Casa Loma: Pellatt's Castle and Its Ghost Legend

Casa Loma is a 98-room Gothic Revival mansion on the lot next to Spadina House in Toronto, built for financier Sir Henry Pellatt between 1911 and 1914 and lost by him within a decade. Its ghost legend does not come from a resident haunting; it comes from a 1930s radio broadcaster who spent a night inside the empty castle specifically to write about the supernatural, and whose story helped save the building from demolition.

What follows draws on the castle's documented history.

Who Built Casa Loma, and Why?

Sir Henry Pellatt was a wealthy Toronto financier when he commissioned architect E. J. Lennox, the same architect behind Toronto's Old City Hall, to design a private residence unlike anything else in Canada. Construction began in 1911, and it took 299 workers three years to finish, with the house completed in 1914. At 64,700 square feet across 98 rooms, Casa Loma was, at the time, the largest private residence in the country.

The house sits on Davenport Hill, an escarpment above Davenport Road, which gives the property its name, Casa Loma, Spanish for "hill house." On the neighbouring lot stands Spadina House, the other grand Toronto residence this magazine has already traced, built from 1866 by James Austin and home to his family for more than a century, on more modest, if still substantial, terms.

How Did Pellatt Lose His Own Castle?

Pellatt enjoyed Casa Loma for less than ten years. The outbreak of the First World War halted further construction almost immediately, and the postwar years brought financial trouble that the house itself made worse: during the depression that followed the war, the City of Toronto raised Casa Loma's property taxes from 600 dollars a year to 1,000 dollars a month, and a residence built to impress turned into a liability that cost more to keep than to abandon.

Already in financial difficulty, Pellatt auctioned off 1.5 million dollars in art and 250,000 dollars in furnishings in an effort to stay afloat. It was not enough. He left Casa Loma in 1923, and the City of Toronto seized the property the following year, in 1924, for unpaid taxes. The largest private residence in Canada sat vacant, its original owner gone for good.

How Did a Ghost Story Help Save the Castle?

For years after the seizure, Casa Loma's future was genuinely uncertain, and demolition was a live possibility for a building nobody wanted to pay to maintain. The turn came from an unlikely source: CFRB radio broadcaster Claire Wallace made a public appeal to save the castle from the wrecking ball, and as part of building that case, she spent a night inside the empty building specifically to gather material for a story about ghosts and supernatural phenomena.

Wallace's overnight stay was reporting with an angle, not a formal investigation, and the historical record treats it that way: a journalist's device to draw attention to an empty, visibly spooky castle rather than a confirmed account of a haunting. It worked. The publicity around her appeal helped bring in the Kiwanis Club of West Toronto, which leased Casa Loma in 1937 and began running it as the tourist attraction that, in one form or another, it has remained ever since. The castle that almost fell to a wrecking ball survived in large part because someone made its emptiness sound haunted.

Does Casa Loma Have a Documented Haunting?

Not in the way Gibraltar Point Lighthouse or Fort York do, where this magazine has already traced a specific violent death and a specific battle behind each location's folklore. Casa Loma's ghost reputation rests almost entirely on Wallace's 1930s broadcast stunt and on decades of the castle sitting empty, dimly lit, and visibly abandoned at exactly the point its legend took hold. No historical record ties a death or a documented tragedy to the building the way those other entries do.

That makes Casa Loma a useful contrast rather than a repeat of this magazine's other haunted-place entries. The folklore here was not inherited from an old tragedy slowly retold over generations. It was built in a single, deliberate broadcast, by a reporter who needed a story and a castle that, empty through the Depression years, was already playing the part.

Who Runs Casa Loma Today?

The Kiwanis Club of West Toronto's 1937 lease began Casa Loma's long run as a public attraction, and the castle has continued operating as a museum and event venue since, passing to new operators over the decades. Liberty Entertainment Group took over its management in 2014, and the castle today hosts tours, exhibitions and seasonal events across the same 98 rooms Pellatt built and then, within a decade, could no longer afford to keep.

Why Does Casa Loma Belong Beside Spadina House in This Archive?

The two houses sit side by side at the top of the old shoreline cliff climbed by the Baldwin Steps and tell opposite versions of the same Toronto story. Spadina House survived as a documented Austin family home for more than a century and a long, continuous record. Casa Loma was built faster, lost faster, and saved by a ghost story rather than by a family's steady occupancy. Read together, the two residences show how differently a grand Toronto house can end up in this magazine's archive: one through a slow accumulation of witnessed history, the other through a single broadcaster's deliberate, successful attempt to make an empty building sound alive.