Intro
I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has unofficially “joined the ghoul gang”, and for the kind messages, comments, shares and interaction from everyone on social media. It means a lot! I really do care about making Small Town Spooky as good as it can be, and I hope to keep it going for as long as I can!
Today’s episode is a bit of a different format than the first. I’m going to talk a little about several different places, all purportedly haunted, from my current hometown.
I also want to set aside some time at the top here to share some of the kind words from listeners: thank you to Davona Mapp (@davonamapp_author) for your shout-out on Instagram and 5-star review on iTunes and your comment “Renee’s approach from multiple angles was interesting from start to finish. Including geography was really helpful as someone who has been to the area and isn’t from Canada. Her commentary was witty and entertaining and her voice was perfect for the mood and tone she presented with the episode! This was a lovely opener. I can’t wait to hear more!” Thank you so much, Davona!
And thanks to Viktoria Bradley (@viktoriawithakreadsbooks), co-host of Interdisciplinary History Pod for your shares on social media! If you haven’t listened, IHP is a really excellent, thoughtful and deeply researched podcast that features interviews with academics, book and television reviews and analyses, all from an interdisciplinary & historical lens.
Thank you as well for the suggested episode topics that I’ve received so far. I’m going to list a few, and if any strike your fancy, I’ll be polling people about it on social media in the upcoming weeks so make sure you vote for your favourite! If you don’t hear any that you like, email smalltownspooky@gmail.com and send in your suggestion!
So we've got the Ottawa Jail, which is a hostel now, and a student dormitory at the boarding school Brentwood in British Columbia that's supposedly very haunted, from when it used to be a nurses' dorm when Brentwood was a sanitarium.
The landscape confounds the eye. You touch down in an airport after flying through blue-bird skies, where you looked out the window and see white-capped mountains, their rugged stone faces carved by wind and rain. Now, those same forms are visible in the distance, hazy through the blinding glare of the midday sun. The brilliance is deceiving; when you step outside, a cutting wind assails you and you wrap your coat around yourself a little tighter. The airport staff welcome you to Calgary, and you linger by the gate, taking in the travel-worn faces. You pull a pamphlet from a nearby kiosk when its cover draws your gaze. Leafy deep green pines and bizarre striated stone pillars are displayed next to endless, flowering yellow fields and grazing cattle. At the bottom, a pristine lake the colour of the truest teal you’ve ever seen is nestled under the impassive faces of those snow-capped rocky mountains. The pamphlet is emblazoned at the top with three words: Welcome to Alberta.
Oh, Alberta. I had never been west of Georgian Bay when I took a plane for the first time in 2011 and ended up on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains. Before that, Alberta didn’t strike me as a place where people lived, so much as a layover between Ontario and British Columbia. I don’t mean to sound dismissive--I grew up a sheltered, poorly travelled white kid who, like most sheltered white kids born in smalltown southwestern Ontario, considered Ottawa the geographical centre of the country.
I first came to Alberta for a four-month contract--which I referred to as a “working holiday”--at the Jasper Park Lodge. Jasper Park Lodge has its own ghost stories, which I might have to delve into in another episode. I was completely boggled by the scale and--honestly, there’s no other word for it--majesty of the rocky mountains, having seen nothing taller than a landfill hill before coming out here. I met my partner that summer and ten years later, we’re married and living in Edmonton...but that’s a story for another podcast.
A few years ago now, my spouse and I took the Old Strathcona Tour with Edmonton Ghost Tours--hosted by Nadine Bailey. We walked around one of the oldest parts of Edmonton and saw some of the purportedly haunted locales, which includes the Strathcona Hotel, the Princess Theatre, The Strathcona High School, The Walterdale Playhouse, the Arts Barn, etc. We didn’t see anything--probably the most memorable part of the tour was the person who wore a horse-head mask the entire time without taking it off. It can’t have been comfortable.
Trigger Warning
I want to give a trigger warning for this week’s episode. From the historical side, it’s a heavy one. Content includes discussion of medical mistreatment, physical and sexual abuse of First Nations people, genocide and racism. Also mentions of suicide, homicide and violence.
First Nations & Colonists
The Nehiyawewin (Plains Cree) place name for the Edmonton area is amiskwaciy-wâskahikan, meaning Beaver Hills House. This was the traditional meeting place for many First Nations peoples, including Nehiyawak (Cree), Saulteaux , Nakota Sioux, Niitsitapi /Blackfoot, Tsuut’ina (Dene) and Métis people, and was located at the intersection of many travel and trade routes they used, before colonial contact. The North Saskatchewan River was an important transportation and trade route for these groups. It gets its name from the Nehiyawaywin: kisiskâchiwani-sîpîy, which means “river with a swift current”.
Image: Nehiyawak (Cree) camp on the prairie, south of Vermilion (Lat N. 53 Long W. 111 nearly) Sept. 1871. (Charles Horetzky (1838 - 1900), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
In the late 1700s, the British “claimed” an area of land surrounding Hudson Bay and its drainage basin, asserting their ownership over it while ignoring the Indigenous people who had lived, hunted and looked after the land for thousands of years already. This area encompassed much of Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and the lower half of Alberta, south of what would eventually become Edmonton.
European colonists arrived in this area and established fortified settlements from which to conduct trade with First Nations bands, and other settlers. The first European settlers in the Edmonton or Beaver Hills region were associated with the North West Company of Montreal, who established themselves in northern Alberta in 1779, to compete with the Hudson Bay Company.
Fort Augustus was established by the Hudson Bay Company in 1794, so just about 50 years after the first colonial settlements in south-western Ontario that I mentioned in Episode 1. Less than a year later, Fort Edmonton was built. It took its name from Edmonton, England, the birthplace of Sir James Winter Lake, a member of the Hudson’s Bay Company Board.
Image: Fort Edmonton, Canada, October 1870. (Charles Horetsky 1838-1900, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Even after it was “officially” named by the HBC, the fort continued to be called other things by the people who came to trade. The Cree continued to call it amiskwacî-wâskahikan; the Nakota Sioux called it ti oda, meaning “many houses”; and the Niitsitapi called it Amakowsis, or omahkoyis: “Big Lodge”--and these are just the names I was able to find.
Forts Edmonton and Augustus operated profitable trading posts until the early 1800s, when the fur trade started to decline. In 1802, both forts were relocated to the north bank of the North Saskatchewan river, which is where the downtown district of Edmonton is presently located. The North West Company was predominantly run by titled Scots settlers in Canada--think baronets--who employed settlers from the Montreal region referred to as canadiens--impoverished farmers who were often of Metis heritage. The North West Company and The Hudson’s Bay Company were such fierce competitors that their rivalry escalated to armed conflict, before the British Crown intervened and forced the companies to merge in 1821, becoming consolidated under the name Hudson’s Bay Company.
From HBCHeritage.com:
Fort Edmonton was selected as the district headquarters for the North Saskatchewan region. Under Chief Factor John Rowand it became one of the largest and most important posts in what would become Alberta. An administrative centre, warehouse, and storage facility, it was also a place where goods were manufactured by tradesmen as well as a source of provisions for other posts. Fort Edmonton was a “meat” post: much of the pemmican and dried and fresh buffalo meat consumed by fur traders came from there. It also produced the York boats used to transport fur and trade goods to and from Hudson Bay.
The fort enjoyed its most prosperous time from 1826 to 1853. In 1870, shortly after its formation, the Canadian government purchased the area designated by the British crown as “Rupert’s Land”, that portion of Southern Alberta they had claimed. Meanwhile, the northern portion of Alberta was considered part of the Northwest Territories until 1876, when the Crown finally agreed to negotiate with First Nations groups for their rights to the land they had always stewarded and lived on. During this time, pressures from settlers moving up to Canada from the United States, or United Empire Loyalists fleeing to Canada, in addition to the activity of the fur trade, were acting on the bison population in Alberta. The First Nations chiefs, concerned for their communities, believed that securing Treaties with the Crown would afford them some food security and pull the brake on the decimation of the buffalo population.
The treaty agreements negotiated in Alberta were Treaties numbered 6, 7 and 8. Treaty 6, where Edmonton is located, was signed between the Crown and the Plains and Woods Cree, Assiniboine, and Ojibwe band chiefs. The Treaties, when they were finally made, were negotiated in bad faith by the Crown. The Plains First Nations had been attempting to negotiate with the government since as early as 1871, due to their concerns about starvation, illness and death among the different lodges from European diseases such as smallpox, and encroachment from settlers.
Image: A presentation copy of the original Treaty No. 6, ÈArticles of a treaty made and concluded near Carlton, on the twenty-third day of August, and on the twenty-eighth day of said month, respectively, and near Fort Pitt on the ninth day of September, in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and seventy-six (1876), between Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, by Her Commissioners, the Honorable Alexander Morris, Lieutenant-Governor of the province of Manitoba and the North-West Territories, and the Honorable James McKay, and the Honorable William Joseph Christie, of the one part, and the Plain and Wood Cree Tribes of Indians, and other tribes of Indians, inhabitants of the country, within the limits hereafter defined and described by their Chiefs, chosen and named as hereinafter mentioned, of the other part." (Public Domain, University of Alberta Library Internet Archive collection)
The government declined to negotiate, despite local missionaries and government agents urging them to do so, until members of the Cree First Nations stopped Canadian Geological Survey agents from moving any farther past the elbow of the North Saskatchewan river. Lawrence Clarke, the manager at the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost Fort Carlton, also wrote to the Canadian government to inform them that the Cree were threatening to turn back workers trying to establish a telegraph line between Winnipeg and Edmonton, prompting a Mounted Police detachment to be sent into the area. Alexander Morris, the lieutenant governor of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories at the time, further agitated for treaty, as they were, in his opinion, the Canadian government’s primary path to accessing and developing land. The First Nations chiefs, concerned for their communities, were assured that the “Queen’s care for her Indian subjects” would be paramount; however, interpretation of the treaties show that the Crown intended from the get to annex the land designated by the agreements and place it under the Canadian government’s sovereignty, whereas the First Nations bands understood that these lands would be used by settlers, in a way similar to their own interaction and stewardship of it.
Here I want to give a more complete explanation of what I mean by Indigenous “stewardship” of the environment, although I can’t encompass the full breadth and depth of every Indigenous culture’s knowledge, relationship, and approach. The Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre provides what I consider a helpful primer:
While there is no monolithic Indigenous culture in Canada, some overarching values are common to most Indigenous communities. This connection is particularly evident in relation to the environment and humanity’s role within it.
Indigenous peoples living in Canada possess a deep and spiritual connection to the land. The Environmental Stewardship Unit within the Assembly of First Nations, a national advocacy group representing the interests of First Nations citizens in Canada, explained the First Nations’ perspective on the environment: “The term ‘environment’ from a traditional First Nations’ perspective does not distinguish between humanity and everything else. Humans are part of the environment as much as are the fish, wildlife, air, and trees. Traditionally, First Nations’ use of the land recognized the impact on other species around us and we were respectful of the impact we imposed. We do not view people as the masters of the earth, but merely a part of the delicate balance of the earth’s cycle of life. We are aware that our lives depend on observing and honouring this balance.”
While early European settlers may have recognized the connection First Nations people had with the land, this was largely in a racist way that characterized them as “primitive” and “less evolved” than white people--e.g., closer to animals. This is not to say that Indigenous ways of stewarding the land were only ever without conflict, difficulties or unintended negative consequences--only that the colonial settlers brought with them different intent and cultural baggage that they imposed on land management. Historical records from the Canadian Geological Survey, established in 1842, show that the Canadian government’s interest in mapping landscape was primarily motivated by the exploitation of natural resources, and “part of a broader project of promoting the settlement of the frontier by white subjects loyal to the British Crown”. This had a massive impact on First Nations’ relationship to the natural resources of their traditional lands.
Treaty 6 was meant to provide “reserves”--tracts marked for sole First Nations occupation, reserved from the acquisitive gaze of white settlers. It also included the provision of livestock and farm equipment from the Crown, the promise of schoolhouses for “optional” education of First Nations children, and a medicine chest clause, which was a guarantee of government assistance in the case of famine or pestilence within the First Nations bands.
You can see how these terms deteriorated as the Canadian government imposed their edicts on these First Nations bands once they were considered “treaty people”. The optional education, meant to facilitate communication between European settlers and First Nations people, become residential schools, institutions run by the Catholic Church where children were removed to, and subject to physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Many died of disease, malnutrition, abuse and neglect, and those who did survive are still suffering the after-effects, or have inherited generational trauma from their parents’ and grandparents’ suffering. The Catholic Church was successfully sued in 2006 to make restitution to residential school survivors, to the tune of $21 million. The Church not only failed to make those restitutions in full, they negotiated a deal with the federal government for $1.2 million that effectively enabled them to wash their hands of any remaining obligation to repay the federal government or residential school survivors. The basis for this negotiation was that the Catholic Church was not able to raise the funds; however, a Globe and Mail investigation conducted in August 2021 which analyzed tax records of the Catholic Church’s holdings revealed that, in all, the Catholic Church in Canada’s net assets totaled $4.1-billion in 2019, and that it had received $886-million in donations.
With the discoveries of over 4000 children (as tallied by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) buried in unmarked graves at former residential school sites since 2015, this number is only growing. In 2021, more than 1300 suspected graves have been found. Canada had over 130 residential schools in operation between 1831 and 1996, and of those only 7 have been completely searched.
If you are a former residential school student in distress, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419. I will also link additional and online resources in the episode description and blog post for this episode.
I don’t mean to overwhelm this episode with historical content, but this history of what I can only qualify as Canada’s genocidal treatment of First Nations’ people since the nation’s inception is relevant as we go forward with our exploration of some of Edmonton’s most reputedly haunted locations. If you need to take a break after hearing all of that, please take one. I’ll be here when you get back.
Unearthly Edmonton
Edmonton itself wasn’t officially established as a town until 1894, but prior to that, small settlements cropped up around Fort Edmonton in the form of pioneer farms--think log cabins and plots of land along the river. These are some of the most highly valued properties in Edmonton today. A railway from Calgary was built across Edmonton in 1903, and by 1904 Edmonton--with a mere 5000 person population--was named Alberta’s capital. In 1912, Edmonton amalgamated the city of Strathcona, predominantly located on the southern banks of the North Saskatchewan River.
When I was researching this episode, I quickly discovered there are more than a few haunted venues to choose from in Edmonton. Some honorable mentions include the “B” wing of Edmonton General Hospital; the Firkins House at Fort Edmonton Park; even downtown, and the Hotel MacDonald, named for one of Canada’s arguably most corrupt and genocidal prime ministers, with its dramatic French Renaissance architecture which overlooks the river valley. The Mac is rumoured to have a ghost carriage that can be heard clopping along the top-floor hallway, that may or may not be the spirit of a poor exhausted animal that dropped dead while the foundation for the building was being poured in 1914. The Highlands neighbourhood hosts its own purportedly paranormal site: La Boheme, the former restaurant and bed and breakfast which closed in 2018. A 1913 historical building, originally luxury apartments with pressed-tin ceilings, La Boheme is supposedly haunted by something that has lifted guests’ beds right off the floor. Supposedly, the former caretaker of the building murdered his wife and dragged her down to the basement, cremating her remains in the cast-iron furnace there.
The Strathcona area of Edmonton has more than a few locales to choose from, including the Walterdale Playhouse—a former firehall that is supposedly haunted by firefighters in old-fashioned gear and horses, and where lights come on or bells ring inexplicably in the building. But the veritable crown in the jewel of haunted Strathcona spots has got to be Princess Theatre.
Princess Theatre
Princess Theatre was built in 1913, and it’s a historic building. It’s one of the last of the old-fashioned theatres in western Canada. Walk along Whyte Avenue today and you’ll hardly be able to miss it. The marble-facade of the building is still intact; all three stories boast classical and symmetrical features with rows of black-blocked windows and two gables with copper cornices set on either end of the roof. If you look past the massive retro-style marquee with its iconic yellow bulbs, up to the second story, you can see a massive scroll engraved into the facade of the building bearing the name of the man who commissioned the theatre’s construction: J. W. McKernan and the year it was completed: 1914.
Image: The Princess Theatre in 2011. (Solange Gagnebin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
When the theatre opened in 1915, it offered moving picture shows, musical vaudeville and concerts, and a billiard and games room in the basement. Go inside today and you’ll see the red-velvet covered chairs and the scalloped backs of the shell-shaped brass footlights edging the stage. The balcony boxes are decorated with raised sculptural details and the arched ceiling is picked out in plaster friezes and figures evoking a neo-classical sensibility. When it first opened, the theatre’s frescoes and gold-leaf decoration, in addition to its modern amenities like an electric ticketing machine, refrigerated drinking fountain, and heating and cooling ventilation system were noteworthy and drew large crowds.
Image: A photo of the Princess Theatre in Edmonton Alberta shortly after opening in 1915.(M. Burgess, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
In less than a year, the theatre switched exclusively to cinema and newsreels, earning its revenue primarily from its two screens and from the rental spaces in the basement and upper floors. The Henderson City Directory for Edmonton from 1916 does list the Princess Theatre as some residents’ addresses, including a pianist, a cashier, and an operations manager. According to what I could find, the rental units would have been on the second floor of the building.
According to Nadine Bailey, storyteller and guide of Edmonton Ghost Tours, the staff at The Princess Theatre have seen a woman in white haunting the premises. They’ve seen her walking around the center lobby, up and down the grand staircase, and hovering above the projection room. Bailey further details this story in her podcast “Haunted Canada” (Episode 3), where she gives the woman’s name as Sara-Anne and says she lived in 1917 and conceived a child out of wedlock. In the story, the woman is staying on the third floor of the Princess, though as I said the records I found indicated the rooms to let were on the second. When Sara-Anne tells the father of her child, he agrees to marry her and keep the secret. Sara-Anne goes out to purchase a wedding dress in anticipation of the day...only to discover that her lover has fled. Unable to face life as an unwed mother, Sara-Anne dresses herself in her gown--this symbol of her ruined prospects--and hangs herself in her apartment, where her body stays undiscovered for over two weeks, until the arrival of the landlord who has come collecting rent.
In addition to the full-body apparitions, employees of the theatre have cited flickering lights and disembodied voices as further evidence of unearthly activity. The Princess Theatre is still open and operating today, with only one screen that shows independent movies and art house films.
Charles Camsell Hospital
Our second site has one of the most macabre and disgusting histories I’ve ever read, not only just in terms of what was done there but also what it says about Canada’s history as a country. Charles Camsell Hospital was the site of horrific mistreatment and abuse of First Nations people in Edmonton. The building was constructed in 1914 as “Francis Xavier Academy '' by Jesuits--essentially a missionary brotherhood formed under the Roman Catholic faith, who were some of the earliest colonial settlers in Canada, missionaries who accompanied those who followed the fur trade. Francis Xavier Academy was a college for young boys--sorry, no X-men here--and then later purchased by the American Army during World War II, for use as their base for the construction of the Alaska Highway.
Image: Exterior view of the Edmonton Jesuit College in Edmonton, Alberta. The college closed in 1942 and after the Second World War, became the Charles Camsell hospital. College des Jésuites, Edmonton, Alberta, Edmonton Jesuit College" (Attribution - Non-Commercial - Creative Commons)
The government of Canada bought the building in 1944 and the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps set it up as a hospital for veterans. In 1945, the hospital was approved to treat First Nations groups from Alberta, the Yukon, parts of the Northwest Territories and Alaska for tuberculosis, and jointly run by the Indian Health Services department of the Canadian government.
I couldn’t find much online about who directed the hospital during this time. I did find a bit on Wikipedia about Dr. Otto Schaefer, a Canadian-German doctor who headed the Northern Medical Research Unit for the Department of Indian Affairs, and who published findings based on his travels into remote northern communities, engaging with First Nations people and administering vaccines. The paper stated that First Nations’ peoples traditional cultural, dietary and social modes of living should be protected, or their populations would be decimated and suffer great negative health consequences. At the same time, however, Camsell Hospital was operating under the purview of the Alberta Eugenics board and forcibly sterilizing First Nations’ people. Notable proponents of the eugenics movement in Canada included members of Alberta’s Famous Five who fought for women to be included under the legal definition of “Persons”: judge Emily Murphy, politicians Louise McKinney and Irene Parlby and author Nellie McClung.
First Nations people from all over Alberta and the rest of Canada, were (often) forcibly removed from their families and communities, and brought to Camsell on the pretext of combating TB. From UAlbertaLaw.Typepad.com blog post “Edmonton's Own Hospital of Horrors”, posted by the organization ReconciliAction YEG:
While at the hospital, Indigenous patients received medical care that often went far beyond the usual practices to combat TB. [...] Accounts of the traumatic and oppressive practices have been the subject of many news stories, books and documentaries over the past two decades. Such experiences include children being routinely tied up at night (face down), so they would not cause disruptions to other patients and medical staff. Further experiences of abuse within the hospital include experimental surgeries, drug testing, forced sterilization and shock treatment. In addition, allegations of sexual assault, beatings, isolation in rooms for long periods of time, food and drink deprivation, forced feeding and forcible eating of patients’ own vomit have been made by victims of the Camsell’s staff.
Of the above horrific experiences, stories of forced sterilization have been revealed increasingly over time by ex-patients of the Camsell. [...] One such story of the forced sterilization of Indigenous women while in the care of the Charles Camsell came from Priest Rene Fumoleau. Fumoleau indicated that some women from Denendeh, located in the Northwest Territories, came to him with concerns of why they were no longer able to have children. Upon further medical assessment, the women discovered that following the birth of their children in the Camsell Hospital, they had been sterilized without their permission or knowledge of the procedure. [...] The Government of Alberta has paid out more than $50 million to those wrongfully sterilized [...].
We can’t know the full scale of the impact that Charles Camsell, and other hospitals like it, had on First Nations communities until these institutions respond to government or public pressure to release their records. By 1953 there were nearly 3000 Inuit admitted to TB hospitals, all across Canada. In 2016, Inuit elders from Cambridge Bay came to pay respects to the 98 Inuit--including 31 children--who were taken to Camsell and never returned home. Many people have yet to find hospital records to determine what happened to their children and other loved ones. The book Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada by Maureen K. Lux attempts to provide a history of these institutions, and includes many first-hand accounts of the patients of Camsell and other so-called “Indian” hospitals from the 1920s to the 1980s. The book details the history of staff, operations and the development of national health policies--also exploring the relationship between the federal government’s accountabilities regarding First Nations’ communities health care, and how this relates to the original medicine chest clause in Treaty Six.
As recently as 2021, class-action lawsuits have been levelled against hospitals and other medical institutions including Charles Camsell Hospital, with plaintiffs alleging widespread sexual abuse, mistreatment of patients, and its implication in the Sixties Scoop, where First Nations children were abducted by Canadian federal or military employees under the pretense of health care or education and fostered or adopted out to white, Christian families and institutions where they were largely subject to trauma, loss of culture, appaling treatment and abuse. I don’t want to name anyone--you can see the sources in the show notes, and go read--but there are people living today who are still suffering from what they say they experienced. And if that weren’t enough, in July 2021 construction crews paused development on the former hospital site to run a radar search for potential mass graves. Almost 200 years into our history, Canada’s legacy of genocide against First Nations’ people still has yet to be properly acknowledged, addressed and reconciled.
Image: Abandoned Charles Camsell Hospital building in Edmonton Alberta, 23 May 2009. (Darren Kirby, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Camsell attracted amateur ghost hunters and thrill seekers before its sale in 2004 and demolition several years ago for the construction of apartment complexes. People reported disembodied screaming, flickering lights, and the feeling of being observed from the windows, and even the apparition of a teenage girl who had apparently ripped out her fingernails. The Paranormal Explorers, a team from Edmonton, visited Camsell in 2005 and claimed that everyone involved felt physically ill or experienced vivid nightmares after returning home from the investigation; and that they witnessed powerless elevators moving on their own, heard footsteps in unoccupied parts of the building, picked up strange chatter on their walkie-talkies and heard the unearthly screaming.
I spoke to a local Edmontonian--my friend S., who was born and raised here--and they told me about their experience breaking into Camsell as a teenager.
“It was the thing that everyone did--everyone I knew in high school broke into this hospital at one point. You start hearing about it in Grade 11.”
So, one winter day in 2009, S. and about six or seven of their friends jumped the perimeter fence, crossed the open field and headed for the hospital. Their friend, let’s call him Zane, had been there before and showed them the way in--a side door, where the lock was busted. The teens explored the main floor before heading upstairs, where overturned furniture, tables and chairs, room dividers with the curtains still attached and other hospital equipment littered the floors. “It had that ‘left in a hurry’ feeling,” S. told me. “[We wondered] why wasn’t this building fully emptied?”
There was no power to the building. The only light came from windows and large gaps in the walls, where the facade of the building had deteriorated. There were holes in the floor, too, and cracks in some of the doors--but the air was completely still, as if the building existed in its own ghostly climate. “It should have been drafty but it wasn’t.” The teens kept going--all the way to the roof. They were able to access it because none of the locks in the building’s doors were still functional. From the roof they could look out on the whole neighbourhood, peacefully blanketed by snow.
Then someone suggested the group head back down--all the way down. They took the deserted stairway to the basement floor. As they descended, a noise finally registered--a faint, continuous noise, like the entire building was groaning or shifting in the wind. When they reached the basement, they could hardly see and it felt colder than any part of the building had before. Peering down into the darkness, someone finally realized what they were looking at--the entire basement was encased in ice. Flooding had filled the basement floor with about six feet of water, and it had frozen solid in the winter months. The only part of the basement still visible was the foot or so between the top of the ice and the ceiling.
Suddenly, a door creaked and slammed shut somewhere upstairs. Spooked, the teens scrambled back up the stairs and back out the side door where they’d come in. They crossed
the wide open field in a hurry, and just as they cleared the fence, a police cruiser came creeping up the road. The teens turned the corner and continued down the block as though nothing had happened--all save for Zane, who returned later that week at night. He and a friend got locked out on the roof somehow, despite the broken mechanism, and had to call the police to get them down. According to S., the rumours of haunting at the Camsell were very believable, based on the energy they experienced there.
In the Facebook group “I’m obsessed with Charles Camsell Hospital”, a user posted an entry from The Encyclopedia of Haunted Places by Jeff Belanger about different sightings and experiences there, including photographs of orbs and apparitions screaming, crying, and asking to go home.
There is certainly an exploitative bent to these stories when we talk about the history of genocide and Indigenous opression in Canada. I do think it’s important for us to understand the history of Camsell hospital, so that we can acknowledge its impact and the role played by the federal government and medical complex in so much suffering. There’s enough within the experience of those individuals who were committed to Camsell that I find haunting, without the possibility that their pain is still lingering after death.
Outro
That was a heavy one.
The Charles Camsell Hospital was truly horrific. Maureen K. Lux actually starts her book Separate Beds with the opening day of the Camsell Hospital, and it’s stomach-turning to read how for so many First Nations leaders, despite their experience being continually disenfranchised and oppressed by the government, they truly saw the opening of the Indian hospitals as a final relief for their people who were suffering. My hope is that the lawsuits being brought against these institutions can begin the healing process for those people who are still dealing with the aftermath, and that the journalists and activists who are working to have relevant records released succeed, so that family members can find closure for the loved ones they lost.
I couldn’t find any records to substantiate the story of Sara-Anne, who took her life at the Princess Theatre, in archives, obituaries or newspapers, other than a single mention in an Edmonton Journal article from 2017, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s false. “White lady” or “woman in white” ghost stories are incredibly common and found in cultures around the world--including but far from limited to Europe to South America to Southeast Asia. We heard one in the first episode of Small Town Spooky, about the woman in the white dress whose husband had possibly removed her head, leaving her to roam the countryside looking for it. Another well-known “lady in white” ghost story, similar to Sara-Anne’s, is the legend of Montmorency’s Dame Blanche--centered on the Montmorency Falls in Québec, where a woman supposedly leapt to her death in her wedding gown after finding out her lover had been killed at the base of the falls in the Battle of Beauport in 1759.
There seems to be a reasonably strong case for “white lady” ghosts being imported by Canada’s early settler population, especially those from the UK and eastern Europe. In “The White Lady of Great Britain and Ireland”, an article for the scholarly publication Folklore, Jane C. Beck posits that these apparitions are based on pagan beliefs of river goddesses due to the white lady’s tendency to appear near bodies of water in various folk stories, perhaps sublimated into legends about fairies (specifically the banshee, a harbinger of death) or repurposed from them in areas where stories about fairies were less popular.
With all of the research that went into this episode, I didn’t really get the chance to dig into the folklore aspect of these “white lady” or “woman in white”-type hauntings. I’d love to explore the connection between ladies in white and bodies in water, too, since I think there’s something there about how fog rises off the water, and what that might look like to someone who just happens to glance over. Anyway, I would love to cover this in a future episode if someone has their own hometown scary they want to share, featuring a lady in white. Send it in via email (smalltownspooky@gmail.com) or on the socials @smalltownspooky.
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Until next time, thanks for listening and hope to spook you soon. ;)
Credits
Special thanks to the providers of the music for this episode.
It’s Not Hard to Get Lost by Bryan Mathys (title theme); July by Kai Engel; Autumn Sunset by Jason Shaw; выходной by Kosta T; Clusticus the Mistaken and You’re Right But I’m Me by Doctor Turtle all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License; Lesicia by Kai Engel licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial International 4.0; Rose of the World by The Victor Herbert Orchestra is licensed under CC0 Public Domain Mark 1.0.
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