St. George’s Adelaide Hunter Hoodless Homestead is gearing up for its second annual Haunted Willows: Haunted Tour Series fundraiser, to be held on Friday, October 25, Saturday, October 26 and Wednesday, October 30, 2024.
The historical site, which dates back to the early nineteenth-century, was once home to Adelaide Hunter Hoodless, the co-founder of the Women’s Institute, the National Council of Women, the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Victorian Order of Nurses. Her work played a large role in domestic sciences, providing education for women to help protect their families.
During the event, Margaret Byl, past-president of the Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada, will be bringing guests on a one hour historical tour where she will recount the stories from the people who lived, worked and volunteered at the homestead throughout the years.
““There are very different things that have happened there that we can’t explain, and I myself have had several experiences there,” she said. “The first thing I want to emphasize is that this is a historical walk that is for entertainment and there is nothing there that will jump out at you or hurt you. I’m also not going to say it’s haunted because we’re going to leave that up to our guests to decide if there’s paranormal activity or not.”
With that being said, Byl noted that in her experience, there is a different atmosphere in the original part of the home.
“The very interesting thing about the Adelaide Hunter Hoodless Homestead is that if you’re in the newer part where the kitchen and the offices are, as soon as you cross the threshold to go into the pantry, it has a whole different atmosphere,” she said.
The one hour tours, which take place at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., will kick off outside in the pavilion before heading into the house for the rest of the tour.
“Once we’re inside we may show a video of one particular unexplainable event that we caught last year from our security cameras, as well as some other photos that our guests caught last year too,” she said.
On October 30, the 11:00 p.m. two-hour tour will feature a few bonus activities for attendees.
“The 11:00 p.m. tour on Wednesday is a little different. We still do the tour, but we’ll also be doing some small investigations so there will be some equipment and we’ll break up into a couple of groups,” she said. “This tour is also the only time we’ll be going down to the basement, we have a stone hearth down there and the guests will be able to see that and hear some stories as well. We’ll also have some refreshments available for this tour and then we can reconvene and go over all the experiences afterwards.”
She said that if anything is caught during the investigations, they’ll then look at the findings and see if there are any scientific influences that could have contributed to it.
“When we do investigations we try to look at the findings based on a scientific level,” she said. “We’ll look at solar flares, because they usually bring more activity for whatever reason, and then we’ll take into consideration the sunrise, the sunset, the weather conditions and moon phase. We’ll document all of those and try to see if there’s a correlation with the things that happen. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t…so if anything happens during any of the tours, we will be doing that documentation as well.”
Byl said that because the tour will start outside, she recommends dressing in warm layers and bringing a flashflight. As well, she said that for the 11:00 p.m. tour, if anyone has a tape recorder, a camera or EMF meter, people are more than welcome to bring them along.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
