It could be argued that the modern nation of Canada, or at least its western half, owes its very existence to the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), that great trans-continental highway which has connected the Canadian Maritimes with the Pacific Ocean since 1885. It was on the condition that the railroad be built that the province of British Columbia agreed to join the easterly Dominion back in 1871. It was, in part, for the purpose of ensuring its safe construction that the North-West Mounted Police, Canada’s first Mounties, were formed up and sent west onto the prairies in 1874, where they brought British law and order to what are now the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
As might be expected of this most historic and foundational piece of Canadian infrastructure, the CPR is the axle around which revolve some of the country’s best known and most intriguing mysteries. One of Canada’s great classic Sasquatch stories – the tale of Jacko, the controversial wildman from Yale – is set during the turbulent days of the railroad’s construction through British Columbia, when Chinese navvies were laying ties across the Interior Plateau, and work camps lined the sandbars of the Fraser Canyon. The chilling story of the phantom train of Medicine Hat, Alberta, a phantasmal omen which portended a deadly locomotive collision in 1908, has appeared in many a Canadian ghost story anthology, from John Robert Colombo’s classic works to Barbara Smith’s popular paranormal series. The legendary headless brakeman of Vancouver, BC, has featured in a spooky Canada Post stamp collection. And nearly all of Canada’s grand railway hotels, from the Chateau Frontenac to the Banff Springs Hotel, have their own well-known hauntings, most of which the establishments officially deny.
In this piece, we will explore some of the lesser-known tales of the unexplained told by the conductors, engineers, and firemen who worked that great iron road throughout the previous two centuries. Enjoy!
Three remarkable tales of CPR mystery appeared in the July 1962 issue of the magazine Fate, in an article written by Julie C. Crawford. Julie learned these stories from her father, Matthew Fulton Crawford, a senior locomotive engineer who worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway. According to Julie, Matthew Crawford, prior to his death in 1954 at the age of 92, was the last living person to have been present at the driving of the CPR’s famous ‘Last Spike’ on November 7th, 1885, at Craigellachie, BC.
“The men who pioneered the Canadian Pacific Railway through British Columbia,” Julie began, “had many hair-breadth escapes from sudden death, and most of them attributed their survival to warnings, of one kind or another, they had received. Wherever a group of railway men gathered, sooner or later the conversation turned to this subject and around some of these true warnings have grown up legends that persist to this day.”
Matthew Crawford received his first psychic warning while he was a young man, during a routine trip from the newly-incorporated city of Kamloops, his home, to the community of North Bend, in the Fraser Canyon. “It was in the spring of 1895,” Julie wrote, “not far from the spot where the Thompson River empties into the mighty Fraser. The track there runs through a twisting series of curves that are still, at times, subject to mud and rock slides that come hurtling down the hillsides after a rain or snowfall, blocking the track for years and sometimes carrying it away altogether.”
Matthew’s experience took place on a dark and rainy night, when the locomotive headlight only dimly pierced the heavy precipitation that was quickly transforming the Thompson and Fraser Canyons into a muddy morass. With the darkness having thrown its heavy shroud over the spectacular scenery which that stretch of railroad afforded trainmen in the daytime, Matthew’s mind began to wander. Soon, he found himself thinking about his young wife, who had died suddenly and unexpectedly in childbirth. “In the darkness,” Julie wrote, “she seemed very near to him.”
As he reminisced, Matthew was suddenly struck by the uneasy feeling that that pouring rain which so hampered their visibility would trigger a rockslide that night somewhere in the Thompson or Fraser Canyons. He said as much to the inexperienced fireman who sat in the opposite seat, sipping tea. The younger man tried to allay his fear, assuring him that the watchman on duty that night, a competent railroad veteran called Old Honey, would be extra vigilant in such nasty weather.
Suddenly, out of the blue, Matthew heard a voice in his ear say, “Stop! Don’t go any further!”
“What did you say?” he asked the fireman. “What did you see ahead?”
“I didn’t see anything or say anything,” his colleague replied, “because I wasn’t looking out of the window. What’s the matter with you?”
“But you said to stop!” Matthew retorted.
“I said no such thing! Why would I? Don’t go getting pipe dreams, Matt.”
No sooner had the fireman turned his back than Matthew heard the clear command: “Stop! Stop right now!”
Matthew stared at the fireman, who was preparing to refuel the firebox, apparently unaware of the startling injunctions that were causing his partner so much consternation. He then leaned out the window, but could only see a few feet ahead on account of the rain and the darkness. As he hesitated, the same strange voice barked:
“Stop… stop… STOP!”
This time, Matthew obeyed, and cranked the brake lever.
“Well! What do you think you’re doing?” the fireman asked. “They aren’t going to like this back on the tail.”
“I’m stopping the train,” Matthew replied quietly. “And I don’t care whether they like it or not. Someone or something told me to stop and I’m doing just that, till I find out what’s ahead.”
As Matthew, torch in hand, made to exit the train, he was accosted on the gangway by the conductor and the brakeman, who seemed intent on giving him a thorough dressing down. When he explained the reason for his action, the conductor nodded soberly and volunteered to accompany him on foot to see if anything unusual lay up ahead on the tracks. When the young fireman scoffed at this display of superstition, the conductor gave him a sharp look and snapped, “You’re still pretty green about these things, ain’t you? After a while you’ll learn – maybe. If you don’t, you’ll be no use on a railroad.” With that, Matthew and the conductor stepped into the mud.
After trudging about a hundred yards up the tracks, the two men stopped and motioned for the fireman and brakeman, who watched derisively from the train, to join them. “My God,” the fireman whispered as he approached the two veterans. “Look at that!”
“Yes, you should thank God,” Matthew replied, “for certainly, but for that warning, we’d be in the Fraser now.” Just up ahead, a huge rock slide had swept the track and the embankment on which it rested a hundred feet below into the Fraser River.
“Let this be a warning to you, my lad,” the conductor told the brakeman sternly. “When a seasoned railroader like Matt says he has a hunch to stop, he has a hunch! See you never forget what you’ve learned tonight – if you want to be a railroader.”
Matthew Crawford’s next strange experience took place about a year later, in the spring of 1896, on a night much like the aforementioned. This time, his train was eastbound, destined for Kamloops. His fireman on this trip was his brother-in-law, John “Jack” Ladner. Although naturally a cheerful and carefree soul, Jack had an uneasy feeling about this particular journey, confidentially remarking several times to his brother-in-law that he would glad to get home in one piece that night.
Matthew and Jack were drinking tea in the cab while the train skirted the shores of Kamloops Lake, a winding stretch of track typified by sharp curves and short tunnels. When they reached a bend in the road a short distance from the Cherry Creek tunnel, roughly halfway down the lake, the cab gong began to ring. This gong was connected to the caboose by a long cord which ran across the top of the train, and was designed to ring automatically at both ends whenever the train broke apart, which happened with casual frequency in those days of hand-brakes, alerting both he conductor and the engineer.
Baffled as to how the train could have broken apart at that relatively flat grade, Matthew nonetheless seized the throttle and slowed the engine to a stop. No sooner had the gong stopped ringing than Matthew and Jack were approached by conductor Sam Jones, who wanted to know the reason for their unscheduled pit stop. Jack, his gloomy foreboding apparently forgotten, facetiously asked Jones whether he and the brakeman had been arguing about the upcoming federal election, the candidates being Wilfred Laurier for the Liberals and Charles Tupper for the Conservatives, and had pulled the cord in their agitaiton. On the contrary, the conductor and his colleague had been cooking breakfast, doing their best to watch their language in the company of Father Jean-Marie-Raphael Le Jeune, a French Catholic priest who served as the superior of the St. Louis Mission in Kamloops, whom they had picked up earlier in their journey. Neither of them had pulled the cord, and Jones had seen no sign of a break on his way up to the cab.
Suspecting that the cord had been pulled by a hobo hiding somewhere on the train, the crew made a quick search of all the places where trainhoppers typically rode, but were unable to find any trace of an unpaying passenger. Having exhausted all rational explanations, the crew proceeded on toward the Cherry Creek tunnel.
“But no sooner had the train begun to drift around the long curve,” Julie wrote, “than the gong rang again, loud and insistent. At the same instant, Jack, who had his head out of his window, drew it in to shout, ‘My God, Matt! The mouth of the tunnel is blocked with a slide. Shut her off and jump for your life! Quick! Before we hit!’
“In less time than it takes to tell it, both men had jumped through the cab windows since there was no time to seek the usual way out of the stricken engine as she mounted the huge rockpile and lay there a broken thing, panting out great clouds of steam in the dawn air.”
Matthew Crawford landed on the sandy slope of the lakeshore, on which he broke his wrist, struck his head, and was knocked unconscious. Jack Ladner, on the other hand, hurled himself onto pile of rocks, on which he injured his back severely. The rest of the crew was mercifully unhurt, and quickly tended to their injured colleagues. Father Le Jeune, also unscathed, volunteered to walk to Cherry Creek station and inform the operator of the obstacle.
“… If the gong had not rang and Dad had not stopped the train just before the accident,” Julie wrote, “both of them would have been killed, for the train would have plowed into the rock pile going at full speed.
“Jack managed to get the gong from the repair crew and for years it hung beneath his window so that the call boy, summoning him in the middle of the night, needed only to pull the cord to wake him.”
Julie’s third and final story is set in January 1904, when both her father and her Uncle Jack were working out of the city of Revelstoke, British Columbia, on an alpine route which stretched from that city east to Laggan, Alberta, the site of present-day Lake Louise. This mountain passage was both beautiful and dangerous, consisting of a series of switchbacks that wound through both the Albertan Rockies and BC’s Columbia Ranges. In order to traverse this treacherous trail, locomotives required the assistance of an auxiliary engine, or pusher. Although the pusher job was monotonous, it paid well, and so Jack Ladner, whose preacher father was given to open-handed generosity, opted to work exclusively in the auxiliary engines in order to allow his mother some extra luxuries.
Matthew Crawford had spent the evening of January 21st, 1904 with his wife’s family, the Ladner’s, in Revelstoke. Cognizant that he had to return to work early the next morning, he kept his visit short. When the time came for him to say goodnight, Mrs. Ladner gave him a pair of hand-knit wrist-warmers and asked him to give them to her son, Jack, if he managed to see him at Laggan, or at the station in Field, BC, at the summit of the route.
“All the way east the next day,” Julie wrote, “Dad was glad his mother-in-law could not see the mountains as they looked in the intense cold, menacing, implacable. The track was in fair condition for the big rotary plough had preceded the passenger train and he was right on time when he pulled into Field station at the summit at 6:00 o’clock.”
Sure enough, Jack Ladner was present at the Field station at the time of Matthew’s arrival, and watched his train crawl into the station. No sooner had the locomotive come to a stop than Jack swung into the cab to give his brother-in-law a hearty hello. After exchanging news, Matthew gave Jack the wrist-warmers his mother had knitted for him, and showed him a new pocket watch he had purchased, of which he was very proud. “The case isn’t much,” he said, “but it’s 21 jeweled, the best works I could afford, and guaranteed to keep perfect time.”
After chatting for some time, the two men parted ways, Matthew to continue his journey to Laggan and Jack bound for Revelstoke with a load of heavy freight. “Jack, be extra careful going down the hill,” Matthew cautioned. “It’s a bad night and if you’ve got a heavy train you may have some trouble. It’s slippery now and the track’s getting worse all the time. Hold her tight.”
“Thanks, Matt,” Jack replied. “You’re always looking out for me, but I’ve gone down the hill in a lot of blizzards this winter. I’m getting used to it. Besides, if the train starts to run away there’s always the safety switches. Nothing could happen once the train got in them. I’ll be alright… But if I don’t get there, I’ll find a way to let you know.” This last remark was a reference to Jack’s oft-repeated insistence that, if he ever met a sticky end on the railroad, as he strongly supposed he would, he would do everything in his ghostly power to let Matthew know about it.
Matthew’s journey to Laggan was uneventful. When his work was complete, he headed to the station boarding house for a hot meal and an evening of banter and comradery with his fellow trainmen. In the midst of the after-dinner conversation, Matthew, eager to show off his new pocket watch, drew the timepiece from his pocket and showed it to the men with whom he was chatting, saying casually, “It’s not much to look at because I didn’t splurge on the case. But it keeps perfect…”
Rather than displaying the correct time, however, the watch was stopped at 7:56.
While the trainmen jokingly disparaged the jeweler who had sold the watch, Matthew attempted to move the hands ahead to the correct time. Bizarrely, they refused to budge, glued resolutely to 7:56. Suddenly, Matthew was struck by a hideous hunch. Pushing back his chair, he shrugged into his coat and set out for the station, ignoring the laughs and jeers of his fellow trainmen as he headed into the cold.
Halfway to the station, he ran into the operator, who had just searched for him at the bunkhouse. With a heavy heart, the operator informed him that Jack’s train had ran off the rails, having broken through two safety switches. It broke its descent by slamming head-on into a huge rock. Rescuers on the scene had yet to find any sign of Jack or his fireman.
Matthew spent the ensuing week working on the wrecking crew, searching for any sign of his missing brother-in-law on the mountainside. Three days later, Jack’s broken body was discovered beneath the twisted metal of the ruined engine. His own pocket watch had stopped at 7:56 – the exact same time as Matthew’s – as had the clock on the second safety switch through which the train had broken. Although Jack’s pocket watch and the clock on the safety switch ran perfectly well once they were rewound, Matthew’s watch never worked again, its hands pointing obstinately to the very minute at which Jack had met his untimely demise. Matthew later brought the watch to two different jewelers, who determined that there was nothing wrong with any of its components. They were unable to ascertain why it had stopped in the first place, and why it refused to resume its regular function.
Julie explained that one of her uncle’s friends implored her father to leave the watch as it was, and to never attempt to use it again. “And he didn’t,” she wrote. “It still is in the family; its hands fixed at the hour when my uncle left this world so tragically.
“Naturally, the watch was talked about for a long time wherever two railroaders met and it was not unusual to have perfect strangers come to the house and say: ‘I worked for the CPR out of Calgary – or Moose Jaw – or Brandon – we heard that you have the watch that stopped when your brother-in-law was killed. Can we see it?
“And Dad would show it, and tell the story again.
“Coincidence? Maybe.
“But Dad said that Jack had kept his promise and had let him know the exact minute he had reached the end of his earthly run!”
“The Psychic Warning that Stopped the Train,” by Julie C. Crawford in the July 1962 issue of Fate