Witching Hour - Legends

Witching Hour - Legends For decades, people said a tunnel in the basement of Abars on Riverside Drive East ran under the Detroit River to the U.S. No one ever proved it. The 1904 building came down in July 2016, and the tunnel question went with it.

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Witching Hour is our nightly local history and folklore feature. Ghost stories and legends are retold as stories people tell, not reported as fact. Sources are listed below the story.

Witching Hour - Legends

For decades, people in Windsor's east end told the same story: somewhere in the basement of Abars, a tunnel ran across the Detroit River.

The history is real. The Island View Hotel stood on Riverside Drive East at the foot of Lauzon Road, facing Belle Isle. A 1910 postcard in the University of Windsor's archive shows it on the shore. The building dated to 1904 and was once a stagecoach stop. Over time it became known as Abar's, from the French way of saying Hebert, the family that ran it. In the rum-running era, its spot across from Belle Isle made it part of the smuggling trade, and the Windsor Public Library says it was wired to other riverfront places so they could warn each other of a police raid.

The legend, told as legend and not fact: accounts mention hidden basement rooms and tunnels, and the story grew into a tunnel under the river itself. We found no record that a river tunnel was ever found, mapped or dug.

The building was added to the city's heritage register in 2010 and closed in November 2015 after a dispute between the owner and the tenants. The owner, Dauntless ULC, part of the Ambassador Bridge company, applied to demolish it. In June 2016, council turned down a bid to designate it a heritage site and allowed the demolition, on the condition that artifacts go to the city museum and that a plaque mark the site. Demolition began July 18, 2016.

The building is gone. The tunnel question was never settled.