Haunted Montreal Blog #119 – Update on St. Joseph’s Oratory

Welcome to the one hundred and nineteenth installment of the Haunted Montreal Blog!

With over 600 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!

This service is free and you can sign up to our mailing list (top, right-hand corner for desktops and at the bottom for mobile devices) if you wish to receive it every month on the 13th! The blog is published in both English and French!

We are pleased to announce that our season of public outdoor ghost tours is now in full swing and tickets are on sale! These include Haunted Old Montreal, Haunted Mountain, Haunted Downtown and Haunted Griffintown. Paranormal Investigations include Old Sainte-Antoine Cemetery and Colonial Old Montreal.

Haunted Montreal is also running our Haunted Pub Crawl every Sunday at 3 pm in English. For tours in French, these happen on the last Sunday of every month at 2 pm.

To learn more, see the schedule at the bottom of our home page and see more details in the Company News section below!

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 $235 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 provide an update on St. Joseph’s Oratory and its disturbing refurbishment.

Haunted Research

Montreal’s iconic St. Joseph’s Oratory has been undergoing a major $150-million renovation since 2018. The goal is to increase accessibility and create a new welcome center, museum and observatory in the gigantic dome. 

With a reputation of being haunted, there were concerns that the refurbishment could stir up even more paranormal activity within the Oratory and on its vast grounds.

Ominously, in August of 2019, workers accidentally unearthed four pre-colonial Indigenous skeletons under the Oratory’s parking lot. Work immediately stopped and officials decided that no more excavation would be done in the area to prevent the desecration of more Indigenous graves.

After finding the remains, Oratory officials decided to reach out to the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake. Ross Montour, a Ratsénhaienhs or chief with the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, stated to CBC News that the Oratory had done the “right thing” by engaging with his community and respecting its wishes.

In September 2020, a ceremony was held to transport the remains to their final resting place in Kahnawake. Following long-held traditions of keeping deceased ancestors close to the community, the transfer required Rotiskaré:wake, or “the ones that carry the bones on their backs,” in Kanien’kéha (the Mohawk language). The name refers to the ancient Kanienʼkehá꞉ka practice of bundling and bringing along ancestors when a village site moved.

Montour explained that, as part of the ceremony, traditional knowledge keepers went to the site “to pick the remains up, to speak to the ancestors, let them know what is going on and why they are being moved, why they are being disturbed and have the ceremony here to put them back to rest​.”

Once the remains arrived in Kahnawake, they were interred in the oldest known cemetery in the Mohawk community. Montour conceded that while it’s ideal not to relocate burial grounds, the council wanted to ensure that the graves wouldn’t be disturbed again.

Unfortunately, as construction continued at the Oratory, three more sets of Indigenous remains were discovered in the spring of 2023. Workers unearthed the bones of two adults and one child while removing an old asphalt road leading up the slopes of the site.

Katsitsahente Cross-Delisle, the archeologist for the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, was present as a monitor when the remains were uncovered. She said: “Most of these ancestral remains that were found are over 1,000 years old,” adding that they were found just a few metres away from the first site of the 2019 unearthing.

As reported in the Eastern Door, in April, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake made a new arrangement with the Oratory to rebury the remains at a discrete location near where they were unearthed.

“We can’t be a catch-all for all the remains that are found – that’s not the way we look at it,” Montour said. “The idea of bringing remains to Kahnawake, or any other Indigenous territory, is a last resort.”

Cross-Delisle said it comes down to a question of respect for those that were unearthed: “When you have a reburial, you want them to be in the same place that they lived and died, because that’s what they’re familiar with and that’s where they lived their life out.” 

The ancestral remains will be re-interred without any markings to indicate the presence of the Indigenous burial ground. A plaque commemorating the presence of Kanien’kehá:ka who lived and were buried on the mountain prior to European colonization will be installed on the Oratory’s lookout.

However, despite the best efforts to mitigate the disturbance of the long-deceased Indigenous ancestors, there are still lingering concerns. Some people believe that the Oratory may have cursed itself and become even more haunted than before. 

Visit at your own risk!

Company News

Haunted Montreal’s season of public outdoor ghost tours is now in full swing and tickets are on sale! These include Haunted Old Montreal, Haunted Mountain, Haunted Downtown and Haunted Griffintown. Paranormal Investigations include Old Sainte-Antoine Cemetery and Colonial Old Montreal.

We are also running our Haunted Pub Crawl every Sunday at 3 pm in English. For tours in French, these happen on the last Sunday of every month at 2 pm.

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 $235 for small groups of up to 7 people.

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

You can also 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!

Please like, subscribe and hit the bell!

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:  shop.hauntedmontreal.com

Haunted Montreal has temporarily altered its blog experience due to a commitment on a big writing project!  

The book is titled Haunted McGill, and is authored by yours truly, Donovan King! Our publisher is The Stygian Society.

McGill University isn’t just known for its academic prestige – it’s also home to some of Montreal’s most fascinating ghost stories. Our upcoming publication, Haunted McGill, digs into the campus’s eerie legends and real-life hauntings, taking you to key landmarks like the Roddick Gates, and the Arts Building, rumored to house lingering spirits.

We’re crowdfunding through The Stygian Society’s Scriptorium, with the first 25 backers receiving an exclusive 1st edition copy, beautiful art prints, and other spooky treasures. Help us reach our goal by July and secure your piece of Montreal’s haunted history. Don’t miss out – back us today and make history a little spookier!

Until publication, new stories at the Haunted Montreal Blog will be offered every two months, whereas every other month will feature an update to an old story. As always, these stories and updates will be released on the 13th of every month!

Haunted Montreal would like to thank all 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 and/or on Google Reviews – 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 August 13: Place Royale

Place Royale is an unassuming and overlooked historic square in Old Montreal that hides many dark, colonial secrets. Known as the Place du Marché during the French regime, the marketplace was essentially the town square for well over a century. Hosting markets on Tuesdays and Fridays, it was also known as a site of horrific public torture, punishment and execution. While today the site looks banal and excludes its own history in public commemoration, Place Royale is considered one of the most haunted sites in Old Montreal!

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.