Читать книгу Real Hauntings 5-Book Bundle - Mark Leslie - Страница 18

Cholera came to Montreal on a ship called Voyageur.

It docked in June 1832, and as the passengers disembarked one man was left behind, lying on the deck, his body twitching in agony. The health commissioner was quickly called in and it didn’t take long for him to make his diagnosis: cholera. Unfortunately, the man on the deck was not the only person on the ship who had been infected. Other passengers, who had already disembarked, were also carrying the deadly virus, and soon the highly contagious disease spread through the city like wildfire.

Within days Montreal was transformed. Barrels of burning tar sat on street corners to purify the air. Gravediggers travelled the roads to collect the bodies in their “dead-carts,” crying out, “Have you any dead?” People were dropping like flies.

At the time, the lovely park we now know as Dorchester Square was actually a graveyard called St. Antoine Cemetery. The road leading up to it (now Cathedral Street) was called Cemetery Street, because it was the lane the dead-carts rode up from Saint Antoine Street in the Old Port to deposit the corpses at the cemetery. Within three days of the outbreak, there were 150 coffins stacked in the cemetery awaiting burial. That was only the beginning, though.

Over a thousand people died in June alone. Although the health commissioner insisted that every corpse be buried within six hours of death in order to stop the spread of the disease, the gravediggers simply couldn’t keep up. The Sulpician priests came in to help with the digging. As it was simply impossible to dig separate graves for each body, they instead dug long trenches that were eight feet deep, ten feet wide, and one hundred feet long. The crude coffins were stacked inside these trenches with no indication of name. They were the anonymous dead.

In the 1830s cholera was still very much a mystery to medical professionals. As recounted by Donovan King on his downtown Montreal ghost walk, doctors would treat the disease with a variety of methods, including bleeding, leeches, bed rest, and even opium. We know now that opium can slow a person’s breathing and heart so significantly that they appear dead, when in fact they aren’t. But such details, as well as knowledge of the proper dosages of the drug, weren’t readily available in the early nineteenth century. As a result, there were some horrifying scares during this period: poor unfortunates, believed to be dead, would rise up and terrify everyone. It was as if the dead were rising from their graves! Of course, eventually it was established that they were never dead to begin with, but until then there was great public fear. So, on top of the all the dead bodies crowding St. Antoine Cemetery, the mourners, the bawling children, the dead-carts, and the digging priests, there was also a small rash of “un-ghosts” to deal with, crawling out of their graves and wondering why everyone was screaming at them.

Let’s examine a few of these un-ghost’s tales.

Bill Collins: Not Quite Buried

Though the impossibility of burying all the dead quickly was a huge crisis for the city on the whole, it was the one thing that saved Bill Collins.

When Bill died he was taken to the cemetery by one of the dead-carts. Since there were no open graves, Bill was left on the ground for the night. Bill, who had been suffering from cholera but had somehow fought off the disease, woke up sometime in the night, not at all dead, and started walking down Saint Antoine Street, bewildered. A police officer saw Bill coming toward him in his winding sheet and ran off in a panic, crying out that the dead were coming out of their graves!

The confusion was quickly dealt with and Bill went on to live to the ripe age of ninety-two.

Hervieux: Tried to Escape

There was a woman known only by the first name Hervieux who wasn’t as lucky as Bill. She was visiting friends when she became ill quite suddenly. Fearing the worst, her hosts sent for a doctor, who medicated her with opium right away, then tried bleeding her and applying leeches. Sadly, Hervieux did not respond to these efforts, and she was pronounced dead the next morning. She was quickly buried in St. Antoine Cemetery in her dress and jewellery, and because she was more wealthy than some, she was given her own grave and a cross carved with her name marked the spot.

The cemetery was closed in 1854, and some, but not all, of the buried were moved to the newer Mount Royal Cemetery on the mountain. Some years thereafter, workers were digging a ditch when they came upon a coffin. It was disturbing. This coffin, later identified as Hervieux’s, had been broken from the inside, and a woman’s arm protruded from it. Poor Hervieux, drugged with opium, had not been dead when she was buried and had been unable to dig herself free.

Unknown: The Woman Who Didn’t Die, but Later Did

The perished poor sometimes weren’t even given the dignity of a rickety coffin, as was the case of a woman whose body was dumped in one of the long trenches after she was believed to have died. As recounted on a ghost walk of the Old Port conducted by Montreal Ghosts, she, like so many others, had been administered opium and was not actually dead. So there she was, in a trench full of corpses, when fifteen hours later she suddenly woke up. She managed to claw her way out of the trench and proceeded to walk home, completely naked and yelling for help. Her neighbours looked out their windows and saw the woman whose body they’d seen taken away on a death-cart the day before walking down their street. Is it surprising they thought she was a ghost?

Unfortunately, though she was an un-ghost that day, the unnamed woman did become a ghost one week later, when cholera finally took her life.

* * *

Dorchester Square is now a pleasant park visited often in the summer months by professionals on their lunch break. Little do they know that there are 70,000 corpses under their feet. With so many dead in one place, there are bound to be strange phenomena about. Over the years disembodied voices and mumbled prayers have been heard. Orbs have been spotted floating through the trees. Most disturbing of all, piercing screams have disturbed the nighttime quiet in the park more than once.

There is a stomach-turning explanation for those screams that dates back to the cholera epidemic. As so little was known about cholera, doctors were desperate for more information about the disease and started performing autopsies on fresh cadavers in order to get it. The dissection of corpses was still illegal in Canada at this time, but the medical community was desperate. They erected autopsy sheds in the cemetery, conveniently located right next to the corpses waiting for burial, and got to work.

People were scandalized by what they saw as desecration of the bodies of the dead, and the newspapers called the sheds slaughterhouses. Catholic residents turned to their priests to put an end to this practice and the clergy moved in, but for a far different reason.

Knowing that the unbaptized wouldn’t be able to get into heaven, the city’s priests became concerned about unborn babies dying of cholera in their mother’s wombs. They devised a grisly solution. Thirty willing pregnant cholera sufferers lined up outside these autopsy sheds and entered, one by one. Inside, the doctors performed hasty C-sections on the dying women, after which the priests sprinkled the newborns with holy water, thus savings their souls before their untimely deaths. The screams of the mothers could be heard for kilometres … perhaps the very same screams reaching us now.…