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Although it isn’t widely known, John Easton Mills, who served as mayor of Montreal from 1846 to 1847 — for less than a year — has a ghostly connection. He was sworn in as mayor in December 1846 and had barely settled into his office when he was faced with a major crisis. In the spring of 1847, the Irish potato famine caused thousands of Irish immigrants to flee to North America. Many ended up in Montreal, and before the year was out, 6,000 Irish, weak from hunger and disease-ridden, would die on the shores of the city. Many local inhabitants, including the new mayor, died too, victims of the diseases brought by the newcomers. The death toll was enormous, so it’s hardly surprising that there are a lot of ghosts from those days.

The Irish potato famine, also called the Great Famine, was caused by a potato blight that was felt all over Europe. Over three million Irish people were entirely dependent on the potato for food, so when at least one-third of the potato crop in the country was lost to blight in 1845 it was a disaster. In 1846 three-quarters of the crop was lost. The people were starving. One million Irish people would die over the course of the famine, which lasted from 1845 to 1849. During that same time, a million Irish chose to emigrate to save themselves. The destination for one hundred thousand of those immigrants? Canada.

In her Montreal Gazette article “Montreal, Refugees and the Irish Famine of 1847,” Marian Scott states that of those one hundred thousand, seventy thousand Irish immigrants arrived in Montreal, which had a population of only fifty thousand at the time. They made the three-month journey to the New World on ships that were used to carry lumber to Europe. Normally the ships were weighed down with rocks for the journey home to make up for the weight of the wood, but as so many people were desperate to make the journey, human beings were used to fill the ships instead. These ships weren’t meant to transport people, and conditions on board were horrific. The boats were crowded and violence abounded. There was no system to get rid of human waste. Disease was everywhere, especially typhus, which was spread by lice. Death by typhus is hardly pleasant; symptoms including shivering, aches, bloating of the face, muscular twitching, delirium, a darkening of the skin, and a rapidly spreading rash. The bodies of those who died during the journey, which numbered in the thousands, were simply thrown overboard.

When these “coffin ships” arrived in the Wellington Basin, Montrealers were aghast. A great number of the travellers died right there on the wharfs. A medical superintendent of the time said that the odour wafting from the immigrant ships was like the stink of a dunghill.

The influx of the sick onto the island horrified the population, who were terrified that typhus would spread across the city. Their fears weren’t baseless — the mortality rate for untreated typhus is up to 60 percent. As a result, the immigrants were kept on the waterfront, housed in fever sheds that spread across the shore, filled to bursting with the sick and dying.

Mayor John Easton Mills felt compassion for the suffering Irish. Bruce Davis reports in a Montreal Gazette article that Mills welcomed the immigrants, despite the protests of Montrealers, and supervised the construction of more sheds, outhouses, hospital wards, and surgical rooms. He assured citizens that the sick were being kept at the waterfront, and they had nothing to fear.

Public outrage at the situation flared, however, when a young immigrant girl was spotted on the corner of Notre-Dame and McGill Streets begging for change. An angry mob marched to city hall, calling on the mayor to fix this problem or prepare to face vigilante justice. They went so far as to threaten to throw the fever sheds and their inhabitants into the river. To appease the people, Mills ordered a wall be built around the basin with guards to monitor anyone coming or going.

The Irish Commemorative Stone, also known as the Big Black Rock, honours the thousands of Irish people who perished during their immigration to Canada.

The Church also did its part to help the sick. It’s reported that the Mother Superior of the Grey Nuns said to the sisters in the convent: “I wish to send you to Wellington Basin [to help the typhus victims], but in doing so I am signing your death warrant. So if any of you don’t wish to volunteer for this job, I will not hold it against you.” All the sisters agreed to go to the waterfront to aid the sick. Seven of them would die. They were replaced by the sisters of Providence, who in turn were replaced by the sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu. Dozens and dozens of nuns and priests would perish after tending to the sick in the fever sheds. They were buried, along with the Irish, in trenches right next to the sheds themselves, the coffins piled three deep.

In the fall of 1847, the people of Montreal began to notice that the mayor had not been seen about town or made any public declarations of late. In fact, no one had seen his face in weeks. It wasn’t long before it was revealed that the mayor had died of typhus, proving that status is no barrier against disease.

What the people didn’t know at the time was that Mayor John Easton Mills had been sneaking down to the Wellington Basin on the sly and tending to the sick himself. It was there that he contracted the disease that eventually led to his death.

Today, if you’re walking along the Lachine Canal, approaching the Wellington Basin, keep an eye out for a footbridge where many people report feeling uneasy. You may spot a number of white orbs floating above the bridge. You might also spot something even more remarkable: a ghostly man, quite tall, wearing a top hat. Some believe this spectre is the ghost of John Easton Mills. Though the clergy declared that Mills was assured a place in heaven due to his good works, the former mayor continues to pace the shores of his city, keeping watch over the long-gone fever sheds and the poor souls he couldn’t save all those years ago.