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 13^th 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 13^th! The blog is published in both English and French!

With the weather getting nicer, we have resumed public outdoor Haunted Old Montreal tours, with the rest of our outdoor public tour schedule, including Colonial Secrets of Old Montreal resuming throughout May.

Our Haunted Pub Crawl still runs every Sunday at 3 pm in English. Tours in French happen on the last Sunday of every month at 2 pm.

More on this in the Company News section.

This month, we take a look at an abandoned, crumbling church, that has become a destination for urban explorers, and is also purportedly haunted.

Haunted Research

Towering above Fullum Street in eastern Montreal stands the crumbling ruins of Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church.

Religious services were relocated in 2016 due to safety concerns about the deteriorating church, a dwindling flock of worshippers and rumours that the building was haunted.

The dilapidated building is causing a major headache for the Montreal Catholic Archdiocese.

Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Parish was established in 1896 to cater to a growing Catholic population in the eastern part of Montreal. Church officials erected a temporary chapel for worshippers until a more permanent structure could be built.

In 1913, construction of the Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church finally began, based on plans by architect Aristide Beaugrand-Champagne.

Designed in the Romanesque Revival style, it was meant to be an imposing visual landmark at 2151 Fullum Street.

However, due to the First World War, work was suspended from 1914 to 1919. Resources were scare and men were conscripted to go fight in Europe.

After the war, work resumed on the church under the direction of Joseph-Henri Caron. The magnificent Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church opened its doors in 1923. At the time, it was one of the largest churches in Montreal.

The church functioned well with good attendance until the 1960s, when rumours spread that The Devil himself had somehow managed to enter Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church and take up residence in the holy building.

Stories circulated of the church bells ringing in the middle of the night during the Devil’s Hour, which starts at 3 a.m.

Local residents who went to investigate claimed they could also hear someone playing disjointed notes on the church organ late at night when the building was closed.

The priests denied the allegations and blamed Quebec’s Quiet Revolution for the falling attendance.

It was a time when church attendance fell across the province due to secularization and anger at the strict policies of the Catholic Church, not to mention allegations of abuse.

As the decades passed and attendance continued to dwindle, in 2003 the Diocese of Montreal merged the neighboring parishes of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul and Saint-Anselme into Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil.

Starting in 2009, worshippers moved into the church basement due to economic and security concerns.

In a nutshell, the diocese could not afford to fix structural defects in Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church, which were estimated at several million dollars. Furthermore, it cost tens of thousands of dollars annually to heat the immense building.

As such, services were held daily in a small chapel set up in a hallway between the deteriorating church and the rectory. At the time, parish secretary Laurianne Mailloux said: “For the few people who come, it’s more than enough.”

However, in March 2016 serious damage caused by leaking water triggered the few remaining worshippers to be relocated elsewhere.

At the time, parish priest Father Thomas explained: “When it came time to renew the building’s insurance, it was no longer possible. So, I made the decision to move the services.”

After Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church was abandoned, it began to take on a forlorn appearance. Despite being fenced off, vandals painted graffiti on its walls and urban explorers started breaking in to film the vast, crumbling interior.

Sadly, in 2019 a major fire broke out in the church, which required the intervention of dozens of firefighters.

The church floor was destroyed and the artworks inside were severely damaged. Investigators could not identify how the fire started but suspected it was caused by squatters or intruders.

Since then, the church has been vacant and is collapsing into ruin. The diocese has proposed several redevelopment projects over the years, such as a housing cooperative or private residential project. However, these ideas never came to fruition.

It soon became evident that Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church would have to be demolished due to its advanced deterioration, weakened structural conditions and the resulting safety issues.

Indeed, according to a CBC News report from February 2026 entitled Montreal parish fights to demolish derelict church that’s become a TikTok destination:

“Inside the church, the floor of the cavernous sanctuary is covered with debris, bird droppings, beer cans and the mangled remnants of the church’s organ… The sound of cooing pigeons and the flapping of wings echoes through the space, which once accommodated some 1,000 worshippers.”

Furthermore, Priest Roger Dufresne, who oversees the site, was scandalized when vandals graffitied the church’s interior. They spray-painted blasphemous messages such as “The Devil was here,” and “Kill God 666.”

Father Dufresne noted that intruders ripped out pipes from the Casavant Organ and tossed them on the floor, broke heads off statues and repeatedly climbed to the roof, trying to ring the church bell.

The priest said: “They use all kinds of tools to break the windows, break the doors, get inside. For young people, it’s mostly to make videos, TikTok challenges.”

Furthermore, the church has spent more than $100,000 trying to secure the site since 2017, including erecting a fence around the building and by hiring security guards. Despite those efforts, the City of Montreal has fined the church $219,000 related to the structural integrity of the building.

In 2012, the City’s Division de l’expertise en patrimoine et de la toponymie listed Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church a building of “exceptional heritage value”.

Such designations make demolition much more difficult.

Fully repairing the church would cost more than $50 million according to engineering firm CIMA+, but the parish does not have the funds nor the worshippers to fill such a large space.

With unfathomable challenges like these, Father Dufresne and the Montreal Catholic Archdiocese want Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church demolished as soon as possible.

On January 7, 2026, the parish asked a judge at the Superior Court of Quebec to grant a demolition permit, citing health and security concerns as well as financial difficulties.

As the parish waits for a decision, Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church continues to decay and fall into ruin as urban explorers, vandals and TikTokers continue to break in.

Haunted Montreal reached out to a TikToker to ask what conditions are like in the church’s interior. The influencer, who wanted to remain anonymous for legal reasons, described many of the same things from the CBC article: flocks of pigeons nesting in the rafters, crumpled beer cans, obscene graffiti and bent Casavant organ pipes littering the floor.

When we inquired if the TikToker had experienced any paranormal activity, they said:

“It’s funny you should mention that. One of the TikTok challenges is to go into the building alone and film during the Devils’ Hour because the church is haunted. It’s a big dare.”

When pressed for more information, the TikToker explained:

“The inside of the church is scary late at night. It is very dark. I used my flashlight to walk through all the beer cans, broken pews and organ pipes. I wanted to stream my TikTok video at the altar. As I approached, I swear I could hear a faint noise, like an echo. I froze and listened carefully. It sounded like some sort of laughter, quiet at first. But then it started getting louder and scarier. It started cackling and sounding full-on demonic!”

Haunted Montreal asked what the TikToker did next. They replied:

“I decided to get the hell out of there! I ran to the exit, trying not to trip over all the junk on the ground. As I bolted, I accidentally kicked a pile of broken organ pipes scattering them across the floor. As I was reaching the exit, I heard a noise that I have never heard before. It sounded like the organ playing, but in a wheezing and sputtering way, like something half-alive. I turned around for one last look and shone my flashlight. I swear I could see those broken organ pipes slithering around the floor while making that horrible groaning noise. Then I left, glad that I was still alive. I won’t be trying that TikTok challenge ever again.”

When Haunted Montreal asked them if they would swear to the truth about the story, the TikToker admitted that they had been on magic mushrooms, but added: “Dude, it’s totally true. I’d swear with my hand on the Bible.”

All of these deranged stories have led many people to ask: is Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church haunted by The Devil? These rumours have been circulating for decades, after all.

Whatever the case, until this church is demolished, it will undoubtably continue to witness all sorts of problems. From anti-social behaviour and vandalism to the possibility it might be haunted by The Devil himself, it would not be surprising if the historic Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil Church is demolished in the near future.

Company News

Our outdoor public tours are resuming with Haunted Old Montreal in April and the rest of our slate throughout May. Haunted Montreal is running our Haunted Pub Crawl every Sunday at 3 pm in English. Tours in French happen on the last Sunday of every month at 2 pm.

Colonial Secrets of Old Montreal will also resume in May, but is currently available in English and French as a private tour.

Private tours for any of our experiences (including outdoor tours, except for Haunted Mountain) 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 $250 for small groups of up to 8 people. Email info@hauntedmontreal.com to book a private tour!

Our bilingual indoor Paranormal Investigation at the Montreal Art Center and Museum in April is already Sold Out. We are working on adding another one in May. Stay tuned!

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

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).

Our online shop is offline for the next few months. If you would like to purchase any Haunted Montreal-branded t-shirts or mugs in the meantime, please contact us at info@hauntedmontreal.com

Holly and Dr. Mab are back! Now part of Stygian Media, they will continue releasing Haunted Montreal videos based on our blogs in English and French among other horror-themed content.

Please like, subscribe and hit the bell!

Haunted Montreal also has temporarily altered its blog experience due to a commitment on a big writing project! Until further notice, we will be offering updates on old stories every second month and the regular blog service alternating.

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 each month, please sign up to our mailing list.

Coming Up on May 13: Update on The Black Rock

In March 2018, Haunted Montreal first wrote about The Black Rock, a 30-ton granite boulder that marks the site of the city’s second mass grave for Irish Famine victims. Located in an industrial area on Bridge Street, efforts have been made to create a world-class park on the desecrated burial ground. However, the project has been sabotaged and the plans presented are raising eyebrows among the stakeholders who were excluded from participating.

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.

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.

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 will be resuming in early April! Tickets are already on sale!

In the meantime, Haunted Montreal is 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 Montreal’s famous Red Roof Church, or St. John the Evangelist, which could be permanently shuttered. This raises questions about how its resident ghost might react.

Haunted Research

The Red Roof Church, or St. John the Evangelist, enjoys a prime location in the heart of the Quartier des Spectacles – and a reputation of being haunted by its founder, Reverend Edmund Wood. 

Reverend Wood is a legend in the Montreal Anglican community.

Not only did he go from offering masses within a crumbling cemetery to establishing a historic church, but he was also known to have banished an offensive gargoyle that was terrorizing the city in the 1890s.

The Reverend died in 1909 and since then his ghost has been known as a friendly spirit who leaves warm feelings among those who encounter him. People have reported being hugged and comforted by an invisible force in his church.

Sadly, the Red Roof Church, which the Reverend conceived and founded, is now threatened with permanent closure. In 2023 church officials debated putting the historic church up for sale after disclosing urgent repair work that the congregation can ill afford. 

There are now concerns that if the church is shuttered, the ghost of Edmund Wood might feel lonely and start haunting other locations in the Quartier des Spectacles.

It is worth noting that the Red Roof Church has a history of supporting artists and renting its space out for everything from classical music symphonies and a homeless mission to sublime candlelight concerts to and even horror film festivals.

One classical musician, who has played at both the Red Roof Church and the neighbouring Opera House, contacted Haunted Montreal to report her concerns about the situation. 

She wrote: “I wish to remain anonymous, but I wanted to tell you that I play an instrument in a prominent orchestra in Montreal. I have played at both the Red Roof Church and the Opéra de Montréal, along with many other famous venues. The Red Roof Church has great acoustics, but there is sometimes the risk of an interruption during a performance.”

The musician added: “Once, when I was playing in a symphony at the Red Roof Church, I started to feel very warm. It was a winter concert, which was unusual. Here I was sweating when the old church is usually a bit chilly at this time of year. I was actually starting to boil as I played my instrument in the orchestra.”

She then reported what happened next: “Suddenly, as I was playing a very intense part of the symphony, I felt a warm hand grab my shoulder, as if to reassure me. However, I was jolted. Because of this weird interruption, I screwed up the next few bars of the music. I was very embarrassed to have compromised the symphony.”

The musician had heard of Reverend Wood’s ghost and chalked her paranormal experience down to this. She then added: “If they shut down the Red Roof Church, what is the Reverend’s ghost going to do? In both life and death he was very animated and sociable. I don’t think his spirit will tolerate being in an empty church for very long.”

One agent who works in programming for the Quartier des Spectacles is aware of the issue. Wishing to remain anonymous, he told Haunted Montreal: 

“Reverend Wood’s ghost is on our radar. While we know he is friendly and welcoming of people in the church he built, we cannot predict what he might do if the church is closed.”

He concluded: “The last thing we want are disturbances in other nearby artistic venues such as the Place des Arts and Opera House. We must hope that they find a way to keep the Red Roof Church open long into the future.”

Company News

We are pleased to announce that our season of public outdoor ghost tours will be resuming in early April! Tickets are already on sale!

Before we launch our season, we are offering the Irish Famine in Montreal Walking Tour with Augmented Reality (in English) at 1 pm on Saturday, March 15!

Learn about Black ’47, the year 75,000 Irish refugees fleeing the Famine landed on Montreal’s wharves. The tour visits key sites associated with this tragedy, such as the locations of fever sheds, burial grounds and hospitals, providing in-depth history about the Irish Famine’s impact on Montreal in 1847.

Led by Donovan King, the Irish Famine in Montreal Walking Tour also features Augmented Reality to resurrect Saint Ann’s Church, the heart of the Irish Famine community in Griffintown!

In the meantime, Haunted Montreal is 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!

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! 

We are also pleased to unveil it this month! The book is titled Haunted McGill, and is authored by yours truly, Donovan King!

Our publisher is The Stygian Society. They are crowdfunding Haunted McGill through The Stygian Society’s Scriptorium. The first 25 backers will receive an exclusive 1st edition copy, beautiful art prints, and other spooky treasures. Help them reach their goal by July and secure your piece of Montreal’s haunted history!

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 April 13: The Ghostly Soldiers of Pointe à Quenet

There is a little-known old ghost story set in Beaurepaire Village, Beaconsfield, called “The Ghostly Soldiers of Pointe à Quenet”. Recorded by famous folklorist E.-Z. Massicotte, the tale involves the oldest house on the peninsula. Connected to a colonial fort from the New France Era, people in the home have spotted ghostly soldiers in the cellar and sometimes marching about the property in formation. This mysterious ghost story has been passed from generation to generation in the ancient home known today as the Maison Beaurepaire. There is wild speculation about who these ghostly soldiers are, from the ranks of the French and British Armies to Irish Fenian rebels.

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.

With over 350 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!

Haunted Montreal is now in winter mode and is not offering a season of outdoor public tours until the spring. The good news is that we are pleased to announce that the Haunted Montreal Pub Crawl runs year round on Sunday afternoons. We are also looking for an indoor haunted location for our new Paranormal Investigation. Lastly, our ghost walks can still be booked for private groups, including Haunted Griffintown and Haunted Downtown. Haunted Mountain is not available due to dangerous icy conditions on Otsirà:ke / Mount Royal until it melts in May.

Our February blog examines Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel and the persistent rumours that the oldest church in the city is also the most haunted.

Haunted Research

The Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel is both the city’s oldest church and, if paranormal experts are to be believed, one of the most haunted locations in Old Montreal. Also known as the Sailor’s Church, this quaint stone structure is topped with three statues including the magnificent Lady of the Harbour, flanked by two Angels of the Apocalypse.

The church is shrouded in mystery. Not only are there the bodies of several nuns buried in the crypt, but it is also the location of Saint Marguerite Bourgeoy’s sacred remains, a miraculous statue, and a possibly haunted 1848 painting called “Le Typhus” by Theophile Hamel that depicts the gruesome impact of the Irish Famine on the city.

There are also several reports from tourists at having photographed either a man in a tuxedo or a priest from the outside of the church’s stained-glass windows. Some believe the ghost captured on film is none other than Famine priest M. Gottefrey, who suffered a terrible injury in the church hours before dying in the summer of 1847 while caring for Irish refugees.

To understand the significance of the church, it is important to look at some history. The island of Tio’tia:ke is part of the traditional territory of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka or Mohawk First Nation. As part of European colonization, a French Catholic organization called “The Notre Dame Society of Montreal for the Conversion of the Savage Peoples of New France” established a colony called Ville-Marie on the island in 1642 when the Mohawk people were in their southern territory.

It wasn’t long before an all-out war broke between the French colonists and the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka First Nation, which lasted until 1701.

In 1652, colony leader Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, visited his sister in France and invited her colleague, Marguerite Bourgeoys, to join the colony as its first teacher.

According to Bourgeoys:

“One morning, when I was fully awake, a tall woman dressed in a robe as of white serge, said to me clearly: “Go, I will never forsake you.” And I knew that it was the Blessed Virgin, although I did not see her face.”

Being a devout Catholic, she decided to join the colony where she was tasked with educating French children and “converting” Indigenous children to Catholicism. While today her “education” might well be considered cultural genocide against Indigenous people, in the mid-1600s, Catholic doctrine was almost ubiquitous in France and adherents believed that all non-Catholics were heathens in need of conversion.

It was a dangerous time for colonists to leave the palisaded settlement as the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka First Nation wanted their territory back and were willing to fight for it.

It was during this war that Marguerite Bourgeoys had the idea for the church.

In 1655, she rallied the colonists to build a chapel as a site of pilgrimage outside of the colony’s palisade, despite the danger. Before long, enough stones and materials had been collected to lay the foundation. However, in 1657, due to a change in ecclesial jurisdiction in the colony, the new Sulpician leaders suspended construction work for several years.

When the “The Notre Dame Society of Montreal for the Conversion of the Savage Peoples of New France” gifted her a stable to be used as a schoolhouse, Marguerite Bourgeoys kept herself busy with indoctrinating her students with Catholic ideology while also teaching them skills deemed useful for the colony.

In in 1658, she founded the Congrégation de Notre Dame, a religious community for women that was not cloistered and which spent a considerable amount of time with “education”. They instructed not only the colony’s children and Les Filles du Roy (orphaned girls sent by the King of France to “populate the colony”), but also various Indigenous people, especially children.

The Congregation was directly associated with “The Notre Dame Society of Montreal for the Conversion of the Savage Peoples of New France”. The overall and feverish goal was to colonize and actively “civilize” the Indigenous people who had lived there for thousands of years by converting them to Catholicism. These religious zealots believed that they were “saviours”, and mainstream history has largely recorded them in this manner to the present day.

In 1676, with the help of the new Order of Sulpicians, Bourgeoys established a small school for Indigenous girls in a village located at the base of the mountain, known as the Mountain Mission.

It’s effectiveness in evangelizing the students was seen as successful by the French. As a result, funding was granted to further her “educational” projects.

Marguerite Bourgeoys died in 1700, leaving a legacy of practical and religious “education” for French colonists – and cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.

Following her death, the mission she founded moved from its location on the mountain to join with the Sulpicians at the Sault-au-Recollet.

For 20 years, the religious authorities continued their efforts to evangelize the children of the Nipissing, Kanienkehà:ka and Algonquin First Nations.

The mission would then move to Oka, in the area where Kanestetake exists today.

In 1678, the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel was finally completed after numerous setbacks. A statuette that Marguerite Burgeoys had acquired in France of Our Lady of Perpetual Help was placed in the church as a religious relic.

The chapel would continue to serve the community until a fire broke out in 1754, reducing it to a smoldering ruin.

The colonists claimed a miracle when the statuette acquired by Marguerite Bourgeoys was discovered in the ashes unscathed inside its reliquary.

Just six years later, the city capitulated to British forces, who saw the site of the ruins as an ideal location to construct a barracks. The Sulpician priests intervened and persuaded British authorities that the chapel be rebuilt instead.

In 1771, a new church in the Norman-Gothic style was erected on the foundations of the old ruins and the “miraculous” reliquary and statuette were placed above the entrance on St. Paul Street. With the British in charge of new immigrants arriving from the United Kingdom, Irish and Scots Catholics soon began attending religious services in the church.

In 1831, the little statuette went missing and was presumed stolen along with its jewel-encrusted reliquary. In 1844, the statuette was discovered in one of the attics of the Mother House of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame.

Its reliquary was found in a dusty corner of the chapel 50 years later. It was only in 1988 that the statue was permanently returned to the chapel, now encased in a protective glass.

As the numbers of Irish immigrants rose dramatically, Sulpician authorities decided to build the new Saint Patrick’s Church, inaugurated in 1847. This was the same year that the Irish Famine devastated Montreal. Both Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel and Saint Patrick’s Church were instrumental in providing assistance of over 75,000 typhus-stricken Irish refugees. The shocking details can be read at the Haunted Montreal Blog about the Black Rock (issue 35).

Tragedy occurred on July 11, 1847, when a priest named M. Gottefrey had a terrible accident after tending to the Irish refugees in the fever sheds. According to the Annals of the Grey Nuns:

“On the 11th , M. GOTTEFREY, having to exercise his ministry at the convent, arrived in the evening, probably after returning from the SHEDS. A few of our sisters met him, he told them with his vivacious and joyous humour: “Courage, my dear sisters, the sufferings are short, but the reward is eternal.” In wishing goodnight to the superior whom he found very anxious and preoccupied with her patients, he said to her: “Take care to not kill yourself.” It was 6:30 in the evening. He directed himself towards the Church of Notre-Dame de Bonsecours to be given the Holy Sacrament which he wished to receive as the last rites. Reaching the third floor of the sacristy and wishing to open the door giving passage to a gallery, he forgot, perhaps, or he did not know most probably that we had got rid of this gallery, and since he had made a great effort to open this door which we had taken care to nail shut sufficiently, he rushed into a drop of more than THIRTY feet high. We transported him to the Hotel-Dieu, where it was not long before he expired and went to receive, the palm of the good servants always ready to immolate themselves in the service of the divine Master.”

At the time, Bishop Bourget contracted typhus during the course of his duties and was nearing death. He prayed to the Virgin Mary for a divine intervention to save his life.

He promised that, if spared, he would restore the church as a pilgrimage site, create a new statue to adorn the church and commission a votive painting about the Church’s role during the Famine.

When the bishop survived the epidemic disease, he made good on his promises and commissioned Theophyle Hamel to paint “Le Typhus”, which was installed on the ceiling above the main entrance to the chapel, where it can still be seen today. It depicts the bishop and three orders of nuns tending to the typhus-stricken Irish famine refugees.

At least one American tourist believes the painting is haunted. Indeed, in late 2019, when looking up at the painting she witnessed something incredible. The tourist stated: “In the painting, the typhus victim of the dead man with the child clinging to him suddenly opened his eyes and stared directly at me! I was shocked! I grabbed my phone to snap a photo, but when I looked up his eyes were closed again. And no, I wasn’t taking advantage of Canada’s new legal marijuana laws, if that’s what you are thinking.”

Many tourists have reported paranormal activity within the church and its vicinity. On July 2, 2014, another visitor attending a ghost tour took some strange photos of the church and later wrote:

“While the tour guide was showing us around, I decided to capture moments and took pictures of the buildings and churches. One of the pictures was the Notre Dame De Bon Secours’s windows on the side of the building. I’ve shown the picture to my friends and we were wondering if one of the stained glass on the side of the building had an image of a man. I have attached here the photo and if you zoom in the 2nd window, you will see a man wearing a black tuxedo looking right back at the shooter. We just want to confirm if there really is an image of a man on the window.”

One paranormal expert believes the image is none other than the ghost of M. Gottefrey and that far from wearing a tuxedo, it is his ripped collar in the image, caused by his terrible plunge into the pews.

Another point of interest is the chapel’s maritime connection. It is also known as the “Sailor’s Church” because God-fearing seafarers would pray for safe crossings, trans-Atlantic or otherwise. Another of Bourget’s promises was to install a statue of the Virgin Mary, and in 1848 Charles Dauphin’s “Star of the Sea” was. This inspired a larger statue of The Lady of the Harbour on the rooftop in 1892. She faces the port, flanked by two Angels of the Apocalypse holding trumpets.

There is a fascinating Montreal legend about an apocalyptic and paranormal day when The Lady of the Harbour turned her back on the port, resulting in some serious tragedy. The story can be found in the Haunted Montreal Blog about the Phantom Calèche (issue 37).

Several miniature ex voto ships also hang from the chapel’s ceiling, gifts from thankful seafarers over the years.

Marguerite Bourgeoys became Canada’s first female Saint when she was Canonized on October 31, 1982. The Hallowe’en ceremony at Vatican City was presided by Pope John Paul II.

On the 350th anniversary of Marguerite Bourgeoys’ arrival in Montreal in 2003, celebrations marked the occasion. Two years later, the remains of Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys were placed in the left altar, below the statue of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours. A few weeks after that, the remains of devout recluse Jeanne Le Ber were inserted into the east lateral wall of the chapel.

Le Ber is one of the city’s most devout personalities from the “New France” era. On June 24, 1685, then 18-year-old Le Ber took a simple vow of perpetual seclusion, chastity, and poverty.

Once a recluse, she spent long periods of time below a church altar when not self-flagellating, sewing or praying – right up until her death in 1714. Given her bizarre life of eternal seclusion and repentance, some paranormal experts believe that she too has returned as a spirit.

Today, visitors to the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel can enjoy exploring the church in quietude and examining the exceptional relics, architecture and artworks. It costs nothing to enter.

For a fee, guests can explore the Margueritge Bourgeoys Museum to learn more of the history, climb up to the steeple for a panoramic view, and visit the creepy subterranean crypt.

According to archaeologists, the bodies of several nuns lied buried beneath the crypt. Apparently, they were victims of an epidemic during the New France era and were buried below the first church. There is speculation that they too may haunt the chapel.

With all of the chapel’s storied history, statues, artworks, relics and various human remains, it’s no wonder that Montreal’s oldest church, Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, is also reputed to be its most haunted!

Company News

Haunted Montreal is now in winter mode! For this first time ever, we will be operating year-round with our award-winning Haunted Pub Crawl, every Sunday afternoon.

Private tours are also available for Haunted Griffintown, Haunted Downtown, the Haunted Pub Crawl and our new Paranormal Investigation into the old Saint-Antoine Cemetery, weather-permitting for outside tours.

The Haunted Mountain Ghost Walk is not offered in the winter due to dangerous and icy conditions on the slopes.

Haunted Montreal would like to thank all of our clients who attended a ghost walk, haunted pub crawl or paranormal investigation during the 2019 – 2020 season!

If you enjoyed the experience, we encourage you to spread the word and to write a review on our Tripadvisor page, something that 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 March 13: Réseau Express Métropolitain’s Ghostly Gamble (Part 2)

The Réseau Express Métropolitain recently extracted over a dozen skeletons from the Black Rock Famine cemetery. Many of them were children who had succumbed to typhus. Tragically, they were buried in mass graves after crossing the Atlantic Ocean on “coffin ships”. The REM’s rationale for the exhumation was to install a concrete pylon for its upcoming $6.3 billion electric train network. This act prompted fears that ghosts of the Irish Famine Dead could easily haunt the system. Artists have already begun creating visuals depicting a paranormal station atop the pylon that serves as a disturbing connection between the living and the dead. Part 1 of the blog speculated about some of the ghosts who might infest the REM network. Part 2 offers Haunted Montreal’s innovative and inexpensive solution to try and protect the $6.3 billion electric train system from becoming haunted by Irish Famine ghosts and spirits.

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.

With over 200 documented ghost stories, Montreal is easily the most haunted city in Canada, if not all of North America. Haunted Montreal is dedicated 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) if you wish to receive it every month on the 13th!

Our February blog explores St. Joseph’s Oratory and the alleged hauntings unfolding within the shadowy interior of the gigantic church on the slopes of Westmount.

While Haunted Montreal is in winter mode and will not offer any more public ghost tours until April, 2019, we are pleased to announce our Haunted Pub Crawl is now open for business! Running every Sunday of the year, the tour in English starts at 3 pm and the tour in French is at 4 pm.

Please see our new Haunted Pub Crawl webpage for more details, the full schedule and to buy tickets.

For those seeking ghost walks during our off-season, Haunted Montreal is still offering private tours for company outings, school groups, bachelorette parties and other gatherings of all types. Please contact info@hauntedmontreal.com to organize a private tour for your group. These ghost tours require very warm clothing during the winter months and the Haunted Mountain tour is not offered once there is snow on the ground due to dangerous and icy conditions on Mount Royal / Otsirà:ke. The haunted pub crawl is also available as a private tour.

Haunted Research

Saint Joseph’s Oratory of Mount Royal (Oratoire Saint-Joseph du Mont-Royal in French) is Canada’s largest church and also has one of the largest domes in the world. The magnificent building is a Roman Catholic minor basilica and national shrine and is located on the western slope of Mount Royal’s Westmount Summit. Located at 3800 Queen Mary Road, more than 2 million visitors and pilgrims visit the Oratory every year.

While the basilica is undoubtedly popular with the living, it is also said to attract visitors from beyond the grave. Indeed, according to the French-language Quebec Huffington Post, St. Joseph’s Oratory is on the list of the top 11 most haunted sites in Montreal:

“The famous cathedral where Brother André worked has had several visitors from beyond the tomb apparently. Some tourists have indeed seen priests in tunics, and when they approached them… they evaporated into thin air! In addition, it is said that Brother André himself appears from time to time in the little chapel where his heart is exposed.”

Photographer Chris Koelbleitner captures the spooky atmosphere nicely in his shot called “The Haunting of St Joseph’s Oratory.”  

Before delving into these alleged hauntings, it is important to look at the Oratory’s remarkable story. The basilica is dedicated to Saint Joseph and actually enshrines a statue of him, which was authorised a Canonical coronation by Pope Pius X on 19 March 1910. Saint Joseph can be seen as the saint of everyday life, to whom one turns for help with both minor worries and at life-defining moments. Traditionally, one confides to the care of Saint Joseph issues related to family, work, health, death and material needs. Saint Joseph’s Oratory of Mount Royal is the largest shrine in the world dedicated to him.

The magnificent Saint Joseph’s Oratory also contains a diversity of architectural styles in its cruciform plan, including Beaux-Arts and Italian Renaissance designs. Ironically, an oratory suggests a small place and is defined as a “place of prayer, such as a small chapel or a room for private devotions”. The first small wooden oratory dates from 1904, but it was the seed for what would become the largest church in Canada.

Because the basilica is on the Westmount slope, to reach the Crypt Church and Oratory, visitors and pilgrims can climb one of three parallel flights of 283 concrete steps. Two are for climbing on foot and the other, in the center, is for the more devout. These people must ascend on their knees, uttering a prayer on each and every one of the 283 steps.

Once inside, the Oratory offers a series of dark corridors and candle-lit places of worship, along with dusty relics such as hundreds of abandoned pairs of crutches lining the walls. These serve as evidence of miraculous healings from earlier times, provided by a humble monk who would go on to become a Saint.

One of Montreal’s twelve Saints, Brother André Bessette was believed to possess healing powers through his devotion to Saint Joseph and his application of a special oil ointment to all believers who requested it. Many pilgrims suffering from illnesses, handicaps, blindness, etc. poured into his basilica, including numerous non-Catholics. In many cases, he was able to miraculously heal them through divine prayer to Saint Joseph, whom Brother André credited all of his reported miracles to.

Born Alfred Bessette in 1845 in Mont-St-Gregoire, southeast of Montreal, he was so sickly as a baby that his parents baptized him immediately. They feared he wouldn’t survive, but miraculously he did. Although he was frail and suffered from a permanent stomach ailment, he was very much alive.

After the death of both his parents in 1857, Bessette, then age 12, was taken in by a family in nearby St-Cesaire. His nine brothers and sisters were scattered to live among relatives and friends. Unskilled and illiterate, Bessette drifted from job to job, working as a blacksmith, baker and then a shoemaker.

In 1870, André Bessette entered the novitiate of the Congregation of Holy Cross and took on the name of Brother André. Unimpressed with his frail health and lack of skills, his superiors appointed him to be “doorkeeper, nurse and lamp tender” at the congregation’s Collège Notre-Dame. Located in Côte-des-Neiges, a small village at the time, his duties included running errands, cutting hair and managing the laundry.

The humble Montreal monk said of his time at the college: “My superiors showed me the door, and I stayed there for 40 years.” Despite the fact that he never advanced beyond the most lowly positions within his religious order, Brother André would go on to become the most popular religious figure in Québec in the 20th century.

Brother André’s first miracle occurred in 1877. When his colleague, Brother Alderic, complained of a leg injury, Brother André took a bit of oil from a lamp that was burning in front of a statue of Saint Joseph. He offered it to Brother Alderic and told him to rub it on his aching leg and to pray to Saint Joseph for relief. Miraculously, following the procedure, the leg was completely healed.

The word spread of his healing powers and soon Montrealers of all sorts were lining up to ask Brother André for his assistance. His reputation grew, and before long he was known as the “Miracle worker of Mount-Royal”. Despite facing criticism from numerous adversaries, many of whom called him a “charlatan”, he had the strong support of the diocese. Officials at the Congregation of Holy Cross were impressed with his inexplicable healing powers and wanted him to build a chapel to welcome the sick. Fearing a developer would buy the property across the street from Collège Notre-Dame, in 1896 the Congregation bought land for $10,000 where St. Joseph’s Oratory is today.

In 1904, Brother André established St. Joseph’s Oratory, originally a small, 15-by-18-foot wooden chapel across the street from Collège Notre-Dame. It was built by a colleague named Brother Abundius. 

Within a few years, the original chapel was overwhelmed by visitors, many of them seeking divine cures for medical conditions. Despite expansions, the space was insufficient for the number of guests, so in 1914 work began on St. Joseph’s Crypt Church, which was built into the side of the mountain and inaugurated in 1917 with seating for 1000.

Realizing that they would need even more space, construction of the domed basilica began in 1924. The project was stalled after the stock market crash of 1929, due to a severe worldwide economic depression. Regardless, Brother André continued healing the sick, even as he got older and sicker himself. Plagued by a stomach ailment since birth, his condition began to worsen with old age.

At 91 years old, Brother André died of acute gastric catarrh in the infirmary of Our Lady of Hope convent on January 6, 1937. During his funeral, over million people filed past his coffin to pay their respects. He was interred in an alcove inside the crypt behind the Votive Chapel at Saint Joseph’s Oratory. His tombstone reads: Pauper, servis a humilis (a poor and humble servant).

Prior to his death, Brother André had requested that his heart be preserved as a relic to be used to protect his basilica. In the Catholic faith, bones and other body parts of holy figures are often preserved and kept as relics and placed in reliquaries, often beneath church altars, so worshippers can venerate them.

Unsure at first how to prevent the organ from decomposing, church authorities decided to have Brother André’s heart preserved in a glass urn filled with a formalin solution. It was then displayed to worshippers and pilgrims on a marble pedestal beneath the gigantic, yet unfinished, basilica.

St. Joseph’s Oratory, while still under construction, was inaugurated in 1955, with a seating capacity of 2,200 and a standing room capacity of 10,000. As the construction continued, a religious-themed garden was laid out on the slopes behind the basilica. With the final completion of the Oratory in 1967, the number of pilgrims continued to increase. The Congregation of Holy Cross was proud of its legendary accomplishment.

However, scandal struck on Thursday, March 16, 1973 at about 5 p.m., when thieves broke into the Oratory and swiped Brother Andre’s heart from its pedestal. The clergy broke into a panic when they realized that the sacred relic had gone missing. Some began praying, whereas other called the police.

According to investigators, the theft appeared to be very professional. To retrieve the heart, the thieves had picked three locks to open a steel door and an iron grille. Without attracting the attention of any clerics or security guards, the thieves then chiselled the urn off its marble pedestal and smuggled it out of the basilica undetected.

Before long, an anonymous francophone caller rang up the Journal de Montréal and threatened to destroy the heart unless he was given $50,000. The caller directed the newspaper to a car parked at the corner of Cremazie and Drolet Streets. Inside, a roll of film was located which contained photos of the missing heart. Authorities at the Oratory rejected the demand. With no leads to go on, the police were completely baffled.

After a gruelling 645 days, Brother André’s heart was finally located after police received a tip. Famous lawyer Frank Shoofey directed them to a house in southwest Montreal where officers recovered the heart in a basement.

No arrests were made, and the heart was returned to the Oratory.

Investigative blogger Kristian Gravenor of “Coolopolis” claims to have solved the mystery about the identity of the thieves. According to Gravenor, on the day of the theft, two criminals named Peter Fryer and Bobby Addlin were sitting outside the Condi Tavern with Bobby Matticks of Montreal’s West End Gang. Two of the criminals were about to be given lengthy sentences for robberies and Addlin thought he could barter to reduce their jail time if they had something valuable to exchange.

Later that day, using their skills as professional thieves, they stole Brother André’s heart. Needless to say, ultimately their plan did not work because the Oratory refused to pay the ransom. Eventually, the thieves directed the lawyer to the heart’s whereabouts. Rumours swirled that the thieves either felt guilty for their deed or were actually confronted by the spirit of an angry Brother André, who demanded the return of his heart in order to protect the basilica, as was his original intention.  

Officials at the Oratory decided to place the heart under tighter security, including metal bars to prevent any more robberies. Notably, it is often said that Saint Brother André’s spirit appears from time to time in the little chapel where his heart is again on display. Some speculate that the good Saint returns to guard his heart, providing a sort of holy surveillance, and to ward off any thieves who would dare consider stealing his precious organ again.

For many years, everything returned to normal at the basilica. On October 19, 2004, bells across Montreal tolled when the Oratory held its centennial. All the bells of all the churches on the island of Montreal were meant to ring at 9:00 a.m., though not all churches participated. At 9:05 a.m., the basilica rang its bell in response to the celebration. That year, the Oratory also was designated a National Historic Site of Canada and Canada Post issued a special ‘Saint Joseph’s Oratory, Quebec’ stamp.

However, scandal hit the Oratory again in 2008 when a class-action lawsuit for sexual abuse was formally launched against the Congregation of Holy Cross. A total of 223 victims claimed that they had been sexually molested by over 40 members of the Congregation in their youth. These allegations included perversions at Montreal’s Collège Notre-Dame between 1950 and 2001, where Brother André used to work as doorkeeper.

Despite the brewing scandal, the Oratory had another major celebration in 2010. The Vatican announced that Brother André would be canonized after yet another miracle was attributed to him. A 9-year-old boy in a coma was suffering from severe brain injuries after a cycling accident and he recovered after his family prayed to Brother André. On October 17, Pope Benedict XVI canonized him as Saint Brother André.

Hoping to put the pedophile scandal behind them, in 2013 the Congregation of Holy Cross apologized and paid up to $18 million to compensate 206 victims for abuse that occurred at three of its institutions, including Collège Notre-Dame. Father Jean-Pierre Aumont, Canadian provincial superior of the Congregation of Holy Cross, said in a statement at the time: “Some members of our Congregation have broken their vows and failed in their mission.”

Notably, this class action suit did not include St. Joseph’s Oratory.

A second class action lawsuit, which did name the Oratory along with other Holy Cross institutions, was launched when roughly 40 more alleged victims came forward after hearing other men share their horror stories through the 2013 lawsuit. The Oratory was included in the new lawsuit amid allegations that some of the abuse occurred there. One of the complainants, who went on to become a famous organist, recalled being sexually molested at the Oratory by sisters, priests and even his music teacher, starting at 8 years old.

According to the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, there could be up to 500 more victims who were assaulted between the 1940s and 1980s. Holy Cross ran dozens of orphanages, schools, and colleges where abuse was known and covered up.

The newer lawsuit was first rejected by Quebec Superior Court in 2015, but then allowed to move forward by the Quebec Court of Appeal. The case, now before the Supreme Court of Canada, is called “L’Oratoire Saint-Joseph du Mont-Royal v. J. J.“

If more than 40 of the Congregation members were molesting children since the 1940s, it seems almost certain that sexual abuse was rampant and systemic within the Congregation of Holy Cross before then, raising questions about how much Saint Brother André knew about these perverse activities during his tenure at Collège Notre-Dame and the Oratory. Whether or not this will be investigated, the scandal still threatens to undo the prestige of Saint Brother André, including his 2010 canonization and all of his holy and miraculous deeds.

Returning to the alleged hauntings at the Oratory, as noted by the Huffington Post, some tourists have reported seeing mysterious priests wearing tunics, and when they approached them, the priests suddenly evaporated into thin air.

According to one witness: “When I saw a group of several priests wearing old-style tunics wandering through the Basilica, I thought there was some sort of ritual going on. They were moving as though in some sort of procession or ceremony, and many of them held candles. When I went to get a closer look, they all just evaporated into thin air, like the smoke of incense. I couldn’t believe my eyes!”

Rumours suggest that this group of vanishing priests dates back to earlier times in the Basilica’s history, long before it was wracked with open scandal. Indeed, one of the victims represented by the lawsuit said he wouldn’t be surprised if the ghosts in tunics comprise a gang of pedophile priests who never left the Oratory, but haunt it as a way of paying for their deranged sins.

Whatever the case, staff at the Oratory do not like discussing these shameful issues, preferring less controversial topics, such as the $80-million renovation the Oratory is currently undergoing. This will include a new 360-degree Montreal observatory at the top of the basilica that will be home to “the highest window in Montreal,” as well as a welcome center and a new illuminated pavilion aimed at attracting pedestrians.

Work is expected to be completed in 2020.

Perhaps to distract the media from all the bad press, during the Christmas Season in 2018, the Oratory featured an unorthodox Nativity Scene that was described as everything from “hipster” and “avant-garde” to “ridiculous” and even “blasphemous”. The Three Wise Men, riding Segways, delivered Amazon Prime boxes while other characters stared into smartphones. In other nods to the 21st century, Mary was holding a cup of Starbucks coffee and a cow devoured gluten-free feed.

The unsubtle message was that with all of these consumer distractions, none of the characters in the scene were paying any attention to Baby Jesus.

Today, as one of the most allegedly haunted sites in Montreal, the Oratory has a lot to offer. With so much history, some of it wonderful and some of it beyond disgusting, it gives the visitor pause to reflect on how both good and evil can simultaneously exist in religious settings. As such, St. Joseph’s Oratory, with all its dark, candle-lit chambers and creepy relics of the past is a perfect spot to search for ghosts and spirits, whether they be a group of vanishing priests in tunics or one of Montreal’s controversial twelve Saints.

Company News

After much research and hard work, Haunted Montreal launched our new Haunted Pub Crawl on Sunday, February 10!

Led by a professional ghost storyteller, the Haunted Montreal Pub Crawl visits four haunted bars. Starting at Charlie’s American Pub in Downtown Montreal on Bishop Street, guests not only learn about many of the haunted drinking establishments in the city, but also hear Montreal’s most infamous ghost stories.

While sipping suds, guests enjoy haunted pubs, spine-tingling Montreal ghost stories and learn about the historical forces that transformed the ancient Indigenous island of Tiotà:ke into Ville-Marie, an austere French colony founded by Catholic evangelists.

After the British invaded, the city became a booming financial center and crime hub, a site of violent rebellion and subversive revolution and finally into Canada’s most haunted city.

Clients hear the paranormal tales behind Charlie’s American Pub, the recently-burned John Doe Pub, mysterious McKibbin’s Irish Pub, the famous Sir Winston Churchill, funeral-home-cum-discotheque Club Le Cinq and, of course, Hurley’s Irish Pub, where a ghost known only as the Burning Lady haunts the establishment.

The ghost storyteller regales guests with Montreal’s most deranged and infamous ghost stories, including Simon McTavish, a Scottish fur baron known to toboggan down the slopes of Mount Royal in his own coffin, the ghost of John Easton Mills, Montreal’s Martyr Mayor who perished while tending to typhus-stricken Irish refugees during the Famine of 1847, and Headless Mary, the ghost of a Griffintown prostitute who was decapitated by her best friend in the shantytown in 1879. She returns every 7 years to the corner of William and Murray Streets, still looking for her head!

Join Haunted Montreal on this unforgettable pub crawl, where you can drink some spirits with a spirit, all the while learning about the city’s deranged history and hearing spine-tingling local ghost stories!

For full details, including a description, the starting location and schedule, please visit our new webpage! Join us at 3 pm any Sunday of the year for a haunted pub crawl in English or at 4 pm in French! Tickets are now on sale!

Haunted Montreal also offers private tours and pub crawls for company outings, school groups, bachelorette parties and all types of gatherings. Please contact info@hauntedmontreal.com to organize a private tour.

We are also pleased to promote a new book called Macabre Montreal.

Written by Mark Leslie and Shayna Krishnasamy, it is a “collection of ghost stories, eerie encounters, and gruesome and ghastly true stories from the second most populous city in Canada.

The authors write:

“Montreal is a city steeped in history and culture, but just beneath the pristine surface of this world-class city lie unsettling stories. Tales shared mostly in whispered tones about eerie phenomena, dark deeds, and disturbing legends that take place in haunted buildings, forgotten graveyards, and haunted pubs. The dark of night reveals a very different city behind its beautiful European-style architecture and cobblestone streets. A city with buried secrets, alleyways that echo with the footsteps of ghostly spectres, memories of ghastly events, and unspeakable criminal acts.”

With the introduction written by Haunted Montreal, Macabre Montreal is a must-read for anyone interested in Montreal’s dark side.

Haunted Montreal would also like to thank all of our clients who attended a ghost walk during the 2018 season or more recently!

If you enjoyed the experience, we encourage you to write a review on our Tripadvisor page, something that helps Haunted Montreal to market its tours. If you have any feedback, please email us at info@hauntedmontreal.com so we can improve our visitor experience.

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

Coming up on March 13: The Grey Man

Sara Hart-Snowbell remembers her childhood, growing up with her four brothers and sisters, in a haunted house on St. Urbain Street in the Mile-End. Located between Fairmount and St. Viateur streets, from the mid 1940’s to the mid 1950’s, Sara’s family had to endure invisible hands grabbing them, ghostly rectangular lights appearing, flying knives, restless spirits and a mysterious and shadowy “Grey Man”. While the family moved out when Sara was 12, some members are still troubled by memories of the haunted house they lived in so many decades ago.

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 Abbot 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).

Haunted Research

Tourists wandering around Montreal’s Place-des-Arts area are often struck by an old, Neo-Gothic stone church with a striking red roof, seemingly out of place among the more modern architecture in the vicinity. With its rugged look and ecclesiastical vocation,  St. John the Evangelist Church is definitely an anomaly in the bustling new Entertainment District. Erected in 1878, the venerable Red Roof Church is certainly the oldest building in the area, which is presently undergoing a 21st Century construction boom.

As glossy new theatres, cinemas and performances venues go up, St. John the Evangelist Church remains firmly planted on the corner of St. Urbain Street and President Kennedy Avenue. It is both an architectural reminder of an earlier era and a fully-functioning Anglo-Catholic Church, which continues to serve its congregation and operate a drop-in center for the needy. What the tens of thousands of tourists streaming past during the festival season likely don’t realize is that the Red Roof Church has long been rumoured to be haunted.

The hauntings, however, are extremely unusual: they are benign. Interestingly enough, instead of unsettling cold spots and other unpleasant paranormal activities manifesting themselves, the spirit haunting the church is said to be very gentle. Indeed, “warm spots” are known to surface on occasion, comforting the parishioners lucky enough to experience one. The feeling, according to one church-goer, is not unlike “being embraced by a loved one.”

St. John the Evangelist Church is unique in Montreal. Built from 1877-1878, dedicated in 1878, and consecrated in 1905, the Red Roof Church was designed by architect William Tutin Thomas, in consultation with Rector Edmund Wood, the founder of the parish. Wood had studied churches in England and his vision was central to the construction of St. John the Evangelist.

The style of the Victorian church is perhaps best described as “slum Gothic”, originally developed for the poor Ritualist parishes of London, England. Described as “muscular” and “big-boned”, the church was designed to be sensible and restrained on the outside, but robust in decoration and capable of “advanced ritual” inside. With services offered in Latin, a pipe organ and choir, and billowing incense, the Anglo-Catholic Church, or “High Church”, caters to those who have sometimes-controversial beliefs and practices within Anglicanism. Emphasizing the Catholic heritage of the Anglican religion and the differing identities of various churches, Anglo-Catholicism embraces ancient Catholic rituals such as Solemn High Mass, Solemn Evensong and Benediction. Some controversial worshippers also hope that the Anglican and Catholic churches will eventually reconcile and merge together.

The church’s founder, Edmund Wood, was undoubtedly a remarkable man. Born in 1830 to a scholarly family in the south of England, he followed in his family footsteps as a devoted student. Following stints at schools in Brighton and London, Wood was admitted into the Ivy League at St John’s College, Oxford, in 1849. However, due to financial constraints within his family, he was quickly transferred to the less expensive University College in Durham, shattering his original dream to receive a world-class education. According to Wood, this unexpected situation caused “a wound which time will never wholly heal”. However, Wood ploughed through his studies and received his B.A. in 1854 and M.A. in 1857. He also became involved in Durham’s Anglican High Church, where he was made a deacon in 1855. He paid particular attention to the plight of poor and disadvantaged coal miners, which led to accusations of “popery” from some parishioners and raised the ire of his local bishop. Meanwhile, his family emigrated to Lower Canada and his father died in Montreal in 1857. Wood decided to follow his family and arrived in Montreal in November, 1858.

Montreal Anglican Bishop Francis Fulford immediately put Edmund Wood in charge of ministering to the poor in the south-eastern part of the parish, a vocation he would continue for the remainder of his life. Wood excelled at his work and showed a lot of empathy for the less fortunate, however the original centre for his mission work was far from ideal. At first, Wood had to contend with working from an old stone mortuary chapel in the Protestant Burying Ground (today the location of the Complexe Guy-Favreau). Bishop Fulford, with the assistance of John Samuel McCord, granted permission to use the homely and decrepit building. The first day Wood and Bishop Fulford opened the mortuary door, they were nearly overpowered by the stench of decay. The Bishop, his nostrils twitching, remarked, “Do you not think, Wood, a little incense would be appropriate?”

Edmund Wood was not discouraged. The creepy mortuary was opened for church services and seats were provided free of charge. Wood’s pastoral work concentrated on the poor, prompting the congregation to grow quickly in size. Before long, there were twice as many people sitting outside, among the tombstones, as there were inside the mortuary.

Wood, a lover of elaborate theatrical rituals, impressed his parishioners with the first choral evensong in Montreal, if not in Canada, on Christmas Eve in 1859. In 1860, he opened a school and assumed the role of teacher and headmaster.

In July, 1861, Bishop Fulford ordained Edmund Wood as an Anglican priest, laying the foundations for his future work overseeing the construction and administration of St. John the Evangelist Church.

That same year Wood founded Canada’s first Anglo-Catholic parish and the first Anglican “free seat” church in Montreal. The old system involved renting out pews, which provided income for the church but also allowed wealthy citizens to purchase the best seats. In replacing the pews with chairs, Wood advocated that the rich and poor should sit together at Church and worship as equals before God.

By 1874, the mortuary was deemed too small. A lot was purchased at Saint-Urbain and Ontario Streets, and Edmund Wood got to work planning and overseeing his dream church. After many years of meticulous work, St. John the Evangelist Church was finally opened for worship on March 6, 1878.

Wood instituted weekly and daily choral services and the ceremony of the liturgy was enhanced through a surplice-clad choir, altar candles, and a prominent cross erected on the altar.

Wood’s love of the ritualistic would eventually lead to a conflict with Reverend Ashton Oxenden, Fulford’s replacement as Bishop in 1869. Oxenden was unhappy with the “mode of conducting the ritual of public worship in one of our churches,” and tangled with Reverend Wood over his unorthodox approach to the Anglican religion. Wood, never a person to compromise his ideals, responded with a publication entitled “The catholic and tolerant character of the Church of England”.

By the 1880s, Wood’s reputation had solidified as an excellent spiritual counsellor, a passionate proponent of the use of music and ceremony to enhance the liturgy, and an initiator of a daily Eucharist in Church. Wood had successfully subdued his religious adversaries while attracting thousands of followers. Frederick George Scott, assistant master at the school Wood founded from 1884–85, suggested, “There is no church in Canada that has not learned something from the standard of worship set by Father Wood.”

When the great Rector Edmund Wood died in 1909, the city felt his loss keenly. A compassionate and selfless man, Wood was sorely missed. Bishop John Cragg Farthing began an address to his synod the following year by stating: “In the death of Mr. Wood, the Canadian Church lost one of her best known and most honoured priests. Such a life as his is witness to the fact that sacrifice alone is fruitful.”

During the church’s history, there have been many reports of benign hauntings inside the building. Parishioners speculate that the ghost might be that of the church’s selfless founder, Rector Edmund Wood. The spirit of the good rector is rumoured to still visit the Red Roof Church now and again to check up on the congregation. The ghost is not regarded as sinister, but rather is seen as a happy reminder that the church’s first patron, a passionate and visionary man, who still appears to be involved in the ministry.

According to a Montreal Gazette article from October 26, 1985, the church has been haunted since 1909, the year Rector Edmund Wood died. The article cities the rector of the era, Canon Humphrey Slattery, who believed that Wood still visited the church sometimes, but that there was nothing sinister about it. On one occasion, Slattery was alone and praying at the altar when he heard someone enter the church and take a seat. The rector began to pray aloud, expecting a response from the worshipper, however nobody responded. When he turned around to see who was sitting there, he realized that the chair was empty and he was still alone.

“It’s a presence,” claimed Slattery “There’s a feeling about the church…and sometimes it is intensified.” He went on to conclude: “It’s not a bad feeling at all,” explaining that both clergymen and parishioners have experienced Wood’s presence at the church since his death in 1909. One standing joke, according to Slattery, occurs when objects such as keys or documents go missing for short periods of time. Those seeking the lost items often claim: “Father Wood must have taken them.”

Furthermore, those attending or visiting the church have sometimes experienced comforting warm sensations. According to a theology student named Stephanie Rendino: “The only public building that I know is haunted in town is St. John the Evangelist Church.  That’s the one with the red roof behind Place-Des-Arts metro.  The founder, Fr. Edmund Wood, still visits now and again, manifesting with a warm spot as opposed to a cold spot.”

While in many churches the idea of a clergyman becoming a ghost might be seen as sacrilegious, at St. John the Evangelist Church there is no scandal. Indeed, in 1985 Rector Slattery stated: “We believe in the communion of souls so it’s not out of order to realize that the world we live in is full of spirits of those who have gone before.”

Today, the Red Roof Church is making an effort to fit in to the Quartier des Spectacles. Presently overseen by a rector named Fr. Keith Schmidt, the church continues to offer ritualistic religious services in Latin, English and French. St. Michael’s Mission offers free art classes every Thursday. Recognized for its heritage by the Conseil du Patrimoine religieux du Québec, the church has also appeared alongside Nick Nolte in the 1997, Academy Award-winning film “Affliction”, and was featured in the Quebec science-fiction television series “Dans une galaxie près de chez vous”.

The church also rents out the building for various workshops, film-screenings and spectacles. It would appear, to the satisfaction of artists, that censorship is not an issue. For example, the Pop Montreal Festival advertised a film screening of “The Omen” at the Red Roof Church as a “Midnight Mass Church Screening.” They described the horror film as being about “the pint-sized spawn of Satan wreaking havoc over a powerful political family certainly contributed to its status as one of the greatest horror films of all time.” Furthermore, the screening was co-organized with The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, a non-profit endeavour whereby “established horror writers, directors, scholars and programmers/curators celebrate horror history and culture while helping enthusiastic fans of the genre to gain a critical perspective.” Named after the fictional university in American horror master H.P. Lovecraft’s literary oeuvre, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, despite its dark mandate, was most welcome to use St. John the Evangelist Church for their activities.

It is unknown whether or not the spirit of Edmund Wood visits when non-church activities are taking place, such as horror workshops and movie screenings. Those familiar with the ghost probably wouldn’t be surprised if the good rector did make an appearance: not only was Edmund Wood a fan of the theatrical, but he also insisted that absolutely everyone would be welcome in his church, a tradition that continues to this very day.

Company News

Haunted Montreal’s public season of ghost walks is now over for the winter months, but private bookings for groups of 10+ are still available for all of our tours. For more information or to see which times and dates are available, please contact info@hauntedmontreal.com.

Haunted Montreal is expanding for the 2016 season. Our goals are to reconfigure our website in order to improve it, to create a new box office system, to hire more actors and to have all of our tours available in both English and French. We plan to open our 2016 public season of ghost walks in May.

For clients who attended a ghost walk, we invite you to write a review on our Tripadvisor page, something that is very helpful for Haunted Montreal in promoting its tours.

For those reading the blog who want to stay updated and receive a new Montreal ghost story on the 13th of every month, please sign up to our mailing list.

Coming up on April 13: La Cinémathèque québécoise

Montreal’s hip Quartier Latin neighbourhood plays host to numerous theatres, cinemas and cultural and educational facilities. Located in an old Catholic elementary school, La Cinémathèque québécoise is a government-funded film library that screens movies which were usually made in Quebec. A popular cinematic diversion in a bustling area, the facility is enjoyed by thousands of local cinephiles and tourists every year. However, despite the cinema’s jovial atmosphere, there are persistent rumours that the building is haunted by the ghost of a little girl. Janitors have reported seeing her on many occasions, and in 2005, the girl’s spirit was spotted by an employee in one of the projection booths, clutching a stack of school books. Could the ghost be one of the school’s former students, and if so, why is she haunting the building?

Donovan King is a historian, teacher 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 Abbot College), BFA (Drama-in-Education, Concordia), B.Ed (History and English Teaching, McGill) and MFA (Theatre Studies, University of Calgary).canadienne a perdu l’un de ses prêtres les plus connus et les plus honorés. Une vie telle que la sienne est le témoin que seul le sacrifice est fructueux. »

Au cours de l’histoire de l’église, il y a eu de nombreux rapports de hantises bénignes à l’intérieur du bâtiment. Les paroissiens pensent que le fantôme pourrait être celui du fondateur désintéressé de l’église, le révérend Edmund Wood. L’esprit du bon recteur est réputé visiter l’église au toit rouge, encore et toujours pour veiller sur la congrégation. Le fantôme n’est pas considéré comme sinistre, mais il est vu plutôt comme un rappel heureux du premier patron de l’église, un homme passionné et visionnaire, qui semblerait toujours être impliqué dans le ministère.

Selon un article de la Gazette de Montréal du 26 octobre 1985, l’église serait hantée depuis 1909, l’année ou le révérend Edmund Wood mourut. L’article cite le révérend de l’époque,  Canon Humphrey Slattery, qui croyait que Wood visitait toujours l’église de temps en temps mais qu’il n’y avait rien de sinistre là-dedans. À une occasion, Slattery était seul et priait à l’autel quand il entendit quelqu’un rentrer dans l’église et s’asseoir. Le révérend commença alors à prier à haute voix, espérant une réponse de l’adorateur mais personne ne répondit. Quand il se retourna pour voir qui était assis là, il se rendit compte que la chaise était libre et qu’il était toujours seul.

« C’est une présence » affirma Slattery « Il y a une atmosphère dans l’église… et des fois elle est plus intense. » Il en est venu à la conclusion : « Ce n’est pas une mauvaise sensation du tout, » expliquant qu’autant les membres du clergé que les paroissiens avaient expérimenté la présence de Wood dans l’église depuis sa mort en 1909. Une blague, selon Slattery, circule quand des objets tels que des clés ou des documents viennent à manquer pour une courte période de temps. Ceux qui recherchent les objets perdus affirment souvent : « Père Wood a dû les prendre. »

En outre, ceux qui vont à l’église ou qui la visitent ont parfois expérimenté des sensations chaudes et réconfortantes.  Selon une étudiante en théologie du nom de Stephanie Rendino : « Le seul bâtiment public de la ville que je sais être hanté est l’église évangélique St. John. C’est celle avec un toit rouge derrière le métro Place des Arts. Le fondateur, le Père Edmund Wood, visite encore et toujours l’église, se manifestant avec des zones chaudes par opposition aux zones froides. »

Alors que dans beaucoup d’église l’idée qu’un ecclésiastique devienne un fantôme pourrait être considérée comme un sacrilège, à l’église évangélique St. John, il n’y a pas de scandale. En effet, en 1985, le révérend Slattery a déclaré : « Nous croyons à la communion des âmes donc il n’est pas hors de propos de réaliser que le monde dans lequel nous vivons est plein d’esprits de ceux qui sont partis plus tôt. »

Aujourd’hui, l’église au toit rouge fait des efforts pour s’intégrer dans le Quartier des Spectacles. Actuellement supervisée par un révérend nommé Père Keith Schmidt, l’église continue d’offrir des services religieux ritualisés en latin, en anglais et en français. La Mission St. Michael offre gratuitement des cours d’art tous les jeudis. Reconnue pour son patrimoine par le Conseil du Patrimoine religieux du Québec, l’église est aussi apparue aux côtés de Nick Nolte dans le film qui a reçu de l’académie le prix du meilleur film en 1997 « Affliction » et a fait une apparition dans la série télévisée de science-fiction « Dans une galaxie près de chez vous ».

L’église loue également le bâtiment pour divers ateliers, projections de films et spectacles. Il semblerait, au grand bonheur des artistes, que la censure ne soit pas un problème. Par exemple, le festival Pop Montréal a annoncé le visionnement du film « The Omen » dans l’église au toit rouge comme une « projection sur l’autel d’une église sur le coup de minuit. »  Ils ont dit que le film d’horreur traitant « d’un suppôt de Satan haut comme trois pommes causant la déchéance d’une famille influente de politiciens – a certainement contribué à en faire un des plus grands films d’horreur de tous les temps. » En outre, le visionnement fut co-organisé avec l’Institut Miskatonic d’études sur le fantastique, une organisation sans but lucratif selon lequel «des essayistes, des réalisateurs, des chercheurs et des programmeurs/commissaires reconnus dans le domaine du fantastique et de l’horreur qui célèbrent l’histoire et la culture du fantastique tout en aidant les amateurs du genre à aborder cet univers d’un point de vue critique. » Nommée après l’université fictive dans l’œuvre littéraire du maître de l’horreur américain H. P. Lovercraft, l’Institut Miskatonic d’études sur le fantastique, en dépit de son mandat sombre, était plus que bienvenue à utiliser l’église évangélique St. John pour ses activités.

Personne ne sait si l’esprit d’Edmund Wood visite l’église quand aucune activité religieuse n’a lieu, comme lors des ateliers  et des projections de films. Ceux qui sont familiers avec les fantômes ne seraient probablement pas surpris si le bon révérend faisait une apparition : non seulement Edmund Wood était un fan de théâtre mais il insistait également sur le fait qu’absolument tout le monde était le bienvenue dans son église, une tradition qui continue encore à ce jour.

Haunted Nouvelles

La programmation grand public des tours de fantômes de Haunted Montréal est suspendue pour la période hivernale mais des réservations privées pour les groupes de 10 personnes ou plus sont toujours possibles pour chacun de nos tours. Pour plus d’information ou pour voir quelles sont les dates et horaires disponibles, veuillez nous écrire à info@hauntedmontreal.com.

Durant les prochains mois et en vue de la saison 2016, Haunted Montréal prévoit d’évoluer. Notre objectif est de reconfigurer notre site Internet afin de l’améliorer et d’y intégrer un nouveau système de réservation, mais aussi d’engager davantage d’acteurs et d’offrir tous nos tours aussi bien en français qu’en anglais. Nous projetons d’offrir notre programmation grand public 2016 des tours de fantômes dès le mois de mai.

Nous invitons les clients qui auraient participé à un tour de fantômes à écrire un commentaire sur notre page TripAdvisor qui s’avère très utile à Haunted Montréal dans la promotion de ses tours.

Pour ceux qui lisent pour la première fois le blogue et qui souhaiteraient rester à l’affût des dernières nouvelles et recevoir le 13 de chaque mois une nouvelle histoire de fantômes se rapportant à Montréal, veuillez-vous inscrire à notre liste d’envoi.

À venir le 13 avril : La Cinémathèque québécoise

Le Quartier Latin, quartier huppé de Montréal accueille de nombreux théâtres, cinémas et institutions culturelles et éducationnelles. Située dans une ancienne école élémentaire catholique, la Cinémathèque québécoise est une bibliothèque de films financée par le gouvernement qui projette essentiellement les films qui ont été réalisés au Québec. Distraction populaire de ce quartier animé, l’établissement est fréquenté par des milliers de cinéphiles et de touristes chaque année. Cependant, en dépit de l’atmosphère joviale qui règne dans le cinéma, il y a plusieurs rumeurs persistantes selon lesquelles  le bâtiment serait hanté par le fantôme d’une petite fille.  Les concierges ont rapporté l’avoir vue à plusieurs reprises et, en 2005, l’esprit de la jeune fille a été repéré par un employé dans l’une des cabines de projection, serrant une pile de livres scolaires. Le fantôme serait-il celui de l’une des anciennes élèves de l’école? et si oui, pourquoi hante-t-elle le bâtiment?

Donovan King est historien, professeur et acteur professionnel. Fondateur de Haunted Montréal, il coordonne ses talents pour créer les meilleures histoires de fantômes possibles, que ce soit dans la qualité rédactionnelle ou dans la performance théâtrale. Donovan King détient un DEC en Interprétation théâtrale (Collège John Abbot), un Baccalauréat en arts appliqués (Arts dramatiques en éducation, Université Concordia), un Baccalauréat en éducation (Enseignement de l’histoire et de l’anglais, Université McGill) et une Maîtrise en arts appliqués (Études théâtrales, Université de Calgary).