The iron hinges squeak just as they
should as Glen Shackleton unlocks the prison door. The coffin-creak
of the old wood floor dogs his steps as he enters the Old Carleton
County Jail on Nicholas Street, walking past a long row of white
cells with black iron bars.
“This is one of my favourite buildings,” Shackleton
says. “I’ve never seen a more convincingly haunted
building.” It is the perfect place to ply his trade: telling
ghost stories.
He tells one now. Real people languished in these cells up until
1972, he says, when the jail became a hostel. Conditions were
terrible: the cells baked in the summer, froze in the winter,
and stank year round. At least three people died here, hanged
on what was the last working gallows in Canada.
Today, the jail is famous for its strange happenings. Cell doors
inexplicably slam shut during tours and invisible, but audible
footsteps, walk down the halls. Some claim the jail is haunted,
possibly by Patrick Whelan, executed here in 1868 for the assassination
of D’Arcy McGee (one of the fathers of Confederation).
One time, four men demanded their money back because they had
not seen any ghosts. The cashier refused, and they started bickering.
“And while these four men were arguing and arguing,”
Shackleton says, “behind the desk, in front of all five
witnesses, a coin rose out of the cash register. It levitated
at eye level for about, oh, five seconds, before it dropped back
down into the cash drawer. The men left without a further word.”
A huge grin breaks out on this reporter’s face. Shackleton
laughs, squinty grey eyes twinkling with joy. This is why he
tells stories. “At heart, we all love the applause.”
This is Shackleton’s 10th Halloween as the head of Haunted
Walks, the walking tour company he founded in 1995. What started
as a one-man weekend operation has since grown into a successful
business, one that takes thousands of people in Kingston and
Ottawa on walks through the past each year.
Shackleton is a well-known advocate of local culture and history
and has been featured in the Ottawa Citizen and on national television.
Many of his tours highlight the history of famous places in Centretown
such as the Bytown Museum and Friday’s Roast Beef House.
It is that history, not the ghosts, that Shackleton says has
motivated him to spend the last decade telling stories. “What
makes Ottawa so interesting (as the nation’s capital) is
that it really was the middle of nowhere,” he says. “It
would be the equivalent of somebody announcing that Pickle Lake
is going to become the new capital of Canada.”
At one time, it was also considered the most dangerous town on
the continent. Imagine Canada’s first MPs arriving in town
to find the streets full of mud, crime and disease, he says.
“It was complete chaos. You had gangs running everything.”
“But it turned out all right eventually, I guess,”
he jokes.
Shackleton, 33, is a skilled orator. There are no flashlight-under-the-chin
dramatics in his performance; his manner and voice are casual
and relaxed. Were it not for the black storyteller’s cloak
that he wears, you would think you were talking to an old friend
at a party.
Shackleton says he probably got his skills from his father, Keith.
“My father was always kind of a storyteller. He would tell
long stories everywhere we went. He always had something to say
about places.”
Their grandfather was the same way, adds Shackleton’s older
brother, Craig. “He had a good memory and a knack for knowing
what the interesting thing (about a story) was,” he says.
Craig says his brother has been an entrepreneur ever since they
were kids on a farm near Campbellford, Ont., about 200 kilometres
southwest of Ottawa. He recalls how Shackleton would organize
a community yard sale and buy any surplus stock to sell at a
profit. “He had a complete old shed that was just full with
yard-sale stock,” he says.
Shackleton says he first got the idea to make a career out of
storytelling when he went for a ghost walk while studying for
a semester in London, England.
“What I loved about it was that it was you were learning
history, but it was interesting,” not dull as history is
usually taught, he says.
When he returned to finish his history degree at Queen’s
University, he decided to give his own walking tours of Kingston
on the weekends.
Craig says he thought it was a great idea since Kingston had
plenty of ghost stories and a serious shortage of jobs. He and
his future wife, Jacqueline, were the first tour guides Shackleton
hired, and watched as the tour groups grew from 11 to regular
crowds of 30 to 40 people.
Today, Shackleton’s walks host about 30,000 people a year
in Ottawa and Kingston. Last year, there were 4,400 during the
week of Halloween alone.
Shackleton says he delights in fine-tuning every part of his
business. “You’d think that after 10 years I’d
be bored out of my mind,” he says, “but that’s
never happened since I’ve never had time to sit still.”
He does not give tours except on special occasions, but he says
he gets a kick out of researching new tales for his walks.
“You search for hidden treasure,” he explains. “There’s
nothing more fun to me than getting in there to do research and
finding something crazy like that there was a riot at the jail
because they took away their playing cards or something.”
Shackleton has done a lot to get people engaged in this local
heritage, says Steve Dezort, program co-ordinator at the Bytown
Museum.
“He’s put a really good quirky spin on history that
engages people. People often show up at the Bytown Museum or
at Haunted Walk because they are interested in the paranormal,
but in the process they pick up a lot of heritage.”
Heritage strengthens communities, Dezort adds. It makes people
more interested in their community, and gives them an attachment
to something greater than themselves. “Get them picturing
a brawl between hundreds of lumberjacks in Lowertown and all
of a sudden Ottawa becomes a lot more interesting to them,”
he says.
That heritage is a vital part of Ottawa’s tourism industry,
Shackleton says, and he volunteers for industry boards like Attractions
Ottawa and Ottawa Tourism to promote it. “It gives a place
some character,” he says. “If Ottawa didn’t have
these (stories), it would deserve the reputation of being a sleepy
government town.”
“I live right here in the Byward Market (and) love being
in the centre of culture in Ottawa. I couldn’t bear to live
in some sterile boring place.”
Despite basing his whole career around them, Shackleton says
he does not believe in ghosts. “I’m the last person
who wants to think there are real malevolent spirits in these
places!” he says.
“Glen is to a certain degree a real skeptic,” Craig
says. “He really enjoys ghost stories because he likes debunking
them.”
Shackleton says he is more interested in the history ghosts represent
than their actual existence.
“So many of these stories draw out the lives of the people
that were there,” he says. “Whether they are ghosts
or not, they sort of survive in the afterlife because people
are telling their stories.” |