The Ghost Tours of Quebec
Test Your Tolerance to Ghosts in North America’s Oldest Walled City
Tourists come to Quebec City to experience French culture and cuisine but few know this French-Canadian gem also has its unpolished and grizzly hidden past.
As night falls and most Quebec City tourists share stories over drinks at a sidewalk café, another tour begins. The Ghost Tours of Quebec offers a walking tour of the old city like none other. Part history lesson, part campfire story, the dramatic guides spin yarns as tangled as the old city’s meandering cobblestoned streets.
Perfect for a summer evening walk or Halloween, a time when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead become hazy and spirits mingle, this guided stroll conjures up stories of events from this city’s own dance with the dead.
Ghost Tours of Quebec Tales of Deathly Acts
The Ghost Tours of Quebec begin at Place Royale, a charming square bordered by the quaint Notre-Dame-des-Victoires church, popular among locals for summer weddings. While newly weds gather in the square for group photos, few know the first execution in Canada took place at this very church, that of a 15 year old girl for petty theft.
Place Royale also provided the backdrop for a twisted love story between a condemned criminal who escaped execution by becoming an executioner only to face the heart-quickening task of executing his own wife and mother of his children.
From Place Royal, visitors follow the guide, draped in a dark grey coat carrying a single candle-lit lantern, down to the Quebec City port. Today, a beautiful port on the shores of the St. Laurence River and a common spot for strolling tourists and cruise ship docks, this same wharf once cracked under the weight of piling bodies lifted from the sunken Empress of Ireland.
Ghost Tours of Quebec Haunted by the Empress of Ireland
The guide looks off into the cold dark waters beyond the wharf and describes the tragedy of the sunken Empress of Ireland as well as its connection to the notorious dentist Dr. Crippen. In 1910, Crippen murdered his wife, hid her body in his basement and ran off to Canada from England with his mistress.
Spooked, you leave the grizzly images of watery graves behind and twist back to the entrance of the Museum of Civilisation. The most majestic museums in Quebec City, it houses world-class exhibits and tourists from all over the world visit its halls every year. But in the not so distant past, on the same spot where this museum now stands, a horrible, history altering event took place in 1796 that would shake the colony for years to come.
In the spring of that year, a time when the British had just taken over this former New France colony, France was in the midst of a revolution and the United States had just finished one, fear spread like wildfire. Amid much panic, insecurity and mistrust, the British began hunting for spies. Government encouraged townspeople to find intruders and report them.
Ghost Tours of Quebec Standing on Stained Soil
When David MacLean, an American who had come to Canada to log, uttered misinterpreted words concerning the vast unspoiled forest, the nervous new state tried him for treason. The chief justice ordered MacLean’s body to be hung and disembowelled, drawn and quartered. Beheaded, his entrails were pitched upon a fire on the wharf where the Museum of Civilisation now stands.
The tour concludes at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, an exquisite Anglican cathedral and the first built outside of the British Isles. Completed in 1804, this Cathedral, standing in an open courtyard adjacent to the magnificent Château Frontenac, houses one permanent resident.
Conflicting stories surround the ghost of the Holy Trinity; is she the woman mistakenly buried alive during an outburst of cholera? Is the church haunted by a nun who buried her newborn child under the floorboards and never left her baby’s side? Sit down and wait a while, you may get the answers that you seek. One thing is sure, you’ll never see the walled city of Quebec the same again.
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