2026 Guided Spirit Walks: Character Biographies Part 2

Learn more about the historic personalities included on this year’s annual Guided Spirit Walks including Mary McCalla, D.W. Bixby, Lily Wilson, and Robert Lawrie.

Pictured is Brenda Schultz as Martha Burgoyne in the 2024 Guided Spirit Walks. Brenda returns to portray Martha Ann St. John this year.

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14th Annual Guided Spirit Walks – The Source Material

It’s this imbalance of the application of justice, which runs through all the source materials – letters, diaries, court records, jail lists, summaries of convictions, and most of all, newspapers – that threads the many narratives of crime together in this year’s walks. Hundreds of pages of newspapers and handfuls of letters, testimony, and court records show us a St. Catharines that in some ways is unrecognizable, and in other ways, show us that society still has a long way to go.

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Reminiscences of 10 years of Guided Spirit Walks

There’s nothing quite like a guided tour through a cemetery. There are a lot of versions of this type of event. A spooky walk in the dark, a theatrical ‘spirit walk’ featuring actors portraying folks buried in the cemetery, or even an afternoon historian-led walking tour. Everyone has their favourite experience but it’s the theatrical spirit walk that advances important and personal historical narratives with a high return on interpretive value. The spirit walks also have the unique ability to allow us to lift the primary sources found in the Museum’s collection off the pages of the archives and bring them to life. In most cases, there may not be another opportunity to present those archival sources to the public.

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Museum Chat Live! E405 – Obituaries

In honour of ooky-spooky Halloween time, this Museum Chat Live! episode explores local obituaries in St. Catharines newspapers. Obituaries can be incredibly valuable sources for understanding the nuances of society at a particular moment in time.

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