Of course, not all of the stories associated with the ghost were eerie and unexplained. One of the most memorable frights, Braide explained, were just the result of bad timing, or perhaps perfect timing, depending on your perspective. One night, a pair of priests, a woman considered the “den mother” of the station, and the owner’s son were in the music library performing an exorcism at midnight. Braide and other employees knew to stay away from that area so the group could complete their task. But later on, in the wee morning hours, Braide needed to enter the library to retrieve a Pink Floyd record. He figured that they would have completed their ritual and left hours earlier; but when he burst through the door, they all screamed and jumped out of their seats. It turned out they were in the middle of using a Ouija board to try to communicate with the dead man’s spirit.
Everyone who came through the station always mentioned the ghost. It simply became a part of the legend of a station that Braide describes as “a great piece of Montreal culture and a legacy of a radio station that meant a lot to a lot of people.” When the station relocated down the street to its original location a few years later, the staff held a tongue-in-cheek “Ghostbusters” party to say goodbye to their spectral companion. And that is when the stories of the green-topped ghost seemed to fade, much like the fleeting image of the apparition itself.
However, if you were to go to CHOM-FM’s current building and speak with staff from the radio station who had the pleasure of working with Robert “Tootall” Wagenaar over the years, they are likely to tell you that, even though he is now enjoying the disappearing act that comes with retirement, they are very likely to still feel his spirit ever present in that hallowed radio studio.
One Town, Two Poltergeists
Hudson, Quebec
Poltergeists never take credit for their mischief. They work in the quiet, when everyone is out of the room. They move your things around, empty your drawers, break the glass in your picture frames. They are the creak in your floorboards as a chair rocks when nobody is rocking it. They are your bedroom door slamming shut on a windless day. They are here, but you never see them. You see only the mess they leave behind.
In the early 1880s, the town of Hudson, just west of Montreal, was disturbed by two poltergeists, as described by John Robert Colombo in Ghost Stories of Canada. The first struck at the Hudson Hotel in October 1880. John Park, the innkeeper, entered a vacant room to find it had been ransacked. All the furniture had been scattered about, including the mattress and the tables and chairs. Weirdly, some pillows had been tied together in such a way that it looked as though a person was sitting there. The windows were all open.
These strange happenings continued for several days. A loaf of bread went missing from the kitchen when the cook left the room briefly. More rooms were left a mess when no one had been there. A fire broke out in the stables. Untouched bottles of booze began to move around in the tavern. The mayhem came to an end rather anticlimactically when a priest performed an exorcism of the building and sprinkled some holy water. There were no further disturbances. All was quiet in the town of Hudson, until it wasn’t.
A year later, in May 1881, the Perrault home was rocked with a series of odd disturbances that couldn’t be explained by the residents, including Madame Perrault, her five children, her mother, and her grandmother. The disturbances consisted mainly of the quiet shuffling around of objects in the home: a lady’s shawl moved, cupboards opened and their contents scattered, furniture toppled. Sometimes it seemed that the poltergeist had a woman’s sensibility, because it kept laying things out neatly: a Sunday dress, a roll of lace, winding sheets. Other times there seemed to be some meaning to the disorder, even though that meaning sometimes couldn’t be discerned, as when twelve porcelain religious figures were found lying in a circle with their heads all pointed together, as if to make a wheel. Or when two pillows were laid out on a bed and a quilt carefully laid over them, making the pillows look like a covered corpse.
No one ever heard a thing, and they couldn’t figure out why any of the events were taking place. Madame Perrault believed that her husband, who was working in Rivière-du-Loup, had passed away and his spirit was haunting them. But her husband was not dead. Then, thirteen-year-old Ernestine, one of Madame Perrault’s daughters, began to have convulsions (or “fits”) so violent that two grown men could barely hold her down. During one hour-long fit she punched through a pane of glass without cutting her skin. She remembered nothing that had happened during the convulsion once it was over.
A priest was called, and he decided to do a little experiment to see for himself if the stories were true. Herding everyone out of the house, he made sure one room was clean and tidy, then closed the door to be sure no one could get in. A little while later, when he returned to check, the room was a mess.
We can’t be sure how things turned out for the Perrault family. No further reports can be found about their home and its poltergeist, though Colombo does put forth one theory that could explain what happened. In the village it was widely known and believed that a curse had been placed on the Perrault family by an old woman. It seemed her husband was owed four dollars for some work he had done for Mr. Perrault, and since he was never paid, the old woman had cursed the house. The villagers seemed unconcerned, asserting that it could have been much worse than furniture being overturned. They believed the old woman could summon Satan.
What happened to the Hudson poltergeist? Were there one or two? Were they banished by the will of the local priest, or did the Perrault family finally pay their debt? We may never know. A poltergeist tells no tales. It simply knocks over your chairs, plays your piano, and locks you out of the house before whisking itself away, leaving you scratching your head, in this case for centuries to come.
The McGill Student Who Killed Houdini
The Princess Theatre, Downtown Montreal
Harry Houdini was born in Budapest on March 24, 1874, and he died in Detroit on October 31, 1926. But the man, whose birth name was Erik Weisz (later Ehrich Weiss, finally adopting his well-known name when he began his career as a professional performer) sealed his fate in Montreal on Friday October 22, 1926, due to a series of sucker-punches he received from a McGill University student by the name of J. Gordon Whitehead.
In a 2004 book titled The Man Who Killed Houdini, Don Bell tells the story of that event. He spent almost twenty years speaking to eyewitnesses and gathering the research to tell a very full and thorough tale about the man responsible for the death of someone who was, perhaps, the world’s most famous and legendary escape artist, magician, and illusionist.
Bell documents the many different interviews and conversations he had with various people, sharing in detail the conflicting accounts from multiple sources about the specific time, place, and circumstances surrounding the escape artist’s infamous demise. Among the tales, Bell stitches together multiple accounts to create a document about Houdini’s death, but also the man behind the legend.
According to Bell, Whitehead, along with two colleagues by the names of Samuel “Smiley” Smilovitz and Jacques Prince, entered Houdini’s dressing room prior to one of the illusionist’s Montreal performances. There they found the magician reclining on a couch. After some conversation in which Houdini remarked about the abilities of the human body to prepare for intense physical feats, such as being able to withstand a strong blow to the stomach, Whitehead unexpectedly hit Houdini in the stomach, landing at least two, if not as many as four or five, hard punches. Since he was still lying down and not expecting it, Houdini had not been prepared for the series of sucker punches he received.
Almost immediately after the attack, Houdini began to suffer from severe abdominal pain. Nevertheless, as a man who rarely let physical pain or discomfort prevent him from performing (prior to his Montreal stint, he had performed a show in Albany with a broken ankle), he continued on with his scheduled shows at the Princess Theatre that night and the next day.
Montreal’s