Fort Garry Hotel

The story

The Fort Garry Hotel rises on Broadway in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, one block from the old Union Station. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway built it between 1911 and 1913 as a luxury stop for well-off passengers, part of the wave of grand hotels that Canadian railways put up in the early 20th century to sell their transcontinental routes. It is the only railway hotel of that era left in Winnipeg.

The railway's first choice of name honored the Selkirk Settlers, as the Selkirk Hotel, but it opted instead to honor Upper Fort Garry, the fur-trade fort that once stood where the Red and Assiniboine rivers meet. Montreal architects George Ross and David MacFarlane based their design on Ottawa's Château Laurier. The plans called for ten floors, two more were added during construction, and the finished 13-story building was the tallest in the city. It is Manitoba's only example of the château style that became the trademark of Canadian railway hotels.

The hotel opened with a ball on December 10, 1913, which the Manitoba Free Press praised as an "opening ball of great brilliancy," and took its first overnight guests two days later. From 1923 to 1932 it housed the Winnipeg studio of CNR Radio, the forerunner of CBC Radio. Its guest book filled with famous names: Louis Armstrong, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Harry Belafonte, Liberace, Gordie Howe and Lester Pearson among them, and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth stayed during their 1939 royal tour.

When Grand Trunk was nationalized, the hotel passed to Canadian National. A small fire broke out on the 12th floor in 1954. A far worse one started on the seventh floor at 1:30 a.m. on December 7, 1971; it caused more than $1 million in damage to the upper floors, took 50 firefighters two hours to control, and forced the evacuation of all 95 guests, one of whom was hospitalized. In 1979 a Winnipeg family bought the hotel and ran it independently until 1987, when it owed $2.5 million in taxes and badly needed modernizing. After a short spell of city ownership, a Quebec hotelier's company bought it in early 1988 for $1 million, promising $12 million of renovations, and reopened it that year with a black-tie party for 750 guests. The two ballrooms then became the provincially run Crystal Casino (about 1989 according to a 1995 Free Press article, in the 1990s according to Wikipedia and Heritage Winnipeg), which lasted about ten years before the owners asked for it to go. New owners gave it its present full name in 2009, adding Spa and Conference Centre to the old one, and joined Choice Hotels' Ascend Collection in 2020.

Canada named it a National Historic Site in 1981, and Manitoba made it a Provincial Heritage Site in 1990.

The legend

The story everyone knows concerns Room 202. A woman, so the tale goes, was told her husband was dead, killed on the road in a car crash, and, overcome with grief, hanged herself in the room's closet. It has become the hotel's calling card: Room 202 is said to be popular with ghost hunters, and travel journalists have spent the night there for articles. Canada.com listed the hotel among the country's top five haunted travel spots in 2011.

The documented trail tells a more interesting story. No record or newspaper report of a woman's death in the hotel has ever been found. The earliest dated account of the hauntings is a Winnipeg Free Press article by Gordon Sinclair Jr. titled "Haunted Hotel," published on August 8, 1995. By then staff were already passing ghost stories on to new employees and including them in behind-the-scenes tours, but the article says nothing about Room 202 or a suicide. Instead it mentions a bloodstain and a man discovered dead in one of the rooms, a tale the manager preferred to avoid. That matches Wikipedia's remark that the legend changed shape over the years, a dead man turning into a widow in mourning.

The 1995 article collects several other stories. According to assistant manager Don Klassen, a frequent guest from Northwestern Ontario reported a woman in an evening gown hovering by the end of her bed before slipping out through the window; Sinclair playfully connected her to the opening ball of 1913, where a "Lady McMillan" had worn white lace, but that was pure speculation. In the fall of 1989 a night dishwasher saw a man eating alone at 4 a.m. in the closed dining room, then called the Factor's Table; by the time Klassen arrived the man had gone, yet the door was still locked on the inside. Staff spoke of dishes clattering and dining-room noises when the room was empty, of a chef who had died, and of a light that travels along the corridors. One of the co-owners, who lived in the hotel, described feeling someone sit down beside her on the bed when no one was there. According to Heritage Winnipeg, other spirits share the building with the Room 202 woman, though it names none.

The same article offers a welcome dose of common sense. A breathing sound in the sub-basement, Klassen explained, was simply the air-conditioning chiller. Tales of a secret tunnel are also shaky: Heritage Winnipeg calls the tunnel legend false and says the real tunnel served the demolished Royal Alexandra Hotel, while the 1995 article mentions a tunnel to a steam plant at The Forks. No TV paranormal investigation has been found.

What remains today

The Fort Garry remains a working hotel, spa and conference center, and its château-style roofline is still a downtown landmark on Broadway. Next to it, a national heritage park linking the hotel to the remains of Upper Fort Garry, the post that gave it its name, was completed in 2017-2018. Floor plans from 1916 and postcards from around 1920 show the building much as it was first built.

Visiting

The hotel is open as a normal business, so it can be visited legally by staying there or using its facilities; check the official website for current services. Guests can ask for Room 202, but expect to book well ahead. No official ghost tour has been found, although in the 1990s managers included ghost stories in behind-the-scenes tours, so it may be worth asking at the front desk. Guest floors are for registered guests only: do not knock on doors or linger in corridors. The Upper Fort Garry heritage park next door is free to explore and adds the fur-trade history behind the hotel's name.

Sources

1. Répertoire canadien des lieux patrimoniaux — Parks Canada
2. Old Fort Garry Gate and Fort Garry Hotel, Winnipeg, Canada — Internet Archive · Photogelatine Engraving Co.: Publisher, 1920-01-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
3. "The Fort Garry". Grand Trunk Pacific's new hotel, Winnipeg, Man. — Internet Archive · Valentine & Sons Publishing Co., Ltd.: Publisher, 1920-01-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
4. The Fort Garry Hotel - Winnipeg — Internet Archive · Photogelatine Engraving Co.: Publisher, 1920-11-03 · Public domain (pre-1929)
5. The Fort Garry Hotel, Winnipeg, Manitoba. — Internet Archive · Camera Products Co.: Publisher, 1920-01-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
6. The Fort Garry Hotel, Winnipeg, Manitoba. — Internet Archive · Camera Products Co.: Publisher, 1920-01-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
7. Wikimedia Commons category : Fort Garry Hotel — Wikimedia Commons
8. A Canadian Castle: The Fort Garry Hotel (10 June 2020) — Heritage Winnipeg — Heritage Winnipeg
9. "Haunted Hotel", Gordon Sinclair Jr., Winnipeg Free Press, 8 Aug 1995 (scan) — Internet Archive — Internet Archive
10. Official website
11. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.