Real Hauntings 5-Book Bundle. Mark Leslie

on the human body.

      But scenes like this aren’t only relegated to faraway places or to the imagination of science fiction and horror writers. Terribly similar events have taken place in the heart of Montreal … and in the not-too-distant past.

      The Canadian Oxford Dictionary describes torture as “the infliction of severe bodily pain, especially as a punishment or a means of interrogation or intimidation; severe physical or mental suffering.” Coercion and mind control were at the centre of a controversial series of experiments that took place between 1957 and 1964 at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill’s Royal Victoria Hospital, partially funded by the CIA. They were inspired by a phenomenon observed in American soldiers who had been captured during the Korean War and whose behaviour was significantly and frighteningly altered.

       Ravenscrag

      These experimental atrocities couldn’t have occurred in a more fitting building: an eerie, imposing, and intimidating Italian Renaissance–style mansion that clung to the foothills of Mount Royal. The building simply looks intimidating, and its original name was decidedly creepy and Poe-esque: Ravenscrag.

      Built between 1860 and 1863 by Scottish-Canadian financier and shipping magnate Sir Hugh Allan on the fourteen acres he purchased at what was then considered the outskirts of the city, the mansion consisted of five floors and seventy-two rooms. The looming building was considered to be larger and more costly than any other building in Canada at the time, including the formidable Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, Ontario, constructed by Sir Allan Napier McNab thirty years earlier.

      Like McNab, Allan, who died in 1882 as one of the wealthiest men in Canada, intended his property to be an impressive display of his prosperity and importance. During his tenure there, Allan could sometimes be seen looking down from the mansion’s seventy-five-foot tower at the three-hundred-foot front yard, past the gate, and over Old Montreal.

       Ravenscrag. The mansion was originally built in the early 1860s by the wealthy industrialist Hugh Allan. Following his death the building was bequeathed to McGill University and became the home of the Allan Memorial Institute.

      In 1940, Sir Hugh Allan’s son, Sir Montague Allan, donated the mansion to the Royal Victoria Hospital. The Allan Memorial Institute opened in July of 1944 and launched what was considered a very modern Department of Psychiatry as part of McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine, with an initial offering of fifty-two patient beds.

       MK-ULTRA

      At the end of the Korean War, something was alarming the U.S. government. Some of the American soldiers who had been taken as prisoners of war returned home with decidedly different views, values, and thoughts, described as anti-American and Communist. U.S. government agencies, such as the CIA, believed this was evidence that foreign militaries had mastered methods of brainwashing and mind control as a powerful new weapon.

      Fears that countries deemed hostile to the United States had the ability to use chemical and biological agents against Americans and their allies led to the development of a defence program designed to discover similar techniques. The plan was to develop these techniques so that American intelligence agents could learn to detect them and be able to counteract.

      Among other efforts, such as Project CHATTER (a Navy project involving a “truth drug”), Project BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE (a program designed to promote memory enhancement and the establishment of defensive means for preventing hostile mind control), and MKNAOMI (a covert support base to meet clandestine operational requirements and stockpile severely incapacitating and even lethal materials), MK-ULTRA was developed.

      MK-ULTRA, approved by the director of Central Intelligence on April 13, 1953, was the principal CIA program concerned with the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological agents capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behaviour.

      MK-ULTRA documents were destroyed in 1973 under the orders of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Chief of Technical Services Division. But various hearings, pieces of testimony, and recorded eyewitness accounts survived and can be put together to create a disturbing and unforgettable tale. In an almost 180-page document of a United States Senate joint hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee of Human Resources that took place on August 3, 1977, the chairman of the Health Subcommittee, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy, stated:

      Some two years ago, the Senate Health Subcommittee heard chilling testimony about the human experimentation activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an “extensive testing and experimentation” program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens “at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.” Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD on “unwitting subjects in social situations.”

      The hearing revealed that there were 149 MK-ULTRA subprojects, many of which appeared to have some connection with research into “behavioural modification, drug acquisition and testing or administering drugs surreptitiously” and that the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (also known as the Human Ecology Foundation) was established to undertake research in the general area of the behavioural sciences. This foundation provided funding to “a lot of innocent people” who had no knowledge of the fact that this money was coming to them from the CIA. According to a March 11, 1980, report by The Fifth Estate, the CIA spent twenty-five years and twenty-five million dollars on secret brainwashing and mind control research under codenames like MK-ULTRA. It was through this funding that the CIA became interested in the work being done by Dr. Ewen Cameron, a professor from Albany.

      Between the years of 1957 and 1961, about sixty-two thousand dollars was provided by the CIA to Dr. Cameron. But, according to a 2012 feature article in the McGill Daily, it all began at a clandestine meeting at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel on Sherbrooke Street on July 1, 1951, to launch a joint American-British-Canadian CIA-funded series of studies on sensory deprivation.

      Dr. Donald Hebb, McGill’s director of psychology, received a ten thousand dollar grant as part of this funding, in an attempt to determine the relationship between sensory deprivation and the vulnerability of a person’s cognitive ability. In one study, Hebb played tapes of recorded voices expressing either pro-religious or anti-scientific sentiments to students who were isolated and deprived of most of their senses for an entire day. The students, who had previously taken stances against sentiments being expressed, came out of the experience more receptive to those same thoughts and viewpoints. The long periods of sensory deprivation appeared to make the subjects far more susceptible to perspectives that radically differed from the their previous stance.

      Dr. Hebb’s research helped to fuel the CIA’s ongoing interest in the effects of interrogation and psychological torture. Work that, years later, Dr. Ewen Cameron would continue to conduct at McGill.

       Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron

      Considered an authoritative figure in psychiatric research, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Scotland on December 24, 1901. He was educated at Glasgow University and the University of London before working and studying in Glasgow, Switzerland, Manitoba, and Maryland. In 1936 he moved to Massachusetts to become the director of the research division at Worchester State Hospital, where he published his first book, Objective and Experimental Psychiatry. This book, and his research, revealed his underlying belief that psychiatry should follow a strict clinical and scientific method, with rigorous scientific principles that studied the relationship between the mind and the body, or the organic and the neurological.

       MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

      The term Manchurian Candidate is sometimes used when referring to such military techniques as mentioned in this chapter, and is derived from the 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon. Condon’s novel, a political thriller, describes the fate of an American soldier (Sergeant Raymond Shaw) who is