Hockey Hall of Fame apparition

The Hockey Hall of Fame is located at 30 Yonge Street in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Hall was initially founded in Kingston, Ontario. Still, it was forced to relocate to Toronto in 1958 due to financial issues, mainly caused by the NHL discontinuing its support for the International Hockey Hall of Fame in Kingston, Ontario. In 1961 the Hall found its first permanent home at Exhibition Place. In 1993 the Hall again relocated. It now resides at an office complex in downtown Toronto at Brookfield Place, the former home of the Bank of Montreal (1885). The hockey shrine houses numerous player exhibits, National Hockey League records, team histories, memorabilia, and NHL Trophies, including the Stanley Cup.

Hockey Hall of Fame apparition

The Hockey Hall of fame is also home to a spirit known as “Dorothy.” This is an esoteric bit of history that is seldom talked about. Apparently, during the early 1990s, just before the old Bank of Montreal transitioned into the Hockey Hall of Fame, Toronto musician Joanna Jordan claims to have seen a female apparition staring down at her from the second floor.

Jordan, who was playing the harp at the musical event, had no idea that the building was haunted. So imagine her shock when she locked eyes with the ethereal image staring at her. “I remember it so vividly,” Jordan recalls, “because it’s one of those things you’ll never forget.” The experience so unnerved her that to this day. She will not go to the second floor by herself. “It’s just too spooky up there.”

Nobody is quite sure as to the identity of the lost soul, but it’s believed to be the spirit of a young bank teller by the name of Dorothy Mae Elliot, 19 years old. She shot herself early in the morning of Wednesday, March 11, 1953, and succumbed to her self-inflicted injury 22 hours later at St. Michael’s hospital.

No one is quite sure why she committed suicide. Some have said it was because she had been caught stealing money. Others have said it was because she had been plotting with the members of the Irish Republican Army, who were planning to rob the bank to fund their political ambitions in Ireland. A psychic had an epiphany where she claims that Dorothy was murdered because she had uncovered a plot that had the bank manager, the chief of police, and a prominent judge, who were colluding to embezzle money belonging to farmers.

The most prevalent belief as to why Dorothy took her life was because she was despondent over a love affair she was having with a co-worker at the bank, a married man who had an apartment in the bank. A witness who wishes to remain anonymous and has intimate details of the alleged affair has stated this off the record. “She was a beautiful young woman who was very popular,” this person says. “She looked like the actress Rita Hayworth.”

Len Redwood, the bank’s messenger and co-worker of Dorothy’s, described Dorothy as “the life of the party, the most popular girl in the bank.” Redwood remembers that she shot herself in the women’s washroom of the second floor with the bank’s .38 revolver that he kept in his drawer.

Doreen Bracken, a co-worker of Dorothy’s, remembers her as a “beautiful girl, tall and buxom.” and popular with the men.

Bracken recalls the day of the shooting. She claims to have come in around 8 a.m. and witnessed Dorothy, who was wearing a blue-knitted dress and looked “distressed and disheveled.”

Shortly after 9 a.m., another co-worker, Zeta Rushbrook, began yelling and screaming from the second floor, alerting the bank staff that she had found the injured Dorothy.

Ever since the tragic events of March 11, 1953, there have been numerous strange and unexplained paranormal activities in the building that are attributed to Dorothy: doors and windows opening and closing, lights turning on and off, screams, moans/groans, and ominous sounds reverberating throughout the century-old building. Many of the staff have reported hearing footsteps when working alone at night, while others have reported being touched on the shoulder or leg by unseen hands.

Rob Hynes, a former Hall employee and ghost skeptic, recalls a time while setting up for an event when he had the eerie feeling of being watched. When he went to the adjacent room, which was in darkness, he could see a chair turning all by itself, he says. “It actually moved right into my hand. I’m rather skeptical about ghosts, but I just freaked out and ran out of there.”

Other than Joanna Jordan, the only other person to have ever seen the ghost was a young boy, while touring the Hall of Fame, began screaming, “Don’t you see her, don’t you see her,” says Jane Rodney, who was Hall’s coordinator of resource center services at the time. “He claimed a woman with long black hair was going in and out of the walls.”