BONUS: Haunted Canada

Shauna: I want you to picture this. A tunnel system that moves beneath a building like a root system of a dead tree. There are narrow passageways, damp corridors, almost 20 kilometers. And they were used for a very particular reason. Mostly to move dry goods from one location to the next, linen, food. But there was another purpose. Bodies. lots and lots of bodies. Because at the time, people were trying to recover, trying to get better, trying not to dampen their hopes. So the idea of watching their fellow patients be wheeled off the grounds after they passed, well, that's just not good for the spirits. So workers would Wheel the bodies down, out through these tunnel systems, and into the vehicles that would take them eventually to the morgue. But after years passed and the purpose of the tunnels was no longer needed, contractors were sent down there to do a little bit of demolition work. To spruce things up a bit, I guess you could say. But contractor after contractor began to walk out and refuse to go back in, claiming that it was like walking. From a summer warmth into a winter storm. That the air got so frigid that they could see their breath. And then there were the sounds. The sounds of screaming, crying, muffled conversations, and the squeaky wheels of a cart. So maybe you're thinking, ⁓ this sounds like a place I totally would like to visit. And you can. We're gonna talk about where in a little bit, but if you get a chance to, these are the things that you might hear. A woman scream, a tall figure walk past you, or the sound of a child calling to a mother that would never answer back. Some stories blur the line between reality and the unfamiliar. They whisper in the night, waiting to be heard. So let's listen. Let's talk spooky. Welcome back, Spooky Souls, and Happy Birthday, Canada! Hey to all my fellow Canadians that are celebrating Canada Day today. I hope you're having fun. If you are just stumbling upon our show, welcome. I am your ghostly guide, Shauna, and I will be taking you through all things creepy, paranormal, darkly curious, haunted history, and essentially anything strange that we can come across. This week, to honor my beautiful country, I'm doing something a little bit different. I want to share six locations with you across six provinces, and some of these locations are actually places that if you are from Canada or you've traveled through Canada, you might have stopped by and had no idea how haunted it truly was. It's a sh bite-size bonus episode, so I will be keeping things a little short. But if there is a location that stands out to you, one that just sends chills down your spine, and you want to know more, leave it in the comments. I read every single comment and I genuinely love hearing from you guys. So before we get into it, if this episode has you in the road trip mood, I want you to travel over To the review button and to that follow button. It helps our spooky community grow and it helps keep the show moving and grooving. So I think I've had enough ⁓ coffee for today. If you're ready, let's jump in to our ghostly ride of the night, which I think I would imagine being something along the lines of baby from supernatural. Get cozy, and as always. Let's talk spooky. Before it was anyone's nightmare, Tranquil was someone's cure. It opened in November of 1907, built on a stretch of ranch land that lay across the shores of Kamaloop Lake. Tranquil was one of the first tuberculosis sanatoriums in Canada, next to the Muskoka Cottage Sanatorium, which is actually located in Gravenhurst, Ontario. And we might visit it. Back then, TB was considered the white plague. It was the single leading cause of death throughout the country, and at the time there was no antibiotics for it. So it was a 50-50 chance. You might live, you might not. Essentially, the only advice doctors had for this was find rest, fresh air, sunlight, and take time. So British Columbia built a small city around the cure itself. A farm, a fire department, even a school, a laundry facility, a tennis court, gardens. And by the 1930s, more than 600 patients and staff lived on the grounds. It was mostly self-sufficient, and it was miles from anywhere. So containing the disease was fairly easy. When a cure finally did arrive in 1957, the sanatorium closed. But the building didn't sit empty for long. In 1959, it reopened as a psychiatric institution, and stayed that way until 1983. Then A three-week staff protest over patient care finally shut its doors for good. After that came a brief stretch where it served as a youth detention center. And then, finally, for the first time in 75 years, it sat empty and has remained that way to this very day. Today the land belongs to Tranquil Farm Fresh, who runs a heritage tour and occasionally a Halloween escape room. Which you can actually tour the tunnels that we talked about in the beginning of the episode. So if the sound of sobbing voices and empty corridors, wards that held both the ill and the criminally insane, sounds like an afternoon out to you? Well, not only are you in the right place, but I suggest you book it. And it's definitely worth the visit if you're in for some thrills and chills. Now let's follow the tuberculosis thread a little bit more eastwards. We're gonna take a drive to Edmonton, where there's a hospital that the cure came a little too late for. But the stories are not all about the ghosts. The building that became Charles Campsell Hospital started completely different. It served as an army base during the construction of the Alaskan Highway. Then The hospital was for servicemen with respiratory illness, but that's not why people remember it. You see, in 1946, the federal government turned it into what was officially called the Indian Hospital, one of several that were built across the country to treat indigenous peoples only for tuberculosis. A separate healthcare system that essentially segregated an entire community. Planes flew X-ray screening tours into remote communities of Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon, and even parts of the Northwest Territory. Anyone who showed signs of TB, men, women, children, even infants, would be sent south for sometimes years. And that's if they survived. Some were taken without the consent of their families. Records of survival accounts. Show procedures that were forced upon these individuals, including sterilization, and many never came home, mostly because of that, and less because of their tuberculosis diagnosis. Some are buried in the cemetery at St. Albert's, which is also a shared ground to a formal residential school. And even today, decades later, there are families that are still searching for the records of their loved ones, having no idea what truly happened to them. The hospital operated this way until 1968, and it never fully closed its doors until 1996. People who've gone into the now abandoned buildings since then described the feeling of a large empty void. Figures are glimpsed at windows, footsteps are heard down corridors, and the fourth floor psychiatric ward. seems to be the most active with sounds of people crying and shouting, footsteps, the sounds of carts rolling, wheelchairs squeaking. What I think is the most unsettling about this isn't the ghosts. It's the history that's really embedded underneath this location. And Edmonton's Heritage Council also recognized this and they put together a short documentary a few years back built From research done by Danielle Metcalf Chennel and how it shaped Canada's recognition of its indigenous people today. So now I want to move from Edmonton's Roads down east out of Alberta and across the open landscape of the prairies, where the skyline literally goes on forever. Here we come across Winnipeg's Fort Gary Hotel, where the ghost story is based entirely on one woman, one room, and one terrible phone call. Fort Gary opened its doors on December 11, 1913, built by the Grand Truck Pacific Railway to give wealthy train travelers somewhere suitably grand to sleep. The 13-story chateau style stone was actually modeled after Ottawa's Chateau Laurier. And it was briefly the tallest building in Winnipeg. Royals have stayed there, and so has Louis Armstrong. Liberance and the king himself. But almost anyone in Winnipeg knows about Fort Gary's history. And they'll skip straight past the guest list and go to room 202, where the story goes that a young woman checked in sometime in the hotel's early decades. Not long after her husband passed away, a car accident. That's what most versions go with. Some say it was a horse-drawn cart, others it was a streetcar. But regardless, overcome with grief, she was said to have hanged herself in the closet of room 202 that very same night. Some call her Kate, and other versions her story doesn't really have a name. But there are darker tellings of the story. A forbidden marriage, a furious family, a death made to look like an accident that really wasn't. But nobody can fully agree. Because ghost stories are just that. A little bit of everybody's interpretation. Which is usually a sign that you're dealing with a story that's been told and retold and told again for hundreds of years, rather than written down word for word that very day. But there is one thing that people can agree on: that the closet door in that room will not stay shut. The television switches on and off by itself, and there's an unmistakable scraping sound, like a hanger sliding back and forth when nobody's touching it. And in the year 2000, a sitting member of Parliament told a national newspaper that while she stayed in that room, She woke up twice, with a distinct sensation that someone was climbing in the bed next to her. Now the staff at the hotel's lounge kind of brushed it off. They said, well, everybody has a story for that room. But what they have seen and what they have witnessed is a woman in a pale robe seen crying quietly in the corner of the room. She's usually gone before anyone gets close enough to ask. Room 202 still exists, and you can book it. Though the front desk will tell you exactly what you're walking into. Full disclosures given. Fort Gary sits in the downtown Winnipeg area. It's a short walk from the forks, and it does have its own ghost walk. So if you're up for evening, take a tour, see the beautiful city, and maybe Kate will climb into bed with you when you get back to your room. Now let's hop back in our spookymobile and head east again. This time to the Great Lakes, into Ontario, into a haunted hotel that is also a battlefield. Fort George is located on the Niagara River, where the dead from one of Canada's defining wars never quite finished what they started. Fort George went up between 1796 and 1799 on a strip of high ground looking over the Niagara River. It was built to guard the Upper Canada against the American invasions, and it got its chance to prove itself in May of 1813, when the American artillery bombarded the fort for two days straight, leveling nearly everything in the building. Before the troops landed and took the town, the Americans held Fort George for nearly seven months before the British finally took it back, and then there wasn't really much of a fort left to defend. And it seems the dead from that siege never really left their post. According to people who run nightly ghost tours there, visitors and staff have described soldiers in red coats standing watch in the officers' quarters. A man, known as Irving, pacing the upper floors where the barracks were located. And the most often sighting, strangely enough, is that of a little girl. Her name is Sarah Ann Tracy. And unlike most of the ghosts we talked about tonight, she isn't really much of a mystery. She was a real child, the daughter of a troop sergeant major stationed at the fort where she died in 1840, At the age of seven from unknown causes. She was buried in the town St. Mark Cemetery, which, as a sad note, is actually far away from where the rest of her family was eventually buried. So she's all by herself there. People on the Fort's tunnel tours say that because of this, she still follows people along with the tours, trying to get interaction, to get a little company. She'll She'll peek around corners, she'll play peekaboo, she'll roll balls, and occasionally she'll tug on the sleeves of unsuspecting walkers. Just to get a little attention. Typical kid, right? And Fort George is under the full National Historic Landmark site. So today it's open seasonally for daytime tours. There's musket demonstrations, costumed reenactors, and after dark. There is a candlelit ghost walk that's run by the friends of Fort George. It's available most weekends from spring through October, and have actually been on it. It's pretty good. It takes visitors down into the tunnels, and on more than one occasion, visitors have said that they have heard the sound of little girl footsteps running behind them, trying to catch up to the tour. But We can't stay here very long, so let's keep going. We're gonna journey north, northeast to be precise, into Quebec, to a hotel that is so recognizable that it's probably Canada's most photographed building. And the ghost who lives here, well, they like to be photographed as well. The Fairmount Chateau Frontenac wasn't built until 1893. A turret Copper roofed castle style design was created by architect Bruce Price. And it was done so for the Canadian Pacific Railway, the same company that essentially built luxury hotels across the entire country in order to create an allure for train use. And it hosted quite a few interesting people, including Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Alfred Hitchcock. And during the Second World War, two real wartime summits, the Quebec Conference, and it also played host to two real wartime summits, one of which was the Quebec Conference that held Winston Churchill, Roosevelt, and Mackenzie King. So it held some big names. But the hotel itself was named after Louis de Bois, the Comet de Frontenac, the governor of New France at the time. Two centuries before any fancy people showed up on it. Which creates a problem. If you try to take a ghost story literally, because Frontenac died in 1698, nearly 200 years before the hotel itself even had blueprints attached. So he couldn't have died there. Because he was never there to begin with. So why is it that People believe to see his ghost walking through the halls. Because they do. Generation after generation, guests describe a man of 17th-century attire moving through the hallways, passing through walls, and when anyone tries to speak to him, well, he smiles, nods his head, and disappears. So he's a pretty nice guy. At least he says hi. There's a very romantic story attached to this. He said if he ever died, he would want his heart sent back to France, to be buried beside that of his wife, even if his body couldn't make it there. And I wish I could tell you that that request was honored. But it wasn't. It was actually quietly ignored. So, the legend states that he haunts the hotel that was named after him, seemingly looking for For the heart that was never taken back to France. Or maybe he's looking for his long lost love. Or maybe he just likes that a hotel was named after him. I mean, who wouldn't? And he's not alone there. There's not just one ghost. ⁓ there's multiple. A second figure, known as the woman in white, appears at the foot of guests' bed in the small hours of the morning. Her identity as well, and her history, is entirely unknown. Because nobody ever really manages to explain exactly what she looks like. Because she vanishes before their eyes before they even get a close enough look at her. Hard to tell who someone is when we can't get a good shot of them, right? But the Chateau Frontenac sits in the heart of Old Quebec, an active, luxurious hotel today that you can book a room and find out for yourself which floor collects the most ghost stories. And you might be surprised to know that the front desk has a very interesting way of not confirming with anybody, whether they're a ghost in the building or not, coming from experience. I tried. Now, we're going to finish the leg of our trip at the most, in my opinion, beautiful side of Canada. And that is the Atlantic. We're gonna move into Halifax, Nova Scotia, to an old church that watched a city burned to the ground, but stayed completely intact. St. Paul's is the oldest building that still stands in Halifax today. It's older than the explosion that almost destroyed it. It's older than Confederation. Older in fact than Canada itself. It was founded by the Royal Proclamation in 1749, the same year that Halifax was founded. And the first service it held was the following September. For over a century afterwards, it served as the city's Anglican cathedral, the first one ever built outside of Great Britain. And on the morning of December 6th, 1917, two ships collided in the Halifax Harbor. And we actually covered this in a previous episode. One of them was the Mount Blanc, carrying roughly 3,000 tons of wartime explosives. And what followed that was essentially the largest man-made explosion recorded in history. It leveled an entire city, killed an estimated 2,000 people, and was felt all the way to Prince Edward Island. And if you're interested in knowing more about that explosion and the repercussions of it, check out our Canada's Most Haunted Lakes, and you'll get a little snippet in that. But in all of the explosion and the chaos, St. Paul stood still. Every window in the building had shattered or cracked, but the structure itself stood firm. In the midst of the chaos, it became an emergency hospital that same morning, as it was considered by the city to be one of the most sound structures. Essentially, it withheld the blast so it could hold the people's lives in its hands as well. And eventually, as the cleanup began, it housed the dead as well. And believe it or not, there are two relics from that very morning that remain in the church today. One is a steel window frame hurled from somewhere else in the city, still lodged in the vestibule wall above the door's entrance. The other is the window itself, one pane broken in the blast that Has shattered into an unmistakable silhouette of a man's head and shoulders. And nobody in the congregation can explain how it happened. Many believe that it could have been an individual whose silhouette was burned permanently into the glass during the blast itself. Others believe it's much more divine than that. But whatever you believe, if you take a look for yourself, let me know. Send your interpretations if you have a chance to visit Halifax and you go to St. Paul's Church. St. Paul's is open daily in Halifax and it's located near the Grand Parade. It is a free, self-guided tour, and during office hours, both relics are still there and can be viewed exactly where the explosion left them. I hope you enjoyed tonight's episode and our tour across six provinces with six very different and very haunted locations. Today, Canada celebrates its 159th birthday. And I can't help thinking that in those 159 years, how much history we still haven't uncovered. So if you're spending today as a Canadian enjoying fireworks, hanging out on your porch, having a drink, planning a future road trip, I hope you include one of these locations. Or check out your own historic location near you. Support your town and maybe learn something new and a little spooky. Because guaranteed, every single one holds a creepy story of its own. Thank you again for joining me on tonight's episode. And I hope that if you've experienced one of these places, you're gonna let me know about it in the comments. Hit that follow button, leave a review, and as always, I look forward to scaring you in the next episode. Stay curious, stay spooky.