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It happened in Griffintown.

The area located north of the Lachine Canal, south of Notre-Dame Street, and bordered by the Bonaventure Expressway to the east was once a bustling slum. Now an odd mixture of old industrial buildings and sparkling condos, it once housed a mainly Irish community of families and labourers working for the railways, at the port, and on the construction of the Victoria Bridge. Out of this shanty town comes Montreal’s most well-known ghost story: that of a headless ghost named Mary Gallagher, who died in 1879, killed by her own best friend.

Mary Gallagher was a prostitute. Though thirty-eight years old (quite aged for a working girl), she was still quite attractive and didn’t have trouble finding clients. According to the Haunted Griffintown ghost walk’s account of her story, the events that would lead to Mary Gallagher’s demise began rather pleasantly on June 24, 1879. She had gone out with her friend and fellow prostitute, Susan Kennedy, to celebrate Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, a holiday in Quebec. The town was filled with music and festivities. It was fun; it was also perfect for picking up johns.

Though they were unable to find any male companions at Joe Beef Tavern, they went on to Jacques-Cartier Square and there met a young man named Michael Flanagan. They spent the evening together, flirting and drinking at a local watering hole. Flanagan took a special liking to Gallagher, and the two decided to leave together. They went to a flophouse, leaving Kennedy on her own and none too happy about being abandoned.

Two days later, in the early hours of June 27, Mary and Michael showed up at Susan Kennedy’s house. The two-room house was situated on the second floor of a tenement building at the corner of William and Murray Streets. Kennedy seemed willing to let go of her grudge at the time, for she let the two in, even though it angered her husband (both Susan and Mary were married). Kennedy’s husband stormed off.

In his article “How a Dismembered Montreal Sex Worker Became a Sensation, Then a Ghost, and Now a Fading Legend,” Patrick Lejtenyi reports that the husband, Jacob Mears, was used to Gallagher dropping by at odd hours, but was furious that she’d brought a man with her this time. Apparently, he hadn’t yet come to terms with his wife’s profession, or perhaps he just didn’t want dirty deeds taking place inside his house. He returned some time later to find all three drinking and his wife alone in a room with Flanagan. Another row ensued, this time due to the drinking, and Mears stormed off again. It’s lucky that he did, as he left just in time to miss the murder.

In later testimony, Flanagan and Kennedy did not agree about what happened next. When he was questioned by police, Flanagan remembered finishing a bottle of whisky with the two women, then falling asleep by himself in the front room. When he woke up a few hours later in the middle of the day, he wanted to get a drink with Kennedy but she declined. He got up to leave, and on his way out saw Gallagher asleep in the other room. Everything seemed normal, there was no blood, and in Flanagan’s opinion Kennedy seemed a little quiet but calm.

Kennedy’s story was very different and often contradicted itself. She claimed she followed Flanagan into the other room, and that the two fell asleep side by side. During her trial she testified that later on that day she heard Gallagher invite another man in for a drink, and also heard them arguing before she fell asleep again. When she woke up hours later, the man was gone and Gallagher was dead. Kennedy said she was horrified when she saw the body and literally fell to the ground, too weak to call for the police. Flanagan, she said, woke up around the same time, saw the body, and ran off, as did her husband when he returned home.

A sketch of the building where Mary Gallagher was murdered, at the corner of William and Murray, 1879.

A different story was reported in the Montreal Weekly Witness. According to an article titled “Murdered with an Axe,” the policeman who was first on the scene reported the explanation Kennedy gave the day of. When he came in, he said, Kennedy was on the bed pretending to be drunk. She claimed that a man had come into the house early Friday to give her some money. For some reason this angered Gallagher; she and the man quarrelled, and he killed her. The man then washed his hands, told Kennedy not to tell the police, and left. Strangely, Kennedy added that she was glad he’d gotten away, because he was good-looking.

So how exactly did Mary Gallagher die? Whether it was by the hand of one of the three men reported to have been in the house or of her own friend, one thing is for sure: she lost her head in a terribly gruesome way.

The Weekly Witness called it “one of the most repulsive murders ever chronicled” and quoted the constable at the scene, an army man, as saying he’d never seen a sight like it. This was the first murder to occur in the city in two years, and the police, it seems, were simply not prepared for this kind of violence. Apparently there was blood everywhere, even on the walls, and for a length of time nobody could find Gallagher’s head.

The description of Gallagher’s body in the Weekly Witness is quite gruesome and detailed. Her headless body, clothed in a thin cotton dress, was lying stomach-down on the floor. One of her hands had been cut off, but this wasn’t obvious at first because the arm was caught under the body. There were several jagged cuts at her neck, indicating someone had really been hacking at the head before it came off. The head also had several gashes across the forehead, which the Weekly Witness reporter believed might have been the result of the first blow Mary received. Her head and hand were found in a wash basin by the stove.

Susan Kennedy, though clearly a little shaky on the details, never wavered in her claim that she was innocent. Flanagan made the same claim, too.

You might be inclined to feel sorry for Susan Kennedy, who was arrested that very day for the murder of her friend — her profession likely biased the police against her. But before you feel too bad, you might want to know a thing or two about Susan Kennedy. In interviewing her neighbours, the plucky Weekly Witness reporter uncovered some interesting tidbits about her. She was known to be a disturber of the peace, and was regarded with terror in the neighbourhood — the reporter never bothered to explain why. She was a drinker and a familiar face to the area’s police, who stated that she was difficult to arrest. “Difficult” seems an apt description for this woman — some of her neighbours thought she was insane because when drunk she spoke in a silly manner.

There was also concrete evidence linking Kennedy to Gallagher’s death: the day Mary died, a boy, likely the son of the downstairs neighbour, notified a policeman that a woman was dead at 242 William Street. A crowd had already begun to form outside the building when they arrived a good ten hours later — disturbances in Griffintown were hardly their priority. Upon entering the house, the policeman found Kennedy alone with Mary Gallagher’s body. She was covered in blood and wearing three dresses, one of which belonged to Gallagher. Kennedy tried to explain this away by saying she’d slipped in the blood as she tried to clean it up. A small axe, normally used to chop firewood, was found inside the apartment, covered in blood and bits of flesh and hair. The police examined the body. They examined Mary’s head. They arrested Kennedy and Flanagan on the spot.

At Kennedy’s trial for the murder of Mary Gallagher, a number of damning pieces of evidence came to light. Lejtenyi writes that one witness claimed to have heard the two women arguing at about midday. Kennedy had been swearing from her window at people down on the street and when Gallagher tried to pull her away she was heard saying, “If you don’t leave me alone I’ll split your head open with an axe.” Not good. The downstairs neighbour testified that she heard a body falling to the floor, followed by chopping sounds. She claimed to have heard Kennedy say, “I’ve wanted revenge for a long time, and I finally got it.” Really not good.

Not surprisingly, Susan Kennedy was found guilty. Though the jury recommended clemency, the judge was in no mood and sentenced her to hang on December 5 of that year — a shocking decision for the time, when it was generally believed that women were incapable of committing murder. Even more shocking was the sentence, for those very few women who were convicted were almost never sentenced to hang.

In a twist of fate, Kennedy did not actually hang. According to John Marlowe’s book Canadian Mysteries of the Unexplained, Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald commuted her sentence to a prison sentence; she would serve sixteen years in Kingston Penitentiary. Strangely, Michael Flanagan, after being acquitted of the crime of murder, slipped while working on a boat in the Lachine Canal and drowned on December 5, the very day Kennedy was meant to hang.

After her time in prison, Kennedy returned to Griffintown, where she lived out the last eleven years of her life. Marlowe states that she was used as a cautionary tale for little children in the area: Misbehave and Susan Kennedy will get you! As a result, children were known to leave penny candy at her door to get on her good side.

Mary Gallagher was buried in a pauper’s grave, but if the abundant reports about her are true, she did not find her eternal resting place. It’s said every seven years since her death she wanders the streets of Griffintown, always visiting the corner of William and Murray Streets, looking for her lost head. The first sighting was on June 27, 1886, Marlowe writes, when her cloaked, headless, figure was seen haunting the streets. Ever since, June 27 has been known as Mary Gallagher Day in Griffintown.

There have been two dozen sightings of Gallagher over the years, though none since the 1920s. This hasn’t stopped believers from flocking to her site of her death every June 27, eager to spot her. In 2005 there were nearly one thousand people looking for the ghost with no head, wearing a red dress with green ribbons and black ankle boots.

The building where Mary Gallagher was murdered is long gone. In fact, the corner is currently nothing but an empty gravel lot full of scattered trash, surrounded by graffitied walls. It seems unlikely that Mary’s ghost will be seen there again, despite her fame. Perhaps one day, when all the old buildings of Griffintown are no more and the condos and shiny new coffee shops have completely taken over, the story of the headless ghost of Griffintown will fade away, too.

Until then, see you on June 27 at the corner of William and Murray Streets. Don’t forget to bring your axe, just in case.