Photo: A new haunted tour series is coming to Stittsville Main Street this month. Photo via Joseph Carbonetto.
The mysterious and unexplained specters of Stittsville’s past will be told in a new haunted tour series coming to Stittsville Main Street this month.
Stittsville’s Haunted Heritage is the latest project by Intenseffex, a show production company owned by Stittsville resident and spook show mastermind Joseph Carbonetto.
The tours along Stittsville Main Street are his take on downtown’s popular Haunted Walks and a follow-up to last year’s Manchester Hill Séance, a special effects-type show inspired by local history that he produced inside an abandoned house in Stittsville.
Carbonetto said he and co-producer Austin Durling were considering what kind of show Intenseffex could produce for Halloween this year — their thoughts turned to the Haunted Walk downtown.
“So we went on a number of haunted walks,” he said. “We said ‘this is really cool, how can we make it for Stittsville?’”
The result is a 90-minute series of walks along Stittsville Main Street containing 11-12 stories about various aspects of the town’s history, dating back to the mid-1800s. Spooky sightings, secret executions and even reports of ghostly disturbances will be covered.
“It’s kind of going to be about the history of Stittsville with a little Stephen King twang,” Carbonetto said.
Ghosts in Stittsville? One may scoff, but Carbonetto says the stories are based on fact. They commissioned published author Allan McCarville, a Stittsville resident, to research and write the stories they will tell on the tours.
“He’s working with the Goulbourn Historical society to get the historical baseline,” Carbonetto said.
“(And) we have interviews from people in the community who’ve said ‘I’ve seen this, I’ve felt this’,” he said, acknowledging that the reports may simply be their imagination at play. Or are they?
When the tours have wrapped up, Carbonetto said they plan to publish a booklet containing all the stories and make them available for sale. Besides royalties for McCarville, Carbonetto said he’d like to donate proceeds for the booklet to a local organization.
Tours cost $15 per ticket and begin Oct. 5, running every Friday and Saturday throughout the month (Carbonetto said they may extend into November if demand calls for it.) Tours depart from the barn at Village Square Park (Stittsville Main and Abbott Streets) at 7 and 9 p.m.
Large groups can contact Carbonetto directly to arrange tours during the week.
Tickets can be purchased online via bit.ly/StittsvilleHaunt. Readers of StittsvilleCentral.ca can enjoy a 10 per cent discount off advance tickets by entering the promo code CENTRAL when purchasing.
Please don’t make Lala Butler, who was killed on the railway tracks beside Butler’s (Green’s) Hotel in 1900, into a ghost. It was a tragedy for her family and her death should not be sensationalized or exploited.
I totally agree with what Richard Grand says. It was a tragedy for the community as well as the family who moved away.
As someone who has grown up there (up the 10th Line as it was called) I rode my bike all through the town and the only part I found scary was Orville Street. If I have the name correct, as a 11 year old, I I would drive down that street, and the houses were all decrepit, the people walking looked like they had been living in the ditch. There were many open sheds that housed stacks of milled lumber. The road got narrower and more closed in, and now I knew I was somewhere my parents would not like me to be. My school bus came up that street, and from the bus it didn’t look that bad….from the ground level it looked horribly different. Today the street is cleaned up in as much that owners of properties now take care of their homes – those still standing have been upgraded and renovated over the years. Its a nice part of town now.