The Yuletide lyric “You better watch out, you better not cry” takes on a whole new meaning with Haunted Walks’ holiday-season tour “Nightmare Before/After Christmas,” which runs over the coming three weekends.
The walking tour, offered Dec. 13, 20 and 27 has three start times: 7:30 p.m., 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.
The walk begins at the Haunted Walks’ ticket centre at Sparks and Elgin and winds up at the Bytown Museum.
A tour guide will lead a group of people along the Rideau Canal to the museum. The guide will tell a series of spooky Christmas stories during the walk. Once the group gets to the museum, which should take about 15 minutes out of the 75-minute tour, they will hear other creepy Christmas stories from inside the historic building.
Jim Dean, creative director at Haunted Walks, says the tours are not meant to be overly scary and are family oriented.
“It’s a combination of historical facts and what people have done or do at Christmas time around the world, combined with these brilliant, interesting ghost stories,” he says.
The walk experienced over a 100-per-cent growth from its first year to its second, says Dean, with around 50 participants in the first year and 120 in the second.
While looking for inspiration for a holiday themed walk, one classic Christmas story stood out to the team at Haunted Walks.
“One of the biggest holiday traditions around is to read or watch a version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. When you think about it A Christmas Carol really is a ghost story, perhaps the best well-known ghost story ever written, so that was really our jumping off point,” says Dean.
The stories tour guides will tell range from the Yule Lads of Iceland, a group of 12 pranksters who wreak havoc – to stories about ghosts believed to haunt the Bytown Museum itself.
Dean says all of the stories “have this very magical feel, with lovers being reunited or prophecies of great things to come to some supernatural entity.”
He says the stories mixed with the Christmas setting in Ottawa make for a unique experience. “Christmas time in the evening when there is a nice layer of snow and all the Christmas lights are up everywhere, you know just the environment and the atmosphere being downtown Ottawa that time of year, it has a kind of magical feel to it already.”
Fraser MacKay, lead tour guide and researcher for the Nightmare Before/After Christmas walk, says he believes being able to use a real “haunted” house as part of the tour is special.
“We know it’s haunted from personal experience,” says MacKay. The founder of Haunted Walks, Glen Shackleton, and a few co-workers went to the Bytown Museum one night and experienced their own eerie moment.
“They were having a look at the exhibits and so on,” he claims, “and things started to happen. There were doors that started vibrating on their hinges when there was no one on the other side, they started to hear footsteps walking around the level above them and so they all got pretty freaked out.”
MacKay says these kinds of stories really make the tour stand out.
“There are some of our guides that will not do the tours inside the Bytown because they get so freaked out by that.”
The Bytown Museum gives people on the tour a few minutes after it’s over to sit around and chat before leaving. “I quite like the fact that I have time to stand around and chat with the people that came on the tour and talk about our favorite stories,” says MacKay.