Five of ambulance driver Arthur Bernier's children died of asphyxiation at 2190 Cuvillier on 26 April 1950 inside that very house.
Jacques Bernier, 16, was reported in critical condition, as was Yvette Bernier, the mom, so they too might have died, or wished they did.
Gerard, 13, Bernard, 5, Normand, 3, Mariette, 7, Guy, 14, were the dead kids.
Authorities attributed it to a broken gas pipe in the bathroom and a coal stove.
The house is now owned by Paul Thibault. Did anybody tell him? Well he knows now.
I'm sure you've heard the Buddhist parable about this. A young woman whose child has died goes to the Buddha and asks him to revive it, and he says he can do it but only if she brings him mustard seed from households where nobody has died. So she goes around knocking on doors and asking people, and at every house there's always somebody who has died, old and young, some more recently than others. Anyway, she comes to a realization that death wasn't just a catastrophe that struck her personally, but happens to everyone and to every family.
ReplyDeleteIf you want a house where you can be sure nobody has died, you need to build a brand new one.
You can go through the local newspaper archives of past years to discover that horrible car crashes occurred at just about every major intersection; busses slamming into cars, trucks losing their brakes on the Cote des Neiges downslope, murders and robberies taking place at numerous duplexes and triplexes with and without the outdoor stairs, existing houses where murders took place, where brothels and illegal gambling were set up, and homes exploding from gas leaks,to be replaced with apartment buildings where no one today would be the wiser. Even long-deceased Vic Cotroni's home and bar-club still exist, doubtless taken over by many successive owners who would likely be shocked to know such facts.
ReplyDeleteAnd what about the old Rosedale Funeral Home at the corner of Cote des Neiges and Decelles? What ground floor and basement tenants now living in the high rises which replaced it have a clue that their bedrooms may be located exactly where for decades corpses had been laid out on tables? Pleasant dreams?
And then we have the old burial grounds: Dorchester (Dominion) Square is atop an old cemetery, and there are several others in and around the downtown area covered by parking lots and other properties where skeletons are just waiting to be discovered by some errant backhoe excavator operator.
There used to be gallows outside the Place Royale in Old Montreal just south of the old Custom House, a pillory or stocks just south of the Nelson Monument, and another less-well-known public execution place at the northwest corner of Dorchester and Guy.
On a lighter note, Montreal's very first fire station used to exist at Dalhousie Square--today much smaller than it used to be. The condo dwellers of the building which occupies the precise location of that station will most likely have no idea about what came before them, either.
This "time-overlay" analysis could go on forever,of course. If I think of anything else, I mention them in later posts.
Just remember: if you ever happen to invent a time machine and plan on visiting the past, just make damn sure you check what used to exist on the exact spot you dematerialize from!