The screaming lady
of the Dead Man Dam

Fraserdale, 74 kilometres north of Smooth Rock Falls along Highway 634, and 54 kilometres south of the Otter Rapids Hydro Electric Generating Station, is not a ghost town. Not literally, anyway.
Randy MacDonald says there are maybe seven families living there, but they're not easy to find, because what is left of Fraserdale has no roads, no signs, indeed no sign of life, not even from the polished iron rails of the Ontario Northland Railway, not even from the train station, where a light, but no life, shines through the mist of the early evening.

Randy MacDonald, in fact, is the only sign of life, and he's not even in Fraserdale, he's four kilometres away on the other side of the tracks in a trailer atop the dam at the Abitibi Canyon Generating Station of Ontario Power Generation.

"Ghost town?" Randy smiles indulgently.
"Once there was a colony here," he says. "There were more than 70 houses, a school, a church, a grocery store and a post office that doubled as a kind of a bank. We had satellite television and, well, a fair amount of alcohol."
The colony at Abitibi Canyon was made up of Ontario Hydro employees and support workers, for the most part, he said. On the other side of the figurative tracks was Fraserdale, which had about 20 houses or so, a train station because that's where Ontario Northland's Polar Bear Express and Little Bear passed through on their ways to and from Moosonee.

Fraserdale and Abitibi Canyon were as different as Toronto's Rosedale and New York's ghettos. Today, though, Abitibi Canyon's more of a ghost town than is Fraserdale, because there are still some people in Fraserdale, but there's nobody in Abitibi Canyon except the 35 or so workers who drive in from Timmins or Kapuskasing or Smooth Rock Falls for a week's work before going home again.

It wasn't too hard to prepare for the mysteries of Abitibi Canyon and Fraserdale. Leaving Smooth Rock Falls and driving north in a sedan with a Cleveland V-8 engine approximately the size of a Queen Mary turbine throbbing under the hood, with the nearest gas station and it's $1.40-a-litre-fuel dropping farther and farther behind, with no spare tire and only a sleeping dog for company, with the skies blackening and lightning flashing, thoughts of discontent are bound to creep into the fragile mind of someone who fears spiders and heights as much as he fears ghost stories and thunderstorms. About halfway up the 74-kilometre road, a partridge stands curiously in the glare of the headlights, unmoving. Some say partridges are stupid. They have been on Earth for many millennia before man, and they will be on Earth many millennia after man. Partridges do not drive on lonely roads with no spare tire, low on gas, with no cellular telephone service if anything should go wrong, just to get a story.

There is not too much convincing needed for the boy and his dog to get out of Fraserdale. Darkness is coming. Abandoned cars suddenly seem to be moving. There is a satellite dish on a boarded up house, and why is there a light on at the train station when it's obvious nobody's set a foot around the place for, well, a ghost's age? Dear God, please let the car start . . ."

Over the bumpy gravel road for maybe half a kilometre to the stop sign, and down four kilometres of paved highway to the dam, and the lights, and seven trucks and not a sign of life except a man in an orange vest seen through the window of a trailer atop the dam itself. On one side of the dam is the backed up Abitibi River. Randy MacDonald says it's more than 220 feet deep and he won't fish there because there's mercury in the water, much of it naturally occurring in the rocks around the site. On the other side of the dam is a drop that would terrify an experienced skydiver.

Randy is genial, pleasant, as are many isolated workers who seldom get company save the company of the work crew on site. He's glad for a new face, glad to chat about the history of the huge power project, glad to remind a visitor that he's sitting in a chair in a trailer atop a dam that was built in the 1930s, and where maybe four bodies are interred in the concrete of the massive structure, where five huge turbines spinning at 120-rpm provide electric power to Ontario's teeming masses, and where maybe 200 people who worked on the construction of the dam are still officially reported missing.

"Ghost towns?" he laughs. "You've come to the right place."
Randy was instrumental in restoring a monument atop the dam, a monument to the men who gave their lives in the construction of a power generating station that has lit the lamps of Ontario for 70 years since. The monument is dedicated, interestingly, to "The Sons of Martha," although he has no idea why. There are no names on the monument, because nobody knows for sure who died, just that four, or maybe more, actually did, and they lie at rest in the concrete mass of the dam, lulled forever in their sleep by the whirring drone of the turbines.

The ghost stories of the colony are legion, he says. But the one that carries the most weight is the tale of the Screaming Lady. Atop a hill, on the west side of the Abitibi, overlooking the colony, was a house, an empty house, boarded up, where night after night the sounds of a screaming lady could be heard. Townsfolk were alternately terrified and intrigued, until one group decided to camp out near the house for an entire night to determine once and for all whether the screaming lady was real.

They stayed, they partied a bit, and heard nary a sound, so they simply went home.

They went back in the morning. The abandoned house, boarded up, alone on the hill, had burned to the ground. It appears no cause was ever determined, although admittedly not too many people dared go close enough to check too closely.

Another house, says MacDonald, who lived on site from 1979 to 1982, had pieces of furniture that mysteriously moved from place to place on their own, thereby terrifying anyone who lived in the house, causing them to move.

Darkness has enveloped the dam site like a glove, like a blanket of warmth and comfort for Randy, like a blanket of fear for the visitor. Randy says, in response to a worried query about wildlife on the road that ends 54 kilometres north, closer to Moosonee than to Highway 11, "you don't have to worry about hitting a moose if you're careful.

What you have to worry about is seeing something on the road - that you can drive right through."
And a smile, and a wave, and an "I've got to leave you now," and he's gone. All the way back to civilization, there are monsters under the car seat.