Can a building be reincarnated? Perhaps not, but Century Manor in Hamilton, Ontario, is in the midst of a resurrection — even if a few former patients haven’t quite been discharged yet.
For the first time in more than 30 years, the city opened the doors to the last standing building of the Hamilton Asylum for the Insane. The East House was built in 1884 in the High Victorian style as a reception building, eight years after the original structures. It closed in 1995 and was designated a provincial heritage building in 1997.
The original asylum opened in 1876 on 529 acres of land beside the escarpment. In the 21st century, the province transferred 28.8 acres, including Century Manor, to Schlegel Villages for $24.3 million. The manor was then gifted to Indwell, a Hamilton-based Christian charity dedicated to affordable housing that operates 1,450 units of supportive housing across southern Ontario.
“We need to save all the historic elements of the exterior,” Indwell community manager Teresa Howe said during Hamilton’s Doors Open in May. “There’s not much historic value in the interior. We’re going to keep the terrazzo floors as much as we can.”
Indwell will redevelop the landmark into 40 studio apartments for people needing deep affordability. It’s a project that has enthused Howe, even though she is not keen on the stigma that has seeped into the building’s foundations — the revenants of its psychiatric past.
“I don’t go for that,” she admitted. “We have not seen any evidence of any of that. We’ve seen a lot of evidence of rodents. I imagine some of the noises that people think are other things are probably rodents.”
The evidence, Howe noted, was the one-and-a-half tonnes of rodent excrement removed during the abatement process.
The west wing second-floor hallway.
Writer in residence
Thankfully, Century Manor has not been left to the rats, something that delighted Ontario horror and paranormal author Mark Leslie Lefebvre. He was surprised to learn the long-abandoned building would open for the architectural event.
Leslie used to live in the Mohawk neighbourhood when he called the Hammer home. He wrote about Century Manor in his 2017 book Haunted Hospitals: Eerie Tales About Hospitals, Sanatoriums, and Other Institutions (with Rhonda Parrish for Dundurn Press). But he had really wanted to include it in his 2012 book Haunted Hamilton: The Ghosts of Dundurn Castle and Other Steeltown Shivers. At the time, he had only a few anecdotes from Haunted Hamilton co-founders Daniel Cumerlato and Stephanie Lechniak-Dumbreck.
In December 2015, while giving a library talk, Leslie was approached by a man he calls Martin, who shared his encounters with the building’s resident spirits while working security there.
“I was probably showing slides and pictures and talking about the behind-the-scenes of how the book Haunted Hamilton came together, just to give people some insight,” Leslie recalled. “People usually hang back when they want to tell you something.”
Martin told him two stories that caught Leslie’s attention. The first happened in a hallway that ended with a single wooden door. He heard voices and muffled noises and, assuming trespassers, went to investigate. Already tired from a full day at the steel plant, Martin opened the door expecting to find two adventurous teenagers.
Instead, he found two nurses in old-fashioned uniforms engaged in conversation. They looked at him. “See, I told you he would find us,” one said to the other.
Martin stepped back, closed the door, gathered his wits and reopened it. The room was empty. The only exit was the door he had just used.
Later that same night, still processing what he had seen, he was walking down another corridor when he felt wind pick up inside the building. The pressure mounted, so he quickened his pace. By the end of the hallway, the gust hit him in the back as if urging him to leave faster.
“He basically said, ‘Yeah, I quit my job because of that place,’” Leslie recalled. Martin then told him about the extra job he had taken at the steel plant to make ends meet and how he used a pay phone to call in his resignation.
“The thing I always want to ask, because I’m a big chicken, is like the nurses,” Leslie said. “If I saw something like that, I’d get the hell out. And he still waited until that force hit him while he was walking down the hallway, that wind pushing at his back. That’s when he decided to leave.”
Even though the building has been stripped down, graffiti remains.
Good bones for a new purpose
Ask anyone on the Doors Open tour whether they had any paranormal experiences and Flourish’s director of projects and development, Graham Cubitt, laughs it off.
“Nobody reported being too creeped out,” he said. “There are lots of rumours and ghost stories. I’ve been here a number of times … creepy is not the right word.
“You just realize that the building has been through a lot and standards for mental health care 150 years ago were different than they are today. How do we start evolving that in a good way?”
The 15-minute tour of the bare-bones East House was filled with history. Indwell regional director Jess Brand guided a group of 10 through the reception area and explained the grounds, which once included a working farm.
Tour members marvelled at how clean the building was after the removal of fallen ceiling debris, plaster, scattered electrical conduits and heating pipes.
“Everything had been either smashed and salvaged or was hanging loose and it was in pretty horrendous condition,” Cubitt said. The team had to gut the interior and abate mould, lead paint and asbestos.
“You could not come in here before without a full hazmat suit, full face mask and respirators,” he said.
The project is now in the design phase, determining safety features such as fire egresses, elevators and ventilation. Indwell plans to reopen Century Manor by 2029.
“We’ll keep the heritage footprint,” Brand told the group. “The outside of the building will look very similar. The windows will be beautiful instead of blackboards.”
This time, the social workers and nurses available to tenants will be alive and wearing more modern clothing.
As any carpenter will tell you, the building still has good bones.