Fort Edmonton Park
Renovating a house can bring out both contractors and entities. Can you imagine what happens when buildings from different parts of the country are uprooted and transported together to one site? One of Edmonton’s famous historical tourist attractions and Canada’s largest living history park has haunted buildings throughout it.
Fort Edmonton Park represents four historical periods in Edmonton’s history: the 1846 fur trade fort, and the streets of 1885, 1905, and 1920. In 1966, the fort was reconstructed (after being demolished in 1915). The fort itself contains various inner buildings and structures. Buildings were found from the four different eras and brought into the park. The uprooting and reconstruction of the structures have stirred up some ghostly happenings in the park.
Just before Halloween 2003, our group, accompanied by a local news photographer and a reporter, went to Fort Edmonton to spend most of the night in the Firkins house.
Dr. Ashley Firkins originally owned the house, which was built in 1912. In 1992, the house was donated to the park. He was an Edmonton dentist and had a wife and son. As far as history shows, no one had actually died in the house. Upstairs in the children’s bedroom, the photographer captured an amazing purple-colored figure beside one of our group’s members on the bed—he could not explain, technically, how it showed up on his camera.
There was a definite presence of a small boy with a red ball in the house, but nothing overly negative or threatening was sensed. In the study/sitting area, one particular piece of furniture seems to attract ghostly pictures. A female visage shows up in the middle of the bookcase, and an orb we captured with our camera appeared in the window and had a male face inside of it. The rest of the park is just as haunted as the Firkins house. As it gets dark, up and down the different streets you can feel energies watching you out of the windows.
Talking to the staff who work there, stories of unexplained thumps, footsteps, and the feeling something is behind you are very common. It’s a fascinating place to go to see life the way it was during Edmonton’s history.
Written by — Rona Anderson Paranormal Investigator/Psychic, Paranormal Explorers
FORT EDMONTON PARK
70000-143 STREET EDMONTON, ALBERTA
TEL: 1 (780) 496-8787
Taken from the: Encyclopedia of Haunted Places -Ghostly Locales from around the World – Compiled & Edited by Jeff Belanger – Copyright 2005 by Jeff Belanger