She is known as the woman in white, a vision that appears around the film room and haunts the grand staircase of Edmonton's Princess Theatre on White Avenue in Edmonton, Alberta, in a district formerly known as Strathcona.
And Nadine Bailey of Edmonton Ghost Tours loves to talk about this and other ghosts as stops on her tour.
Nadine Bailey, who started Edmonton Ghost Tours, says the story of this apparition goes back a hundred when this area, then known as Strathcona, was a boom town of its own.
The spirit is said to be of a girl known as Sarah Anne, who arrived from the east without relatives and she let out a room atop the old theater.
"She met a man and got pregnant, an unconscionable thing at that time for an unmarried woman," Bailey tells us.
The father promised to marry her but renaged on his promise. With no other alternatives, the poor woman hanged herself in her room, where her spirits are said to haunt today.
Walking further down Whyte Avenue in Old Strathcona, you will find the remodeled Strathcona Hotel. It started in 1891 and was built by the Calgary and Edmonton Railway Company, later part of CP Rail, and was a way to stop those going to the Klondike gold rush in Alaska and the Northwest Territories. But, unfortunately, it had a reputation for rowdiness. And ghosts of men dressed in 19th-century attire parade in the hotel's halls and bar after dark, even after recent renovations.
Another stop on Bailey's tour is Pembina Hall at the University of Alberta. It has had multiple uses, including as a hospital and quarantine building during the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1919. It was first built in 1914 and is now a building for residents, one of the few that has maintained its original structure. Who haunts this building? For many years, residents of Pembina Hall have reported seeing apparitions of women and children. At night, they also heard coughing from locked and closed rooms, which are empty when people go to operate.
Another stop on tour is Rutherford House, also at the University of Alberta. Rutherford house was built in 1911 and was the home of Alberta's first premier, Alexander Cameron Rutherford, from 1911 to 1941, and has subsequently been designated as an Alberta provincial historic site. Now a museum, staff and visitors say that they'll often see a young boy dressed in period attire or hear the sound of a ball bouncing on the grand staircase.
No child has ever been reported to have died in Rutherford's house, so the ghost's origins are somewhat uncertain. However, Bailey tells us that spirits may be associated with a piece of furniture imported into the house.
These are just a few of the many scary tales Bailey tells on several different tours she leads from May through mid-November, which include tours of Old Strathcona, The University of Alberta, The haunted trolley over the high-level bridge, a haunted pub tour, and two historical tours - of Pembina and central cemeteries. The spooky stories result from Bailey's eighteen years of guiding people through ghost tours.
Are the stories accurate?
"I spend countless hours in the archives going through old newspapers and digging up stories," says Bailey, referring to the research she does to ensure her stories are historically accurate.
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