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Accidents and Meaningless Deaths

 

The house was a wreck, and what they had not smashed the oil from the lamp had scorched.

Gazette, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 1895

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Spare a thought for poor John Griffin. In trying to act the peacemaker, he wound up in hospital – and then in jail to boot.

Griffin, a steamfitter, rented the lower floor of a small tenement on Hermine St., near the corner of today’s St. Antoine. Upstairs lived a labourer named Thomas O’Connor and his wife, Bridget O’Brien.

It was a cold Tuesday evening in 1895, and O’Connor and his wife were making a dreadful racket. Finally, Griffin could take no more. He set off for the stairs to separate the combatants, and got caught up in the fracas himself. It nearly cost him his life.

A man named McKenzie lived in a house on St. Antoine that overlooked the back yard of the Hermine St. tenement. Like Griffin, he couldn’t help being aware of the almighty row going on between the couple, but unlike Griffin he was content to keep his distance.

Suddenly, through the windows, McKenzie watched in horror as an oil lamp went flying through the air. Immediately after, as The Gazette reported, he was startled to see “a man running out into the cold with his head all ablaze.” The man was John Griffin.

McKenzie rushed out and with his overcoat smothered the flames enveloping Griffin. Other neighbours, meanwhile, rushed into the tenement and put out the fire that was beginning to spread before too much damage could be done.

The police arrived, arrested the warring couple and hauled them off to a nearby station. Griffin was taken in an ambulance to the Montreal General Hospital.

“At the hospital Griffin was found to have a half-dozen cuts, besides having all his hair and his ears nearly burned off,” we reported. He was patched up and sent back to the police station where he told the officers, “Mrs. O’Connor, the damn fool, threw the lamp at me, and look at me now.” (We can only guess he said “damn,” for our editors used a long dash instead.)

But then, the police added insult to the injury dished out by Bridget O’Brien. “A charge of drunk and disorderly was laid against [Griffin], so as to hold him as a witness,” we said, “while the other two were charged with aggravated assault.”

The outcome of the case is lost to us. Not so for another oil lamp mishap a few days earlier.

It occurred a few blocks away in a tiny, ramshackle house on St. Justin St., today’s Berger. The wife of a labourer named Israel Lebovitch knocked a lamp from a table onto the floor. It exploded, spreading its burning oil over her, and she died at Notre Dame Hospital three days later.

Alas, she was scarcely alone in her meaningless death. As she lay in agony at Notre Dame, a young Scottish immigrant named John Thompson stepped from the quarters he rented on St. Paul St. Perhaps he had been drinking; not long before, his wife had left him to return to her father’s house on Congregation St. In any event, Thompson stumbled, fell down the stairs and badly cracked his head. He was taken to the same hospital but died early the following morning.

Drink certainly figured in the death of a man named Martin Higgins. The same day Thompson died, an inquest concluded that Higgins’s excessive drinking had hastened the onset of pneumonia, which killed him.

That afternoon as well, a woman named Margaret Carson was buried. Like John Thompson, she also had fallen. In her case, it was in the middle of Peel St. and she did not survive long enough to be taken to a hospital. She died on the spot. Her brother ordered a coffin but then promptly absconded. The coroner ordered that she be buried at the city’s expense.

Death hovered in the background of a robbery trial then under way. One of the accused, we reported, was “in the last stages of consumption, and it is feared that imprisonment will kill him.” A different affliction had befallen his co-accused: the night he was arrested, his infant son died.

But elsewhere in the case, death was perhaps forestalled. The two men on trial accused a third of complicity in their scheme but the police decided, at least for the moment, not to arrest him. “The wife of the man had just given birth to a child,” we reported, “and it was feared that the arrest of the husband would kill her.”

courtesy – Montreal Gazette

©2017 The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Golden Age of Tramways

 

Created in 1911, the Montreal Tramways Company (MTC) quickly acquired all of the other transit companies on the Island of Montreal. This private monopoly caused some concern for the general public, who were worried about the quality of the service offered. Late that year, the new company opened its first repair shops in Youville, where the metro’s primary maintenance shops are currently located. A few years passed before the creation, in 1918, of the Montreal Tramways Commission, a public organization tasked with supervising the activities of the Montreal Tramways Company. This new balance worked quite well and the tramways were on the cusp of their golden age in Montreal.

 

Funeral Car - 1915

At its peak in the early 1920s, the Montreal tramway network comprised over 300 miles (500 km) of tracks and more than 900 vehicles carried nearly 230 million passengers per year. In 1924, the first network map was distributed and the tramway cars began indicating the route number. That same year, the first solotrams (tramways operated by one employee) appeared and passengers now had to board at the front of the vehicle. In 1925, a huge terminus was opened on Craig Street, today’s Saint-Antoine West. In 1929, the MTC moved its offices just next door and, the following year, the company launched its Mount Royal tramway line.

 

Band Car - 1913

 

Courtesy Archives of Montreal

©2017 Linda Sullivan – Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Montreal a city of ghosts

 

To the government, his name is Robert Wagenaar, but hundreds of thousands of Montrealers know him as Tootall — one of the best-loved and longest-serving disc jockeys in the city. He works today, as he did in the late 1970s, at rock station CHOM-FM.

“In 1972,” he says, “CHOM moved from an office building at 1310 Greene Ave. across the street to a three-storey house at 1355 Greene. The former owner of the house had committed suicide in the third-floor back bedroom. This room became the CHOM music library. I’m not sure if a lot of people at the time were aware of the suicide, but strange incidents started to happen in the house, and people started talking about the CHOM ghost.”

Montreal actor Vlasta Vrana was a student when he boarded in a third-floor room of the Westmount house a few months before the owner shot himself. The man was, Vrana says, “going through a disastrous divorce. I was there when bailiffs arrived to take his TV. He became an alcoholic, and on the day he shot off his head, his ex-wife claimed he’d been looking for her with a shotgun.”

Years later, Tootall heard reports of objects that moved in the studio, of an apparition on the stairs. Even if a spirit was crying for leaving, this was no stairway to heaven. From time to time, people in the building would find themselves in a place where the temperature seemed suddenly lower.

“I recall meeting up with an announcer who had just finished the overnight show,” Tootall says. “He was seriously pale and shaken by the strange events that had happened on his shift. I believe water taps were being turned on and off, and his coffee cup kept mysteriously emptying. I myself witnessed, a few times, my turntable’s tone arm skipping merrily over an album, back and forth.”

In 1978, CHOM’s office manager hired a psychic. Eventually “pictures of Jesus were hung in the building and we were asked not to go into the library on a certain night.” An exorcism took place with the station’s eccentric owner at the time, Geoff Stirling, in attendance. A few years later, when the station moved back to its former home down the street, staff members held a Ghostbusters party to say goodbye.

“At 1310 Greene, we had a camera on the roof,” Tootall says. “It was controlled from the studio. And on a Saturday night in the 1980s, as I was zooming the camera around town, I looked down Greene and I saw the old house on fire. I watched it burn. The roof was already gone and I could actually see the inside of the former library in flames.

“Maybe that was the end of the ghost.” Or else, over time, it had become comfortably numb.

courtesy – Montreal Gazette

 

Chicago Cubs - 2
Cleveland Indians - 7

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved