From unexplained sounds to a mysterious Ouija board, Nora Dirks has lived with ghostly encounters for the majority of her life.
At the age of 21 she spent seven months living in a CN section house with her husband and two kids near the railroad tracks paralleling Celestine Lake Road, about 25 km from Jasper. The family shared the house with a CN foreman and his wife.
“When I lived there, there was a sign on the bunkhouse that said 'beware of the thing that lurks here' and there was never a bird in sight,” recalled Dirks, who is now 74 years old.
“One day I was sitting having coffee with the foreman’s wife and behind her was a fire poker sitting against the wall, the fire poker came off the wall and flew right past her and right past me and hit the other wall.”
After moving out of the house, Dirks' father, who also worked for CN, was assigned to check the signals along that section of track.
“I said to him, 'you beware of the thing that lurks there,' and he just laughed,” recalled Dirks.
About an hour and a half later, he was back in town. Surprised to see him back so soon, she asked her father what happened.
“He said, 'Judas Priest, Nora, there was smoke coming out of the chimney and no one lives there.’”
Her father never went back.
After moving to Saskatchewan and bouncing around from house to house, she returned to Jasper about three years later and moved into Henry House, where she lived with her family for the next six years.
According to Dirks, Henry House was located about a quarter of a mile from the Jasper Airfield, along Snaring Road and the railroad tracks.
“One day I was cleaning and I found this Ouija board in the closet and I said to the kids, 'where did this Ouija board come from?' and they didn't know, so I burnt it in a barrel.”
A Ouija board is board game marked with the letters of the alphabet, numbers 0–9, as well as the words “yes,” “no,” and “goodbye,” along with various symbols and graphics. Some people believe the board game holds spiritual powers and can connect with the dead, although the scientific community has debunked this belief.
After moving out of Henry House, the family moved into the Sunwapta Apartments in town, which, at that time, housed CN employees. Once there, Dirks found the Ouija board again.
Dumbfounded by how it could have possibly got there, she immediately threw it out.
About a year later, she moved to a trailer in the west end of town, where she still lives today.
“Every time my cat would go down the hallway, it would stop and look and when my little niece would go into the bedroom, she would also stop and look,” said Dirks.
Confused by what they were always looking at, she decided to investigate and discovered the Ouija board was behind her dresser.
“I threw it out again,” said Dirks, who was at a loss for words as to how the board game continued to reappear.
“When I found it I told the kids that’s something you don’t play with.”
Back at the Henry House, Dirks said she experienced some more unusual encounters.
“I got up one morning and every ashtray in the house was full of water, all of them,” said Dirks, who asked a CN foreman to confirm there weren’t any leaks in the house.
And the strange occurrences didn’t just affect her.
Her daughter, who was three years old at the time, also had some interesting premonitions and refused to sleep in her room because she said there was a family living in her closet.
“I don’t like to call them ghosts, I call them spirits,” said Dirks, explaining she believes the spirits followed her to her trailer and even followed her to the hospital where she worked as a support staff 30 years.
“I had one sitting in my chair and I was the only one that could see him. It scared the hell out of the nurses.”
She said the only time she was ever scared was when she saw a spirit at the Snaring House; she described that spirit as an “evil spirit.”
While living in her trailer in town, she said her rotary phone would randomly start dialling a 10-digit number, despite the fact that telephone numbers in those days weren’t that long.
“It happened for about three years. I finally had to get rid of the phone.”
About five years ago, she said she had enough with all the unexplained occurrences and asked the spirit to leave her trailer.
“You would hear the fridge open and from my bedroom you could see the light, but there was no one there,” said Dirks.
“I could hear footsteps, they would start in the kitchen and then it progressively started down the hallway and when it came to sit on my bed, that was when I told it to leave.”
Since then she hasn’t had another encounter and she said she’s just fine with that.
Paul Clarke [email protected]
