Witching Hour - Legends: Willistead Manor and the face no one knew
Witching Hour - Legends Legend has it something waits in Willistead Manor's basement. Catering managers, the story goes, went down, came back up and quit on the spot. The real part: the manor was finished in 1906 for Edward Chandler Walker.
Topics: Witching Hour
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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.
Tonight's Witching Hour is a legend from Walkerville, told as legend, with the real history beside it.
The manor
Willistead Manor stands in a park in Walkerville. Detroit architect Albert Kahn designed it in the style of an old English Tudor manor house, with 36 rooms, and it was finished in 1906 for Edward Chandler Walker and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Griffin Walker. Edward named the estate for his brother Willis.
Edward died in 1915. In 1921 the estate was given to the town of Walkerville, and when Walkerville joined Windsor in 1935 it passed to the City of Windsor. In the years since, the manor has held the Walkerville town council, a library and the Art Gallery of Windsor.
The legend
Ghost walk tellers in Windsor have long told a story about the basement. The story goes that catering managers who worked events at the manor went down into the basement, came back up and quit on the spot, and would not say what they saw or heard. It is a ghost story, not a fact, and no one has ever shown what, if anything, is down there.
The odd part
For decades, no one alive knew what Mary Walker looked like. The one known photo of her was a worn print pulled from a time capsule, so faded it barely showed her face.
