The house known locally as the Superman House in High River is now known as Mystic Manor.
Mystic Manor is an authentic haunted house, and according to the owner and creator of Mystic Manor, Faye Steinberg, everything in the building that is paranormal is real.
"We have no jump scares, we have no actors," Steinberg explains. "We have no manufactured haunts. Everything is a hundred percent authentic."
The house was originally built in 1905, and according to Steinberg, not only is the building haunted, but so are hundreds of objects inside.
"I always say that we have four levels at Mystic Manor. Not four floors, but four levels."
The first level, Steinberg says, is the house's personality.
"If you notice it right now, if you come back later in the evening, people even notice it from the beginning of their tour to the end of their tour that the house has shifted. And then the second level is that we probably have about two or three, maybe 400 spirits in the house at any given time."
According to Steinberg, Mystic Manor was High River's first hospital for five years, and as she says, with hospitals comes death.
Not only that, but the basement was used as a temporary morgue.
"Again, you're storing bodies. We're a block and a half from the Highwood Cemetery. Ghosts are often attracted to other energies and light. So, when there's more spirits, it's sort of like the more the merrier."
There were also several owners of the building and their families who have passed away in the house, as well as a lot of farming accidents that were associated with the building.
"People have passed away in the house."
The third level of the house, Steinberg says, is the artifacts and relics in the home.
Some of the items in the home are a few hundred years old, and the only items she puts in there are haunted themselves.
"The only thing that I will put in Mystic Manor, people will come to me and say, 'Oh. I've got this heirloom. I'd really love to just give it to you.' So, if I do a tour, I can see it and I'll look at it. And if it's not haunted, I say, 'Thank you very much. You know, maybe we'll put it in the cafe, but it's not going into the rooms, it's not haunted.'"
And the fourth level of Mystic Manor is the people who are visiting.
"There is an opportunity during the tour where we may connect with them during a seance. So, you're actively ghost hunting. You're with a real psychic medium, which is myself, and no two tours are ever the same."
Currently, they do mini seances, but Steinberg says they plan on doing more events where they will just do the seance, because she has heard from people that they want to experience a full one from start to finish.
At Mystic Manor, they also have a basement experience.
"As a psychic medium, I'm very affected by the house, and some of my resident haunts, we know each other. They'll protect me. That's certainly a thing that is great, but the basement is a whole other story."
Last July, a ghost show visited Mystic Manor to shoot an episode, and they had experiences in the basement, including technological issues, such as their equipment shutting down all at once.
Steinberg says the show is in their tenth season, and they were surprised that all their battery packs drained.
"And I kind of laughed at them and said, 'Well, you guys are a ghost show. Like, are you used to this?' And they're like, 'No. Not in the middle of the afternoon and for everything to go down at once.'"
While they were filming in the basement, Steinberg says they wanted her to go down into the basement late at night.
Because they didn't want any light on, and it was around one or two in the morning, it was dark in the basement, but Steinberg says she could see 30 people standing in the basement in different eras of clothing.
"Some of them just didn't even see me, walked right past me. Some really were very confused. And then we had the angry, negative spirit that is still residing down there today, which is why when we first opened the tours in October, I would finish the main part of the tour. And at the very end of the tour, we would just let people pop downstairs quickly to look at the basement."
She added that just those few minutes in the basement were enough for her to go home and tell her husband that she was going to close Mystic Manor, because she felt like she could never go back.
"I was so affected."
But, after a visit to the Winchester house in California, they realized they could create a self-guided portion of the tour that allows people to go check out the basement by themselves.
With a place like Mystic Manor come skeptics, but Steinberg says that people tend to come around after the tour.
"I had a grown man run from the house. He was a skeptic. Had people faint. We've had to put chairs in almost every single room," Steinberg says.
On top of being used as a hospital and morgue, this building was part of a dairy farm, and entrepreneurs used the house to sell their wares.
But, more recently, a single family had lived in the house from 1958 to 2005.
This building was also used in the Superman III movie from 1983, starring Christopher Reeve, as Lana Lang's home in Smallville, which is what many locals know it for.
According to Steinberg, they get the odd Superman fan who comes by to check it out.
In 2005, Steinberg's family purchased the home and eventually turned it into Mystic Manor.
"I've been speaking and hearing the head since I was three years old. I have a private practice for the last 30 years where people come for psychic readings, and I work with law enforcement," Steinberg says. "It was my dream. It was always on the back burner, even when I was a young teenager, to have a haunted house. I always thought, 'How cool would it be just to own a haunted house where people could come?"
She says she had the name Mystic Manor spoken to her before she even knew where Mystic Manor was going to be, so she kept putting it out to the universe, asking the universe to let her know when she finds the right place to be called Mystic Manor.
"I wanted there to be at least one resident ghost or at least have something about the area or the building that I would inhabit to have some sort of energy to it. So, in terms of the creation of Mystic Manor, it had been brewing for a very long time. Then, in 2022, my siblings and I, we stepped into the family business, and we were renting the home at the time."
At that time, one of their staff had told them about a family living in the house, and there was no heat in some of the rooms, along with some other issues, and they weren't sure if they should keep renting out the home.
Because of that, Steinberg went to check out the home, and after seeing that the windows had been smashed, the house needed a new boiler and roof, and the backside of the house needed to be lifted.
"I looked at the tenant and I said, 'I'm sorry, but this is not suitable for you to live here.'"
So, they made arrangements for them to move out.
But, while she was there, she heard a voice say that this is where Mystic Manor should be.
"And when I hear voices in my head, I usually obey. I listen carefully."
One of the resident ghosts, Emma Jane Robertson, who was the original owner and builder of the home in 1905, has been one of Steinberg's vocal spirits, telling her she needs to open Mystic Manor.
Steinberg says that everyone is intuitive, but just to different degrees.
"Then, depending on what family system we're born into, where somebody, you know, parents are like, oh, you're seeing imaginary friends," Steinberg says. "In my case, it was always, you have a very overactive imagination."
At Mystic Manor, Steinberg says that even people who come in as skeptics experience paranormal activity and often will ask her if it's her or a ghost that's creating the thing they are experiencing, such as an antiseptic smell in one of the rooms.
For example, Steinberg told a story about how partway through a tour, a man asked her if she was pumping an antiseptic smell into one of the rooms.
Not only was Steinberg not pumping any smell into the room, but the other people on the tour couldn't smell what he was smelling.
Steinberg says that other people have reported that they have felt touched by the ghosts in the house.
At times, when she experiences something paranormal, she even questions if what she is smelling is real.
"That's a way that we experienced the paranormal. You might not see the spirit that's creating it, or you might not be seeing into that dimension, but you're certainly tapping into that dimension."
The rooms at Mystic Manor are set up, Steinberg says, as the house tells her they need to be set up.
"The house says this is so-and-so's room. This is so-and-so's room. I just comply with the requests."
During the interview with Steinberg, there were several times she said she could feel the presence of someone else in the building with us.
One instance, an early one, she says, we were visited by Emma James.
"I'm starting to... I could run upstairs and get one of my REM pods. We probably would go off right now, 'cause I'm sensing all sorts of stuff. What happens is the spirits are like, 'Oh, what's going on? Can we come in here? What are you doing?' I can feel some of them coming forward a little bit."
Steinberg says that even though she does the same tour every time, she has not had the same experiences each time.
Not only that, but they have also captured a lot of things on their cameras, and their alarm goes off often, saying that a person was detected in the house, but when they would look at the live feed from the cameras, there would be nothing happening in the house.
But, when she would rewatch the part of the tape when the alarm went off, Steinberg says you could hear voices and banging noises, as if there was a radio on.
When asked if there was anyone in the room with us after she mentioned the alarms, she said yes.
"There's a couple that came up from the basement. There's a couple that have come here. I know a couple of them. Two of them, I don't know who they are."
She said she also sensed one that she doesn't like, as the ghost tends to just stand there with her hair flipped over her face.
The interview then continued in a different room, and within minutes of us being in that room, Steinberg said we were being visited by a ghost she calls Freddie, who she said sat down right beside us.
According to Steinberg, Freddie is a young man who had his arm ripped off during a farming accident and died in the room we were sitting in, roughly 90 years prior.
"He's one of our friendly spirits. He's very friendly, very happy."
They currently do tours on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, but starting in October, they plan on adding more tours.
To learn more about Mystic Manor and to book a tour, head over to their website.