Don't Look Now Again

TT here.   I am unsure how to begin this post.  I am still in a daze ...maybe it's the chill I got yesterday... but I'll try to make sense of the whole event  It will not be easy.


  Sheldon and I went to  up the hill  to Spadina    (pronounced Spadeena by the well-to-do once the Avenue becomes the Road)  House Museum yesterday.  It has just been re-opened after extensive restoration to present the house as it would have looked in the 1920’s.   The work that has gone into it all is stupendous. But......

This was our first view of the lovely old home....third on the site and built by a Toronto magnate for his wife and family.  I know now I should have turned and walked away as soon as I saw it. Despite the  bitter cold I felt a real sense uf unease.  Though there was no wind the air was beginning to hum and a strange tune was playing as if created by the branches of the trees.  Was that a child's voice accompanied by an old music box?  I should have turned back then.   But we had come this far and any way Sheldon had already seen the sign on the gate .

and was being drawn in like a wasp to paper or a scuttling beetle to..... but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

  HOW could this elegant house  

with its circular drive which still echoes with the excited murmurs of the creme de la creme; arriving for a gay musical soiree; a glamorous 47 course dinner or a magical summer garden party be the throbbing centre of such evil that as I write every remaining hair on my head is standing erect in fear while those on my arms are lashing and dancing in an electric wave of unadulterated terror?

Oh that I had run when I had the chance!

But then standing looking up at that beautiful edifice I  made myself tell myself that I was imagining that there could be anything wrong with...Spadina House.

Sheldon was already stripping the shelves of  the gift shop as I finally drew forth the courage to walk over the threshold.

 And now the oddest thing. There was another person in the shop when I took this photo. She was a little woman, a really little woman, and she was staring out of the window into the garden. Her back was to me so I didn't see her face. She was wearing a pink cardigan and a head scarf and she was right next to the door on the right. The thing that struck me was how tiny she was. Her head barely reached the glass and and she was stretching up on her toes to look out. She could have been a child but for her gutteral wheezing,almost growling, and the old skin on the back of her hands.  I remember thinking that I hoped she didn't mind me putting her in the photo. She seemed so absorbed that I figured it didn't matter.
 I checked the photograph on the camera and she was definitely in it.  Sheldon was paying for the tickets just off to the left of frame and  he asked me if I had a 2 dollar coin. When I turned back the little lady had gone. And as you can see.....she is not in the photograph.

The ticket lady showed us into the video room where we were to watch a film about the House and Toronto in the Twenties and as it finished I checked the photograph of the gift shop. and that's when I saw that the little  lady had gone. I was going to tell Sheldon when our tour guide arrived and forgot all about it til we got home. 


We were the only two visitors at that session.... or so I thought !

We started in the entrance hall which looks out onto the carriage drive. 

The vestibule contains a hideous stuffed wolf  which posed here for years. It then disappeared and  was located  in the attic. It has just gone back on display in the restoration project.  It seems wolves played a large part in the history of the original owners and there examples of stuffed animals all over the house.

 Now follows what I  have just finished reading before I posted these latest blogs.  It is a letter given to me just before we left Spadina House.  I have interspersed my photos. The black and white ones were in the bulk of the letter itself.

 Dear Reader   You are probably thinking of the house you just visited today. Are you not? I thought so.  And your musings are straying to the grey wolf in the vestibule.  Are they not?  I thought so. This is where it all started. And this wolf  is the very one that tore out the....no not yet. There is so much more you need to know first.


Take no notice of the lies that the guides tell you on the laughably inaccurate tour. If they told the real story there would be no business and the house would be left to rot, stewing in its own evil.


Don't you love the house?  I have known it for so long that it is almost a part of me.

My mother, Polly 

and her two sisters, Albania and Caen

 came from the Dorset village of Lummerlea which had stood for centuries on the cliffs over  the English Solent until February 8th 1912.

Lummerlea High St looking South in 1911.

 The sea lay on the other side of the houses in the background. The woman by the piles of  mens underwear was Polly's mother, the village laundress.  Local artist, Charles Blackner is at his easel.

  All the people in this picture are now dead.

  A gas leak - gas was new to Lummerlea - had exploded in Blind Woman Crowe's  kitchen and  disturbed a fault which ran right across the road behind the last house on the High St.  The whole village  plummeted into the sea. 

The only surviving photograph of Lummerlea folk indoors.  

The Lummerlea Mummers rehearsing for  Lummerlea Wattle Flecking Day in the Lummerlea Assembly Rooms.         All the people in this photograph are now dead.

The sole survivors were my mother, Polly,  and her sisters, Albania and Caen, pronounced Con, who had been picking okum in the top meadows. They were now rootless and desperate.  23, 19 and 17 years old and with no future but the dreadful obvious.  As they stood on the edge of the cliff and looked down at the the spire of All Saints sticking up from the waves a newspaper fell across Caen's (Con's) straw slippers. And on page 18 was an advertisement for the maiden voyage of a White Star Liner to New York. 

Needless to mention the name of the ship. It didn't get to New York. But a  crew member of the salvage ship, Mackay-Bennet,

(he is the one sitting down,)

 prised this

from Caen's blue and purple fingers.  The three girls were found lashed to a crate of sauce bottles

 ( specifically McLeish's Zesty Turmeric Relish).  They were crazed with cold and terror but alive.  Their story is one of Halifax's best kept secrets.

The girls were billeted in Quinpool Street  and stayed in that building in the middle rear, a boarding house.

It was run by  a Widow Choyle 

She seemed a kind soul as she pinched their rapidly pinkening cheeks and turned them around with gleeful sounds of approval. But she turned out to be a madam and the boarding house a brothel. The girls escaped 3 bearded lascars just in time and made their way by foot to Toronto and to the rear door of Spadina House in the spring of 1913.

They were immediately  taken in by kindly old Mrs Awsten and stayed with the family until a horror destroyed them and many others all.

I expect you would have gone next  into the grand hall of  Spadina House. Yes? I thought so.

 This is the hall that Albania and Caen swept and polished and mopped for nigh on fifty years. (with a break of four during the 1920's)

And this is the site where the first of the Spadina horrors happened.  You were  swept with a frisson of unease when you saw this at first, weren't you? You felt like dropping the camera and racing for the door didn't you? I thought so.  Count seven stairs up from the beautiful parquet floor with its hand woven Turkish rugs.  Seven steps up and  just below the portrait of the Master and that is where the two Dorset sisters saw the youngest Awsten girl die.  A grey wolf  ( kin- beast to the one that is  now a hideous trophy)  had been seen around the house for a number of days.   Keef , the ancient dogsbody, had promised Mrs Awsten that nothing would stop him from killing the mad animal before it did more damage.  It had already  ripped  out seventeen lambs' throats and done savage damage to a lower portion of the animals  that is not decorous to describe.  The wolf was a cunning devil and had eluded all capture.

 That day the girls were on their knees scrubbing the entrance hall. 

This is probably theirs.  It was found in the attic when they found the mummified wolf. The letters A.C. (Albania Caen) are etched in the base

The girls had thrown  2 buckets of hair and grit- besmirched water onto the gravel drive and then suddenly remembered that the  damp sheets were still out and saw a summer storm was on its way. They ran through to the scullery and were only away for a few minutes.  Those minutes were enough. The wolf had been hiding under an oleander plant near the  entrance steps and saw the open door.  It padded gently into the hall and crouched in the shadow of the dining room right under the death mask of the last Master.

Little 8 year old Alabaster Awsten was bedecked in summer finery ready for the carriage to take her over to Casa Loma for a birthday party.  She ran down the stairs, giggling with delight that her dress, a copy of the one Marie Antoinette had worn at Versailles, was bound to win the "Who Am I and How Did I Die?" fancy dress competition. She stopped on the seventh step to adjust a ribbon that had caught in her heel and then the wolf sensed his chance. It leapt at Alabaster Awsten's little white throat and added another lamb to its total.

It ate the entire  throat and ripped both lips clean off and disappeared into the fading afternoon.  Horror number one