"I have spent many hours wandering the cemetery at St. George's church.  It is truly the most interesting, beautiful, peaceful and mystical place. I believe there are many spirits there.  I have "felt" things there but never seen anything, however I have usually been there in the day time hours.  When I lived in the area, it was my favourite place to go when I needed to think; there was a bench where you could sit overlooking Lake Simcoe.

I would like to relate another story about Stephen Leacock on a nearby property a few miles from Sibbald's Point.  My parents lived on a farm on what used to be called "Hell Hill, near the hamlet of Egypt, southeast of Sutton.  This was the farm Stephen Leacock grew up on after his family emigrated from England.  The Leacock farmhouse had burned down in the 1960's and all that was left was a pile of rubble/fieldstone from the foundation of the house.  English perennial flowers still grew beside the foundation of the house.  My late stepfather had a framed photograph of Stephen Leacock which he displayed in a prominent location in the tack room of his horse barn.  He had told me many times he had seen Stephen Leacock's ghost wandering around on the farm, especially around the site of the old farmhouse."

 

 

Stephen Butler Leacock (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was an English-born Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist. In the early part of the 20th century he was the best-known humorist in the English-speaking world. Leacock was born in Swanmore, near Bishop's Waltham, Hampshire, England, and at the age of six moved to Canada with his family, which settled on a farm in Egypt, Ontario, near the village of Sutton and the shores of Lake Simcoe. While the family had been well off in England (the Leacocks had made a fortune in Madeira and lived on an estate called Oak Hill on the Isle of Wight), Leacock's father, Peter, had been banished from the manor for marrying Agnes Butler without his parents' permission. The farm in the Georgina township of York County was not a success and the family (Leacock was the third of eleven children) was kept afloat by money sent by Leacock's grandfather.