A Night at the St. George: Barkerville's Hotel and Its Haunted Reputation

Seven rooms and an additional reputation

The St. George is small enough that its haunted reputation feels personal. The current operator describes seven individually arranged bedrooms, period furnishings, a balcony and continental breakfast. It sits within Barkerville, where staying overnight means choosing a room in the historic town itself.

A ghost story adds another expectation to the stay: the possibility that an ordinary night might contain something worth retelling. There is a particular intimacy to choosing a bed in a place whose reputation has travelled ahead of you.

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How the haunted hotel was advertised

By 2010, the reputation was being used openly in Barkerville’s Halloween promotion. A Prince George Citizen report quoted the site’s special-events coordinator inviting visitors to stay at the St. George and provided a booking contact for a room described as haunted. That establishes a public reputation at a particular date; it does not establish who, if anyone, appeared in the room.

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The visitor at the bedside

Travel writer Margaret Deefholts recorded a more specific tale: a young fair-haired woman in white, said to appear beside the beds of men staying alone. Deefholts presented it among the yarns told about Barkerville. It is a reported hotel legend, with no verified identity attached to the figure.

The bedside is what makes the story intimate. A hotel room is briefly private, but it belongs to a succession of strangers. The legend gives that familiar arrangement an unsettling turn: perhaps a previous presence has not quite left.

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Fanny Bendixen’s actual career

Fanny Bendixen’s documented life needs little embellishment. Born in France around 1820, she reached Barkerville in 1865 after earlier ventures elsewhere. She opened the Parlour in 1866 and the Bella Union the following year. The 1868 fire destroyed the latter, with losses estimated at $5,000.

Sylvia Van Kirk’s biography identifies Bendixen as proprietor of Barkerville’s St George Saloon in 1871. It also records a different St George Hotel that Fanny and her husband had opened on View Street in Victoria in 1862. The shared name can easily blur two cities and two businesses; keeping them separate makes her movements clearer.

Bendixen followed opportunities to Lightning Creek, operated in other Cariboo communities and eventually returned to Barkerville. She remained active in business into the 1890s. There is a whole life of repeated starts, losses and persistence behind the name.

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A name worth remembering in daylight

In 2019, British Columbia included the St. George Hotel among historic places recognized for their significance to the province’s Francophone heritage. Its association with Bendixen was described in terms of business success, resourcefulness and courage.

That recognition offers another way to enter the building’s story. Look for the businesswoman behind the theatrical reputation: someone making decisions, recovering from loss and trying again. A haunted hotel may be the reason you first hear her name. It need not be the only thing you learn.

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Book the hotel that exists now

Check the St. George’s own booking system for the dates and room you want. Its summer-season information should not be read as a promise of year-round availability. Barkerville also offers other accommodation, so a general winter-booking announcement for the historic site does not automatically apply to this hotel.

Choose the room for the stay it offers. If the quiet feels wonderfully strange, you can tell that story in the morning without claiming to have solved the one that brought you here.

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