Recorded as local legend, not as proven fact. Names, dates, and buildings are real; the haunting is the story people keep telling.
1312 Bay Street was built in 1913 as the Home Store, A. Lawson proprietor, a women’s clothing shop that ran from 1913 to 1929 and was known for its windows. Lawson expanded near the start of the Depression and then went under, which is a common enough sentence for that year and still a hard one if it was your name on the glass. Local historians have it that in April 1930 he shot himself in the building and died about a month later. That is the civic memory. It is not a tour script that needs embellishment.
The address is now the Spark Museum of Electrical Invention, a public museum with a radio station in the mix. The old dry-goods floors hold transmitters, horns, and the kind of apparatus that makes a room hum even when it is not plugged in. The building’s second life is louder than its first. That matters, because the haunt reports are mostly about sound.
Dress-shoe footsteps after hours are the core of it. Staff and volunteers have described a walk that is not the work-boot walk of a man closing a shop in 1929, or not always. The dress-shoe version is reported more often by women, which is a detail the story has kept without explaining. There is a work-boot version that people are more willing to call Lawson. There is a DJ story involving a theremin that behaved as if it had an operator. Museums accumulate after-hours stories the way they accumulate surplus inventory. Some of it is the building. Some of it is the hour.
The story spread in the ordinary way: museum gossip, then a feature, then haunted-museum lists that copy features. Lawson’s death is the hook because it is specific and sad and happened on the premises. The footsteps are the hook because a clothing merchant in dress shoes is an image you can see on Bay Street after the lights are out. Nobody has to prove the shoes to keep the image.
What is unknown is the interior of Lawson’s last month, beyond the fact of the wound and the delay before he died. Suicide files from 1930 are not written for later radio stations. The museum does not owe the public a séance. It owes the public a building history and a collection, both of which it has.
Spark is open on a schedule. The Home Store’s windows are gone. The man who dressed them is a name in the local histories and a pair of footsteps that may be the heating system and may be something the night staff would rather not argue about. The record stops at the death. The rest is what a museum sounds like when it is supposed to be empty.