Victoria’s ‘Haunted” Architect

You may recognize the names of renowned Victoria architects Samuel Maclure and Francis Rattenbury who’s as well remembered for his having been murdered by his wife’s lover as he is for having designed the B.C. Parliament Buildings.

But how about Thomas Hooper?

Not only are his wonderful creations all over the Greater Victoria and City of Vancouver landscapes but he has left another, far, far more tantalizing legacy. Many of his homes and buildings are believed to be haunted!

So much so that some honestly believe that he practised black magic while achieving his architect’s credentials—that he baptized his first buildings with human sacrifices.

Sound far-fetched?

Of course it is. But those stories about his creations, some of them credibly vouched for, of ghostly images, mysterious doings and things that go bump in the night are too many to be ignored. Hence his title among B.C. paranormalists as “the haunted architect.”

* * * * *

If you Google Thomas Hooper, architect, you won’t learn much. There are over 20 pages of listings that include Hookers, Hoppers and Hopes, many of them in duplicate and triplicate for some reason, but very little about the subject of today’s Chronicle.

Wikipedia notes another, earlier English architect of—almost—the same name. But Thomas Hopper (1776-1856) whose works across southern England were favoured by King George IV, isn’t the man we want, either.

**And one site, just as it begins to get interesting, cuts off at the word “nondescript...” Hmmphh.**

So let’s see what Martin Segger and Douglas Franklin have to say in their 1979 tome, Victoria: A History in Architecture. According to the index Hooper is to be found on no fewer than 47 pages—almost a quarter of the book. So much for Google and Wikipedia.

According to the authors, the filthy rich of Victoria at the turn of the last century were driven by a desire not to just outdo their opulent fellow Victorians but to thumb their noses at the uncouth nouveau-riche of Vancouver. The result was a frenzy of one-up-manship that made Hooper, Maclure and Rattenbury rich and famous.

Englishman Hooper who’d “learned architecture in the construction business in eastern Canada,” set up his practice in Vancouver in the late 1880s before opening an office in Victoria. Here, in 1890, he received a commission to design a new Methodist Metropolitan Church.

(Segger and Franklin jump right into his professional practice, saying little about Hooper the man and Hooper himself, so unlike Rattenbury who courted publicity and recognition until life went sour, seems to have kept his head down and his hand on the tiller.)

Taking his cue from a visit to Toronto to survey existing Methodist churches, Hooper’s resulting 1891 red-brick creation is to be seen today, at Quadra and Pandora streets. But it hasn’t been a church for a long time, having been sold, upon union of the Presbyterian and Methodist churches in 1925, to serve as the home of the Victoria Conservatory of Music.

One of Hooper’s first major Victoria commissions, the Methodist Metropolitan Church. —*www.pinterest.com*

It’s one of the few Hooper creations for which I have no reference to its being haunted.

But let’s dig into the case-book histories of Hooper’s houses and buildings which are reputedly haunted, beginning with popular Victoria ghost tours guide and historian John Adams. Twenty years ago he wrote in his book, Ghosts & Legends of Bastion Square: “...One amazing fact emerges from studying [Hooper’s] works: a high proportion of them is haunted.”

Unlike Segger and Franklin whose book is a study of Victoria architects but tells us nothing about Hooper himself, Adams did a little more homework. He notes that Devonshire-born Hooper came to Canada when he was 14, “working his way to Winnipeg and Vancouver before arriving in Victoria in 1889” where he practised architecture with outstanding success through the 1890s and into the 1920s.

It was Adams who first tuned me on to the legend that Hooper’s seemingly high propensity of buildings are purportedly haunted because he’d belonged to a secret society or cult in the Old Country and he’d deliberately intended his structures to become homes to haunted spirits. Adams cited the bestselling novel Hawksmoor about an architect of that name who worked with the great Sir Christopher Wren while constructing churches after London’s Great Fire of 1666.

The cult to which he belonged demanded that a murdered body be placed in the foundations of each new structure he designed.

Ian Gibbs, author of the much more recent Vancouver’s Most Haunted: Supernatural Encounters in B.C.’s Terminal City, takes this legend about Hooper further but we’ll get to him a minute. Adams makes it plain that he doesn’t subscribe to this tale: “There is no evidence to suggest [Hooper] had any reason for creating ghost traps.”

But he does accept that an uncanny number of Hooper’s surviving creations likely are possessed, or inhabited by spirits: “...There is something about the buildings and places he was associated with that appeals to spirits from the other side.”

Gibbs, as I hinted, takes this further in his chapter on Vancouver’s Hycroft Manor. He cites the theory introduced above by Adams, that, while in London, Hooper “belonged to a school of dark architectural beliefs” that required a building to have a ‘resident’ spirit to ensure its success.

This was achieved by intentionally hiring a workman who was known to have serious health issues or who was “otherwise vulnerable” and could be expected to expire on the job before construction was completed. Should the intended human sacrifice not oblige the architects’ plans he’d be helped to the Other Side by means of a worksite accident. Bingo, a resident spirit.

A great story if nothing else, so let’s get down to business.

But before I sully Thomas Hooper’s name further by linking him to the black arts and spooks, let’s put him in some kind of historical context. If you Google the Biographical Dictionary of Architect In Canada 1800-1950 you’ll find a list of his commissions that prints out at an incredible 12 pages.

I didn’t bother to count them but a quick scan suggests they add up to about 170 commercial and industrial works, schools, churches and houses, mostly in Victoria and Vancouver, but also to be found in New Westminster, Chilliwack, Nanaimo, Vernon, Revelstoke, Sardis, Merritt, on Lulu Island, Bella Bella, Clayoquot, Prince Rupert and Port Simpson.

We even have one here in the Cowichan Valley: the third St. Ann’s, Tzouhalem. I can’t speak to its being haunted but surely its two predecessors, the Butter/Old Stone Church and the second St. Ann’s appear to have been cursed. Father Rondeault was ordered to abandon his beloved church constructed of local sandstone broken to size with cannon balls and partially financed through the sale of his own butter when it was just 10 years old, and its replacement burned down the night before it was to hold its first service.

Mind you, Hooper didn’t design either of them.

The long gone Quamichan Hotel on Duncan Street, opposite the E&N station, was one of Hooper’s creations, however, and, in its day, one of Duncan’s most attractive.

The Hooper designed Quamichan Hotel was one of Duncan’s most prominent landmarks. —*Cowichan Valley Museum and Archives*

Many of Hooper’s other designs have survived and besides those commissions I’ve referred to above, he also created:

—Public and private schools, churches and Indian and Chinese Mission churches galore
—Ditto major hotels in various locales
—the E.A. Morris Tobacco store, Victoria
—the Leiser Building, Victoria
—the Rogers Chocolate Shop
—the Protestant Orphan’s Home, Victoria
—the Carnegie Library, Victoria
—University School, Victoria
—the Bishop’s Palace, St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Victoria
—Royal Jubilee Hospital’s new Children’s Ward, Victoria
—St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Academy, Victoria
—the Provincial Courthouses, Vancouver, Vernon and Revelstoke
—Numerous mansions, mostly in Vancouver and Victoria

This, remember, is just the tip of the iceberg—what a remarkable life’s work for Hooper who did, for some years, work with a partner but who, virtually singlehanded, was unbelievably prolific.

So, finally, to Thomas Hooper “the haunted architect” and the most notorious of his creations.

Of those that survive and those that have been demolished, is anyone seriously suggesting that most of them (including churches, remember) are or were haunted? When John Adams referred to “a high proportion of them” being haunted, he meant those in the downtown Victoria area, specifically those “adjacent to Bastion Square”.

So let’s begin there with a four-storey brick warehouse Hooper designed to replace the American Hotel in 1900 at 535 Yates Street. Its first occupants were Pither & Leiser, dealers in imported wines, liquors and tobacco, before it became the home of a wholesaler in fruits and vegetables for years.

By the mid-1960s, however, Bastion Square had lost its shine and was ripe for redevelopment. The old warehouse was reinvented as the Bastion Arcade with offices on the upper floors, restaurants and shops at ground level. It’s in one of these restaurants, Pounders, that ghosts—note the plural, I’m quoting Adams—are said to have taken up residence upon its opening in 1992.

(Or, perhaps, they were there all along during the years of its being a warehouse?)

According to Adams, who interviewed the owners, dishes in the kitchen “floated” off shelves to land (unbroken, I’m assuming) on counters across the room; full glasses would slide, unaided, along the bar; there was the eerie sound as of “dry rice” being thrown against the wall; once, the electric lights which had been mounted on the exposed interior brick walls were turned upside down.

None of this sounds life-threatening, just, well, creepy. Before dismissing it out of hand, however, think for a moment how you’d feel if your home began to take on a life of its own. If, upon entering your kitchen in the morning, you found that it had been rearranged overnight although you knew no other family member had done it.

The tempo of unaccountable phenomena picked up when the owners installed a mezzanine floor from which, when unoccupied, came the distinct sound of footsteps. These, no doubt, were made by the woman’s apparition which was seen from time to time, late at night, as she climbed the stairs to the mezzanine!

There is, perhaps, an uncanny explanation to the lady ascending the stairs; the owners learned that, originally, there had been a mezzanine more or less where they’d built theirs. Was the ghost going about her business as she had in a previous existence?

Few owners of homes or buildings that are thought to be haunted want the fact known; the owners of Pounders have found their invisible co-tenants (again the suggestion of more than one) to be, quote, “possible, helpful spirits” and have spoken openly of them as they did to John Adams.

Pounders wasn’t the only tenant of the Bastion Arcade to report eerie events. One day, a hairdresser working in the salon at the front of the building couldn’t find the key staff used to squeeze the last drops of hair colouring from their tubes. She looked everywhere, finally gave up and began the tedious chore of squeezing a tube by hand, all the while grumbling under her breath.

At that moment the key reappeared—sliding across the counter before launching itself into the air and sailing past her head, lightly touching her ear. Her client also witnessed the key’s flight. Was this a case of spiritual mischief or malevolence?

It would appear that the spirit or spirits that haunt Pounders Restaurant is/are benign and likely unrelated to one of Victoria’s most horrific crimes which has a direct link to the American Hotel, the original occupant of 535 Yates Street.

But that’s another story for another time...

Back to Adams’s take on Thomas Hooper, the haunted architect. He believes that Hooper’s buildings “harbour as many ghosts of those of almost all the architects in the city’s history,” and he cited the Protestant Orphanage, Carnegie Public Library and Lampson Street Elementary School.

The Victoria Public Library’s heritage Carnegie Building looks to be anything but haunted in the summer sunshine. —http://www.victoriaonlinesightseeing.com/794-yates-street-carnegie-library-victoria-british-columbia/

Even the Hibben-Bone Block where Hooper rented his office is said to be haunted (by a ghost who postdates his time of residence, it should be noted). Originally an office building, now the Bedford Regency Hotel, 1140 Government Street, its lower ground floor was for years a beer parlour. Although facing Langley Street, the so-called basement is accessed via a stairwell from Government Street.

By that time the once-elegant office block was among the most notorious in town, known for its rough beer parlour clientele, criminal element and for the use of its upstairs rooms by prostitutes. All of this came to an end in the 1980s thanks to the late developer and visionary Sam Bawlf who brought the handsome building back to respectability.

It’s the former beer parlour and the stairwell where Brady the cigar smoking spectre, as Adams calls him, has made himself known to staff from time to time. Several have seen and smelled the man in a felt hat and windbreaker and smoking a cigar. He enters the onetime beer parlour, glances around as if looking for someone, then turns about and heads back up the stairs, only to vanish, halfway up.

Witnesses have thought him so real that they checked to see that the door at the head of the stairs was locked; it was.

They named him Brady upon learning of a onetime regular who’d been about to enter the beer parlour in search of his girlfriend when he encountered a rival suitor. There were harsh words, a struggle then the flash of a knife. Brady, mortally stabbed in the midriff, made it halfway up the stairs where he collapsed and died.

Brady’s girl friend who lived upstairs in the Churchill Hotel (1940s-1970s) was later found dead in her fourth-floor room; it’s believed she was a drug addict based upon the discovery of hidden drug paraphernalia during the 1980s renovation. She supposedly still hangs out in Room 49, now a luxurious suite.

In the single case described by Adams the apparition of a woman who appeared to be in her mid-30s but looking older than her years made as if to block entry to the room then vanished in a rush and roar of cold wind, leaving a strong scent of perfume.

The Downtown Victoria Business Association’s website which obviously sees ghosts as a good marketing ploy, has as its sub-site, The Haunted History of Bastion Square. It gives a slightly different slant to the hapless Brady. The notorious beer parlour of old is now the Wind Cries Mary Restaurant whose “comfortable and modern setting” is the home of Brady and his girl friend, Charlotte aka “Lady Churchill.”

According to the DVBA, Brady’s assailant cut his throat with a smashed beer bottle not a knife. Either way, the wounds as we’ve seen were fatal. The DVBA believes that Brady and Charlotte “come back from time to time to relive happy times together,” as evidenced by the smell of cigar smoke and perfume.

Now that’s my kind of ghost story!

Ian Gill gives more details of the Brady-Lady Churchill in Victoria’s Most Haunted (available through Volume One Books where I bought mine if you’re interested) but let’s go to another of Hooper’s best-known handiwork, the Rogers Chocolate Shop, 913 Government Street, ca 1903.

The company website gives a brief history of how Charles and Leah Rogers built a destination company as “Canada’s first chocolatier,” their most popular creation being the Victoria Cream. By the time of their deaths, Charles in 1927, Leah in 1952, Rogers Chocolates (the company and their product) were legendary, with a world-wide clientele.

Their classical confections are still made today, in a modern plant in Saanich, but the Government Street shop, designed by Thomas Hooper, continues at its original location and has since been formally designated as a heritage building.

But such phenomenal success (the chocolates were all hand-made) had consumed the Rogers’s total attention; they just didn’t have time for their son Freddie, born in 1890. By his early teens the love-starved Freddie was desperately seeking attention by, to use modern parlance, “acting out” with, of all things, dynamite (then easily accessible).

His most dramatic trick was to board a streetcar and stand at the front. To capture the other passengers’ attention, he’d pull out a short stick of dynamite not much bigger than a firecracker, light it, wait until the fuse had burned almost to the point of detonation then throw it out an open window where it would explode with a loud bang.

Show over, he’d jump from the car and run off, laughing. Incredibly, instead of being arrested he was simply banned from using public transportation.

We can assume that the senior Rogers tried various ways to reel in their son (we can also assume they used their money and influence to protect him from prosecution) but to no avail. When he was only 14 and experimenting in the woods with his dynamite, a premature blast left him with a shrivelled stump for his left hand (described as resembling a lobster’s claw), blinded him in his right eye and deafened him in his right ear.

Crippled and despondent, Freddie borrowed a revolver, rented a hotel room and shot himself. He was just 15.

The Rogers channelled their grief into their chocolates; they began sleeping in the store rather than going home at day’s end. Their beds were two wicker rocking chairs that they’d hang up on a wall, out of the way, in the morning. So it went until Charles died in 1927. Leah sold the business and retired, a wealthy woman, to a small home in James Bay. Upon her death 25 years later, she was broke, having given all her money to her church and to charities.

All in all, a truly sad story. But it doesn’t end there (and I’m not referring to the fact that the company survives to this day). This is about Thomas Hooper “the haunted architect,” remember.

Charles, the workaholic, it would appear, still hangs out at the store, moving tools around and turning the radio and lights on or off, and opening and closing drawers and cupboards. Or is it Freddie, the attention-seeking troublemaker who ties peoples’ shoelaces together if they’ve been standing still, who throws handfuls of coins around the upstairs office, who stomps about noisily?

As for Leah, ever the perfectionist, she still rearranges things such as window displays when they don’t meet her satisfaction.

The eerie happenings all seem to suggest that the senior Rogers are still on the job, zealously guarding the high quality standard they’d set so long ago. But the capper occurred in December in the early 1980s when, upon arriving at work, staff noticed a smudged handprint on a mirror at the back of the store. It’s eight feet off the floor and would require anyone touching it to use a ladder.

With a shrug, a staff member did climb a ladder and wipe away the mark. It was there the next morning and the next and the next despite having been removed each time. By this time, employees were beginning to believe that one of their own was playing tricks on them.

Only when a worker, cloth in hand, climbed the ladder and looked carefully at the smudge before erasing it, was the mystery—if one chooses to believe so—“solved.” To quote Ian Gibbs, “The handprint resembled something like a lobster claw—a print that would have perfectly matched Freddie’s disfigured hand if he had been around to compare it with.”

With a collective shudder, Rogers Chocolates staff concluded that Freddie had come home to be with his parents for Christmas.

Then there’s the E.A. Morris Tobacco Shop, another of Victoria’s oldest mercantile institutions. Like Rogers Chocolates, when you enter you’re stepping into a time warp, so unchanged are the store’s display counters and fixtures. (When I took up smoking a pipe in my 20s I used to visit E.A. Morris just to savour the aromas of the various tobaccos and to soak in the Old World ambience; it’s one of my few ‘destination’ stores over the years.)

The shop’s resident spirits are more of the usual variety; the sounds of footsteps and the castors of an office chair being rolled across the floor are heard upstairs, cabinets and drawers are opened by unseen hands—someone clears their throat when no one is there. Mischievous spirits who seek attention by being obnoxious are called poltergeists; one or more of these unruly entities has made itself known by exploding light bulbs and flinging things from shelves.

‘Ghost busters’ using sensitive high-tech equipment have located cold spots and other purported signs of extra-terrestrial presence in the building.

It’s the basement that really caught their attention with what appears to be a blocked-off tunnel entrance in one wall; what it’s original purpose was is unknown.

But it’s time to draw the curtain on today’s post and I haven’t even dealt with Hooper’s haunts in Vancouver. Perhaps another time although you can read about them yourselves in Ian Gibbs’ companion volume, Vancouver’s Most Haunted, also available at Volume One Books.

So let’s conclude with this quickie, Munro’s Books, formerly a Royal Bank at 1108 Government Street where, legend goes, an employee who was caught embezzling committed suicide in a back room. Apparently she’s still trying to make amends by working in Munro’s, helping people find the books they’re looking for.

To the point of actually handing them the desired volume with an invisible hand!

Imagine it—24-foot-high ceilings in one of Thomas Hooper’s most impressive commissions now a book store which has been rated as the third best in the world!

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