What: Ghosts of Christmas Past walking tour
Where: Start at the Visitor Centre at 812 Wharf St.
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 22, through Dec. 31
Tickets: $13/15
For more information, visit: discoverthepast.com
It was Christmas Eve of 1890 when a young man was shot dead in front of St. Andrew’s Cathedral on Blanshard Street in a case of mistaken identity.
His spirit has, reportedly, haunted the city ever since.
“Just as the clock was striking midnight, ushering in the joyous Christmas day, a crime as dark, cowardly and mysterious as ever disfigured the history of this province was perpetuated,” said the front page story in the Daily Colonist on Dec. 25, 1890.
It’s one of the Christmas-related murder stories that local historian John Adams and his team will tell on the Ghosts of Christmas Past tour around downtown. The walk includes stops for a dozen stories, including at the Empress Hotel, Rogers’ Chocolates and Bastion Square.
David Fee, a 21-year-old son of a grocer, was in town to visit his parents, Adams said. He’d been at a masquerade party and was dressed in a white clown costume a friend gave him. Fee decided to pop over to the church, which was under construction, for midnight mass with his parents.
At the same time, a watchman at the cathedral was downing whiskey and plotting his revenge on a labourer who had told him to take down his Irish Independence flag. He knew the man wore a white overcoat and he waited for him at the corner of View and Blanshard streets.
Fee and a friend were walking toward the church when Clarence Phelan yelled from the corner: “You challenged me.” They turned and “at that instant, the man raised a double barreled gun … and fired. The muzzle must have been within four feet of Fee’s breast … the young man fell, his blood gushing over the sidewalk,” the Daily Colonist story said.
Adams said there have been sightings of Fee’s ghost outside the church and at Ross Bay Cemetery, where he’s buried, ever since.
“They describe a feeling of apprehension in that area, across from Hermann’s Jazz Club. Some saw a figure with a red blotch, which makes sense,” said Adams, who collects sighting from a variety of sources. He said there were similar descriptions from Ross Bay, “and together everything pointed to David Fee.”
Adams said ghost sightings are often more than seeing a figure.
“I tend to hear or feel things, but don’t see full figures,” said Adams, who operates the tours with his son and others.
He said the Christmas ghost tours are popular, especially with families, which makes sense — one of the most famous Christmas tales is a ghost story, after all.
In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the spirit of giving is discovered through ghosts from the past, present and future.
