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

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!

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

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

Private tours for all of our experiences (including outdoor tours) can be booked at any time based on the availability of our actors. Clients can request any date, time, language and operating tour. These tours start at $170 for small groups of up to 7 people.

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

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

Our Virtual Ghost Tour is also available on demand!

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

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

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

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

Haunted Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Jeff:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff added:

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

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

He feels threatened now.

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

Upon reflection, Jeff concluded:

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

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

Company News

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

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

Private tours for any of our experiences (including outdoor tours) can be booked at any time based on the availability of our actors. Clients can request any date, time, language and operating tour. These tours are based on the availability of our actors and start at $170 for small groups of up to 7 people.

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

We’re also launching our newest haunted experience:

You can bring the Haunted Montreal experience to your office Christmas party, house party school or event by booking one of our Travelling Ghost Storytellers today. Hear some of the spookiest tales from our tours and our blog told by a professional actor and storyteller. You provide the venue, we provide the stories and storyteller. Find out more and then contact info@hauntedmontreal.com

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

Please like, subscribe and hit the bell!

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

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

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

Purchases can be ordered through our online store.

Haunted Montreal would like to thank all of our clients who attended a ghost walk, haunted pub crawl, paranormal investigation or virtual event during the 2022 season!

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

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

Coming up on January 13: Place Viger

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

Author:

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

Translator (into French):

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

With over 450 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!

We are also thrilled to announce that with new public health measures in place, we have re-booted all of our outdoor haunted experiences:

Haunted Downtown Ghost Walk

Haunted Mountain Ghost Walk

Haunted Griffintown Ghost Walk

Paranormal Investigation in the Old Sainte Antoine Cemetery

We are also offering our Virtual Ghost Tour on demand!

Both public and private sessions are available!

Last but not least, we have opened an online store for those interested in Haunted Montreal merchandise. More details are below in our Company News section!

This month we examine a poltergeist in Côte-Saint-Luc based on a first person account by a man named Jeff. After a decade of living in his apartment, in October 2019 the poltergeist suddenly appeared and started its shenanigans.

Haunted Research

In June 2021, Jeff contacted Haunted Montreal regarding poltergeist activity in his apartment. He provided many examples of things moving on their own, turning on and off and generally behaving strangely, despite the fact that they are inanimate objects.

Jeff wrote: “I am prepared to sign a sworn statement stating that all of the events described have actually happened.”

Jeff moved into his Côte-Saint-Luc apartment in 2009, which is located near Cavendish Mall.

However, he did not experience any paranormal activity until a decade later. In 2019, it would appear that a poltergeist either moved in or woke up from a long period of inactivity.

A poltergeist, also known as a “noisy ghost”, tends to play tricks such as moving things around, turning lights on and off, adjusting the heat of stove burners and other bizarre activities.

Since the paranormal activity began, strange events have been happening in the apartment, with each event spaced about a month or two apart.

According to Jeff, it all started with a rubber band that started teleporting:

“A rubber band wrapped around the kitchen garbage pail (to hold the garbage bag) disappeared from the pail and reappeared around the corner on the dining room carpet. This happened a couple of times. On another occasion, that same rubber band disappeared from the pail and reappeared wrapped around the middle of an empty oat-milk container placed next to the pail for recycling. On another day, the same thing happened with a tissue box placed next to the pail.”

Jeff continued with more examples of paranormal activity in his kitchen:

“While I was doing the dishes after lunch, I felt something fall on my feet. I looked down and saw that it was a small towel. The thing is, this particular individually identifiable towel had been stored in a kitchen cabinet behind a closed door, a few feet away from me. It seems to have teleported from there to just above my feet, where it fell.”

Another time, Jeff was frying some cheese blintzes on a low heat. Just before he was about to take them off the stove, he noticed that they looked underdone, so he decided to turn the burner control knob to a higher setting. As he was about to do so, he noticed that the control knob had been turned to the “off” setting. It seemed to him that the poltergeist had turned off the burner because he didn’t.

It seems that the poltergeist also likes to play with the dish rack. Once, Jeff had placed a drinking glass upside-down on the dish rack to dry, but when Jeff glanced at it a few minutes later it was right-side up.

In another case, a round-tipped metal knife from the kitchen drawer appeared in the dish rack, lying flat. Also, a small pot and a dessert bowl that had been put away the night before reappeared on the dish rack by themselves the following morning.

There was also the time Jeff had finished a container of Mrs. Dash salt substitute. He unscrewed the top, rinsed out the container and lid, and put both next to the kitchen garbage pail, side by side, for recycling.

Then, Jeff went shopping.

When he came back, the lid had been screwed back onto the container.

Finally, a disposable aluminum candle holder moved fifteen feet by itself from the kitchen pantry, where it was stored, to the top of the middle stem of a candelabra in the dining room.

In the dining room, a picture fell off the wall with the hanging loop unbroken and the nail in the wall intact. The dining room radio (not a clock radio) has been known to turn itself on, and once during suppertime, the lamp in the ceiling turned on by itself.

The paranormal activity also happens in the bathroom. In one case, a toilet paper holder popped out of its receptacle by itself, untouched, while Jeff watched. Another day, Jeff bought a new plug for the bathroom sink and cut off the chain completely from the plug’s ring, since he didn’t need it. The next morning, a single loop of the chain had reappeared on the plug’s ring.

On another occasion, the bathroom medicine cabinet door slid open by itself while Jeff’s back was turned – he heard a sliding sound before turning around to see it open.

Jeff provided many more examples of paranormal activity all over his apartment, from the living room and dining room to even near his garbage chute. He continues to update Haunted Montreal as to the latest happenings.

When asked who or what Jeff thinks it haunting his home, he mentioned receiving a gum bone graft with real bone a month or so before the poltergeist activity began in the Fall of 2019. Jeff speculates that perhaps the deceased person from whom the bone was taken is haunting him.

Another theory is that it could be his deceased father, who passed away in 2013 and whose picture Jeff looks at every morning to remember him.

Jeff said: “Poltergeist activity raises fundamental questions about reality,” asking “what does it all mean?”

Jeff believes that that the Universe is not physical, but mental; that reality consists only of our consciousness, and we are having a collective dream. He feels that poltergeist activity could not occur in a physical universe, but it could occur in a mental universe where “we are dreaming the whole thing up”.

As such, Jeff has no plans for an exorcism of the poltergeist that is plaguing his home. Indeed, he finds the poltergeist experience fascinating.

Company News

Haunted Montreal is thrilled to announce that we have re-booted all of our outdoor haunted experiences:

The Haunted Downtown Ghost Walk

The Haunted Mountain Ghost Walk

The Haunted Griffintown Ghost Walk

Paranormal Investigation in the Old Sainte Antoine Cemetery

Both public and private tours are available!

For private tours, clients can request any date, time, language and operating tour. These tours are based on the availability of our actors and start at $170 for small groups of up to 8 people.

Email info@hauntedmontreal.com for more information about how to book a private tour!

We are also offering our Virtual Ghost Tour on demand in both English and French.

Please spread the word to those who might be interested in a Haunted Montreal experience!

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

Purchases can be ordered through our online store: shop.hauntedmontreal.com

Haunted Montreal would like to thank all of our clients who attended a ghost walk, haunted pub crawl, paranormal investigation or virtual event during the 2020 – 2021 season!

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.

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 September 13: Old Windsor Hotel

Montreal’s old Windsor Hotel was once the most palatial lodging in all of Canada and hosted numerous celebrities over the decades. It was also the site of an unusual occurrence in December, 1881, when celebrated American writer and wit Mark Twain was on a lecture tour. He had the only paranormal experience in his life while staying at the old Windsor Hotel.

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.

Haunted Research

Located in the McGill Ghetto, Sainte-Famille Street is a rare beauty. The bucolic, tree-lined streetscape features stunning Victorian architecture and blissful quietude. Maple, oak, lilac, ginko, and cedar trees overshadow small garden plots bursting with flowers.

At the northern end of the street sits the beautiful, historic chapel of the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital. It almost seems like a utopian oasis quaintly tucked into an urban environment.

However, a paranormal mystery has long-plagued this exquisite street. Since the summer of 1929, mysterious knots have been appearing in one of the homes, tying up curtains and bedsheets and the like. According to various reports, some residents blame the unsolved mystery on a poltergeist.

Apparently the poltergeist was first detected in 1929 on the section of Sainte-Famille Street located between Prince Arthur Street and Pine Avenue. With rumours swirling on the internet, there are many different versions of the tale. Some place the home on Prince Arthur Street, but more trusted sources have it located on Sainte-Famille.

So intriguing was the tale of the poltergeist to author Pat Hancock, that in 2003 she decided to research and write a version of the story, entitled “Nightmare Knots”. Written for Scholastic Books, the story is featured in Haunted Canada 1.

In Hancock’s version of the tale, a young family living on Sainte-Famille Street became distraught in 1929 when knots began appearing in their towels, curtains and various other items in their home: “in sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths and dishtowels, in socks, shirts, dresses and trousers.” Before long, everything that could be knotted was tied into small, tight knots.

The family was frantic and unsure whether it was all the work of a practical joker or something more sinister. The parents began spying on the children and then on each other, but were unable to find any logical answer as to who was tying the cursed knots. Embarrassed and confused, they did not want the bizarre story to reach the general public.

However, a journalist somehow learned about the story and attempted to interview the parents, who insisted on complete anonymity in the final publication. At the end of their wits, the parents contacted religious authorities and asked for some priests to come and bless their home. Two priests arrived from St. Patrick’s Church and attempted to exorcise the spirit, but unfortunately they were unsuccessful.

One family member told the journalist: “The spiritualists who came there said that somebody must have cast a spell on the place.”  As a last resort the family finally called the cops.

When the police arrived, they were perplexed and did not understand how the knots could have appeared. They searched the home, top to bottom, and interviewed all members of the family separately. One officer thought he detected a foul odor in the basement, raising suspicions that a body had been buried there, which might have accounted for the haunted activity. Using spades and shovels, the police dug up much of the basement but did not discover a decomposing corpse or anything else unusual.

According to the author, the police then devised a plan: “Officers left several handkerchiefs in one of the rooms, and locked and sealed the door behind them.” When they returned the following morning and broke the seal, they were baffled to find the handkerchiefs all tied up into knots. Next, the police separated family members again and asked them to tie things into knots. They then compared the knots tied by family members with those found in the handkerchiefs in the room they had sealed. Apparently the police felt that the knots tied by the youngest daughter looked eerily similar to the ones discovered in the handkerchiefs and put the blame on her. They suggested she had probably tied them in a “trance-like state” and decided to close the investigation.

The family members were perturbed because it was logically impossible for their daughter to have tied the knots because the room had been sealed. The family finally decided to move out. One member put their paranormal ordeal in perspective, saying: “And it was terrible. It put knots in everything. I wouldn’t live in that house again for a million dollars.”

In Hancock’s version of the story, the knots stopped appearing in the home after the police investigation. She asks: “Did a ghostly double of the young girl haunt the house for those few months in 1929?”

Others believe that the knots did not stop getting tied in 1929, but rather continued after the family had finally moved out. Apparently, several years later a new tenant maintained that he would also find knots tied in his curtains and bed sheets.

Furthermore, many versions of the tale blame the knot-tying on a tormented poltergeist. The term “poltergeist” comes from two German words (polter: to make noise by throwing or tumbling around, and geist: ghost or spirit). The literal translation of the term is therefore “noisy ghost.” While tying knots is generally not seen as a noisy activity, poltergeists are known to wreak all sorts of havoc and it is unlikely one would disappear simply because of a questionable police investigation.

According to Dr. John Ankerberg and Dr. John Weldon of the Ankerberg Theological Research Institute: “Poltergeists are commonly interpreted as troublesome ghosts which haunt houses, causing disturbances and a variety of problems for those who live there. Casual observers often see them as harmless and intriguing or “entertaining” spirits while naturalists and materialists often view them as simple hallucinations.”

Before theorizing why a poltergeist might haunt one of the homes on Sainte-Famille Street, it is a good idea to explore the history of the area.

During the era of New France, French colonists had originally named the plateau-like area at the south-eastern foot of Mount Royal “Mont Sainte Famille“. Sainte Famille can be translated as “Holy Family”, and it was a popular name in ultra-Catholic New France because it refers to the trinity of St. Joseph, Mary and the Baby Jesus.

Members of the Basset family were the first people to own the site and they cleared the land for farming. In 1730, they ceded it to Les hospitalières de Saint-Joseph, a Catholic organization who used the fertile lands for agriculture to supply the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, then located within the walled city. Following the British Conquest of 1760, wealthy families from Montreal began to acquire the adjacent lands in order to build luxurious villas on the slopes of Mount Royal.

In the early nineteenth century, the city expanded towards the sloping terrace then called Côte-à-Baron, which was the southern boundary of the Mont Sainte Famille area. Starting around 1840, large estates were subdivided and a few isolated houses were constructed, but the area remained sparsely built. Major urban development only began to appear in 1859, when the Les hospitalières de Saint-Joseph started building a new Hôtel-Dieu Hospital on their land located at Mont Sainte-Famille.

The original Hôtel-Dieu Hospital was founded by nurse Jeanne Mance in what is now Old Montreal, on October 8, 1645. Unfortunately, the hospital was prone to catching fire in the dense neighbourhood, and burned down on three separate occasions. As it continued to grow in size, the hospital moved to its present site near Mount Royal in 1861.

The fresh mountain air was seen as being ideal for recovering patients and a beautiful healing garden was laid out behind the hospital. Not only did the living nuns and patients move to new hospital on the mountain, but they also took all of the remains of the deceased nuns, who were transferred to the chapel’s crypt of the new hospital at the end of Sainte-Famille Street. 178 nuns had died over the span of two centuries, however only 23 coffins were needed to transport all of their dusty, skeletal remains.

Sainte-Famille Street was laid out in 1862 in the middle of the property and led directly to the chapel of the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital. Between 1862 and 1864 the religious order gave the City lands south of their hospital in order to open of new streets to attract residents. Hundreds of buildings were erected in the new residential area and the coming of the horse-drawn tram in the 1860s accelerated urbanization. By 1880, the area was fully built up.

Today, the chapel is a dominant feature on the streetscape. Located beside the chapel is the Musée des Hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, a museum devoted to the history of the hospital, where visitors can see a magnificent wooden spiral staircase and learn more details about the city’s oldest hospital.

Over the centuries, the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital has overseen thousands of deaths, many of them caused by tragedies, epidemics and violence. According to some local residents, it has the feel of an extremely haunted location.

Also, not to be forgotten, on northern end of Sainte-Famille Street is the old D’Arcy McGee High School. Opened on September 21, 1931, it was the first high school that catered to English-speaking Catholic students in Montreal. Because most of the students had Irish roots, the school was named in honour of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

A Father of Confederation, the statesman and journalist of Irish descent was assassinated in Ottawa on April 7, 1868, allegedly by a man named Patrick James Whelan. While Whelan’s ghost is said to haunt the old Carleton County Jail in Ottawa (now a youth hostel), students used to spread rumours that the ghost of Thomas D’Arcy McGee himself would sometimes haunt the corridors of the school that was named in his honour. Unexplained mysteries, such as phantom footsteps and disembodied voices, were frequently attributed to his ghost. Over the decades, the D’Arcy McGee High School educated hundreds of young students, but with declining enrollment, it was shuttered in 1992. The abandoned school was then converted into a condominium complex for wealthy residents.

Meanwhile, on the southern end of the stretch in question a giant mural has recently been painted on the side of a building on the south-west corner of Prince Arthur Street. Some residents believe the mural was inspired by the mysterious knots that make Sainte-Famille Street so infamous.

There is much speculation about hauntings on Sainte-Famille Street, and nobody has any solid answers. That the haunting first appeared in 1929 is interesting historically because that is the year the Great Depression began wreaking havoc on the city’s economy. With the collapse of the Stock Market in October of that year, many families were ruined and forced into destitution. Some stock brokers and businesspeople who lost everything are reported to have committed suicide. Could the poltergeist be related to someone who took their own life during the economic crash?

Others believe the nearby crypt and hospital, along with their macabre history, may be responsible for the appearance of the poltergeist. Others still think the ghost of Thomas D’Arcy McGee has something to do with it. There is definitely no consensus.

One elderly man, who prefers to remain anonymous, has lived on Sainte-Famille Street for almost 30 years. He suggested that the poltergeist rumour is well-known among neighbours: “People were talking about the mysterious knots long before I moved onto this street and they still talk about it to this very day. Because nobody knows the exact address of the poltergeist house, it has always been a bit of a game or a past-time to look for knots in the curtains of the windows of the homes to try and solve the mystery.”

Furthermore, it is not only the residents in search of the paranormal knots, but also curious visitors who want to find the haunted house. It is not uncommon for strangers to walk slowly up the street, scrutinizing buildings and peering into windows. The elderly gentleman said: “Long before Pokemon Go started irritating people, we have had to deal with endless Peeping Toms on our street in search of those cursed knots. Many of the residents tired of it and replaced their curtains with blinds or shutters.”

Indeed, wandering up and down Sainte-Famille Street reveals that most of the windows do not have curtains or drapes, but rather coverings which cannot be knotted, such as Venetian blinds or wooden shutters.

Did the residents get fed up with curiosity-seekers peering into their windows, as suggested by the gentleman?

Whatever the case, whether or not a poltergeist is still active on the street, tying knots in one of the homes, is a matter of pure speculation. There just isn’t enough evidence at this time. Only one thing is certain: to this day, the “nightmare knots” of Sainte-Famille Street are one of the most puzzling and unsolved mysteries in Montreal’s McGill Ghetto.

Company News

For the Hallowe’en Season, Haunted Montreal is pleased to announce a brand new ghost tour: the Haunted Red Light District Ghost Walk!

Today, Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles is famous as a zone for festivals and entertainment. However, most visitors are unaware the most notorious Red Light District in North America once existed on the same site. Not only does it have a very dark and salacious history, but many of its buildings and streets are also reported to be haunted.

Step back in time and experience Montreal in its heyday as a “wide open city”! Discover an era when brothels, gambling dens, booze cans and burlesque halls lined every street and corruption of every type reigned. Guided by a professional actor and storyteller, guests will hear twisted tales and visit sites that are reputed to be haunted and where the ghosts have been spotted.

Hear tales about Montreal’s transformation from a strictly religious colony into Sin City and how the clergy tried to stop it at every turn. Visit one of Montreal’s ghost streets, where paranormal activity is known to disturb tourists exploring the neighbourhood. Learn about Montreal’s Red Light history and how Prohibition prompted millions of visitors to stream in from all over North America looking for a good time.

Discover a haunted hotel where guests experience strange disturbances during the night, thought to be related several murders during the 1980s. Examine an old church that is said to be haunted by its founder, who still visits the parishioners to this very day, albeit in a paranormal manner.

Many theatres, cinemas and performance halls in the Quartier des Spectacles are also rumoured to be haunted. Learn about the spirits that occupy these places, including one creepy apparition who is said to lurk in the basement of the Monument-National, once the site of a deranged Victorian waxworks museum – the Eden Musée.

Hear about some of the notorious characters from the era, such as bank robber Machine-Gun Molly, Burlesque Queen Lili St. Cyr, brothel-owner Marcel Les-Dents-en-Or, and serial killer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, McGill University’s most infamous graduate.

Learn why the Canadian Army demanded that the Red Light District be shut down during WW II and how Mayor Jean Drapeau and police chief Pax Plante tried clean up the unsavory area. Discover how brothel raids, legal battles against corruption, the demolition of entire city blocks, and the rebranding of the entire neighbourhood led to the creation of the Quartier des Spectacles, Montreal’s glittering new Entertainment zone. While officials may have tried to erase the district’s history and stop all salacious activities in the area, the ghosts of the Red Light District still remain.

The Haunted Red Light District Ghost Walk is sure to please ghost hunters, history buffs, Hallowe’en lovers and those who seek pleasure in the paranormal. The following dates have been set in English:

Friday, October 14 8:30 pm Haunted Red Light

Saturday, October 15  8:30 pm Haunted Red Light

Sunday, October 16 8:30 pm Haunted Red Light

Friday, October 21 8:30 pm Haunted Red Light

Saturday, October 22  8:30 pm Haunted Red Light

Sunday, October 23 8:30 pm Haunted Red Light

Friday, October 28 8:30 pm Haunted Red Light

Saturday, October 29 8:30 pm Haunted Red Light

Sunday, October 30 8:30 pm Haunted Red Light

Monday, October 31 8:30 pm Haunted Red Light

To book tickets, please visit our 2016 Tours section.

Haunted Downtown is currently being revised before translation, but is still available for private tours for groups of 10 or more people (in English only, for the moment). Haunted Griffintown and Haunted Mountain are also available for private bookings, in both English or French, subject to availability.

Finally, we invite clients who attended a ghost walk 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 receive a new Montreal ghost story on the 13th of every month and stay updated, please sign up to our mailing list.

Coming up on October 13: Haunted St. Lawrence Burial Ground

In September, 2016, dozens of skeletons were discovered buried underneath René-Lévesque Boulevard in front of the Hydro-Québec headquarters during construction work. This was the location of the St. Lawrence Burial Ground, a Protestant cemetery that served the community from 1797 until the early 1870’s. After being abandoned, a beautiful park called Dufferin Square was laid out on the footprint of the old graveyard. In 1978, the park was expropriated and work began on Complexe Guy-Favreau, a federal government building that was partially built on the old St. Lawrence Burial Ground. Over the years, more than 100 skeletons have been removed from the vicinity, including that of university-founder James McGill. Today, there is no indication of the cemetery’s existence, except when digging up the road. In the October edition, learn about the ghosts that are said to haunt the old St. Lawrence Burial Ground and the endless paranormal activity that workers at Complexe Guy-Favreau must contend with to this very day.

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).