Real Hauntings 5-Book Bundle. Mark Leslie

of Montreal became fearful of the mountain after these sightings, and as the castle was a terrible eyesore it was demolished in 1861. To put an end to the desecration of McTavish’s gravesite, the rubble from his castle was used to bury his mausoleum for good. During the demolition a construction worker fell three stories to his death, which some believe was McTavish’s last act of revenge against those trying to bury his legacy as well as, quite literally, himself.

      On the Haunted Mountain ghost walk, King posits a logical explanation for the tobogganing ghost. Though it may not be widely known it was almost impossible to obtain legal cadavers, or corpses, for dissection in the classroom until the mid-1800s. Professors had to get creative in order to teach their anatomy lessons, and it’s said that one such McGill professor, nicknamed “The Resurrectionist,” did just that. In the dead of night he would climb up Mount Royal to the Catholic cemetery and dig up a corpse from one of the unmarked paupers’ graves, which wouldn’t be missed, then strap it onto a toboggan and ride down to the medical building.

      So we’ve either got a grave-robbing and possibly unhinged professor of medicine, or a dead millionaire out for a joy ride down the slopes of the mountainside he once considered his. Personally, we know which story we’re sticking with. There’s nothing more Canadian than a tobogganing ghost, after all.

      Ghosts of the Old Royal Victoria Hospital

      Golden Square Mile

      Spirits of former patients, the echo of footsteps and voices down deserted corridors, lights flickering on and off all on their own, and nurse call buttons being activated with nobody in the room to press them: these eerie events have all been reported in the Royal Victoria Hospital. Though it moved to a new location in 2015, the original buildings of the “Royal Vic,” as it has been affectionately known, have been an iconic city landmark near the bottom of Mount Royal. It has links to doctors such as Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae (author of the beloved Canadian war poem “In Flanders Fields”), and was the site of the first injection of penicillin and the first kidney transplant in the Commonwealth.

      The Scottish baronial–style hospital was originally built in 1893. It was lauded as one of the finest and best-equipped hospitals in North America and was intended by its founders “to be for the use of the sick and ailing without distinction of race or creed.”

      Over the years, the hospital has received worldwide recognition for the multitude of positive work done out of it, but not everyone has been so kind in their descriptions of the original hospital buildings. Indeed, Jolene Haley, an author and writer at the Midnight Society, said that the place offered “a creepy Arkham Asylum vibe.” Haley’s reference to the fictional psychiatric hospital made popular through the Batman comics might, of course, be alluding to the hospital’s links to the Allan Memorial Institute and the controversial secret brainwashing experimentation that took place there in the 1950s and early 1960s (see “Unspeakable Torture and Mind Control”). Or, Haley may have been referring to some of the other dark tales associated with the Royal Vic prior to the 2015 relocation of the hospital to the Glen site of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC).

       The original buildings of the Royal Victoria Hospital, sitting near the bottom of Mount Royal, are an iconic city landmark.

      A few of those tales appear in an October 2013 posting on the MUHC’S website. The first tells the story of a nurse who experienced something eerie in the staff room. During a break on one of her long and tiring overnight shifts, she headed to the staff room to take a quick nap on the couch. At one point during the nap, she opened her eyes to see an odd, white smoky substance floating in the air just a foot or so above her. She rubbed her eyes, not sure what she was looking at, and tried to focus on the hazy vision; that’s when she realized the transparent wisps of white were in the shape of a person standing over her.

      A chill ran down her spine as she slowly sat up and slid her legs to the floor. “Go away,” she said quietly. But the smoky figure remained where it was.

      The nurse carefully reached toward the figure, but her hand went right through the smoke. As she moved her hand back and forth, the figure and the foggy wisps in the air began to disperse. She sat there, wondering where the smoky haze could have come from and curious if she was hallucinating due to being overtired. She contemplated lying down for a bit longer and getting some more rest.

      That’s when the foggy figure rematerialized … except this time it wasn’t alone. There were two other similarly sized human shapes formed out of white wispy haze standing with it.

      Too frightened to scream, the nurse slowly stood and left the staff room. She never saw any of the three smoky figures, or anything remotely similar, ever again. But she did confirm that no matter how tired she was during a long shift, she was never tempted in the slightest to lie down on that couch again.

      Another tale concerns a painting of a beautiful house and surrounding landscape that once hung on the wall in the Ross Pavilion. It was well liked, part of the relaxing ambiance of the space. But every once in a while when somebody was looking at the painting, small things about it would change. Sometimes there appeared to be an old woman peering out from one of the home’s windows. Other times she came out of the doorway of the house, stood there, looked around, and then went back inside. The old woman appeared enough times that people began to complain, and speculation led to the painting eventually being removed from the wall.

      What happened to the painting once it was taken down was never revealed.

      A former staff member shared her tale about a patient who passed away in the M5 cardiac ward of the hospital. After declaring the man’s time of death, the staff carefully arranged his body, left the room, closed the door behind them, and waited for the man’s family. When the family arrived, the staff tried to let them into the room, but they found the door bizarrely locked from the inside.

      Security was called. After they unlocked the door, they confirmed that there was nobody else in the room other than the recently deceased patient. The staff member who shared the story speculated that perhaps the man who had passed away had not been comfortable with his family seeing him in that condition.

      * * *

      A woman who identified herself only as DB (who we will call “Debbie”) posted her story about the Royal Vic on the Haunted North America website.

      In 1996, Debbie was spending the night in hospital after a surgery. She woke up in the middle of the night and was shocked to discover she was lying in a large pool of blood, her pyjamas and the bed sheets completely soaked with it.

      Horrified by the sight, and fearful that her stitches had opened in the middle of the night, Debbie rang for the nurse. When the nurse arrived, Debbie was beside herself with fear and anxiety, sickened by the feel and sight of all the blood on her clothing and skin.

      “One nurse came, then a second, then a third,” Debbie wrote. “They were baffled. My bandage was intact, no blood anywhere on my skin. So they decided to remove my bandage, thinking perhaps there was a leak somewhere around it. Once they removed it everything was fine. I wasn’t bleeding from anywhere, it was so very strange. My entire body showed no sign of blood at all, yet my pyjamas and bed was full.”

      Later, during tests, it was discovered that Debbie was anaemic and needed two pints of blood transfused. Debbie speculated that the appearance of the mysterious blood was an omen about her condition.

      A short time later, Debbie became frustrated by her long post-surgery recovery stay, reflecting on her scheduled release date and how far away it was. To alleviate her anxiousness, she took a morning walk down one of the corridors, longing for the end of the lengthy hospital visit that seemed never-ending. As she was reflecting on this, she looked over to her right and noticed another patient that she didn’t recognize. The older woman was standing in the doorway of one of the rooms and looking directly at Debbie, her frail hand clutching a tall intravenous pole. Debbie wondered if she was newly admitted.

      The old woman smiled