It’s hard to drive by the corner of Westmount Drive and Mary Street without noticing the distinctive stucco building with two sculptures of lions standing sentinet outside.
The building, constructed around 1911, has served as a children’s wear store, a fish and chips eatery, a steak house, a tea house, and now an old-school barbershop.
The building was owned by Laurie Neill from 2010 to 2019, when she operated the White Lions Tea House.
During her first year in business, Neill and her staff noticed strange happenings in the building and would laugh it off by crediting the bizarre occurrences to ghosts. But it wasn’t just Neill and her staff who noticed that something wasn’t quite right.
“I had two ladies in at lunchtime one day and they asked me if they could go upstairs; they felt like they were ... being summoned,” she said. “I would get messages from people asking me if I’m aware that there was an entity there.”
Neill brought in a psychic who told her there was a lady from the 1900s who was living her afterlife in the upstairs of the building.
“Her name was Dorothy and it’s believed that she was the wife of the original owner. I have the impression that she died in the house and her ghost was stuck there for many years,” Neill said.
“There is a little walled-off corner upstairs in the bathroom that serves no purpose, and I always thought she was buried in the wall, but I never tore it apart to find out.”
Neill says there were other spooky happenings in the building that she credits to a mischievous little girl named Caroline whose spirit, she says, dwells in the building's basement.
“She would play tricks on us all the time. She would move things, she would hide things, and she loved to play with elastics. They were always all over the place, especially in the kitchen. We would pick them up, throw them in the garbage, and then find them back on the counter or on the floor,” she said.
“She would hide our utensils, she would hide cups ... the biggest thing I ever saw her move was a chair. We set the tables a certain way and when we would return to the dining room one chair would be somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be," Neill explained.
A psychic told Neill that Caroline died of a childhood disease, and she had a connection to the old Mount Slaven Public School that used to be across the road.
While Neill believed her building to be haunted, she never once felt frightened.
“They weren’t malevolent in any way, they were Caspers, friendly ghosts,” she chuckled.
“My staff might not say the same thing. Sometimes they would get locked in the basement bathroom. She never did it to me, but she would do it to my staff.”
Neill says she even had to find a new electrician after her serviceman refused to go into the basement.
“He would say Caroline would touch him; she liked playing with people’s hair,” she laughed.
Today, 33 Westmount Dr. N. is occupied by Julien Comtois who owns Highlander Old School Barbershop. He says he has never experienced any ghost sightings or strange happenings in the building.
He also says not a single customer has ever made a comment to him about the building potentially being haunted.
“There are so many stories from people who talk about it, and I don’t think they are all crazy. I just know that I’ve never experienced it myself, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” he said.
Neill says it comes as no surprise to her that Comtois has never experienced any kind of haunting in the building.
“You have to be open to it. Sometimes, you have to match up your experiences with what might have been a ghost as opposed to giving it natural causes,” she said.
“The second thing is what I learned from a couple of psychics about Dorothy upstairs, is she was very terrified of men. I think it’s possible that her husband was abusive, and because I was the first female owner in 30 years and had an all-female staff, she was finally comfortable in letting herself be known," Neill explained.
Now that the building is a barbershop that serves men every day, Neill believes Dorothy has either gone back into hiding or was free to leave and moved on, which she believes is most likely the case.
