Real Hauntings 5-Book Bundle. Mark Leslie

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.

      The Tobogganing Ghost of Simon McTavish

      Mount Royal

      In the late 1700s, Simon McTavish was the richest man in Montreal. An immigrant of Scottish decent, McTavish prospered as a fur trader, founding the North West Company, which would compete for business with the more well-known Hudson’s Bay Company, and eventually merge with it. Like many rich men, McTavish was known to be arrogant. He was also somewhat of a dandy, and according to Donovan King, who conducts ghost tours of Montreal, he would strut around town in the finest garments, wearing elaborate jewellery and whacking anyone who disrespected him with a gold-tipped cane. Though he was in no way a nobleman, he insisted on being called “The Marquis.”

      Perhaps in an effort to literally look down on the inhabitants of Montreal, McTavish purchased a swath of land on Mount Royal, the highest point in the city, right next to a property owned by James McGill. Soon after, in the early 1800s, he began construction of a grand castle for his family, to be built in the Scottish baronial style. As work on the castle neared completion, McTavish liked to stalk around the construction site, striking anyone working too slowly with his infamous cane.

      Then fifty-four years old, McTavish would often make the trek up the mountain from his home in Old Montreal on foot. It was on one of these occasions that he was caught in a rainstorm and developed a cold. Being a stubborn man, he would not listen when his doctor instructed him to stay in bed to recover and as a result, his cold developed into pneumonia, then pleurisy, and finally killed him just weeks before the castle was set to be completed.

       The snowshoeing club: Bad boys of the 1800s.

      There was an elaborate funeral. A mausoleum was built to house his body and a tall stone monument was erected in McTavish’s honour. But work on his beloved castle, so close to being finished, was abandoned. Over the years the structure began to crumble. In an episode of the podcast Listen with the Lights On, King muses about how at one point the disintegrating castle resembled a giant hollow skull from the street below as snow collected in the gaping windows, or “eye sockets.”

      Twenty years later, in 1821, McGill University opened its doors, the crumbling castle looming over its buildings from Mount Royal. It didn’t take long for stories to begin to circulate on campus about McTavish, his tomb, and his ghost. These rumours may have been prompted by the school’s rabble-rousing snowshoeing club — apparently the bad boys of the 1800s — who liked to get drunk, strap on their snowshoes, light their torches, and run amuck across the mountain. King likens the sight of these boys and their torches going up the mountain to a fiery snake.

       Is that a dead man tobogganing in his coffin?

      Apparently, this band of mischievous youths liked to make a pit stop at McTavish’s tomb to try and rouse his spirit by yelling and carrying-on. On one particularly passionate occasion they even went so far as to break into the mausoleum and vandalize the place, tipping over the coffin and spilling McTavish’s remains across the floor.

      Simon McTavish’s ghost saw its chance and escaped.

      It wasn’t long before there were reports of ghost sightings at the castle. McTavish’s spirit was seen peeking from the doors and windows of the abandoned structure at night. It was even reported that the appar-ition could be found dancing on the castle roof on moonlit nights. But in perhaps the most Canadian description of a ghost sighting ever reported, McTavish’s ghost was spotted tobogganing down the slopes of Mount