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Mount Albion Falls

Alma Dick-Lauder opens chapter 15 of her book, Pen and Pencil Sketches of Wentworth Landmarks, with the following: “There’s a fascination frantic in a ruin that’s romantic.” She goes on to describe an area that is most impressive when the nights are moonlit, and she writes of a half-hidden pass filled with strange, lurking figures and a suppressed murmur of voices:

We know the figures are only shadows cast by the sombre swaying pines, and the voices are the voices of nature embodied in the trees, and running water; yet heard in connection with the idea of a fortress, they make us think of soldiers preparing for the attack, in obedience of orders passed along the line. Aided by imagination the sounds take meaning and grow distinctly on the ear. A ray of moonlight flashes on some bright object among the shadows. Firearms surely! And instinctively we turn, half expecting to hear an awful salute from the fortress. An owl hoots dismally that weird note which turns the thoughts to death and disaster. The grey bird flits past the face of a rock that rises to a height of 80 feet, and from the top of which a young girl cast herself to death, rather than face desertion on the part of her lover, who, when the wedding feast was ready, failed to appear. Out of the gloom where the bird has vanished comes another mournful cry and the gorge is filled with ghostly echoes.[1]

Alma was, of course, writing about Albion Falls, a classical cascading waterfall of just under 20 metres (62 feet) in the Red Hill Valley in Hamilton.[2] The cascading steps of the waterfall begin on Mud Street and the lower end is found at the south end of King’s Forest Park. The falls and the area are stunning in their picturesque glory. But beneath the postcard-perfect glimpses of natural beauty lie shadows that crawl out from the pages of history and up the spines of those who stand nearby and reflect on the tragedy and horrors that occurred there.

The drop of the ravine has been dubbed “Lover’s Leap” due to the legend of a young Jane Riley, who, disappointed by the unreturned love from Joseph Rousseau, flung herself from the steep cliff at the top of Albion Falls.[3] Her love and the extreme disappointment she faced was known throughout the village of Mount Albion, which was an important community, as it featured a gristmill, blacksmith shops, taverns, a church, and a general store.[4]

The village owed its existence to William Alexander Davis (1741–1843), a United Empire Loyalist who left North Carolina to fight alongside the British in the American Revolution. Davis was granted 2,300 acres in Barton and Saltfleet Townships, including five hundred acres around Albion Falls. The Davis estate consisted of a tannery, an orchard, a general store, a distillery, taverns, a church, a sawmill, and a gristmill. The two names lent the area the name Albion Mills (Albion being the poetic name for Britain). In 1880 the village was renamed Mount Albion.[5]

Legends of the Lover’s Leap aren’t the only things that haunt the picturesque ravine at Albion Falls.

Courtesy of Stephanie Lechniak.

The Hamilton Spectator archives note an incident that took place in 1897 near a house not far from the falls. A gentleman and two ladies were driving in a horse-drawn carriage, when the horses suddenly snorted in fear and stopped in their tracks. There, alongside the carriage, they saw a ghostly figure appear. Out of either fear or in an attempt to protect the ladies he was travelling with, the man lashed his horsewhip into the air toward the figure, but the whip passed right through and the ghostly image faded. They then proceeded on their journey and they saw nothing more, but it frightened them enough to share their eerie tale.

About half a mile down the valley from Albion Falls, two streams join together. One is from Buttermilk Falls and the other from the Albion Falls, or the Mill Falls as it was called at the time. Below this merger of the two streams there was a dam and a primitive sawmill. When a quarrel broke out among some of the workers, one of the men was killed. Local legend holds that for the fifty years following his death, his home was haunted. People continued to report seeing his ghost wandering about the house, hovering over the stream near where he died, travelling along the road, or flitting about the woods.

Years later, in the height of these legends, a woodcutter who lived in that very house spent the day drinking at Mount Albion’s Black Horse Tavern. While he was out, his mischievous neighbours slaughtered a pig, dressed it up in some clothes, and then hung it in a tree adjacent to his home. At midnight, when the inebriated man returned to the dwelling, he saw the hanging pig. His mind immediately flashed to the stories of the ghost reported to have haunted the building and the area, but rather than take flight, the alcohol in his system gave him a bout of courage, and he stormed up to the “ghost” and struck it with all of his might. He ended up breaking his right arm and putting an end to both the ghost stories and that particular type of prank, at least on that spot and in that era.

In 1907, the owner of the old mill, Robert Grassie, fell to his death in the wheel pit near the falls. The mill, which was eventually torn down in 1915, was never run again after he died.[6]

The aforementioned tragedy of Jane Riley took place in the early 1900s. Jane and Joseph Rousseau were said to have been childhood friends who fell in love with one another. It was Joseph’s mother, however, who did not like the young girl and was against their courtship and plans for marriage.

Heartbroken and devastated that she could not have the man she so loved, on a fateful moonlit night in September 1915, Jane threw herself into the dark depths of the ravine. It is rumoured that on some nights, perhaps similar moonlit nights to the one in which she took her life, you can hear her soft cries echoing from the gorge below.

A poet known only as Slater commemorated the events of that tragedy in verse:

Alas, poor Jane Riley

For Joseph she did die

By jumping off that dizzying brink

Full sixty cubits high[7]

It was reported that Joseph’s mother said of the event, “Let the blame rest on my shoulders.” Some years later, the still-healthy woman suddenly shrieked, “Jane’s hand is on my shoulder!” and collapsed to the floor, dead.[8]

Another interesting aspect of the area involved organized crime. One of the most significant mobsters in Canadian history, Canada’s version of Al Capone, Rocco Perri (1887–1944) was known as “Canada’s King of the Bootleggers.” And mobster activity typically comes with some sort of body count.[9] It’s reported that people who got in Perri’s way received a one-way ticket to the King’s Forest or the mountain brow. The dense bushes, jutting rocks of the escarpment, and twisted trails were supposedly an excellent place to dispose of corpses.

The bodies of Joseph Boytowicz and Fred Genesee were found in the area in 1924, allegedly victims of Perri and his gang. On November 6 of that year, a group of boy scouts found a decomposed body concealed in some bushes on the escarpment nearby. It was the body of Boytowicz, who had been missing for over three months. The thirty-eight-year-old’s skull had been fractured. Eight days later, Genesee’s body was found on the Stoney Creek mountainside. His body had been pushed over the edge of a small cliff and lay caught in bushes about fifteen feet down the slope. Blunt force trauma was evident on the right side of his head, and the blow had shattered his right eye socket and dislodged the eyeball. Cause of death was ruled to be strangulation.[10]

The police, aware of an ongoing bootleg war and rumoured death threats, felt there was a connection between the two murders. A small media circus ensued, with local reporters speculating wildly about the involvement of both men and the manner by which they suggested they had crossed paths with Perri and his bootleg gang.

Perri was found to not be responsible for either death.

On April 23, 1943, Rocco headed out for a walk “to shake a headache” and never came home. Although Hamilton police alluded to having information that he could be found in cement at the bottom of Hamilton Bay, they suggested he would likely not ever be found until the bay was drained. For all anybody knows, the body might very well be buried somewhere on the side of Hamilton Mountain.

Twenty years after the gruesome discovery of two bodies in that area, an even more horrifying “body dump” took place, one that would send the media into an even more dramatic frenzy and send shockwaves through the entire Hamilton community. It is an event that has been turned into countless books, a stage play, and several different films.

Known as the Torso Murder, the case of Evelyn Dick remains one of the most sensationalized events in Canadian crime history. A well-known schoolyard song from the time (which inspired the Forgotten Rebels in their 1989 song “Evelyn Dick”) went like this:

You cut off his legs ...

You cut off his arms ...

You cut off his head ...

How could you Mrs. Dick?

How could you Mrs. Dick?[11]

A song entitled “Over the Hill” was written by Marcy Italiano and her husband Giasone, a pair raised in Hamilton not far from where the Dick murder took place. It appears on Gruesome, which is a soundtrack CD to promote the book Johnny Gruesome by Gregory Lamberson. The CD features songs based on the novel as well as other eerie things like ghosts and monsters — people like Evelyn Dick falling into the “monster” category. It takes the element of morbid humour a bit further in its opening:

He did not know

When he came home

That you’d be there

With a cleaver in the air

You chopped up John

Oh, did you have fun?

You said you didn’t kill

Threw him over the hill[12]

Born on October 13, 1920, in Beamsville, Ontario, Evelyn Dick later moved with her parents to Hamilton. There is evidence that her father was abusive, struggled with alcohol abuse, and might also have been siphoning funds from the Hamilton Street Railway, where he worked. Evelyn tried hard to fit in with the higher-class in town and was consistently at the heart of rumours. She was often seen in the company of older men and continually being caught in outright lies, such as her claims to be married to a man stationed overseas, who was never proven to exist.[13]

Evelyn married John Dick in 1945 after a very quick courtship and apparently engaged in her first extramarital affair within the first week of marriage.

On Saturday March 16, 1946, a group of five children found what they thought was a human body partway down the escarpment in the Albion Falls area. They scrambled up the hill and blocked the roadway on the top with a human chain, hoping to stop the first car that arrived and alert them of their find. The first adults on the scene insisted that what they likely saw was the body of a slaughtered pig, but the children insisted it was human and was wearing a shirt.

What they had found was the torso of an adult male. The head, arms, and legs were missing and to this day have not been found. A deep abdominal wound suggested that somebody had tried to cut the torso itself in two.

A report in the Hamilton Spectator read, “Clothed only in an undershirt and shorts, the torso of an unidentified man with the head, legs and arms missing, was found ... one half-mile from Albion Falls, about 10 o’clock this morning ... The gruesome find was made by a group of children ... out for a Saturday morning hike.”[14] The body was confirmed to be that of John Dick, who had been reported missing by his cousin on March 6.

Evelyn Dick was immediately questioned but denied knowing anything or having anything to do with her husband’s murder. Investigation revealed that a Packard Evelyn had borrowed from a Bill Landeg was returned to him with blood covering the seat and bloody clothing in the back. Her excuse involved a companion who had cut herself and made the mess, but the blood was found to be the same type as John Dick’s.[15]

When the blood was revealed likely to be that of her husband, Evelyn told police that an unknown man had called her and told her of John having gotten a woman pregnant, further adding he had received what was coming to him for his actions. She explained the man asked to meet and gave her a large sack containing “part of John.” She claimed to have driven this man and his sack to the dumping site.[16]

The sultry-eyed, black-haired, beautiful woman found herself at the centre of one of the most publicized trials in Canadian crime history. Hundreds of Hamiltonians appeared to witness the trial, packing lunches and shoving their way to get a good spot, and those involved in the case became unwilling celebrities of their time.

Evelyn reportedly yawned and drew sketches while in the courtroom, smiled openly for photographers, and uttered phrases such as “My public is waiting to see me.” Taxi drivers fawned over the beautiful woman, eagerly competing to escort her to court, and her admirers sent her flowers and cards.[17], [18], [19]

She later changed her story and suggested the involvement of killers hired by Bill Bohozuk. Evelyn Dick was found guilty of John Dick’s death through involvement in participating and planning the murder and was sentenced to hang on January 7, 1947 — but the case was overturned on appeal due to the fact that Evelyn’s statements were improperly admitted into evidence.

Though acquitted of the murder of her husband, the police later got her on a second charge of manslaughter related to her newborn son, who was found encased in cement in a suitcase in her family home. She was sentenced to life in prison but was paroled after a dozen years.

Evelyn Dick has not been seen since her parole, but some suggest that her husband’s tortured ghost still prowls the mountainside near Albion Falls in a futile attempt to collect his still-missing body parts. John Dick is just one of many lost souls wandering the area, reminders of the accidents, murders, and suicides it has been played to.