Alma was, of course, writing about Albion Falls, a classical cascading waterfall of just under 20 metres (62 feet) in the Red Hill Valley in Hamilton.[2] The cascading steps of the waterfall begin on Mud Street and the lower end is found at the south end of King’s Forest Park. The falls and the area are stunning in their picturesque glory. But beneath the postcard-perfect glimpses of natural beauty lie shadows that crawl out from the pages of history and up the spines of those who stand nearby and reflect on the tragedy and horrors that occurred there.
The drop of the ravine has been dubbed “Lover’s Leap” due to the legend of a young Jane Riley, who, disappointed by the unreturned love from Joseph Rousseau, flung herself from the steep cliff at the top of Albion Falls.[3] Her love and the extreme disappointment she faced was known throughout the village of Mount Albion, which was an important community, as it featured a gristmill, blacksmith shops, taverns, a church, and a general store.[4]
The village owed its existence to William Alexander Davis (1741–1843), a United Empire Loyalist who left North Carolina to fight alongside the British in the American Revolution. Davis was granted 2,300 acres in Barton and Saltfleet Townships, including five hundred acres around Albion Falls. The Davis estate consisted of a tannery, an orchard, a general store, a distillery, taverns, a church, a sawmill, and a gristmill. The two names lent the area the name Albion Mills (Albion being the poetic name for Britain). In 1880 the village was renamed Mount Albion.[5]
Legends of the Lover’s Leap aren’t the only things that haunt the picturesque ravine at Albion Falls.
Courtesy of Stephanie Lechniak.
The Hamilton Spectator archives note an incident that took place in 1897 near a house not far from the falls. A gentleman and two ladies were driving in a horse-drawn carriage, when the horses suddenly snorted in fear and stopped in their tracks. There, alongside the carriage, they saw a ghostly figure appear. Out of either fear or in an attempt to protect the ladies he was travelling with, the man lashed his horsewhip into the air toward the figure, but the whip passed right through and the ghostly image faded. They then proceeded on their journey and they saw nothing more, but it frightened them enough to share their eerie tale.
About half a mile down the valley from Albion Falls, two streams join together. One is from Buttermilk Falls and the other from the Albion Falls, or the Mill Falls as it was called at the time. Below this merger of the two streams there was a dam and a primitive sawmill. When a quarrel broke out among some of the workers, one of the men was killed. Local legend holds that for the fifty years following his death, his home was haunted. People continued to report seeing his ghost wandering about the house, hovering over the stream near where he died, travelling along the road, or flitting about the woods.
Years later, in the height of these legends, a woodcutter who lived in that very house spent the day drinking at Mount Albion’s Black Horse Tavern. While he was out, his mischievous neighbours slaughtered a pig, dressed it up in some clothes, and then hung it in a tree adjacent to his home. At midnight, when the inebriated man returned to the dwelling, he saw the hanging pig. His mind immediately flashed to the stories of the ghost reported to have haunted the 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