When it comes to Canadian quotes, Wayne Gretzky’s line, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take,” best captures podcaster Nadine Bailey’s mindset when she applied for the 2025 Canadian Podcast Awards.
The Haunted Canada host and Edmonton resident ended up winning an award in December for Outstanding True Crime Series, and the result hit like a bottle rocket.
“I threw my name in there, and I was even surprised I made the nomination,” she said during a mid-March phone call. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool.’”
She pointed to Craig Baird’s Canadian History Ehx and Ashley Lanna’s Lullaby: The Fear as two previous podcast winners she admired.
“I honestly didn’t even know. I was probably green, but I really didn’t know there was a podcast awards,” she admitted, adding she later discovered it is a strictly Canadian awards organization.
The episode she submitted was “Calgary Zoo Bridge,” which details the July 5, 1946 murder of Donnie Goss. His killer, Donald Staley, was a Canadian army veteran who also killed another boy in Vancouver. Staley was hanged in December of the same year.
Even though the case of the six-year-old falls into the sphere of true crime, the bridge is now associated with phantom calls for help from a young boy, right in Bailey’s wheelhouse.
“A little boy was sadly murdered,” she said. “They did eventually find the killer … he was caught and executed.”
The transplanted Newfoundlander started the podcast three years ago as an extension of her Edmonton Ghost Tours, which include Old Strathcona, the University of Alberta, the High Level Bridge and Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
It’s a small world. Her best friend from her Memorial University days, Kelly Jones, is the partner of Dale Jarvis, founder of St. John’s Haunted Hike.
“He got the idea when he was in England and saw one there and thought, ‘I could do this in St. John’s,’” Bailey said. “When we moved to Edmonton, I was working corporate, and I hated it. There’s nothing wrong with it, to each their own, but I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart.”
Playing off Jarvis’ idea, she launched Edmonton Ghost Tours.
Haunted Canada also allowed her to keep sharing ghost stories from across the country and abroad. It brought her more attention and eventually led to a connection with Baird and a pitch to Curiouscast.
“They’ve taken the show and helped me bring it to a whole other level,” she said. “I’m loving it.”