The Ghost of Wesley Hall

(From a site called Eerie Places: Haunted Windsor and Essex County)


Ontario - Chatham - Park Street United Church - A tall man dressed in black has been seen at night running through a room called Wesley Hall. Two janitors had seen him. The odd thing was, was that the motion detectors were on. On another occasion, the same man was seen by a teenager playing hide and goes seek in the sanctuary. Also, in a certain storage room near the gymnasium, an intoxicating smell can be detected.

OK then. This might just be one-of-your-average, run-o'-the-mill ghost sightings. Most of the strange goings-on listed on this site really aren't so strange. But who is this mysterious man-in-black running around Wesley Hall?


I think I might know.

Eons ago, I wrote about the minister of my church, Rev. Russell Horsburgh, and the havoc he wreaked on a small-town congregation in the early 1960s. This had such a deep impression on me that I based a character on him in my second novel, Mallory. Who knows why the good folks at Park Street United hired a man like Horsburgh: he was a firebrand who believed in civil rights and actually allowed "negroes" into the church (and not just as cleaning staff). He  held meetings and discussion groups about controversial issues instead of sweeping them under the rug. As if that weren't bad enough, soon he had marshalled the listless young people's group into a passionate affair, which turned out to be a mite too passionate.

I was only eight or nine when all this happened, and my parents were trying to protect me, I guess, or else just get me to shut up, so I had to piece together whispered fragments: "psychopath," "in league with the devil," "what they found in the church," "liquor bottles, cigarettes. .  .and worse." There was national coverage of the scandal as Horsburgh was thrown in jail, tried, and found guilty of leading juveniles into immorality, vagrancy and delinquency.

I don't know how long he spent in jail, but a few years later he died of cancer, all his holy fires spent. He had a group of loyal supporters who in later years claimed to have exonerated him and found him completely blameless, the victim of a witch hunt, but by then it was too late.


Personally, I think Horsburgh was a megalomaniac and a sociopath. I remember him as a big, tall, scary man in black who harangued the congregation and literally pounded on the pulpit as he drove his points home. He once (infamously) printed Martin Luther's "casting my pearls before swine" speech in the church bulletin and signed it with his own name. ("Someone" - ? - had x'ed it out before it was mimeographed, but it was easy to read the original by holding it up to a window. Such goings-on.)

Do you believe in spooks? Ghosts, things that pound pulpits in the night? This account, full of spelling mistakes, may just be a hoax playing on a dark bit of Chatham history which the townsfolk would rather forget. In fact, if you asked anyone about it even 10 or 15 years later, they would likely have denied any knowledge of it. I once tried to hunt down a copy of The Horsburgh Affair, a book someone wrote to defend him, and it had to be dredged out of the inactive vaults of the Vancouver Public Library. Not exactly a bestseller, though I do remember a copy floating around our house in the book-lined den in about 1965.  As I recall, the book is exceedingly poorly-written and doesn't prove anything.

Oh, about that "intoxicating smell" in the storage room near the gymnasium. . . well, this is just too funny, isn't it? For one of the more vile rumors about Horsburgh was that he encouraged his teenage reprobates to partake of illegal substances in the church basement. I don't remember a gymnasium in the church, but maybe they added it when Dufferin Hall was torn down and turned into a parking lot for the dental offices and chiropractors who had invaded the main church building. (This was when the proposed Country Music Hall of Fame and the indoor parking lot for a local motorcycle club had been vetoed, along with other "unseemly" options which we can only imagine.)

http://www.cktimes.ca/archives/column/11/9271.html
http://www.cktimes.ca/archives/column/11/9302.html

I attach a couple of links to a very well-researched article from the Chatham Daily News which I found a few years ago. This was the only detailed information I could find on the subject. The article is largely sympathetic towards him, an understandable attitude in light of the small-town primness of the times and the fact that most people never knew about the strange butts, empty liquor bottles and used condoms the (black) cleaning staff found on the floor of Wesley Hall.

(I just thought of something. The way that ghost-sighting report was worded, it's unclear whether it was that teenager in the sanctuary who was playing "hide and goes seek", or if in fact it was the Good Reverend Scary-boo Horsburgh himself. And if so, playing with whom? With the Ghost of Christmas Past, or the deceased maiden lady clerk at the Metropolitan store who sold goldfish for 15 cents, or that well-known reprobate of abandoned church sanctuaries, Ebeneezer Screwed?)

Harold Lloyd: the ghost behind the wall

Ghost signs from Vancouver’s past spring up to haunt us still

Ninety years after it was covered up by a building, a “ghost sign” for a 1922 movie has reappeared at Granville and Robson.

By John Mackie, Vancouver Sun February 23, 2012

 Ghost signs from Vancouver's past spring up to haunt us still

  

Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, PNG

VANCOUVER — Ninety years after it was covered up by a building, a "ghost sign" for a 1922 movie has reappeared at Granville and Robson.

The demolition of a few buildings in the Granville/Robson block has unveiled a "ghost sign" advertising a Harold Lloyd movie at the Capitol Theatre.
The sign promotes the Harold Lloyd comedy Grandma's Boy, which played at the Capitol theatre Oct. 2-7, 1922.

The sign is painted onto the north wall of the Power block at 817 Granville, across the street from where the Capitol opened in 1921. Hence the sign includes a red circle reading "Capitol over there," and features a wonderful disembodied hand with a finger pointing across the street.

The sign reappeared during the demolition of the three-storey Farmer building at 801 Granville. The Farmer building was constructed in 1922, so the Lloyd sign would have been covered up almost immediately after it was painted, and hidden for nine decades.

Signs like this are called ghost signs, because of their ghostly faded beauty and/or because they advertise long-dead businesses.

Several ghost signs have cropped up in recent years in Vancouver, including a lovely ad for Shelly's Bakery on Victoria Drive and a bunch of long-hidden painted signs on the Woodward's building. Part of an old painted sign for the Pantages theatre showed up on the side of the Regent Hotel when the 1907-08 theatre was being torn down.

Still, heritage expert John Atkin says he's never seen a painted sign for a movie, which would have had a short shelf life.

"You can certainly see movie posters and billboards [in old photos], but not [signs] painted on the wall," he said.

"I think the management of the theatre took advantage of the brief period when a building [on the corner] was demolished and before construction started on the new one."

Harold Lloyd is largely forgotten today, but he was one of the giants of the silent screen, a comic genius whose popularity once rivalled Charlie Chaplin. Like many silent stars, he cranked out movies at a breathtaking pace - he made 205 films between 1913 and 1947, including 40 short films in 1919 alone.

By 1922 he was doing longer features such as the 60-minute Grandma's Boy, which an ad in the Oct. 1, 1922, Vancouver Sun called his "first five-reel comedy."

The movie was released a month before it hit Vancouver, and was already a huge hit. The Sun ad boasted Grandma's Boy "holds the world's record for continuous comedy run in one theatre - over 450,000 people have seen it in one house in Los Angeles and it's still running!"

It played the Capitol for only a week before moving to the Dominion for a week and then leaving town. A painted sign would have cost the owner of the Capitol much more than hanging a poster, but would have grabbed attention away from competition like the Tom Mix movie The Big Town Round-Up that was showing at the Rex, or the Cecil B. DeMille movie Manslaughter at the Dominion.

The full glory of the painted ad for Grandma's Boy may be unveiled over the next few days as the building that covered it up comes down, brick by brick. But it won't be visible long, because the building it's on is also coming down, save for the facade.
The Power block dates to 1888, with a distinctive art deco facade that was added in 1929. It originally housed a saloon, later became a bank and in recent years was the location of Charlie's, a used CD/DVD dealer.

Both 801 and 817 Granville are being redeveloped into a five-storey building that will have two floors of retail on the bottom and three floors of office space above. The new building will have a contemporary glass facade, but the deco facade from the Power block will be incorporated into the new structure, because the facade was designated on the city's heritage register.

The rest of the Power block will come down, however, including the wall with the ghost sign. The city will be documenting the sign with photographs.

Another historical quirk unearthed during the demolition is an old "areaway" under the sidewalk along Robson. An areaway is a room under the sidewalk that merchants used to expand their premises in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You can often tell where they're located because there are small purple glass bricks in the sidewalk that were installed to bring light into the space.

The original Capitol theatre was torn down in the mid-1970s and replaced by the Capitol Six multiplex. That in turn was torn down in 2006, and replaced by a condo tower, the Capitol Residences.

jmackie@vancouversun.com

OK. With considerable weariness, I write about Harold Lloyd once again: in a startling bit of synchronicity, a painted sign advertising one of his most popular movies has been uncovered in my home town. Up to now it was covered up by a brick building. Everyone's scratching their heads over the fact that a mere movie would warrant an ad painted on a brick wall, but though the writer insists HL is "largely forgotten today", he was HUGELY successful back in 1922, to the point that it would not have been surprising if someone painted a bloody canvas and hung it in the Louvre every time a new Lloyd movie came out.


I don't know if this is synchronicity or not. For a long time the name Lloyd was coming up two, three, even FIVE times a day under different circumstances. Like the Gloria Baptist Church, situated at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd (Gloria was the name of his daughter). Like the movie with four different Lloyd references in it. I was going insane, and I'm still going insane.


I became so possessed by HL that I wrote a novel about him called The Glass Character, and though a sane person surely would have given up by now, I haven't: I just hate myself too much, I guess. I want to see this published before I die.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm