From Fort Edmonton to U of A, plenty of haunts in the city

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The Firkins House doesn’t look haunted from the outside. The old brown and grey house sits on 1905 Street in Fort Edmonton Park, a quiet nondescript home set back from the dirt road.

But the quiet exterior hides a slightly more active secret, ghosts or spirits or whatever you want to call it interacting with park guests and staff.

Sam Stralak, the product operations supervisor for Fort Edmonton Park, doesn’t know for sure what the spirit inside the house is. He oversees the ghost tours in the home and has seen and heard things he can’t explain.

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The family who owned the home before it was moved to the park reported seeing an older man dressed in “old-time clothes” in the dining room. Unexplained noises can be heard, especially in the upper floors of the home, more than just creaks and groans from an old house shifting in the wind.

“I’ve heard furniture move when we are down here. Doors creaking, footsteps, scratching on the other side of doors,” says Stralak, standing in the living room of the park’s haunted house.

The Firkins House is a craftsman-style home originally built by Dr. Ashley Firkins, a dentist who had moved to the city with his wife Blanche in 1911. The Firkins family moved to California in 1923, and the house was eventually donated to Fort Edmonton Park in 1992, after which it was moved from its location on Saskatchewan Drive.

About 15 years later, electricians working in the house reported strange happenings. Working upstairs one night, a junior electrician turned off the lights and headed for the stairs when he suddenly felt something grab him from behind, like a hug. He bolted from the home, trying to escape whatever had a hold on him. When he got downstairs and bolted out the door, the lights on the upper floor were on again.

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The official position of Fort Edmonton Park was, for many years, that ghosts didn’t exist; there’s nothing to see here. But then, in 2018, they invited Ghost Hunt Alberta to investigate some of the buildings and teach staff the tricks of ghost hunting.

That turned into ghost tours, which got their start during the pandemic when the park couldn’t operate as normal and started running ghost tours, bringing small groups of guests into the park when large crowds and big gatherings weren’t possible. The popularity of the tours has skyrocketed, with fall tours this year sold out into November.

Small groups are brought through the house once per week, using devices such as electromagnetic field readers to check out the spirits that might be inside the century-old home.

“You have an innate sense of knowing when something is wrong. It’s those feelings we are getting people to tap into,” says Stralak.

Spooky Old Strathcona

The Princess Theatre towers over the south side of Whyte Avenue, its large marquee jutting out over the sidewalk on the popular shopping street. A few steps back from the sidewalk brings into view the windows on the top two floors, the final resting place of Sarah Anne, known as the Woman in White, who haunts the century-old building.

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The spectre of a woman draped in a flowing white dress can be seen wandering up and down the grand staircase or hovering above the projector room.

Built in 1915, the Princess Theatre housed not only a theatre but also offices for rent and boarding rooms. A few years after it opened, a young woman came to town and found her new home on the upper floors of the building.

An unexpected pregnancy soon followed for Sarah Anne, a child conceived out of wedlock at a time when such things were highly frowned upon. The father proposed but skipped town a few days before the planned wedding. Heartbroken, Sarah Anne slipped into her wedding dress and hanged herself in her room.

“Her body was not discovered until 15 days later,” says Nadine Bailey. “The only reason her body was discovered was because the landlord was coming to collect that month’s rent.”

Bailey has been collecting ghost stories in the city for two decades, the owner of Edmonton Ghost Stories guiding large groups through the University of Alberta, local cemeteries and the old buildings that make up Old Strathcona.

That includes the Strathcona Hotel, which has dominated the same corner since 1891. Staff have reported seeing an apparition in the hallways, a woman with long curly dark hair, drenched in blood wandering the halls while repeating the phrase “Where is my head?” She vanishes as quickly as she appears.

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It’s a story that goes back four decades with a man staying in the hotel looking to pay for some female company. After a disagreement about the payment to be rendered, the man became agitated and strangled his guest.

He sat with the body for three days before coming up with the horrendous idea to chop it up and dump it in the North Saskatchewan River. The man was eventually caught and his ghastly crime was discovered.

“According to the paper, the only bag never recovered from the river was the bag that contained the woman’s head,” says Bailey, who is also the host of the Haunted Canada podcast, highlighting some of the country’s spookiest locations.

The room he stayed in, number 16, is visible from the alley behind the hotel. Bailey can still stop and point to it from her tours.

Campus apparitions

It should come as no surprise that at more than 100 years old, the University of Alberta has its fair share of ghost stories.

Pembina Hall looks like a typical university building out of a movie. It’s a low, squat red-brick building with vines climbing the side. Young university students scurry past, unaware of the apparitions that supposedly haunt the home of Native Studies on campus.

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But the red brick building, locked up at night, houses restless spirits. It was full of bodies of the sick and dying, as well as the dead, at the outbreak of the Spanish Flu. At night it’s said that spirits wander the halls, including that of a woman who is floating around, trying to find her betrothed.

The story comes from Ellen Schoeck, an author who has written five books about the history of the University of Alberta, including I Was There, stories about life on campus published at the University’s centenary.

Her stories come not from late-night maintenance staff at the end of a long shift or heard second-hand from students 20 years after they left campus, but from high-level university officials, one of whom passed along the story about Pembina Hall while she was writing her first book.

“He stopped me, says ‘Ellen, you know there’s a ghost in Pembina Hall,” says Schoeck. “He had this very serious look; he was so serious about this. I didn’t prod him or laugh. I said, ‘Ok, I will put it in the book.’”

It’s not the last time she was approached with a ghost story from campus. The now torn-down Ring House 1 was supposed to be haunted, while the spirit of Dr. Karl Clark, the scientist who perfected the process of extracting oil from the oil sands, still inhabits the old Power Plant building, where he did his work.

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On the south side of campus, an associate dean told Ellen about a ghost at Corbett Hall.

“He said, ’Ellen, I know you’re doing a book. He had this very serious look. ‘Most of us in Corbett Hall know there’s a ghost. A whole bunch of us have seen here, wafting her way across the stage of the auditorium.’”

Staff and students called her Emily, the name of a female student who had died right before graduation. They think she may be the spirit of that student, unable to collect her degree in life so she crosses the stage now, as a spirit, to finish the work she was doing on campus.

The stories she’s collected all involve, in some way, unfinished business or a strong connection to campus.

It could be the same for the rest of the spirits on this list, from the women wandering the Strathcona Hotel to whatever it is that inhabits the Firkins House. Maybe it’s just a connection to the world they refuse to give up. Whatever the reason, the city plays host to more than a few places that go bump in the night.

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