If you don’t believe in ghosts, this story might just make you think again.
Two weeks ago, paranormal researcher Dan Ducheneaux and his team spent two nights at the Willow Place Inn in Hudson, just west of Montreal, to look for paranormal activity.
For years, rumours had circulated of a ghost that haunted the place, and was the spirit of a servant girl named Maud who was supposedly murdered here in 1837.
READ MORE: Ghost hunting In Hudson’s historic Willow Place Inn
The story goes that she was killed by the Patriots and buried in the inn’s basement, because she heard them plotting against the Loyalists.
But some in Hudson say the tale is a bit of a stretch.
Rod Hodgson, a local historian, says that the whole story was conjured up by the hotel’s owners in the seventies, to drum up more business.
“They just wanted to have an interesting situation with an old building with an English-style pub with a ghost.”
READ MORE: Is Hudson’s Willow Inn haunted?
He says there was a Maud Leger who lived and died there, the mother of a former owner, but that she died in 1960.
So, he says, “if you want a ghost, it very probably is Maud Leger.”
But it turns out that there might be another Maud associated with the inn. Because in 1906, a steamer collided with another boat and sank not far from the inn, killing three people.
The name of the steamer just happened to be, the Maud.
READ MORE: Hudson’s iconic Willow Inn has new owners, plans to reopen
So the question for Ducheneaux was to determine if the place was haunted, and by whom.
After going through the material he and his team gathered, they met with the owner, Patricia Wenzel, to discuss their findings.
“Well I found out that there are quite a few things that are unexplainable,” she says. “There’s definitely something, something that’s not quite right.”
Ducheneaux said he picked up one sound that sounded like like a child calling out the number “one.” But he points out that there were no children with them overnight at the Willow.
Wenzel notes that it is unlikely that they would’ve overheard anything from the street, because the space is quite soundproof.
“That kinda creeped me out a little bit because if there’s a child in trouble, that’s bothersome to me,” he said.
There was another sound that the ghost hunters picked up that they say was a bit more ominous.
They say it sounds like an older woman laughing or crying, and that their heat sensors went off at the same time.
There are other things that Ducheneaux said he picked up, but says nothing is conclusive yet, so he’d like to do more tests.
He thinks that there certainly is something going on.
“I was uneasy about the second floor, for a good part of the night.”
And Wenzel was also curious to know for sure.
“Does Maud exist? Not so sure. Is there something else? Possibly, and if it is, what is it?”
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