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Fiddlers Green/Visiting Emily's Ghost - Cambridge
Visiting Emily's Ghost
By Johanna Weider
Standing in the clock tower of the old Galt post office, visitors enjoy a bird's-eye view of the stone buildings along the murky Grand River.
Maybe that's why it's a favorite haunt for Emily,the building's resident ghost.Her apparition is occasionally spotted peering from the narrow tower windows by patrons of the Fidders Green Irish Pub, the latest incarnation for the building erected in 1885.
According to a legend dating back to the 1900's, postmaster William Turnbull had a secret affair with a young clerk named Emily.Frustrated and desperate, Emily threatened to announce the liaison in public, which no doubt would have ignited a scandal among Galt's elite.A few days later Emily was found hanging in the clock tower.Murder was suspected, but never proved.
A few weeks later, so the romantic tale goes, Turnbull died in his sleep of a broken heart.
For pub owner Nash Cohen, Emily is a welcome guest and popular attraction at the Cambridge restaurant and night spot.Her story is printed on the menu, the second- floor bar is dubbed Emily's Attic and tradition calls for a midnight toast in her honor.
A phantasmal portrait of Emily with a noose trailing from her heck adorns the winding staircase leading to the third floor, once the postmaster's living quarters and also where Emily supposedly died.
After years of neglect, the third floor was renovated and opened two years ago as a swanky private lounge with a waterfall, bar, track lighting and aquarium.
Below the gabled wooden ceiling, the original hardwood flooring bears scars where walls once partitioned the postmaster's apartment.Visitors can stroll down the hall where Turnbull's tread once echoed, perhaps with Emily's footsteps not far behind.
It was during the renovations that Emily's ghost first introduced herself to the new tenants, explained Cohen's father, also named Nash.
Often he came to the top floor and found one window swung open on its hinge, the bitter winter wind blowing snow inside.He fastened the window with screws and piled chairs in front, but to no avail.
"No matter when I came by, this window was wide open," said the senior Cohen, gleaning out of the portal overlooking Water Street.
That strange tale is just one of any surrounding the landmark designed by Canadian architect Thomas Fuller, who also created Canada's first parliament buildings in Ottawa which were destroyed by fire in 1916.
Staff, patrons and Cohen eagerly recount Emily sightings.
"You have people come running up from the bathroom saying, 'I saw her, I saw her,'" Cohen said with a chuckle.
Emily's mischievous side was caught on tape when a surveillance camera recorded a liquor bottle flying off the bar then spinning in the air before crashing to the ground.
"And there's just no one there," Cohen said of the eerie event, adding that the tape mysteriously vanished like Emily's momentary appearances.
A rounded doorway opens off the third-floor lounge to the clock tower.A yellow nylon cord whimsically tied as a noose travels upward to the bell room, two floors above and now home to dozens of pigeons.
From their lofty perch, the pesky pigeons guard the tower, only hinting at its century-old secrets with their quiet cooing.