The Ghost of Mary Gallagher

 

Mary Gallagher was murdered on June 27, 1879 by her friend and fellow prostitute Susan Kennedy. In the years that followed the heinous murder, stories of Mary Gallagher’s ghost began to circulate around Griffintown, Quebec.  By the end of the 19th Century Mary had become something of a local legend.

The story of Mary Gallagher’s ghost began when Mary and Susan Kennedy went out for a night of drinking. While at a tavern the drunken Mary picked up a young man named Michael Flanagan.  The three left the tavern and went to Kennedy’s home where the drinking continued for hours.  At some point in time, before midnight, the young Flanagan passed out.  Then at about 12:15 AM the neighbor that lived below Kennedy said she heard loud sounds coming from above which lasted several minutes.  She would describe the noise as “chopping sounds.”  As it turned out the description was horribly accurate.

Not much if anything is known about what was going on between Mary and Susan.  The two were known to be good friends and often seen in each others company.  One idea is that over time, Susan became jealous of Mary because of Her apparent ease in picking up men as well as the money she made from prostitution.  Whatever the reason or cause was, something sent Susan Kennedy into a homicidal rage and she murdered Mary by chopping off her head.  Susan Kennedy as well as the passed out Flanagan, were both charged with the Gallagher killing.  As police continued to investigate the case however, all charges against Michael Flanagan were dropped and Kennedy faced the murder charge alone.

Kennedy was found guilty of the killing on December 5, 1879, and sentenced to be hanged. Following a re-sentencing, Susan Kennedy was sent to prison where she served 16 years for her crime before being released.  Interestingly, on the same day that Kennedy was convicted of murder, Michael Flanagan fell while working and drown in Wellington Basin.

By the turn of the century the headless ghost of Mary Gallagher had been seen several times.  Soon the legend began to develop that Mary appeared every seven years, on the anniversary of her death, near the old police station where Susan Kennedy and Michael Flanagan were taken following their arrests.  The location of Mary’s appearance may have to do with the fact that the location of the murder, 242 William Street, was demolished when the area was re-zoned and developed.

If your thinking about a trip the see the Ghost of Mary Gallagher it may be too late.  After making her once every seven years appearance many times, reports of Mary’s ghost stopped after 1928. Perhaps Mary’s headless ghost is gone for good, but if you’re in the area and want to take a look for yourself, Mary’s next scheduled visit is June 27, 2019.

courtesy – True Tales of the Unexpected

 

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The Past Whispers
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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

 

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©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
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Rue Rufus Rockhead

Rockhead’s Paradise was founded in 1928 at Mountain and St. Antoine Streets by Rufus Rockhead. Rockhead was a former railway porter from Jamaica who was able to draw the biggest jazz and blues names in the business during Montreal’s Sin City heyday from the 1930s to ’50s.



Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Leadbelly, Nina Simone, Fats Waller, Dizzy Gillespie and Sammy Davis Jr., among countless others, were drawn to the hot spot. While the aforementioned legends played upstairs at Rockhead’s Paradise, Rufus Rockhead and, later, his son Kenny gave then largely unknown local talent like the late Oscar Peterson, Charlie Biddle, Nelson Symonds, Andy Shorter and his dad, Andy Shorter Sr., as well as Jones, Georgette, Mason, Parris and Villeneuve their big breaks downstairs.
Some of these players would later form the Paradise Band, which became the house ensemble at Rockhead’s. In 1980, it was sold and then shortly thereafter was demolished. In the 1990's, this street was named after him in his honor.

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John-Pierre Roy

 

Jean-Pierre Roy (June 26, 1920 – November 1, 2014) was a Canadian pitcher in Major League Baseball. He pitched in three games during the 1946 season for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was born in Montreal, Quebec.

While with the minor league Montreal Royals, Roy played with Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play in the major leagues. Roy retained a friendship with Robinson's widow, Rachel Robinson.

The major highlight of his Montreal years was going 25-11 with a 3.72 ERA in the 1945 season and he compiled an overall 45-28 career record pitching with the Royals.

Roy was later a television commentator for the Montreal Expos from 1968 to 1984 and a public relations representative for the Expos.

He was inducted into the Montreal Expos Hall of Fame in 1995, and the Quebec Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001.

He died on November 1, 2014 at his Pompano Beach, Florida winter home in the United States, at the age of 94.

 

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Jackie Robinson in Montreal

"It is ironical that America, supposedly the cradle of democracy, is forced to send the first two Negroes in baseball to Canada in order for them to be accepted." (Chicago Defender editorial, April 13, 1946)



Delorimier Stadium (1950), home of the Montreal Royals, top farm team to Brooklyn/LA Dodgers and Jackie Robinson's first pro team.

Manny McIntyre, a black athlete who excelled at both baseball and hockey and was prominent in Quebec sporting circles during the 1940s, passed away on June 13, 2011. His death came almost 60 years to the day when he first stepped onto the playing field at Sherbrooke's Stade du Parc as a member of the Sherbrooke Canadiens, a baseball team in the newly formed Class C Border League, and became one of the first half-dozen black players, and the first Canadian, to traverse Organized Baseball's demonic colour barrier. Regardless of his other accomplishments, and they were many, McIntyre will always be remembered as a courageous baseball pioneer who successfully cracked through an impenetrable, albeit invisible, barrier, one so hostile it had prevented men of colour from playing baseball at the organized level ever since the game's early development.


Jackie Robinson - 1946

Indeed, the year 2016 marks the 65th anniversary of the integration of professional baseball in America. When Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play a regular game on an otherwise all white diamond, entered his first game wearing a Montreal Royal's uniform in April of 1946, he established a precedent and opened a door that could never again be closed. The integration of baseball had begun...

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Saint Catherine’s Day

 

For generations of Quebec children, Saint Catherine's Day was the sweetest of the year — marked by community gatherings and turning gooey molasses into pulled taffy.

With the Roman Catholic Church's gradual decline, however, the celebrations meant to honour Catherine, considered the patron saint of girls and unmarried women, have also cooled off.

But while most elementary school children no longer get to spend an afternoon pulling warm buttery taffy into golden strands, some Quebecers are keeping the Nov. 25 holiday alive.

"At one time it was as big as Halloween," says Madeleine Juneau, general manager at Maison Saint-Gabriel, a Montreal history museum that hosts festivities to celebrate the occasion.

In previous decades, schools would mark the day with a party with taffy pulls and hat-making contests. The night before, townspeople would get together for food, music and dancing.

Women who reached the age of 25 without being married were designated "old maids" or "Catherinettes" and had to wear an outlandish bonnet as they were teased about their inability to find a husband. Juneau says the festivities were also a chance for young women to attract husbands by offering them candy to showcase their culinary skills.

"It's an extraordinary holiday, and we want people to relive it," she said.

On Nov. 20, their Saint Catherine's Day festivities will include traditional music, storytellers, and taffy-making demonstrations by women dressed as Kings Wards — young French women recruited to move to New France to serve as potential brides for settlers.

The namesake of the day is Catherine of Alexandria, who, according to legend, was beheaded in the early fourth century for refusing to marry a Roman emperor.

But Quebec's candy-making tradition is traced to Marguerite Bourgeoys, a nun and educator who used to make taffy to entice her young students to come to the school she founded in 1658.

The Maison Saint-Gabriel, a 300-year-old farmhouse once purchased by Bourgeoys, has committed to keeping the tradition alive as part of its mission to educate visitors on life in Quebec in the 17th to 19th centuries.

Although public celebrations have largely fallen by the wayside, the tradition lives on in some Quebec kitchens.

In the east of the province, a group of 40 women — and a few men — from Sayabec are preparing to boil, pull and cut 25,000 pieces of the candy using the traditional recipe of molasses, sugar, corn syrup, butter and baking soda.

Marielle Roy, the president of the women's group who organizes the event, said she, like most others, first learned the technique from her mother.

Now, she says, the group does it as a fundraiser and for the pleasure of carrying on a tradition.

"November, it seems like a sad month, so to get together as a group of women does us good," she said. "It warms the heart."

The annual event, which inclues a community bingo night, is included on the Quebec culture minister's list of "intangible cultural heritage."

Because so few people are carrying on the day's tradition, Juneau says she gives out the recipe to Maison Saint-Gabriel visitors.

She explains how the candy is made in the hopes they'll try it at home with their kids.

"This is something that will be lost if we don't pass on the knowledge," she said.

Maison Saint-Gabriel's Saint Catherine's Day celebrations take place Nov. 20 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Guided tours of the museum are from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday until Dec. 25. Visit www.maisonsaint-gabriel.qc.ca  for more information.

 

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The Past Whispers
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The British and Canadian School

 

The British and Canadian School was founded in 1822 by a group of Montrealers with widely different political views: Horatio Gates, Louis-Joseph Papineau, John Frothingham, William Lunn, Alexander Ferguson, François-Antoine Larocque and Olivier Berthelet. These men were united in their commitment to the moral improvement of working people: the school was intended to serve “the children of all labouring people or mechanics” (that is, artisanal workers). The governors also wanted to provide an alternative to the schools run by Catholic religious orders and the very Anglican Royal Institution. The British and Canadian School was to be non-denominational.

 

British Canadian School – 1839

It would also be a “monitorial school,” based on a concept imported from Britain wherein one master taught the more advanced pupils (the “monitors”) who in turn taught the younger ones. Monitors were given special instruction outside the usual hours of 9:00 to 12:00 and 2:00 to 5:00 in subjects such as English Grammar and Geography; during regular hours, monitors taught reading, writing, arithmetic and needlework, and the master supervised. By this method, it was claimed, “one master can teach 1000 as well as 100.” The monitorial system was suitable for girls as well as boys, and at most times at least a third of the pupils were girls.

After a few years in rented accommodation, the governors secured enough government grants and public subscriptions to build a permanent school, designed by architect James O’Donnell (of Notre Dame Church fame) and built by master mason John Redpath (later of sugar fame). Land was purchased at the corner of Lagauchetière and Côté streets, in what was then on the outskirts of town. The cornerstone was laid in October 1826 and the school opened the following September. It appears to have functioned smoothly until after the 1837-38 rebellions, when it lost a lot of Catholic pupils. Even so, references to it in the 1850s and 60s suggest it was one of the best schools in the city. In 1866, Montreal’s Protestant school board acquired it and expanded it by adding a third story.

 

School register 1873 showing the name “Chas McKiernan.”

Despite being under the Protestant board, the school remained non-denominational, though it had long since abandoned the monitorial system. Many liberal or anti-clerical Catholic families sent their children there in the 1870s, including Charles McKiernan, aka “Joe Beef.” The school also attracted a fair number of Jewish children, who lived nearby – the synagogue was just around the corner. The school board paid the salary of a Hebrew teacher for the school, a service in return for the school taxes it received from Jewish property owners. This was the beginning of a long relationship between the Jewish community and the Protestant school system.

The British and Canadian School was finally closed in 1896 and the pupils transferred to a more modern building. The school was eventually used as a noodle factory. Today, it stands at the heart of Montreal’s Chinatown, probably the oldest surviving purpose-built school in the city.

 

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