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When the sun sets over Montreal, the vibrant city transforms into a dark and shadowy metropolis. As the night cloaks the island, Montreal becomes eerie and ominous. In this macabre urban setting, terrifying tales have long been told. With hundreds of documented ghost stories, Montreal easily lays claim to being the most haunted city in Canada, if not all of North America.

To take advantage of this unique situation, in 2011 I founded Haunted Montreal, a company that researches local ghost sightings, paranormal activities, historic hauntings, unexplained mysteries, and strange legends, and utilizes all this information to conduct ghost walks. With so much material to choose from, Montreal is a haunted researcher’s paradise.

Montreal is the perfect city for ghost walks. It is a city of quartiers, distinct little neighbourhoods, each with its own unique history and architecture. Incredibly, many quartiers have enough ghost stories to create tours. Old Montreal, Griffintown, the old red-light district, Chinatown, Point St. Charles, Centre-Ville, and the Golden Square Mile are all very haunted. Mount Royal also has its ghosts. Many of them originate from the mountain’s cemeteries that form the largest intact burial ground in North America. It is a veritable City of the Dead overlooking the City of the Living.

So, Montreal is a wonderful city to explore the mysterious and the macabre. It is also an incredibly beautiful city: its architectural heritage is largely preserved, meaning historic buildings dating all the way back to the 1600s still exist. Walking the streets fills one with wonder — of all kinds.

The city’s riveting history reads like a timeline of terror. The island has been inhabited for thousands of years by various Indigenous Peoples. Known in earlier times as Tiohtià:ke, the fertile island was a place of trade, diplomacy, and habitation. When the French attempted to colonize the island in 1642 by establishing a settlement called Ville-Marie, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a league of five First Nations, was not impressed. A bloody and intense war erupted. The Iroquois War raged on and off for almost sixty years. Captured enemies were forced to endure gruesome forms of torture on both sides of the conflict.

When the British conquered the city in 1760, a whole new type of brutality began, as the Redcoats arrived to impose the power of the British Crown over the French inhabitants. When rebellions broke out in the 1830s, they were crushed under the heels of the British soldiers, who burned down farms in the regions surrounding Montreal, bombarded churches with cannon fire, and hanged patriots at the local prison.

The bodies continued to pile up.

In 1847, tens of thousands of typhus-stricken Irish refugees overwhelmed the city. They had fled Ireland in a bid to escape a devastating famine there. However, conditions aboard the notorious coffin ships were even worse. Deprived of food and water, the poor were crammed into fetid, rat-infested holds where disease ran rampant. Those who survived the trip were confined to camps by the docks, where many of them died.

Not only was there disease and death, political violence was also a problem in nineteenth-century Montreal. Just two years after the Irish influx violent politicians burned down Parliament, causing Montreal to lose its status as the capital.

And the deaths continued.

The Victorian era saw some of the city’s most deranged murders, including that of Mary Gallagher, a lowly prostitute who was beheaded by her best friend in Griffintown. During Prohibition in the 1920s Montreal became known as “Sin City” as mobsters took control and began knocking each other off in the red-light district. In the 1960s, deadly terrorist bombs exploded throughout the city, causing local residents to live in fear. Today, things have settled down a bit, but the ghostly traces of the city’s unbearably macabre past still remain.

It is the combination of distinct quartiers, preserved heritage, and deranged history that makes Montreal the ideal haven for eerie and spine-tingling tales. While most large cities have many books dedicated to their ghost stories, Macabre Montreal is a long-overdue first for our metropolis. As a dedicated researcher of Montreal’s ghosts and haunted legends, it is my absolute honour to write the foreword to this tome. I hope its stories keep you up at night.

Donovan King

Haunted Montreal