The Canadian Rockies – a succession of majestic snow-capped peaks that run along the border of Canada’s westernmost provinces, Alberta and British Columbia. Every year, tourists from all over the world flock to this natural marvel to take in the fresh alpine air and soak up the wild beauty. In the winter, some ski or snowboard, carving the powder at Banff’s Sunshine Village or the Lake Louise Resort. In the summer, some camp or hike, pitching their tents in Jasper’s Dark Sky Reserve or weaving the emerald trails of Yoho National Park.
Relatively few of the Canadian Rockies’ annual visitors venture west beyond the typical tourist traps, leaving the charm of Jasper for the dark wooded drive through the Yellowhead Pass, the quaintness of Banff for the treachery of the Kicking Horse Pass, or the comfort of Fernie for the winding abomination that is the Crowsnest Highway. Those who do arrive at a gaping valley called the Rocky Mountain Trench, which separates the Canadian Rockies from their westerly twin, the Columbia Mountains, home to the sleepy mountain towns of Nelson, Revelstoke, and Kimberly. Here, the crisp mountain breeze gives way to a thick, dreamy atmosphere that saturates the forests – an unnerving aura redolent of enchantment and ancient secrets, which stimulates the primitive urge to look over one’s shoulder. In this older range, the rugged majesty that dominates the Canadian Rockies surrenders to a muffled ambiance of silent, wooded mystery.
Like its more famous easterly counterpart, the Columbia Mountains are filled with tales of the unexplained, from ancient native legends of monsters that haunt the forests and lakes to unsolved disappearances which stretch back to the days of the fur trade. In this video, we will dig up forgotten mysteries of the Columbia Mountains, the Canadian Rockies’ shadowy twin.
Mountain Giants
Long before the first white explorers ventured into the Columbia Mountains, the region’s First Nations told stories about unusual creatures that prowled the wilderness. One of these was a wild giant reminiscent of the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest. The lower Kootenay Indians, who fished for trout and Kokanee salmon on the Kootenay River and its widest section, Kootenay Lake, regarded these beings as simple-minded monsters that could be killed through trickery. One traditional Kootenai story, recorded by German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, implies that these giants were people who underwent gruesome transformations after engaging in self-cannibalism, and that the bones of one who was killed by his relatives in the ancient past lie at the bottom of Kootenay Lake. Another Kootenay legend, recorded by anthropologist Dr. Alexander Francis Chamberlain, tells of a dim-witted giant who approached a Kootenay mother while she was out picking berries. The creature admired the smooth, pale skin of the woman’s baby, who was trussed up in a skin bag nearby, and asked the mother how she had achieved it. The woman convinced the giant that she had affected that dermatological marvel by roasting her child, and offered to do the same to him. At his own request, the woman roasted the giant alive.
To the Sinixt who lived west of Kootenay Country, hunting alpine game in the Valhalla Mountains and paddling their sturgeon-nosed canoes along the wooded banks of the Arrow Lakes, the wildmen of the Columbia Mountains were huge deer-hunting troglodytes who wore long beards not unlike those of white men. Every once in a while, these giants captured lone hunters they found in the wilderness, keeping them as pets in their mountain caves. Natives who claimed to have escaped from these alpine prisons described the giants as being kindly disposed to their human captives, and acutely sensitive to physical pain.
The Shuswap who lived in the Columbia Mountains north of traditional Sinixt territory had wildman stories of their own. They claimed that their elusive wilderness neighbours were tall dark-grey creatures who easily blended in with the surrounding trees. They hunted large game in the mountains, and sometimes stole into Shuswap camps to steal fish. Sometimes during the night, they threw stones at native campfires from concealment in the trees.
John Bringsli’s Encounter
Incredibly, at least as far back as 1951, residents of the Columbia Mountains have encountered strange creatures in the wilderness which indicate that the old native legends of wild giants might be more than fireside fables. Such run-ins were so prevalent in the mid-20th Century that Sasquatch researcher Peter Byrne regarded the Columbia Mountains as the region with the second highest concentration of Bigfoot sightings in North America, the largest concentration being in the Pacific Northwest.
Perhaps the best documented wildman sighting in the Columbia Mountains is the experience of John Bringsli, a veteran woodsman from Nelson, British Columbia, who came face to face with a huge hairy creature in the Selkirk Mountains in the autumn of 1960. The incident took place near the headwaters of a stream called Lemon Creek, incidentally near a small body of water known today as Sasquatch Lake. According to an old local legend occasionally referenced in regional newspapers, a group of silver miners headed up this stream at the turn of the 20th Century and were never seen again.
According to Bringsli in his various statements to reporters and Sasquatch researchers, his extraordinary experience took place one weekend morning while he was picking huckleberries near a deserted logging road which branched off Six Mile Road, the latter having its genesis about sixteen kilometres northwest of Nelson, BC. At about 7:30 in the morning, he found a promising berry patch about 150 yards from the road and went down on his knees to harvest.
After about fifteen minutes, Bringsli rose to his feet to find an enormous hairy animal standing about 40 feet away from him, on a slight rise in the ground. “At first I thought it was… a bear,” he said in an interview, “but then I looked closer at it and realized it wasn’t an animal. It was more like a human being.” The creature, which Bringsli intuitively believed to be male, stood from seven to nine feet tall, and had very wide shoulders. It had no neck, giving Bringsli the impression that its head was fastened directly to its shoulders. Its face was apelike, and its ears lay flat against the sides of its head. It had thick arms and humanlike hands complete with fingernails. The creature’s entire body was covered with smooth silver-blue hair, which Bringsli estimated to be about four inches long. “It looked terrible to me,” the woodsman said, “like a terrific human being.”
With a thrill of terror, Bringsli realized that the unusual creature was watching him with what he perceived to be an air of curiosity. “Its head was cocked to the side like it was trying to figure out what I was doing…” he said. “I wouldn’t say it looked menacing at all… but it was sure curious to see what I was doing.”
Paralyzed with fear, Bringsli stood and stared at the creature, which initially seemed content to study its human visitor from afar. After about two minutes, however, the creature suddenly began to walk toward Bringsli, spurring the woodsman into action. Abandoning his huckleberry pail, the terrified woodsman made a dash for his vehicle, leapt into the driver’s seat, and peeled down the logging road.
The Monster of Kootenay Lake
Another frightening animal of local native legend is a sort of water monster which appears in the campfire stories of the Kootenay. One tale featuring this freshwater leviathan appears to be a variation of a mysteriously universal legend common to indigenous folklore across the country, bearing striking resemblance to a certain Okanagan, Thompson, and Shuswap legend from the Interior Plateau; an Ojibwa legend from Lake Superior; a Mi’kmaq legend from Prince Edward Island; and a Tahltan legend from subarctic British Columbia, all of which we have explored in previous pieces.
According to this tale, long ago, a woman named Little Grey Bird lived with her husband, Swift Hawk, in the vicinity of present-day Fort Steele, British Columbia, at the southeastern edge of the Columbia Mountains. The husband forbade his wife from drinking or bathing in the water of the Kootenay River, warning her that a dark presence dwelt therein.
One fine summer day, while Swift Hawk was out hunting deer, Little Grey Bird went on a berry-picking excursion on the banks of the Kootenay River. Her toil under the sweltering sun made her too hot for comfort. Heedless of her husband’s oft-repeated injunction, she decided to take a dip in the cool water.
No sooner had she waded into the current than the water rose, and a huge monster with a spotted tail emerged from the depths. The creature seized Little Grey Bird and ravished her before slipping back beneath the surface.
When Swift Hawk returned from his hunting trip and learned what had transpired, he seized his bow and quiver and headed for the Kootenay River. Responding to his challenge, the river monster emerged from the deep, and Swift Hawk put an arrow in his heart. Loathe to let her husband’s arrow go to waste, Little Grey Bird withdrew it from the monster’s breast. Immediately, blood began to gush from the wound, causing the water level to rise rapidly. Swift Hawk and his wife barely managed to escape the deluge by climbing to the top of a tall tree and waiting there until the water level returned to normal.
Incredibly, in the autumn of 1900, a story emerged from the silver mining town of Nelson, BC, indicating that the old Kootenay legend might have a kernel of truth to it. According to an article in the October 10th, 1900 issue of the Nelson Daily Miner, a 12-year-old boy spotted what he described as a “sea serpent” near Crawford Bay, a tiny settlement located at the end of its namesake, an appendage of Kootenay Lake, about 36 kilometres northeast of Nelson and about 26 kilometres southeast of Kaslo. The young witness, who had a reputation for truthfulness, described the creature as being twelve feet long, and having two legs on the front portion of its body. The boy watched the creature crawl out of the water onto a particular stretch of shore where kitchen waste had been left to rot. After gorging itself on the refuse, the monster turned around and slipped back beneath the surface of the water.
In his 1998 book In the Domain of Lake Monsters, Canadian cryptozoologist John Kirk identified the young witness as George Goudereau, and included an additional testimony in which the 12-year-old described the creature as having a black and green colour, a long neck, and a foot-long snout with vicious-looking jaws. In this statement, Goudereau gave the creature four legs instead of two, and described them as being about ten inches long. Kirk added that Goudereau’s mother and a neighbour, W.G. Sayer, had also spotted the creature several times during its nightly escapades.
“The boy notified some men in the neighborhood,” reported the article in the Nelson Daily Miner, “and they visited the spot where the serpent had appeared on shore, and could plainly see the marks of the web feet.” News of the sighting was relayed to Captain W.J. Kane of the steamer Marion, who shared it with several of his friends in Nelson, who, in turn, took it to the press. The article ended with the announcement that “the Sawyer brothers who run the pack train at Crawford Bay, and others planned to capture the serpent, dead or alive, and watches have been kept by men with rifles in the hope of getting a shot at it…”
Publication of the report in the Nelson Daily Miner seems to have encouraged other witnesses of the Kootenay Lake monster to come forth with their own stories. Within a week, the paper received word that the creature had also been lately spotted at two additional locations, namely a marble quarry across the river from Kalso, BC (not to be confused with the more northerly Marblehead Quarry, also on the Kootenay River, which did not exist at the time), and at a spot ten miles from Nelson, where it had eaten a string of fish. “Their descriptions tally,” said an article of the witnesses, “and all agree that the mysterious creature is from 12 to 15 feet long, that it has front legs or fins near its head, and is of a decidedly unprepossessing appearance.”
John Kirk identified the Kaslo witness as August Bishop, who likened the creature he saw to an alligator. Kirk also determined the identity of the Nelson witness to be C.D. Robertson, and included a letter that he wrote to the Nelson Daily Miner, which states:
“Seeing your reports of the appearance of a strange animal or sea serpent in different parts of the lake, I am encouraged to tell what I myself have seen of the monster. I hesitated to speak of it at first, thinking that I had surely been under a hallucination. I was fishing about ten miles up the west arm of the lake from Nelson some few days ago and, having caught several fish, I tied them to a stake and left them in the water. Hearing a commotion, I looked around just in time to see a large scaly body emerge from the water, open its jaws and seize my fish, disappearing almost immediately. I was pretty well scared and fished no more that day. I should judge that the reptile was about fifteen feet in length.”
Near the end of October, the monster of Kootenay Lake surfaced a fourth time, this time at Pilot Bay, another harbour in Kootenay Lake a mere four kilometres west of Crawford Bay. According to an article in the Fort Steele Prospector, the creature was spotted by two fisherman and a twelve-year-old boy. “Monsters of this kind,” the article contended, “are frequently seen by fishermen in this vicinity, and is of such common occurrence that no attention is paid to it.”
Two months later, in late December 1900, the monster of Kootenay Lake was allegedly captured by a man named Frank Goodenow, who brought the specimen to Nelson for exhibition. “It is described as about six feet eight inches long,” declared a Vancouver article, “with a serpent-like yellow body. If the story is true, the fish is either an unusual variety of a very large water eel or a specimen of the water snake tribe, which are numerous in some southern parts of the continent.”
With the exception of a strange fish caught in Moyie Lake, another augmentation of the Kootenay River, which was said to look “like a cross between a sea serpent and a hippopotamus,” as well as another reported sighting in the summer of 1902, the monster of Kootenay Lake evaded the scrutiny of the Canadian press for over two decades. Out of the blue, in August 1926, a rancher named A. Milton came forth with his own encounter with the creature the previous spring. Milton, who hailed from the community of Mirror Lake, just south of Kaslo, wrote a letter to the Nelson Daily News in which he stated that, while fishing on Kootenay Lake near a place called Boulder Creek the previous spring, he spied a large object resting on the surface of the lake in a stretch of water that he had just paddled over. As there had not been any driftwood in the area mere minutes before, he took a closer look at the object, which he judged to be roughly the same size and shape as a boat. To his astonishment, the object seemed to fluctuate in size before finally disappearing beneath the surface.
“Mr. Milton,” declared an article in the Calgary Albertan which covered the story, “states that U.F. Sherwin, foreman of the Bluebell Mine, once reported seeing a strange object between Riondel and Kaslo, and that Rev. J. Calvert, of Kaslo, twice had this experience. Old timers say in the early days there was a tradition of a Kootenay Lake sea serpent.”
Slogopogo
Another body of water in the Columbia Mountains said to harbour an aquatic monster is beautiful, lonely Slocan Lake, sandwiched between the Valhalla and Kokanee Glacier Provincial Parks. “We find Slocan Lake nestled in high mountain country,” wrote anthropologist Joy F. Bell in a 1977 paper, “with densely wooded forests and sheer cliffs rising vertically from the water. Often the wind sweeps down onto the lake from surrounding canyons. One may be enjoying the calm surface of the lake one moment and, within minutes, be battling white camps and trying desperately to reach shore.”
The secluded vale was once the mountain hideaway of the Sinixt, an Interior Salish people whom anthropologists once called the Lake Indians, who are closely related to the westerly Okanagan. In centuries past, these people painted mysterious pictographs in precarious places on lakeside cliffs. As we explored in our piece on the Ogopogo, the legendary monster of British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake, Interior Salish legends consistently suggest a strong traditional association between ancient waterside pictographs, sudden violent wind, and beliefs regarding mysterious preternatural creatures that dwell in the depths. The presence of rock art on windy Slocan Lake seems to imply an ancient Sinixt belief that the cold, deep water is haunted by some powerful preternatural entity. Indeed, Joy Bell interpreted one particular pictograph that overlooks the lake as depicting what she called a “Rain God,” beside which, significantly, stands a large vertical snake.
In the 1890s, the Slocan Valley was invaded by hordes of miners drawn by news of a silver strike in the Selkirk Mountains, who founded the boomtown of Sandon east of the lake. Around the turn of the century, the region received a fresh influx of Doukhabor settlers – members of a Protestant offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church fleeing persecution in the Tsarist Empire, who would gain notoriety in Canada for protesting in the nude. Crowded by these newcomers, the Sinixt gradually relocated to the Colville Valley in Washington, and were officially declared an extinct First Nation by the Canadian government in 1956 – a policy which was revoked in 2021. Although some Sinixt have since returned to their ancestral homeland, any legends they might have had concerning a monster in Slocan Lake seem to have been lost in the chaos of their diaspora.
The existence of a modern belief in Slocan Lake’s monstrous resident is equally difficult to pin down, although, like its ancient native counterpart, there are compelling indications that such a notion is held by at least some members of the scanty local populace. While online information on the supposed monster is virtually non-existent, this author has personally heard several references to the creature made by seasonal residents of the tiny twin villages of Silverton and New Denver, which lie on the lake’s eastern shore. These informants referred to the creature as the Slogopogo – a portmanteau of ‘Slocan Lake’ and the aforementioned ‘Ogopogo’.
In September 2023, a YouTube channel called ‘Sandhill Studios,’ run by New Denver composer Noel Fudge, published a polished 10-minute documentary on an alleged monster sighting made on the evening of April 26th, 2023, by a group of teenagers from New Denver. While hanging out on the beach at Bigelow Bay Regional Park just north of town, the teens were startled by the sound of a large splash in the water nearby. Looking out over Slocan Lake, some of them caught a glimpse of a large, dark object quickly vanishing beneath a succession of large isolated waves, conspicuous against the lake’s otherwise glassy surface. One member of the party described the object as resembling a huge serpent with spikes on its back. Another recalled seeing an enormous head with both equine and serpentine attributes. Another of the teens, who had been filming a jamming session at the time of the incident, actually caught the object on film, quickly panning to the water just in time to capture an amorphous black object sinking beneath the waves.
The mini documentary went on to chronicle the teens’ search for answers, which culminated in an interview of Lisa Lake of Galiano Island, British Columbia – one of the Gulf Islands off the eastern shores of Vancouver Island. Lake appeared in a 2016 episode of the Discovery Channel program Lake Monsters: The Definitive Guide, in which she described her sightings of the Cadborosaurus – the legendary sea serpent of Vancouver Island. The teens compared their experience with Galiano’s and concluded that the creature they had seen bore great resemblance to the Cadborosaurus. In acknowledgement of this resemblance, they dubbed the monster of Slocan Lake the ‘Slocanosaurus’.
While some of those who have commented on the video have accused the teens’ dialogue of being rehearsed, and opined that the dramatic style of the documentary detracts from the credibility of the story, the footage presented is undeniably compelling, leaving the viewer to ponder whether
Slocan Lake might really be home to a monster.
The Columbia Express
The first white men enter the Columbia Mountains were eight employees the great fur trading syndicate the North-West Company (NWC), who served under the command of Welsh surveyor David Thompson. Back in 1805, U.S. Army officers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had led an epic expedition of discovery west across the continent, crossing the American Rockies and reaching the Pacific Ocean by way of the Columbia River. The North-West Company feared that some American fur trading company would soon begin establishing posts on the upper Columbia, potentially jeopardizing business in their newly-established district of New Caledonia, in what is now north-central British Columbia. In order to prevent this, the NWC tasked David Thompson with locating the upper Columbia River and establishing a fur trading post on its banks. Thompson set out on this errand in 1807, accompanied by his Metis wife, Charlotte, their three children, and eight engages, or company employees. That summer, Thompson and company crossed the Rocky Mountains by way of Howse Pass, in what is now Banff National Park, and proceeded to the Columbia River by way of the Blaeberry River. They then travelled up the Columbia River to its source, Windermere Lake, and established a trading post called Kootenae House at the latter’s outlet at the foot of the Columbia Mountains, just north of present-day Invermere, BC.
In the decades that followed, the Columbia River became the main artery by which North-West company voyageurs travelled to and from the so-called Columbia District – a region comprising what is now southern British Columbia and most of what is now Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. When the North-West Company was absorbed by its competitor, the Hudson’s Bay Company, in 1821, the Columbia River became the westernmost section of the Columbia Express, a brigade trail that stretched across the continent, connecting the lower Columbia in present-day Oregon with York Factory on the frozen shores of Hudson Bay.
The Rapids of the Dead
One treacherous leg of this aquatic highway was a violent stretch of whitewater north of present-day Revelstoke known as the Dalles des Morts, or the Rapids of the Dead, now mercifully buried beneath the backwaters of the Revelstoke Dam. These rapids owe their gruesome name to a pair of tragedies that played out in their boiling viscera in the heyday of the Canadian fur trade.
The first of the grim events took place in 1817, when the upper Columbia was firmly in the hands of the North-West Company. On May 27th, a party of voyageurs who planned to travel east across the Rocky Mountains decided to send seven of their number in a canoe back to Spokane House, deeming them unfit for the overland journey. According to a fur trader named Ross Cox, who was among the travellers, these invalids consisted of six French-Canadian voyageurs, some possibly of Metis extraction, and an English tailor named Holmes. While attempting to lower their canoe down the Dalles des Morts with track lines, these unfortunates swamped their only vessel and were forced to proceed along the thickly-wooded riverbank on foot, bereft of supplies and provisions.
Three days into this grueling odyssey, a voyageur from Macon fell dead, a victim to privation and exhaustion. In a desperate attempt to preserve their lives, his surviving comrades stripped the meat from his bones and dried it on the rocks of the river. They subsisted on this grisly jerky as they trekked on. One by one, four other members of the party met the same fate as their unfortunate companion, until only two voyageurs, named La Pierre and Dubois, remained alive. Although Cox maintained that La Pierre was French-Canadian, an artist named Paul Kane, who heard the story from voyageurs with whom he travelled in the autumn of 1846, was told that he was of Iroquois descent, having shared a canoe with a man who was supposed to be his son.
Sometime later, a couple of natives who were passing through the area spotted La Pierre’s forlorn figure sitting on a raft on a widening of the Columbia called Upper Arrow Lake, rambling incoherently as he attempted to conceal a pile of dried human meat. The natives rescued the starving voyageur and brought him to Spokane House.
During his subsequent interrogation, La Pierre told factor James McMillan that when he and Dubois became the last survivors of their party, the two of them began to wander about aimlessly in search of Indians. They made short work of their hideous provisions, and soon found themselves on the brink of starvation once again. It was then that La Pierre began to suspect Dubois of sinister designs, noting the hungry looks he would give him when he perceived himself unobserved.
Sure enough, on the second night after their last meal, Dubois drew his knife and sprang at La Pierre. A desperate struggle ensued, in which La Pierre gained the upper hand and put an end to his would-be-murderer’s existence. A few days after the duel, he was discovered and rescued by the natives.
No sooner had La Pierre delivered his report than native travellers arrived at Spokane House with news that they had discovered Dubois’ corpse. Contrary to La Pierre’s testimony, however, the badly-mutilated bodies of two other men were also found at the scene, mangled in such a manner as to lend the impression that they had been murdered. These remains are said to have been buried where they were found, at the head of Upper Arrow Lake, where, for many years, they were marked by a large wooden cross.
In light of this startling intelligence, McMillan sent La Pierre with the next brigade to Montreal for trial. “But as the testimony against him was merely circumstantial,” Cox wrote, “and unsupported by corroborating evidence, he was acquitted.” According to Paul Kane, the voyageur was subsequently dispatched to a distant post in New Caledonia, no crew in the Columbia District being keen to have him among their ranks.
The second tragedy to which the Dalles des Morts bore witness took place in the autumn of 1838, when the Hudson’s Bay Company’s annual Columbia Express was hurtling down the river for which it was named, bound for Fort Vancouver in present-day Vancouver, Washington. Among the forty travellers were a newlywed couple, recently married at Fort Edmonton, who had resolved on an unconventional honeymoon. The groom was an English botanist named Robert Wallace, and the bride was Maria Simpson, the Metis daughter of Hudson’s Bay Company governor Sir George Simpson.
The party arrived at the head of the Dalles des Morts on October 22nd, 1838, and decided to run the watercourse. In the midst of the frothing current, one of the boats began to take on water and was soon completely submerged. The vessel’s French-Canadian pilot, Andre Chalifoux, enjoined his passengers to hold onto their seats, assuring them that the craft could still be manoeuvred in this state owing to the nature of its cargo.
After continuing for a mile in this condition, the boat drew near a rock ledge. Apparently convinced that they would crash, Robert Wallace drew Maria into a tight embrace and lunged for the shore. The force of this action flipped the boat upside down, spilling her passengers and cargo into the Columbia.
The pilot and thirteen other passengers made it safety to shore. The remaining twelve were drowned. According to Chalifoux, who described the event to Paul Kane, “We immediately commenced searching for the bodies, and soon recovered all of them, the unfortunate botanist and his wife were still fast locked in each other’s arms – an embrace which we had not the hearts to unclasp, but buried them as we found them in one grave.”
The Vanishing of Elizabeth Harriott
Another noteworthy location on the HBC’s brigade trail was a station called Boat Encampment, located on the shores of a sharp northerly crook in the Columbia River known as the Big Bend. Now a lonely and forgotten ghost town, Boat Encampment was once a requisite stopping place where voyageurs travelling east would cache their battered canoes, pack their freight for overland travel, and proceed across the Rocky Mountains by way of the Athabasca Pass, preferring that alpine trail to the southerly Howse Pass ever since the Blackfoot blockaded the latter in 1811. In a similar way, footsore voyageurs trudging west over the Athabasca Pass and the succeeding portage route down the Canoe River would stop at Boat Encampment to load their baggage into canoes, happily exchanging their snowshoes for paddles, and the drudgery of pedestrianism for a swift voyage down the Columbia.
In 1832, six years before the second tragedy on the Dalles des Morts, Boat Encampment became the site of one of the earliest documented unsolved disappearances to take place in the Columbia Mountains – a mystery as gloomy as it is obscure. An article for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography described this strange event as “shrouded in legend,” as did an online genealogy of the Metis families of Manitoba’s Red River Valley.
In the autumn of 1832, a party of Hudson’s Bay Company men under the command of John Edward Harriott set out from Fort Vancouver for the Bow River near what is now Canmore, Alberta, tasked with establishing a trading fort that would called Piegan Post. Among the party was Harriott’s wife and cousin, 32-year-old Margaret Ann ‘Elizabeth’, the Metis daughter of John Peter Pruden, then acting factor of Fort Carlton in what is now central Saskatchewan. Also present was the couple’s two-year-old daughter, Margaret.
Shortly after leaving Boat Encampment for the Canoe River portage and the Athabasca Pass beyond, Elizabeth, as Harriott’s wife was generally called, inexplicably vanished. “Although the party stopped and searched,” wrote historian J.G. MacGregor in a 1978 book, “no one could find any trace of her.” Some members of the party speculated that the woman had lost her mind and wandered into the bush, recalling a spell of insanity that had stricken her three years earlier, while she was living in a trading post deep in New Caledonia. A native HBC employee who had witnessed the incident described it in a letter to the district’s Chief Factor, William Connolly, writing, “Harriott’s wife whom he had left at Alexandria was raging mad; I had to allow him to go for her with two [men] to assist him.”
Later writings hinted that Elizabeth Harriott may have fatally slipped off a cliff and disappeared into a canyon below. Painter Paul Kane appears to have alluded to the incident in his 1859 memoir, writing, “A distressing occurrence took place here some years previously. Whilst a party were ascending this mountain, a lady, who was crossing to meet her husband, was in the rear, and it was not noticed until the party had encamped that she was not come up. Men were instantly sent back to seek her. After some hours’ search, they found her tracks in the snow, which they followed until they came to a perpendicular rock overhanging a roaring torrent; here all traces of her were lost and her body was never found, notwithstanding every exertion was made to find it. Little doubt, however, could exist but that she had lost her way, and had fallen over the precipice into the torrent, which would have quickly hurried her into chasms where the foot of a man could not reach.” Similarly, Rocky Mountain trail guide writer Don Beers included a cryptic passage in a chapter in one of his books on the Athabasca Pass which may be an allusion to Elizabeth’s vanishing, writing, “A distraught woman disappeared into the canyon near Scott Creek.”
Miraculously, Elizabeth’s daughter, little Margaret Harriott, was spared the mysterious fate of her mother. Although there are no records indicating in what manner the 2-year-old was discovered on the trail, sources concur that the little girl was brought to Edmonton House and placed under the care of Louise Rowand, the wife of factor John Rowand. She later went to live with her grandfather, John Peter Pruden, at Fort Carlton, and would go on to marry Hugh S. Donaldson, a future captain in the army of Metis revolutionary Louis Riel.
Ghosts of Wild Horse Creek
In 1864, more than three decades after the disappearance of Elizabeth Harriott, gold was discovered on Stud Horse Creek, a tributary of the Kootenay River which runs through the mountains near present-day Cranbrook, BC. By the end of the summer, nearly a thousand prospectors, most of them of American extraction, had descended on this waterway, renaming it Wild Horse Creek and establishing a boomtown called Fisherville on its banks.
By 1865, the population of Fisherville and the surrounding area had swelled to nearly 5,000. Attracted by the free flow of freshly-mined gold and the famous extravagance of newly-wealthy prospectors, rough women with names like ‘Axe-Handle’ Bertha, Little Lou, ‘Gunpowder’ Sue, and ‘Wildcat’ Jenny moved into Fisherville and established their own district, called Toneyville.
By the end of 1865, the most easily-attainable auric contents surrounding Fisherville had been liberated from the earth and safely stowed away in buckskin pokes. Many of the town’s residents began to move on in search of brighter prospects – namely the aforementioned Big Bend Country in the northerly crook of the Columbia River, and Helena, Montana, in the south – and as suddenly as it had boomed, Fisherville was abandoned. Despite being briefly resurrected as a Chinatown by Oriental prospectors who arrived to sift through the claims that the Americans and British had deserved, Fisherville was gradually devoured by the British Columbian forest.
For many years, civilization survived in the area in the form of Galbraith’s Ferry, a town established in 1864 by a ferry operator named John Galbraith, who made his living transporting prospectors across the Kootenay River. In 1888, the settlement was visited by the famous Mountie Sam Steele, who came to settle a dispute between a local prospector and a Kootenai Indian whom he accused of murder. With the firm, even-handed tact for which he would become famous in the Klondike, Steele diffused the situation, preventing what many locals were certain would have been open warfare between Galbraith Ferry’s white residents and the area natives. The town’s grateful citizens renamed their settlement ‘Fort Steele’ in honour of the Mounted Policeman.
Although the original settlement of Fort Steele dwindled into a ghost town in the early 1900s, a true-to-life replica of the frontier community was built in the late 1960s and opened to the public as the Fort Steele Heritage Town, a living museum designed to imitate Fort Steele as it appeared in the 19th Century. Today, visitors to Fort Steele can walk down raised wooden sidewalks past horse drawn carriages, a steam engine locomotive, and actors dressed in period costume who appear baffled by the size of your tiny camera.
According to a tale recorded in 2008 by Canadian folklorist John Robert Colombo, the Fort Steele Heritage Town might not be the only shadow of the Wild Horse Creek goldrush to linger in the southeastern Kootenays. Back in 1985, 24-year-old Darren Skaalrud and his 22-year-old friend, Brian Irving Shaw, drove by Fort Steele on a road trip from Golden, BC, down the Columbia and Kootenay Valleys, and up the Crowsnest Highway to Sparwood, BC. In an attempt to bypass the city of Cranbrook, the friends took what they hoped would be a shortcut down the Wardner Fort Steele Road, which was a dirt road at that time.
Skaalrud and Shaw crossed the bridge over Wild Horse Creek and continued along the northern banks of the Kootenay River. “It was a very clear sky that night,” Skaalrud wrote, “in late June, with lots of stars visible, not a cloud in sight. Everything was normal for several miles, then all of a sudden there was a solid flat wall of fog standing about 20 feet high and spanning the entire road.”
The friends slowed their pickup truck to about 30 km/h, or 19 mph, and continued on for about a quarter mile through the fog. All of a sudden, a crowd of about forty people, whom Skaalrud described as being “glowing white”, came down an embankment on the left and filed across the road in front of them. “They were all very well dressed in Victorian style clothes,” Skaalrud wrote. “Some of the men I remember were wearing long tail tuxedos, with frill-collar shirts and top hats and boleros. Some men had beards and or moustaches, and the ladies were wearing bell-style dresses and bowl hats with feathers. Some had umbrellas and canes. All of these people were adults.”
It was clear to the two terrified friends that the 19th Century pedestrians were of an ethereal nature. Slowly, they drove their truck through the crowd. “I remember clearly,” Skaalrud wrote, “the front end of the truck didn’t knock any of them down. The truck passed right through them. Some of the people looked and responded and lifted their hands in a friendly way, and I remember one man with his top hat smiled at us.”
Almost in a state of panic, Skaalrud and Shaw stepped on the gas and hurried down the road, leaving the misty apparition behind them. When they finally emerged from the fog, they pulled the truck over and discussed what they had just witnessed.
“After we had both shared our sightings,” Skaalrud continued, “we agreed we both had seen the same thing, and we were both still experiencing that state of fear. We couldn’t believe the clear visible look we had with these ghosts, and the clothes they were wearing. It made us have goose bumps all over. Then we got up the courage to unlock the doors and inspect the truck and trailer for any hangers-on. Thankfully it was all clear and we carried on to Fernie, B.C., and Sparwood, B.C., our final destination.”
The Wraith of Revelstoke
In the summer of 1871, the province of British Columbia agreed to join Canadian Confederation on the condition that a railroad be built from the Pacific Coast to the cities of southern Ontario and the Laurentian valley. Throughout that decade, members of the Canadian Pacific Railway Exploratory Survey tramped through the wildernesses of British Columbia and the Canadian Shield in order to determine the best route for the promised thoroughfare. The engineer tasked with overseeing the CPR survey crews in British Columbia was an English adventurer named Walter Moberly, who described his 1870s treks through the BC wilds in an 1885 memoir entitled The Rocks and Rivers of British Columbia.
One of the tales Moberly recorded in his book was a ghost story he learned from his native guides, set near present-day Revelstoke not far from the Dalles des Morts.
“At one place,” the engineer wrote, “not far from the ‘Dalle de Mort’, seeing an old hut I landed to find out what it was. As my Indians did not like to land I asked the reason why, and one of them told me that several years before, a Columbia River Indian, his wife and two children were staying in the hut. The Indian went in his canoe to visit his traps, but night came on, the woman watching for her husband’s return. At last she heard the dip of his paddle in the water, and saw him step carefully out of his canoe at the usual landing place and begin to unload his canoe, when she laid down again in her blankets. After a time, surprised at his not coming in, she got up, but could see no sign of the Indian or canoe, and went to the landing place to examine the newly—fallen snow to see, as she expected, his footsteps, but was dreadfully frightened to find there were not any marks. A day or two afterwards, two Indians of her tribe came and told her they had found her husband’s broken canoe at the foot of a bad rapid, but could find to trace of him. His body was never found, and the wrecked canoe told the poor woman the mournful tale. The Indians, believing the hut to be haunted by the spirit of the drowned Indian, do not like to go to it.”
Weird Energy
In 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway was built through the Columbia Mountains, meandering through Roger’s Pass and what is now the city of Revelstoke, and opening up that rugged region for settlement. In the century and a half that has followed, a myriad of strange and tragic events have taken place in the area, which some believe have left their peculiar imprints on the region’s gloomy forests and ancient valleys.
Over the decades, a number of unorthodox religious sects have taken refuge in the secluded confines of the Columbias, beginning with the Doukhobor settlers who formed communes near Castlegar and in the Slocan Valley in the early 1900s. On October 29th, 1924, the leader of the Canadian Doukhobors, Peter Vasilevich Verigin, was killed in a train bomb at the southwestern edge of the Columbia Mountains, while travelling on the Kettle Valley Railway between Castlegar and Grand Forks. His assassination remains unsolved to this day.
In the 1940s, members of a fundamentalist Mormon sect which held polygamy among its highest virtues established a colony just south of Creston, BC. Throughout the first two decades of this 21st Century, leaders of this religious community, known today as Bountiful, waged legal battles with the Crown over their alleged polygamist practices. The community remains enshrouded in shadowy rumours of human trafficking and the abuse of minors.
During WWII, when the Commonwealth was at war with Imperial Japan, the Canadian government forced Japanese-Canadians from their homes and sequestered them into two different internment camps in the Columbia Mountains, fearful that some of them, out of a sense of loyalty to their ancestral homeland, might commit acts of subterfuge on Canadian soil. The Canadian government under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney officially apologized for this injustice in 1988 and monetarily compensated the citizens whom it had incarcerated.
In the 1960s, New Age cults trickled into the West Kootenays to practice their own unconventional rituals away from the prying eyes of conservative civilization. Many of these congregations settled around Nelson and the Slocan Valley, where their arcane rites are still practiced to this day.
In August 1982, a 23-year-old man named David Shearing tortured and murdered six people in Wells Grey Provincial Park in the northwestern Columbia Mountains, wiping out three generations of the Johnson-Beltley family in what has been called “one of the worst crimes in Canadian history”.
And on Friday, November 13th, 1998, Michel Trudeau, the son of former Prime Minster Pierre Trudeau and youngest brother of current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was swept by an avalanche into remote Kokanee Lake while backcountry skiing, and drowned while attempting to reach the shore. The Trudeau family’s public reaction to the news and decision to leave Michel’s body in the lake have inspired a slew of controversial conspiracy theories.
To those who subscribe to the notion that places have memories, dark echoes of events such as these still linger in the Columbia Mountains, adding to the haunting aura which some feel hangs over the region like a pall. Several subscribers have independently articulated this sentiment to me in private correspondence. One woman, around 2019 or 2020, recalled being plagued by an unaccountable sense of dread after taking an interesting-looking rock from the ghost town of Fisherville, where age-silvered hand-hewn timbers, a ruined stone chimney, and prospectors’ graves are all that remain of the boomtown that once flourished on Wild Horse Creek. This untenable sensation dogged her until she returned to the ghost town and replaced the rock in its original location.
Another woman, in the spring of 2024, recalled entering what she described as “a weird energy spot” while hiking with her friend in the Columbia Mountains near Revelstoke, comparing the sensation evoked by this strange locality to the feeling she gets whenever she spends time in a reputedly haunted building. At a point where the trail crossed a particular creek, the woman felt herself compelled to walk upstream and stand barefoot on a certain large rock that stuck out of the water. “It felt like there was a lot of energy around it,” she wrote of the rock, “like how haunted places sometimes feel, but not negative. We were just goofing off when I suddenly felt all the energy drain from my body, as I was in the stream with my hands on the rock. It felt as though the rock’s energy suddenly matched mine, and then I was drained. I don’t know how else to describe it, and I’ve never had any experiences that weird before… It was like it had wanted something from me, and had taken my energy. It took me the rest of the day to recover, and I had a hard time walking back downhill.” The woman’s hiking companion later revealed that, while walking the same trail some time before, another of her friends had inexplicably decided to venture off the path and meander up the same creek on which she had her uncanny experience, avowedly drawn by some invisible force.
The Murder of Carmella Lajeunesse
The formless notion that the Columbia Mountains might be haunted by some invisible parasitic force renders all the eerier the profusion of mysterious disappearances to which their ancient peaks have borne silent witness. Some disappearances, like the 1965 death of a skiier on the Illecillewaet Glacier in BC’s Glacier National Park (not to be confused with its American counterpart in Montana), or 2003 disappearance of kayakers on the Incomappleaux River, which runs through one of the only inland temperate rainforests in the world, are probably attributable to the natural hazards inherent to all alpine areas. Others remain shrouded in mystery, suggesting the interference of something more deliberate than the chaotic forces of nature.
In the summer of 1938, for example, a toddler named Carmella Lajeunesse disappeared from the Yankey Girl coal mine near her family’s home in Ymir, British Columbia, a village in the Selkirk Mountains south of Nelson. Her father, Morris Lajeunesse, had allegedly left her to play atop a pile of slag, and had checked on her minutes before her vanishing.
A search and rescue operation involving tracking dogs and two hundred volunteers failed to turn up any hints as to her whereabouts. The only clue unearthed was a man’s bloodstained handkerchief which had been discarded in the bush on the side of a road near the mine, igniting suspicions of foul play. Sergeant C.G. Barber of the British Columbia Provincial Police, who directed the operation, told the press, “There is more to this child’s disappearance than appears on the surface.”
Eight days after her vanishing, Carmella’s body was found by four boys picking huckleberries, lying in a creek about three miles from the site of her disappearance. A coroner determined that the girl had been killed by a blow to the back of her head. The culprit was never found.
The Disappearance of Deborah Schneider
In the summer of 1962, 6-year-old Deborah Schneider disappeared in Kokanee Glacier National Park at the end of a family camping trip, vanishing while her parents were packing camping gear into their car. The disappearance took place in the wilderness about fifteen miles north of Nelson, incidentally very near to the spot at which John Bringsli encountered a wildman two years earlier.
For two days, an RCMP-led search and rescue operation involving a hundred volunteer searchers, a tracking dog, a bush plane, a helicopter, and a scuba diver failed to yield any clues as to her fate. Despite Mr. Schneider’s insistence that his “daughter was not inclined to wander off,” investigators feared that the girl had fallen into Kokanee Creek and had been swept into Kootenay Lake.
Three days after her disappearance, the six-year-old was found sitting beside a creek at a place ten miles away from her last known location, hungry and mosquito-bitten but alive. “Searchers were amazed to find the girl so far from the camp site,” reported an article in the Calgary Herald. “They at first had thought it impossible for her to have gone more than a mile from the car because of the rugged terrain… The two men who found her, Joe Kershaw of Kimberley, B.C., and Gary Saunders of Nelson, walked more than two hours to carry her back through the dense bushland of Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park.” The only explanation Deborah could give for her disappearance was that she “went for a walk on Friday but got on the wrong path.”
Myron Shutty’s Mysterious Rescue
In the summer of 1967, 5-year-old Myron Shutty vanished while picnicking with his parents on either Lockhart or Sanca Creek, on the southeastern shores of Kootenay Lake north of Creston. His father, Joseph, told the press that he, Myron, and his 8-year-old son, Johnny, were washing dishes in the creek when Myron declared his intention to go back to the car to see his mother. About a minute later, Joseph and Johnny returned to the vehicle, but Myron was nowhere to be seen.
“He went missing in the 300 feet between the creek and the car,” Joseph explained. “It just seemed like he had disappeared into thin air.”
An RCMP-led manhunt consisting of a pair of tracking dog, three helicopters, skin divers, members of the Kimberly Militia, and a hundred volunteers scoured the creek and the forest surrounding the campsite but failed to turn up any clues.
On the second day of the search, Myron walked out of the woods into the arms of volunteer searcher Marijan Sakic, on the opposite side of the creek from where he had disappeared. “He just came walking down the hill,” Sakic told the press, “and when I asked him where he’d come from, he told me the bush.” The five-year-old was tired and hungry, and his legs were covered in scratches, but otherwise seemed to be in good condition, to his father’s unspeakable relief.
When he was sufficiently recovered from his backcountry ordeal, Myron made the startling statement that he had been rescued in the woods by a teenager in an orange baseball cap, who approached him while he was getting a drink from the creek, carried him across the creek and through the forest, and set him down within sight of the searchers. “How he got out of the woods is a real mystery,” explained Joseph Shutty. “Myron tells us that he was carried out of the woods by a person he calls a teenager. Nobody has seen this teenager or person, but we have to believe Myron’s story.
“Myron says the teenager found him way back in the woods, picked him up, carried him down the mountain, across the creek near where he disappeared and then showed him all the cars and people and told him if he walked to the people he would find his parents.
“It’s weird. When I asked him where the teenager went, he said, ‘back into the woods.’
“Also, Myron says the teenager asked if he had any money and Myron said he hadn’t. The person then gave him a quarter, telling him one should have money when lost.”
Myron indeed had a quarter in his pocket at the time of his rescue despite that, to the best of his parents’ knowledge, his pockets were empty at the time of his disappearance.
Joseph elaborated on Myron’s story in a later interview, paraphrasing his son’s testimony thus:
“I went down to the creek and made sure it wasn’t too deep unless I fell in. I took my slippers and socks off and got in the water to get a drink.
“Then the teenager appeared and called my name. He picked me up and took me across the creek because he said it was easier to go down the other side.
“The teenager carried me most of the way down. We sure came a long, long way.
“We stopped once at a pretty island to have a rest. I was all right, but the teenager was sure sweaty.”
In an effort to verify his son’s story, Joseph returned to the scene of his rescue and explored the surrounding bush. He discovered that the ‘pretty island’ to which his son alluded was located a few miles from the campsite at which his family had picnicked. He strayed further into the forest and came across an abandoned cabin about five miles from the site of Myron’s disappearance. When he asked Myron if he had seen the cabin during his time in the woods, the 5-year-old declared that the teenager had carried him past it.
Another detail bolstering the veracity of Myron’s story was the fact that he was found on the opposite side of the creek from the place of his disappearance. “I know he wouldn’t have crossed the creek himself,” Joseph explained, “because he was afraid of water.”
The Vanishing of Wally Finnigan
Although the cases of Deborah Schneider and Myron Shutty had happy if inexplicable endings, the disappearance of Wally Finnigan, a longshoreman from Surrey, British Columbia, remains hauntingly unresolved.
On Saturday, November 4th, 1989, 51-year-old Finnigan went on a hunting trip with his friend, Andy Wilfan, in the East Kootenays nineteen kilometres north of Creston, BC, with tags for elk and deer. The friends had planned to make it a day trip, and when Finnigan failed to return to the scheduled rendezvous point at the end of the day, Wilfan contacted the RCMP.
In the days that followed, a hundred searchers scoured the forest north of Creston but were unable to find any trace of the missing woodsman. About a week into the search, a local woman reported that she had driven past a man matching Finnigan’s description several days earlier, not far from the place where Finnigan and Wilfan had hunted. The man had been walking along Lower Wynndel Road, a lonely two-lane backroad which parallels the BC Highway 3A. The witness recalled that he had been dragging one of his feet, and appeared to be disoriented. Assuming that the pedestrian was intoxicated, the woman drove on, thinking nothing more of the incident until she saw a photo of the missing hunter on TV.
This new lead prompted Finnigan’s family to hire tracker Sid Harty of Washington state to search Lower Wynndel Road with bloodhounds. Sure enough, the dogs picked up Finnigan’s scent and followed it up the highway. Without any explanation, the scent trail suddenly disappeared.
Nearly a year later, in the summer of 1990, RCMP searchers found Finnigan’s clothes, hunting rifle, and wallet somewhere north of Creston, amid a scattering of shredded clothing and gnawed bones. Finnigan’s widow, Jean, theorized that her husband had suffered a stroke during his hunting trip, recalling that the man spotted on Lower Wynndel Road was dragging one foot and appeared to be disoriented, as well as bouts of chest pain that Wally had suffered a few days prior to his hunting trip. The RCMP suspected that a bear had dragged Finnigan’s body to the spot at which the remains were found. The only variable unaccounted for was the inexplicable termination of Finnigan’s scent trail on Lower Wynndel Road – a mystery which seems likely to remain forever unsolved.
The Disappearance of Brianne Wolgram
Of all the disappearances to take place in the Columbia Mountains, perhaps the strangest is that of Brianne Wolgram, a 19-year-old girl who vanished from Revelstoke, British Columbia, in the autumn of 1998.
A detailed description of the victim of this haunting tragedy appears on the About Page of the website FindBrianne.Wordpress.com, maintained by Brianne’s friend, Anna Swayze.
“Brianne Ruth Wolgram was a soft-spoken, sweet, and attractive young woman,” the page explains. “She was just 19 years old at the time of her disappearance. Many people viewed her as shy or timid. Those who were lucky enough to get to know her would say she was outgoing, fun, and absolutely hilarious…
“Brianne led an active lifestyle; playing sports throughout high school and working out at the gym. She occasionally consumed alcohol at parties but did not smoke cigarettes or ‘do drugs.’ She had dreams of going to college, travelling, getting married, and having children. Though she was not romantically linked to any particular boy, Brianne did have ‘crushes.’”
At the time of her disappearance, Brianne lived with her parents, Sheryl and Cliff Wolgram. She had aspirations of becoming a pharmacist’s assistant, and worked two jobs in an effort to save enough money to go to college. In the day, she was an attendant at the Frontier Super Save gas station on the Trans-Canada Highway at the northern edge of town. At night, she worked the late shift at the McDonald’s restaurant, located a 2-minute’s drive down the highway from her other place of employment.
The morning of Saturday, September 5th, 1998, was a rough one for Brianne, who had stayed out late with her girlfriends following her night shift at McDonalds. According to her co-workers at the Frontier, the 19-year-old seemed upset that day, and was quieter than usual. At one point in the afternoon, she burst into tears. “She had a little cry and then she got over it,” said her mother, Sheryl, of the outburst. “They told her she could go home, but she wanted to keep working.”
When she got home from the gas station at 7:00, Brianne decided to take a nap, passing up a Labour Day weekend barbeque to which her family had been invited. At 9:00, she called her close friend, Kristi Cain, with whom she hoped to go to a party later that night. Kristi, who also worked at the Frontier Super Save, was still on duty at the time, but ended her shift at 11:15, and was in no mood for an early night. Brianne declared that she would pick her up in her new ride, a black 1989 Acura Integra with gold-coloured rims which she had purchased a few months before, which her friends described as her “pride and joy.” On the way, she would pick of a 6-pack of blackberry wine coolers for the two of them to enjoy at the party.
Later that night, Kristi finished her shift and awaited the promised ride, relishing the prospect of a fun Saturday night with her friend. 11:15 came and went, but Brianne and her new car were nowhere to be seen. At 11:20, Kristi called Brianne’s house to inquire into the delay, and discovered that her friend was not at home. That wasn’t like Brianne, whom Kristi was certain would have called her if she found herself delayed.
Sometime between 11:00 and 11:30, four local witnesses, whose memories were later jogged through regression hypnosis, claimed to have spotted Brianne talking with three teenage girls outside a local 7-Eleven, whom she seemed to know personally. Brianne was wearing blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and black sandals at the time of the encounter. The first of her mysterious acquaintances was a tall slender girl with long auburn hair tied back in a bun, who wore a long brown floral skirt and a white short-sleeved shirt. The second teen was shorter and plumper than the first, wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, and shoulder-length brown hair. The third girl was described as being of average height and slightly overweight, with a reddish-blonde ponytail and a nose ring.
Shortly after the 7-Eleven sighting, another witness, a male motorist, claimed that he drove behind Brianne’s car as it proceeded down Airport Way, heading towards the wooded gloom on the southern outskirts of town. As he passed the vehicle, he spotted three passengers inside.
Brianne never met Kristi that night, nor did she show up at the party for which she had made arrangements. At 3:30 in the morning, a concerned Kristi phoned Brianne’s mother, Sheryl, to alert her to the troubling situation. Sheryl spent the rest of the night driving around town in search of her daughter’s vehicle. When the search proved fruitless, she filed a report with the local RCMP.
While those closest to Brianne were searching for clues as to the whereabouts of the vanished girl, a local hunter had a strange experience in a remote area southeast of town. On the morning of September 6th, at around 8:00 a.m., this unidentified witness headed back to town after a night in the mountains. While driving down Echo Lake Road, a tortuous gravel logging road about 30 kilometres south of town, not far from the Akolkolex Falls, he came upon a young woman in white shorts walking uphill. He rolled down his window to acknowledge the teenager, around whom he had to carefully ease his truck. The girl did not respond to his salutation and continued walking.
Four days after Brianne was last seen, an RCMP helicopter pilot spotted the missing girl’s new car abandoned in a gully off Echo Lake Road, the same mountain trail on which the hunter had his strange experience. The location of the vehicle, and light damage to the front bumper, indicated that that driver had miscalculated a hairpin turn in the dark and driven off the road. The keys were still in the ignition. Inside the glove compartment were Brianne’s driver’s licence, bank card, and more than $200 in cash. The console between the driver and passenger seat contained a pack of cigarettes. In the backseat was a 6-pack of blackberry wine coolers which Brianne had picked up for herself and Kristi Cain. Outside on the road were a package of cigarillos, a beer can, and an empty air freshener package.
In the weeks that followed, Brianne’s family and friends joined search and rescue personnel in combing the forest surrounding the accident site. Tracking dogs followed Brianne’s scent a mere three metres up the road, where it inexplicably disappeared. Despite the best efforts of all involved, no further clues were unearthed. Brianne’s body was never found, and her fate remains a mystery to this day.
Over the years, several different theories have been put forth as to the nature of Brianne’s vanishing, many of them formless hypotheses involving the three girls with whom the 19-year-old was last seen, or a man at the 7-Eleven who reportedly leered at the girls as they chatted outside the gas station. “It’s almost like an alien came down and took her away,” said Sheryl Wolgram of her daughter’s disappearance, stating adamantly in other interviews that she was certain Brienne did not take her own life. Another vague theory was proffered by a psychic named Tracy Ord, who claimed to have received a vision in which Brienne was murdered in a shack in the woods, and interred in a water-filled culvert.
In the absence of a body, Brianne’s parents still hold onto the thin shred of hope that their little girl might still be alive out there somewhere. Every year on Brianne’s birthday, Sheryl Wolgram lights a candle for her missing daughter. “I put it on the porch window,” she once told a reporter, “facing the direction where she went missing, and I let it burn all night so it’ll guide her way home.”
Sources
Mysteries of Canada: Volume IV (2023), by Hammerson Peters
“Report on the Kootenay Indians of South-Eastern British Columbia,” by Dr. A.F. Chamberlain in the Fall/Spring 1974 issue (Vol. 8, No. ½) of Northwest Anthropological Research Notes
“Nelson,” in the October 13th, 1900 issue of the Victoria Daily Times
“Nelson’s Sea Serpent,” in the October 14th, 1900 issue of Vancouver BC’s Daily News-Advertiser
“Fort Steele,” in the October 30th, 1900 issue of the Weekly News-Advertiser (Vancouver, BC)
“Nelson,” in the October 17th, 1900 issue of the Victoria Daily Times
“Nelson,” in the December 30th, 1900 iss ue of the Daily News-Advertiser (Vancouver, BC)
“Daily City Gossip,” in the July 23rd, 1902 issue of the Vancouver Daily World
“Mysterious Sea Serpent Reported in Kootenay Lake: Rancher Tells Nelson News About It; Many Persons Have Seen It,” in the August 11th, 1926 issue of the Calgary Albertan
“Sees Mystery Monster in Lake at Kootenay: Rancher Declares Large Object Like a Boat Appeared on the Surface,” in the August 11th, 1926 isue of the Star-Phoenix (Saskatoon, Saskatchwean)
In the Domain of Lake Monsters (1998), by John Kirk
“Moyie,” in the August 27th, 1901 issue of the Weekly News-Advertiser (Vancouver, BC)
The Slocan: Portrait of a Valley (2004), by Katherine Gordon
“The Pictographs of Slocan Lake,” by Joy F. Bell in CRARA ’77: Papers from the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Canadian Rock Art Research Associates (1977)
“Lake Monster – Slocansaurus caught on camera! (real),” published on the ‘Sandhill Studios’ YouTube channel on September 23rd, 2023
Travels and Adventures Among the Indians of North America from Canada to Vancouver’s Island and Oregon through the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Territory and Back Again (1858), by Paul Kane
Adventures on the Columbia River: Including the Narrative of a Residence of Six Years on the Western Side of the Rocky Mountains, Among Various Tribes of Indians Hitherto Unknown: Together with a Journey Across the American Continent (1832), by Ross Cox
This Blessed Wilderness: Archibald McDonald’s Letters from the Columbia, 1822-44 (2001), by Jean Murray Cole
The Rocks and Rivers of British Columbia (1885), by Walter Moberly
Historic Sites of the Province of Alberta (1966), by Hugh Aylmer Dempsey
“Harriott, John Edward,” by Lewis G. Thomas in Volume 9 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1976)
Jasper-Robson: A Taste of Heaven (1996), by Don Beers
Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America (1859), by Paul Kane
“Killer Fears: Campground Mass-Murderer Eligible to Apply for Parole,” by Jason Van Rassel, in the September 27th, 1999 issue of the Calgary Sun
“Missing Tot Hunted in B.C. Park,” in the July 21st, 1962 issue of the Sunday Times (Victoria, BC)
“Missing Tot Hunted in B.C. Park,” in the July 21st, 1962 issue of the Victoria Daily Times
“Alberta Girl Disappears in Park,” in the July 21st, 1962 issue of the Edmonton Journal
“RCMP and 100 Searchers Fail to Find Child,” in the July 21st, 1962 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News
“Missing Girl Located Beside Mountain Creek,” in the July 23rd, 1962 issue of the Calgary Herald
“Girl, 6, Found in Rugged Bush,” in the July 23rd, 1962 issue of the Calgary Albertan
“Search for Girl in Kootenay Wilds,” in the June 7th, 1938 issue of the Victoria Daily Times
“200 Men Seek Lost 3-Year-Old,” in the June 7th, 1938 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Mother, Ill, Unaware of Her Baby Missing: 250 Men With Police Dog Scout Hills; Eagles, Cougars Feared,” in the June 8th, 1938 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Clue to Missing Child is Found: Blood-Stained Hankerchief Discovered Near Ymir, B.C., Where Baby Disappeard,” in the June 9th, 1938 issue of the Victoria Daily Times
“Missing Girl,” in the June 10th, 1938 issue of the Vancouver Daily Province
“Dog Seeking Missing Girl: B.C. Posse Hoping Smart Animal Will Pick Up Child’s Track,” in the June8th, 1938 issue of the Windsor Star
“Says Baby Killed by Blow on Head,” in the July 15th, 1938 issue of the Coeur d’Alene Press
“Lost Canadian Infant is Dead,” in the July 12th, 1938 issue of the Spokesman-Review
“Skier Lost on Glacier,” in the May 17th, 1965 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Charity Climbers Missing After Kayaking Mishap,” in the August 6th, 2003 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Police Still Searching for Answers in Revelstoke Missing Persons Case from 1998,” by Josh Piercey in the September 6th, 2023 issue of the Revelstoke Review
Missing 411: Canada (2019), by David Paulides
“Five-Year-Old Lost at Picnic,” in the July 10th, 1967 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News
“Copter Joins Hunt for Five-Year-Old,” in the July 10th, 1967 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Militia Aids Search For Boy,” in the July 11th, 1967 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News
“Big Search Goes On For Boy, 5,” in the July 11th, 1967 issue of the Vancouer Sun
“Two Days in Bush, Boy, 5, Walks Out,” in the July 12th, 1967 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Hungry Boy, Lost Two Days, Walks To Safety,” in the July 12th, 1967 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News
“Mystery Teener Saves Boy,” in the July 13th, 1967 issue of the Province (Vancouver, BC)
“Father Seeks Teen-Ager Who Rescued Boy in Bush,” in the July 13th, 1967 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Missing Hunter’s Family Begging for Volunteers to Help End Six-Day Search,” in the November 10th, 1989 issue of Fort McMurray Today
“Family Will Keep Looking For Man, 51,” in the November 14th, 1989 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Reward Offered For Missing Hubby,” in the December 9th, 1989 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News
“The Agony of Families,” by Neal Hall in the July 7th, 1990 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Friends, Relatives to Hunt Surrey Man,” by Harold Munro in the May 11th, 1990 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Vanished – Without a Trace: Two Years Ago Last Tuesday, 19-Year-Old Brianne Wolgram Simply Disappeared,” by Wendy McLellan and Chris Mongomery in the September 10th, 2000 issue of the Province (Vancouver, BC)
https://FindBrianne.Wordpress.com/
“20 Years Later: Foul Play Never Ruled Out in Disappearance of Revelstoke Woman,” by Liam Harrap in the April 13th, 2019 ussue of the Abbotsford News
“Hardworking Teen’s Disappearance Baffles Town,” by Lora Grindlay, in the September 13th, 1998 issue of the Province (Vancouver, BC)
“Missing Revelstoke Woman: Police Hope Sketches Will Help Witness Search,” by Sasha Nagy in the February 27th, 1999 issue of the Calgary Herald
“Mom Still Shines a Light for Missing Daughter,” by Cheryl Chan in the September 7th, 2010 issue of the Province (Vancouver, BC)
“Tracy Ord is a Different Detective: Psychic Uses Visions to Help Solve the Unsolvable,” in the August 7th, 2000 issue of the Calgary Herald
Leave a Reply