It might just be the haunting presence of the three hundred bodies buried in the basement.
There are 276 people buried in a crypt below the building, including 232 bodies of the “grey nuns” who were interred there.
The Grey Nuns is the name most commonly given to the order of Roman Catholic nuns originally founded in 1737 by Saint Marguerite d’Youville. Devoted to helping others, the nuns participate in compassionate service, host charitable events, and support society’s most vulnerable through schools, hospitals, and long-term care facilities.
By age thirty, Marie-Marguerite d’Youville had lost her father, her husband of eight years, and four of her six children. Instead of letting circumstances overwhelm her, she turned to religion and dedicated herself to helping others. She began by taking the poor into her small home; but, as the group of women who joined her in her efforts slowly grew, they began to take on other projects, and in 1747 they took over the operation of the General Hospital of Montreal.
It might be the presence of the three hundred bodies buried in the basement crypt of this old convent that is keeping some students up all night.
The term grey nuns was derived from the original mocking nickname given to d’Youville and her sisters. The French term les grises has a double meaning: both “the grey women” and “the drunken women,” the latter a reference to Marguerite’s husband, François d’Youville, a bootlegger who had illegally sold liquor to the local Indigenous population. This term stuck and was maintained as a reminder of the group’s humble beginnings, even as they grew and continued their important charitable work.
The first Canadian-born saint, Marguerite d’Youville was beatified in 1959 by Pope John XXIII, who called her the “Mother of Universal Charity.” She was later canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1990. That same year, in an October 12 Montreal Gazette article, Susan Schwartz reported that a plan had been announced by the federal government of Canada in which $851,000 would be invested into the conservation, protection, and internal renovations of the Grey Nuns’ former mother house.
This building, which was built in 1871, served as an orphanage and hospital, and, at one point, housed as many as a thousand Grey Nuns. The top floor was used as a dormitory for the young orphans. During the First World War, the lower part of the building’s west wing was occupied by sick and wounded soldiers.
On February 14, 1918, a tragic nighttime blaze on the top storey of the building resulted in the deaths of at least fifty-three children (while fifty-three infant bodies were identified, there was speculation in a 2014 Concordian article that some children’s bodies may have been entirely cremated in the fire).
The Grey Nuns Convent was a place of healing, but it was also a place of death. There were wounded soldiers who never recovered, the children killed in the fire, and the many nuns, young and old, who passed away in the building that was their home.
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In 2004 Concordia University acquired the building from the nuns, which by then had been declared a historic site, and slowly began the process of converting it into a student residence. The last nun in residence moved out in 2013. The high-vaulted chapel in the building was converted to a stately and serene study hall for up to 240 students, and the nuns’ rooms were turned into dorm rooms that currently house about six hundred students.
The remains buried in the building’s crypt were supposed to have been transferred to Île St. Bernard in Châteauguay, about twenty minutes south of Montreal, which the Grey Nuns own, but Quebec’s health authorities refused to allow the opening and exhumation of the tombs, citing health concerns (some of the sisters buried there had died of infectious diseases).
Chris Mota, a spokeswoman for Concordia University, told CBC in April 2013 that the crypt in the basement would be visible to the public, but only returning nuns would be able to visit it. “For the nuns, this was their life,” Mota said. “This was home. This was their family. This was where they worked, where they lived.… There’s a real connection here, and they will always be welcomed back.”
However, in the years since the dorm was converted into a student residence there have been multiple reports of eerie and strange events there that have nothing to do with typical student partying.
In an article for the Montreal Gazette in October 2014, Mark Abley reported that one student claimed she was unable to sleep properly while living in the building, regardless of her usual bedtime rituals. She explained that even sleeping pills were not allowing her to sleep through the night. The student’s dreams were plagued with ungodly and ghastly images — every time she attempted to close her eyes to sleep, horrific scenes of tortured children being burned alive would haunt her through yet another sleepless night. The student eventually moved out of the residence, claiming it was the only thing that eventually brought the nightmarish visions to an end.
Other student residents shared similarly eerie experiences in an October 2015 article in the Concordian. Those experiences weren’t restricted to dreams of the horrible 1918 orphanage fire, but involve glimpses of spectres, those who used to live in the building.
“I’m constantly feeling as though I’m sharing my space with other people,” Keeara, a Concordia student, said. “There have been multiple times that I have seen both nuns and children walking around corners and standing in the lifts.”
The experiences aren’t limited to visions and images, but they all include a sense that others are present.
“I haven’t had any experiences,” said resident Holly, “but I’ve definitely felt like I haven’t been alone in a room.”
Kayla, another resident, told CBC that though she hadn’t experienced anything she would describe as paranormal she found the building creepy and that there was something eerie in it. “I feel like it’s kind of like a ghost hospital,” she said.
In an April 2016 interview with CBC, Donovan King, of Haunted Montreal, said that “students moving into residence are literally sleeping above a cemetery, [which is] literally a few metres below. A lot of students get creeped out by this.” He said that students have reported hearing the tramping and crying of children coming from the top floor of the building.
According to some daycare workers at the Grey Nuns’ residence, a couple of children in the daycare have encountered and played with the same imaginary friend. The spectral playmate matches the description of one of the orphans who died in the 1918 fire and has been described as wearing a tattered hat and ripped, charred clothes.
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There are other, even more ghastly, stories from the convent’s past. Some of these tales first appeared in a sensational book first published in 1836: The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. In the text, Monk claims that Montreal nuns were forced to have sex with priests who entered the convent through secret tunnels:
One of my great duties was to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them. I expressed some of the feelings which this announcement excited in me, which came upon me like a flash of lightning; but the only effect was to set her arguing with me, in favour of the crime, representing it as a virtue acceptable to God, and honourable to me.
The priests, she said, were not situated like other men, being forbidden to marry; while they lived secluded, laborious, and self-denying lives for our salvation. They might be considered our saviours, as without their service we could not obtain pardon of sin, and must go to hell. Now it was our solemn duty, on withdrawing from the world, to consecrate our lives to religion, to practice every species of self-denial. We could not be too humble, nor mortify our feelings too far; this was to be done by opposing them and acting contrary to them; and what she proposed was, therefore, pleasing in the sight of God. I now felt how foolish I had been to place myself in the power of such persons as were around me.
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