The Walterdale Playhouse in Old Strathcona, Edmonton, is a community theatre in a fire hall, and its ghost story grows straight out of the building. When the railway reached the south bank of the North Saskatchewan in 1891, the town that grew up at the end of steel was built mostly of wood, and in 1901 Strathcona raised a volunteer fire brigade with a horse-drawn wagon and a wooden water tank. By 1907 it was a city of about 3,500, and the old wood-frame hall would no longer do.
The new one went up on the same lot beside the waterworks, begun in 1909 and finished in 1910, designed by Wilson and Herrald and built by J. M. Eaton for an estimated $13,715. It was a two-storey red brick hall with room for three fire wagons, a stable at the back for nine horses, two fire poles from the upper floor, and a bell tower rising 77 feet; upstairs were the chief's office, bedrooms, a band room and showers. After Strathcona joined Edmonton in 1912 it became Edmonton Fire Hall No. 6, with salaried crews backed by volunteers in an emergency. By 1954 it was judged dilapidated, and it was apparently slated for demolition, but instead it spent twenty years as a furniture warehouse, falling badly into disrepair.
Then, as Edmonton began to value Strathcona's early buildings, the Walterdale Theatre Associates, one of Western Canada's oldest amateur theatre groups, took over the lease in 1974 on condition that they restore the hall. It seats 145, it became a central venue for the Edmonton Fringe Festival, the tower still holds its original bell, and in 2007 the province named it a Provincial Historic Resource, the oldest major fire hall in Alberta.
Its resident ghost is a friendly one called Walt, said to be one of the original volunteer firefighters, killed in an accident inside the building. People describe objects moving, lights coming on unexpectedly and the feeling of being watched. Others hear a bell ringing where no one is pulling it, catch the smell of horses, and hear phantom hoof beats on the cement floors, in a building whose back once stabled nine of them.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
