Haunted tales from Saskatchewan and Manitoba

Here are some fun haunted tales from Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

The first story is written by Alan Hustak from Grassland News, who allowed me to reprint the tale here. 

Melville’s haunted highway

She’s been seen just as the full October moon rises, walking along a lonesome stretch of Highway 15 between Melville and Ituna.

The details are sketchy. But those who have encountered her describe her as an attractive young farm girl in her late teens. Although she is pretty, she has a pale, bleached look. She wears a woollen skirt and a flower-patterned blouse with shoulder pads that were a fashion statement during the Second World War. 

In her hand, she carries a 10-gallon Roger’s syrup pail.

She doesn’t always accept a ride, but John Pawelko, a member of the Calling Lakes Paranormal Investigators, recalls being smitten by her when he once gave her a lift to a farm north of Melville.

Steve Koselski claims he drove her to a farm east of Melville, near Fenwood. Both men say her name was either Angie or Abby or Aggie, “something that begins with an A,” and that she told both of them that she was on her way to pick up her infant daughter, who she had left in the care of her “babusia” or grandmother. 

As  Koselski turned off Highway 10 to follow a grid road, the moon was out. Off to the side, he could see the tombstones of a small country cemetery that came into view.

“It’s a good thing I gave you a ride. You wouldn’t want to be walking around a graveyard at this time of the night.” Koselski made small talk with the girl.

He distinctly recalls her reply.

“The dead are not to be feared,” she said quietly. “Nothing to be afraid of. Many of them are sad creatures because they find themselves on a path to an unreachable destination.”

They drove in silence for a few miles until the road turned, and she directed him to a farmhouse.

A coyote howled, and a light went on in a second-floor window. His passenger got out of the car and disappeared into the house. 

It wasn’t until the following morning that Koselski discovered the woman had left behind the syrup can she had been carrying. He pried off the lid and discovered it was filled with hundreds of old banknotes. 

That afternoon he drove over the same roads he had followed the previous evening to return the can to her. He went over the railroad tracks, and down the same bad gravel, past brown fields while leaves blew from the trees. 

He knew he was on the right grid when he saw the graveyard they had passed the night before.

He kept driving, trying to find the farmhouse where he had dropped her off. But like Pawelko before him, who had also tried to return and find the girl, Koselski found himself disoriented.

Something about the surroundings seemed odd. There was an abandoned house hidden behind an overgrown caragana windbreak, but that wasn’t the place.

The road came to a dead-end near a weather-beaten country church with an onion dome that he had not noticed the night before. 

A few yards down the road was a burial ground where a gravedigger was at work.

Koselski approached him, told him the story, and asked the gravedigger if he could identify the woman he had picked up hitchhiking and where he could find her farmhouse.

The gravedigger was an old man, one of those wise and witty rural sages in the countryside.

He put down his shovel and blinked.

“There’s a reason they call this area Fenwood,” he said slowly. “You’re not the first to experience the fen fire.”

“Fen fire? What’s that?”

“It’s a will o’ the wisp. It’s the spirit of a young woman who walks the earth.”

Then the old man told him of a family from the vicinity who had been murdered while they were picking potatoes in a field decades before. The victims included a young mother, her two infant children, her husband and her mother-in-law. The killer got away with thousands of dollars the old lady had hidden in a syrup tin. 

“They never found who did it.” he continued. “Here, I’ll show you where they are buried.”

He directed Koselski to the group’s grave.

There, on one of the tombstones, he read the name: Angeline. She was 20 when she died.

Koselski felt his heart race. He didn’t linger. Back in his car, he opened the syrup tin that he had come to return.

It was empty. 

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A haunted tale from Winnipeg – Fort Garry’s haunted room

Winnipeg’s Fort Garry Hotel was built in 1913 by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and has a history of hauntings in room #202.

Guests claim they’ve been woken by ghostly figures standing at the foot of their bed.

The story of the haunting begins with a pair of honeymooners, who checked into room 202 just before the bride fell ill.

The new husband left to pick up some medicine for her but never returned. He died in a car accident on the way.

The bride, in a state of shock and grief, committed suicide by hanging herself in the hotel room closet.

Today, her ghost has been spotted in room 202, as well as in the lounge, where she cries over her love lost.

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The stone house near Indian Head

This story comes from The Flatlander reader Kelsey. He writes:

On the #1 Highway east of Regina, not far from Indian Head, Saskatchewan, there is an abandoned stone house near the highway and the rail line that runs parallel. The windows on the rail side have been covered over with bricks. 

The story goes …..

The mother of the family that lived there in the early 1900s looked out the upstairs window to see her young daughter playing on the train tracks. She then noticed a train was rapidly approaching. She ran downstairs to save her daughter only to get there in time to watch her daughter (be) killed by the train. She was so saddened by the accident that she and her husband bricked up the windows and doors on the railway side of the house.

I don’t know if the story is true or not, but one day just before dark I was driving back to Regina, and I just happened to look over at the old stone house. It could have been shadow, optical illusion caused by headlights of the other cars, or …??? , but I could swear that I saw an apparition of a woman in a dress typical of the 20s/30s carrying something in her arms towards the door on the highway side. When she got to the step to go inside it looked like she collapsed in a sitting position. 

After I swerved and pulled my SUV over onto the shoulder of the highway, I looked back to make sure it wasn’t a squatter or teenagers in the house. It was completely dark and abandoned.

A haunted tale from Selkirk, Manitoba – St. Andrew’s on the Red

The oldest stone church in Western Canada, St. Andrew’s on the Red River, outside Selkirk, was completed in 1849.

The dare is to walk backwards around the church three times, if you do, you’ll disappear, apparently. 

People say the church is haunted:

• At night, some claim they’ve seen disembodied red eyes floating through the cemetery.
• Others say they’ve heard an organ playing from somewhere.
• Different visitors say they hear the rattling of church gates. 
• A mysterious woman cloaked in white has also been spotted floating through the cemetery. Some accounts say it’s a man in black.  

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Thanks for reading, and kind regards,

Kelly-Anne Riess