The house at 2 Haviland Street has been many things in its century and a half: a shipping merchant's widow's showpiece, the American consulate, a military officers' club, a tea room. On three evenings this October it becomes something else again — a crime scene.
The Body & the Belvedere, an original murder mystery written and directed by Mark Belfry, opens at The Haviland on Thursday, October 15, 2026, with further performances on October 17 and 18. The premise is drawn straight from the building's own history. It is April 1872, and Esther Lowden is hosting the first ball ever held in her new home — the Italianate mansion she had built at the corner of Haviland and Water Streets, the house that is now The Haviland. During the evening, something goes badly wrong. The suspects are the people who would plausibly have been in the room: the architect, the builder, a railway magnate on the verge of scandal, and a sea captain whom Esther is said to secretly admire. Can she solve the mystery? Can you?
It is a piece of site-specific theatre in the most literal sense. The audience moves through the same rooms where the real Esther Lowden once received guests, and the fictional crime is stitched to documented facts about the house and the woman who commissioned it. That is not incidental. The evening is the flagship theatrical offering of the Esther Lowden Heritage Trust, the body that recently took over the property from the Haviland Club with a mandate to keep the house open and alive as a community and cultural venue rather than a museum piece.
Esther Lowden is the reason the house exists, and her story is more interesting than most of the fiction built on top of it. Born in Halifax in 1836, one of three daughters of the merchant William Full, she married George Fesch Crowe Lowden in 1858 and sailed with him to Charlottetown, where he ran a shipping business near the busy wharves. George was seventeen years her senior and had already made his way to and from California during the gold rush; the name Fesch, family lore holds, traces back to the mother of Napoleon and to the Cardinal Fesch. Esther was twenty when she married. She was twenty-eight when she was widowed, and thirty when fire took her home.
That fire was the Great Fire of Charlottetown of 1866, one of the most destructive events in the city's history. It broke out around two o'clock on a Sunday morning and burned through four blocks of the business district, running from Dorchester to Water Street and from Pownal to Great George. The contemporary account in The Herald counted upwards of a hundred dwelling houses and places of business destroyed, with only nine buildings left standing in the burned district, and estimated that between 150 and 200 families had been rendered homeless and almost destitute. "Nothing remains to tell that they were ever inhabited," the paper reported, "except blackened timbers, smouldering ruins, and long rows of desolate, naked chimneys." The fire is also why brick buildings in Charlottetown can generally be dated after 1866; the city was largely wooden before it burned.
Esther Lowden rebuilt in brick and stone. The house at 2 Haviland Street was completed in 1869, three years after the fire, and is rumoured to have been designed by the Halifax architect David Stirling, who favoured the Italianate style. She lived there until her death in 1896. In the meantime she did something unusual for a genteel woman of her era, an era in which, as the club's own history puts it, ladies were largely restricted to dancing, socializing and embroidery. She ran her own affairs, built with money from shipping, and is now described as believed to be Prince Edward Island's first female entrepreneur and one of Canada's earliest businesswomen. Her shrewdness, the club's history suggests, was learned by watching her merchant father at work in Halifax.
After her death the house stayed in the family for a time — her son-in-law, L. L. Beer, applied for authority to administer the estate — and was then leased to Delmer J. Vail, the American consul for Prince Edward Island. For many years it served as the American consulate, and at one point the American flag flying from a thirty-foot flagpole on the belvedere, the rooftop lookout that gives the murder mystery half its title, was likely the first flag a ship's crew would see on entering Charlottetown harbour. Later the house was rented to various tenants. In 1944 it was bought for $4,000 by the Army and Navy Club of Prince Edward Island, which had been formed in 1932 by officers of the local militia and naval reserve units; the organization evolved into the United Services Officers' Club of Charlottetown, whose initials, U.S.O.C., are still displayed in places around the building. The USOC closed as a club in 1997, and the property carried on as the Haviland Club until the recent transition to the trust.
The building was formally recognized as a heritage property in 1979 and listed on the Canadian Register of Historic Places in 2005, its heritage value resting on its association with the Lowden family, its years as the American consulate, and its grand Italianate architecture. The designation covers the exterior and the parcel, not the interior — which is precisely the part the audience will be walking through in October.
The evening is built as a social occasion as much as a whodunit. A cocktail hour with charcuterie boards begins at 5:30 p.m., with oysters available for $3 each, before the show proper. Tickets are $45. It is general admission in spirit — anyone can buy in — but the room is a nineteenth-century parlour, not a theatre, so capacity is the house's, not a hall's.
The mystery itself is fiction, and the trust is upfront about that: the murder is invented, but the setting, the characters and the world they move in are drawn from the record. The suspects on the night — the architect, the builder, the railway magnate, the sea captain — are the sorts of people who genuinely populated Esther Lowden's Charlottetown, a thriving British colony in the heyday of sail, where ships built on the Island crossed the Atlantic and ladies in hooped skirts and gentlemen in tall beaver hats picked their way through the ever-present red mud and dust.
The Body & the Belvedere is part of a broader effort to make the old house earn its keep as a living place. The trust launched Tea & Tales, a Victorian high tea and storytelling series, in May 2026 to mark the 190th anniversary of Esther Lowden's birth, and it runs on select Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays through the end of October. The murder mystery is the more theatrical cousin of that impulse: heritage tours, teas, performances and staged historical experiences, all aimed at the same end. As the trust has put it, the goal is not simply to preserve an old building but to ensure it remains a living part of the community.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that on three nights in October, a house built by a widowed entrepreneur who refused the life expected of her will host a party much like the one she threw in 1872 — except that this time, someone will not survive it. The oysters are extra. The suspicion is included.