Ottawa Jail Hostel

The Carleton County Gaol on Nicholas Street was Ottawa’s first purpose-built jail. Designed by the architect Henry Horsey and completed in 1862 alongside the county courthouse, it is a handsome limestone building in the Italianate style – and, inside, a cramped, stone-cold place of confinement. Its small cells could hold up to around 150 men, women and children at a time, with solitary cells and, on the top floor, death row and a gallows.

Its most famous prisoner arrived in 1868. In the early hours of 7 April, Thomas D’Arcy McGee – Irish-born journalist, poet, Father of Confederation and the most eloquent Irish Catholic opponent of the Fenian movement – was shot dead outside his boarding house on Sparks Street. Patrick James Whelan, a young Irish tailor suspected of Fenian sympathies, was arrested within a day. He was convicted in September, with Prime Minister John A. Macdonald sitting beside the judge at the trial, and his appeal failed. Whelan protested his innocence to the end, and historians still debate whether he fired the shot, was one of several conspirators, or was a convenient scapegoat.

On 11 February 1869 Whelan was hanged in front of the jail before a crowd of about 5,000 people, in what is usually described as Canada’s last public execution; public hangings were abolished later that year. He was buried somewhere within the jail grounds, and his grave has never been identified with certainty. The jail carried out its last execution in 1946 and closed in 1972 after decades of criticism of its conditions.

In 1973 the building reopened as a youth hostel, keeping the cells, bars and iron doors so that backpackers could sleep in a real cell block. Ghost stories soon became part of its identity. The best known is that Whelan still walks the building, appearing at the foot of guests’ beds or near his old death-row cell, sometimes said to be protesting his innocence. For years the hostel and Ottawa’s Haunted Walk ran lantern-lit tours of death row and the gallows; the hostel, now run by Saintlo, has since reclaimed much of that space for accommodation.

The real history is grim enough without embellishment: overcrowding, people held for debt and poverty alongside the violent, and a series of executions in a building still standing in the middle of the capital. It is a designated heritage property of the City of Ottawa.

A man glimpsed standing at the end of a bed or in the corridors, identified by guests as Patrick Whelan; footsteps, moans and cell doors rattling on the upper floors; a heavy, watched feeling on death row. Reports come mainly from overnight guests and hostel staff, and were long promoted by ghost tours.

The top floor – the former death row and gallows – and the upper cell blocks, especially at night. Some tellings place Whelan near the cell where he spent his final months.

The hostel is one of Canada’s most famous “haunted” places to stay and a regular entry in lists of Ottawa’s ghost stories, alongside the Château Laurier and Billings Estate. McGee remains the only federal politician in Canada to have been assassinated, and his murder and Whelan’s trial are the subject of books and of the Historical Society of Ottawa’s publications.