Ghost writer stumbles on eerie tale

Ghost writer stumbles on eerie tale. Etobicoke author and paranormal investigator, Richard Palmisano has recently released his third book, Ghosts: An Investigation into a True Canadian Haunting. Staff photo/ IAN KELSO

Quite possibly both, said Richard Palmisano, an Etobicoke resident and paranormal investigator who recently chronicled the otherworldly tale based on his Searcher Group's surveillance of a old abandoned Mississauga mansion - and the six ghosts who allegedly occupy it - in his third book, Ghosts: An Investigation into a True Canadian Haunting.

Three and a half years ago, Palmisano and his team of enquiring minds, clairvoyants and skeptics began an investigation into the haunting of the picturesque mansion at the mouth of Joshua Creek - named Fusion Centre in 1961 after it was sold to Ontario Hydro for its Canadian Fusion Fuels Project - notorious for giving its visitors an overwhelming feeling of being watched.

From the moment Palmisano stepped foot on the grounds of the once-grand, but decade-abandoned estate at Lakeshore Road and Winston Churchill Boulevard on Lake Ontario, he knew his team had stumbled onto something special.

"On our first night there, we witnessed more activity in the first 15 minutes than we did at any of the other 10 (Mississauga) properties we'd (previously) had under investigation combined," he said.

"When we first arrived, my brother Paul walked down to look at the house and as he was crossing the path he called out to me. What followed was a '10' on the creep scale: I saw a human figure, all black and in shadow, run forward at an incredible speed about 6 feet, then disappear when it went behind a sapling. It was like a cartoon, it went in but it never came out."

Fifteen minutes later and still outside, the team had another sighting - this time from within the mansion itself. A figure appeared at a second floor window, a hand pulled back its vertical blinds, a face peered out at the investigators below, then retreated as if being discovered, the blinds swaying in its wake.

Fearing a vagrant might be squatting there, security was summoned and the entourage entered the house. But upon entry, Palmisano saw that the window from which they witnessed the figuring peering down upon them was located in 14-feet of open space, with no floor for a person to stand on and no way to get close to the window.

"I don't think you have an intruder here," he said he whispered to the security guard, before they all rushed out.

And so the Searcher Group decided to launch what would become a three-year observation at the site, leading them to uncover a host of six very social ghosts, who often called to each other by name - Kathleen the singer; Henry the ornery one; Annarita, the devoted housekeeper who, according to Palmisano, continues to sweep the back stairwell "sparkly clean" whilst the rest of the house is draped in dust; "The Captain," who often comandeered the other spirits; a spooky, unnamed coach house wanderer who tries to lure visitors into his home; and an inquisitive and playful little girl named Tonya.

Through a combination of careful research into the mansion's history, 640 hours of tape capturing 391 incidences electronic voice phenomena (EVP) - or recordings of voices believed to belong to the dead (almost a third of which mentioned names and events correlated directly to real people from the history of the property) - and the expertise of three independent clairvoyants, Palmisano said he and his team have gathered enough evidence to put together a fairly convincing argument for his murder-lynching hypothesis.

From the farmhouse across the road, the repeated sorrowful recordings of a hysterical woman crying out for "My baby! My baby!," purported to be the cries of little Tonya's mother upon seeing her dead child's body. Then, later in the investigation, Anita the clairvoyant's discovery of a tree on the property on whose branches she claimed a young man had been hung, and then second clairvoyant John Perrone's similar, albeit independent sense that a man had died an unnatural death at that very same tree.

"This tree is depressed. There is something in its past. I see something swinging here, swinging from a branch, it's a young man - he can't breathe," Palmisano quoted Perrone as saying. "It isn't an accident, not a suicide, and it's clear he doesn't want to die...he was hung!"

From those incidences, as well as many others chronicled in Ghosts, Palmisano pieced together the recorded messages of the ghosts, along with historical data, to speculate about what might have happened to at least two of the six Fusion ghosts - Tonya and her murderer, the coach house wanderer.

"Tonya's is a tragic story, and this is where the speculative part comes in, because it's a crime that was never reported, never investigated," he said, noting that it all began in 1937 when a gentleman by the name of Charles Bell bought the parcel of land Fusion now stands on and commissioned the construction of the building.

During the building process, Bell hired a young man to watch the building supplies overnight. One morning when she was done her chores, Tonya, who lived at the farm house across the way and was used to crossing the land on the way down to play at Joshua Creek, took a short cut through the land and was attacked by the young guard.

"Her screams were heard by people in the fields, but she was dead by the time anyone got to her," Palmisano posited. "They caught the guy, brought him and Tonya's body back to the farmhouse and sent a runner out into the fields to get the boss. Through our EVP we captured the mother's voice screaming for her daughter."

Those screams pushed the angry mob that had gathered to bear witness into a frenzy, and the young man was strung up and hung to death. By the time the boss returned, there were two bodies to deal with, Palmisano hypothesized. To avoid a scandal, little Tonya was given a proper, albeit private, burial, while her murderer's body was disposed of in a shallow grave inside the newly laid foundation of the coach house.

Both ghosts remain - Tonya happily manouevring between her home at the farmhouse and the mansion where she plays with her friends, while the coach house wanderer remains an eerie and threatening presence, scaring off those who dare to enter.