Ghosts, Ghouls, and Galivants: Exploring Small Town Spooks, Aboyne

Tucked between Elora and Fergus Ontario is a little hamlet called Aboyne. There isn't much there, except for the imposing view of the Wellington County Museum towering atop a hill. But this museum holds much more than community treasures and history.

What locals refer to as The Aboyne Museum holds a large history in the area as the local poorhouse. This building, built in 1877 is the oldest remaining House of Industry in Canada. This place was a refuge for the poor, homeless, and destitute where men, women, and children where given a place to sleep, a little food, and meager hygienic facilities in exchange for long hours of work. The property was a working farm, the last remnant of this being seen in the still standing barn to the right of the building, until 1947. Due to their cramped quarters, little food, and long work hours this historic building saw about 600 recorded deaths. These where dealt with as most paupers where to be dumped in a graveyard at the very edge of the property or shipped off to the loved ones who could afford to pay for a funeral.

There's many different stories about the graves. Some say it was a cemetery and nothing more. They where given a proper Christian burial with only simple wooden crosses to show where they lay and attended by a single minister and the undertaker. Or the story that there was a bout of illness that swept through the poorhouse and, not wanting to waste the money on boxes, the county decided to simply dig one large hole and start rolling bodies into it. Whatever the truth may be there's no mistaking the neglect that continued to mark the cemetery.

Worn away by time any trace of wooden markers vanished. In the 1920's there's a report of simple metal markers being added to the 1 acre of land the dead rest on. These also disappeared, supposedly worn away by the elements. In 1951 spruce trees where planted instead to mark where the final resting places sat. These trees where left to grow wild and the graveyard was once again forgotten about. Between 2010 - 2013 the staff at the Museum finally decided to address the forgotten graveyard. they spent considerable time cleaning up the trees and undergrowth, installing benches, creating a gravel path, and installing a large tombstone with a QR code for those with smartphones to be able to access further information on the site. There's said to be between 271-600 bodies laid to rest there.

Over time, three jail cells were added to the back of the building and used to confine dangerous and unstable 'inmates', the name of the poor who lived on the property. In 1892 a hospital wing was constructed to house the ill and infirm which would later be used by the County House for the Aged. This was thanks largely to the efforts of Dr. Abraham Groves who was a prominent doctor in the area and whos name is still attached to the local hospital.

This was in no way a happy place. The few photographs seen show almost no smiling faces and the stigma around being poor was worse than even today. You must be found deserving of being poor. Anyone seen as "lazy" or poor through their own ill reputation or a "moral failing" was turned away at the doors. Those who did make it in where treated as less than human and constantly called "inmates" or worse. Their schedules where dictated by a bell which sat at the top of the tower on the building. It was not uncommon for people to flee the refuge they so desperately sought.

In one case Mary Wilkins made an escape during the winter of 1878 but didn't live very long outside of the walls of the Institute. When spring arrived, her frozen corpse was found in a nearby field on the property.

In 1947 the building was transformed into a County House for the Aged and ran until 1974. There is not much information here but it is safe to say that this already scarred building saw a few more deaths during that time.

It wasn't until the House for the Aged left that the building was turned into what we now see today as the Wellington Museum and in 2010 there was an added Archives wing open.

This building has always been imposing yet easy to miss if one isn't looking. There have been many rumors about it being haunted and even more stories passed through the local communities. In recent years, it's also become a fixation for ghost hunters and paranormal investigations, popping up all over Tik Tok, YouTube, and in articles.

Many of these people claim that the museum is the or one of the most haunted places in Ontario and it's slowly getting its claim to fame. On Tik Tok users such as hauntinglykrista post bits of their investigations as well as a look at the museum after hours and the tunnels under the museum.

Walkingamongusofficial is another popular account on Tik Tok that shares their investigation of the property, including the graveyard.

Or the local paranormal group the Wellington County Paranormal Investigators articles and videos of their evidence of hauntings on the property. They managed to capture an EVP as well as an orb or two. You can see that evidence here as well as see some of their other work.

There are even a few cases of news networks getting in the spirit and doing segments on the museum and other local haunted histories of the area.

There is a small walking path leading from St Andrew's Mall onto the Museum property and it was here in 2015 a teen reports strange things happening. The young woman, we can call her E as she wishes to remain anonymous, used to take the path to get to the library which is located on the property. She would report that the closer to the property line she got the worse she would feel. "I would feel really thirsty all the time. The closer I got the worse it got but I always felt drawn there. One year I was riding my bike and when I got close to the cemetary it all goes blank. I remember coming back out of it, still on my bike, but going in the other direction back towards town. The sun was setting even though I left at around noon and I had twenty or so missed calls and texts from my mom freaking out asking where I was. I had no idea what to tell her. I was on the path one minute and the next I was going the other way and it was hours later. I didn't even have any books with me nor had I returned my other books like I was supposed to. It was so weird I just went home and avoided that path for a while."

As a member of the community I've grown up hearing stories about the ghosts that roam the halls of the old museum as well as my own experiences as a child during fieldtrips or karate classes on the property. Likely the scariest story I've heard comes from my own parents who used to clean for the museum and archives when they where first married. My mother, always open to new experiences and people, would start every story telling me that being in the building at night was always unnerving. They waited until after dark to go in and would usually be there well after 3am cleaning the building from top to bottom, even going so far as to buffing and waxing the floors most nights. My parents were both rather young at the time, barely into their 20's when they got the job through a friend of a friend and it would just be the two of them there at night. With how large the building is they would often split up to cover more ground faster, something my mother understood but hated doing.

She recounted that she would often feel very uneasy from the second their car slowed to turn onto the property and the feeling wouldn't leave until they where about halfway home every night. It was a feeling that lingered in the pit of your stomach and an ache in your chest. She would always feel watched as she went along, the mostly silent building always feeling like it was holding it's breath in anticipation for something that never came. She would tell me about how the toys seemed to move in their cases, creaking floorboards suddenly sounding in the darkness, random cold spots, and watching eyes around every corner.

One day she was almost finished dusting and cleaning the glass of her last old display case in a room on the right wing of the second floor when she heard the sound of something hitting the glass behind her. She quickly turned, heart beating into her throat in an effort to escape, and found nothing. Taking a few deep breaths she walked across the room to see if she could find a reason for the sudden loud noise when she notices small, child sized finger marks in the corner of a recently cleaned display case. It was as if someone had hit the case in frustration, the most concerning part to her being when she realized the case was filled with old toys. Something a child would be very interested in getting. She wiped the finger marks off the glass and continued cleaning the room.

Moving onto the next room she again hear a large bang come from her previous room, the tell tale sound of something hitting glass. When she went back in she found the same child sized finger marks on the glass of the toy case. Before my mother could raise her rag to clean it she heard a loud exhale and what she said sounded like someone running in the hallway. She popped her head back out of the room but was only met with the relative darkness of the hallway. Deciding not to investigate the possible break in herself she left to get my father who promptly reminded her that all the doors and windows where locked tight and staff did a sweep before leaving to ensure no one was still in.

Mother went back to cleaning her rooms. She once again removed the handprints and told the empty room to stop leaving a mess where she was cleaning. She continued on with the night. My father, ever the skeptical pragmatist, told her she was being silly and to stop "talking nonsense about ghosts" whenever she brought up things she had heard, seen, or experienced. Mother reported that it got so bad she was being scratched and bruised in places she's certain she had never hit and was always reluctant to go back to the next time.

It came to a head one night when she was alone on the first floor buffing the floors and heard tapping on one of the closed and lock doors. They didn't have to clean that door so they never went into it and it remained locked throughout the night, some kind of storage room she always told me. There shouldn't have been anyone in it. Yet she heard tapping. She said it was very faint so she turned off the machine she was using, a machine that is very loud, and the tapping stopped. She waited for a few minutes before she started the machine again and after a few seconds the tapping started back. She once again, stopped the machine and listened as the tapping stopped. This time she checked the machine for anything wrong and found nothing. She went over to check the door and it was still locked. She called out for my father but he had been on the other side of the building from her when she started and he didn't reply. She started the machine and the tapping started. She left the machine on and went about her work and the tapping remained.

It wasn't until she had moved into a new section the tapping stopped. She breathed a sigh of relief, even though this section was much colder than the one she had just come from. Until her buffer started choking. And the emergency lights flickered. And the few lights she worked with went out. Once the light went out her buffer stopped working altogether. She always paused at this point, looking hesitant to speak about the next part. She would take a breath and continue. Telling the story of how she looked into a window at the reflection of herself in the flickering emergency lights and saw a man standing behind her, too wide gash of a smile on his face and yellow eyes meeting hers in the reflection. She said it felt like the air was taken from her lungs and replaced with ice water, that the oppressive feeling of the room seemed to wrap around her and she was frozen to the spot before she broke out into a run trying to find my father to know it wasn't a cruel prank he was playing in some mockery of her belief in ghosts. After all, the laughing following her from the room, over the sounds of the buffer running, sounded a lot like his.

When she found my father, standing still in the center of a room in the right wing of the second floor she began asking him about the figure she saw. She talked frantically to his back, getting no response for several minutes. After several times calling his name she finally stepped one foot into the room and slowly my father turned around, looking pale and wide eyed. He seemed to firm himself, clenching his jaw and silently striding towards her with purposeful steps. He grabbed her elbow in a very firm grip and tugged her out of the building, making a pit stop to turn off the still running buffer.

Mother looked at the clock on the wall, it was 3:50am. Father didn't stop again and he didn't speak as they walked to the car, leaving behind most of their equipment. When he finally did talk, it was once the car was safely parked in their driveway at home. All he said was: "ghosts aren't real but we wont be going back". He called their contact later that morning, resigning them from the job, and left to pick up their cleaning supplies and drop off their keys. He refuses to speak of it again, only shaking his head and stubbornly replying with "ghosts aren't real" whenever he was asked what happened.

Years later my karate classes temporarily got moved to an empty meeting room in the archives wing of the building. After the sun had set the giant windows became very mirror like. Something I always hated seeing, mostly because of the glimpses I would get of people disappearing down previously empty hallways behind me or fingers curling around doorways only for none of it to be there when we would go to investigate. The automatic doors leading into the archives wing would also randomly open and close when no one was around it and the feeling my mother described of constantly feeling watched was ever present when we the children where left unattended in the building while waiting for our parents to finish their class or be done talking at the end of the night.

Back in 2022 I returned to the Museum with E and another friend of ours Alice. It was late at night, around 9:00pm and the girls needed to use the bathroom so we took a chance and went to the archives door. It opened, apparently there was a meeting that was running late and we slipped in before the stragglers could lock the doors. The washroom doors were recently made accessible so they could only really be opened automatically. As the other two where in the stalls I was leaning on the doorframe by the sinks, a few feet away from the door and buttons. As they're talking I hear a soft click followed by the door slowly swinging open. Curious, I shifted to look at who's coming into the washroom so late only to find no one there. As I stood to move to look into the hallway I felt a soft breeze blow past me and all conversation ceased when we heard soft clicking of shoes on tile walking past all three of us.

The other two finally came out the stalls and found me looking at where the door was ever so slowly closing, having stayed open for much longer than it did when had originally came in. They both asked me who had come in to which I could only reply simply with "a ghost". Of course, as luck would have it the door swung open once again and a woman walked in, using the washroom before heading home for the night. I have to admit, as much as our group enjoys spooky stuff and horror she scared most of us more than we ever want to say.

For a while on that visit we got separated, Alice and E going off to the butterfly garden as I stood by the front steps watching a very large black shadow figure standing just outside the gates at the bottom of the property. When the girls came back Alice had a death grip on E's hand as she dragged E behind her. E was stumbling as if drunk and she couldn't seem to focus on anything. Alice told me that they had heard a voice coming from the path beside them, which was cast in shadows from the trees over it. "I hated everything about that voice." she told me, looking paler than usual. "The tone, what it said, the growl in it, my whole body went cold and tingly in the worst way when I heard it, we had to leave the area." E looked like she had suddenly gotten very high even though none of us had had any drugs or alcohol that night.

She was very quiet and even though she stood straight she had a slight lean to one side and swayed back and forth. As Alice and I talked about the voice and the changing colored lights at the base of the steps we noticed E very slowly and clumsily walking down the few steps we where on. I called out to her several times but she didn't respond. Alice yelled her name close to her ear but E just kept stumbling forward. I grabbed her hair and yanked her back which finally got her to stop and respond to us but it was like she was fighting through cotton. Her eyes would barely focus as she tried to tell us what was happening and her head kept turning to look to the gates at the end of the property. She continuously cut herself off from what she was trying to say to us to tell us "I just have to go down there, he's waiting".

We switched sides so that she was closer to the building and I was between whatever the figure at the gate was and her as well as both Alice and I keeping a firm grip on her. E's strange behavior didn't stop and she seemed to get more and more agitated the longer we refused to let her out of our grip. Eventually we gave in as E refused the idea of leaving the property until she had gotten close to the figure who was also inching closer and was now standing in the gateway. Alice walked her down the lane to a little after midway and stopped in a pool of light, refusing to go further. I had walked with them for most of the way but feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand I stopped and turned around. It was like something out of a horror movie, the whole building behind us felt alive and watchful. Like it was waiting with baited breath to see what was happening. There didn't seem to be one window that wasn't filled with shifting shadows or strange lights. There wasn't one spot immediately outside the building that didn't have creaks and groans or flashes of something moving around in both the light and shadow. After a few minutes I heard footsteps coming from behind me and turned to see E, pale and slightly shaking, walking with great difficulty and leaning heavily on Alice who was dragging her as fast as she could up the path. Looking back, it seemed as if the figure was strainging to get past the gate to their retreating forms. Once they got to me we all walked together until we made it back to my car. I made sure to drive the backroads home to Fergus.

Another story whispered around the community is that of the woman in white. The legends of the woman in white differ from culture to culture but for the purpose of this we're looking at the general description of the White Lady, a ghost created from the death of a woman feeling great loss, betrayal, or unrequited love. All themes that fit the horrors that filled the Poor House walls. She is seen by the graveyard, walking through the line of trees or running terrified out into traffic late at night, appearing just around the bend in the road and disappearing just as quickly after. She's often described a woman with long black tangled hair that looks to be falling out of a bun with an old looking white ankle length dress and dirty bare feet.