Ghost of Hockey Past?

WORKERS AT THE HOCKEY Hall Of Fame may be completing some mundane chores on any given day, and suddenly that creepy feeling that they are being watched begins to wash over them. Then they hear a sudden thump on the floor or an eery creak of an opening door. Maybe there are strange footsteps or mysterious hushed voices, seemingly eminating from thin air.

Odds are, it's not an old building settling and it's not overactive imaginations. It isn't even the distant echoes of Gordie Howe's slapshot or Eddie Shore's body checks.

It's just Dorothy making herself at home.

Dorothy is a ghost many have seen and heard and run in terror from over the decades in the 153-year-old building at 30 Yonge Street that used to house a Bank of Montreal branch. It now is home to part of the Hall of Fame, having had another building, BCE Place, erected on top of it to help house the Hall's vast collection of history.

"The old part of the building, where the bank used to be, is now the room where we keep the NHL awards and the Stanley Cup," says Izak Westgate, who helps coordinate the Hall's many exhibits. "It's a room with a large dome ceiling."

A couple of people have mentioned that they've been in that area alone and they've heard or seen something that makes them think someone else is there. They've been a little scared by something.

"I've never seen her," says Westgate. "I've heard the odd creak, but I don't think anything about it because it's an old building. Later on, I'll think, `Maybe that was Dorothy.'"

The legend of Dorothy is shrouded in mystery. Kelly Masse, a spokesperson for the Hall of Fame, says that the popular story that has been handed down surrounds a young teller who was in love with her bank manager. When he broke off their relationship, she was so distraught that she took the bank's pistol and shot herself.

"One version of the story says she shot herself in the vault room or the galley behind the vault. It's says that she did it in such a way that she wanted to be the first thing the manager saw when he walked into the bank in the morning. Apparently she wanted to get back at him for breaking up with here," says Masse, who in her four years with the Hall of Fame, says she is yet to meet up with Dorothy.

But Matthew Didier, a member of the Toronto Ghost and Hauntings Research Society, says that some legends paint Dorothy not as a jilted lover, but as a victim of circumstance.

"In the early part of this century, there was a robbery at the branch in which a young woman was shot and killed," says Didier. "Her apparition is says to wander around the bank, especially near the area where she died: the vault.

"Either way, the tales of the ghost are effecitvely the same: A woman in an old-fashioned dress appearing near the offices and vaults, and also poltergeist activity, such as lights going on and off and doors opening, dosing and locking by themselves."

Didier worked in the building before it became part home to the Hall of Fame and remembers "several cold spots in and around the branch, but nothing more than that." He says his group would love to have the chance to investigate the Hall of Fame and track Dorothy, especially since he had heard that some bank employees used to refuse to transfer to the branch because of her ghostly mischief.

Until then, she will remain one of the biggest and most famous mysteries in Toronto, which has apparently become home for many visitors from the afterlife. For instance, the Old City Hall which now houses the city's municipal courts, seems to have a ghost that enjoys tugging on the judges' robes on a particular stairway. Visitors to the provost's office at Trinity College swear that a portrait of Bishop Strachan is somehow haunted and that his eyes seem to watch people as they move about the room.

One paranormal investigator, Janet Kroenke, says there are many theories about why Dorothy and other ghosts haunt this world.

"In the majority of cases, a haunting is precipitated by a violent death or traumatic event," says Kroenke, a member of Vestigia, a New Jersey-based organization that has researched "scientific anomalies" from UFOs to Bigfoot to ghosts for more than 25 years. "Some believe that the actual spirit of the person would linger at that location, unable or unwilling to leave this world and pass into the next.

"There is also the old occult metaphysical belief that those who commit suicide are condemned to remain bound to this earth, trying to somehow resolve an unhappy situation or simply unwilling to let go of this world. Nobody knows for sure, these are just theories of what ghosts might be."

Whatever ghosts are, if Dorothy is any indication, they apparently have a good business sense.

"The part of the Hall of Fame where she's been seen is where the tours end up" says Westlake. "As far as I know, no visitors have seen her. It's not like she's jumping out and scaring the visitors."