INTRODUCTION Calgary is a city of "the new," and so you might think finding ghosts here would be a challenge. It wasn''t. There''s something about the pioneer spirit that is particularly tenacious when it comes to sticking around, and the ghost stories in Calgary are certainly proof of that. Calgary is a city of action, energy, and pushing onwards. Bracing against the elements, enduring the harsh conditions, and learning how to survive in a new land. While Calgary likes to play up its cowboy past--and indeed it is a city of ranches, cattle, and farming--it''s also a city of oil, money, and powerful corporations. The taste of global fame it enjoyed during the 1988 Winter Olympics only whet its appetite for bigger, better, more. Calgary continues to grow and thrive, while its historic places sometimes shrink, but it''s getting much better at preserving the old alongside the new.

Downtown Calgary was very close to being somewhere else. I had no idea about this until I started writing this book. The Grand Trunk Railroad set up shop near Fort Calgary, and the original neighbourhoods of Inglewood and Ramsay formed around it, essentially creating "Old Town." This was meant to be the centre of the new city. However, when the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) showed up in the summer of 1883, they asked the Grand Trunk if they would like to share things like the depots, some of the lines, the terminal. Grand Trunk told them no, and so the CPR set up shop across the Elbow River, where it became a formidable force in Canada. Downtown Calgary grew up around it, and the Grand Trunk was gone by 1912. The way forward in Calgary has always been one of cooperation, establishing clubs and associations, and working together.

In the early days, there was no choice, it was do it or don''t survive. While the land was first stolen from the First Nations people by the Hudson''s Bay Company (hbc) and sold off to the Government of Canada, the actual birthplace of the colonial settlement now known as the city of Calgary is the land where, today, the Fort Calgary National Historic site stands. It has been and always will be a major meeting place for trade, community building, and the exchange of ideas and information. The confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers was a sacred space for the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy: Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Îy'rhe Nakoda (Chiniki, Bearspaw, Wesley), the Tsuut''ina people, and Métis Nation, Region 3. My family emigrated to Calgary from England when I was four and a half years old, and I remember all the thoughts and feelings I had when we arrived. Hearing my first Canadian train, and thinking it was a ghost playing an organ certainly helped get things off on the right foot. I lived in Calgary until I was twenty, and I certainly had more than my fair share of ghostly experiences during those years. My parents were very religious, though, and so ghosts were either all in my imagination or something evil, but mostly they were dismissed as something decidedly not real.

That left the younger me in a very weird space. Knowing I was experiencing something but not having anyone to talk to about it, bounce ideas off of, or confirm that "yes, there is something going on" was, at times, pretty lonely. Places that my parents would take me and my brother to on a regular basis sometimes baffled me with the energy I was sensing. We''d go to the Calgary Zoo, Heritage Park, the Planetarium, Stephen Avenue Mall, and I would sense things. I was sure that there was something going on just out of my sight, but I didn''t know what that was. Sometimes it was scary, sometimes it was exciting, but mostly I just didn''t talk about it. I had learned not to. When I was around sixteen, I met someone who was an official religious figure in the world of ghosts, and all of a sudden a lot of the pieces in my personal ghost-sensing puzzle came together.

I had some context. I had some validation, and most of all I learned a common language to put words to what I had sensed for as long as I could remember. A huge part of my own spiritual journey started in Calgary and has continued on in meeting others who have had their own experiences and encounters with a type of energy many people simply don''t want to believe in. When I was contemplating which place to write about once my first two books, Victoria''s Most Haunted and Vancouver''s Most Haunted , were done, Calgary just made sense. I''ve had my own experiences there, after all, and knew the city and still had plenty of friends both old and new who were willing to share their stories. Calgary was calling me home, or at least . something was. These stories came to me in a variety of ways, some by researching and asking the right questions of the right people at the right time, others because they were well known and easy to corroborate.

Some came from people wanting to share their own personal ghost story or haunted place, and others through the kindness of strangers who wanted to contribute or help in some way. I am so grateful to the individuals and agencies that let me ask a ton of questions and were so open and honest with me. Any book I write, I always try to weave in some lesser-known stories, even ones that perhaps have never been told publicly before. These stories bring a richness to my books, as they are simply the very honest experiences of another human being . living, that is. As always, I want to bring together stories that can provide entertainment, a thrill, a jump in the dark--or if you are experiencing something that you found troubling, curious, or unexplainable, then perhaps even comfort as these types of books often brought me comfort when I was young. Whatever you''re looking for--a ghost story, a little history, or a connection to the past--I hope you find it here, and I thank you for joining me on this journey, travelling around Calgary as I share some of her ghost stories and most haunted places.