IF YOU’VE EVER MADE the road trip from Vancouver to Prince George, British Columbia, chances
are that you’ve driven through the village of Ashcroft, located about an hour west of
Kamloops in the most arid region in all of Canada, in the heart of what some claim to
be Canada’s only true desert south of the Arctic Circle.
In addition to its 1,500 residents, Ashcroft is home to a number of chilling ghost stories.
One of these tales tells of the frightening spectre of a Chinese woman whom travelers
sometimes encounter at night on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway just south of town.
Another Chinese ghost, this one the spirit of a friendly cook, is said to haunt (and
occasionally bake ghostly bread in) Hat Creek House- a historic stagecoach hotel situated
20 minutes north of Ashcroft on the Cariboo Highway.
Of all the historic buildings located in and around Ashcroft, few have more ghost stories
attached to them than the Sundance Guest Ranch, a dude ranch situated about ten minutes south
of town off the Highland Valley Road.
The Phantom Prospectors According to Stan Rowe- a nonagenarian, former
Calgarian, and Sundance’s long-time owner- two of his former employees encountered a
pair of phantoms one evening in 1978. That night, the two young ladies, both of whom
worked as cooks in the ranch kitchen, headed out for a walk. The path they took was an
old trail that skirted some of the desert hills ubiquitous in that part of the country,
now dark silhouettes in the twilight. Suddenly, one of the women stopped dead in
her tracks. “Who are those men?” she asked, staring
ahead down the trail. “What men?” the other lady replied, following
her co-worker’s gaze. All she could see in the gathering dusk was prairie grass, sagebrush,
a scattering of lodgepole pines, and a barbed wire fence. To her, the trail ahead appeared
empty and lifeless. “Those two! Can’t you see them?” She
giggled. “They look like they’re ready for a costume party.”
The lady proceeded to describe the men’s appearance to her companion who, for some
reason, was having a hard time seeing them. Both were dressed in heavy boots, long canvas
overcoats, and wide-brimmed hats that cast shadows over their bearded faces.
As she was speaking, the men turned off the trail, walked straight through the barbed
wire fence, and vanished into thin air. The two women, the story goes, returned to
the Sundance Ranch to relay the frightening tale to fellow staff members before catching
the next bus to Vancouver. Stan Rowe suspects that the strange apparitions
that his employee saw that night in 1978 may have been the spirits of prospectors who came
to Ashcroft more than a century earlier in search of fortune and adventure- participants
in an event known today as the Cariboo Gold Rush. In order to make sense of Rowe’s theory,
we’ll need a little backstory.
Trails to the Cariboo Back in 1857, when British Columbia was an
agglomeration of fur trading districts and British colonies, gold was discovered near
the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers not far from present-day Lytton, BC
(an hour’s drive southwest of Ashcroft). Immediately, veterans of the California Gold
Rush of 1849, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, flocked to the new diggings
and began to pan the creeks of the Fraser Canyon in what is now known as the Fraser
Canyon Gold Rush. This event prompted the British Crown to consolidate many of its holdings
in western North America into the Colony of British Columbia, a precursor to the province
that we know and love today. During the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, most prospectors
made their way to the goldfields of the Fraser Canyon by one of two routes. The first route
was the Fraser River itself- a waterway which was notoriously difficult to navigate. The
second was the Douglas Road, an old Hudson’s Bay Company trail beginning in Port Douglas,
BC, and ending in the settlement of Coyoosh Flat (present-day Lillooet); which British
Columbia’s first governor, Sir James Douglas, reconstructed in 1858.
Of the thousands of prospectors who poured into the Fraser Canyon in the 1850s, only
a few found gold of any significance. Many disenchanted gold seekers returned to California,
while others, still hoping to strike it rich, pushed on into the interior.
In the 1860’s, some of these enterprising prospectors discovered gold in the Cariboo
Plateau of south-central British Columbia. These discoveries launched the Cariboo Gold
Rush, in which thousands of prospectors (chiefly of British, Canadian, and Chinese extraction)
streamed into the British Columbian interior by way of the West Coast.
There were two main routes by which prospectors initially reached the Cariboo Goldfields.
The first was a rugged and treacherous mule path called the River Trail, which wound through
valleys and canyon bottoms, often
running along cliff sides. The second was a rough freight wagon trail called the Old
Cariboo Road, built by American contractor Gustavus Blin Wright in 1862. An extension
of the Douglas Road, the Old Cariboo Road connected Coyoosh Flat (the terminus of the
Douglas Road) with the settlement of Alexandria, nestled deep in Cariboo Country. Much of the
road followed an old HBC thoroughfare called the Hudson’s Bay Brigade Trail. One of the
more colourful stories to come out of the Old Cariboo Road involves a prospector named
Frank Laumeister, who packed his supplies over the trail using Bactrian camels from
the United States Camel Corps.
Shortly after the construction of the Old Cariboo Road, Sir James Douglas declared his
intention to construct another freight wagon road which would comprise a new first leg
on the journey to Cariboo Country; a thoroughfare which would make the less efficient Douglas
Road obsolete. This road would begin in Yale, go through the Fraser Canyon, head up the
Thompson River (a major tributary of the Fraser) and further up the Bonaparte River (a tributary
of the Thompson) to the town of Clinton, a station on the Old Cariboo Road. The Royal
Engineers of the British Army completed this project in 1865, constructing what is known
today as the Cariboo Road.
The Birth of Ashcroft, BC In 1862, before the construction of the Cariboo
Road had commenced, two young, adventurous, upper class, Cambridge-educated English brothers
named Clement and Henry Cornwall (the former being the future Lieutenant Governor of British
Columbia) took a steamer to Victoria, BC. Like thousands of other adventurers, they
crossed over to the mainland to the town of New Westminster (present-day Vancouver, BC),
headed up the Fraser River, and trekked over the Douglas Road to Coyoosh Flat.
At Coyoosh Flat, the Cornwall brothers encountered a number of dejected prospectors who were
returning emptyhanded from the Cariboo goldfields. After hearing their woes, the brothers reasoned
that they would have better luck catering to the needs of prospectors than searching
for gold themselves. Instead of following the crowd north, the Cornwall boys decided
to venture off the beaten track and search for a good piece of land on which to set up
shop. After encountering several wild camels that
Laumeister had turned loose- an incident which terrified their horses- the Cornwall brothers
came to what Clement described in his diary as “a desirable looking flat watered by
2 streams with a fine surrounding range for cattle.” This area was located a short distance
from the Thompson River, the Bonaparte River, and the so-called “River Trail”. Better
yet, it lay along the proposed route of the Cariboo Trail. The brothers knew they had
found a perfect location on which to settle, and so they travelled down the Thompson to
Lytton, where they purchased the land from the regional magistrate.
Hiring former prospectors and local Shuswap Indians as labourers, the Cornwall brothers
established a farm, a sawmill, a gristmill, a cattle ranch, and a roadhouse on their property,
the latter which they named Ashcroft Manor after their birthplace in Gloucestershire,
England. Following the construction of the Cariboo Trail, the Ashcroft Manor positively
thrived, evolving into a favourite stopping place on the road to the Cariboo diggings
and a sort of Mecca for British Columbia’s English gentry. By the late 1860s, Ashcroft
Manor was famous for its foxhound kennels, its coyote hunting parties (which were modeled
after the traditional British fox hunt), and its horse racing competitions, and was said
to serve the finest liquor east of Victoria. In 1884, the Canadian Pacific Railway was
built across the Thompson River not far from the Ashcroft Manor. Almost overnight, the
village of Ashcroft sprang up around the Cornwall brothers’ property. Due to the proximity
of the railway, Ashcroft soon eclipsed Yale as the gateway to the Cariboo. Several years
later, during the Klondike Gold Rush, Ashcroft served as the trail head of an all-Canadian
route to the Yukon goldfields. Considering Ashcroft’s beginnings, is it
possible that the ghostly men whom Stan Rowe’s employee encountered in 1978 were the spirits
of prospectors once destined for the Cariboo goldfields? Maybe they were the shades of
bygone guests of the Ashcroft Manor, or perhaps they were the ghosts of Clement and Henry
Cornwall themselves.
The Ghostly Indian Girl Another ghost story connected with the Sundance
Ranch has its roots in a roundup conducted in the 1980’s or early ‘90s in which eighteen
guests of the Sundance Ranch were invited to run cattle to a northerly pasture.
“We’d been rounding up cattle when a big downpour rolled in,” Stan Rowe told a reporter.
Seeking shelter from the rain, the riders headed for a Sundance barn located a short
rides’ distance. When they finally reached the safety of the
barn, all but one guest was accounted for. A short time later, this tardy patron, a sober-minded
businessman, caught up with the party, a strange expression on his face.
“What kept you?” Rowe asked. The businessman removed his Stetson to scratch
his scalp. “This Indian girl,” he said. He proceeded to tell Rowe and the other guests
about a Shuswap girl he encountered after being separated from the main group. The girl
was dressed in a doeskin gown and was holding a string of trout. She had asked the businessman
if he knew the way to the main trail, and invited him to have dinner with her.
Before the businessman could reply, a bolt of lightning obliterated a nearby tree. Thoroughly
spooked, his horse bucked him off its back and galloped towards a proximate cluster of
trees. The man raced after his horse, and by the time he returned, the Indian girl was
gone. Rowe informed the bewildered businessman that,
according to local legend, the ghost of a 19th Century Indian woman whose husband had
drowned while fishing was said to haunt the area. Some believe that those who accept her
dinner invitation will never return.
Lightning Storms and Indian Ghosts Curiously, the tale of the businessman’s
encounter is not the only Canadian anecdote involving lightning strikes and vanishing
Indian ghosts. More than a century prior, Cecil Denny, an officer of the original North
West Mounted Police, claimed to have had a similar experience in a thicket near Fort
Macleod, Alberta, the Force’s first western headquarters.
One afternoon in the summer of 1875, while fishing on the Oldman River about fifteen
miles upriver from Fort Macleod, Denny found himself caught in a rainstorm. After tying
his boat up to a cottonwood, he heard the distant sound of Indians singing to the beat
of a drum. Hoping to shelter himself from the storm, he made his way towards the sound.
After stumbling through the rain, Denny came to a clearing in a thicket in which he found
a cluster of Indian teepees. Immediately, the Mountie knew that something was amiss.
Although the wind was howling violently, it seemed to have no effect on the teepees nor
on the Indians who moved about them. The fires within the teepees shone through their entranceways
with an eerie brightness. All of a sudden, a lightning bolt struck a
nearby tree. When the Mountie recovered his senses, the Indian village had vanished.
Terrified, Cecil Denny abandoned his boat and walked all the way back to Fort Macleod.
He arrived at the barracks after midnight and collapsed into his cot, cold, wet, and
exhausted. The following morning, Denny related his misadventure
to his fellow officers in the mess house. His wild tale met with laughter and incredulity.
Undeterred, the Mountie secured the services of a local Blackfoot guide and a Metis interpreter
made his way back to the site of his strange experience. In his journal, Denny wrote:
“On questioning the Indian, he stated that the Blackfeet had surprised and slaughtered
a camp of Cree Indians at that place many years ago.”
Sure enough, when they arrived at the place where the ghostly village had stood, Denny
and his companions discovered two sun-bleached skulls lying side by side in the grass.
Considering the tales of Cecil Denny and the guest of the Sundance Ranch, it is interesting
to note that people who claim to have encountered ghosts often report an accompanying chill
or a sensation of being suddenly sapped of energy. Some of those who have studied such
encounters have theorized that ghosts might require energy in order to make themselves
known. Lightning, which features in both of the aforementioned ghost stories, is believed
to contain a whopping 5 billion joules per bolt- more than enough energy, one would think,
to achieve such a purpose. Thanks for watching! If you enjoyed this video
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