Toronto's most enduring ghost story turns out to have a verifiable core.
The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse stands on Hanlan's Point, the most westerly of the Toronto Islands. It was authorised in 1803 along with two others by an Act of the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada, though construction did not begin until 1808. That makes it the oldest existing lighthouse on the Great Lakes and one of the oldest buildings in Toronto.
It was built to 52 feet and extended to 82 feet in 1832. It tapers from about seven metres in diameter at the base to about 2.1 metres at the top. The base is stone quarried at Queenston and the extension is Kingston stone, which you can see in the join if you know to look for it.
The story attached to it concerns its first keeper. John Paul Radelmüller, born in Germany, was murdered in 1815, and that killing is the basis of the city's best known ghost story. The useful part is what has happened to the account since: recent research has verified many aspects of the traditional tale of his death and identified the soldiers who were charged with the crime and ultimately acquitted.
His case has also been written up in true crime collections, where he appears as the lighthouse keeper whose murder remains an unsolved mystery.
So the shape of it is unusually satisfying. A ghost story that most cities would leave as atmosphere has been taken apart by historians, and what came out the other side is a real man with a real name, a real death, and a court record of men who were tried for it and let go.
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