Dark Poutine - True Crime and Dark History

Episode 440: In 1879, Montreal’s Griffintown was a crowded working-class neighbourhood shaped by Irish immigration, heavy industry and life along the Lachine Canal. On June 27, Mary Gallagher entered a tenement at the corner of William and Murray streets, where a morning of drinking with her friend Susan Kennedy ended in a brutal killing for which Kennedy was accused.

The crime became one of Montreal’s most enduring ghost stories. For generations, residents have said that Mary returns to the corner every seven years, searching for her missing head. In this Spooktober episode, we examine the documented case, the legend it inspired and the changing neighbourhood that kept her story alive for nearly 150 years.

Sources:The Ghost of Griffintown: Mary Gallagher's Haunting LegendMary Gallagher | Haunted MontrealMary Gallagher – The Ghost of Griffintown / WKT2 26Calling all ghost hunters: Headless Mary may return to Montreal tonight | CP24Headless Mary | ScholasticMeurtre de Mary Gallagher | WikipediaThe Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada · Tuesday, July 08, 1879The British Whig, Kingston, Ontario, Canada · Monday, June 30, 1879Montreal Gazette, Quebec, Canada · Wednesday, October 01, 1879Montreal Gazette, Quebec, Canada · Saturday, October 04, 1879The Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada · Thursday, July 03, 1879The Montreal Star, Quebec, Canada · Saturday, July 05, 1879The British Whig, Kingston, Ontario, Canada · Saturday, November 29, 1879The Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada · Tuesday, October 07, 1879The Montreal Gazette Thu, Oct 02, 1879 ·Page 4Ottawa Daily Citizen • Mon, Jun 30, 1879 • Page 1 • (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)The British Whig, Kingston, Ontario, Canada · Monday, July 07, 1879St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Missouri · Thursday, October 02, 1879Ottawa Daily Citizen, Ontario, Canada · Thursday, October 02, 1879Ghost of Griffintown | ConcordiaLes origines d’une légende irlandaise… montréalaise ! | banq.qc.ca
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Episode 439: In September 1632, plague was tearing through Loudun, France, when the Ursuline nuns began reporting apparitions, unexplained blows and violent physical attacks. During a series of exorcisms, the voices speaking through the women named a local priest: Urbain Grandier.

Grandier was intelligent, outspoken and surrounded by scandal. He had also made powerful enemies. As clergy, physicians and royal officials entered the case, reports from inside the convent became part of a much larger struggle involving religion, medicine, politics and the law.In this episode, we examine the Possessions at Loudun and the people who tried to explain them. Were the nuns experiencing a supernatural attack, a shared psychological illness or something shaped by suggestion and institutional pressure? What happens when investigators settle on an answer before they finish asking questions?

Sources

The Possession at Loudun by Michel de CerteauThe Devils of Loudun by Des NiauDocuments pour servir à l’histoire médicale des possédées de Loudun by Gabriel LeguéSœur Jeanne des Anges, supérieure des Ursulines de Loudun: autobiographiePossédées de Loudun, Affaire des (1632–1634)“The Possessions at Loudun” by Craig E. Stephenson“La possession de Loudun (1632–1637) by Sophie Houdard“Mass Sociogenic Illness” by Robert E. Bartholomew and Simon Wessely“Divine Punishment or Disease?”The Devils of Loudun by Aldous HuxleyJeanne des Anges bibliography and manuscript record“Edict of Nantes”“Tarantism, Dancing Mania and Demonopathy: The Anthro-political Aspects of ‘Mass Psychogenic Illness’”Looking Back: The possessions at Loudun | StephensonThe Possession at Loudun by Michel de CerteauMalleus Maleficarum Index | Internet Sacred Text ArchiveThe Devils of Loudun by Edmund Goldsmid, free ebook download | Global Grey
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Episode 438: In September 1755, more than four hundred men from Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, were summoned to their parish church and told their land, homes, and livestock had been forfeited to the Crown. They would not be going home, and neither would their families. The Acadians, French-speaking Catholic settlers who had farmed the Bay of Fundy’s tidal marshes for more than a century, were about to be deported in one of the largest forced removals in North American history.

Here we tell the story of what the Acadians of Grand Pré built, why the British destroyed it, and what became of the families torn apart and scattered across the Atlantic world. More than ten thousand Acadians were forcibly removed from their homeland over the course of the operation, and by some estimates, nearly half did not survive the decade that followed.

From Lieutenant-Colonel John Winslow, who carried out the deportation, to René Leblanc, the elderly notary who refused to abandon his people, we follow the Great Upheaval from the shores of Grand-Pré to the bayous of Louisiana, where the Acadian legacy lives on as Cajun culture.

Sources:L'Histoire de l'Acadie | Moncton.caExpulsion of the Acadians | WikipediaHeritage Minutes: Acadian Deportation | YouTubeHistory of Acadia | The Canadian EncyclopediaCentre d'études acadiennes Anselme-Chiasson, Université de MonctonAcadian Expulsion (Plain-Language Summary) | The Canadian EncyclopediaView of The Deportation of the Acadians from Ile St.-Jean, 1758 | AcadiensisThe Records of British Government at Annapolis Royal, 1713-1749 | Nova Scotia ArchivesPapers Relating to the Acadian French - 1714-1755 | Akins, Thomas BeamishPapers Relating to the Forcible Removal of the Acadian French from Nova Scotia - 1755-1768 | Akins, Thomas BeamishNotes on Nova Scotian Privateers by George E. E. Nichols | Archives of New BrunswickGreat and Noble Scheme by John Mack FaragherThe Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History by Christopher HodsonParks Canada - Expulsion of the Acadians National Historic EventThe Acadian Deportation, Women, and Refugee Resettlement in the British and French Atlantic (1755-1793)Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie by Henry Wadsworth LongfellowGrand-Pré National Historic Site | Memorial churchLandscape of Grand Pré | UNESCO World Heritage Site 2012
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Episode 437: Tyrone William ‘Ty’ Conn became the first man in over forty years to climb over the wall at Kingston Penitentiary, Canada's oldest and most secure federal prison. Born to a teenage mother in 1967 and adopted at age three by a prominent Belleville psychiatrist, his childhood unravelled into a cycle of theft, institutionalization, and escape that would follow him for the rest of his life. By the time he was thirty-two, a string of armed bank robberies and repeated prison breaks had compounded into a forty-seven-year sentence, a number that raised eyebrows given that not one of his crimes had ever physically harmed another person. On May 6, 1999, using a homemade ladder and a length of sewn canvas, he scaled Kingston's wall and disappeared into the Ontario countryside, setting off a thirteen-day manhunt that captivated the country. What happened when police finally caught up with him in a Toronto basement apartment two weeks later remains, to this day, a matter of dispute, one his own mother was never able to get answered.

Sources:Tyrone William Conn | Brief BiographyTy Conn: A Life Imprisoned (2000) | The Fifth EstateTy Conn : My Brother The Outlaw | YouTubeTy Conn : My Brother The Outlaw | FacebookWho Killed Ty Conn by Linden Macintyre, (Paperback) | IndigoTy Conn Project Materials - York UniversityTy Conn | WikipediaTyrone Conn's escape ends in death | CBC News7 Things You Need to Know About Kingston PenitentiaryNiagara Falls Review • Wed, Mar 14, 1984 • Page 8The Kingston Whig-Standard • Thu, Mar 15, 1984 • Page 1The Ottawa Citizen • Sat, Mar 07, 1987 • Page 8The Kingston Whig-Standard • Fri, Jun 30, 1989 • Page 2The Kingston Whig-Standard • Mon, Dec 18, 1989 • Page 9The Kingston Whig-Standard • Thu, Jun 28, 2001 • Page 1The Kingston Whig-Standard • Thu, Jun 28, 2001 • Page 10
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Episode 436: In June 1967, two of northern Saskatchewan's most respected bushmen, Métis political organizer James Brady and Cree band councillor Absolom Halkett, were dropped off by float plane to prospect for uranium near La Ronge. A week later, their employer found the camp standing, the beds slept in, the canoe still tied to shore. Both men were gone. The RCMP searched for three weeks, found a trail of unexplained clues, and closed the case without finding either man. More than fifty years later, a small team of researchers and family members went looking for answers the original investigation never sought, and what they discovered at the bottom of a northern lake raises more questions than it resolves.

Sources:

Cold Case North: The Search for James Brady and Absolom Halkett — Michael Nest, with Deanna Reder and Eric Bell (University of Regina Press, 2020)

CBC News — "Searchers pursue the truth on mysterious disappearance of Métis leader" (2018)

CBC News — "Authors explore decades-old mystery of disappearance of 2 northern Sask. leaders" (2020)

MBC Radio — "RCMP says it has no plans to search northern Saskatchewan lake for remains of Brady and Halkett" (2018)

Canada's History — "Cold Case North" (2021)

Prairie Books Now — "50-year-old case of two men disappearing revisited, investigated from Indigenous perspective"

Slaw / Canadian Law Library Review — Book review of Cold Case North

Wikipedia — James P. Brady

The Canadian Encyclopedia — Jim Brady

Active History — "Liberation from 'That Vicious System': Jim Brady's 20th Century Métis Cooperatives and Colonial State Responses"

Glenbow Museum — "Enclosing Some Snapshots: The Photography of Métis Activist James Brady"

SaskCulture — "Remembering James Brady"

Saskatchewan Association of Chiefs of Police — Missing Persons Database, Absolom Halkett

Saskatchewan Association of Chiefs of Police — Missing Persons Database, James Brady

Simon Fraser University — Deanna Reder faculty biography

Simon Fraser University, Indigenous Studies — "Cold Case North"

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