Deane House, Calgary – the Haunted Superintendent's Home

When

since 1971 date reconstructed from later accounts

Where

Deane House, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Verdict

Legend

A Mounted Police superintendent's house from 1906, moved twice and for years a cheap rooming house, is reputed to be the most haunted place in Calgary.

What happened

Deane House was built in 1906 on the Fort Calgary site for Superintendent Richard Burton Deane, the last commanding officer of the North-West Mounted Police post in Calgary. When the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway bought the fort grounds in 1914, every building was demolished except Deane's house, which was moved – a 1929 photograph shows it on the move again, to the east bank of the Elbow River. During the Great Depression it became a rooming house, and according to local historians it was a crime scene in 1971, when a tenant killed his wife and then himself. Other deaths are spoken of too – suicides, stabbings and accidents. Today the building houses a restaurant, and guests and staff describe a man with a pipe seen in windows and on the stairs, a rust-coloured stain in the attic that changes shape, a closet door that will not stay locked, laughter in the halls, the smell of cigar smoke and a disconnected telephone that rings. An Indigenous man is also said to appear, ordering trespassers off his sacred ground.

Witnesses

Accounts by restaurant staff and guests collected by the Calgary Heritage Initiative (2021, 2024) and local media; no named witnesses.

Explanations and hypotheses

The building's history is well known: a house of 1906, the fort's demolition after 1914, the moves and the rooming-house years. The 1971 murder-suicide is given by local historians of the Calgary Heritage Initiative, but one online source dates it to 1952, and the details – names, circumstances – would need checking in newspaper archives. The other “deaths” belong to tour-guide storytelling. The phenomena reported by guests – the stain, the closet door, the smell of smoke – have never been investigated. An old wooden house, moved several times and with a turbulent past, makes ideal material for local ghost tours.

Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.

Sources

More: Wikipedia (en)