With a spooky name like the Black Cat Guest Ranch, a ghost story or two are almost assumed. 

The name is taken from a nearby mountain’s sprawling forest that has been shaped like a stretching black cat after forest fires ripped through the area in 1885. While the cat can still be seen, another fire almost destroyed it in 1950. The forest is beginning to re-grow the feline, and it can be spotted in the right light and time of year. Staff at the Black Cat, located 20 kilometres from Hinton on the east boundary of the park, recommend trying to find the cat after an early autumn snowfall. 

Hilary Shannon from Black Cat said her aunt, Mary Bond, had a spooky experience at the ranch in the evening of Sept. 16, 1976.

The family was in the middle of construction of a new ranch building. So far Hilary’s uncle Jerry Bond and husband Perry Hayward had managed to get the four outer walls up, and were working in the deep hole that would eventually form the basement. 

That day in September, Hilary’s aunt began to head back to the original building to do up the dishes. She paused by the power house to hook up the generator that was attached to the original building. She glanced back towards the ongoing construction, where Jerry and Perry were still working in the front section of the basement. 

Mary noticed a tall, large man dressed in brown trapper clothes standing at the back of the basement. She looked up the road to see if a car had driven by, but there was nothing on the road. She continued on into the house thinking nothing of the visitor. 

When Jerry and Perry returned to the original lodge building after finishing up for the day, Mary asked them who had stopped by to visit. 

Both men said no one had stopped by as they worked. The only ladder to get into the basement was at the front end of the basement where they had been working. 

The next day the family walked over to the area where Mary had spotted the mysterious man. They determined that he couldn’t have been a shadow or illusion on the area which later became the eighth room of the lodge. 

Mary always regretted that she didn’t try to engage the trapper when she saw him standing there. 

“She was angry that she hadn’t walked down to talk to this man,” Hilary said. 

In Mary’s diary that she kept, she wrote: “If I had [gone to talk to him], would he have dissolved into nothing, or would I have talked to a very real athletic, heavy, older man?”

The family believes the man could have been one of the early trappers that arrived in the area long ago. 

Hilary herself had a strange experience on the ranch one day in the 1980s, as a light dusting of snow fell in the area. 

She was working in the kitchen when she saw a man, dressed in trapper’s clothing, pass by her window. Hilary wondered who it could have been. The family was friendly with all their neighbours, and anyone passing through the yard would surely have poked their head in to say hello. 

After finishing in the kitchen, Hilary went out into the snow-covered yard and checked the area where she had seen the man. No tracks were found in the snow that had by then stopped falling. 

Mary’s ghost story can be read in Ghost Stories Of Alberta. Author Barbara Smith attended a writer’s retreat at the Black Cat Guest Ranch. After a power outage, the writers began reciting ghost stories. Hilary told the group about her aunt’s experience, and the story appeared in the next edition of the popular book.