The upstairs exhibit room beneath the gables of the hundred-year-old building gathers the heat on a summer day. And with no table or desk to work at, the young volunteer prefers to lie on the floor, the text panels she’s preparing spread in front of her, pencils and pens close at hand. A 14-year-old with a passion for history, Pam loves her summer volunteer job at the Meaford Museum, and she’s soon lost in her work.

She reaches for the blue marker to underline a title, but it’s gone. Of course! She knows it hasn’t simply rolled off or been accidentally kicked to the side. She’ll have better luck looking around a corner or underneath one of the exhibits – a place the marker would have no place being on its own. She prowls the room with some irritation, lifting items and peering behind furniture, until she locates the missing pen behind the wooden rocker of the old baby cradle. The ghost has been at it again!

Pam Woolner first heard about the ghost of the Meaford Museum in 1994, from the curator who hired her on in her first volunteer position. Today, Pam is herself the museum’s curator, and the ensuing 18 years have left her with a host of stories of the woman who walks the upstairs room.

“It used to sound like someone with boots on,” says Pam. “She got a big kick out of walking around, because I think she knew we could hear her footsteps downstairs.”

Before the renovation of the museum in 2003, the building – which was built to house the town’s pump house in 1895 – had not been much modified. Dark rooms crowded with antique curios led visitors to a winding narrow stairway up to the small exhibit room under the eaves. Former museum curator Fred MacDonnell once called the building a “dark, dank hole”.

The upstairs flooring was the original wood, and the thumps and creaks it gave off when someone (or something) crossed it told of their passing.

With no insulation, the upper room trapped summer heat, and Pam says it could regularly reach 120 degrees F. So the presence of the spirit was that much more noticeable. “That particular space would get hot very quickly,” says Pam, “But it wasn’t unusual to be walking around and all of a sudden have the temperature plummet 15 degrees in a spot maybe 2 feet square.”

Visitors would comment on “the cold spot”.

“There was no rational reason for it,” says Pam. “And it would move around; it was never in the same spot. Sensitive people would mention it and ask if we had a ghost.”

Her actions, and the ghost was a “she” as far as everyone was concerned, seemed centered around three artifacts in the upstairs exhibit: a century-old rope bed, an antique cradle, and a child’s doll. “She didn’t like it when we changed the way they were set up or put different things in them,” says Pam. “She would let us know she wasn’t too impressed.”

A few years back, a Meaford woman asked Pam if she’d come across some items her family had donated years before. Pam discovered a few pieces of weaving that fit the description, and tucked them in the cradle. When the woman arrived the next day to see the items, they were nowhere to be found. “She decided to move them on me,” says Pam with a sigh. “She made me look like a complete idiot in front of the lady who’d come in.”

It was months before the items surfaced – on a shelf in the attic behind a locked door. To this day, no one who would have had access to the key has admitted to moving them.

Another time, the morning after setting up a display case of men’s grooming supplies in the upstairs room, staff discovered it had been completely rearranged. “It looked better,” says Pam. “We left it that way.”

Even as a teen, when Pam had to crawl around looking for pencils that had mysteriously disappeared, she never felt afraid of the spirit. “She isn’t malevolent. I’ve never felt threatened by her or scared by her,” she says. “I’ve been frustrated by her jokes, irritated, duped by thinking there was someone walking around upstairs, but I’ve never had any fear.”

The gentleman climbs the narrow stairway heavily, and soon he can be heard moving around upstairs as he examines the exhibit. Pam has a lot of work to do, and visitors pop in throughout the day, so the shadows have grown long before she notices that the upstairs visitor hasn’t yet come down. Nearly three hours have passed, and the exhibit is small. She realizes suddenly that she hasn’t heard his footsteps in some time. He was somewhat heavyset, she remembers, and a tingle of worry crosses her spine. What if he’s fallen over, or had a heart attack, even? It’s only when she heads for the stairs to check that she hears the man descending.

“He told me he’d talked to her for quite an extensive period of time,” says Pam. But, taken aback by the idea that the spirit had actually spoken, she didn’t press the man for details. “I remember asking what she looked like, but I was a little too shocked to ask exactly what they talked about. I wish I had now.”

So who is the ghostly figure who haunts the Meaford Museum? Some have suggested her story lies in a tragic past. More on that in Part 2.