
Newsham Park Hospital.
This has got an international reputation.
If you haven't checked this one out, then you need to.
I mean, this one has it all.
It's literally frozen in time still.
And, you know, people report distant voices, strange noises, shadowy figures, things being moved around, knockings, bangings, crashings.
You know, that one is archetypal.
Yeah, I remember that one because that was one of the hospitals.
Yeah, Newton Park Hospital.
That there was a Google Street View image.
You know, they have the street view images where they have the car that goes by and takes the pictures, and it normally blocks out people's faces, right?
Like it blurs them and stuff like that.
But there was a Google Street View image that captured what appeared to be a face in the window of the building, which is kind of interesting because it was obviously not a person standing on the street.
So it's something that shows up or had showed up.
And I know Google Street Views often changes over time.
So they always update and refresh things.
But that was one of the ones that came up.
And I think it made all the paper, well, it made a lot of papers here.
Going back to America, though, Los Angeles, a hospital that was originally built for rail workers, you checked out.
And this one has maybe the spookiest and scariest one of the lot, a woman in a bloody gown.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So this was a hospital.
I think it opened in 1900, 1904, sometime in that realm.
And I guess the story associated with this came from a television program.
Sometimes the research comes from watching different programs where they do their research.
And a former nurse there claimed that she was transferring a patient to a different facility.
And she looked up and in the corner of the room, there was this woman wearing this bloody hospital gown.
And she looked at the nurse and then reached up towards her as if crying out or asking for help.
And that is just when you think about the role a nurse plays and what they do and what like they're there to help.
And so I can only imagine the conflict of terror and compassion that she was probably struggling with because she came out of nowhere.
And then, so what had happened is after this had happened, the nurse was shown a sketch that they had done based on somebody who had allegedly died there.
And she said, that's the woman that I saw.
This woman who had been reported by someone else and seen her.
She says, that's the woman I saw.
That was the woman in the bloody gown.
Very kind of, yeah, obviously very creepy.
So as we said, locations are the key to all of this.
Places where the human drama of life is played out, like hospitals, like prisons, like places where people travel.
Maybe there are accidents and stuff like that at those venues.
All of these things we think, because we don't know definitively, may leave an impression.
Finally, as they say on all the good TV shows, there is a story that's not really about ghosts or about spooks or anything like that.
But I know that you were keen to talk about this, and it is interesting.
We know about places that claim to be cursed, but apparently you say that the Parliamentary Library of Canada in Ottawa has some kind of reverse curse, a charm on it that people believe protects it.
What's that all about?
Yeah, so the Parliamentary Libraries in Canada, which are attached to the Parliament buildings, in Canada's capital, and they're a gorgeous, gorgeous, beautiful part of the Capitol buildings on Parliament Hill.
And our Parliament's very much modeled after the Parliament in obviously in our mother country, in the UK.
But one of the things that I was most fascinated, and it was funny because I remember this from the tour I went on the very first time I went on a tour in Ottawa.
I lived in Ottawa.
I went to school there.
And I went on a tour because you only go on tours when friends from out of town come because you live there, right?
Why would you go on a tour?
I live not very far from Hampton Court Palace, okay, said to be one of the most, if not the most haunted place in the UK.
I only ever go there when I'm showing people from overseas around.
I know what you're saying.
Anyway.
So, yeah, it was my first visit was when a friend from the U.S. came and we took her on a tour of the Parliament buildings.
And that's when we learned.
So it was 1916.
It was in February.
So we like very cold, and Ottawa gets a real winter, unlike where I get in the Waterloo area.
And there was a fire in the Parliament buildings, and the entire Parliament buildings burnt down.
It was one of the most devastating fires in, there were other massive fires in Ottawa, but obviously it took down our Parliament building.
The only original part of the Parliament buildings that survived were the libraries.
And it was a very quick thinking, very quick-thinking security guard who, when the alarms went off around 8 o'clock or so at night, managed to get the doors closed between, because obviously the books and obviously the paper would be a huge fuel for the fires and managed to close these iron fire doors, and that's what protected it.
And then as I was, I think it was when I was writing the book, there was one other, there's been some floods and there's been some other tragedies that have happened that have taken out adjacent parts, but never, never the library.
And then, and my editor made me cut this part from the book.
Because which book is this, by the way?
Oh, sorry, this was Creepy Capital.
This is Ghost Stories of Ottawa, Ontario.
And my editor didn't want me to include this part, but there was a Canadian soldier who was murdered in Ottawa not that long ago, about 10 years ago.
And he was standing in front of, we have the War Memorial not far from the Parliament buildings.
And he was shot by a deranged lunatic with a gun.
And then after he murdered the soldier, he ran up towards the Parliament buildings with his gun.
And it was just as he was getting to the library that they actually got him.
And it was almost like the relevance I was trying to make was that it was almost as if there was some sort of protective element that they didn't capture him.
They weren't able to get him until he got really, really close to the library.
And perhaps there was something about the library that wanted to prevent him from murdering anyone else or killing anyone else.
And that's where they managed to take him down.
That's cool.
And again, because out of respect for probably for the fallen soldier, which it was quite a tragedy.
He was quite a young man that did not make it over here.
So I'm hearing about this for the first time now.
Yeah, I mean, it doesn't happen much.
It doesn't happen very often in Canada.
We're nowhere like the United States when it comes to gun violence, but we have had our share of pretty nasty tragedies associated with that.
As indeed we have here in the United Kingdom.
Okay, of all the ghost and spook stories that you've written about and you've observed, what's your favorite?
I think one of my favorites was when I was on a radio program, it was about two in the morning, oftentimes doing these live.
A gentleman called in to share a ghost story about, and it was a hospital and it was in Alberta.
It was an asylum that he worked at in Alberta.
And he shared this story about this possessed woman.
And I remember, so Liz was asleep in the other room, and I was sitting in the living room by myself doing this two-hour live broadcast.
And when the guy called in and shared the story, I remember sitting there in just a small pool of light.
And as he relayed the story, there's a story about this woman who pretty much spent her entire life in this institution.
They believed that she was possessed because they often would even bring in priests to deal with her because they would have to subdue her and inject her to get her to calm down because she would have these violent outbursts.
She would bite.
She would be able to fling people off of her like really, really strong, like paranormally powerful.
And he was on one of the night shifts and he was just going in and checking.
And he would go in to check in and make sure all of the patients were okay.
Walked into her room and she was sleepstanding.
And you'd think, okay, no big deal, you know, put her back to bed.
But she was standing horizontally with her feet on the wall, facing out into the middle of the room, facing down, maybe about three feet off the floor, looking down.
And he shared this story on how he walked in, he saw this, walked right out of the room, went and sat in the television room, never told anyone about it.
And then a week.
And then straight out of the exorcist, isn't it?
Sorry, you were saying.
Yeah, yeah.
But what gets freakier is about a week later, someone he knew who recognized his voice and also worked there contacted them.
They went out for coffee.
And he said, I knew that was you and I knew who you were talking about because something similar happened to me.
I went into that room on one night and she was standing, sleep standing, and she was about a foot off the floor standing straight up vertically.
And he said, I've never told anyone about that either until you shared your story.
I thought I was crazy.
I thought I was the only one that actually saw her levitating.
And that was, it was, it was really freaky because I heard that story.
It freaked me out.
Then I contacted him because I was working on hospitals at the time.
I was like, I talked to the producer of the radio show.
I was like, hey, can I get a hold of that guy?
And he managed to pass along the contact information.
And when I talked to him about him, he says, oh my God, you won't even believe what happened after this show.
And that kind of freaked me out because it was like, wow.
It was almost like an additional eyewitness of a very similar event.
That is astonishing.
I mean, I don't know how you explain that, but like I said, it sounds like it's straight out of the exorcist.
But how could she be apparently asleep, but also suspended in, effectively, in mid-air?
Yeah, I don't know.
And it's just that It's that unknown that fascinates me.
And it's stories like that that keep you doing what you're doing.
What are you working on at the moment, Mark?
I am working on Weird Waterloo because I live in Waterloo.
I want to capture those stories, as well as a book on haunted artifacts, haunted objects called Screaming Skulls and Demonic Dolls.
Oh, I want to talk to you about that one.
Have you got a story that you could leave me with from Waterloo, where you live?
Not yet.
Not yet.
I'm still just in the early phases of gathering, but there is the Galt Haunted School, which kind of we call it the Harry Potter, the Hogswort every time we drive by, and it's in Cambridge, which is part of the Waterloo region.
Cambridge, Kitchener, Waterloo are all part of like this tri-city area.
And there's some really fascinating ghost stories about Galt, about a custodian that haunts that gorgeous, beautiful old building, as well as just inexplicable things that are constantly happening.
You know, not just lights going on and off, but voices and different eerie eyewitness accounts that have been coming out of that place over the years.
So we can add to the list hospitals, train stations, prisons, and now schools.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, good luck with the book about Waterloo.
I lived some of my formative years in a place called Crosby, which was connected with a place called Waterloo.
So you'll find places called Waterloo everywhere, including, you know, where I'm speaking here in London.
Mark, listen, good to speak with you.
Have you got a website of your own?
Yeah.
And what's that website?
It's markleslie.ca.
That's marklessli.ca for Canada.
Mark, good to speak with you.
I'm sure we'll talk again.
Good luck with the books.
Oh, thanks so much, Howard.
It was great chatting with you.
And as ever, your thoughts about Mark Leslie in Canada.
Nice, pleasant change to talk to somebody not in the United Kingdom or the United States to get a Canadian guest on.
I think we're due for some Australian guests.
So if you're listening in Australia, you've got a lot of listeners, West and East Australia, and in the middle, too.
A guy, I haven't heard from him for a bit who worked on mining projects right in the blazing middle of Australia.
So if you're listening in Australia, you can suggest some good guests in Australia.
I would love to get the Aussies on again.
You know, I love Australia and lots of places I've got to go and visit while there is still breath in my body.
And Australia is certainly one of those places.
I'm going to stop talking now.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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