Haunted headquarters Gags Unlimited moves into new digs with a definite connection to the afterlife By: Ben Waldman Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Monday, Nov. 1, 2021

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This article was published 01/11/2021 (1451 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gags Unlimited will soon have a new home, and it’s supposedly haunted.

The Winnipeg party supply and novelty staple is being disinterred from its current home in Osborne Village to be buried in a spookier part of town: the old Hamilton House at the corner of Henderson Highway and McIntosh Avenue, a building where the original owners once conducted metaphysical experiments such as seances in attempts — including some purportedly successful ones — to communicate with the dead.

Gags Unlimited owner Cheryl Wiebe heard about the listing from her psychic medium.

“She felt it would be a good fit,” said Wiebe, who bought the business almost seven years ago from the original owner, who started the store nearly 40 years earlier.

Wiebe bought the business after a motor vehicle crash ended her career as a Red Seal millwright, seeing it as a good opportunity to start fresh with an established enterprise. For the first five years, business went quite well, but in the last two years, a trio of unforeseen struggles converged into a bit of a nightmare.

First, there was a shortage of helium: of the three processing plants for the gas in the U.S., two were shut down for long stretches, leaving slightly less than one third of the finite substance, which is extremely expensive to store, available for gas suppliers to distribute across the continent, Wiebe said. Much of what was available was sent to hospitals, where helium is used for devices such as MRI machines. Bad news for physicists and purveyors of party balloons.

Then, as helium supplies rose and prices accordingly fell back to earth, the pandemic came, and parties, galas, weddings and more were cancelled — yet another burst to Gags Unlimited’s bubble.

Finally, in September 2020, the building and lot where Gags Unlimited had operated for decades was sold to a developer called Seekville Inc., heralding an end of an era in Osborne Village.

With Halloween around the corner, Wiebe was left to ponder what came next. She didn’t want to sign a long-term lease, given the uncertainty of the pandemic, which, paired with the helium situation, made for the worst year on record for the business. “I had to contemplate closing,” she recalled recently. “Commercial space was so expensive and I couldn’t justify any of it.”

Following her medium and friend Bernice Bisson’s intuition, she considered Hamilton House, where 100 years earlier, the family who lived there also considered what came next. Dr. T.G. Hamilton and his wife, Lillian, weren’t thinking about the next fiscal quarter, though: they were considering the next life.

Dr. Hamilton, a leading orthopaedic surgeon who became president of the Manitoba Medical Association, chair of the Winnipeg Public School Board and the MLA for Elmwood, was drawn into the supernatural and metaphysical world in 1918, when he visited a medium in the United States. Intrigued, but not convinced, he returned home. His dormant interest was invigorated the following year when his son Arthur died in the influenza epidemic of 1919; Lillian encouraged her husband to explore ways to communicate with the three-year-old beyond the grave.

The Hamiltons conducted thorough experiments in telekinesis and table-lifting, photographing the parapsychological work in a room on the second floor. Their family nanny, Elizabeth Poole, was photographed levitating and inverting a table. Soon, work with mediums followed, and ectoplasm — a material emerging from the mouths and ears of mediums — was captured on film, supposedly.

Seances came, with guests including prominent local doctor Bruce Chown and legal scion Isaac Pitblado. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes books and himself a parapsychological enthusiast, visited the Hamilton House while on a North American tour.

All the while, Hamilton maintained a steady reputation in the city’s political and medical circles, before finally presenting findings in 1926 to the Winnipeg Medical Society. “I did not know whether or not I would have a shred of professional prestige left when I was through,” Dr. Hamilton wrote in Intention and Survival, a book published after his death in 1935, completed by his son and available in the Hamilton Fonds in the University of Manitoba’s digital collection.

To his surprise, his findings and insights were treated with respect. “I wish to pay tribute to our friend and fellow member, Dr. T. Glen Hamilton for the efforts he has made, and is making along this line of thought and discovery,” Manitoba Medical Society president R. Rennie Swan said in 1930.

“Whatever criticism may be made of his work, no one can ever attempt to deny the truth of the wonderful phenomena which have come under his observation. We know our man, and we know that he is in this work a student and investigator, and we can have nothing but admiration and praise for him,” he added. “And let me also say, thanks, for the work he is doing.”

The house remained in possession of the Hamilton family until 1986, changing hands once more and most recently serving as a homeopathic clinic. But the owners decided to list it almost two years ago, and the job of marketing and selling the dually zoned property fell to Emma Alfons, a realtor with Coldwell Banker Commercial Preferred Real Estate.

It was a tough job: several promising starts fell through, and for a while, Alfons must have wondered what she had gotten into. Then Wiebe called, and with some negotiation and support from her husband, managed to seal the deal.

“I’m humbled by the whole experience,” Alfons said. “This property came with its own personality and went to the right hands.”

“The Hamilton House is a true landmark in Winnipeg and my career,” she added.

Wiebe, who grew up in a family that was open to the possibilities of the occult, took possession Sept. 18, and plans to move Gags Unlimited’s retail operation into the building’s main floor and to turn the residential suites upstairs into spooky AirBnBs, while selling off the bulk of the stock in Osborne Village at discount prices.

Despite legends that the house is haunted, and its eerie past, Wiebe said it has a good energy.

“My grandkids love it. My dogs love it. They run around and play, and if the dogs aren’t worried, I’m not worried,” she said.

Neither is her medium.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca