[INTRODUCTION]
Joli: Welcome listeners to another episode of Beyond the Unknown. I'm your host, Joli, and I'm Quinn, and today, we want to take you to the flat plains of the Canadian prairies, all the way to Saskatchewan. Here, we’ve uncovered ghostly apparatitions in one of the capital’s oldest and most renound hotels. We’ve also discovered a very interesting tale of a train….where there isn’t a train? What? Join us to find out about the Bessborough deltal hotel hotel hauntings and the eerie St. Louis Ghost train!
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So do you remember when I went to Saskatchewan last fall for a wedding? Well I figured I would do a little ghost hunting, since we were in the area ….
The wedding was in Saskatoon, the largest city in Saskatchewan, at the Delta Bessborough hotel. Naturally, I had to at least see if there were any ghost tales or sightings at the hotel. It turned out to be a goldmine!
So if you aren’t familiar with the area, Saskatchewan is known as being extremely flat. When I say flat, I mean flat. There are no hills and the roads are extremely straight. Its both dull and beautiful…hard to explain. There’s a well-known TV show called corner gas set here – its super funny! As with any prairie Canadian province, it is largely an agricultural and farming community.
Anyways, the Delta Bessborough, built in 1935, sits on the edge of the Saskatchewan river. It has a similar architectural background as the Banff Springs hotel. I describe this hotel in an overkill amount of detail in our Episode called the Ghosts of the Banff Fairmont Springs Hotel. I highly recommend you check out that episode, it is one of our most popular. The Delta Bessborough, is built similarly and bears a significant resemblance, BUT it is far smaller and the details far less grand and less ornate. It almost reminds me as though they build the structure and then ran out of money to put on the finishing touches, like crown moulding and such. It’s a beautiful hotel, but just in comparison to the Banff springs, it can’t compare. I think very few hotels can compare to the Banff Springs - So I guess it is a rather unfair comparison. Either way, it has that old French/Scottish chateau-esque vibe. The perfect setting for ghost stories and paranormal activity. Check out our social for a visual.
This hotel has three intriguing areas of interest - paranormally speaking. Im not going to let that go. Paranormally will be an abverb? word? adjective?
The first is the main floor. When you read about the legend of the main floor ghost, you will learn that guests often see a man wearing a grey suit and a fedora near one of the ballrooms. He is very friendly and does not cause any disturbances. In some cases he even helps guests or provides a tour. However, in my experience and after my own research, I suspect a somewhat different experience. This all comes down to how and where this man supposedly died. As the story goes, this man worked for the hotel as a bellman in the mid 1900s. He was called to one of the upper floors regarding a noise complaint. When he went to the 7th floor to tell the patrons to calm down, he was hoisted over the staircase railing by two drunken men and fell to his death. To this day, there is a large crack on the marble floor said to be caused by the impact of his body. I will post of video of this on our social media when my husband and I went to check it out. Now the reason I am not so sure of this “friendly” man in a defora by the ballroom, is that this fall over a staircase with the subsequent death occurred in what is actually the service stairwells, as opposed to being common areas. And when we went in there, we both felt very imcomfortable. We heard some unusual noises and felt random chills and gusts of cold air. Now it is a super old building and a very large set of stairs that wind to the top of the building - so there might be lots of explanations for this and we didn’t look into it any further.
Now the second story, involves either the 3rd or the 7th floor, depending on what source you read. The floor we were actually staying on was the 7th floor, and based on my experience up there, I strongly suspect it is paranormally active on some level or another. Now, the story involving the 3rd or 7th floor, I did not experience personally, but I tell you about it anyways. The legend says there is a very sad and tired looking woman with long hair who wanders the coridor. If you ignore her, she will ignore you. But if you draw attention to her or try to speak to her, she will scream and run at you before disappearing. I have no back story on who this woman might be or what she is upset about. Sometimes I wonder about her though and think was she a victim of foul play? a murder never solved? There is a long and treacherous history of indigenous women missing and presumed murdered. Most indigenous women would have long dark hair, but its just a hunch I have. After a deep dive on reddit, I did see something about a suspicious death and possibly murder that took place on the third floor. And lots of other hotel patrons talked about weird experiences where they thought someone had entered their room, and had even gotten out of bed or quickly gotten dressed to go see who entered, when in fact there was no one there. Now for my own story, and I so wish I had been able to capture this on video, but it kept happening while I was getting raedy for the wedding or otherwise preoccupied. Essentially, there is obviously a washroom in each hotel room. And in ours, the door to the washroom was a very large and heavy wooden door. If you opened the door fully, and it would stay open. It wasn’t one of those doors that would slowly close itself. So we kept it open when it wasn’t in use. But everynow and then, the door would slowly close itself. There was no draft in our room, and I would constantly try to leave the door open at different degrees to see if it would self close, and it never did. Gave me the creeps!! I sure wish I had some of that ghost hunting gear that a lot of our social media pals have!
The final story in the hotel is also without a backstory, but often children can be heard playing and laughing in the stairwells.
So all in all - for our ghost hunter friends out there - this place is worth your while to check out !! Saskatchewan as a whole is actually riddled with fascinating ghost stories, and because of that, I wanted to tell you just one more!
Our next story takes us to a small town in Saskatchewan of 450 residents called St. Louis, just south of Prince Albert. At one time, there were train tracks crossing north of the town. It is said that in the 1920s, on a cold winter night, when this particular railroad was still in operation, there was a brakeman or conductor from the Canadian National Railway traveling along the tracks in a locomotive. Due to some breakdown or obstruction, he exited the locomotive to examine the train and the tracks. Horrifically, he was struck by his own train and decapitated. Some other versions of the story say he was drunk, others say he was just unlucky. Since that time, locals report seeing very bright prominent beam of light on the tracks. Usually the lights are white but sometimes they even shine red. The light would seem to approach and then fade away. It is said that this is the beam of the train that struck the unlucky conductor, others saying it is actually the brakeman himself holding his lantern walking along the tracks.
The tracks were abandoned in 1983 and later removed in 1988, and despite that, the legend of the ghost train has continued to haunt residents and become a part of regular life; some residents report having heard or seen the lights of the ghost train over 60 times. Apparently it is rare to NOT have an experience seeing the light. The land is now on private propertly, and thus it cannot be promoted as a tourist attraction.
Naturally skeptics have tried to disprove this as a paranormal event. Two twelfth grade students actually did a project on the subject. Showing that the lights come from diffraction of headlights from the nearby highway. However, the phenomenon predates the presence of the highway and the vehicles. Yes, there was a model T ford that was mass produced in 1913, but the prominence of highway traffic in that area occurred much later. Additionally, the headlights on the first vehicles were nothing like our current bright lights being able to produce the intensity of the reported light seen.
No other concrete explanations have ever been put forth. So what do you think? Paranormal activity or simply some sort of explainable light refraction?
[Transition Music]
Joli: Thank you for joining us for another episode of "Beyond the Unknown." If you have a story you’d like to share, please email us at moody.mediaprod@gmail.com. You can reach out on our website, and who knows, your story might be featured in our next episode.
Quinn: All of our sources for this episode can be found on our website: beyondtheunknownpod.com.
And don’t forget, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review.
Joli: Until next time, listeners. Stay curious and remember that the unknown is always just beyond the shadows.
Both: BYEEEE