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Hotel Europe is a 6-storey flatiron building that stands at the corner of Water, Alexander and Powell Streets in Gastown (near Chill Winston). The 100 + year old building was completed in 1909 and his home to one, possibly two ghosts.

The ground floor, which is currently occupied by Kimprints paintings store used to be restaurant. Beneath the restaurant was an underground saloon accessed by stairs from a sidewalk entrance. The underground area, including the saloon extended beneath the sidewalk on both sides of the Hotel Europe, this extension is commonly known as “areaways”, a typical feature of buildings in Gastown. Areaways were used to load/unload freight through trap doors in the sidewalk. The Hotel Europe’s areaways were filled in and bricked up and the underground saloon is now a storage cellar.

As for the supernatural experiences at The Hotel Europe, the first reported encounter with the paranormal was in the 80′s by a contractor who was doing some repair work in the cellar, near the old areaway entrance. While working on the repairs, he left briefl, when he returned, his tools had been scattered on the floor. Perhaps they fell on their own or perhaps it was one of the spirits that haunts this fantastic building. If that wasn’t eerie enough, he also heard scratching noises coming from behind the brick wall. The contractor refused to come to back to finish up the job. To this day, scratching noises have been reported by numerous people coming from the other side of the bricked up areaway. It could be rodents, however, the areas ways have been filled in a long time ago.

The second ghost is that of a man who occasionally appears in Kimprints. One evening, after closing time a store clerk saw the ghost clearly reflected in the security mirror. When she went to check it out, nobody was there. The same employee also reported seeing the spirit of man again on another occasion.