Ghoulish tales of the Fiendly City

From ghosts wielding hatchets to the spirit of a janitor, the city has seen its share of the paranormal.
Tourism Moose Jaw Executive Director Candis Kirkpatrick not only conducts a special summer trolley excursion dedicated to exploring the world beyond - Hob Nobbin' with the Hob Goblins - but has also been haunted herself.
When Kirkpatrick was young, she and her family lived in old farmhouse outside of Mortlach.
Once, she saw black sooty hand prints leading down from an attic opening in an upstairs room, across the ceiling and down the wall.
No one had been in the room all day.
Stranger still, was when Kirkpatrick saw the same hand prints again in a home on Connaught Avenue in Moose Jaw after her family moved away from the farm.
"That ghost from Mortlach followed us for years," she said. "We heard it was the spirit of a girl who lived in the farmhouse and drowned in the dugout when she was 12."
Kirkpatrick's experiences sparked her interest in the paranormal and were a catalyst for Tourism Moose Jaw's ghost tour.
On that excursion, people learn about a haunting at the Brunswick Hotel, where the spirit of a bartender supposedly killed by a drifter in the 1900s still lurks.
Staff members reported hearing people arguing when no one was around and bartenders said they've often set something down, only to turn around and find it gone.
Another local entity is Jerry, the spirit of a man who worked at SIAST Palliser Campus in the 1980s.
"He's one of our newer ghosts," said Kirkpatrick. "Apparently, he was a very loyal, hardworking employee who loved his job and didn't want to leave."
The Clifton Avenue mansion, also known as Clifton Hall, is well-known in Moose Jaw for harbouring the spirit of a little girl.
She has been seen on the balcony of the building wearing a white night gown. Orbs are said to hover in the attic, chairs fly across rooms, chandeliers shake and doors swing open randomly.
Clifton Hall was featured in the book, More Ghost Stories of Saskatchewan by Jo-Anne Christensen.
Moose Jaw's Ashley Mawson believes the old Providence Hospital, a home at 680 Ominica St. W. and Riverview Collegiate are also haunted.
"When I was in my freshman year of high school, I was told of a janitor who worked at Riverview and died in the basement, later haunting the school," said Mawson.
The house at 680 Ominica St. W. was featured in the book, Moose Jaw Murders and Other Deaths, by Bruce Fairman. The book says a woman named Ellen Chambers killed her daughter with an axe, then hung herself in March 1925.
"I believe there was a ghost of a young woman carrying a baby," said Mawson.
According to another book, Ghost Stories of Saskatchewan, by Jo-Anne Christensen, in 1919, a family of four living on a farm near Belle Plaine reported hearing unexplained footsteps in their house and saw doors opening and closing on their own.
The most disturbing incident, however, was waking one day to find a downstairs door chopped up by a hatchet.
"Years after leaving, the family heard that the man who built that farmhouse had been murdered there by his hatchet-wielding wife," said the book.