Mackenzie House

William Lyon Mackenzie was the firebrand of early Toronto: a Scottish-born newspaper publisher whose attacks on the colonial elite got his press smashed by a mob in 1826, who became the city’s first mayor in 1834, and who led the failed Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. After years of exile in the United States he returned under an amnesty, still in debt and in poor health. In 1858 friends and supporters bought him a three-storey brick townhouse on Bond Street, and he died there in 1861.

His widow, Isabel, nearly lost the house to creditors but was allowed to stay, and in 1868 she bought it back with money voted by the Ontario legislature. The family kept it for decades. In 1936, when Mackenzie’s grandson William Lyon Mackenzie King was prime minister, the house was saved when the neighbouring row houses were demolished. It opened as a museum in the 1960s and is now one of the City of Toronto’s historic sites, furnished in the style of the 1860s, with a working 19th-century print shop at the back.

Mackenzie House has long been described as the most haunted house in Toronto, and the City itself now cheerfully notes that it is “rumoured to have its own resident ghosts.” The stories told on the city’s ghost walks include strange lights on the third floor, a figure of Mackenzie seen at a writing desk, a small woman with white or grey hair – sometimes identified as Isabel or one of the Mackenzie daughters – and, most famously, the printing press in the shop clattering into motion on its own at night.

The press is an appropriate ghost for Mackenzie, whose life was shaped by printing: his newspaper, the Colonial Advocate, made him famous and the wrecking of its press in 1826 made him a martyr to press freedom. Nothing in the record, however, explains the stories beyond the house’s age, its creaking floors and its role as a museum that leans into its legend with Halloween lantern tours.

Guides from Toronto ghost-walk companies present the house as a test case for scepticism, pairing each tale with the history and possible natural explanations. The house is worth visiting for the history alone: the family’s rooms, the print shop and the story of a city that once sent its first mayor into exile.

A printing press heard or seen operating by itself; lights on the third floor when the house is empty; apparitions of a man at a desk and of a small, older woman; footsteps on the stairs. Reports are attributed to staff and visitors and are mostly passed on through ghost tours and media round-ups.

The print shop at the back of the house, the third floor and the staircases. Stories are set at night after the museum closes.

The house is a fixture of Toronto ghost walks and media Halloween lists, and the City runs seasonal lantern tours there. Mackenzie himself is one of the most written-about figures in Canadian history, and the 1837 Rebellion and his printing career are central to the museum’s exhibits.