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Amie Flanigan wondered if any of her ancestors were among the ghosts haunting her workplace, the Erie Canal Museum. Once, in a meeting with a medium, she interjected the medium’s questioning to ask if the spirit’s last name was “Flanigan.” It was.

Sitting on the library floor, Flanigan discovered one of her ancestors, Peter Flanigan, was alongside her at the museum. The medium continued questioning via an electronic voice phenomenon reader.

“The medium…asked ‘Is John Flanigan here?’ and the recording said ‘Always,’” Flanigan recounted.

The Erie Canal Museum is host to countless spirits — so many that the people who work there don’t even have an estimate. The staff at the museum focuses on its exhibits, which showcase archival material, while knowing the museum is haunted. The museum sits atop the former Erie Canal, drawing ghosts from the history of canal workers, their families and people who drowned.

The Haunted History Trail of New York State features the location as one of the most haunted in Syracuse. Most recently, the museum gave its third annual ghost tour ahead of Halloween.

The Erie Canal Museum has four primary levels. The first is home to the museum’s exhibition and the former canal’s location. The basement is perhaps its spookiest level, which the employees avoid the most. Upstairs, you’ll find the library and offices. Finally, the attic stores some of the museum’s archives.

Since she began working at the museum, Flanigan said she has smelled, heard and dealt with more ghost encounters than any of her coworkers. Sometimes her technology goes awry, and she’ll try unsuccessfully to fix it. But when someone else comes to help, it’s fixed the second they touch the computer.

Before she started at the museum over 10 years ago, Flanigan wasn’t aware that her ancestors had worked on the canal. But now, the ghostly encounters have inspired her to do more research about her family.

Courtesy of Amie Flanigan

The current site of the Erie Canal Museum, back when the canal was a major shipping network. The Erie Canal formally ran between the Hudson River and Lake Erie.

Flanigan is the archivist and collection manager, so she spends her time shifting through historical items anyway.

Her ancestors are from her hometown of Oswego, 40 minutes north of Syracuse. She doesn’t know why they would haunt the Erie Canal Museum other than the fact that she works there.

“Honestly, I was not surprised,” Flanigan said. “It’s just the kind of thing that would happen to me.”

In the building’s original purpose as a weighlock station, boats would come into one chamber to be weighed and locked in with the water drained. People from all across the state passed through this specific stop.

Though they don’t know how many spirits occupy the museum, the workers know the supposed stories of a few.

According to one story, a captain’s wife stayed on the boat while workers weighed it. The tiller, used to steer the boat, swung and knocked her overboard. Another spirit is a little boy who drowned and told a medium he felt sad that he was stuck. Other ghosts are women secretaries of engineers.

Cassie Roshu | Digital Managing Editor

A statue of William O’Brien, an early 1900s canal superintendent, in the weighmaster’s office. Museum employees who turn off the lights in the office at night typically feel uncomfortable doing so.

Since the Syracuse canal was drained, the first level of the museum has since been sealed and now features a model boat similar to what many would have sailed on. Flanigan isn’t too curious about the ghosts here — she knows everything she wants to for now.

The bigger curiosities stem from the second floor, where the staff works. Oftentimes, they hear sounds they can’t explain. Steph Adams, the director of interpretation, once heard typing from Flanigan’s office, next door to theirs. Naturally, Adams assumed it was Flanigan. But she wasn’t in her office.

“I saw her go past, and my stomach, it just dropped,” Adams said. “I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’”

Flanigan used to work in Adams’ current office and experienced the same phenomenon of hearing typing when no one was there. Flanigan said this same office space is where the staff has encountered the most spirit activity.

She recalls a story from a former curator, who’s the only person to report actually seeing a spirit. One day while sitting in his office, a man stood in the doorway and blankly stared at him.

“The curator said, ‘Can I help you?’ and the man just looked irritated and turned around and walked away,” Flanigan said.

As he walked away, he disappeared before he reached the exit.

Usually, the day-to-day experiences with spirits don’t really feel creepy for the museum staff. One woman’s spirit hangs out with Adams in their office. Overwhelmed with modern-day technology, the ghost likes to sit in Adams’ chair.

“It does encourage me to stand on my standing desk a little more because I’ll say, ‘Okay, I’ll let the ghost have a chair for a little while,’” Adams said.

The attic is another hot spot for paranormal activity. One ghost grew attached to Rachel Rumbold, who now works as a collections assistant, when she was an intern. Surrounded by boxes, Rumbold sat at a tiny desk, alone in the attic, looking at the Canal Society archives.

Three times, Rumbold heard heavy footsteps. They’d check to see if anyone was there. Each time, she found she was alone.

Cassie Roshu | Digital Managing Editor

A baby carriage, belonging to the Gridley family, is stored in the Erie Canal Museum attic. A museum employee once saw the carriage roll back and forth on its own.

Since ghost tours and mediums are common at the museum, the next time someone toured, the team decided to ask about Rumbold’s ghost. That’s when they discovered his name: Jason.

“He was coming to check on me, just to see how I was doing and stuff and if I was working, so it never felt malicious,” Rumbold said. “I was chill with it.”

Since completing their time as an intern, their work has mainly stayed in the museum’s main floors. She said Jason hadn’t followed her down.

While most experiences feel pretty tame, there are certain places the staff avoids, like the basement, which they said they don’t show anyone because it has bad energy. One hallway by the weight masters room, where the boat’s tolls would be logged, and the basement have it especially.

The staff doesn’t know when the basement was dug out since it’s not part of the original building. One basement door has an Egyptian ankh symbol. Flanigan doesn’t know if it’s there because the previous owners simply liked the symbol, or if it’s there to keep something out.

Either way, a medium discovered a man’s spirit trapped in the door. The medium said he’s stuck in a constant loop and can’t get out because of the symbol’s presence. But the true story remains a mystery.

One way the staff mitigates each person’s frightening experiences is by divvying up who turns off the lights. As daylight savings approaches and the building gets dark quickly, the staff rush to turn them off. Many of the lights are on a breaker switch, though, automatically turning some off and leaving some staff in the dark.

When Adams has to turn the lights off in their attic workspace, they run out like a little kid, they said.

“I put my phone flashlight on, and I go very quickly, but I’ve lived in houses that I thought were haunted before,” Adams said.

The staff handles the museum’s spookiness with a little bit of humor.

Flanigan found an old doll in a box of toys, though no one knows why it’s there. She decided it would be funny to place the doll in the carriage, much to Adams’ chagrin.

“I don’t like dolls,” Adams said. “I very quickly walked away.”

Adams sticks to “their side” of the attic. They avoid the carriage and dolls as much as possible. But at the end of the day, it is part of their job.

While some things may bother Adams, Flanigan is impartial to it all. Her humor is important to her connection with the spirits.

“If I was dead and attached to some physical location, I feel like even if they didn’t have a sense of humor when they were alive, they’d have to develop one,” Flanigan said.

At this point, these kinds of encounters rarely bother staff because they’ve grown accustomed to them. Working in the museum, the staff may sometimes be physically alone, with no one living around. But they feel like they’re never alone.

“Everyone’s happy to be here,” Flanigan said about the spirits. “The spirits are interested in looking out for the building and interested in what we’re doing in it.”

Published on October 31, 2024 at 1:53 am

Contact Rosina: rlboehm@syr.edu