The Haunted History of the Firkins House, Edmonton

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Tucked inside Fort Edmonton Park's recreated 1920s streetscape, the Firkins House looks like an ordinary Edwardian family home. It has instead become one of the city's most talked-about “haunted houses” — and one of its most contested.

The Real History

The Firkins House was built for Dr. Ashley M. Firkins, an American dentist and adventurer who relocated from Chicago to Edmonton with his wife around 1912. The couple raised two daughters in the home, who lived there from birth until the family moved to California around 1923. Dr. Firkins later died suddenly in 1933, reportedly during the Long Beach earthquake in California — not in the Edmonton house itself.

After the Firkins family left, the house changed hands through a series of other owners and residents over the following decades. In 1992, the house was donated to Fort Edmonton Park, which relocated and preserved it as an example of well-preserved Edwardian-era residential architecture, complete with many original fixtures.

Crucially, when historians and park officials later researched the property's actual ownership and resident history to check the popular ghost stories against them, they found no record of anyone dying inside the house itself. The one documented death connected to a former resident occurred decades later, in a car accident on Whitemud Drive — nowhere near the property. Much of the house's popular horror mythology was traced to a Canadian television program, Creepy Canada, which dramatized a fictional storyline involving a haunted ventriloquist's doll and a sinister book of magic. Fort Edmonton Park's own historians have described that version of events as invented for television rather than reflecting the house's real past.

The Haunting

Despite the debunking, the legends persist and vary considerably depending on who is telling them. Reported sightings include a woman's translucent figure drifting near a bookcase, a ventriloquist's doll said to reappear inside locked cupboards, and the apparition of a sickly young boy wandering the halls — none of which correspond to any documented resident of the house.

When the house was still on its original site with the Karpetz family, later owners reported being warned by neighbors that the property had a reputation for strangeness. During its relocation to Fort Edmonton Park, construction crews reported odd incidents: tools that went missing and window panes that fell out but landed on the ground unbroken. These accounts remain anecdotal and unverified, consistent with the rest of the house's folklore.

Can You Visit?

Yes. The Firkins House stands inside Fort Edmonton Park in Edmonton, Alberta, and is open to the public during the park's regular operating season; the park has also hosted seasonal evening “ghost tour” events that include the house on their route.