Strange Connections

Ingrid or Monique...take your pic

Funny...while researching my last St Albert Trail blog (now freshly updated) I wondered what that big, creepy, abandoned, building was. Turns it out it's the old Charles Camsell Hospital.

[wiki]

1946 - opened as tuberculosis hospital 

1964 - housed Northern Medical Research Unit for the changes to Inuit lifestyle with the coming of the DEW Line and increasing southern influence.  [DEW is Distant Early Warning radar Line from the Cold War]

1945 to 1967 - occupational therapy program for aboriginal patients.

1990 - hospital donated over 400 arts and crafts items made by patients in the program to the Royal Alberta Museum

1996 - closed and abandoned, condemned due in part to asbestos

2009 - building and grounds sit empty

The hospital was an "Experimental Hospital" run by Indian Affairs and was known as the "Indian Hospital". Stigma surrounds the hospital as it is alleged that the aboriginal population was treated poorly, abused, and murdered. It is also alleged that south of the building near what used to be the staff garden is a mass grave of aboriginal children, though officials say that most of the people who died were buried St Albert. These rumours and others regarding hauntings of the hospital are based more in urban legend than fact.

Link to Creepy Pics of Camsell Hospital

The movie "White Coats" was filmed in this hospital.  Apparently a wretched Dave Thomas movie, but it starred Ingrid Kavelaars, who's married to the Oilers' ex-coach Dallas Eakins.  The film was released in 2004.

Ingrid has a twin sister Monique Kavelaars, who won a silver medal in fencing at the Commonwealth games.  She's also the only Canadian woman to win an individual match in Epee (type of fencing).  She did it on my birthday in the same year as the film came out: 2004.  

Creepy.  I knew something was strange about that place...probably a secret insane asylum too.