Quebec's most haunted place: St. Ferdinand

   You have to drive two-and-a-half hours northeast from Montreal to get to the small town of St. Ferdinand, where 2,000 inhabitants live by Lake William. You might wonder why you went, as it's an eerie town that time has forgotten, as the only significant employer, a hospital complex built in 1870 has long since moved out.
   But what St. Ferdinand residents don't talk about is the tragedy that occurred there on a bitterly-cold Saturday night on Dec. 30, 1916 when 46 girls died in a fire at the insane asylum.
   Back then a wide variety of people were put into such places, they included drug addicts, intellectually impaired and other such misfits who were others among the 135 women confined to the premises.
   Nonetheless the New York Times saw fit to call the poor victims "idiot girls," in its report, the Associated Press calling them "feeble minded."
   Thirty normal girls at an adjacent school survived the blaze.
   Three nuns died in the fire: Emilie Beti, Elmire Beti and Elise Beti and Abbe O. Gosselin, who was on the scene, said that he tried vainly to prevent three of the patients from returning to the death into the demonic conflagration. (La Patrie Jan 4. 1917)
   The women and girls hit by the fire were forced out into a bitterly cold night of -20 degrees Fahrenheit and those who weren't killed by the heat were definitely hurt by the cold.
   It was said that the residents of St. Ferdinand did little to help the victims, a claim that was later disputed.
   This Halloween, whatever you do, we do not recommend you go anywhere near this town where the spirits of these nameless young women who perished by fire are surely waking to seek justice after almost a century of slumber.

   The one-kilometre-long St. Julien Hospital re-opened after the terrible fire and had about 500 patients until it closed in 2003.  

   The building still stands, for the moment at least. For the last decade ghosts are all that remain in the psychiatric hospital.  

   After spending $12 million maintaining the building, the province decided in June to simply demolish it at the cost of another $7 million.
   The religious authorities dealt with quite a few fires at their insane asylums, including one in mid-December 1930 at the St. Michel d'Archange in Beauport.
   In May 1890, 100 inmates died by fire and in 1935 another fire killed five at the St. Jean de Dieu Insane Asylum, now known as the Louis-Hyppolite Lafontaine Hospital in east end Montreal. The nuns in that case attempted to avoid an investigation on the basis that the hospital formed separate municipality called Gamelin and had its own police and fire forces, even though there was nothing there but the insane asylum.
   At least one expert in those fires doesn't believe that they were necessarily accidents. This is what Rod Vienneau told me today: 

   "Sister Saint Thérèse de Jésus was the Head Nun at Saint Jean de Dieu hospital of Montreal and wanting to build a bigger institution, went to the United States for funds, to Baltimore, checked out how a certain psychiatric hospital was built, came back, not long after, a fire at Saint Jean de Dieu, it burnt down and patients burned with it, patients who were unable to look after themselves. They were called "gâteux," spoilers or in a state of senile decay, unable to go to the toilet, so when they had too many, so they burnt the place down."