Medicine Hat full of spooky stories
By Tim Kalinowski on October 28, 2017.
tkalinowski@medicinehatnews.com @MHNTimKal Medicine Hat has many ghost stories associated with its history, and paranormal writer Hammerson Peters, best known for his book “Mysteries of Canada: Oak Island,” has delved into many over the years. “Medicine Hat has its fair share of ghost stories,” confirms Peters. “Depending on who you talk to, the town was named after an Indian legend tinged with the supernatural. The same goes for Seven Person’s Creek. Connaught School is supposed to be haunted, and some say that a particular neighbourhood in Crescent Heights is cursed. There are old-timers who will swear that the upper floor of the old Centennial Stationers building has a resident poltergeist. “And I know one very level-headed guy who had a strange experience around Ross Creek where two boys froze to death in a blizzard in 1892.” None of those stories is more eerie than the now infamous “Medicine Hat Ghost Train Story.” Originally told to a Lethbridge Herald columnist in 1966 by retired CPR engineer named Andrew Staysko, Peters writes an excellent summary of the story on his website “Hammerson Peters: A Resource for Curious Canucks.” Basically, the story goes, in June of 1908 a passenger train departing Medicine Hat for Dunmore engineered by Bob Twohey and stoked by fireman Gus Day was winding around the Ross Creek coulee when they encountered another train heading straight for them. Panicked, Twohey attempted to apply the brake when he and Day suddenly realized the oncoming train was actually a phantom. The two men stood there petrified as the ghost train moved off the track to pass by them. As Peters writes: “The spectral crewmembers in the cab (opposite) waved a greeting to the two horrified trainmen, as CPR crewmembers passing another train would typically do. As Day — who stood weak-kneed in the cab doorway — would later recount, the windows of the coaches that trailed behind the ghostly locomotive were lit. Suddenly, as soon as it had materialized, the phantom train vanished.” As eerie as this incident was, it would re-occur a few nights later when Gus Day was working with an another engineer named J. Nicholson near the same spot. “Just as before,” writes Peters, “the train sped past on invisible parallel tracks, with the ghostly crewmembers waving greetings from their positions in the cab and the cars.” On July 8, later that summer, the same engineer, Nicholson, was heading east toward Dunmore. At the same spot in the Ross Creek coulee Nicholson was horrified by the sight of another train heading straight for him, but this time it was for real. The two trains collided head on and Nicholson was killed on impact. In the other train engineer Bob Twohey, who had been involved with the previous ghost train sighting, was also killed on impact. Peters says it is stories like these which keep him fascinated about the paranormal, and still send a shiver down his spine. “It’s a piece of genuine Albertan folklore, and I think it deserves retelling,” he says. “I first read about it years ago, in Barbara Smith’s “Ghost Tales of Alberta,” and thought it was pretty interesting. There is an excellent version of it in Senator F.W. Gershaw’s book “Saamis: The Medicine Hat,” and there is a neat documentary on it that someone uploaded to Vimeo. 14
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