R.J. Riley
In Focus
Humber’s Lakeshore Campus is one of Toronto’s most haunted sites, according to The Toronto & Ontario Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society.
The buildings and the underground tunnels that connect them were once home to Toronto’s Mimico insane asylum.
Students allege the buildings are haunted.
Last year, lights flickered in class and “you kind of got that weird vibe,” said second-year golf management student, Jamieson Dzenekoj, 20.
“One day me and some guys from golf management were walking by and we swear from one of the abandoned buildings we saw a head and something moving.”
Carol Anderson, head of facilities at Lakeshore Campus, denied campus rumours that the tunnels would be opened to the public during Halloween.
“Absolutely not,” she said.
English professor Jim Macdonald said he has heard the stories, though he does not believe them. Others – whom he would not name – said they had seen ghosts.
“In a mental institution like that there were sometimes some pregnancies between the inmates,” Macdonald said. “In a lot of cases they would abort those babies, put the fetuses in boxes and bury them under the apple orchard.”
The Mimico Branch Asylum buildings were first constructed in 1888 as a branch of the Toronto Asylum for the Insane. It housed the chronic insane from across Ontario, said architect Jill Taylor, who oversaw the renovation from a hospital to Humber’s campus.
Rumours that the buildings were erected using patient labour are only partly true. They were originally done by construction workers, Taylor said.
“Over time, because the hospital was also a place of training, they wanted the patients to have meaningful occupations,” Taylor said. “So they used patient labour and they had training schools on site for people to learn how to do brick laying and carpentry and painting.”
Patient labour was used during renovations in the 1930s, Taylor added.
The I and K buildings are currently under renovation and renovations should begin by the end of the year on the G building, which were formerly the hospital’s administration building, Lakeshore Campus principal Ian Smith said.
Golf management student Kevin Crozier, 24 said G building has always seemed strange to him.
“It’s creepy to look up at that building because it’s unoccupied,” he said.
Crozier said he thinks Lakeshore campus is haunted because they used electric shock therapy there and he’s afraid that someone has died in there too.
That is true, but the bodies are buried more than a mile away.
“The cemetery was and still is at the corner of Horner and Evans,” said Smith.
Whether the campus is Haunted or not is another matter, but the facts presented in this article are skewed and at times even totally inaccurate.
Some pregnancies did occur, but there are no graves of dead fetuses under the trees of the apple orchard that is still visible on the west side of Colonel Samuel Smith Park Drive. Stillborn children of the patients are buried at the cemetery.
The building were all erected by the patients transferred from the Provincial Lunatic Asylum on Queen Street West, now currently the site of the Centre for Addiction of Mental Health. Not by construction workers, as Prof. Macdonald claims. There are numerous primary sources supporting the reality of unpaid patient labour.
It is very unfortunate that such unfounded rumours are presented here as historical facts.