The Fort Garry Hotel – Winnipeg
Built in 1913, the Fort Garry Hotel is a majestic, 14-story, chateau-style structure that is both a national landmark and beacon of pride in the Winnipeg skyline. But beneath the opulent façade, and back in the hotel’s history, lie some tragedies and some ghosts. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway built a fort in 1911 where their east and west lines joined. The company then built the hotel to offer plush accommodations to luxury railway passengers. For many years, the first landmark rail riders saw as they approached Winnipeg was the Fort Garry Hotel. The hotel has experienced and survived floods and even a major fire, and today the building represents the spirit of the city—and some of that spirit seems intent on staying around forever. The second floor is said to be the most haunted, and room 202 is the epicenter of activity. Sebastian Ritchie was over from England staying at the hotel on business in November 2003. Ritchie said,
“I was staying in the infamous room 202. At the time, I knew absolutely nothing of its spooky reputation whatsoever. In the early hours of the morning of November 20, I woke to see, by a crack of streetlight filtering in between the curtains, the outline of a figure standing at the end of my bed. I could barely make out more than the haggard silhouette of the head, and the shape of the body, clad in some kind of robe or cloak. I was literally petrified but, after a time, the figure dissolved into nothing, and I assumed it had been a trick of the light or an optical illusion. “On my last day at the hotel, on leaving the breakfast room, I got into the elevator with a couple of other guests and pressed the number 2 button. ‘Have you seen a ghost?’ A woman asked me. ‘No, why, should I have seen one?’ I replied, and she said, ‘The second floor’s supposed to be haunted.’ On checking out later that morning, I asked one of the staff at the front desk about the haunting, and he grinned back at me and said, ‘Actually, it’s not just the second floor. Room 202 is one of the rooms that is supposed to be haunted.”
Dark figures are the most prominent sighting at the hotel, though a ghostly woman in a ball gown and strange ghost light that glides down the halls of the hotel have also been reported.
Written by Jeff Belanger Founder, Ghostvillage.com
THE FORT GARRY HOTEL
222 BROADWAY AVENUE WINNIPEG, MANITOBA R3C 0R3
TEL: 1 (204) 942-8251
WEBSITE: www.fortgarryhotel.com
SOURCE:
Encyclopedia of Haunted Places -Ghostly Locales from around the World – Compiled & Edited by Jeff Belanger – Copyright 2005 by Jeff Belanger