A desire to develop more programming down by the waterfront has stirred up ghosts along Pickering’s waterfront.
That left Pickering heritage programmer Ali Crone at a loss for words at first because the area seemed to be something of a dead zone when it comes to the uncanny.
“That was my first inclination,” she admitted during a July phone conversation. “Then you start digging.”
So began the Pickering Paranormal Tour that touches not only on the inexplicable along the shores of Durham Region’s westernmost municipality but also on the mysterious shipwrecks, true crime tales and the seedy underbelly of bootlegging on Lake Ontario.
“The tour takes place right at Frenchman’s Bay, and so we tell the story of Rocco Perri, who’s Canada’s Al Capone,” Crone said, adding they discuss his lucrative rum-running business with his common-law partner Bessie Starkman. Frenchman’s Bay was known as one of the hubs for his operations from 1920 to 1933.
From Millennium Square and Frenchman’s Bay, the tour winds its way up Liverpool Road to Fairport United Cemetery. Even though it is still an active burial ground, there are many graves that date from the early to mid-1800s.
“We’ve been able to do some research on the people in that cemetery, and there’s a whole family tree we’re working on,” Crone admitted. “We just point out some specific things about the people and some of the things that are typical of a historic cemetery.”
Most of the spectral tales shared focus on marine lore, especially the tale of French lumberjacks who drowned in Frenchman’s Bay.
“There is definitely activity,” she said, adding later that the body of water could have taken its name from the drowned lumberjacks, or from Catholic missionary François Fénelon, or the fact that French cannonballs were discovered in the bay.
“We know it was at one point a French trading post,” she added. “There are a few reasons.”
In addition, the tour covers the story of the “Unknown Stranger,” who is buried in an unmarked grave in Whitevale, just south of Highway 407 and east of the York-Durham Line. His ghost is considered a token or portent of things to come.
“People in Whitevale claim that they have seen a man, and they also claim that whenever there is a fire, they see this same apparition of a man,” Crone said.
The Pickering Museum Village also hosts an annual ghost walk during the fall. Mediums have walked through the village at Highway 7 and Westney Road. That does tickle Crone’s fancy as she has a mild interest in the paranormal. She had experiences in a house her grandparents lived in, as well as her mother, who revealed that she saw the ghost of a little girl in their own house.
“She tells the story of my sister having a Ouija board at some point and my mom eventually confiscated it from us and hid it behind her headboard,” she recalled. “That was the first night she saw the little girl sitting on the edge of her bed in the middle of the night.”
The next Pickering Paranormal Tour is July 16, with additional tours running every Thursday from 9:15 p.m. to 10:15 p.m. up until October 29.
“I’m hoping that it sparks an interest in our local history because I think so many people think wherever they live is boring,” Crone said. “People don’t know that we have a history of bootlegging and rum-running and that there are all these really cool shipwrecks.”
Photo courtesy of Pickering Museum Village