A haunted long-distance move? Stranger things have happened.

Long distance moving has a way of turning ordinary workdays into stories that stay with you forever. For Ron Fill, who has been working with Two Small Men with Big Hearts for just over two years, one winter move out of Kamloops stands out above everything else he’s experienced so far.

Ron originally moved to Canada from South England in 2014 and says the transition was “absolutely brilliant.” When he joined the company, moving was completely new to him. “This was my first gig in the moving industry,” he says. Since then, he’s handled everything from local moves to long-haul relocations, but nothing quite prepared him for the job that took him deep into rural British Columbia in the dead of winter.

“It was a long haul,” Ron explains. “Somewhere south, near the Kootenays. I’d have to look on a map.” The address itself didn’t raise any red flags at first. “It was something-something Service Road, and we were like, ‘That should be fine.’”

To make a long story short; it wasn’t.

As the two moving trucks climbed farther into the mountains near Rock Creek, the road conditions deteriorated quickly. “We eventually lost cell service while we were driving up,” Ron recalls, “and the road just started getting worse.” The climb became steep enough that turning around was no longer an option. “It came to a point where backing up was not a good idea.”

Ron and the other driver, Mark, hadn’t seen a house in ages. “We were certain we were on the wrong path,” he says. “But we just had to keep pushing because there were no other options.” The road narrowed, deepened with ruts, and continued uphill until they finally spotted a single address marker. “There was only one house number. And we were like, ‘Oh no way. That’s the one.’”

Things would only get stranger.

“Once we pulled in, the road actually got worse,” Ron laughs. “It just turned to absolute crap.” It was so bad that they filmed videos of it. And this was all with two fully loaded moving trucks. “Yeah — two of them,” he says. “It was crazy.”

The house itself didn’t offer much reassurance. “We were a little bit hesitant to go inside because we thought the thing was going to collapse on us,” Ron explains. By the time they arrived, it was already late in the day. “It was like five o’clock. It had been a rough, rough day.”

Inside, the conditions were unlike anything Ron had seen before. “Everything was heavy. Everything,” he says. Old solid-wood furniture filled every room. “Imagine real wood desks everywhere. Beds, cabinets — everything that hypothetically could’ve been light just wasn’t.” Thick layers of dust coated the home. “You’d move something and it would just explode,” he says. “Every single footstep, every item — it was all over you.”

Ron likens the whole experience to popular science fiction:

“It felt like being in the Upside Down in Stranger Things,” he says. 

Power was unreliable, adding another layer of difficulty. “There was this little eight-year-old daughter who was constantly fuelling the generator,” Ron remembers. “She’d be like, ‘Oh no, power’s going out,’ and then all the lights would turn off. They were lighting candles everywhere so we could keep on doing the move.”

Despite the conditions, Ron speaks warmly about the family. “They were ever so nice — lovely, lovely people.” The household included five children, most of them very young. “All the daughters were homeschooled,” he says. “They’d never really had much human interaction apart from the milkman and the propane man.”

The house itself felt frozen in time. Missing boards had to be stepped over carefully. There was an awkward upstairs loft reached by a narrow staircase. “Probably like twenty feet up,” Ron says. “Sketchy. Very sketchy.” Even experienced movers hesitated. “I’m pretty sure Logan was like, ‘I do not want to go up those stairs.’”

To make matters worse, the crew had a brand-new mover on his very first day. “He was traumatized,” Ron says flatly. “I don’t think he ever came back to work after that.”

As the day dragged on, stress levels climbed. “Our geo tabs were yelling at us,” Ron explains. “We had such limited time left and we were so far in the middle of nowhere.” There was no realistic way to reach the nearest town and return before running out of hours. “So we just pushed the clock.”

They finished loading with almost no time to spare. “We got there with zero minutes left. Literally zero.” And staying overnight was not an option. “There were many reasons we were not staying the night there,” Ron admits.

Emotionally, the entire crew was drained. “Every single person was miserable,” he says. “There wasn’t a smile in sight.” At one point, one mover told him he needed to sit in the truck. “I was like, ‘Dude, just grab whatever you want from my lunchbox. Just keep pushing.’”

Ron is blunt about how it felt. “We genuinely thought we were going to be murdered. That was it.”

The drive back down the mountain was tense but manageable. “You just chucked it into low gear,” Ron says. He was driving one of the older six-speed trucks. “We always said it was my truck because I was one of the only ones who could drive stick.” The descent, thankfully, went smoothly. “It actually rolled down the hill really nice.”

When they finally arrived at the destination, the contrast couldn’t have been greater. “They moved into this sweet little yellow heritage house,” Ron remembers. “Right in the centre of town. It was really, really cute.” The customers were understanding about the late arrival. “They were completely cool about it.”

In the end, the move finished on a positive note. “They were ever so polite and friendly,” Ron says. “They left a really good tip, too.” Despite everything, he describes it as “a really interesting job we ended up leaving.”

Then came one final twist.

“A week later, the customer called one of us,” Ron recalls. “Apparently the house they moved out of burned down under mysterious circumstances.” 

He admits the whole experience was incredibly bizarre and more than a little bit spooky. “The mysterious death of the husband, everyone being oddly calm about it, and then the house burns down — it was an odd correlation of events.”

Looking back now, Ron says the biggest takeaway wasn’t the road conditions, the dust, or even the stress.

“It was just that we had to keep going,” he says. “We thought we were lost. We were fishtailing up a service road in winter. Everyone was miserable — but we just kept pushing.”

For Ron, that’s what long distance moving often comes down to: showing up, adapting, and finishing the job no matter how unpredictable the road becomes. And for Two Small Men with Big Hearts, it’s exactly that commitment — even when the power goes out, the road disappears, and the move feels like something out of a movie — that keeps customers moving forward safely, one long haul at a time.

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