With files from Jennifer McIntyre
As we learned last week, the first Halloween celebration in our area took place in Iroquois Falls in 1917.
And one of the spookiest places there was built a few years later. Kim Price and her sister, Alexa Wollan grew up at the Hotel Iroquois in the 1960s, when their father, Walter Oldham managed it for the Abitibi Paper Company.
(Iroquois Falls Pioneer Museum)
Price says going through the boiler room to the laundry room was like being in a horror movie.
“The furnace would bang and there’d be all kinds of sounds and it was so dark and I swear there were spider webs,” Price recounts. “So we used to just bet each other and run through as fast as you could.”
Even though the ice room was no longer use, it was worse.
“It was all a big wooden floor,” says Price. “It was, just to open the door, creaked and it was so spooky there. We used to go there every Halloween and bring kids and they would walk through the ice room, but it was terrifying.”
Price is also convinced there were ghosts in the hotel’s basement. The building was demolished in 1977.
(Photo by Jennifer McIntyre)
