A little before 10:00 am on October 3, 1975, David Samson, an inspector with the Canadian Grain Commission, was walking down the tracks to the Burrard Terminals when he saw a few of the workers he knew moving quickly away from the grain elevators.
The full story is in Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History.
“The side of the workhouse terminal had been blown off and I could see the stairs going all the way up to the top of the grain elevator,” he says. “There wasn’t any real blaze at that time, but that came in the next half hour.” A conveyor belt had caught fire and ignited the explosive grain dust in the elevator. Grain dust, it turns out, is about 35 times more explosive than TNT.
Ed Hooper was standing at the top of the elevator when the fire broke out and he grabbed a fire extinguisher and tried to put it out. Samson thinks he must have been killed by the second explosion, because nothing of him was ever found.
The two explosions rocked North Vancouver
David Ferman, was on a Grade 4 field trip to the Olde Spaghetti Factory in Gastown. He told me: “I remember seeing a bright yellow light through the north window,” he says. “I thought something had blown up in Burrard Inlet or that a lightning bolt had hit a ship. Then came the sound—a muffled boom, and the yellow light became an orange fireball that blew outward towards us before quickly receding under grey clouds.”
Other men came staggering out of the elevator covered in dirt and burns. Sixteen men suffered severe burns and four later died in hospital. They were Hoey 58, John Scully 56, James Evoy, 42, and 28-year-old Dave Brown.
“The workhouse was made of wood, so eventually the whole thing caught fire,” says Samson. “Mel Hoey was standing on the grate when the explosion took place. He had these big heavy work boots on and all the other clothes that he was wearing were burned right off.”
Burn wing:
Dave Brown was taken to the burn unit at Vancouver General Hospital, where against all odds, he managed to survive for 58 days, before dying of his injuries. Then, for some reason, the young man decided to stick around in his room—#415.
In 1989, Robert Belyk researched the story as part of his book Ghosts: True Tales of Eerie Encounters. Although 11 years had passed, Belyk was able to find two nurses and a patient who had experienced strange encounters with Brown’s ghost.
Staff told Belyk that they heard breathing when no one was in the room, they would feel a presence, see an unexplained shape in the room, the toilet would flush, lights would go on and off, and the room was often freezing cold. Staff said that while it was unsettling, they never felt any danger. They also said that the ghost was kind to other burn patients. He would visit critically ill patients and bring them comfort. The ghost stayed around the burn unit until staff moved to new facilities in 1983 and the building was torn down two years later.
For more ghostly stories check out these podcast episodes:
S1 E9 Three Ghost Stories and a Murder
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