By Robert Lucke
Watertons Prince of Wales Hotel should have a ghost in it. Consider these facts about the hotel built in Canada by Empire Builders Jim and Louis Hill.
The hotel was to be a copy of the Hills Many Glacier Hotel, but Louis Hill toured the French Alps the summer the plans were being drawn and even into construction kept changing things so that the hotel goes up where Many Glacier spreads out and bears little resemblance to any one architectural style.
When the hotel was being built on a promontory above the townsite of Waterton the wind blew so hard that the hotel was thrown out of plumb twice and to this day has a built-in sway during windy days in its upper reaches.
Employees at Many Glacier point to Many Glacier as being used in the filming of the movie The Shining, a ghost story about ghosts in a large hotel during its off season. Meanwhile north at the Prince of Wales everyone knows about the ghost and it is treated as commonplace as the winds that buffet the building almost daily.
It seems that a college girl named Sarah was working at the Prince during the early 1970s and while there she fell in love with the manager of the hotel dining room.
The dining room manager, quite happily married himself, spurned Sarahs attempts at romance which caused her to jump off a fifth-story balcony and die on the cobblestones of the hotel veranda where high tea was served on the occasional day when the wind was not blowing gale force around the building.
Sarahs blood would not wash out of the cobblestones, so they were all removed, leaving the strange rock low veranda like walls with grass growing on both sides of them giving the lake side of the hotel a sort of maze-like appearance.
Sarah since that time has been seen in the hotel by many. She is sort of a kindly ghost even with those staying in her room, 510.
If not seen but felt everyone from the Windsor Lounge waiters to the winter caretaker to the information folks in the main lobby says she turns lights on and off, unplugs vacuum cleaners and mischievous things like that. Perhaps not very ghost like, but there is little doubt in the minds of many at the Prince that there is a ghost and Sarah is it.
And when she is alone all winter long and the winds are blowing 70 miles an hour rocking and rolling the hotel, who knows what Sarah is busy doing in those times!
