Haunted Saskatchewan: Screaming House

The next location I visited (before the snow came) was near Indian Head, Saskatchewan. This stone house, typical of the late 1800’s in the area, is located off the Trans-Canada Highway east of Indian Head. The more important fact about this house, as it relates to the legend behind the haunting, is that the Canadian Pacific Railway was built nearby.

Welcome, my ghouls, to the Screaming House of Saskatchewan.

The legend claims that there was a family that lived in this house in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. They say that one day, while standing in the house and looking out one of the south facing windows, a woman stared on in horror as one of her children was hit by a passing train. They say that the grief from the fatal accident made her demand that her husband seal the south-facing windows that look on the train tracks. To this day, the windows on the south side of the house are sealed (excluding a basement window).

Nowadays, they claim that if you stand in the main floor of the house when a train passes by, particularly at night, you can still hear her screaming.

I did some digging to see if there was any validity to these claims, but I couldn’t find any information about who might have lived in this particular house in that time frame. Around the same time, there were multiple stone buildings popping in the area, with the Bell Farm nearby and Indian Head forming as an incorporated town in 1902. I will add more details about the Bell Farm and Indian Head history in the next post, as I visited Bell Farm while I was in the area, but I imagine the stone house was built as part of the incoming settlers that began to homestead in the area shortly after the railway was built in 1882.

Another things that happened around the same time frame include the Dirty Thirties, when dust storms were common in the prairies. Other reasons behind the sealing up of windows could also be related to the harsh cold winters of Saskatchewan. I hope to dig into this area even more, but for now, I am not 100% convinced that this haunting is related to someone being hit by a train. While taking photos, I didn’t feel like anyone was hanging around the building, so perhaps, if the accident did happen, it is more of an imprint of the event and not actually a haunting. Needless to say, I’m not convinced.

Until next time, my ghouls.

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Sources: Town of Indian Head; Haunted Places; Canadian Pacific Railway