Someone occasionally knocks on the upstairs wooden floorboards at the Old Town Hall building during the Craik’s Farmer’s Market, but only an empty room is found whenever a curious person puts down their coffee to go up and see who it is.
The patrons and workers of the Market, which is located on the first floor of the Old Town Hall building every Friday from May to the end of September, believe no one has found anything because Oscar is making the noise. Oscar is the ghost that can be heard every now and again playing in the old second floor dancehall.
“Every once in a while you can hear him walking around up there banging on things,” said Doug Androsoff after he had just settled down for his usual Friday morning coffee at the Farmer’s Market. “They say across the street the building that was in that lot was a hardware (store), but the backend of it used to be the mortuary at one time. There is talk about ghosts from the mortuary moving upstairs here when that building got torn down.”
Androsoff described the sound as either a child bouncing a basketball on the wooden floorboards upstairs or a piece of siding flapping against a wall. He said the problem with concluding the latter is the flapping noise occurs whether it is windy or not.
Pauline Dixon, a regular patron at the Farmer’s Market, said Oscar first started making noise at the Old Town Hall about four or five years ago when the neighbouring and nearly century-old hardware and burial preparation building owned first by Ernest Insull and then George Gower was demolished. She said the ghost must have needed a “place to be” after that happened and the majority of the regulars at the Farmer’s Market have no problem with the bit of noise he makes at his new haunt.
“Some people are scared,” said Dixon, noting one customer at the Market seemed a little frightened when he was told a ghost lurked upstairs. “But I’ve never been scared.”
Dixon said no one has actually seen the ghost, but as far as they can tell Oscar makes his home around the old ticket booth room that is situated right above the Market space. She said there is no heat and water pipes on the second floor of the building, so there has to be another explanation for the rapping.
“I’m so used to it,” said Cindy Jaremicki, who regularly sells baking goods at the Market, about the noise. “It’s usually pretty much every Friday you hear him at least once (and) sometimes more. (It’s) usually earlier in the morning you hear it more, but then it’s quieter in here. When it’s noisy here you might not notice it, but it does happen later in the day too.”
Jaremicki said nobody has specifically gone looking for Oscar, but people have tried to find an explanation for the banging sounds and can’t come up with any. She said even though the ghost hasn’t seemed to attract any more patrons to the normally bustling Market it has at least added to the conversion around the coffee table.
“I’ve heard him from in here and from in the library (located in the room next to the Market),” said Androsoff, noting he has no idea how the ghost got to be named Oscar. “He does it whether there is many people around or not. It’s a mystery.”