started the Toronto Sun. And anything we can celebrate these days with the anti-Semites praising Hamas and Trudeau fopping his way to new disasters is welcome relief.
When I was a kid, an old sheet and some lamp black was my costume and my dour Dutch grandparents thought carving a pumpkin was something only devils did. So later I embraced all the weird elements of Halloween with a joy equal to my three sons. But of course that was hidden at the office where I was a cub just trying to stay afloat at the Toronto Telegram, the large newspaper that was better in a news sense than the pretentious Star and the sanctimonious Globe.
We were a tough newspaper town but the Tely had more flash and fun.
There was the time in
Hamilton when I heard stomping upstairs in an empty house and the staid couple confessed it was a ghost that bothered them several times a week. And the time the Tely had a caller tell us about the CBC warehouse that security refused to enter at night. CBC officials spent days giving me the runaround. Then a Star reporter at City Hall, used to Page One bylines, confessed that he thought his basement was haunted by the woman who had hung herself there.
The big story early in the 1960s was when the respected Andrew Macfarlane, later Journalism dean at Western and son of a U of T dean of medicine, wrote about the haunting of Mackenzie House on Bond St. just south of Ryerson. At night the home of Toronto's first mayor had the printing press running and the caretaker getting slapped. It was a Tely sensation and Andy spent hours telling us of his investigation which was only printed because of his reputation.
I was headed home as a kid editor one day in 1968 when someone on the Rewrite Desk said there had been a tip about a haunted house. Since I lived just blocks away, I said I would check it out. Then a reporter, John Gault, who later wrote for Lorne Green on a Canadian TV series, said I had promised to take him along the next time I checked out a ghost story.
We spent several evenings and one night there, listening to footsteps circling overhead in the attic, driving the young jobless couple from the Maritimes crazy. After all, they believed you had to be nuts to believe in ghosts. But there were no branches hitting the house, no plumbing noises, no obvious cause. John and I moved into the attic and saw a light bouncing around at 3 a.m. The temperature would skid up and down without reason.
We were exhausted but didn't write until some neighbour phoned the dreaded rival, the Star, which ran a few paras in the final edition, and the terrible tempered City Editor demanded to know why I had been scooped. So we spent a final night and wrote two pages and the next day hundreds of people and the police stood around the house and oohed and aahed at any noise.
TV came calling, offered the couple money if they kicked us out and let them telecast from the attic with their premier Sunday show. So John and I left. For years there were broadcasts from the house on Halloween and people whispered when they saw me in the stores. But the family went away and a boarder in the basement scoffed at any haunting. And I got promoted where the publishers wanted me to concentrate on federal bogeymen.
I drove by the house the other day and wondered. Again.
Now it is my son Mark with the skeletons in the lawn and car and porch, and the kids come flocking down the street with parents as anxious shepherds. The Tely is gone and the news is as sour as a woke activist. It's time for a great Halloween yarn but I will settle for an answer as to what really happened those nights back in 1968 when I could see my breath and the ghost never bothered to stop pacing in the attic.
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