The following is an excerpt from Ian Gibbs’s latest book, Canada’s Most Haunted: Ghostly Tales and Paranormal Encounters Across the Great White North, published October 6, 2026, by Touchwood Editions. Available wherever books and eBooks are sold. 244 pages, $23.98.
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QUEBEC
MONTREAL
Montreal is one of the oldest cities in Canada. I would also say one of the most spectacular. It was founded in 1642 and has been home to many groups of First Nations people dating back over twelve thousand years. The first Europeans showed up to trade furs in 1535, and with that comes a long, long history of humans in one spot.
Wherever you had human settlements, you usually had epidemics, many times brought on by our own ignorance. Cholera, for instance, was passed through untreated sewage that found its way back into the drinking water. It causes severe dehydration and, to this day, kills between 30,000 and 130,000 people a year. Sometimes known as the blue death—it often makes the skin of those afflicted turn blue due to extreme dehydration—it’s treatable these days, but it certainly wasn’t hundreds of years ago. Because no one really understood how the illness spread, you couldn’t keep the deceased lying around, so as soon as a person had died (or, as we will discover, possibly before), you needed to bury them fast.
Let’s do a little thought experiment, shall we? You’re a Montreal city planner in 1852, and you have a cholera cemetery dating back to 1799, but it’s not being used for anything because, of course, there hasn’t been a cholera outbreak in over twenty years. The question is obvious—what would you do with that land?
If your first impulse is cover it up and build a park, you wouldn’t be the first to think so. Dorchester Square, a popular and integral part of Montreal’s downtown, started life as the Sainte-Antoine Cholera Cemetery and is the permanent home to an estimated seventy thousand skeletons belonging to the unfortunate epidemic victims.
It is a popular “traffic filter” for people going about their business downtown, and many have no idea anything at all is going on until they experience their own encounter. The square has also been the home to rallies and other gatherings, and cutting through the park is a great way to get where you’re going a little faster.
Nathalie is a Montrealer who is far more aware of Dorchester Square’s history than she would like after having paranormal experiences there. “If you are trying to create a haunted public space,” she said, “this is pretty much the perfect recipe for it.”
The first time she experienced something that she couldn’t explain, it was evening—when most ghostly encounters take place. She had broken up with her now ex, was feeling a little melancholy, and just needed to get out and be in the fresh air around other people. Little did she realize that not all of the people around her would be alive.
“I was sitting on a bench at dusk, and the park was strangely still. It took me a beat or two to realize that things had . . . changed. I don’t know what other word to use. I suddenly felt the hair on the back of my arms and neck stand up, but nothing had changed. I cautiously looked around me, fully expecting to see someone staring at me or walking toward me. But there was no one around. I could not shake the creepy feelings that seemed to be moving around me like a mist. That’s when I started hearing the mumbles in old-style French. I could only catch a few words here and there, but they were prayers. I kept looking around, as I was trying to put together the voices with people, but there was still no one there.”
This was when Nathalie decided she had had enough; she was thoroughly creeped out. As she got up to leave, scared but still cautious, she saw something she couldn’t explain. “It was so odd. You couldn’t look fully at them, or they would disappear, but if you let your peripheral vision take over and only focused on them there, you could see what looked like lights, really faint, quite large balls of light moving slowly around.”
As you may know, many people have reported Corner of the Eye Phenomenon (COTEP). The theory behind this phenomenon is that, as early humans, we were still susceptible to predators, who would usually attack from behind or the side. Our peripheral vision seems to catch movements that our forward-facing vision can’t, and now that we are no longer as worried about being hunted, that includes paranormal activity.