In 1991, when Donna decided to expand her Edmonton business, she chose a location in the resort town of Banff. Because operating this store would mean long and tiring periods away from home, Donna rented a large two-storey apartment. To give me an idea of the size of the suite, Donna explained, "It was the top of a whole building-the place slept twelve."

Donna’s background is in health care and so it’s not surprising that the first of settling into her home-away-from-home involved cleaning the apartment thoroughly. With that chore accomplished, she began to stay in the Banff apartment one day a week. Because the place was so big, and her stays there so limited, Donna rented one of the downstairs bedrooms to a business associate. Donna retained a large upstairs bedroom. The first few months passed uneventfully. Then, without warning, the first in a long list of strange and frightening events occurred.

"I began to hear noises coming from the roof," she explained. "It sounded like a team of guys stomping and dragging chains across the gravel roof."

Although the noise disturbed her, Donna ignored it as best she could until one afternoon when her husband, John, accompanied her on the trip from Edmonton to Banff. They arrived tired from their long drive and lay down to have a nap. Before Donna could drift off to sleep, the noises on the roof began once again. Wanting to explain that this cacophony was a regular disruption during her stays in Banff, Donna turned to John. More than a little surprised, Donna stared at her husband lying beside her-he was fast asleep, apparently oblivious to the racket going on overhead. As the next few months were to disclose, this was the first in a series of incidents that only Donna seemed to be attuned to.

Even with one full-time tenant and Donna’s weekly visits, the apartment in Banff was still very much under-utilized and so when her store manager needed a place to live, Donna arranged for the woman to take one of the empty bedrooms. This bedroom was, like Donna’s, also on the second floor, and so right below the roof, but the manager never complained of the noises that had disturbed Donna. Donna seemed to be the only one hearing the racket, and even her experiences with the noises were limited. "I only heard the chains on the roof if I tried to sleep," she acknowledged, before adding, "Then came the smell."

Foul, intense odours that pervade an area for varying durations are frequently associated with a haunted place. Knowing that the place was scrupulously clean, Donna was puzzled and annoyed, with this malodorous addition to her apartment. Worse, as with the noises from the roof, Donna seemed to be the only one aware of the smell.

"I used potpourri to combat it, but that didn’t solve the problem," she recalled. She remembered that the foul smell was so strong and had such a sudden onset that it seemed to her that "instantly you were in the middle of it."

Finally, her colleague, the store manager, also became aware of the foul odour, which Donna described as a stench like a combination of rotten meat and feces. The smell seemed to be concentrated in another big bedroom and the two women wondered if possibly the vents in the room were bringing in the hideous odour from another part of the building. They checked out this possibility and were disturbed to find that their theory was incorrect.

So far whoever or whatever Donna was unwittingly sharing her apartment with had tried sound and smell to get her attention. The next sense the spirit appealed to was sight. Donna set up the scenario for me by describing the design of the kitchen. Exterior light to that room was provided by a skylight in the ceiling and the kitchen doors were accented with gold-coloured glass.

"I arrived [at the apartment] one night about 8," she recalled. "It was a very black night. [As seen from outside,] the windows were all aglow with gold, as if my bedroom lights were on and shining through the gold glass."

This phenomenon surprised and concerned Donna, because she’d expected the apartment to be empty when she arrived. Understandably nervous, the woman entered the building making as much noise as possible. She half expected to scare off an intruder but the place was as empty as she’d expected it to be. Empty of people that is, but filled with the foul odour. By the time she reached the kitchen, the golden glowing light she seen from outside had disappeared.

On another occasion, Donna and John had invited a group of their friends for a ski weekend. Donna was the first one awake in the morning. She tidied the place up a bit and plugged in the coffee urns for their inevitable use. As she walked through the apartment, she was mortified to realize that the now-familiar stench saturated the air yet again. She knew the place was clean. She also knew that her friends would be astonished by such an odour in one of her homes. After all, these people knew Donna and John well. They knew Donna’s obsession with cleanliness – some had even dubbed her Mrs. Clean. But here she was, offering hospitality to friends when there was obviously filth somewhere in the place. Nothing but filth could account for a stench this rancid. The smell was throughout the whole place but seemed to be concentrated under the staircase, right where the fax machine sat.