By Robert Howard
The Hamilton Spectator
Tue Oct 31, 2000

On quiet nights when the full moon casts its eerie light across Ancaster's old Hermitage mansion, the ghost of the coachman is said to walk the grounds between the gatehouse and the ruins.

I've never talked about that night to anyone who wasn't there, but it's time. People were hurt, lives were changed. And it was all meant to be just a stupid joke. I was in Grade 13 -- this was way before OAC even existed -- and I was going to Hamilton Collegiate Institute (everyone called it HCI) down on Sanford North. This was in the early '70s, when it was all-Grade 13 school. It was great. There was a really different feel to it than high school.

By the time the end of October came around, there was a pretty tight group of five of us: John Deel, Harry Garvin, Michelle Kay (everyone called her Mickey), Kenny Wisdom and me. Mickey and Kenny had been going out together since Grade 10 and even he talked about how they'd get married after he finished university and got his engineer's iron ring.

Mickey was great. She was funny and we didn't have to watch our mouths too much around her. But Kenny made all the decisions. And she had a bad case of nerves. You could walk up to her, look her right in the face, say "Boo!" and she'd still jump. Kenny once grabbed her from behind when they were watching a creepy movie and we thought she'd had a heart attack. But she laughed it off, which made her pretty cool in our eyes.

Early in the school year, we'd "discovered" the old Hermitage mansion, off Sulphur Springs Road in Ancaster. It was open ruins then, worse than now. We all knew the bare bones of the story: A huge old stone mansion built in 1855, gutted in a huge blaze in the '30s. The old lady who owned the place built a smaller house inside the ruins and lived there for another 10 years or so.

By the time we first went there, the local conservation authority owned it, but nobody looked after it. Lots of people knew about the place, but we hardly ever saw anyone else there, especially at night when we'd go up in John's old beater of a car with a two-four in the trunk.

The ruins, especially before they got all cleaned up about 10 years later, were like something out of a Stephen King story. The walls were all that were left standing. The old cellar was filled almost to ground level with rubble and there were outlines and ruins of the old stables and other outbuildings.

We just hung out, goofing around about teachers, parents, girls. We found old square-headed nails and I found the hub of an old wagon wheel I wish I'd kept. We got stupid a few times, but never really plastered, and we were always saved by Harry. He didn't drink (I met his dad once and I figured out why real fast) and sometimes he had to drive John's car home.

So, anyway, the thing was that the Hermitage has its own ghost story. It seems that about a hundred years ago, this coachman and the owner's niece wanted to get married. The uncle said no, told the coachman to pack his bag and get out. The coachman goes back to the old gatehouse -- which is still standing to this day -- and hanged himself from the rafters. Suicides couldn't get a church burial, so he was buried right across the road -- which is still called Lover's Lane after him. The story is that on the night of a full moon, the coachman walks between the gatehouse and the ruins, calling for his lover. We didn't believe it -- or wouldn't have admitted we did, anyway. But Mickey did. And she always said she didn't find it scary, just romantic.

One Friday at the end of October, a few days before Halloween, it was going to be a full moon. We were playing euchre at lunch and decided we'd go up to the Hermitage that night.

Mickey wasn't at lunch that day and it was Kenny who got the bright idea of playing a practical joke on her. Kenny would say he was going back to the car for another beer, but go over to the gatehouse instead. He'd make some weird ghost noises over by the gatehouse and when we went over there, he'd jump out on Mickey. We all laughed, knowing she would freak.

So there we were, sitting on the old stones about 10 at night. I remember Harry flicking his cigarette up and over the wall and seeing the sparks arch through the dark. It seemed like everybody smoked back then. Kenny said he was walking back to the road to get a few more beers out of the trunk (we never carried the case up to the ruins, just in case cops showed up.) He said he had to take a stop behind the trees, so to speak, so he'd be a few minutes.

Sure enough, about five minutes later, we heard this "whoooo-ooo" noise from over by the gatehouse. Mickey knew right away it was probably Kenny but, like I said, she was cool. She actually walked down the old path ahead of us. By this time, the "whoooo" had become "Cooooommmmmme tooooo meeeee," which was so corny we were all laughing. But the noise stopped completely as we got to the gatehouse. There was no sign or sound of Kenny.

Mickey was the one who saw that the padlocked door had been forced open and the frame splintered. We were all a little pissed off at Kenny for that: Vandalism was what jerks did, and this was almost as bad.

And Mickey did have her limits. "No way I'm going in there first," she said. "He'll just jump out at me." We all called out for Kenny: "C'mon, man. Joke's over. Forget it." No answer.

John pushed the door open and we all saw it at the same time: Not a rope, but the shadow of it on the wall as the full moon shone over our shoulders. It was swaying from side to side, and we could see something like a head at the end of it. I think we all assumed it was a dummy or something, not that I could figure out how Kenny had set all this up. I was talking as we pushed into the room: "Geez, knock it off. This is really du..."

It was Kenny, the rope around his neck. His feet were still kicking and we could see, even in the dim light, that his face was turning purple.

Mickey was amazing. She was the one who didn't panic. She grabbed his feet and lifted him up -- where she got the strength, I don't know -- and yelled at me to help her, to Harry and John to get the rope down. I don't think I ever knew how they did it, but they got Kenny's head out of the noose and we got him down on the ground.

Mickey never panicked. She was giving him artificial resuscitation while the rest of us were standing there feeling helpless.

Kenny came around, thank God. I don't know what we'd have done if he hadn't. But he seemed OK. He grabbed one of our beers where it had fallen and drained it. "My throat," he rasped. "I can't even swallow right."

Mickey was still in charge. "Let's go," she said. "I can't believe what jerks you guys are sometimes. He could be dead." We were too shaken to protest. We were in the car, roaring back down Sulphur Springs Road, before anyone asked Kenny what happened.

"I don't know," he said, his voice like an old man's. "I was calling and I heard the door creak. I guess it was open already and I thought I'd just hide inside. You know, make it creepier.

"And it wasn't like anyone grabbed me or anything it was like... I dunno, it was like I was just there, hanging from the rope, and I couldn't breathe and the room got blacker and blacker.

"Next thing I knew I was on the grass outside with you guys."

None of us had realized Mickey was crying. She probably had been since we got in the car. "I'm sorry," Kenny kept saying. "I'm sorry, Mickey."

Kenny's voice came back in about a week; he wore turtlenecks until the bruises on his neck faded. We never intentionally made it a secret: We just never talked about it to anyone else. And we never went back to the Hermitage. I came near the place 20 years later when I was walking the trails out of the Dundas Valley Conservation area with my wife and children. I saw the ruin's walls above the trees and it was like my legs froze. I literally could not take another step forward. I said something about a headache to my wife and fled back to the car.

Mickey and Kenny got married a few years after we graduated from HCI. Something changed between them that night -- sort of a switch in roles. Mickey became the strong one; Kenny lost the fire, the drive that had been there. He never did go to university, although he's done well selling Jeeps. I heard Mickey went to med school, but I lost track of them for a few years. Harry moved out to Kelowna the year after HCI and I saw in The Spec a few years ago that he had drowned in a fishing accident. John was in Australia for a few years. I heard he came back, but we lost touch. I don't know if I'd recognize him on the street today.

But Mickey still looked the same. I turned around one day not long ago at a Tim Hortons and there she was.

"Dr. Wisdom, I presume?" I said, with a dumb little bow. "Mickey, you look great."

"It's still Kay, Rob," she said with a laugh that took me back 28 years. "Dr. Wisdom sounds too much like a TVO kids' show."

I motioned to a table, and we sat for a few minutes, chatting. She and Kenny had two kids; we had three. They had just bought a little summer cottage; we had just bought an eight-year-old station wagon.

I told her about freezing up on the trail by the Hermitage.

"It's funny," she said. "I've never been scared of anything since that night. I couldn't have made it through med school before but I knew I could handle it after that."

"How about Kenny?" I asked.

"He used to have bad dreams sometimes, but he's OK now. But he still won't go into a dark room."

I made a sympathetic noise.

"It took him two years to tell me what really happened," Mickey said, staring down into her coffee.

"He did force that door -- he thought it would be funnier to jump out from there. When he went in, there was a rope with a noose hanging from the rafter. He said he knew it was dumb, but he had this idea it would be scarier if he was standing on a box with his head in the noose when we found him.

"He heard us outside calling and he was about to make a noise when this ... this man came out of the corner." Mickey still hadn't looked up. "Kenny says this ... this man said that if Kenny took his place on the rope, he could finally rest.

"Then he kicked the box out from under Kenny's feet. That's when we came in."

She looked up at me. The look on Mickey's face was defiant -- as in, go ahead, call him or me a liar.

"There was no one else in that little room, Mickey. We'd have seen him."

"I know," she said. "Kenny says it was the coachman's ghost, looking for someone to take his place on the rope so that he could finally rest."

"Do you believe it?" I said.

"Oh yeah," she said, looking down again. "I believe -- and more. Kenny almost died that night and I saved his life. But someone -- not just you and the guys -- helped me.

"When I saw him on the rope, I thought I was going to freeze. And then I felt something ... someone ... move into me. Her voice was in my head, shouting, 'Go to him! GO to him!' And I did. And we saved Kenny."

Mickey looked at me.

"Everyone always felt sorry for the poor coachman and said his ghost was there. But no one talks about the niece. She lost the one love of her whole life. She wasn't in charge of her own destiny and the one man who ever loved her killed himself. She was sad her whole life.

"I felt her, Rob. And she changed my life. She made me strong.

"Her name was Mary. Nobody knows that today but me. Mary Kathleen."

Mickey looked up and laughed.

"How 'bout that?" she said half-mockingly. "We're the only couple I know who each felt a ghost: One tried to kill my husband. The other one saved his life -- and changed mine.

"The coachman's ghost might still be wandering," she said. "But the niece is at rest now. She made her peace. And I'm it."

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