Real Hauntings 5-Book Bundle. Mark Leslie
a strange nightly ritual, one I rarely talk about, because upon waking in the morning the events of the night often seem blurred and far away, dreamlike, unreal. The fact is that when I’m experiencing a night terror I am technically still asleep. I can see the room around me, just through a horror-movie lens. It’s like a waking nightmare in which all the everyday things I look at in the daytime come alive at night and try to kill me.
I have also seen people who aren’t there.
One time, sleeping over at my then boyfriend’s apartment, I looked up and saw a thin wire extending from the window to the top of the bookcase. Then I saw a little man on a little bicycle pedal his way across the room on the tightrope before disappearing. He was pink. Once I saw a hunched old woman staring at me from across the room with hatred in her eyes. She turned out to be a stepladder. On another occasion a demonic face came bulging out at me through a solid wall that I maybe, now that I think about it, shouldn’t have painted red.
Each of these experiences is uncanny, a lot like seeing a ghost. I see something, a terrible thing, but once I flick on the light it’s gone. I feel a presence in the room with me and have the irresistible urge to run. I panic, without quite knowing why. I stare into the face of someone who shouldn’t be there, gritting my teeth, willing them to go.
This isn’t real, I tell myself. But I don’t quite believe.
I’m not a die-hard believer in ghosts. I’ve never had an encounter with a spirit. I don’t have one of those stories to tell. But I have seen things in the dark. I have known the fear of being in the presence of something inexplicable. And as a result, I’ve always been attracted to creepy stories, the ones that make the hair on your arms stand on end, the ones where the girl turns around and screams at something only she can see. Because I’ve been that girl.
I hope you enjoy this series of tales of the ghostly, ghastly, and gruesome from my hometown. I know that Mark and I enjoyed writing them. And most of all, I hope you can put them out of your mind before you go to bed tonight so you can sleep a tranquil, dreamless sleep, uninterrupted by any unwanted visitors. I myself will be going to bed in the suburbs of Montreal with one hand on the light switch, as usual, lying in wait for whatever — or whoever — might come around, ready to scream.
Shayna Krishnasamy
Mary Gallagher and Her Missing Head
Griffintown
It happened in Griffintown.
The area located north of the Lachine Canal, south of Notre-Dame Street, and bordered by the Bonaventure Expressway to the east was once a bustling slum. Now an odd mixture of old industrial buildings and sparkling condos, it once housed a mainly Irish community of families and labourers working for the railways, at the port, and on the construction of the Victoria Bridge. Out of this shanty town comes Montreal’s most well-known ghost story: that of a headless ghost named Mary Gallagher, who died in 1879, killed by her own best friend.
Mary Gallagher was a prostitute. Though thirty-eight years old (quite aged for a working girl), she was still quite attractive and didn’t have trouble finding clients. According to the Haunted Griffintown ghost walk’s account of her story, the events that would lead to Mary Gallagher’s demise began rather pleasantly on June 24, 1879. She had gone out with her friend and fellow prostitute, Susan Kennedy, to celebrate Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, a holiday in Quebec. The town was filled with music and festivities. It was fun; it was also perfect for picking up johns.
Though they were unable to find any male companions at Joe Beef Tavern, they went on to Jacques-Cartier Square and there met a young man named Michael Flanagan. They spent the evening together, flirting and drinking at a local watering hole. Flanagan took a special liking to Gallagher, and the two decided to leave together. They went to a flophouse, leaving Kennedy on her own and none too happy about being abandoned.
Two days later, in the early hours of June 27, Mary and Michael showed up at Susan Kennedy’s house. The two-room house was situated on the second floor of a tenement building at the corner of William and Murray Streets. Kennedy seemed willing to let go of her grudge at the time, for she let the two in, even though it angered her husband (both Susan and Mary were married). Kennedy’s husband stormed off.
In his article “How a Dismembered Montreal Sex Worker Became a Sensation, Then a Ghost, and Now a Fading Legend,” Patrick Lejtenyi reports that the husband, Jacob Mears, was used to Gallagher dropping by at odd hours, but was furious that she’d brought a man with her this time. Apparently, he hadn’t yet come to terms with his wife’s profession, or perhaps he just didn’t want dirty deeds taking place inside his house. He returned some time later to find all three drinking and his wife alone in a room with Flanagan. Another row ensued, this time due to the drinking, and Mears stormed off again. It’s lucky that he did, as he left just in time to miss the murder.
In later testimony, Flanagan and Kennedy did not agree about what happened next. When he was questioned by police, Flanagan remembered finishing a bottle of whisky with the two women, then falling asleep by himself in the front room. When he woke up a few hours later in the middle of the day, he wanted to get a drink with Kennedy but she declined. He got up to leave, and on his way out saw Gallagher asleep in the other room. Everything seemed normal, there was no blood, and in Flanagan’s opinion Kennedy seemed a little quiet but calm.
Kennedy’s story was very different and often contradicted itself. She claimed she followed Flanagan into the other room, and that the two fell asleep side by side. During her trial she testified that later on that day she heard Gallagher invite another man in for a drink, and also heard them arguing before she fell asleep again. When she woke up hours later, the man was gone and Gallagher was dead. Kennedy said she was horrified when she saw the body and literally fell to the ground, too weak to call for the police. Flanagan, she said, woke up around the same time, saw the body, and ran off, as did her husband when he returned home.
A sketch of the building where Mary Gallagher was murdered, at the corner of William and Murray, 1879.
A different story was reported in the Montreal Weekly Witness. According to an article titled “Murdered with an Axe,” the policeman who was first on the scene reported the explanation Kennedy gave the day of. When he came in, he said, Kennedy was on the bed pretending to be drunk. She claimed that a man had come into the house early Friday to give her some money. For some reason this angered Gallagher; she and the man quarrelled, and he killed her. The man then washed his hands, told Kennedy not to tell the police, and left. Strangely, Kennedy added that she was glad he’d gotten away, because he was good-looking.
So how exactly did Mary Gallagher die? Whether it was by the hand of one of the three men reported to have been in the house or of her own friend, one thing is for sure: she lost her head in a terribly gruesome way.
The Weekly Witness called it “one of the most repulsive murders ever chronicled” and quoted the constable at the scene, an army man, as saying he’d never seen a sight like it. This was the first murder to occur in the city in two years, and the police, it seems, were simply not prepared for this kind of violence. Apparently there was blood everywhere, even on the walls, and for a length of time nobody could find Gallagher’s head.
The description of Gallagher’s body in the Weekly Witness is quite gruesome and detailed. Her headless body, clothed in a thin cotton dress, was lying stomach-down on the floor. One of her hands had been cut off, but this wasn’t obvious at first because the arm was caught under the body. There were several jagged cuts at her neck, indicating someone had really been hacking at the head before it came off. The head also had several gashes across the forehead, which the Weekly Witness reporter believed might have been the result of the first blow Mary received. Her head and hand were found in a wash basin by the stove.
Susan Kennedy, though clearly a little shaky on the details, never wavered in her claim that she was innocent. Flanagan made the same claim, too.
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