What’s Lurking Under the Burrow? Wiarton Willie’s dark past revealed

On Monday, February 2nd, Wiarton Willie whispered into the ear of South Bruce Peninsula Mayor Jay Kirkland, the only speaker of “Groundhogese.” Kirkland listened thoughtfully for a moment before announcing, “what Willie told me is he did not see the sun. So everybody knows what that means: one, two, three, it’s an early spring!” The crowd cheered, oblivious to the tumultuous history behind the albino groundhog whose prediction they unquestioningly accept, year after year.

In 1956, a man named Mac McKenzie threw a party in South Bruce Peninsula and, partly in jest, sent out press releases, calling it a Groundhog Day celebration. A Toronto Star reporter attended the party, expecting it to be a large festival. The next morning, he approached McKenzie and told him that he needed to bring back a story to justify his expenses. McKenzie threw a woman’s white hat into the snow and made a prediction. The reporter took a photo, and it appeared in the February 3, 1956 edition of the Toronto Star. The first Groundhog Day in Ontario was a sham, and the lies didn’t stop there.

In 2021, Wiarton Willie died of an abscessed tooth. In lieu of the festival, which had been cancelled because of the pandemic, then-mayor Janice Jackson released a video in which she takes a white hat off a woman’s head and throws it into the snow, shrugs, and says “it’s an early spring.” The video confused some residents and angered others, who wanted answers about Willie’s whereabouts. They wouldn’t have answers until November, when all the groundhogs in Ontario were in hibernation, and the city realized their search for an albino was futile. The city announced Willie’s passing and that he would be replaced with a regular brown groundhog that spring.

In a 2022 interview with Jonathan Goldsbie of the Canadaland podcast, Jackson claimed that the coverup had been necessary to preserve the “Willie brand,” saying, “we were hoping to just quietly find another albino and just kind of make that transition as we have in the past. But it just simply didn’t work out that way.”

But Jackson’s explanation didn’t sit right with everyone. Cherry Zhang of The Varsity wrote that, “as history has clearly shown… the groundhog’s lack of physical well-being would not necessarily undermine the event’s continued existence. Over the nearly 66 years of the festival, this isn’t the first time a Willie has died and left event organizers unprepared.” Surely residents and tourists understand that groundhogs don’t live forever, so why not be upfront about the situation?

In 2003, an even more nefarious coverup took place in South Bruce Peninsula. Wiarton Willie II was suspected of murder. That spring, when his two understudies, called the “Wee Willies” mysteriously stopped coming out of the burrow the three shared, caretaker Francesca Dobbyn kept quiet. The two were found, dead, inside the burrow three months later. Groundhogs are territorial, and it’s speculated that Wiarton Willie eliminated his rivals. When the town council demanded answers, Dobbyn claimed she wanted to avoid harming the city’s groundhog tourism, which brings in around $750,000 per year. Then-mayor, Carl Noble, allowed her to keep her job, despite facing backlash for the coverup.

For seventy years, this festival has brought Ontarians together during the dreariest part of the year, but beneath the surface, the celebration has been plagued by controversy and scandal. Who knows what else has remained buried in Willie’s burrow, never to see the sun.