Real Hauntings 5-Book Bundle. Mark Leslie

that packed every corner of the edifice.” For three hours, they watched with undivided attention “the feats of that master-magician, Houdini, as he gave them a display of legerdemain, illusions, mysteries and the most astonishing of tricks, concluding with an exposé of the fraudulent spiritist mediums who batten upon a gullible public.”

       This publicity shot shows famed boxer Jack Dempsey pretending to throw a punch at Harry Houdini, who is being held by Benny Leonard.

      Following his Saturday performance, Houdini and his entourage boarded a train for Detroit. Despite the terrible agony he continued to experience, he knew there was no time for rest because of the two-week booking at Detroit’s Garrick Theater.

      Although he collapsed in the wings, overwhelmed by high fever and pain, Houdini continued to perform. Afterward, he was rushed to Grace Hospital in Detroit and diagnosed with acute appendicitis. Two separate operations were performed on him, but the poison from his ailment had already seeped into his blood and he was diagnosed with streptococcus peritonitis. On the afternoon of Halloween in 1926, Houdini whispered to his brother Theo, who had been standing at the man’s bedside, “I’m tired of fighting, Dash. I guess this thing is going to get me,” and, shortly after, succumbed.

      There continued to be debate in the medical community about whether or not the severe blows could have caused the affliction that killed Houdini. But it is entirely possible that the pain from the hard punches he received might have masked the underlying pain from the appendicitis, and, inadvertently, delayed the prognosis. There was also some speculation that the popular showman’s ongoing tirade against fraudulent spiritualists might have angered the local medium community enough to make them hire a student like Whitehead to viciously attack the magician.

      It was determined that Whitehead was probably nothing more than a hot-tempered young student trying to prove a point … a point that had consequences well beyond that fateful moment. Most historical accounts report that Whitehead simply seemed to drop off the face of the earth, but Bell, in his decades-long research, managed to track down a number of details about the man.

      Jack and Frances Rodick, owners of a Montreal bookshop, relayed how one evening in the shop Whitehead had shared with them that the incident was a sad and irresponsible moment that truly haunted him. “When he told us about his involvement in punching Houdini,” Frances Rodick said, “I didn’t think he intended what happened but he wanted to show Houdini up. Like ‘Is that what you think? Then I’ll show you!’ And of course he did hit him.”

      “I felt,” Jack Rodick said, “that as a student he might have been brash about this sort of escapade, but afterwards he didn’t seem at all proud of it.”

      “Whitehead may have felt like he committed a terrible crime,” Frances concluded. “I certainly sensed a deep sadness, and it was probably what made him ill.”

      Whitehead died sick, troubled, and “thin as a reed,” living in a dark apartment surrounded by gigantic piles of magazines and newspapers, which he kept arranging and rearranging in different locations. He was described, by the few people who knew him, as a gentleman and intellectual. He, perhaps, lived the remainder of his life in the shadow of the knowledge that his youthful actions as a McGill student might have resulted in the death of a man whose legacy continues to astonish people from around the world.

      The Knotty Poltergeist

      The McGill Ghetto, Plateau-Mont-Royal

      You may have already smiled at what you think may be a “naughty” typo in the title of this chapter. Or perhaps you enjoyed the cheeky play on words because you are already familiar with the paranormal mystery that has, for almost one hundred years, plagued a home on Prince Arthur Street between Sainte-Famille Street and Parc Avenue.

      This particular mystery, believed to be a poltergeist, doesn’t involve the usual “noisy spirit” phenomenon — loud noises, knocking over of furniture, or the levitation or throwing of objects by unseen hands. Instead, it involves the appearance of unexplained knots. The phenomenon began in 1929, as outlined in Pat Hancock’s 2003 book Haunted Canada: True Ghost Stories, with knots that appeared in curtains, towels, sheets, pillowcases, articles of clothing, and various other fabrics throughout the home.

      The family was unable to explain the bizarre occurrences, and were soon frustrated with the fact that virtually anything in the home that could be twisted into a knot was tied into ones that were small and tight. Convinced that one of the children was tying the knots, the parents kept a close eye on them. They were, however, unable to find anything amiss in their kids’ behaviour. At a loss for a reasonable explanation, they then turned their suspicions upon one another.

      But still, no human culprit could be detected.

      At their wit’s end, they eventually contacted a local journalist as well as a local church, wondering if the home needed to be blessed in order to rid it of the mischievous spirit or spirits at work. Nearby St. Patrick’s Church sent two priests to the home. They performed an exorcism ritual in an attempt to dispel the spirit or spirits from the building. But the attempted exorcism of the ghost was fruitless. One of the family members allegedly informed a local journalist that they were told that somebody must have cast a spell on the home.

      Finally, not sure what to do next, the family reached out to the local police. When the officers arrived at the family’s home, police did a quick search of the house and then interviewed each member of the family individually to determine if anyone had been lying or deceiving the others with a prank. But the interrogations left them baffled and with no clear answers. The police then searched the house again, examining everything thoroughly. They didn’t find anything in most of the house, but one of the officers did detect what was described as a foul odour coming from the basement. There was speculation that a body might have been buried there and that that could account for the haunting activity in the home. But after digging up the basement and searching, the police couldn’t find any evidence of a skeleton or decomposing body, which might have explained the eerie phenomenon and the odd smell.

      Before leaving the home that night, they left a number of handkerchiefs in a room and locked it behind them, sealing the room with police tape to ensure that nobody could enter it. When they returned the next morning, they broke the seal and entered the room, shocked to discover that all of the handkerchiefs had been knotted.

      At that point, they again interviewed each of the family members separately, this time providing them with a piece of fabric and asking them to tie a knot in it. They compared each family member’s knot with the knots from the sealed room. They determined that the knots created by the family’s youngest daughter looked quite similar to the knots from the locked room. They speculated that perhaps this young girl tied them in a “trance-like” state and left that as the final conclusion from their investigation.

      Although the chapter in Pat Hancock’s book suggests that the knot phenomenon stopped shortly after the family moved out of the home, a September 2016 article on the Haunted Montreal site explores the phenomenon in a bit more detail and speculates about multiple possibilities for the strange occurrences, including looking at the history of the neighbourhood. Sharing tales of deaths that occurred in the nearby Hôtel-Dieu Hospital and the abandoned original location of the D’Arcy McGee High School — allegedly haunted by McGee himself (assassinated in Ottawa in 1868) — the article speculates that the paranormal activity could be the result of any number of nearby spirits still trapped on this earth. It also goes on to outline that the haunting was first reported in 1929, just around the time the stock market crashed and an unprecedented number of suicides occurred when businessmen and stock brokers suddenly lost everything.

      An unidentified elderly man who lived on the street where the knot phenomenon occurred said that people still talk about the mystery to this day. “Because nobody knows the exact address of the poltergeist house, it has always been a bit of a game or a pastime to look for knots in the curtains of the windows of the homes to try and solve the mystery. Long before Pokémon Go started