Mount Royal Park. Jacques Cartier arriving at Hochelaga in 1535.
Ever since Champlain’s visit, questions have lingered about the missing village of Hochelaga. What happened to its people? Where exactly was it located? Did it ever exist at all?
If we skip ahead 250 years, we have our first clue. In 1860 remains were discovered by constructions workers digging below Sherbrooke Street, between Metcalfe and Mansfield. Marian Scott reports that a large number of skeletons were found, as well as tools, pots, and firepits. Principal of McGill and pioneer geologist John William Dawson was brought in to explore and evaluate the site, and he came to the conclusion that the former village of Hochelaga had finally been found. The area was thereafter called the Dawson site.
But doubts remained. The Dawson site was much smaller than the grand village Cartier spoke of. Could the village that was unearthed be a different one entirely?
A hundred years later anthropologists Bruce Trigger and James Pendergast set out to examine this very question. Using the carbon dating available in 1972, they were able to determine that the remains did hail from the 1500s. They were unable, however, to definitively confirm that this village was Hochelaga.
Who the Indigenous people living in Hochelaga were and where they went are other unanswered questions. They were long believed to be Haudenosaunee, but Trigger and Pendergast identified them instead as St. Lawrence Iroquoians, a separate nation entirely. In their book Family Life in Native America, James and Dorothy Volo explain that neither the Wyandot nor the Kanien’keha:ka, both of whom believe the St. Lawrence Iroquoians to be part of their ancestry, have a story explaining the disappearance of the people of Hochelaga. Trigger and Pendergast were, however, able to find an elderly man who recounted a story told to him by his father, in which the Wyandot drove his ancestors from the country. According to this story, the nation split, some going southeast to the Abenaki, others southwest to the Haudenosaunee, and still others straight west to other Wyandot.
But does this explain the complete disappearance of the village they were leaving behind?
The search for the missing village of Hochelaga continues to this day. An archeological effort between McGill and Université de Montréal began in the summer of 2017 and was aimed at finally finding the village, with digs planned for Outremont Park, the grounds of McGill, Jeanne-Mance Park, Beaver Lake, and other locations. Construction on de Maisonneuve Boulevard West, at the southern edge of the Dawson site, was recently halted due to concerns about the destruction of artifacts. Interest in the missing village clearly remains.
We may never know much more about the villagers Cartier and his men encountered over 480 years ago. Were they simply nomadic and eventually moved on? Did Cartier miscalculate his location? If so, was the nation he encountered never located in Montreal at all? Or was it a ghost village even when Cartier landed there, already long destroyed, inhabited by spectres so convincingly real that Cartier could not tell the difference? Did the explorer feast with the dead on that fateful voyage in 1535? We may never truly know.
Not Too-Tall Tales of a Radio Station Ghost
Former CHOM-FM Building, Westmount
Radio is synonymous with disembodied voices, those almost-spectral companions whose words accompany us when we wake up, perhaps on our commute in to work, throughout our work and leisure days, or our car rides. Along with us no matter where we roam or what we are doing, they are welcomed into our lives; a part of our rituals, there like the most reliable of friends.
Sometimes, though, there are other voices on the radio. So what happens when the disc jockeys and radio station personalities encounter an equally pervasive presence, something seen, heard, and felt in eerie glimpses, odd sounds, and chillingly unexplainable cold spots?
Rather than “turning up the volume,” as a DJ might do upon putting on a new hit, they might, instead, call in an exorcist.
Which is exactly what happened in 1978 at CHOM-FM in Montreal.
CHOM-FM’s station slogan is “The spirit of rock.” For a while, one might have forgiven the DJs if they replaced that with the phrase “the spirit of the departed” instead. We are referring to the deceased, rather than the retired, such as Robert Wagenaar, who in the fall of 2017 decided to hang up his headphones after forty illustrious years on the airwaves, most of them at CHOM-FM. An unforgettable presence (whose moniker, “Tootall,” was based on the man’s tall stature), he became synonymous with classic and progressive rock music in the city for more than one generation of Montrealers.
In his decades of working at the station, Tootall regularly encountered such rock legends as Kate Bush, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, Supertramp, and Genesis. But he also, on a fittingly dark and eerie night in the 1970s, bumped into a ghost who had been seen roaming the building.
In a 2014 Montreal Gazette article, writer Mark Abley reported a conversation that he had with the legendary broadcaster, who described a time when the station moved from 1310 Greene Avenue to a beautiful old three-storey greystone across the street at 1355 Greene.
That was when the eerie encounters with a ghost began, described by many eyewitnesses as a man wearing a green top, in various locations on and near the third floor. The apparition was sometimes seen walking up the stairway in the middle of the night, when the station was relatively deserted. Others claimed they saw the haunted eyes of the man staring back at them from a mirror in the bathroom on the third floor. DJs were left confused over how their turntable’s arm was, for no discernable reason, “skipping merrily” back and forth over an album all on its own.
In the Gazette article, Tootall recounted a meeting with a radio announcer who had just finished his stint on the overnight program. “He was seriously pale and shaken by the strange events that had happened on his shift,” Tootall said. “I believe water taps were being turned on and off, and [my] coffee cup kept mysteriously emptying.”
Quite often, the ghost was associated with a feeling of intense cold, centralized near the music library on the building’s third floor. A look into the building’s history might explain a bit about this reported phenomenon that was so well-known that the radio station was featured in an August 1984 article in the National Enquirer entitled “Radio Station Spooked by Tormented Ghost.”
The beautiful old building that was serving as the station’s new location came with a tale of tragedy, according to Rob Braide, program director at CHOM-FM, who was a guest on the “Ghostly Radio Tales” episode of the Radio Stuff Podcast, hosted by Larry Gifford, in October 2017. In that episode, Braide shared some of the tales he had heard over the years, as well as a tragic story about a suicide. A homeowner, a man who was apparently distraught and going through an unpleasant and messy divorce, descended into alcoholism and eventually took his own life with a shotgun in the back bedroom on the top floor of the building — a space that eventually became the music library next to the studio.
The man was apparently wearing a green sweater the day he died, which may explain why the colour green was a common element of the spectral image sometimes seen sitting in the announcer’s chair at the console in the station. Braide said that morning show host Daniel Richler (son of Mordecai Richler) “was completely freaked out by the whole thing and … ended up … leaving [partially] because of it.”
Braide also said that some people claimed that they had seen a head on the top of the vending machine and two feet sticking out of the bottom. But he suggested that this particular vision might have more to do with the smoke of a green plant regularly associated with a rock musician’s lifestyle.
Despite the tragic and violent end of life of the building’s previous owner, the ghost itself wasn’t seen by radio station staff as evil. “It was never considered a malevolent figure,” Braide explained. “He was just kind of there.” But that presence was enough to prompt radio station personnel to seek the services of an exorcist.
Tootall explained that in 1978 the office manager hired a psychic and pictures of Jesus were hung in various locations in the building to see if