It’s a common scene in countless scary movies: the camera pans along a tree-lined street, past Victorian gingerbread houses, as wind chimes and children’s voices mingle in an uneasy cadence, and then we see it — the haunted house.
It’s an old house, built sometime during the 19th or early 20th centuries. At least two stories high, it has turrets or an arched veranda or ivy climbing its ageing stone walls. It is beautiful in the way historic homes always are, and yet something sinister seems to lurk within its walls...
Old Toronto Houses by Tom Cruikshank with photography by John de Visser is filled with examples of houses that could fill in for a haunted house in any horror film. In its pages are the oldest homes in Toronto as well as the most architecturally interesting houses still standing.
There aren’t any ghostly tales included in Cruickshank’s history of the city’s historic homes, so we’ve done some supernatural research ourselves to get you in a Halloween mood. Haunted or not, these amazing houses have incredible stories to tell about the city Firefly Books calls home.
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