Haunted Montreal Blog #98 – Dow Brewery

Happy Friday the 13^th and welcome to the ninety-eighth installment of the Haunted Montreal Blog!

With over 500 documented ghost stories, Montreal is easily the most haunted city in Canada, if not all of North America. Haunted Montreal dedicates itself to researching these paranormal tales, and the Haunted Montreal Blog unveils a newly researched Montreal ghost story on the 13th of every month!

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With the Hallowe’en Season upon us, Haunted Montreal’s season of public outdoor ghost tours is in full swing! Offered every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and some Wednesdays, we have four ghost tours on rotation (Old Montreal, Griffintown, Downtown and Mount Royal.)

Our Haunted Pub Crawl is also offered every Sunday at 3 pm in English. For tours in French, these happen on the last Sunday of every month at 4 pm.

Our Paranormal Investigation in the Old Sainte Antoine Cemetery happens on the first Friday and Saturday of every month.

Private tours for all of our experiences (including outdoor tours) can be booked at any time based on the availability of our actors. Clients can request any date, time, language and operating tour. These tours start at $215 for small groups of up to 7 people.

Email info@hauntedmontreal.com to book a private tour!

Lastly, we have an online store for those interested in Haunted Montreal merchandise. More details are below in our Company News section!

This month we examine the abandoned Dow Brewery in Griffintown. Popular with urban explorers and paranormal investigators, the creepy, rambling structure is reputed to be haunted.

Haunted Research

Griffintown and alcohol have traditionally gone hand in hand, so it is not surprising that breweries, whether legal or illegal, have always been a part of the neighborhood’s fabric. The Dow Brewery opened in 1861.

The son of a brewmaster, William Dow was born in 1800 in Perthshire, Scotland. Given that his family had been brewing beer since 1652, when he emigrated to Lower Canada around 1818, he had substantial experience in the field.

He landed a job as foreman at Thomas Dunn’s Brewery in La Prairie, near Montreal. In November, 1829 William Dow became a partner in the enterprise. Following Dunn’s death in 1834, the brewery was rebranded as William Dow and Company.

The firm prospered and became the principal competitor in Montreal of Molson’s, the largest brewery in the city at the time. In 1861, William Dow ordered the construction of a massive Brewery in Griffintown. By 1863 Dow’s plant was producing approximately 700,000 gallons of beer compared to Molson’s 142,000 gallons.

William Dow was laughing his way all to the bank.

The following year, William Dow sold his brewery to an associate named Gilbert Scott for £77,877. Already very wealthy, Dow wanted to focus on other ventures such as real estate, banking, insurance and railroads. Under new ownership, the brewery kept the name Dow.

Despite being a bachelor, William Dow lived in the baronial style. His luxurious stone mansion, Strathearn House, was located at the top of Beaver Hall Hill.

Upon his death, on December 7, 1868, the house and the majority of his estate, estimated to be in excess of £300,000, were left to his brother’s widow and her four daughters.

In 1909, owners of Dow Breweries got greedy and amalgamated with another 13 companies in an attempt to monopolize the Quebec’s beer industry. Dow Breweries was purchased in the 1920s by National Breweries of Quebec, which itself was acquired by Canadian Breweries. In 1952, the expansion continued when they purchased the Boswell Brewery in Quebec City and renamed it Dow.

The enlargement plan was very successful. Furthermore, with bold advertising and the jaunty slogans “Wouldn’t a Dow go good now” and “Dit donc Dow” in French (translated as “Now for a Dow”), the brand exploded in popularity.

By the summer of 1965, Dow was the undoubtedly the preferred brand of beer for Quebeckers. Indeed, about 85% of beer drinkers were consuming it on a regular basis.

However, starting in August 1965, Dow Beer drinkers in Quebec City began to complain about the taste. Before long, a patient was brought to a local hospital with symptoms of alcoholic cardiomyopathy.

Over the next eight months, 50 more cases with similar findings appeared in the same area with 20 of these being fatal. Doctors noted that all patients were heavy drinkers with many consuming over 12 pints of Dow beer per day.

Rumours began to spread that the beer was poisoned. Although Dow denied any responsibility, the Dow Brewery in Quebec City temporarily shut down and pumped thousands of liters of tainted beer into the St. Lawrence River.

However, epidemiological studies later found that Dow had been adding cobalt sulfate to the beer to increase foaminess since July 1965. The concentration added in the Quebec City brewery was 10 times higher than the same beer brewed in Montreal where there were no reported cases.

The brand took a major hit and lost almost all of its market share in Quebec. Sadly, for Dow Breweries, the writing was on the wall.

Despite opening the Dow Planetarium in 1966 as a major project for the Canadian Centennial, the following year Dow Breweries was sold to O’Keefe.

Molson then acquired it in 1989. In 1997, Molson discontinued the Dow Beer brand, and the following year abandoned the Montreal Dow Brewery. Employees were laid off or transferred, electricity was cut off and the old Griffintown brewery was allowed to fall into ruins.

Contaminated with asbestos, it has since been used by urban explorers, ghost hunters and mediums, all of whom are convinced that the old brewery is haunted. One persistent rumour suggests that the Montreal mafia uses the old Dow Brewery to dispose of corpses, somehow burying or concealing them inside the building.

With such an infamous reputation, travel blog seeya.ca listed the Dow Brewery as one of Canada’s top 20 haunted sites: “In the downtown area of Montreal, Canada sits the Dow Brewery. This brewery has had an entire slew of apparitions frequenting its massive building and sprawling grounds.”

Psychics and mediums have also been known to visit, and in 2009 a team from Montreal Paranormal began picking up “horrifying ghost vibes” in one section of the brewery. When they returned several weeks later with two psychics – who did not know each other, both concluded the same thing; that a girl was murdered in the abandoned building by someone she knew. Both psychics’ descriptions of her clothing were the same, and they both pointed to the same spot where they claimed there is “death under the ground”.

They tried communicating with the girl using ghost-hunting equipment. One of the psychics detected the glowing outline of a little girl, standing and crying. She claimed that the girl’s tears were |happy tears” because she was watching them and knew they were trying to help her escape. Apparently, the ghost thought she was still alive and stuck or locked somewhere.

The paranormal investigators returned a few more times, but unfortunately, the case went cold.

Traditional research into the incident has not revealed any known murders at the site of the Dow Brewery. Therefore, if a little girl was murdered and buried here, it is an unsolved crime.

Urban blogger Taylor C. Noakes wrote in a post:

“…a person I once knew indicated he had come across mobsters disposing of a body in the Dow Brewery. Mob business isn’t mine, and I’m doubtful of the veracity of the story, though in a weird way I want a construction worker to come across a body, only to later reveal (because the building was abandoned for so long), that it had become a preferred location for the victims of organized crime.”

Noakes added: “I have these visions of construction workers standing in line to speak with CSST shrinks in make-shift counselling tents out behind the old loading docks, while the city’s coroner and homicide department deal with a year’s worth of unidentified (and in some cases unidentifiable) bodies, found buried here, there and everywhere in this massive old building.”

Noakes may well get his wish. In 2018, the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) received permission to renovate the old brewery in order to expand its Griffintown campus. Branded as the DOW Complex project, ÉTS explained:

“Located in downtown Montreal, in the former DOW brewery, this project will be added to the ÉTS campus. In addition to allowing the construction of high-level technological laboratories, this space will be a model of carbon-neutral energy resilience.”

With the eventual renovation of the old brewery, any bodies hidden inside are likely to be discovered. Until this happens, the disturbing claims made by the mediums is a matter of pure speculation.

Only one thing is certain, unless the police do a full forensic investigation before the old Dow Brewery is repurposed, this is one Griffintown mystery that will remain unsolved.

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Company News

With the Hallowe’en Season upon us, Haunted Montreal’s season of public outdoor ghost tours is in full swing! Offered every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and some Wednesdays, we have four ghost tours on rotation (Old Montreal, Griffintown, Downtown and Mount Royal.)

Our Haunted Pub Crawl is also offered every Sunday at 3 pm in English. For tours in French, these happen on the last Sunday of every month at 4 pm.

Our Paranormal Investigation in the Old Sainte Antoine Cemetery happens on the first Friday and Saturday of every month.

Private tours for any of our experiences (including outdoor tours) can be booked at any time based on the availability of our actors. Clients can request any date, time, language and operating tour. These tours are based on the availability of our actors and start at $215 for small groups of up to 7 people.

Email info@hauntedmontreal.com to book a private tour!

You can bring the Haunted Montreal experience to your office party, house, school or event by booking one of our Travelling Ghost Storytellers today.

Hear some of the spookiest tales from our tours and our blog told by a professional actor and storyteller. You provide the venue, we provide the stories and storyteller. Find out more and then contact info@hauntedmontreal.com

Our team also releases videos every second Saturday, in both languages, of ghost stories from the Haunted Montreal Blog. Hosted by Holly Rhiannon (in English) and Dr. Mab (in French), this initiative is sure to please ghost story fans!

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In other news, if you want to send someone a haunted experience as a gift, you certainly can!

We are offering Haunted Montreal Gift Certificates through our website and redeemable via Eventbrite for any of our in-person or virtual events (no expiration date).

Finally, we have an online store for those interested in Haunted Montreal merchandise. We are selling t-shirts, magnets, sweatshirts (for those haunted fall and winter nights) and mugs with both the Haunted Montreal logo and our tour imagery.

Purchases can be ordered through our online store.

Haunted Montreal would like to thank all of our clients who attended a ghost walk, haunted pub crawl, paranormal investigation or virtual event!

If you enjoyed the experience, we encourage you to write a review on our Tripadvisor page, something that really helps Haunted Montreal to market its tours.

Lastly, if you would like to receive the Haunted Montreal Blog on the 13th of every month, please sign up to our mailing list.

Coming up on November 13: Saint Louis Square

Situated in Montreal’s Plateau-Mont Royal Borough, Saint Louis Square is a beautiful and bucolic park dating from 1876. Surrounded by stunning Victorian architecture, the leafy square is popular with locals and tourists alike. It features a central fountain, busts of famous poets and even a small stone building with a café and ice cream parlor inside. However, the square also has a turbulent history. Once the stomping ground of many disturbed artists, the Montreal Hippy Movement and an era of decline including rampant prostitution, deranged things happened in the park. Unsurprisingly, there have been several ghost sightings in Saint Louis Square.

Author:

Donovan King is a postcolonial historian, teacher, tour guide and professional actor. As the founder of Haunted Montreal, he combines his skills to create the best possible Montreal ghost stories, in both writing and theatrical performance. King holds a DEC (Professional Theatre Acting, John Abbott College), BFA (Drama-in-Education, Concordia), B.Ed (History and English Teaching, McGill), MFA (Theatre Studies, University of Calgary) and ACS (Montreal Tourist Guide, Institut de tourisme et d’hôtellerie du Québec). He is also a certified Montreal Destination Specialist.

Translator (into French):

Claude Chevalot holds a master’s degree in applied linguistics from McGill University. She is a writer, editor and translator. For more than 15 years, she has devoted herself almost exclusively to literary translation and to the translation of texts on current and contemporary art.