5 of the Most Terrifying Haunted Houses in Canada

By Josh Sherman | 2 minute read

Canada has a long legacy of supposedly haunted dwellings.

Halloween only comes once a year, but it’s forever Spooky Season in some homes. From an upscale Toronto steakhouse with a dark past, to a creepy castle on the Pacific coast in Victoria, here are five of the Most Terrifying Haunted Houses in Canada.

1. Keg Mansion, Toronto

Toronto’s Keg Mansion, the flagship location of the popular international steakhouse, is haunted by active ghosts. According to legend, it all began with the suicide of a maid who served the Massey family — you know, the ones behind Massey Hall, the world-famous performing-arts theatre in downtown Toronto. After the death of Lillian Massey in 1915, an apparently grieving maid hanged herself in one of the mansion’s many rooms. (If that’s not enough, on a separate occasion, a young visitor is said to have suffered fatal injuries after falling down a staircase.) Today, Lillian and her maid are said to stalk the mansion. Sometimes the latter appears hanging in the very room she died in. 

2. Marr Residence, Saskatoon

Dating back to 1884, the Marr Residence is among the oldest homes in Saskatoon. It once served as a field hospital for soldiers injured in the North-West Resistance. It is also rumoured to be the final resting place for two or more ghosts: a child who is known to appear in the front window, and a man who has taken over the basement and is known to verbally harass visitors. Today the home has been converted into a museum, and guests have claimed to inexplicably hear laughing children and shouting.

3. Château Ramezay Museum, Montreal

Opposite Montreal’s City Hall, the Château Ramezay Museum has served as a governor’s residence, fur-trading centre, school of medicine faculty facility, and gallery. Like the Marr Residence, it’s now a museum, one that dubs itself “Montréal’s portal to its past” — but, as the Montreal Gazette points out, it may also be a portal to the paranormal. On multiple occasions, staff have found items mysteriously scattered throughout the abode, which is more than 300 years old, and that’s not all: “An employee who had closed up the building one evening discovered that one of the prize exhibits — a Dion-Bouton car from about 1900 — had its two front wheels turned. The back wheels remained straight,” the Gazette reports. 

4. Craigdarroch Castle, Victoria

One of BC’s most iconic landmarks has a darker side. Visitors to this national historic site have had a number of bone-shaking experiences, whether overhearing children crying, witnessing a childlike apparition running about, or hearing a piano play itself. Exactly why this castle should be haunted is up for debate, but there is a somewhat tragic story behind it. Robert Dunsmuir, at the time the wealthiest man in western Canada, commissioned the opulent estate in 1887, but he died two years later, never living to see its completion. His wife, Joan, inherited the castle, where she lived until her death in 1908.

5. Yeo House, Prince Edward Island

More than one spirit reportedly resides in the historic Victorian Yeo House, which neighbours the Green Park Shipbuilding Museum. The paranormal experiences of museum staff members — one of whom claimed to hear footsteps when the place was empty and shortly after found a hard-to-move cubby door opened — have inspired a series of haunted tours of the property. “The tour first talks about Victorian beliefs around death and dying and funeral and mourning practices and then we start to get into the nitty gritty of the history of the house as it relates to our spooky goings-on,” Caitlyn Paxson, a site manager at the museum, tells peicanada.com.