I pulled into the parking lot at the Evergreen Brick Works at 7:15 p.m. It was dark, but the rain had stopped and it wasn’t that cold. I wore an open coat as I checked in for our ghost tour. A man in a black cape was greeting people as we arrived and another gave us small flashlights to shine on the ground so we could watch our step. 

The Brick Works is an old industrial complex in Toronto’s Don River Valley where they made—surprise!—millions of bricks over one hundred years. You’ve got to presume people died there under unsafe working conditions. The idea is that they also haunt it, at least if they’re inclined. 

The works shut down in 1984 when the clay deposit was exhausted, abandoned to homeless people, teenaged partiers and racoons. Twenty-five years later, the site was morphed into an arts hub, the old industrial buildings repurposed for classes and a weekly farmer’s market, the excavation tamed into wetlands. 

They do tours now. Arts tour, history tours, owl-spotting tours. Ghost tours. Since I’m writing a ghost story, I decided to sign on for a ghost tour, not expecting much but hoping for a nugget—which I found. 

But let’s start by saying that the first caped man was our guide. He began the tour with a lengthy warning about uneven surfaces both inside and outside—watch your step—and ended his spiel by asking if we’d agree to be careful. When everyone nodded, he said the lawyers would be pleased, which made me wonder if liability was behind the untheatrical, non-cheesy, low-key vibe of the tour. No heart attacks, please. No lawsuits.

The ghost tour couldn’t have been more different than a wonderfully tacky haunted house that my son and I visited while living in Latin America. It was a sideshow event at some down-at-heels circus in a small town, I think in Brazil. My son was maybe seven years old. Creepy music played, and there were warped mirrors in which he could make silly faces. Mummies in tattered bandages jumped out unpredictably, waving their arms and howling, making the three teenage girls walking behind us grab me and scream joyously. 

Catharsis. Isn’t that what ghost stories are about?

No catharsis on the ghost tour, I’m afraid. In fact, it was mainly a social history of the Don Valley. Our guide would end the tour asking for a five-star google review, telling us his boss read them. Since I don’t do google reviews, I’ll say here that he was a nice man, kind and well-informed, who reminded me of a high school English teacher. Since I like social history, I enjoyed the tour.

But what about the ghosts?

The most well-known phantom at the Brick Works is a woman in white who can be seen wandering the pathways of the wetlands. Owling birders have seen her trailing their group, but she dissipates when anyone gets too interested. She’s thought to be the ghost of one of two sisters who lived in a house on the banks of the river.

One of the sisters disappeared, perhaps after falling down a well. In any case, she was never found, alive or dead. Neighbours would often see the surviving sister searching for her, always wearing a white nightgown. Perhaps, said the guide, she’s looking for her still.

There’s also a night watchman seen by people who work late at the Brick Works, a man in old-fashioned clothes who carries a lantern and has a tendency to disappear.

I told these stories afterward to a nurse I know. I find nurses have ghost stories of their own, working as they do at the nexus of life and death. This woman said that one time she and her husband moved into an apartment where a solitary man had recently died. The poor man wasn’t found until his body had thoroughly decomposed. They learned this after moving in, but the landlord had done a major renovation and they never got any vibes.

Until the night before they were due to move out. Waking up abruptly, the nurse saw the shadow of a man standing in their bedroom doorway. She wasn’t scared. She sensed no ill will. The man stood there for a while before he faded. She thought it might have been the previous tenant come to say goodbye.

As it happens, the Brick Works ghosts are just as benign: the watchman, the woman in white and some poor lost children whose fate closed out the tour. The same proved true of most other local hauntings the guide mentioned, as he pulled in ghost stories from several Toronto landmarks constructed from bricks fired in the Don Valley kilns. Toronto seems to be reasonably well haunted, and when you put them together, the stories demonstrate that Canadians are as polite after death as we are beforehand.

One time at Massey Hall, a caretaker was making his rounds when he spotted a couple walking across the concert stage. The caretaker called out that they were trespassing. The woman turned to look at him but the man continued walking, and they vaporized as they reached the edge of the stage. 

Then there was the ghost in Hart House at the University of Toronto. Something spectral woke up a theatre director who was overnighting on a cot, startling him upright. Hearing a noise in the wall behind him, the director turned to see an electrical fire spark to life. He got out just in time.

The ghosts in the old courthouse were more mischievous, but they only pulled on the judge’s robes, tweaking them from behind, and sometimes moaned from the basement where the cells used to be. You can’t really blame them.

More striking were the voices sometimes heard by workers in the northbound tunnel between York Mills and Shepherd stations on the Yonge subway line. Shifts of workers heard them while doing trackwork overnight, always in October, always speaking a language that no one recognized… 

…until one night when a worker with a Haudenosaunee background was able to pick up random words he’d learned from his grandparents. As he and his crew approached the place where the sounds seem to originate, the voices fell silent, returning only when the workers finished their job and were on their way out. This time the workers heard drums, and the Haudenosaunee man recognized words of mourning. 

Afterwards he spoke to a Haudenosaunee elder and learned there had been a battle at the site between two Indigenous nations. Not all the bodies had been properly buried, and it now struck the elder that the warriors’ spirits couldn’t settle. After consultations with the TTC, several elders performed a ceremony at the entrance to the tunnel and the voices went quiet. 

Finally, there are the Brick Works children. We were inside the main building when the guide told their story, 20 of us taking the tour, most of us walking silently behind the guide. 

Except for one woman, who had already been frightened by an intricate piece of machinery. It was a storey high, all steel and gears, and she’d interrupted the guide to point it out. 

“Someone died in that,” she said, her voice high and shaking. “Or maybe lost an arm.” 

The woman said she’d started sensing things two years previously. Before she could elaborate, the guide interrupted with a pleasant non-sequitur. This particular piece of machinery wasn’t original to the site, he said, but had been brought here from a different location. 

The guide moved us on, stopping when we reached the opening of one of the great kilns formerly used to dry bricks. When the Brick Works were opened in the late 19^th century, he said, child labour was common, and children greased the machinery on top of the kilns. They were given thick-soled shoes so they could run along the kilns without burning their feet. Some of them must have died. People could still hear the pitter-patter of those thick-soled shoes, the guide said. If we went silent, we might hear it, too.

“I can,” the woman told him. “I think I can. In the distance. Children.”

I didn’t hear a thing, not that I’d expected to. I’m essentially practical-minded, and as I say, what I found most interesting about the tour was the social history. The fact that the Brick Works pit was dug 11 storeys into the ground before the clay was exhausted in 1984. The fact there had been a prisoner-of-war camp in the Don Valley during the Second World War, with Germans and Italians marched daily to toil at the Brick Works, filling the jobs of Canadians serving overseas. 

I was dubious of that one, since prisoner-of-war conventions preclude forced labour. But my husband looked it up, and found that German and Italian members of the merchant marine stranded in ports throughout North America at the outbreak of the war had been shipped to Toronto. Since they weren’t in the military, they could be put to work.

But here’s the thing: The practical-mindedness that sends me tumbling down historical rabbit holes is a drawback when it comes to writing a ghost story. Unlike many of my friends, nurses and not, I have never seen a ghost, and I don’t really expect to. That’s why I go along on ghost walks. I want to gather my nuggets, and if I’m lucky, see other people see ghosts. 

I got lucky at the Brick Works with the woman who heard children’s footsteps. I can still hear the timbre of her voice, and picture the way she leaned in to take pictures of the kilns, where the guide said people were sometimes able to photograph unexplained shadows. 

I also got my nugget. As we waited for the tour to begin, I chatted with a woman who told me something she’d heard, something that the guide would repeat later on in a more muted way. When people had died violently at the Brick Works, she said, their energy could be transferred explosively into the clay, and then into bricks, and then into buildings. 

Pow! You’re trapped! Sometimes you could escape from whatever building was made from your essence when receptive people were around to sense you. Massey Hall. Hart House. 

“Trapped,” the woman said. “Imagine.”

That I can do. 

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If you live in Toronto, you can book onto ghost tours at the Evergreen Brick Works and other sites using this link. Enjoy!