Clubbers Beware
1234 rue de la Montagne
It’s 2005 and Club 1234 on rue de la Montagne is packed. Her voice nearly drowned out by the music pounding through the building, a drunken party girl asks a waiter if she can go up to the attic.
“Absolutely not,” he tells her. “The attic is off-limits.”
Not to be deterred, the girl stumbles upstairs as soon as he turns his back. Only moments later, the clubbers below hear a terrible scream cut through the bass line. Seemingly in mortal terror, the girl dives through an attic window, landing on the lower balcony. Still screaming like the devil is after her, she launches herself right off the balcony and into the arms of the bouncers below.
“What happened?” they ask her. “What’s wrong?” But the girl can’t stop screaming long enough to tell them.
Someone calls 911 and an ambulance comes to take the hysterical party girl away, her screams mingling with the sounds of the sirens.
What this girl saw has never been discovered, but one thing is certain: 1234 rue de la Montagne is haunted. And the ghosts who live there will make you want to jump to your death. According to Donovan King of the Haunted Montreal blog, the building that currently houses Club Le Cinq in downtown Montreal has had a long and varied history. The house was originally built as a family dwelling in 1859. Though it was later owned by Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, a famous Canadian politician, the most significant use of the dwelling began in 1902, when it was purchased by Joseph C. Wray and Bros. and transformed into a funeral home.
By the late 1970s, the Wray brothers had moved on and the building lay abandoned. It was eventually purchased and converted into a nightclub, though there was a lot of turnover through the decades. The spot has housed many different clubs, including Club L’Esprit, Club 1234, World Beat Complex, and the current Club Le Cinq. But no matter the name on the door, ghostly sightings and paranormal occurrences have remained steady.
In the 1980s, while the building was being renovated, construction workers spotted a white orb drifting through the air. Understandably alarmed, the workers complained to the owner, who either didn’t believe them or didn’t care. He would be taught a lesson later that same night.
Dropping by the site to see how the renovations were going, the owner noticed a beautiful woman standing by herself at the bar with her back to him. It seemed strange to him, since the club wasn’t open yet. Planning to ask her what she was doing there, the owner took a seat next to the woman at the bar and asked her if she needed anything. When she turned to him, he nearly fell off his stool.
The woman had no face.
There was no gaping wound or skull peeking back at him, either. Instead, there was a blank plane of skin, as though her face had been surgically removed. Completely horrified, the owner bolted from the building, never to return. The renovations were never finished.
Certain locations in the building house more ghosts than others. The women’s bathroom in the basement is one such place, so haunted that female patrons are often warned not to go down there without a buddy. Several times club-goers have reported seeing a ghostly woman in the bathroom with a jagged scar on full display that runs all the way down her torso. It’s the kind of scar that might be left by a mortician’s knife … when the building was a funeral home, the basement is where the autopsies were conducted.
Even a space as innocuous as the coatroom isn’t safe, where a small table has been known to fling itself across the room without warning.
And then there’s the infamous attic, where our poor party girl saw what she saw and flung herself from the window. Though the window in question has since been boarded up, there have been multiple reports of pedestrians down on the street glimpsing a woman’s ghost in that window, perhaps the same ghost that frightened our friend out of her wits. Three staff members who crept up to the attic on a dare all reported seeing something floating by the wall.
Even the famous and their entourages aren’t immune. During the disco craze, when the club was especially popular and attracted such celebrities as Mick Jagger and David Bowie, Boy George’s bodyguard wandered upstairs looking for the star. Though he saw nothing out of the ordinary, he felt an unseen presence nearby that made all the hair on his body stand on end. It took nearly a week for the goosebumps to go away.
So well-known as a haunted site is 1234 rue de la Montagne that it’s been visited by multiple paranormal investigators throughout the years. It was featured on the TV show Creepy Canada in 2004. On the episode, it was suggested that the corpses had been defiled during their stay at the funeral home and were not able to find their eternal rest … and it is these ghosts that haunt the building to this day.
Another investigation was done in 2010 for a French TV show called Rencontres Paranormales. The owner of the club at the time, popular Montreal DJ MC Mario, had witnessed several unexplained incidents on the premises. He reported that he heard doors slamming on their own and the voice of a young girl singing. A team of twelve investigators was brought in with their equipment to explore the club and search for ghosts. One picture was captured of what could possibly be the face of a female ghost.
The team also conducted a seance in which they contacted the spirit of Galt’s first wife. She claimed to be annoyed with the club and its patrons because their noise and antics were bothering her daughter, another haunter of the building. In an amusing deal made during the seance, MC Mario agreed to play Mozart at the beginning of each evening to appease the ghosts, as long as they agreed to leave the living alone. Apparently, Mozart was played each evening as promised, until Club 1234 closed its doors in early 2013. No ghostly encounters have been reported since.
A Montrealer’s Experience with Slade the Spiritualist
Montreal Star, 1881
Henry Slade (1835–1905) was a famous medium and spiritualist who lived and performed across North America and Europe. He was acclaimed, most notably, for the use of slate-writing. During the ritual, a small slate and a piece of chalk would be placed under the table, and the messages revealed on the slate after the seance was performed were allegedly written by the spirit that had been reached.
The following letter to the editor of the Montreal Star from a Montreal resident was uncovered by John Robert Colombo for his book More True Canadian Ghost Stories.
A Montrealer’s Experience with Slade, the Spiritualist
To the Editor of the Star: Sir — I notice that two or three of your correspondences have been discussing spiritualism in your columns of late. I took some interest in the discussion, as I have had some strange experience of spiritualists, and I do not know whether mediums are frauds or connecting links between man and the spirit land. But I will tell you what occurred to me in New York the other day. I heard a good deal about Slade, the medium. He is said to be by far the best-known “slate-writing medium” in the world. Whether his power is due to hypnotic influences, or to what Dr. Hammond called “syggognicism,” I do not know, but he certainly can perform some of the most remarkable things it has ever been my lot to witness. But I will tell you exactly all I saw. I saw Slade at midday. The room was well furnished, and of course there was plenty of light. I was courteously received, and was then invited to take my seat at a walnut table. I asked permission to look under the table to see if there was any apparatus by which he could be assisted, and he replied “Certainly.” I knocked on the table, turned it over and failed to see anything unusual. Then I sat down and Slade sat opposite me. He took my hands and the raps commenced at once. He ordered them whenever he pleased and he was obeyed. I asked if he would allow me to put my foot on his and again he replied “Certainly,” and with both his hands in mine and both his feet under my feet the raps continued the same as ever, I was satisfied. I could not discover how the raps were produced, and I believed that Slade could produce raps whenever he pleased without detection. Then I asked for the slate trick. But on this point I may