As Sam McAuley patrolled the corridors of his beloved hotel in the spring of 1969, there was a chance it might return to its glory days. This would be a relief, since the talk of recent years had been of tearing it down. He'd come to the Banff Springs Hotel as a bellman decades earlier. Then he worked in the mines each winter, so summer in the hotel was heaven.
Walking the worn carpeting of its hallways, he remembered when guests would come for the entire summer. The Canadian Pacific Railroad had built the hotel in 1888 to draw them as passengers. The bellmen would bring the huge steamer trunks up to the rooms while the guests checked in, often setting up lines of credit for fifty thousand dollars.
With the rich came the famous; Benny Goodman, Helen Keller, Jack Benny and Cole Porter all stayed in the great castle.
As he walked from turret to turret on the top floor, he remembered becoming head of the bellstaff. The little Scotsman was proud when a summer staffer had written that he was "a kind but firm and sometimes tyrannical individual" who was "the iron will behind these men who thought themselves the epitomes of staffpersons." His boys were the first representatives of the hotel to greet guests. They needed his discipline. He enjoyed a joke during the deadly slow times that occurred, but guests must see them as professionals.
As he climbed the stairs up into the turrets, it made him sad to look at the cracked plaster. While the advent of jet travel had brought guests like the Kennedys and Queen Elizabeth, it had also brought bus tours in to fill rooms and wander the corridors. What they saw was a crumbling reminder of former glory.
Sam passed through the great halls, their furniture covered with sheets. As winter caretaker, he tried to get the more worn furniture further out of sight. Some found the sheets ghostly; to him, it was just familiar.
Old steam pipes banged, attempting to heat the 845 room hotel. The stone castle finished in 1928 to replace the original wooden hotel hadn't been engineered for year round use.
Yet there was talk that a new general manager coming in might open the hotel year round to take advantage of the vastly expanding skiing market. That revenue might bring renovation to a hotel so grand before the Depression wore it down and the Second World War closed it completely for awhile.
Sam loved the top floor. There were many little hiding places where he could keep his tips. Although the sloping roof made the corridor more narrow, the views out over the confluence of the Bow and Spray rivers and up Sulphur Mountain reminded him why the hotel was situated here.
He'd told the boys that he would come back and haunt the hotel after he died. Sam had heard of the secretary whose relatives had placed her ashes in the potted plants around the hotel. They'd then gone to the top of Sulphur Mountain to distribute the rest, only to find that mountain goats had eaten them when they'd set them down.
Sam had been with the hotel in its best times and its worst. Maybe he would stay here, forever.
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On the weekend of an enlightened provincial holiday called Family Day, the hotel was very noisy and active. After Family Day, the hotel, and my floor fell dramatically quiet.
The next day, I spent some time in the 12 million dollar Solace Spa. Soothing music played underwater as a computer controlled the mineral content.
A guest reported that James Coburn was vacationing with his wife at the hotel. A second person said he had heard Cuba Gooding, Jr. was at the hotel doing scenes for a film about dogsledding in nearby Canmore. Another guest disapprovingly said that he had seen a male guest heading through the lobby with two clearly underage women on his arm.
Given the solitude of my wing, I went to sleep at 10PM without even putting in the earplugs on my nightstand.
Around midnight, there was a loud banging from the wall in back of the headboard. Such noises aren't unknown in hotels, although perhaps more often at the lower end of the economic spectrum. I put in the earplugs and went back to sleep.
Within 10 minutes the loud banging recurred. My own headboard seemed like concrete. Enthusiastic neighbors seemed an unlikely explanation.
Even after I switched to a new pair of earplugs, the pounding continued- this time in the ceiling.
Upon checking in, there had been confusion at the front desk. The hotel had just moved to a new lobby as another step in the 75 million-dollar renovation bringing it back to the craftsmanship and materials used in 1928. Maybe construction was going on around the clock, to meet a deadline. But the noise was not like construction, and it was not the sounds of steam pipes in an old heating system.
Determined to sleep, I called the front desk. Like the car that works perfectly when you finally get it to a mechanic, the sound stopped as soon as the operator answered, and never returned. The operator said they would send security.
After hearing the story, a uniformed security guard named Kyle asked, "are you a spiritual person?"
Although a visiting scholar at MIT and a lapsed Unitarian, I didn't want to hurt Kyle's feelings, so I offered a tentative "yes."
So began my introduction to Sam McCauley.
Kyle explained to me that Sam had been a bellman who died some years ago, and he came when people needed help. How was Sam supposed to be providing help now?
Kyle and I walked together as far as the lobby, as he continued on rounds.
In the lobby, he introduced his colleague Kerri, who was on break, having coffee. Fully awake, I wandered the hotel.
As dawn drew nearer, Kerri was again at the convenience store off the lobby. She said she hadn't seen Kyle in a couple of hours.
She called him on the radio. He responded, sounding like he was devastated. Kerri asked what was wrong. He said he would come and tell her.
He had been outside the lobby to smoke and seen an underage girl, poorly dressed and at the beginning of hypothermia. She told him it was her intent, after a night of partying, to wander off into the woods to die.
It was a very cold night, in a town that is now residence to about 20 wolves and seven cougars. While wolves aren't known to attack humans, a cougar had killed a woman cross-country skiing a month earlier. The hotel is in a wildlife corridor; an elk had been grazing on the road to the hotel at midday.
The despondent girl had been very resistant to Kyle's attempts to keep her there. However, he kept her talking and she stayed with him until the Mounties arrived and took her into custody.
She wouldn't be very cooperative with them either. She was unwilling to give her name or her age, but eventually it was determined she had run away from Toronto, so she was put on a bus back the next day.
Kyle saved her life. Kyle, not Sam. Pounding on a wall and a ceiling do not a ghost make.
Before I checked out, I thought of one more thing to check in disproving any spiritual connection to that long and interesting night. I asked about the occupancy of the rooms behind and above me.
They were both empty.
Sam wasn't the only legend in the hotel described in books of ghost tales in Canada.
An error made in construction of an added wing produced a room with no door or windows. The blueprints were altered to cover the error, and the room wasn't discovered until a fire in 1926. A spectral figure had been seen outside the room by security guards, but after the fire, the figure never reappeared. Whether the specter was a guilt-ridden architect or a spirit world litigator will remain a mystery.
Supposedly a bride making her entrance had her gown catch on fire from the candles illuminating a staircase. She panicked, fell, and died of a broken neck. A spectral bride would in later years be seen dancing a waltz alone.
The same lounge the bride frequented also featured a long deceased bartender who would inform patrons when they had enough to drink, as well as a headless bagpiper. The books contain all these stories, but with few names, quotes or dates.
The books also were filled with stories about Sam, the only ghost with a name attached.
There was supposed to be an elevator that always returned to the top floor.
Lights seen shining outside windows by guests in rooms lacking any ledge to stand on are attributed to Sam.
Two years after Sam had died, two guests who had checked in late inquired about the elderly man who had helped with their bags. Told that there were no bellhops over thirty, the couple insisted, and proceeded to describe Sam.
Employees shared stories with me. Sam particularly liked working with honeymooners, which would have placed him on my wing and the floor above.
Sam had been forced to retire. Insisting that he had to keep working, he was sent home, and supposedly died without coming back to pick up his last check.
Some employees said they had been told the ghost stories in their orientation. Others said they had been told not to talk about them, that they were untrue and
demeaning to a great hotel. These opposing tacts had both been used on new employees since Fairmont took over management. Virtually all employees said the person to talk to was Dave "Mo" Moberg, who had been working at the hotel longer than anyone else on staff. In fact, they said, Moberg had known Sam.
A friend of Sam's, Louis Trono, played trombone in the hotel orchestra for over six decades. Now 93, Trono describes Sam becoming rather difficult in the last years of his life. When Sam's widow was asked if she minded all the ghost stories about her late husband circulating, she replied "not as long as he stays up in that hotel."
The public relations director for the hotel is named Holly Wood. Wood considers the topic of Sam and other ghosts "bullhooey." She maintains that the story of Sam and the burning bride were fabrications of a public relations director 20 years ago. She has been there twelve years, and she says there are no ghosts.
However, when the hotel ran a Halloween package in 1994, Wood was sharing the legends of Sam and the bride with the Calgary Herald. Similarly, when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ran a show on Sam and the bride in 1995, she must have been more in the spirit of things.
The legends are recorded for posterity in the Archives of the Whyte Museum in Banff.
The bride was originally described as having tripped over her dress, fallen and broken her neck. In later articles, her dress purportedly had been ignited by candles, leaving it unclear as to whether she was merely clumsy or a fire hazard. For the one time a year is identified, the local paper has no reference to any such tragedy at the hotel,
it reports other explosions, fires, accidents and deaths associated with the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the hotel.
In one article Sam's 93 year old widow said that the man friends describe as having been lovable "would come back to me", if he did come back.
The most significant article may be a column called The Psychic from The Edmonton Journal in 1980. It describes the general manager at the time speaking about "their ghost". Details on Sam's ghost were produced in a letter from the Banff Springs public relations director at the time, Elise Williamson.
Sam's successor as head of the bellmen, David Moberg, is interviewed in several articles, as well as on television. In 1985, he describes an incident as having happened just a week earlier, even specifying room 457.
Robert Sandford is historian-in-residence for the Alberta region of the Fairmont chain. He "gets calls all the time about these stories." Sandford sees the persistence of the stories as a result of "the nature, scale and architecture of the building." Conditioned by Shakespeare and other writers, "people in an unfamiliar setting like this are hypersensitive to sounds and circumstances they haven't experienced before."
"Historically, it became something of a tradition to advance the legends in the hotel. This is an example of unstructured communication of information which happens in resort communities."
"One of the earliest stories is of luggage being dragged through the lobby with fishing line to make it appear to be moving supernaturally.
"In my investigations (of the bride) I could not find any record of said guest and said event. You would think it would be in the security records."
"A public relations person took the various noises and rattles of an old hotel and built them into five different story lines that she shared with over a thousand different journalists."
"It finally became so big she stopped doing it, because the stories were taking on lives of their own. They were backfilling with dates and details that she hadn't concocted. When I came in 1997, I wanted to know the historical basis for the legends. Gradually, it became apparent there was less and less substance to this. Still, I got a fair amount of resistance from people who insisted there were ghosts."
Elise Williamson came to the Banff Springs Hotel soon after college. She was "public relations director or social hostess, depending on how the general manager felt." She said that on her first day on the job, Dave Moberg, as head of the bell staff, told her about Sam's ghost.
"True or not, it's mythology, it's something people want to hear. I embraced the story, because I do believe in ghosts personally. I thought 'this hotel needs ghosts.'" From then on, she talked to writers "as often as I could."
The general manager at the time oversaw renovation of the hotel, the conversion to year round use and the expansion into the market for Japanese tourism. He was "a real
media hound. Anything intriguing that would make people think about the Banff Springs Hotel, he supported that."
"I never fabricated things. I listened to what I heard. I listened to the guests, I listened to what other people told me and I embraced those stories. I probably enhanced them a little bit. I'm the one who got the stories going. I just picked up on what Dave created and made it even bigger."
Historian Sandberg says"I firmly believe that there is so much crucially significant heritage and history in a building that has been so important to the Canadian West that we don't need to resort to artificial history."
"So much time, energy and money has been invested in restoring this property to its former grandeur. We should get back to the real foundations of why this hotel is important in the contexts of the national park, the Rockies, and Canada's image, nationally and abroad."
Because Canadian Pacific wanted to keep a record of those contexts, it employed photographer Nick Morant. Morant lived in the hotel for 17 years, including the years when Williamson resided there also. He said the story of Sam's ghost was "poppycock." "His nocturnal wanderings (as night watchman) could have given birth to the idea. But I'm more inclined to think it was dreamed up by some smart alec young blade trying to scare pretty young girls, hoping they'd turn to him."
Louis Trono, the oldest former employee, is often asked to come up to the hotel. Trono says that when he was last there, in November, David Moberg confessed to him that he had made up the stories about Sam.
Moberg did not return calls for this story. When called at home, he said he would need permission from public relations to talk That permission was never given.
Former Banff mayor and historian Ted Hart says "maybe there's a gag order on him. Dave loves to tell stories, and if he doesn't want to tell them to you, you're probably on the right track. It might not be the corporate image they want."
The legends seem to exist at the intersection of public relations and cultural anthropology. The demographics and culture of the skier clientele in the 1970's made the ghost tales an acceptable way to get the hotel greater name recognition. In 1976, Sam died. Two years later, the first stories began to arise.
Working with the public relations director, Sam's garrulous successor David Moberg was a willing participant in passing on the tales. At the Banff Springs, they get wonderful, service oriented young employees, but they tend to move on quickly. A three-year staff veteran is fairly grizzled by comparison to many.
For veterans, knowing the ropes, as well as the legends, gives a status above newcomers. In tribal cultures, the storyteller holds high status. For Moberg, he can be the oracle above all others.
The persistence of urban legends like alligators in sewers and cats in microwaves shows listeners willing to believe in modern day stories.
A friend and fellow employee says of the hotel and Sam, "It's an old place, and old places always have something or other. It's what you believed in, I think, or what you wanted to believe."
The Banff Springs Hotel has returned to the glory of the visionaries who built it. Its marble halls once again shine, its vaulted ceilings continue to echo. Eyes stare out of paintings in a way that some find most unnerving. A suit of armor stands sentinel; guests have claimed to hear it clanking after them down hallways.
The Banff Springs Hotel is once again a great place to stay, things that go bump in the night notwithstanding.