Real Hauntings 4-Book Bundle. Mark Leslie
building and the area, but rather than take flight, the alcohol in his system gave him a bout of courage, and he stormed up to the “ghost” and struck it with all of his might. He ended up breaking his right arm and putting an end to both the ghost stories and that particular type of prank, at least on that spot and in that era.
In 1907, the owner of the old mill, Robert Grassie, fell to his death in the wheel pit near the falls. The mill, which was eventually torn down in 1915, was never run again after he died.[6]
The aforementioned tragedy of Jane Riley took place in the early 1900s. Jane and Joseph Rousseau were said to have been childhood friends who fell in love with one another. It was Joseph’s mother, however, who did not like the young girl and was against their courtship and plans for marriage.
Heartbroken and devastated that she could not have the man she so loved, on a fateful moonlit night in September 1915, Jane threw herself into the dark depths of the ravine. It is rumoured that on some nights, perhaps similar moonlit nights to the one in which she took her life, you can hear her soft cries echoing from the gorge below.
A poet known only as Slater commemorated the events of that tragedy in verse:
Alas, poor Jane Riley
For Joseph she did die
By jumping off that dizzying brink
Full sixty cubits high[7]
It was reported that Joseph’s mother said of the event, “Let the blame rest on my shoulders.” Some years later, the still-healthy woman suddenly shrieked, “Jane’s hand is on my shoulder!” and collapsed to the floor, dead.[8]
Another interesting aspect of the area involved organized crime. One of the most significant mobsters in Canadian history, Canada’s version of Al Capone, Rocco Perri (1887–1944) was known as “Canada’s King of the Bootleggers.” And mobster activity typically comes with some sort of body count.[9] It’s reported that people who got in Perri’s way received a one-way ticket to the King’s Forest or the mountain brow. The dense bushes, jutting rocks of the escarpment, and twisted trails were supposedly an excellent place to dispose of corpses.
The bodies of Joseph Boytowicz and Fred Genesee were found in the area in 1924, allegedly victims of Perri and his gang. On November 6 of that year, a group of boy scouts found a decomposed body concealed in some bushes on the escarpment nearby. It was the body of Boytowicz, who had been missing for over three months. The thirty-eight-year-old’s skull had been fractured. Eight days later, Genesee’s body was found on the Stoney Creek mountainside. His body had been pushed over the edge of a small cliff and lay caught in bushes about fifteen feet down the slope. Blunt force trauma was evident on the right side of his head, and the blow had shattered his right eye socket and dislodged the eyeball. Cause of death was ruled to be strangulation.[10]
The police, aware of an ongoing bootleg war and rumoured death threats, felt there was a connection between the two murders. A small media circus ensued, with local reporters speculating wildly about the involvement of both men and the manner by which they suggested they had crossed paths with Perri and his bootleg gang.
Perri was found to not be responsible for either death.
On April 23, 1943, Rocco headed out for a walk “to shake a headache” and never came home. Although Hamilton police alluded to having information that he could be found in cement at the bottom of Hamilton Bay, they suggested he would likely not ever be found until the bay was drained. For all anybody knows, the body might very well be buried somewhere on the side of Hamilton Mountain.
Twenty years after the gruesome discovery of two bodies in that area, an even more horrifying “body dump” took place, one that would send the media into an even more dramatic frenzy and send shockwaves through the entire Hamilton community. It is an event that has been turned into countless books, a stage play, and several different films.
Known as the Torso Murder, the case of Evelyn Dick remains one of the most sensationalized events in Canadian crime history. A well-known schoolyard song from the time (which inspired the Forgotten Rebels in their 1989 song “Evelyn Dick”) went like this:
You cut off his legs ...
You cut off his arms ...
You cut off his head ...
How could you Mrs. Dick?
How could you Mrs. Dick?[11]
A song entitled “Over the Hill” was written by Marcy Italiano and her husband Giasone, a pair raised in Hamilton not far from where the Dick murder took place. It appears on Gruesome, which is a soundtrack CD to promote the book Johnny Gruesome by Gregory Lamberson. The CD features songs based on the novel as well as other eerie things like ghosts and monsters — people like Evelyn Dick falling into the “monster” category. It takes the element of morbid humour a bit further in its opening:
He did not know
When he came home
That you’d be there
With a cleaver in the air
You chopped up John
Oh, did you have fun?
You said you didn’t kill
Threw him over the hill[12]
Born on October 13, 1920, in Beamsville, Ontario, Evelyn Dick later moved with her parents to Hamilton. There is evidence that her father was abusive, struggled with alcohol abuse, and might also have been siphoning funds from the Hamilton Street Railway, where he worked. Evelyn tried hard to fit in with the higher-class in town and was consistently at the heart of rumours. She was often seen in the company of older men and continually being caught in outright lies, such as her claims to be married to a man stationed overseas, who was never proven to exist.[13]
Evelyn married John Dick in 1945 after a very quick courtship and apparently engaged in her first extramarital affair within the first week of marriage.
On Saturday March 16, 1946, a group of five children found what they thought was a human body partway down the escarpment in the Albion Falls area. They scrambled up the hill and blocked the roadway on the top with a human chain, hoping to stop the first car that arrived and alert them of their find. The first adults on the scene insisted that what they likely saw was the body of a slaughtered pig, but the children insisted it was human and was wearing a shirt.
What they had found was the torso of an adult male. The head, arms, and legs were missing and to this day have not been found. A deep abdominal wound suggested that somebody had tried to cut the torso itself in two.
A report in the Hamilton Spectator read, “Clothed only in an undershirt and shorts, the torso of an unidentified man with the head, legs and arms missing, was found ... one half-mile from Albion Falls, about 10 o’clock this morning ... The gruesome find was made by a group of children ... out for a Saturday morning hike.”[14] The body was confirmed to be that of John Dick, who had been reported missing by his cousin on March 6.
Evelyn Dick was immediately questioned but denied knowing anything or having anything to do with her husband’s murder. Investigation revealed that a Packard Evelyn had borrowed from a Bill Landeg was returned to him with blood covering the seat and bloody clothing in the back. Her excuse involved a companion who had cut herself and made the mess, but the blood was found to be the same