The Curse of the Old Dow Brewery
Griffintown
An old building, mostly abandoned since 1998 and contaminated with asbestos and an apparent curse, stands empty, haunting the Griffintown neighbourhood with memories of a once-brighter time of prosperity and growth … if it hadn’t been for a serious of unfortunate events that altered its fate.
The Molson Brewery, founded in 1786, is not only Canada’s oldest brewery but the oldest in North America. The brewery and its founder, John Molson, are known as a major Montreal success story. The family was involved in the creation of a bank (Molson Bank), which later merged into the Bank of Montreal, and diverse other investments, including the ownership of an NHL hockey franchise (the Montreal Canadiens), as well as shipping, railway, and lumber companies. They used their wealth to support the Montreal General Hospital and McGill College (now a university).
Though Labatt is often seen as Molson’s main competitor for the Canadian beer market, there was another player, founded in the same city, which was Molson’s main competitor and, at one time, Montreal’s number one brewery. In fact, it might very well have sat strong among Canada’s major long-standing breweries such as Molson, Labatt, Moosehead, and Alexander Keith’s if not for the brand-shattering tragic events that occurred in the late 1960s.
Thomas Dunn started his brewing operations just a few years after John Molson in the town of La Prairie, across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. He moved his growing operation to Montreal in the latter half of the first decade of the 1800s. The ownership of the company was assumed in 1834 by William Dow, who had risen in the ranks from employee, to foreman, and finally a partner in the company.
Dow Breweries went on to possess more than sixty plants and office buildings across the country, employing more than one thousand people. It was behind the construction of Canada’s first and oldest planetarium (originally known as the Dow Planetarium, later named the Montreal Planetarium and currently the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium). As Allen Winn Sneath writes in his book Brewed in Canada: The Untold Story of Canada’s 350-Year-Old Brewing Industry, by 1966, Dow Ale, the brewery’s most popular beer, was the number-one selling brand in the province of Quebec.
Memorable advertising slogans such as “Now for a Dow,” “Wouldn’t a Dow go good now” and “Take Dow home” were well-known and the company’s four most popular brands at the time were Dow Ale, Kingsbeer Lager, Champlain Porter, and Dow Porter.
Trouble began for the company when, in late 1965 and early 1966, nearly fifty men in Quebec City were hospitalized with a degenerative heart ailment. In a CBC television interview, Quebec’s deputy minister of health, Jacques Gélinas, explained that the first death was reported in November of 1965, and by the middle of March 1966, another fifteen of those men had died. The deaths, he reported, occurred between twenty-four and forty-eight hours after the beginning of the illness. It was determined that one of the common factors found among the group were that the men were large consumers of beer, none of them drinking less than eight quarts of beer a day.
Because of the popularity of both Dow Ale and Champlain Porter in Quebec City at the time, and indications of a preference for Dow brewery beers in the surviving patients who were questioned, investigations into the brewing process began.
Despite the fact that, after a three-month investigation, no link was established between the heart trouble experienced and any of Dow brewery’s products, the company decided upon a good-faith campaign in order to help alleviate the concerns and rumours that surfaced.
Public relations debacle: Despite the fact that no link was established between the heart trouble experienced and any of Dow’s beers, the company decided upon a public relations good faith campaign that backfired.
In an April 3, 1966, interview with CBC television, Pierre Gendron, president of Dow Brewery, explained quite emphatically that after a thorough analysis of the beers nothing whatsoever was found. “There has been a tremendous amount of rumours and the population was very unnerved and very distressed about this and very nervous,” Gendron noted, explaining that, even though the beer was perfectly good, as a responsible company they had no other choice than to recall it. “Now, if you take back a huge quantity of beer like this,” he said, “there’s no other choice, also, to dump it.”
A Winnipeg Free Press article from March 1966 reported that one million gallons of Dow Ale and Champlain Porter brands of beer (comprising six hundred thousand gallons of stock at Dow’s Quebec brewery and another four hundred thousand gallons from the brewer’s agents, retail locations, and the public) would be dumped into sewers.
Instead of assuring the public, this stunt by Dow Breweries had the exact opposite effect. The public saw it as an admission of guilt, and in less than a year Dow lost its dominant position, its market share transferred to Molson and Labatt.
Within that year, a Canadian Medical Association article by Yves Morin and Phillippe Daniel found similarities between the Quebec case and other “beer poisoning” incidents, including ones that occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, and Manchester, England, in 1900. This study determined that the Quebec City brewery beers contained ten times more cobalt sulphate than the Montreal location. Cobalt sulphate is a chemical that had been added to some Canadian beers since 1965 in order to improve stability of the beer’s head. The report indicated that in both Quebec City and in Omaha the syndrome began appearing a month after the introduction of cobalt sulphate to the beer and that no new cases occurred a month after the use of colbalt sulphate was discontinued.
Even though Dow Breweries stopped using cobalt sulphate in their beer and no new cases of the heart ailment were reported, the damage had been done. Dow never recovered from the 1966 debacle, and not long after the brewery was acquired by Molson. By 1998 both the production of Dow beer and the historic brewery on Notre-Dame Street were shut down.
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Over the years the abandoned Dow Brewery building, originally erected in 1816, has attracted plenty of urban explorers, those interested in history, and, as often happens in old empty buildings, paranormal investigators.
In 1966, Dow Ale was the top-selling brand of beer in Quebec. Nobody foresaw the dark turn the company’s fortunes would take.
The Montreal Paranormal Investigations group explains that the site is haunted by many ghosts, including that of a young girl who was murdered near the location in the late 1990s. Outlining experiences of group member Patrick, as well as other psychics who didn’t want to stay in the building because they felt that “death was under the ground,” the group’s website shared a visual phenomenon that Patrick had seen.
After he continually experienced “horrific ghost vibes” from the location and then identified the spot where the girl was allegedly murdered, Patrick caught a vision of the outline of a little girl, lit in the darkness. She had been crying, he explained. He went on to say that her tears were happy tears because she knew they were there to help her.
The Dow Brewery remains one of the staple locales of the historic tour of Haunted Griffintown. In keeping with the neighbourhood’s brewing roots, once one finishes the ninety-minute tour, it might just be appropriate to end the evening at brewpub Brasseur du Montreal and offer a toast to the past with their aptly named Ghosttown porter.
Unspeakable Torture and Mind Control: Project MK-ULTRA
The Allan Memorial Institute, McGill University
The term unspeakable torture is likely to conjure up images of a secret medieval underground dungeon echoing with the screams of prisoners strapped to a torture rack, the atrocities and experimentation performed on men, women, and children in a Nazi concentration camp, or perhaps a private Dr. Frankenstein–style lab in which a mad scientist secretly