In honour of Halloween I’ll be running different house murder and ghosts stories this month from my book At Home with History.
Back in the 1960s, the City of Vancouver started buying up heritage houses in the West End’s Mole Hill with the intent to bulldoze them and double the size of Nelson Park. Mole Hill is tucked in behind St. Paul’s Hospital and the houses are a mix of Queen Anne and Edwardian that stretch in a square around Comox, Thurlow, Bute and Pendrell Streets.
The name sounds straight from the pages of Wind in the Willows, but Mole Hill is actually named after Henry Mole who built a house there in 1895.
Henry Mole residence - 1895 (demolished)
Blair Petrie, a resident, spearheaded a five-year campaign to save the houses. He researched past owners and wrote a book published in 1995. As part of his research, he made a couple of ghostly discoveries.
The residents of a house on Thurlow Street were convinced they had a female ghost. The house was one of four built in 1903 by a doctor who went into real-estate speculation, the favourite sideline of almost anyone with a few bucks at the time. The house changed hands many times over the years and when Blair started his research, it was a bed and breakfast. The two young guys who ran it would find lights turned on after they had turned them off, and once found a room locked from the inside.
Most convincing though, were the actual sightings.
“They had both witnessed this ghost and had many of their customers over the years come down to breakfast totally freaked out,” said Blair.
The ghost only showed herself in one bedroom and always wore a high-necked nightgown. The owners found old markings on the floor and figured out where the original furniture sat. From the placing they could imagine her brushing her long blonde hair in front of the dresser mirror.
Most of the sightings were by women who generally chose to stay in that particular room. Once the ghost asked a guest: “Are you being taken care of here?”
Blair couldn’t find anything in the house’s history to explain her.
She’s not the only ghost of Mole Hill. In the 1990s, the City agreed to keep and renovate 27 of the houses and engaged two architectural firms to do the work. Blair was in a Comox Street house with the architects to photograph and catalogue the heritage details. While he was upstairs one of the architects saw a ghost.
“He said he was in this room taking photographs of door knobs and things, and all of a sudden he felt this chill and the door slammed. The room was in the interior of the house, and it wasn’t windy. He swore it was a ghost.”
The architect refused to come back to the house again.
