Haunted Peterborough Lock

Workers attest to spooky events that transpire in the late hours of the night in the Peterborough Lock in Canada.
Disembodied footsteps and footprints are heard and seen, many claim it’s the souls of former workers killed in the structure.

Diana Mehta
Canadian Press

PETERBOROUGH–Rising some 20 metres off the ground, the world’s highest hydraulic lift lock dwarfs the people who gaze up at it from the canal below.

A handful of people crane their necks to take in the three grey pillars that straddle the Trent-Severn Waterway in Peterborough, Ont., while others scurry up the narrow stairs that border the lock to see the view from the top.

A woman pauses halfway up the concrete stairway to photograph the rivulets of water streaming from large iron grates cut into the blackened wall that runs across the canal.

Shadowed by the grey boat bay above, the barred openings in the dripping walls are reminiscent of the dingy interior of a medieval prison.

An apt picture considering the Peterborough lift lock is known not only for its size and stature, but also noted for its spiritual inhabitants.

“The lock is haunted,” says lock operator John Stanley matter-of-factly.

“We have Bumpy, who is an ex-employee, Billy, who died during construction, and Art.”

The water is calm as Stanley discusses his spectral companions from his perch in the control tower, a small room built atop the central pillar of the lock.

An intercom crackles, a voice goes out over a loudspeaker and within seconds the mass of water that was stagnant a minute before begins to drop away as a small cheer goes out from people watching below.

Working like a teeter-totter, the lock uses gravity to move boats from one side to another in 90 seconds.

“The lock is 105 years old and still operates on essentially the same principle,” says Stanley. “We’re very much original and we work every day.”

For those seeking a touch of the paranormal, the lock is teeming with tales.

One says a man working on the original construction lost his balance and toppled to his death into the shell of the lock’s central pillar.

His fellow workers apparently continued to fill the pillar with cement, encasing his body in the lock forever.

Later on in the construction, when the boat bays were being painted, unstable scaffolding tipped three workers over the edge, killing one who died close to the same middle pillar.

Stanley says he hasn’t seen a ghost himself, but he has been rattled when working late at night on machinery stashed in the bowels of the lock.

Burrowing as deep as 21 metres into the ground, the area below the lock is a labyrinth of underground tunnels and rooms where the bulk of the ghost stories originate.

“If we have a breakdown at the lock it means me and my partners are here until 5:30 in the morning and that’s when the spooky stuff starts to happen,” says Stanley.

It’s the spooky stuff that’s made the lock more than an engineering marvel.

People from across Canada and as far away as Europe have travelled to Peterborough to take in Lock 21.

Diane Robnik, an archivist at the Trent Valley Archives, has been telling people of the lock’s eerie inhabitants after doing some footwork of her own.

Robnik remembers a recent story about men repairing machinery in the damp spaces beneath the lock. As they worked, heavy footsteps were heard clunking down the concrete steps that led to the machine room.

A curious worker stepped outside to find boot prints stamped into the wet floor, trailing down the stairs and disappearing into a hard stone wall.

“They went right into that centre pillar and they were gone,” says Robnik.

Another time, after a canal worker died, lock operators continued to find his rubber boots in the lock elevator for days after his death, without any idea of how they reappeared after they’d been removed.

“They tell me that things are happening all the time, and you either accept them or you can’t work there,” says Robnik.

But although they might give the burliest of men the creeps, the lock’s spiritual residents have never caused any genuine harm.

“None of the ghosts have any type of sinister, malevolent feelings,” says Robnik.

“They just want to play little pranks to just let people know that they’re there.”

Full source: The Star