By Ted McIntyre
Some renovation surprises are bigger than others.
Hissing raccoons, infestations of mice and old newspaper clippings are typical surprises renovators come across during the course of a project. But some of the discoveries they’ve come across behind walls, in ceilings or basements are extra weird.
Fifteen years ago, Lindsay Haley, director of construction for Ottawa’s Amsted Design-Build, was in Rockport to check out a house where a homeowner wanted to add a basement. “It was an old home set back off the road, and it was an eerie drive down the driveway and through the woods—the type of job where you don’t know what you’re getting into,” he says. “The property was overrun; there was so much stuff everywhere.”
When Haley knocked on the glass front door, a husky lunged at him from the other side of the glass. The owner soon joined the dog and coaxed it away—by offering it dead mice.
There was no access from the house to the crawl space, so Haley had to shimmy under the house through a tiny basement window.
“When I got in there, it was three feet from the ground to the bottom of the house,” he recalls. “I dug a test hole and hit something that appeared to be a rock. I discovered it was a large bone, perhaps a human femur. The owner was standing outside, asking what I found. It’s 6:30 at night, it’s getting dark, and I’m lying within inches of the bone I dug up.”
A freaked-out Haley backed out from under the house, told the homeowner about his discovery, and the man called the OPP. A forensic unit was brought in to test the bone. The homeowner called Haley a few days later to share the results: the bone was from a horse, not a human.
Despite Haley’s relief that he had not crawled up on human remains, “that job wasn’t for us,” he says.
On another occasion, Haley was asked to provide a quote for an ensuite bathroom. “I found a goat in the bedroom standing on their bed. It followed me downstairs later and got a drink out of the dog—or should I say goat—bowl.”
You’d think this would have been a once-in-a-lifetime sort of encounter, had it not been for the goat Haley discovered standing on the hood of his car at another job.
Some encounters with creatures haven’t been as whimsical. “We did one job along the St. Lawrence River where we had to move a boat to do the work,” Haley relates. “As we’re moving the boat, gray ratsnakes were slithering out of a back drain hole. The next day, I was working and looked down to see one wrapped around my boot.”
Although Haley wasn’t on this particular job, an Amsted crew had to deal with a nest of camel spiders behind a wall they demolished to create an ensuite bathroom in a second-floor condo in 2023. Usually found in the deserts of the Middle East, in the southwestern U.S. or parts of Asia and Africa, the arachnids aren’t venomous but have a painful bite. Haley says if reptiles, insects or animals are found on a job, they typically don’t try to move or disrupt them but instead call in professional removal services, as they did in this case.
While many unusual finds are discovered at lower levels, one could be described as ‘high’ for Scott Wootton. The former owner of Kawartha Lakes Construction, who now works in marketing for the company, Wootton remembers being hired to refinish an attic in an older two-and-a-half-storey house in Peterborough for the home’s new owner. As the crew got busy with the attic reno, which took place before marijuana was legalized in Canada, they found a medium-sized bag hidden deep in a recessed corner of a hipped roof.
“It was about the size of a kitchen-sized garbage bag and was clear plastic,” says Wootton. “It was full of weed. There was a lot. I’d say there was about a pound of it.”
They hung the bag off the collar ties and put it in plain sight to see what would happen. The insulators came in and moved it, and it disappeared somewhere during the drywall stage.
Wootton knew the prior owner of the house and, a few years later, ran into her by chance. Knowing that “she was cool,” he told her about the bag of weed found in the attic of her former house and asked her if one of her kids used to smoke pot. He did.
Grave Matters
A renovation job in Milton left no stone unturned, and that yielded a startling discovery for Sedgwick Marshall Heritage Homes Ltd. The Milton-based company restores and rehabilitates century heritage homes that new home builders such as Mattamy, Argo and Branthaven acquire on properties they plan to develop. A find made during a restoration of a house on Robert Street in Milton 20 years ago was strange, but that was just the beginning of an even stranger story.
While the home’s original pathway was being torn up to make way for a new one, a large mid-1800s tombstone was unearthed. It had been turned upside down and used as a stepping stone.
Mirella Marshall and her partner, Mandy Sedgwick, belong to the Milton Historical Society and knew another member, John Duignan, who collected local historical memorabilia. They asked him if he wanted the stone, and he said yes.
Duignan has an insurance office in downtown Milton and rented part of his building to a new-age metaphysical supply firm. The building is old, and Duignan and his staff claim to have experienced multiple other-worldly encounters, such as a playful spirit that once yanked files back from a staff member who was trying to pull them off a shelf. A medium visiting the shop walked up to Duignan’s office to investigate the spirit in the file room. She told Duignan she was receiving messages from Jennifer, Duignan’s late sister, who had died from cancer. In addition to reassuring Duignan that his sister was fine, the medium said Jennifer was trying to introduce him to someone named Jacob.
“I don’t know any Jacob,” Duignan said. The next day, he went to Marshall’s to pick up the tombstone and was surprised to see the name on it: Jacob Inglehart, who died on April 7, 1852, at age 54.
“I thought I’d better check that the tombstone wasn’t missing from a cemetery,” Duignan relates. “I went online and came across the tombstone, which had been located in the Fifty Cemetery in Winona.”
Duigan learned that it had overlooked Jacob’s grave for 18 years, but when Inglehart’s widow, Jane, died in 1870, the original tombstone was removed and replaced with a larger one with both their names on it. How the original stone ended up in a Milton pathway 50 km away remains a mystery.
Upon researching Inglehart, Duignan “got goosebumps.” Jacob was one of his ancestors. “Now I know why my sister was introducing him. It was incredibly wild.”
Today, the tombstone sits proudly at the front of Duignan’s home.
Naked Truth
Recently, Mark Ashton of Ashton Renovations in Toronto was doing a renovation of an older house in the city. As the crew removed an old fireplace mantel, they came across an original artwork, 10 by 10 inches, that had fallen behind the mantel.
It was an abstract watercolour but clearly a nude portrait. A nearby resident recognized the subject and explained that the former homeowner had been the artist, and the nude model for the painting had been the homeowner’s next-door neighbour.
“We just left it on site,” says Ashton.
Old newspaper clippings found behind walls are among what Ashton finds the most interesting. “It’s like going back in time. We once found an article talking about plans to go to the moon. It’s strange looking at it from the perspective of the time.”
If there’s a discovery Ashton despises, it’s raccoons. “When one jumps out from a wall and hisses at you, it’s startling. We call in animal control. We had one that ate through a steel trap. They are savage. Even in a new build, they’ll find their way in.”
Train of Thought
Scott Wennick of Ottawa’s ARTium Design Build has encountered numerous unusual discoveries, particularly in older homes.
“We were doing a renovation on an early ’60s bungalow that had a finished basement that the homeowners wanted to turn into an apartment,” says Wennick. “We were pulling down the ceiling in a closet, and there was a hatch to a hidden space. We found a big machete and a box of gun shells but threw them out. Fortunately, we didn’t find any blood.”
He also came across an old safe in a basement that a homeowner wanted removed and disposed of. “We couldn’t open it and talked to a moving company about taking it away. Safes are heavy and hard to move, so things like that often get buried or built around. The older the house, the more secrets you find.”
Wennick’s company often works in houses built from 1945 to 1950. The production of World War II equipment, such as tanks and planes, created a significant shortage of steel, making steel beams nearly impossible to source. “I’ve seen three houses of that era with a piece of railway track as the main beam in the middle of the house,” says Wennick. “They were each situated next to what used to be a railyard or railway line. The Queensway that runs through Ottawa’s centre core used to be a railway corridor. The houses with the railway track beams aren’t far away from there. Some industrious builder, probably in the dead of night, likely went out and picked up some track. I imagine carrying a railway track would need four or five people. They are 30 feet long—almost the perfect size to build a house.”
Wennick says a project ARTium carried out on an 1880s Ottawa home was also intriguing. While the basement was being renovated, the crew came across what the client had dubbed “the murder room” due to its small, dark and creepy nature—an 8’x15’ ‘apartment’ with one tiny window. It was a difficult-to-access space at the back of the house that had allegedly been rented out in its previous history.
Basements often are where you find the “neat stuff,” Wennick notes. And sometimes the smelliest. Consider a basement reno ARTium executed on an 1850s house near the Parliament Buildings. At the time, cast iron was the material of choice for sewage lines, and it eventually rusts. As the crew broke up concrete to install a new bathroom, they discovered that there was no plumbing left. It had all rusted away, and when the toilet was flushed, a cesspool was created below. Wennick says they kept breaking up the floor and finally found a piece of pipe intact and called in a specialist company to perform a “pipe within a pipe” injection.
“This homeowner was lucky. As the house was built on a cliff, there was enough rock and gravel that the fluid could gradually drain away,” Wennick says. “If it had been on flat ground, it would’ve had nowhere to go except back into the house.”
As fate would have it, Wennick is helping plant the seeds of future discoveries. As it’s the company’s 25th anniversary, ARTium is supplying time capsules to its clients to fill with whatever they want. Once filled, Wennick’s crew will secure the capsules behind the walls.
“We thought it would be a fun thing to do, and most people took advantage of it,” he says.
Who knows what will be unearthed when these hidden treasures are discovered decades from now.
Perhaps a painting of the neighbour?
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