Haunted by the spirit of Winnipeg’s ‘Hobo Queen’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/09/2015 (3714 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In campfire stories, ghosts always linger in solitary spaces, their voices hissing unsettling whispers in attics or dampsmelling basements. This sort of ghost is fiction. But if we understand them as an essence or the ripples of a person, then there is another kind. These ones float through old newspaper pages instead of old buildings. They are apparitions waiting to be found and remembered.

Those archives are where, in black ink on tea-coloured paper, you find the only traces of the woman they called Winnipeg’s hobo queen.

Her name was Hilda McKenzie Howell and she haunts me. She lived on the infamous fringe of Point Douglas, splashing her spirit all over the city’s former municipal courts.

She drank a lot and stole some, and when she got caught (which was often) she doused herself in perfume and sparred with quick-witted words.

There was the time in 1946, for instance, when morality police picked her up on Donald Street, after spotting booze hidden under her dress.

Howell was incensed that officers held onto the bottle through the fabric as they marched her to the station.

Especially because, as she told a judge, it was just a misunderstanding.

“Miss Howells (sic) told the court she had merely been carrying a bottle of rubbing alcohol for a sick friend,” theFree Press reported. The judge didn’t buy that and fined her $200, which she couldn’t pay. Instead, she spent three months at her most frequent home base, the Portage Women’s Jail.

Newspapers of the era are splattered with her antics and crowds of spectators filled the court to watch her perform. In 1944, she swiped a purse from a friend, but insisted she should go free. The two were arguing “regarding the war situation,” she explained, so “to give her something to worry about, I took the purse.”

She never bothered with a lawyer. Instead, she turned up to court in gaudy outfits and advocated for herself, even cross-examining witnesses with tenacious aplomb. She could be so savvy at the bench that police floated a rumour her father was a prominent Scottish judge. She fought dozens of cases; sometimes she won.

More often she wound up in jail, where she was loved. Staff noted her responsible work ethic and the way she cheered up other inmates, to whom she was a mother of sorts. These colours left a lasting impression. When she died in 1957, at about age 50, the Free Press honoured her on the front page. Hobo Queen Dead the headline read and added a wry tease: “Hilda loses her last case.”

In that obituary, Howell comes alive.

She’d been on the fringe for about 25 years, a long time, bouncing among boarding rooms, jail and the banks of the Red River.

She had a “heart of gold,” police said, generous to a fault and quick to turn in criminals.

Her only trouble was liquor. One officer added, “We’ll miss her.”

This is punctuated by the only known photo of her; a mug shot most likely, dark and indistinct. Newspaper presses of the era could not capture the red in her wild swoop of hair, but the fire in her eyes was not similarly erased. She faces the camera, mouth turned in a subtle smile, gazing proudly out from the page.

Something else is revealed in that obituary, a note about a past that very few in Winnipeg knew much about. “It is believed that Hilda is survived by a husband, a daughter and a son,” Free Press reporter Elman Guttormson reported. “She has been separated from her family for about 25 years.”

Fifty years after her death, this is how the ghost of Hilda Howell found me and never stopped haunting me. She fluttered up digitally, on an old online classified ad. “Lost Grandmother,” the subject line read, and I thought that was a strange way to word it: not “missing,” but “lost.” How does one lose a grandmother?

Over the ensuing months, I emailed frequently with Howell’s granddaughter. She is American, searching for any crumbs of information about her vanished ancestor.

She hoped to learn how Hilda died (“a brief illness,” is all the paper said), or where she was buried. Or perhaps someone remembered her; anything, anything.

For years, I searched and found only air.

After newspaper archives are exhausted, the trail of Hilda Howell quickly grows cold. She died at what is now Health Sciences Centre and probate records note she had a fistful of cash in her belongings. Her body went unclaimed — where it is now, no public records reveal.

I called retired reporters and police officers, but answers came back the same: any memories had died with their owners. I called five years, or 10 years, too late.

One question above all I hungered to answer: why did Hilda Howell walk away?

For decades, the area near the Alexander Docks was home to what reporters called “the hobo jungle,” an ever-shifting encampment of transient boxcar-jumpers and eccentric locals. Up to 300 of them dwelled there at once, and though police would occasionally raid the gambling rings, they mostly left them alone.

The Winnipeg Tribune was particularly hot on the “hobo” beat, and regularly checked the pulse of the community. In 1940, Tribune journalist V.V. Murray lamented that as times changed, “so has the hobo jungle.” The “ashes of long-dead hobo fires” remained on the banks of the Red, he said, but few men hunkered down with them.

Murray suspected the Second World War had put the “riders of the rods” to work. In closing, he wondered if one day, the encampment would vanish.

It did perk up briefly after the war — around the time Howell starts cropping up in the public record — though it was smaller and more fractured. There were few women there, but Hilda must have been one of them.

She threw parties on the docks, one of which got her kicked out of Winnipeg for six months. While she was surviving like this, loose and fragile on the fringes, her husband and children waited. She never came back.

That is what haunts me, even more than the echoes of her pugnacious spirit. It’s that she was a mother-figure for her friends, but would not mother her own children. It is that she was brilliant and well-educated; even gripped by alcoholism, she had an uncommon range of options. The one she chose was to burn out on the fringes.

One day, maybe I will find her grave.

Maybe I’ll leave flowers, and clear the dirt away. If she doesn’t have a headstone, maybe I’ll make her a small marker.

Just a reminder, some words to say: here lies Hilda Howell, queen of the hobos, forgotten Winnipeg legend. For better or worse, she walked away.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca