Haunted Montreal Blog #88 – The Poltergeist of Côte-Saint-Luc Part II

Welcome to the eighty-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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Haunted Montreal is now in our winter mode and, with colder temperatures, all of our public haunted experiences are now indoors!

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

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 $170 for small groups of up to 7 people.

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

We’ve just launched our newest haunted experience: Travelling Ghost Storyteller. Find out more in the Company News section.

Our Virtual Ghost Tour is also available on demand!

Want to give the gift of a haunted experience for the holiday season?

You can now order a Haunted Montreal Gift Certificate through our website. They are redeemable via Eventbrite for any of our in-person or virtual experiences. There is no expiration date.

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 follow up with a man named Jeff in Côte-Saint-Luc. Since 2009, Jeff has been experiencing poltergeist activity in his apartment and recently the paranormal happenings have only gotten stronger. From the kitchen faucet turning on by itself to rotating dish racks and drawers opening and closing, Jeff’s apartment is a paranormal dystopia. To make matters worse, the spirit is now following him outside and is getting more aggressive.

Haunted Research

Montreal is a city with a lot of recorded poltergeist activity. From the knot-tying poltergeist of Sainte-Famille Street to the rug-throwing spirit described by Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Montreal has more than a few of these paranormal creatures.

This month, Haunted Montreal follows up with a man named Jeff in Côte-Saint-Luc regarding his own ongoing poltergeist experience.

Jeff had originally contacted Haunted Montreal in the summer of 2021 to explain his unusual situation.

After investigating, Haunted Montreal published The Poltergeist of Côte-Saint-Luc in August of that year. Since then, Jeff has been sending updates on all of the poltergeist activity in his apartment – and now outdoors – and this blog reveals his latest paranormal encounters.

Jeff wrote: “Since my last report of mysterious poltergeist activity over a year ago, there have been many more mysterious poltergeist events taking place in my apartment.”

One of the most common phenomena is objects rotating themselves 90 degrees, including cereal boxes, sponges, a dishrack and a chair.

Jeff is constantly baffled by these paranormal movements and has no idea which object will rotate next.

In another case, Jeff was about to take a shower one day. He glanced up at the rubber bath mat hanging from the shower curtain rod, which was folded over it. He thought to himself that he would put it on the floor of the bathtub after returning from putting something away in his room.

About thirty seconds later, when he returned, he saw that the rubber bath mat was now on the floor of the bathtub, where he had originally wanted it. Furthermore, Jeff did not hear a sound made by the movement of the bath mat from the curtain rod to the floor of the bathtub.

Another time, Jeff put a cereal bowl in the kitchen sink to be cleaned. However, immediately after placing the bowl in the sink, the single-handled faucet turned on by itself! The water coming out was in a thin stream, and Jeff pushed the handle down to shut the water off. According to Jeff: “The faucet had been turned off completely, and there’s no way it could have turned on by itself. Yet, it did.”

Then one night, something weird happened. His freezer contained a package of matzo balls and another of potato kugel. Jeff explained that each package was very different. The previous night, he took out the potato kugel from the freezer, and put it in the fridge to defrost for the meal of the day.

However, the following morning, when he looked in the fridge he saw that the potato kugel package had been replaced by the matzo ball package. Jeff described this as a “double teleportation.”

In another food-related event, one day Jeff went shopping for a jar of plum sauce. After reading the label, he decided to purchase it. When Jeff got home to unpack, he was shocked to see that the plum sauce he had just bought was now a jar of General Tao sauce.

Jeff speculated that the situation was likely a “poltergeist practical joke.”

It seems the paranormal humour continued when a porcelain sugar pot teleported into the fridge just as Jeff was preparing a bowl of strawberries that he planned to dust with the sugar.

The trickery also affected Jeff’s wall calendar. On March 1^st, he flipped up the calendar page to March. However, the next morning, he saw the April page.

Jeff said: “I didn’t do it. In a nutshell, an additional calendar page had been flipped over during the night, and not by me, revealing the incorrect month of April page.” Could this have been a paranormal April Fool’s Day prank?

Following this episode, things started becoming more and more strange.

According to Jeff:

“One night, while my mother was lying in bed, she called out to me. When I came, she said that somebody was patting her head, and that it was a ghost (her word). I told her that she was dreaming, but she was insistent about it. She is very old and forgetful, but her head is still working well and she has a firm grasp on reality.”

With the poltergeist now getting physical, Jeff soon experienced an accident that he blamed on it.

On August 17, 2022, Jeff went for his dental check-up. While at the dentist, X-rays were made of his teeth. Jeff said:

“Strangely, instead of showing the interior of my teeth as X-rays do, the X-ray machine showed my teeth as completely white, as if something was blocking the X-rays from penetrating the tooth. The dentist said that this was the first time ever that the X-ray machine had behave like that. This leads me to believe that the poltergeist which had been in my life for a couple of years had sabotaged the X-ray procedure, and had prevented the machine from working properly.”

As he left the dentist’s office after the check-up, Jeff went for a brief walk nearby while waiting for the bus. He wrote:

“As I stepped off the curb in the middle of the block of a quiet street, I toppled over and fell on my face, resulting in scratches and bleeding, and also hurt my hand, wrist and arm while trying to break the fall. I’m thinking that my bad fall might not have been so innocent.”

Jeff added:

“Stepping off a low curb, even while not watching my step carefully, should not have resulted in a fall, yet I tumbled forward and down forcefully. It was almost as if I were pulled by a force acting horizontally on my upper body, pulling me forward. But there was insufficient forward momentum to cause me to fall forward like that.”

Jeff considers this a poltergeist event, or more accurately, a “poltergeist attack”; a supernatural push causing him to fall.

He feels threatened now.

He wrote: “I was actually injured and had to go to emergency, with X-rays showing bone fractures in my elbow joint, persistent aching, and reduced range of motion in my arm. To me, this is serious; a supernatural entity capable of doing something resulting in injury (and potentially death) is a serious threat for which there is no defence. It suggests that humanity is vulnerable to attack by supernatural forces.”

Upon reflection, Jeff concluded:

“These poltergeist phenomena have forced me to consider what kind of universe we live in that would permit these supposedly impossible events to happen. Indeed, I am compelled to doubt the existence of a material universe altogether, since physical objects as we think of them should not be able to behave in this way. In my opinion, these poltergeist phenomena could only occur in a purely mental universe, where only mind exists and where thought is the basis of reality; a dream, if you will.”

Haunted Montreal awaits more reports of poltergeist activity and will keep our readers updated!

Company News

Haunted Montreal is now in winter mode and with the temperatures dropping, we are moving our public tours indoors!

Our Haunted Pub Crawl happens every Sunday at 3 pm in English. For tours in French, these happen on the last Sunday of every month at 4 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 $170 for small groups of up to 7 people.

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

We’re also launching our newest haunted experience:

You can bring the Haunted Montreal experience to your office Christmas party, house party 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 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 opened 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 during the 2022 season!

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 January 13: Place Viger

Once an opulent Chateau-style hotel and railway station, the Place Viger is undergoing major redevelopments. Situated in eastern Old Montreal, this architectural gem is reputed to be haunted by the spirits of bawling children. In 2011, one visitor wrote, “I felt a very strong negative energy about the place. I immediately knew it was haunted. I heard children crying for their mothers and the sadness engulfed me.” Just who or what is haunting the Place Viger is a question of speculation, but one theory refers to a major gas explosion at the one of the hotel’s rail quays in 1909 as the culprit of the paranormal activity.

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.