I think the camels up here in BC were from a seperate experiment in transportation, not wanderers from the southwestern US attempts.
Yes, we did have (a few, not many) camels wandering central BC for a few years at the tail end of the 19th Century!
That tale of the Red Ghost is creepy as heck, and if it had been fiction I'd have written it off as too macabre to be taken seriously! Giant red camel with a corpse strapped to it terrorizes the countryside!