[URBAN NOTE] "High Park’s ghost rider is dead and gone"

[rfmcdonald]

Hina Alam's Toronto Star report reminds me that urban folklore is almost always interesting, at least on a Halloween evening.

On a black, cloudless night in April 1903, while a new moon sailed across the heavens, there arose a black mist in Grenadier Pond. Like a widow’s veil, it swirled and snaked — and thickened, until it took human form. A man and a horse then emerged from the water, fire in the man’s eyes and bleeding head.

“There are sounds of groaning, and, lo!, in a trice, the wraith is galloping with the speed of sunlight through the park,” reads a page 2 Toronto Daily Star article from Apr. 22, 1903, sandwiched between a labour report and a police report.

They were among many ghosts said to glide around Grenadier Pond, yet so popular were the rider and his “white nag” that a poem was written in their honour, and people spent many an hour talking about them.

However, the spectral rider and steed haven’t been seen since. It’s been 113 years.

Another news report from May 1903 discusses a man named Ed Clarke who was in court on a charge of drunkenness. Clarke had been in High Park to see the phantom horseman.