The grand Montreal mansion that played host to horrific acts of human experimentation, and why you've probably walked over a mass grave without knowing it
Author of the article:Tristin Hopper
Publishing date:Oct 29, 2021 •
From a series of 1910 novelty photos by the Canadian amateur photographer John Boyd. Those are real human bones he dressed up, if you're wondering.
PHOTO BY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA
Most Halloween stories involve ghosts, monsters or other unprovable phenomena. This may be fine for other countries, but Canada is a giant expanse of fog, snow, isolation and madness: We generally don’t need tall tales to get creeped out.
Below are 10 tales pulled directly from Canadian history that aren’t just bone-chilling, but entirely true.
The putrescent sea monster
It’s to be expected that the West Coast of Canada would lay claim to its own legendary sea monster: Everywhere from Lake Okanagan to Scotland’s Loch Ness has done that. But cadborosaurus is different than its contemporaries. Rather than being known only through a scattered handful of witness accounts and grainy photographs, cadborosaurus shows itself in the form of monstrous rotting corpses that regularly turn up in B.C. waters. One of the most famous — found in the stomach of a sperm whale in 1937 — was a snake-like creature with fins and a reptilian head that really, really looked like a baby sea monster. The most likely explanation of all the cadborosaurus discoveries is that they’re simply the bodies of conventional animals rendered into unearthly beasts by the effects of decomposition. As recently as 2008, a decayed raccoon found on a New York State beach was similarly spurring claims of a terrifying new sea monster.
The “Naden Harbour” carcass, found in 1935, one of the most cited alleged specimens of cadborosaurus.
PHOTO BY PHOTO BY G.V. BOORMAN
The Davis Strait vampires
Eighty years before the sinking of the Titanic, it was the fate of a whaling vessel to plunge into the freezing Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg off the Canadian east coast. But the survivors of the Shannon soon found themselves entering a far more visceral hell than anything faced by the passengers and crew of the Titanic. Left to cling to the vessel’s half-sunk hull, the sailors faced a delirious death by dehydration. That is, until someone thought to drink the blood of one of their deceased comrades. “His blood was then divided among us, and that draught, which at one time our hearts would have sickened to look at, and we should have turned from with horror and disgust now became welcome and palatable,” one survivor wrote later.
The day the world ended
The sun rose normally into a blue sky on May 19, 1780. Starting just after breakfast, however, the sky was gradually devoured by an amoebic blackness which blocked out the sun, sent animals into panicked confusion and led communities throughout British North America to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the end-times were upon them. “The sun’s decline may be a sign, some great event is nigh,” reads a surviving poem from the event. The culprit was a massive forest fire in what is now Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. Although cities across North America have in recent years experienced the spectre of skies choked with wildfire smoke, the 1780 Dark Day was well beyond anything seen in modern times: Rivers ran black and the unilluminated world of the 18th century was forced to stop work. Until the skies cleared, a whole swath of the continent was left with the terrifying thought that the sun may never rise again.
The mansion of horrors
Ravenscrag was one of the grandest homes in Canada when completed in 1863, and the grandeur was all the more pronounced because of its mountainous location overlooking the growing city of Montreal. Throughout the 1950s, this imposing stone estate would become the site of some of the most horrifying examples of human medical experimentation to occur on Canadian soil. During that era the mansion was a psychiatric hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute, where patients were unwittingly enlisted as guinea pigs for a series of secret CIA-funded mind re-programming experiments spearheaded by psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron. Patients were given reckless amounts of psychedelic drugs, placed into induced comas and subjected to electroshock therapy in an attempt to reduce their brains into a primitive state from which it could then be rewired. All the experiments did, however, was plunge patients into an emotionally shattered fugue state from which they never emerged.
The Davis Strait vampires
Eighty years before the sinking of the Titanic, it was the fate of a whaling vessel to plunge into the freezing Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg off the Canadian east coast. But the survivors of the Shannon soon found themselves entering a far more visceral hell than anything faced by the passengers and crew of the Titanic. Left to cling to the vessel’s half-sunk hull, the sailors faced a delirious death by dehydration. That is, until someone thought to drink the blood of one of their deceased comrades. “His blood was then divided among us, and that draught, which at one time our hearts would have sickened to look at, and we should have turned from with horror and disgust now became welcome and palatable,” one survivor wrote later.
The day the world ended
The sun rose normally into a blue sky on May 19, 1780. Starting just after breakfast, however, the sky was gradually devoured by an amoebic blackness which blocked out the sun, sent animals into panicked confusion and led communities throughout British North America to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the end-times were upon them. “The sun’s decline may be a sign, some great event is nigh,” reads a surviving poem from the event. The culprit was a massive forest fire in what is now Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. Although cities across North America have in recent years experienced the spectre of skies choked with wildfire smoke, the 1780 Dark Day was well beyond anything seen in modern times: Rivers ran black and the unilluminated world of the 18th century was forced to stop work. Until the skies cleared, a whole swath of the continent was left with the terrifying thought that the sun may never rise again.
The mansion of horrors
Ravenscrag was one of the grandest homes in Canada when completed in 1863, and the grandeur was all the more pronounced because of its mountainous location overlooking the growing city of Montreal. Throughout the 1950s, this imposing stone estate would become the site of some of the most horrifying examples of human medical experimentation to occur on Canadian soil. During that era the mansion was a psychiatric hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute, where patients were unwittingly enlisted as guinea pigs for a series of secret CIA-funded mind re-programming experiments spearheaded by psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron. Patients were given reckless amounts of psychedelic drugs, placed into induced comas and subjected to electroshock therapy in an attempt to reduce their brains into a primitive state from which it could then be rewired. All the experiments did, however, was plunge patients into an emotionally shattered fugue state from which they never emerged.
Ravenscrag
PHOTO BY MCCORD MUSEUM
The haunted ambassador
Ghosts are big business in Canada. Ghost tours, ghost hotels, haunted restaurants; even the Royal Canadian Mint has cashed in with a series of ghost-themed coin sets. So don’t be surprised if many of the country’s most popular ghost stories have been ginned up for touristic consumption. But it’s worth taking notice when a man renowned for his powers of observation reports an encounter with a spectre . Kevin Vickers was the parliamentary Sergeant at Arms whose pinpoint marksmanship famously helped stop a 2014 terrorist attack on the House of Commons. Later, as Canada’s Ambassador to Ireland, the ever-vigilant Vickers would tackle a suspicious protester at a ceremony commemorating British dead from the Easter Rising. It was while living in Canada’s official ambassadorial residence in Dublin that Vickers reported hearing footsteps, laboured breathing and even the occasional rattling of a chain. “I never believed in ghosts. Until I arrived here,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
The Pacific apocalypse
George Vancouver is known to history as the mariner who first charted the coast of what is now British Columbia and lent his name to its largest city. Less known is that Vancouver’s voyage coincided with the immediate aftermath of one of the most apocalyptic single events in human history. A smallpox outbreak originating in New England during the American Revolutionary War had surged westwards along Indigenous trade routes, wiping out whole populations before they had even seen a European. As a result, when Vancouver arrived in the Salish Sea in 1792, what had once been one of the world’s wealthiest and most populous regions was now mostly ruins, unburied bodies and small bands of shattered survivors. “The skull, limbs, ribs and backbones, or some other vestiges of the human body, were found in many places, promiscuously scattered about the beach in great numbers,” Vancouver wrote in a diary entry.
The floating feet
Almost everyone knows about the “floating feet”; the rash of disembodied human feet discovered on Salish Sea beaches. The mystery of the feet has been solved: They largely belong to Vancouverites who died by suicide by jumping off Fraser River bridges. The victims’ bodies initially sunk to the bottom, but as decay set in the feet broke free and were carried to the surface by the buoyant running shoes into which they were still tightly laced. But there’s an extra horror to the “floating feet” when you consider that B.C. beaches were likely strewn with disembodied feet for decades before anyone noticed. Sneakers were ubiquitous on the feet of Vancouverites — and Vancouverite suicide victims — since at least the 1980s. But before a little girl unwittingly discovered the first “floating foot” in 2007 (thus kickstarting an immediate wave of similar discoveries) nobody had considered that the not-unusual sight of a sneaker bobbing in the surf of a British Columbia beach contained skeletal human remains.
The headless murderer
Canada was founded at the tail end of an era where public executions were the norm. Right up until 1870, Canadian cities regularly saw the gathering of large festive crowds who hurled insults and taunts at the rapists and murderers condemned to twitch at the end of a rope. But the business had long been moved behind closed doors by the time Canada saw its most gruesome execution. Montreal woman Tommasina Teolis’ crime was to have successfully ordered a contract killing on her husband, an act for which she was sentenced to die. The executioner did his due diligence and got Teolis’ weight from her jailers so he could calculate how far to drop her and ensure a humane death from a snapped neck. There was just one problem: Teolis had added 40 pounds to her official weight while in prison. When the trapdoor opened, Teolis’ extra bulk severed her head clean from her body, leaving the event’s small coterie of onlookers to witness the sickening sight of a headless corpse loudly impacting the ground while spurting blood from the neck.
The mass grave beneath your feet
The events of last summer showed in tragic detail just how much of the Canadian landscape abounds with forgotten graves. But if you’re reading this in a Canadian city founded before 1860, chances are good you’ve unwittingly walked across a mass grave left behind by one the many devastating epidemics that battered the settlers of early Canada. Toronto’s St. James Park — a favourite place for wedding photos — is a former “cholera pit” containing the hastily buried bodies of as many as 5,000 people. Montreal put a Costco near a mass grave of more than 6,000 refugees of the Irish Potato Famine killed by typhus. Kingston, Ont.’s McBurney Park is a pleasant collection of playgrounds, basketball courts and picnic benches set atop hundreds of graves from the early 19th century. The spectre of gravestones and human bones working their way to the surface is apparently so common that locals have taken to dubbing it “Skeleton Park.”
The nightmare voyage
The saga of the SS Princess Sophia abounds with some particularly nightmarish details. Sophia was a B.C. passenger liner that became grounded on a reef just off the coast of Alaska in 1918. While the Sophia was quickly surrounded by would-be rescue boats, rough conditions meant that none could do anything except shout encouragement at the 364 trapped aboard the groaning ship. For two days, the passengers occupied a terrifying limbo between life and death before the sea finally came for them just as darkness began to fall on the night of October 24. Not one passenger survived, and storms shielded the carnage from nearby vessels, leaving investigators only a few chilling clues to the ship’s final moments. The panicked last message from the wireless operator. The recovered water-damaged letter containing a hastily scrawled final will . And the dozens of oil-blackened desiccated bodies that washed up on surrounding beaches for months after the disaster, many of them wearing watches that all stopped at the same time
The haunted ambassador
Ghosts are big business in Canada. Ghost tours, ghost hotels, haunted restaurants; even the Royal Canadian Mint has cashed in with a series of ghost-themed coin sets. So don’t be surprised if many of the country’s most popular ghost stories have been ginned up for touristic consumption. But it’s worth taking notice when a man renowned for his powers of observation reports an encounter with a spectre . Kevin Vickers was the parliamentary Sergeant at Arms whose pinpoint marksmanship famously helped stop a 2014 terrorist attack on the House of Commons. Later, as Canada’s Ambassador to Ireland, the ever-vigilant Vickers would tackle a suspicious protester at a ceremony commemorating British dead from the Easter Rising. It was while living in Canada’s official ambassadorial residence in Dublin that Vickers reported hearing footsteps, laboured breathing and even the occasional rattling of a chain. “I never believed in ghosts. Until I arrived here,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
The Pacific apocalypse
George Vancouver is known to history as the mariner who first charted the coast of what is now British Columbia and lent his name to its largest city. Less known is that Vancouver’s voyage coincided with the immediate aftermath of one of the most apocalyptic single events in human history. A smallpox outbreak originating in New England during the American Revolutionary War had surged westwards along Indigenous trade routes, wiping out whole populations before they had even seen a European. As a result, when Vancouver arrived in the Salish Sea in 1792, what had once been one of the world’s wealthiest and most populous regions was now mostly ruins, unburied bodies and small bands of shattered survivors. “The skull, limbs, ribs and backbones, or some other vestiges of the human body, were found in many places, promiscuously scattered about the beach in great numbers,” Vancouver wrote in a diary entry.
The floating feet
Almost everyone knows about the “floating feet”; the rash of disembodied human feet discovered on Salish Sea beaches. The mystery of the feet has been solved: They largely belong to Vancouverites who died by suicide by jumping off Fraser River bridges. The victims’ bodies initially sunk to the bottom, but as decay set in the feet broke free and were carried to the surface by the buoyant running shoes into which they were still tightly laced. But there’s an extra horror to the “floating feet” when you consider that B.C. beaches were likely strewn with disembodied feet for decades before anyone noticed. Sneakers were ubiquitous on the feet of Vancouverites — and Vancouverite suicide victims — since at least the 1980s. But before a little girl unwittingly discovered the first “floating foot” in 2007 (thus kickstarting an immediate wave of similar discoveries) nobody had considered that the not-unusual sight of a sneaker bobbing in the surf of a British Columbia beach contained skeletal human remains.
In this 2008 photo, Ken Johnston and wife Diane show where they found a running shoe with a human foot inside.
PHOTO BY GLENN BAGLO / VANCOUVER SUN
The headless murderer
Canada was founded at the tail end of an era where public executions were the norm. Right up until 1870, Canadian cities regularly saw the gathering of large festive crowds who hurled insults and taunts at the rapists and murderers condemned to twitch at the end of a rope. But the business had long been moved behind closed doors by the time Canada saw its most gruesome execution. Montreal woman Tommasina Teolis’ crime was to have successfully ordered a contract killing on her husband, an act for which she was sentenced to die. The executioner did his due diligence and got Teolis’ weight from her jailers so he could calculate how far to drop her and ensure a humane death from a snapped neck. There was just one problem: Teolis had added 40 pounds to her official weight while in prison. When the trapdoor opened, Teolis’ extra bulk severed her head clean from her body, leaving the event’s small coterie of onlookers to witness the sickening sight of a headless corpse loudly impacting the ground while spurting blood from the neck.
The mass grave beneath your feet
The events of last summer showed in tragic detail just how much of the Canadian landscape abounds with forgotten graves. But if you’re reading this in a Canadian city founded before 1860, chances are good you’ve unwittingly walked across a mass grave left behind by one the many devastating epidemics that battered the settlers of early Canada. Toronto’s St. James Park — a favourite place for wedding photos — is a former “cholera pit” containing the hastily buried bodies of as many as 5,000 people. Montreal put a Costco near a mass grave of more than 6,000 refugees of the Irish Potato Famine killed by typhus. Kingston, Ont.’s McBurney Park is a pleasant collection of playgrounds, basketball courts and picnic benches set atop hundreds of graves from the early 19th century. The spectre of gravestones and human bones working their way to the surface is apparently so common that locals have taken to dubbing it “Skeleton Park.”
Toronto Mayor John Tory pictured in Toronto’s St. James Park in 2015. The ground around him is saturated with bones.
PHOTO BY ERNEST DOROSZUK/TORONTO SUN/POSTMEDIA NETWORK
The nightmare voyage
The saga of the SS Princess Sophia abounds with some particularly nightmarish details. Sophia was a B.C. passenger liner that became grounded on a reef just off the coast of Alaska in 1918. While the Sophia was quickly surrounded by would-be rescue boats, rough conditions meant that none could do anything except shout encouragement at the 364 trapped aboard the groaning ship. For two days, the passengers occupied a terrifying limbo between life and death before the sea finally came for them just as darkness began to fall on the night of October 24. Not one passenger survived, and storms shielded the carnage from nearby vessels, leaving investigators only a few chilling clues to the ship’s final moments. The panicked last message from the wireless operator. The recovered water-damaged letter containing a hastily scrawled final will . And the dozens of oil-blackened desiccated bodies that washed up on surrounding beaches for months after the disaster, many of them wearing watches that all stopped at the same time
.
The Princess Sophia pictured alone amid stormy waters only hours before its final plunge.
PHOTO BY STATE OF ALASKA DIGITAL ARCHIVES
If you need more terrifying Canadian stories that actually happened, check out our previous edition, in which we explore ghost soldiers, Arctic zombies and criminals with near-supernatural powers.
If you need more terrifying Canadian stories that actually happened, check out our previous edition, in which we explore ghost soldiers, Arctic zombies and criminals with near-supernatural powers.
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