Our city is known for its ghosts, from post-colonial spirits to present-day apparitions. Some of the more loopy cab drivers out there even refuse to drive through the Old Port for fear of running into the infamous creatures. Here's a rundown of the more popular Frenchie phantoms, so you can learn to differentiate befween true ghost, and truly hungover student road-kill on back alleys.
Montreal's most famous ghost story is that of Mary Gallagher, a prostitute who had her head cut off on June 26,1879 by a fellow prostitute, said to be her best friend. Every seven years her ghost is supposed to appear at the site of her murder, although she has not been seen since 1928. Watch for the supernatural sex worker next year. * The St. Gabriel Inn in Old Montreal, the city's oldest inn, is said to be haunted by the ghost of a little girl who died in a fire there in the 19th century. * Jean St. Pere, one of Montreal's original settlers, was attacked by a band of Iroquois in October 1647, which cut off his head and made off with it. The head started insulting them in Iroquois, and no matter how they tried to get rid of it, it found its way back to them until they buried it and fled from the site. * John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, was believed to have been surrounded and shot at his home in Virginia on April 26, 1865. Yet three days later, Montreal detectives arrested a man they were sure was Booth at the Garneau Hotel. The police superintendent ordered his unconditional release, however, and years later his brother recognized him in London. Part of the bloody towel used to bind Lincoln's head after he was shot is now at McGill's McLennan Library. * A house on Prince Arthur between rue Parc and rue Ste-Famille is the apparent home of a poltergeist. Rumour has it that in 1929 mysterious knots started appearing in the curtains, and eventually everything in the house that could be knotted was tied into similar knots. While some say that the youngest daughter of the family who owned the house was unconsciously tying knots all over the place, a later tenant of the house claimed that he found knots in his own curtains and bed sheets one night. * Security guards at John Abbott College, a CÉGEP in the Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue area, report strange occurrences such as lights turning on and off and doors unlocking themselves mysteriously. Hey, if we had tedious security jobs, we would play jokes on our co-workers in between smoke breaks, too. * American author Mark Twain wrote an article in
Harper's Magazine's September 1895 issue about his "sole experience in the matter of apparitions." He was once at Montreal's Windsor Hotel on a lecture tour when he spotted a woman he had not seen in 20 years. She walked towards him as if she was going to talk to him but mysteriously disappeared. He encountered her later that night in the same dress she had been wearing when he first saw her, but she informed him that she had arrived in Montreal less than an hour earlier. * To take a walk through historic Montreal and learn more about the city's eerie past full of ghosts, mysteries, and notorious crimes, visit
www.phvm.qc.ca where you'll find information on the Old Montreal Ghost Walk and other tours. They stop running in September, but they have Halloween specials on October 28 and 29.
