Q&A with Kenton de Jong, Regina Cemetery Tours

As Halloween wraps up and the last of autumn’s leaves fall, Kenton de Jong’s famed Regina Cemetery Tours come to a close—at least for now. Known for blending history, local lore, and a touch of the supernatural, Kenton has spent the season guiding curious souls through Regina's historic cemetery, bringing stories of the past to life in captivating detail. Read on as Kenton shares his passion for storytelling, the challenges of hosting tours, and the unique history woven into every corner of Regina’s cemetery. Though the tours are done for the year, fear not! They'll return with the warmer days of May or June, weather permitting. Until then, join us as Kenton reveals what makes these cemetery tours a can't-miss experience for anyone curious about the past and the art of storytelling.

You’re very active in the Regina community. What motivated you to get involved in community engagement?

It started a few years ago. I had a travel blog and I wrote about going all over the world, like Paris or Rome, and nobody read it. There are better and more influential writers out there, so I decided it would be a good opportunity to write about the city and once I started that, people seemed more interested. It evolved from there.

What are some of the most rewarding aspects of working within the local community, especially when sharing Regina’s history?

Seeing the change. You see many great organizations come out of the woodwork; grassroots organizations making a difference in the city. You can see changes in policies in the city, the change in neighbourhoods like Downtown and North Central. It’s great to see as you work with people, that something is coming out of it and you can see the difference. There’s a lot of things that still need to be done, and lots of places are missing things, it's nice to see change happen after not seeing it happen for a long time.

Cemetery Tours:

How do you approach storytelling during these tours to keep people engaged while respecting the history of those buried there?

It can be tricky sometimes, like let's say it was a story where someone was killed. Everyone likes true crime stories, but you don’t want to make them funny. It’s not, it's tragic, and you want to make it interesting. You have to have a certain performance with it, and you don’t want to make the whole tour dark. You have to throw in a light story here, a funny story, and so on. You have to make sure people know that it’s not always going to be a bad story. This past year we’ve been doing different themed tours, so in June we did Cyclone Victims, July was my classic one, August was Famous Women of Regina, September was Murder Mayhem and in October we’re doing ones about the Murphy family. It is huge seeing what people want because if I did the same ones every year, people would stop coming, and then I wouldn’t be able to explore other stories.

Can you share one of the most fascinating or unexpected stories you’ve uncovered during your cemetery research?

The first couple of years I did the tour, I had this path that walked between a police officer's grave and the Darke mausoleum. One day someone pointed out that “Mary Wilson is buried over there,” and I recognized the name but I didn’t remember who that was. She was the wife of Sergeant John Wilson, and the secret life of John Wilson is taught in schools. It’s about an RCMP officer who came over here as a civilian, joined the RCMP, and then fell in love with another woman, then his first wife came to Canada too, and then he decided he needed to kill her. It’s a cool story, and I didn’t realize Mary was buried here, and she was right on my path and I walked past her for years. That story has a book behind it, it's on the way [of the walking tour], and it was unexpected.

Can you discuss the video game?

I wanted to do the cemetery tours as an individual, but because of the bylaws in place, I couldn’t do the tours, it had to be an organization or nonprofit. I didn’t want the money going towards something else other than the cemetery, so because of that, I had all the stories and I wanted to share them. If I couldn’t take people to the cemetery, I wanted to bring it to them, so my first idea was to make it kinda like Pokemon Go where it would be a VR experience that you could walk around and when you get to certain headstones, stories would pop up and you could read about them. The city wasn’t a big fan of that because Pokemon Go had caused a lot of trouble in the city, so then I went on the videogame approach where I did old Pokemon style, top-down, where you could walk around the cemetery and you could read the stories that way. People seem to like it, and we are always adding stories and people to it too!

Storytelling and History:

As someone who enjoys sharing local history, what is it about Regina’s history that fascinates you the most?

When you go to other cities, there are often places to go to learn about the city's history. A lot of walking tours, a lot of museums or outdoor exhibits. Regina doesn’t have much of that. You can find hints of it here and there, there's a great display at the Centennial Mall, there's a good write-up in some parts of downtown, but if you came to Regina, you wouldn’t know where to go to learn about Regina. I find that we have a lot of history, but it's fragmented. The cemetery has it all in one place. Here you have the Darke’s, here you have the Government House’s ghost Howie, over here you have Regina Cyclone victims, over here you have a police officer that was killed. You have everyone all together. All the founding fathers together, all the police officers together, you can talk about the first firefighters, the first police officers, the first mayors, all in one place, and you can’t find that anywhere else in the city.

Are there any lesser-known stories or figures from Regina’s past that you think more people should know about?

There’s one grave we do on the tour where they are the parents of Ruby and Daisy Knezevitch. The daughters went to play for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and that was the same league that Bonnie Baker played for. Bonnie Baker has a big park in Regina for her, and all three of them were featured in the film “A League of their Own” with Tom Hanks, Madonna, and Bettie Davis. People don’t realize that it wasn’t only Bonnie Baker, there were a lot of girls from Regina who played in the League in the States.

Another one we cover is a wife who made big headlines in the 1950s for the murder of her husband. You don’t hear of that kind of thing, a lot of the stories you hear in the cemetery are unfortunately the husband killing the wife. That’s a huge problem in Saskatchewan, but with that story, the tables are turned around, and you may think, maybe she’s a nice lady? She’s not, she was an awful person. It’s a whole twist on it.

There are also teachers, and nurses in the cemetery. A lot of people have helped establish the city over the years. Sheldon-Williams is on the tour, we have the first female MLA on the tour. A lot of people don’t realize that those people were groundbreaking in the city.

How do you think storytelling plays a role in preserving and promoting local history?

It’s about engagement. You can have a giant textbook about Regina’s history, but no one is going to read it. You can have displays around the city, and people may read those, but if you go to a play or performance, you may get a little bit of history, but you get the story. Then you are inclined to learn more about the history. Let’s say you go to “The Trial of Louis Riel”, it’s a great performance, but it just touches a little bit of the whole story going on there. In other cities, like in the States they may have street performances of shootouts and whatnot; that’s great but it just touches that moment of history. Storytelling engages you, but it also inspires you to learn more.

Halloween and Spooky Traditions:

Your cemetery tours can tie into Halloween. What makes Halloween such a special time for telling stories about the past?

Everyone is thinking about ghosts and dark history during October. It’s a challenge because the cemetery closes early in October, it closes at 6 pm, and usually, my tours go on from 7-9 pm. Tours are usually 2 hours long, so I can’t do them without starting them at 4 pm, so it finishes before it closes. We can’t do the really dark tour in October, so come September that's when we do Murder Mayhem, even though people aren’t yet interested in it, except for the diehard fans. Come October, everyone wants to go on the Spooky tours, and there is no more Spooky tours. I could do the same thing that I did in September in October, but I don’t want everybody just thinking that the cemetery is full of horrible individuals who killed each other. We try to make October more about remembering people, like maybe some stories of ghosts but mostly just about people. There’s a lot of places in Regina that you can go to to experience Halloween, and the cemetery has its own unique vibe to it that you can’t get anywhere else in the city.

How do you see the connection between local history and the themes of Halloween, such as ghost stories or the supernatural?

It’s a great way to talk about history, like let's say you want to talk about Casino Regina. Great place, but it was a train station and if you go into the casino you can walk around and see parts of the old train station. You can see the last schedule on the wall, and some of the displays behind the machines, but if you walk down the staircase in the casino you can see a picture of how the casino used to look and there's a ghost in the photo. This place that is now a casino, used to be a hub of traffic, and that ghost photo was taken at least 50 years ago because Casino Regina opened 30 years ago. How long has that building been haunted for? You also have stories about Hotel Saskatchewan and Government House, ghosts are a great way to learn about living history.

In your opinion, why do people seem drawn to spooky or haunted stories, especially around Halloween?

I think some people are drawn to it all the time. Halloween is the time when you can embrace the paranormal and not be looked at as weird. It has a certain feel to it, our climate here means that come October it gets colder, but you still have that belief that it will be a nice autumn day when the leaves are falling and the pumpkins are glowing, and you can tell the scary stories. I think people are drawn to the season, it's the end of the summer, and things are dying and passing away and you are thinking about it more. It’s a transitional period both in the season and in the mind.

Personal Insight:

What’s one piece of local history you’ve learned that changed the way you see Regina?

It’s a small one, one of the people I came across in my research was the guy responsible for putting in wooden sidewalks downtown. We don’t have those anymore, but it really helped me realize that when they came here, there was nothing. There was not like there was an idea of where paths or roads would be, there would be a house here and a house over there, and as houses grow we have to build sidewalks, and were going to have wooden ones because the roads are mud, and eventually were going to pave the roads. It’s the idea that the city was built brick on brick on top of each other is really cool. When I realized we had a wooden sidewalk it made sense, because you realize how different [Regina] was.

If someone wants to start exploring the local history of their community, where would you recommend they begin?

Museums, libraries, and archives are all great places to do it. Archives are a little more advanced because you need to know what you are looking for. Probably your best bet would be walking tours, either organization-guided or self-guided ones. And just ask people, there are Facebook groups where people just want to talk about Regina history, and debate and discuss old buildings. Historical groups are also where to go, like Heritage Regina, Saskatchewan Folklore Society, and the REM. It’s decentralized but there are a lot of different resources out there.