Bob greets visitors as they exit the 670-metre-long tunnel to the observation deck of the almighty Niagara Falls.
He’s the resident friendly face at the Niagara Parks Power Station, which has been open to the public since July 2021. A few tourists are chatting with him, asking whether he believes in ghosts, and he eases into the conversation with a personal anecdote about becoming a widower and single parent.
He ends by sharing how his wife, who died in childbirth, saw her grandfather the day she went into labour. That token, or forerunner, in Maritime culture came on the birth of Bob’s son.
“So, I believe in spirits,” he told the visitors in the archway to the observation deck. Once that conversation ends, he transitions into the lore of ghosts at the power station.
The story of Joe is one he related to the Superstitious Times. Bob shares the account of a woman who spoke with him the first year the museum was open. She had the name of a gentleman who worked there. Allegedly, a family member of the woman worked as a night watchman and said he saw Joe in the control room.
“He got killed in the wheel pit,” Bob said during a September 2025 tour. “I did check the obituaries out, as I get into that type of thing, and lo and behold …”
Bob found more information about Joe. According to the diary entries of sexton William Dalton on the Niagara Falls Exchange website, a Joe Ovalie (Georgio Pore), who was a Romanian employee, fell 23 metres into the wheel pit. He died June 27, 1904, during construction of the plant.
It is alleged that Joe is the shadowy entity that walks the area around the wheel pit, as well as upstairs by the control room.
“I have a tendency to believe more so than the woman who’s up there walking around,” Bob admitted. “What I went through with my wife when I was 21 years old, you know, that’s that.”
The woman he alludes to is Annette Rankine, who would soon marry the Niagara Power Company’s founder, William Birch Rankine, after construction of the plant was completed in 1905. That same man was once described as the kind of person who worked while others slept. Nikola Tesla’s words, not Rankine’s.
The two wed, and on their honeymoon in Franconia, New Hampshire, he died of congestive heart failure.
Distraught by that, she held séances in the hope of reaching him. Eventually, while on a trip with her chauffeur in New York City in 1921, she asked him to stop. She stepped out of the car and requested that the driver return to pick her up at a designated time—whether that was minutes or an hour is not confirmed. When the driver did return, she was nowhere to be found.
Eventually she would surface as an unfortunate victim of what was then called melancholia, drowning herself in the East River.
Water from the Niagara River passes through the gates and into the power station.
History in the making
Rankine was a New York City lawyer who footed the bill for the station and founded the Niagara Power Company. Construction on the power station began on May 23, 1901.
For the first phase, workers excavated the area for the wheel-pit chamber, the tailrace tunnel, cofferdam and forebay. It was constructed of stone, brick and cast iron. The interior limestone came from the Queenston Quarry in St. David’s. Construction was done with horses.
During that time, countless men lost their lives. Dalton, a Civil War veteran, kept track of many of the men who died building the plant, as well as the many accidents that followed the workers in such a dangerous place. But later research by Dr. Norman Ball couldn’t quite confirm the death toll.
By 1913, a new control room and switchboard were added to the second floor of the station. They also expanded the plant by 183 metres. Five additional generators were added by 1917. The final eleventh generator was installed in 1924. Each of those generators could create 10,000 horsepower.
“The company who had it for a hundred years literally handed it to us and all the brass was polished. You could have eaten off the floor,” Jim Hill, the senior manager of heritage and legacy for Niagara Parks, said during a March phone conversation.
Many of the former employees have come back to provide insight, as well as serve as guides at the museum.
“There are plenty of people still around who worked there and generations of families worked in the plant,” Hill said. “We look after historic sites where the people directly involved are long, long gone. And here you had people who had a working experience of being in there and their parents and grandparents often did, too.”
Looking back toward the tunnel from the Power Station’s observation deck.
Living with the dead
Niagara Parks is not shy about sharing the encounters of staff through their social media and YouTube channel, even though Hill was reluctant to open up about the uncanny experiences staff have had in the facility, especially during renovations.
“The funny thing about that wheel pit, it was never really meant to have a lot of people down in it. Even when we took camera crews down there while we were building it, it’s pitch darkness,” Hill said. “Once you got down at the very lowest level, there really wasn’t a purpose for a worker to go below the turbine level.”
Those levels were never really lit, which means the shadows can cast doubts over what you’re seeing.
On the Niagara Parks Facebook page, site manager Lin Yin shared her experience with whatever roams the power plant at night. As she was closing up on a cold winter night at 2 a.m. and making sure everything was put back in place, she heard a gentle knock on the window by the guest shop.
“I quickly went to the other side to check who was knocking, but all I saw was an empty power station,” she recalled. “Then I realized that’s not a possibility … I was pretty spooked.”
As she investigated further, she got closer to the window on the other side. A louder rap was heard, which triggered her to collect her belongings and leave very quickly.
“It was the last time I worked by myself until that late,” Yin said in the video.
That might also explain why Snooki: The Paranormal Rookie investigated the thrust deck of the Niagara Parks Power Station. The show, which premiered October 2 on Crave, explored the power station. They focused on the thrust deck, control room and the tunnel.
During their investigation, Kevin Whitaker felt the presence of a woman at the end of the thrust deck. It was assumed the spirit was that of Annette Rankine. They also came across entities in the tunnel, the control panel room and the upstairs meeting room.
The running theme, naturally, was the flow of energy just beyond the walls. Whitaker explained to Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi both at the beginning and end of the episode that the water plays a major role in the haunting.
For Hill, though, it’s a natural pooling of heritage and advancements in engineering.
“It’s a cool coming together of technology, local folklore and all these family connections, stories, and really an essential part of the story,” Hill said. “You don’t realize how much electricity changed people’s lives.”