Niagara Haunted Folklore and Community Radio History

A haunted place in Niagara often begins as a story someone heard on the radio. Before a lighthouse, a mansion or a canal lock acquires a legend, it tends to pass through a broadcast: an interview, a call-in, a late night retelling that turns a name into a narrative. CKTB has been part of that circulation since 1930, and its long history in St. Catharines makes it one of the region's oldest surviving channels for local storytelling.

The details cited in this entry were checked on station's history page.

This article looks at how radio carries ghost folklore, why a station's identity matters to the tales it transmits, and what a broadcast archive can and cannot tell you about the stories that reached listeners.

A licence issued to St. Catharines in 1930

The station signed on the air in 1930, founded by Edward T. Sandell. It began at 1120 kilocycles as a phantom station of CKOC in Hamilton, meaning it operated without a full licence of its own. As with most early AM stations in Canada, its frequencies shifted repeatedly in the years that followed: 1200 in 1933, 1230 in 1941, 1550 in 1946, 620 in 1950, and its current 610 in 1959.

Those numbers are more than engineering detail. Every move changed who could hear the station after dark, and therefore who could hear a ghost story told on it. A frequency is a footprint, and a footprint decides which county's callers get through.

Studios inside a canal promoter's mansion

CKTB's studios sit on Yates Street in downtown St. Catharines, in the former mansion of William Hamilton Merritt, the main promoter of the first Welland Canal. That single fact does more work for folklore than any ghost-hunting technique. A station broadcasting from a nineteenth century house inherits the house's associations: canal money, engineering ambition, and the kind of local memory that arrives when a caller recognizes the building.

Listeners who notice the address are already halfway into a story. The transmitter, meanwhile, is sited on Grassy Brook Road east of Port Robinson, a detail that separates the voice from the ground it reaches.

Network years and the shape of local talk

In 1936 CKTB became a founding network affiliate of CBC Radio as a privately owned station. In 1944 it affiliated with CBC's Dominion Network, an arrangement that lasted until the Dominion Network dissolved in 1962. Sandell died in 1943 and the station was acquired the following year by Niagara District Broadcasting. That company launched an FM sister station in 1949, which at first largely simulcast the AM signal. That station today is CHTZ-FM 97.7 MHz.

Ownership passed through Standard Broadcasting in 1980, Affinity Radio Group in 1997, Telemedia in 2000, and back to Standard in 2002. In October 2007 Astral Media acquired Standard Broadcasting's terrestrial radio and television assets, including CKTB. In July 2013 most of Astral Media's broadcasting properties, CKTB among them, were sold to Bell Media, a subsidiary of BCE.

How does a station keep local voices on air?

On February 8, 2024, Bell Media announced the sale of several stations to Whiteoaks Communications Group. The CRTC approved the purchase on December 19, 2024. On June 16, 2025, Whiteoaks took ownership of CKTB and stated there would be no major changes to programming, while the station added a new local morning program hosted by Gene Valaitis, a veteran Toronto radio personality.

Local programming is the mechanism that lets a region speak about itself. Weekdays begin with "Niagara in the Morning with Steph Vivier." Valaitis hosts midday from 9 to noon. In afternoon drive time, "The Drive" is heard, with Jon "Gonzo" Mark. Late nights are repeats of weekday shows. Following the Golden Horseshoe takeover, CFRB 1010 AM Toronto continued to provide select programming through syndication, including "The Vassy Kapelos Show" and "Shane Hewitt and The Night Shift."

The newsroom behind the stories

Newsroom operations are handled by Bonnie Heslop and Matt Holmes, with additional support from Christine Janzen and Tom McKay. News in off-peak hours comes from the Canadian Press. The station also carries NPR affiliations alongside The Canadian Press.

A newsroom matters to folklore in a way that is easy to miss. Reports of strange sightings, unexplained sounds in old buildings, and anniversary events pass through working journalists before they become the anecdotes people repeat. The reporter decides whether a claim is a news item, a curiosity, or nothing at all. That decision shapes which stories survive long enough to be retold at a kitchen table years later.

What past hosts left behind

Past hosts of locally produced programming include Tim Denis, Joe Cahill, Kevin Jack, Stephanie Sabourin, Rob McConnell, Larry Fedoruk, Chris Biggs, John Michael, Shelby Knox and Tom McConnell. A host's tenure is a timeline of local attention: what the region was talking about, which buildings were in the news, which anniversaries were being marked.

CKTB was the only affiliate in Canada to carry the controversial The Phil Hendrie Show until 2006, when the host retired for the first time. The station continued to air the best of Phil Hendrie on Saturdays from 6 to 10 p.m. until April 2007, at which point the show was replaced with other programming. With Hendrie's return to radio, CKTB brought him back to the lineup on a daily basis. The show was subsequently dropped and replaced by Dr. Joy Browne, another American show. Browne's program was also dropped in favour of two-hour-long best-of blocks edited from the day's local programming.

That pattern, an outside voice arriving and then giving way to local recaps, describes how syndicated content and regional content trade places. Ghost folklore thrives in the local half of that exchange.

Why Buffalo's ratings miss the Niagara signal

While St. Catharines is sometimes considered part of the Buffalo radio market when dealing with syndicated programming, CKTB does not usually show up in Buffalo's Nielsen Audio ratings. A lack of knowledge of the station, its distance from Buffalo, combined with its presence on the AM dial, and its primarily Canadian content during the day all contribute to this. BBM, however, registers CKTB as a popular station in the St. Catharines market, with audience share comparable to that of CHML's audience share in nearby Hamilton.

There is a folklore lesson in that gap. A cross-border listener scanning the dial may never find the station at all, which means a haunting described on CKTB can circulate for years among Niagara residents while remaining invisible to audiences a short drive away. Local legend depends on local reach.

What a broadcast leaves for an archive

A radio broadcast is ephemeral by design. What remains is the record: anniversary coverage, obituaries of hosts, station histories, and the dates on which ownership changed. The station's history page gathers those dates in one place, from the 1930 sign-on through the frequency changes and the corporate transfers to the 2025 handover to Whiteoaks.

For anyone tracing how a Niagara haunting became a known story, that timeline is a starting point rather than an answer. If you want to know which retellings reached the public, look for the broadcast dates that match the years a legend was growing: the 1940s and 1950s, when AM radio was the region's shared evening, or the talk-heavy decades after the 1980s, when callers could put a version of a story on air themselves.

Questions the record cannot settle

The station's own history does not say which ghost accounts aired, which callers told them, or how a retelling changed between one broadcast and the next. Those details live in recordings, in newspaper listings, and in the memories of people who were listening. That is the ordinary condition of broadcast folklore: the medium is documented, the content is not.

What to do with a story you heard on air

If you remember hearing a Niagara haunting described on CKTB, write down the year, the host if you can recall one, and the building or road named. Take that note to a local archive or historical society and ask to see what was published that year, because a dated memory is far easier to check than a story with no anchor. The dates above give you the years to search. The rest depends on whether anyone else was listening.