Sue Darroch and Matthew Didier's Paranormal Blog

This page was written in 1998, when the biggest movie event was "Titanic". The Royal Ontario Museum was founded on April 14th, 1912 -- the day the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic.

Two ghosts inhabit different parts of the museum. One is the original director of the ROM, Charles Trick Currelly, whose apparition has been seen wearing a nightshirt and wandering the East Asiatic collections. Staff have reported strange occurrences in this gallery and some have seen the ghost themselves. The other ghost is that of a little girl dubbed Celeste, whose sad little spectre would sit in the McLaughlin Planetarium watching the shows. As Colombo points out in his book, Haunted Toronto, since the planetarium has been closed one wonders what's happened with little Celeste.

Update: The following was sent in by a co-op student who worked in the ROM...

After the school term ended, I stayed on to help out as a volunteer as I had a semester and summer to kill before university.

Many of the people I worked with kind of wondered about the stories but others who had worked there for years said it was all balderdash.

I should say that I believe in ghosts and always have, so I did think it was possible that something was going on.

The area I worked in consisted of classrooms, offices and a staff room. In the particular hall near these rooms, one often saw "something" out of the corner of your eye... a shape which seemed to be crossing the hall into one of the offices. The doors were all locked and only certain full time staff had keys, anybody else buzzed to gain admittance and that the main door was in full view of and close to the office. No people had buzzed and no doors had been unlocked so the shapes disconcerted people.

One day during the March Break when there were no classes scheduled, I was working on the computer laptop at the back of a large room. I was alone except there was one other employee.

The computer was against the wall, so my back was to the larger part of the room, and the hallway. The other person was in another smaller office and we were alone in the department. As I typed I was concentrating as I wanted to finish before we left for lunch.

I heard soft footsteps behind me, and then a hand landed on my left shoulder. I didn't even look up, I just kept typing and said "Okay, I'm nearly done. Be there in two shakes."

The hand patted my shoulder twice and lifted.

I signed off of the computer and then went to the office where my friend was to find them coming out the door saying, "Sorry, I didn't catch that."

When I asked what they had meant, my friend said that they'd heard my voice in the other office but as they weren't terribly close to me, they had missed what I said. I asked if they had come in and laid their hand on my shoulder and got only a confused look and asked how could they as they was in the other office and I wasn't in there.

There was nobody else in the department, indeed, on the floor and the elevator wasn't working that day, so if anybody had come down to the basement we would have heard the heavy fire doors and certainly nobody buzzed or used keys to enter.

After that encounter another person said they'd actually walked into a figure in the doorway of one of the offices. There wasn't a change in temperature of feeling of the place when I had my experience, but as the entire area is always cold and faintly menacing but we all got used to it.