I live in an old limestone house in Kingston, Ontario. It was built in 1843, when Kingston was briefly the capital of a united Canada, by a hardware merchant named Samuel Muckleston, and it has carried his family’s name ever since.
We came to it in 2022, knowing we were purchasing history. We didn’t know we were buying a mystery. In 2010, a renovation had uncovered something the house kept to itself for over a century: names and dates, carved into the wooden panelling of the walls and hidden behind plaster and lath.
The owners kept the panels and built them into the house’s décor, where they remain. I call them antique graffiti — the marks of young people who felt compelled, for reasons I can only imagine, to scratch themselves into the fabric of the place.
When we arrived, I began researching the names. One by one they resolved: grandchildren, grand-nephews, grand-nieces of Samuel and his wife, Ann, dated across the late nineteenth century. A family, quietly writing itself into its own walls. One name didn’t fit.
Researching a Name
It isn’t inside the house, and it isn’t in wood. It is cut into the exterior limestone, in the lane beside the house, where anyone walking past can see it. A single word: Alfred. No surname. No date. No Alfred anywhere among the Mucklestons or their relations. I looked. Nothing.
I walk my dog every day through Kingston’s Old Sydenham Heritage Conservation District, past the cathedral, the market square, the storefronts that were already old when the 19th century turned, and the question walked with me.
Who was Alfred? Why did he want it known that he was here? And what was it like to live on this street when he carved it — say, in 1875?
The record wouldn’t answer. But maybe a ghost story would.
First Draft as a Ghost Story
Guests who stay with us always arrive, sooner or later, at the question every old house invites: is a house this old haunted? Every 180-year-old house is entitled to a ghost, and in the autumn of 2025 I decided Alfred was ours. I set out to answer our guests with a ghost story for Halloween — a personal experiment with artificial intelligence.
The ghost story was meant for the people sleeping under our roof and really nobody else. But then one character led to another, one setting led to the next. I played with the idea of placing the story among real Kingston people and places, like the Mucklestons themselves and the house they lived in.
I found myself googling and exploring, and the research kept handing the tale what it needed. Each discovery seemed to open another door in the story.
The first version ran to about 4,500 words, printed as a little booklet for our visitors, left in the guest room. It was those first readers who pushed it deeper. I had kept the ghost deliberately vague — is Alfred alive or not? — thinking that was the mystery people wanted. But they walked away more puzzled than haunted.
So I read my way into the gothic tradition and learned that the trick is not vagueness but tension: a supernatural that might be explainable, and might not.
Growing into a Gothic Novella
The ghost story grew into a gothic novella. The diary became a found diary; the found diary became a serialization in the Whig. And when my diarist began to wander past the few blocks of King Street where I had first confined him, the whole city walked in — storefronts, shops, and institutions that begged to be part of the story. Somewhere along the way, the bedside leaflet became a book.
It became a book because I’m enormously proud of Kingston. I had spent my career helping other people tell their stories and drawing attention to their work. The city’s past and its people, I came to feel, deserved the same.
Kingston calls itself Canada’s museum capital, and its past is not hard to find: there is a plaque around every corner. What I wished for was a way to make it felt: not names and dates on brass, but people you could walk beside, whether you’re a visitor or neighbour.
Kingston’s is a deep history, and a complicated one, its contradictions standing shoulder to shoulder — classes and faiths at odds, the university and the penitentiary, the garrison and the town, grand institutions and the people those institutions underserved.
A story is a friendly way in. It hands you real people and real places, and the history comes with them. That is the museum I wanted to make: a living one, with no walls and no hours, its exhibits standing on their own streets.
Yet when I went looking for the kind of book a living museum needs — historical fiction set here, stories with these streets in them — I found surprisingly little. That seemed to me a shame, and Alfred gave me my reason to experiment further.
The Name in the Stone Emerges
The Name in the Stone is the result: the invented diary of Henry Collier, a bank clerk who, through the autumn of 1875, watches Muckleston House — and the orphaned errand boy who serves it — from the bank windows across the street.
The streets Henry walks are Kingston’s streets; the buildings, the institutions, and many of the people are real and researched. The house, the family, the inscription, and the city are true. The diary, and the story it tells, are mine.
I never set out to publish a book — yet here one is. In making it, I learned how much of my own city I had never noticed, and how readily its past could become a story. I am happy to share it, and I hope it finds its readers.
I still do not know who Alfred was. But I know he was here.
— Scott Henderson, Kingston, Ontario, 2026
P.S. The carving is still there. If you walk King Street East, you can see it for yourself.
Antique Graffiti
