Every Place Has a Story

The Ghosts of James Bay

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If you’re wandering around Victoria, check out the ghosts of James Bay at the two Bent Mast and the James Bay Inn.

The James Bay Hotel is the oldest in Victoria
The James Bay Hotel

I was in Victoria recently researching my book Sensational Victoria and spent time in James Bay. 150 years ago the area housed huge mansions with large tracts of land owned by people who live on in street names like James Douglas, J.S. Helmcken and Robert Dunsmuir. Even though a lot of these heritage houses became ugly apartment buildings in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Victoria Heritage Foundation still lists over 150 buildings on its heritage inventory, some dating back to the 1860s.

Quite a few operate as either restaurants, pubs or B&Bs and are worth a look for both architectural merit and fascinating social histories.

The Bent Mast

I had dinner one night at the Bent Mast, a restaurant in an 1884 house on Simcoe Street. According to the menu I swiped, the house was once a rooming home, a brothel, four different restaurants and an erotic art gallery. Apparently a number of ghosts haunt the house. There’s the happy child, a cranky old man who likes to hide things in the kitchen (did have to wait a while for the wine) and an older woman. Female staff report being felt up by a guy in a red fedora who disappears before they can take his order. I’m pretty sure I saw him by the bar when I first came in. The second floor, where the washrooms are, is definitely creepy. There’s a staircase that goes down to the back of the house and a bunch of locked rooms that I wouldn’t want to explore by myself after dark.

James Bay Inn

The next morning I had coffee at the James Bay Inn on Government Street. The hotel was designed by architect Charles Elwood Watkins in 1911 and is the third oldest in Victoria. It sold to Mother Cecilia’s religious order during the Second World War, and its claim to fame is that Emily Carr died there in 1945, a block from where she was born. The artist would be mortified to learn that the room where she died is now the men’s room in the pub.

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