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Sunday 8 September 2024

Behind the Photo: Old city hall's goat skelton

 © 2024, Christian Cassidy

Often I will see an old photo or ad and spend some time digging into its back story. Sometimes I find a great story, sometimes not. Either way, I learn a few things about the city's history. Here's my latest attempt:


March 21, 1936, Winnipeg Free Press

While researching my latest Free Press Community Review column on the history of Winnipeg's civic clocks, I came across a creepy story about the presence of a long-dead goat in the clock tower of the old 'gingerbread' city hall. Where did it come from and how did it get up there? Here's a look back at mentions of the goat over the decades.

The first mention I can find of the goat skeleton comes in the March 21, 1936 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press. Photographer and columnist Nicholas Morant led some of his Free Press colleagues up the tower to show them the “mysterious city hall goat”.  It is likely him who took the photo shown above. 

Morant asked around at city hall about the origins of what he presumed was a mountain goat and found that it “definitely has been there for more than 15 years” and was possibly the remains of a stuffed exhibit from a "natural history society" operating in city hall around 1900. (This was likely the Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba, forerunner to the Manitoba Historical Society, that had a reading room and display area at city hall until they were asked to move the Carnegie Library when it opened in 1905.)

U of M Digital Collections, Winnipeg Tribune Photograph Index


Dead or alive, getting the goat into the tower would have been a challenge.

Piecing together the makeup of the tower using various newspaper articles finds that it could be accessed from the top of floor of city hall using a narrow staircase.

The tower itself had three floors. The first two had a large room in the centre, presumably for storage, that could be closed off with a door. Leading up from the second floor was a curved staircase or ladder that went to the top level where the bell and clock works were. There were 67 stairs in total from the top of city hall to the top of the tower.

According to Morant, the goat's remains were in the tower's second floor storage room.


July 14, 1934, Winnipeg Tribune


The next mention of the goat skeleton comes courtesy of Winnipeg Tribune municipal editor A. V. Thomas in a July 1934 story celebrating the 50th anniversary of the laying of the building's cornerstone.

Thomas wrote glowingly of the building but said of the goat: "... it is enough to make anyone pause and shudder to come suddenly across a skeleton lying amid the dust and dirt. What's more, the head has been severed and lies a few feet away." (The head was likely moved during that Free Press visit of 1932.)

Thomas was told a similar story that it was thought to have been part of a museum display at city hall. he added, "Whether the stuffing shifted with age or whether the goat degenerated from another causes, it was deemed advisable to put it away. Just how it got into the upper precincts of the city hall is a mystery." 

The skeleton had never been removed, Thomas was told, because of the difficulty of get something that large down the narrow staircase.


October 9, 1948. Windsor Star


The goat's presence would be recounted in a story about city hall every few years.

A September 1948 Free Press article described how local jeweller William T. "Bill" Muirhead had been the unofficial caretaker of the clock for over 20 years and had made the journey to visit it hundreds of times.

It noted that one of the things he has to pass is the goat: "It must have been a massive creature in life and just how it came to its death chamber remains a mystery of the city hall. No one goes near the skeleton for the floor is shakey and the room is locked."

The wire story was picked up by at least one other Canadian newspaper, prompting the above headline in the Windsor Star.


Looking east from clock tower, September 1900. (City of Winnipeg Archives)


The legend of the goat grew in the late 1950s.

According to an unnamed Free Press reporter writing a retrospective of the building in April 1960, Mayor George Sharpe started his "famous clock tower tours" in 1954 by taking "... guileless visitors up the winding wooden starts to the very top of the clock tower."

Points of interest along the way were "crude drawings on the walls" and the goat, noting that "the goat's skeleton, still a mystery, lies on the floor area declared unsafe so it cannot be retrieved."


May 17, 1957, Winnipeg Free Press


Mayor Stephen Juba continued the tours when he took over as mayor in 1957, though the purpose of his visits was not to show off its history or views. He had long pushed for a new city hall building for Winnipeg and took reporters and other officials up to show the poor condition of the tower. (Since the early 1950s there was talk of removing the tower portion the building due to its sagging fllors and numerous large cracks.)

One Free Press reporter who went on a May 1957 tour noted, "among the sights of the tour were the mouldering bones ... of a goat's body left there years ago by pranksters." This first mention of "pranksters", Juba's take on how the bones got there, would be repeated in Free Press stories for years to come.


Demolition in 1961, U of M Digital Collections, Winnipeg Tribune Photograph Index


The old city hall was demolished starting in April 1962.

Al Barnes of the Free Press wrote a feature called "The Saga of Old City Hall" after it came down. He wrote that the story behind the the bones was never fully and that "Winnipeg is probably the only metropolis in the world whose city hall literally had a skeleton in its closet."

More about the tower from my blogs:
Selkirk Avenue's Bell Tower - West End Dumplings
Winnipeg's Civic Clock - Winnipeg Places

More "Behind the Photo'

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