There’s nothing like a good ghost story to get the old ticker pumping. Especially when it’s about a downtown Prince George restaurant back in its heyday.
It’s the perfect blend of history and mystery.
Photos on the wall were found askew every morning, people felt like they were being watched, open doors were found closed and footfalls could be heard when nobody else was there. The phone jangled and a vintage radio would play. There was even a sighting of a greyish ghostly image strolling from one room to another. The closest encounter was a literal brush with the ghost that was so very chilling.
Those are the ghosts stories told by Rosel and Wilf Vogt, owners of Rosel’s restaurant that sat at 1624 Seventh Avenue, now called The Heritage House, back in the 1980s and 90s.
Rosel said they have always been reluctant to talk about the haunting.
“That wasn’t the image we wanted for the restaurant so we didn’t exploit that,” Rosel said.
“The way it came to the foreground was actually because of Ben Meisner. He used to live in that house before we bought it and converted it into a restaurant. Once we were open he came in and with a smirk on his face he asked me ‘how do you get along with the ghost?’"
Well, Rosel was speechless and didn’t think anything of it for the longest time, she said.
“I didn’t even bother to give him a response,” Rosel said.
But when she started putting two and two together she realized there might be some reality behind what she considered a cheeky question asked in jest.
And so it began.
“Over time we realized there were funny things happening,” Rosel said. “We had a housekeeper and her duty was in the afternoon.”
She would be in the basement in the laundry area washing all the table linens and if Rosel and Wilf had to go out she would pack up and leave with them.
“She told us ‘I can’t be in this place alone, somebody is always watching me',” Rosel explained.
“And I would say ‘oh you silly girl, no one could even look in through the window - look around - there’s only one tiny window over there and even if someone was there they can’t see you over here’.”
The most obvious one was the family photos on the wall were always crooked - so crooked they were sideways at times.
“I would find the photos of our grandparents and other family members so messed up I would think there had been an earthquake overnight,” Rosel recalled. “That went on for months and months but we got so used to it we just straightened them out every morning.”
One day she met one of her neighbours and was told the story of who was haunting the building.
“She told me the story of the first owner of the house who had a man servant,” Rosel said. “Over the years the man servant got very despondent because he couldn’t bring his family over from China. So he hanged himself in a closet in the house. When she described which closet it was I realized we had taken the closet out and the back wall of that closet is the wall where we hung all our family photos. I guess the ghost felt at home there and didn’t like all our pictures.”
After hours, Wilf would go to work down in the basement office and sometimes things went bump in the night.
“Everything would be locked up and then all of a sudden you would hear somebody walking around upstairs,” Wilf recalled. “We would think we left the door unlocked and someone had walked in but there was never anyone up there.”
One night, Wilf and Rosel were both down in the office and the footfalls sounded like a pack of people had broken into the restaurant. There were several occasions over the years people had indeed broken in to steal the liquor at the bar in the restaurant and at the time it seemed like a real threat.
“So Wilf grabbed something and I grabbed a broom and we stormed up the stairs as quietly as we could ready to smack somebody and nothing,” Rosel said. “The door was locked.”
Wilf recalled one afternoon the phone started jangling and an old radio that wasn’t plugged in started to play.
And what happens to your heart when something like that happens?
“Nothing,” Rosel said. “We got used to it. And if you left a door open, it would be closed the next time you passed by.”
There was never any feeling of dread that came with all the unusual occurrences.
“We never got a bad feeling,” Wilf said. “It was just entertainment after a while.”
But then the close encounter happened that left Rosel cold.
"I went about my business of closing up the restaurant while Wilf was down in the office," she recalled. "I was checking the windows and making sure the door locks were secure, making sure the place settings were all in order, you know, just the regular things. And all of a sudden as I came into the bar I saw this person out of the corner of my eye walk from the lounge into the sunroom. I just thought it was my imagination. And it wasn't a person - it was this greyish thing. I went there and reached into the room to turn on the lights and something came out of that room, touched me on both arms, turned me sideways, and went by me."
There was a bit of a pause in the conversation to let that sink in.
"I couldn't see anything but I felt that touch and it was so cold," Rosel said, rubbing away the goose bumps on her arms as she recalled her most frightening encounter. "Oh gosh, I dropped everything and walked away as quietly as I could. I must have been in some sort of trance because I went down those stairs very slowly and I sat down and Wilf said to me 'what was going on up there - did you let some people in?' I said 'no, it was just me walking around'."
Wilf told Rosel she looked very strange so she told him what happened and they walked through the whole place but there was nothing there.
"That's when I decided to question that Ben Meisner about his smirk and his question 'how do you get along with the ghost?'" Rosel said.
"They moved out of that house because they couldn't stand it anymore," Wilf said.
"They used to live there when it was a house," Rosel explained. "Ben said they had to move out because one of his daughters always had incidents happen in the basement and she refused to come home so they moved out. Ben said his daughter said there was someone always watching her and that's exactly what the housekeeper had said."
The Vogts went on the radio during one of Ben Meisner’s shows to talk about it years ago but that was the only time they publicly acknowledged the ghost. Until now.
In the early 90s the Vogts decided to build a dwelling onto the restaurant because the burglaries were so frequent they thought if they lived there it would stop. It worked. People were only brave enough to break in and steal the liquor if they knew the building was empty, Rosel explained.
And did the ghost ever wander into their home?
"It was the biggest surprise - never - nothing, not a peep," Wilf said.
"It was almost like he was pleased that we lived there," Rosel added. "We had that kind of feeling. Maybe he wanted some company."
"You never know with ghosts," Wilf smiled.
Like most people, both Rosel and Wilf didn't even consider ghosts to be a real thing before their close encounter.
"We never even gave it a thought," Rosel said. "But how can you not believe after going through something like that?"
