A ghost! -- A story from the Calder Railway Yards

Date: October 1959

You don't find ghosts. They find you. Those words were on my mind as I left the hotel bar room and stepped out into the darkness to begin my solitary journey home. Home was a C.N. Telegraph gang's bunkhouse. It was attached to a work train parked on a remote sidetrack inside the huge Calder Railway Yard in northwest Edmonton. I had left the bunkhouse before dark to visit the local hotel; confident the return journey would just be a reversal of the daylight trip. Time passed quickly as I listened to the local yarns. One man told a frightening story of his encounter with a particularly nasty ghost the night before in the same area I was about to cross.

It was his words that were on my mind as the hotel door closed behind me and I faced the night alone.

The Calder Yard contained miles of railroad track and hundreds of boxcars. It never slept as the powerful diesel engines bullied the reluctant boxcars into line, forming mile-long trains that carried freight around North America. A colossal bowling alley of sounds and the smell of cattle car manure and diesel smoke filled the air. Steel wheels complained, screeching loudly as they met steel track like giant finger nails across the night sky blackboard. It was a most intimidating place to walk at midnight. Could a ghost find me in this restless place?

When I began walking home in the yard, stepping over the rails and staying alert for any movement in the darkness, I lost my sense of direction. I stopped to get my bearings. I was lost and standing in the darkness between two endless lines of towering boxcars. It was after midnight that cool October morning of 1959, and I was starting to feel uncomfortable. . Now as the early morning breeze picked up, and a chill went up my spine, I felt the hair on my neck move and goose bumps pop out on my skin. Off to one side, a ball of light appeared and began bobbing up and down as it skimmed the rooftops of the boxcars. It was coming my way, and as I watched its erratic movement, my uncomfortable feeling turned to fear. Unable to move and fascinated by the thing's ability to float through the air from one box car roof to another, I squatted down in the blackness thinking the smaller I was the less likely I would be noticed.

Then I heard the footsteps. As their noise grew louder, the light grew brighter until it was there just above me on the roof of a freight car. To my horror, it stopped as if looking for its victim.

Then it floated off the roof and down to my level and came towards me.

A dark shape stood in front of me as I straightened up to face my final moment. A very human voice asked who I was and what I was doing here this time of night? The light was a C.N. switchman's signal lantern and the voice belonged to the switchman. After identifying myself and telling him I was lost, he walked me to the bunkhouse about three sets of train tracks away from where he found me. He laughed as I told him I thought he was a ghost. He explained there were narrow plank walkways on the rooftops of the rail cars and with practice you could easily jump from car to car. When he floated off the roof to the ground he was climbing down a ladder attached to the car.

We said good night and I watched him walk to the side of a boxcar. He held his lamp aloft, 'floated' up into the darkness, and moved away skimming the roof tops and 'floating' effortlessly through the early morning air from box car to box car. As I got into bed, after making sure the door was locked, I thought I heard a voice whisper, 'You don't find ghosts. They find you.'