Spirits of High Park past

[attach]891[/attach]I pull up to Colborne Lodge on a dark, rainy and very windy Friday evening.

Partially blinded by the downpour, I make my way to the cottage-style house, in the secluded enclaves of High Park.

Walking into the old, musty, candlelit house with creaky floorboards and covered mirrors I’m met by the ghostly face of my tour guide, Adrianna Prosser.

I’m just in time for Haunted High Park, a spooky pre-Halloween history tour.

Today, Colborne Lodge is a museum but at one time it was the home of High Park founders John and Jemima Howard.

I’m with seven other ghost-hunters when Prosser begins the tour. Dressed in period costume, she starts by telling us eerie tales about the happenings in this old house. It was the couple’s dream home, she says, and apparently they haven’t been eager to leave even after death.

The most frequently sighted ghost in the house is Jemima, who is believed to have died after battling breast cancer.

“A lot of people believe when you die with so much pain and emotion surrounding you, you cannot leave that space because it’s like an echo. It leaves such residue on the actual place you resided,” Prosser says. “We have some of those echoes still around the house and one of them is in Jemima’s sick room.”

We are told to be on the lookout for a female ghost in her sixties, wearing a nightcap and a yellowish gown.

At that moment, I want to make a run for it.

The tour is brought through the parlour and sewing room, where our guide takes the opportunity to shed some light on funeral rituals during the Victorian era and how they served more of a social function rather than an outlet for mourning.

She notes both John and Jemima are buried on Colborne Lodge grounds.

“If you were of any stature, you would not leave your house without funeral clothes if you were leaving for more than three days. It would be terrible to miss a funeral for networking possibilities,” Prosser said.

Eventually, Prosser leads us to the sick room, telling us we’re getting closer to the ghost.

Feeling like I am somehow trapped inside The Blair Witch Project, I muster up the courage to enter the sick room, where there’s a mannequin draped in a black fabric, facing the window. My heart jumps when I first lay my eyes on it. This is the room where many people see Jemima’s ghost, we’re told. Prosser says the mannequin is placed there to recreate the image of Jemima watching her tomb being assembled while she was dying.

It is believed when Jemima first became ill, John tried to admit her into the psychiatric asylum (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) that he helped build, because at the time there was limited knowledge and understanding on medical treatments of cancer. Prosser tells us Jemima was given all sorts of drugs that made her hallucinate and every night and she was locked inside her room.

The height of the night’s trepidation was the experience I had while sitting in the kitchen directly below the sick room.

As I sipped cider with my tour companions, a few of us heard soft footsteps directly above us. Initially, I assumed someone who worked there was the cause, but then the footsteps stopped, and no one came down the stairs.

We then realized no one had gone up since we came down, so we knew no one was up there. Suddenly, I felt an urgent need to leave.

After the tour ended, I ran to my car, with the image of Jemima’s ghost watching me through the sick room’s window.

It was just too much to bear.

I think I’ll skip Halloween this year.