As she glanced down the hall toward the nurses’ station, another odd notion struck Debbie. “A strange feeling went through me, like, I just knew I shouldn’t be replying.… I just felt this,” Debbie shared. “For some strange reason I knew I shouldn’t be talking to her. The nurses’ station was close by and it was more like a feeling that the nurses shouldn’t see me ‘talking’ with her.”
Much later Debbie realized her real worry had been the idea of the nurses seeing her talking to nothing.
Still not saying anything to the woman in the doorway, Debbie quietly nodded her head in acknowledgement.
“Straighten your back,” the old woman said, “and walk as fast as you can to the nurses’ station. It’s going to hurt, but then you’ll be out in no time.”
Debbie looked at her, considered the suggestion, and contemplated the dozen or more steps it would take to do exactly what the stranger said. Then she took a deep breath, pulled her back as straight as she was able to manage, and walked as quickly as she could past the nurses’ station. Though pain shot through her body with every single step, she managed to complete the task. A few hours later, Debbie’s doctor came with the good news that she was healing quickly and would be released from the hospital early.
Debbie never saw the strange old woman again. However, a few months later when she returned to the hospital for a follow-up appointment, the elevator she was on stopped on the floor where she’d encountered the old woman. She hadn’t pressed the button for that floor.
The first thing Debbie spotted when the elevator doors opened was the intravenous pole, in the same spot in the doorway where the old woman had been clutching it. Upon seeing it, Debbie shook her head, wondering if there were supernatural forces at play.
Debbie shared her belief that there was some kind of presence in the hospital, appearing in the guises of the old woman and the pool of blood that had coated her, and this presence had constantly been looking out for her.
* * *
On April 26, 2015, as part of the Royal Vic’s move to its new location, 154 patients were transferred the few kilometres west. It was cited as “the biggest hospital move in Canadian history.” The Black Watch Royal Highland Regiment paid tribute to the event in a bagpipe ceremony, as 122 years of operation in the original building came to an end.
The old building itself remains empty, abandoned. And though the McGill Campus Planning and Development webpage mentions an ambitious plan to transform the site into a world-class pavilion dedicated to the study of research of sustainable development and public policy, none of the plans for repurposing the old building have come to fruition. A special report by Salimah Shivji of CBC News indicates that the MUHC is on the hook for 7.5 million dollars of annual costs for heating and maintenance of the vacant buildings. One of the methods used to help offset the costs is to allow film companies to use the buildings for a nineteenth-century hospital setting. The MUHC has accommodated filmmakers by keeping several of the rooms filled with old medical equipment.
The dead buildings have also been the birthplace of other creative works. A Montreal Gazette article from November 2017 by Susan Schwartz entitled “Portraits of Montreal’s Now-Empty Royal Victoria Hospital” describes an art show called Entr’Acte, which is a nod to the fact that the hospital is “between vocations.” One of the portraits, entitled “Diane’s Escape,” by Marie-Jeanne Musiol, is an image named for someone Musiol accompanied on her journey from this life. Marie said she knew she wanted her image to reflect a personal approach and not something that was strictly architectural. “My work has always been about energy and capture of energy in various places,” Musiol said. She found that energy while searching in a tenth-floor room in what was once the breast centre of S Block. She came across an intravenous pole in the basement and taped the tubing to the window in the tenth-floor room. “It is the representation, in a certain way, of life going out of the body.… I see the tubes and the swirls as representing the various convolutions of life and death. And finally, the little tube goes out through the window. And the other window is something of an escape route, giving insight into a dimension beyond.”
In the fall of 2017, CBC Radio Canada sent Hugo Lavoie on assignment to explore the Old Royal Victoria Hospital for a French language segment of Gravel le matin. The piece he recorded is entitled “Visite du tunnel de la mort de l’ancien hôpital Royal Victoria” (“Visit to the Tunnel of Death at the Old Royal Victoria Hospital”). A February 2018 article entitled “Old Royal Victoria Hospital” on the Haunted Montreal blog describes the program about Lavoie’s visit:
The Tunnel of Death connected the hospital to the autopsy room at the Institute of Pathology via an underground corridor that passes under University Street. Interested in recreating the experience of what happens when a patient dies, Lavoie was taken by Dr. Jonathan Meakins, who oversees heritage of the old building, to the former emergency room, the resuscitation chamber, an old surgery room, and through the infamous corridor to the autopsy room.
“It’s a bit disturbing,” Lavoie explained.
Another reporter, Alyson Grant, a former Montreal Gazette journalist, was inspired by some of the stories about the old hospital to write an absurdist play in honour of the building and its ghosts. Her play, Progress!, premiered in the fall of 2015 and features two ghosts who, in the tradition of such classics as It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, persuade a suicidal patient, the hospital’s very last patient, that her life is worth living after all.
Grant was thinking about the hospital’s closure during the year the play premiered and she found herself wondering what would happen to all of the ghosts in a building like that after it is abandoned.
“The original idea of the ghosts being like caretakers was based on something my sister, who was an ICU nurse at the Children’s Hospital here, told me,” Grant said in a Montreal Gazette article. Grant relayed the story of a teenage boy who lay dying in the hospital and received visits from a mysterious red-haired girl who would speak to and comfort him. Yet, despite all the stories the boy shared about this girl, nobody else in the hospital had ever seen her. It was only after the boy died that one of the staff members remembered a young girl with red hair who’d been a patient in the same ward … and who had died there.
“I couldn’t help thinking,” Grant said, “what’s going to happen to the red-haired girl when this hospital is closed? Where is she going to go? What’s going to happen to all those other people who died here?”
In a CBC article, Grant spoke about the play and its celebration of the ghosts from the past. “It’s my attempt at paying homage to these buildings and to our sense of what they’ve been in our lives. Many Montrealers have walked these halls and had profound experiences here, either of healing or giving birth, or of death.”
Grant is correct. Hospitals are places of healing, places of birth, places of hope. They are also places of trauma, places of suffering, and places of death. Intense emotions and many of the extremes of the human condition are experienced in hospitals. If it is possible for human spirits to be trapped on our earth by trauma or unfinished business, what better location for that to occur than a hospital?
What better location in Montreal than a castle-like building that has stood for more than 125 years, the site of such highs and lows of human experience, and stands, empty and foreboding, overlooking the city below, echoes of the past behind the now-dark windows?
Sleeping Above a Cemetery: Ghosts of the Grey Nuns Convent
Concordia University Residence
Students in the Grey Nuns co-ed residence at Concordia University who are up all night burning the midnight oil aren’t necessarily awake because they’re cramming for an exam. They may be sleepless because their dreams are plagued with ghastly images related to the building’s tragic past, or perhaps because of an