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Spooktober 2026: Keeper of the Light — John Radelmüller’s Ghost Oct 19, 2026

Show notes

Episode 441: In January 1815, the keeper of Toronto's Gibraltar Point Lighthouse vanished, and John Paul Radelmüller was never seen alive again. Within weeks, two soldiers from a nearby garrison were under arrest for his murder. Months later, a jury acquitted them both. Over two centuries later, the case remains legally unresolved, and the lighthouse where Radelmüller spent his final years has become the basis for Toronto's oldest and most enduring ghost story—one that's grown so far beyond the documented record that most people who know it can't say which parts actually happened. This episode goes back to the original sources — the coroner's inquest, the trial record, the earliest newspaper account — to find out.

Sources:⁠York Gazette | Sat, Jan 14, 1815 | Page 3⁠⁠Gibraltar Point Lighthouse — Wikipedia⁠⁠New Light on Toronto's Oldest Cold Case: The 1815 Murder of John Paul Radelmüller — Eamonn O'Keeffe⁠⁠Toronto's First Murder at Gibraltar Point Lighthouse — my-toronto.ca⁠⁠The Ghost of the Rock: Toronto's 200-Year-Old Lighthouse Cold Case — Sofistikateit⁠⁠Gibraltar Point Lighthouse — Toronto Island Investigation — The Paranormal Seekers⁠⁠Glengarry Light Infantry — Wikipedia⁠⁠Battle of Ogdensburg — Wikipedia⁠⁠Glengarry Light Infantry Fencibles, 1812–1816 — regimental history⁠⁠Lighthouses in Canada — Fisheries and Oceans Canada⁠⁠Sambro Island Light — Wikipedia⁠⁠Sambro Island's Haunted History — Pinecone Diaries⁠⁠Fisgard Lighthouse National Historic Site — Wikipedia⁠⁠Gibraltar Lighthouse Toronto | Ghost of Accident or Murder | Article⁠⁠https://ghostwalks.com/articles/gibraltar-lighthouse-toronto⁠⁠The true story of Toronto's island ghost - Spacing Toronto⁠

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Spooktober 2026: Headless Mary — The Ghost of Griffintown Oct 12, 2026

Show notes

Episode 440: In 1879, Montreal’s Griffintown was a crowded working-class neighbourhood shaped by Irish immigration, heavy industry and life along the Lachine Canal. On June 27, Mary Gallagher entered a tenement at the corner of William and Murray streets, where a morning of drinking with her friend Susan Kennedy ended in a brutal killing for which Kennedy was accused.

The crime became one of Montreal’s most enduring ghost stories. For generations, residents have said that Mary returns to the corner every seven years, searching for her missing head. In this Spooktober episode, we examine the documented case, the legend it inspired and the changing neighbourhood that kept her story alive for nearly 150 years.

Sources:
The Ghost of Griffintown: Mary Gallagher's Haunting Legend
Mary Gallagher | Haunted Montreal
Mary Gallagher – The Ghost of Griffintown / WKT2 26
Calling all ghost hunters: Headless Mary may return to Montreal tonight | CP24
Headless Mary | Scholastic
Meurtre de Mary Gallagher | Wikipedia
The Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada · Tuesday, July 08, 1879
The British Whig, Kingston, Ontario, Canada · Monday, June 30, 1879
Montreal Gazette, Quebec, Canada · Wednesday, October 01, 1879
Montreal Gazette, Quebec, Canada · Saturday, October 04, 1879
The Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada · Thursday, July 03, 1879
The Montreal Star, Quebec, Canada · Saturday, July 05, 1879
The British Whig, Kingston, Ontario, Canada · Saturday, November 29, 1879
The Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada · Tuesday, October 07, 1879
The Montreal Gazette Thu, Oct 02, 1879 ·Page 4
Ottawa Daily Citizen • Mon, Jun 30, 1879 • Page 1 • (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)
The British Whig, Kingston, Ontario, Canada · Monday, July 07, 1879
St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Missouri · Thursday, October 02, 1879
Ottawa Daily Citizen, Ontario, Canada · Thursday, October 02, 1879
Ghost of Griffintown | Concordia
Les origines d’une légende irlandaise… montréalaise ! | banq.qc.ca

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Spooktober 2026: Road Trip — The Possessions at Loudun Oct 05, 2026

Show notes

Episode 439: In September 1632, plague was tearing through Loudun, France, when the Ursuline nuns began reporting apparitions, unexplained blows and violent physical attacks. During a series of exorcisms, the voices speaking through the women named a local priest: Urbain Grandier.

Grandier was intelligent, outspoken and surrounded by scandal. He had also made powerful enemies. As clergy, physicians and royal officials entered the case, reports from inside the convent became part of a much larger struggle involving religion, medicine, politics and the law.
In this episode, we examine the Possessions at Loudun and the people who tried to explain them. Were the nuns experiencing a supernatural attack, a shared psychological illness or something shaped by suggestion and institutional pressure? What happens when investigators settle on an answer before they finish asking questions?

Sources

The Possession at Loudun by Michel de Certeau
The Devils of Loudun by Des Niau
Documents pour servir à l’histoire médicale des possédées de Loudun by Gabriel Legué Sœur Jeanne des Anges, supérieure des Ursulines de Loudun: autobiographie
Possédées de Loudun, Affaire des (1632–1634)
“The Possessions at Loudun” by Craig E. Stephenson
“La possession de Loudun (1632–1637) by Sophie Houdard
“Mass Sociogenic Illness” by Robert E. Bartholomew and Simon Wessely
“Divine Punishment or Disease?”
The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley
Jeanne des Anges bibliography and manuscript record
“Edict of Nantes”
“Tarantism, Dancing Mania and Demonopathy: The Anthro-political Aspects of ‘Mass Psychogenic Illness’”
Looking Back: The possessions at Loudun | Stephenson
The Possession at Loudun by Michel de Certeau
Malleus Maleficarum Index | Internet Sacred Text Archive
The Devils of Loudun by Edmund Goldsmid, free ebook download | Global Grey

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The Expulsion of the Acadians: Grand Pré Sep 28, 2026

Show notes

Episode 438: In September 1755, more than four hundred men from Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, were summoned to their parish church and told their land, homes, and livestock had been forfeited to the Crown. They would not be going home, and neither would their families. The Acadians, French-speaking Catholic settlers who had farmed the Bay of Fundy’s tidal marshes for more than a century, were about to be deported in one of the largest forced removals in North American history.

Here we tell the story of what the Acadians of Grand Pré built, why the British destroyed it, and what became of the families torn apart and scattered across the Atlantic world. More than ten thousand Acadians were forcibly removed from their homeland over the course of the operation, and by some estimates, nearly half did not survive the decade that followed.

From Lieutenant-Colonel John Winslow, who carried out the deportation, to René Leblanc, the elderly notary who refused to abandon his people, we follow the Great Upheaval from the shores of Grand-Pré to the bayous of Louisiana, where the Acadian legacy lives on as Cajun culture.

Sources:
L'Histoire de l'Acadie | Moncton.ca
Expulsion of the Acadians | Wikipedia
Heritage Minutes: Acadian Deportation | YouTube
History of Acadia | The Canadian Encyclopedia
Centre d'études acadiennes Anselme-Chiasson, Université de Moncton
Acadian Expulsion (Plain-Language Summary) | The Canadian Encyclopedia
View of The Deportation of the Acadians from Ile St.-Jean, 1758 | Acadiensis
The Records of British Government at Annapolis Royal, 1713-1749 | Nova Scotia Archives
Papers Relating to the Acadian French - 1714-1755 | Akins, Thomas Beamish
Papers Relating to the Forcible Removal of the Acadian French from Nova Scotia - 1755-1768 | Akins, Thomas Beamish
Notes on Nova Scotian Privateers by George E. E. Nichols | Archives of New Brunswick
Great and Noble Scheme by John Mack Faragher
The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History by Christopher Hodson
Parks Canada - Expulsion of the Acadians National Historic Event
The Acadian Deportation, Women, and Refugee Resettlement in the British and French Atlantic (1755-1793)
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Grand-Pré National Historic Site | Memorial church
Landscape of Grand Pré | UNESCO World Heritage Site 2012

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Over the Wall: The Ty Conn Story Sep 21, 2026

Show notes

Episode 437: Tyrone William ‘Ty’ Conn became the first man in over forty years to climb over the wall at Kingston Penitentiary, Canada's oldest and most secure federal prison. Born to a teenage mother in 1967 and adopted at age three by a prominent Belleville psychiatrist, his childhood unravelled into a cycle of theft, institutionalization, and escape that would follow him for the rest of his life. By the time he was thirty-two, a string of armed bank robberies and repeated prison breaks had compounded into a forty-seven-year sentence, a number that raised eyebrows given that not one of his crimes had ever physically harmed another person. On May 6, 1999, using a homemade ladder and a length of sewn canvas, he scaled Kingston's wall and disappeared into the Ontario countryside, setting off a thirteen-day manhunt that captivated the country. What happened when police finally caught up with him in a Toronto basement apartment two weeks later remains, to this day, a matter of dispute, one his own mother was never able to get answered.

Sources:
Tyrone William Conn | Brief Biography
Ty Conn: A Life Imprisoned (2000) | The Fifth Estate
Ty Conn : My Brother The Outlaw | YouTube
Ty Conn : My Brother The Outlaw | Facebook
Who Killed Ty Conn by Linden Macintyre, (Paperback) | Indigo
Ty Conn Project Materials - York University
Ty Conn | Wikipedia
Tyrone Conn's escape ends in death | CBC News
7 Things You Need to Know About Kingston Penitentiary
Niagara Falls Review • Wed, Mar 14, 1984 • Page 8
The Kingston Whig-Standard • Thu, Mar 15, 1984 • Page 1
The Ottawa Citizen • Sat, Mar 07, 1987 • Page 8
The Kingston Whig-Standard • Fri, Jun 30, 1989 • Page 2
The Kingston Whig-Standard • Mon, Dec 18, 1989 • Page 9
The Kingston Whig-Standard • Thu, Jun 28, 2001 • Page 1
The Kingston Whig-Standard • Thu, Jun 28, 2001 • Page 10

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Wrong Turn: The Disappearance of Brady and Halkett Sep 14, 2026

Show notes

Episode 436: In June 1967, two of northern Saskatchewan's most respected bushmen, Métis political organizer James Brady and Cree band councillor Absolom Halkett, were dropped off by float plane to prospect for uranium near La Ronge. A week later, their employer found the camp standing, the beds slept in, the canoe still tied to shore. Both men were gone. The RCMP searched for three weeks, found a trail of unexplained clues, and closed the case without finding either man. More than fifty years later, a small team of researchers and family members went looking for answers the original investigation never sought, and what they discovered at the bottom of a northern lake raises more questions than it resolves.

Sources:

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White Paper: Balloon Bombs from Japan Sep 07, 2026

Show notes

Episode 435: In November 1944, the Imperial Japanese Army began launching paper balloons from the coast of Honshu — each one carrying incendiary and anti-personnel bombs, designed to ride the jet stream across the Pacific and set fire to the forests of North America. They called the program Fu-Go. Canada called them White Paper. Over the following five months, more than sixty balloons came down on Canadian soil, from the British Columbia coast to Manitoba, and a small team of Canadian Army bomb disposal officers spent eight months recovering live ordnance from some of the most remote terrain in the country under a blanket of total secrecy that reached all the way to the Prime Minister's office.

Sources:

Fu-Go Balloon Bomb — Wikipedia
Japan's WWII Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America — Smithsonian Magazine
Balloon Bombs: Japan's Answer to Doolittle — National Museum of the United States Air Force

On Paper Wings — IMDB
On Paper Wings Retrospective — Oregon Humanities
On Paper Wings — Oregon ArtsWatch
On Paper Wings Screening — Japanese American National Museum
On 75th Anniversary, Bly Remains Connected to Tragic WWII Event — Herald and News
Japanese Balloon Bomb Explosion Location — PBS History Detectives
WWII-Era Balloon Bomb in B.C. Blown to Smithereens — Global News
BC Studies No. 203 — Balloon Bombs, the Alaska Highway, and Influenza: Tsek'ehne Perspectives — BC Studies
East, Captain Charles A. Japanese Balloons of World War Two. Prince George: College of New Caledonia Press, 1993.
Coen, Ross. Fu-Go: The Curious History of Japan's Balloon Bomb Attack on America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Mikesh, Robert C. Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1973.

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Botched Justice: The Death of Crystal Taman Aug 31, 2026

Show notes

Episode 434: On the morning of February 25th, 2005, Crystal Taman, a forty-year-old dental assistant, wife, and mother of three, left her home in East St. Paul, Manitoba on her way to work. She never arrived. Stopped at a red light on Highway 59 at the Perimeter Highway, her car was struck at highway speed by a blue Dodge Dakota truck driven by an off-duty Winnipeg Police Service constable named Derek Harvey-Zenk, who had spent the night drinking with fellow officers at a north-end bar and a colleague's home. Crystal died on impact. Harvey-Zenk refused to provide a breath sample and was charged with impaired driving causing death, dangerous driving causing death, criminal negligence causing death, and refusal to provide a breath sample. More than two years later, all charges except dangerous driving causing death were stayed in a plea deal, and Harvey-Zenk was sentenced to two years less a day — served at home, with no conditions. The outcome sparked a public inquiry.

Sources:
TAMAN CRYSTAL - Obituaries - Winnipeg Free Press Passages
Taman Inquiry | Wikipedia
Crystal Ann Sveinson Taman (1964-2005) - Find a...
http://www.tamaninquiry.ca/
May 2012: No memory of fatal crash: Harvey-Zenk | Winnipeg Free Press
Review clears police force after controversial case | Global News
Harvey-Zenk appeared tired, not drunk, at party before crash, inquiry hears | CBC News
Province of Manitoba | Archived News Releases | Taman Report Published
Former cop finally takes the stand | Global News
Major changes to how police officers will be investigated | CTV News
Police told cousin Harvey Zenk was drunk | Global News
Jun 2012: Ex-officer from Taman inquiry sues RCMP, police | Winnipeg Free Press
Bringing the Thin Blue Line into Line: Bill 16, the Police Services Act, 2011 CanLIIDocs 256
Disgraced cop’s lawyer slams Taman inquiry | Global News

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If Anything Should Happen: The Ottey Sisters Murders Aug 24, 2026

Show notes

Episode 433: On August 16, 1995, Avis Ottey came home to her townhouse in Scarborough, Ontario, expecting to find her daughters packing for the future. Instead, she found nineteen-year-old Marsha Ottey and sixteen-year-old Tamara "Tami" Ottey murdered in the basement.

Marsha was just two days away from leaving for Arkansas State University on an athletic scholarship she had worked years to earn. She had also confided something chilling to her mother while packing her bags: "If anything should happen to me, it's Rohan."

What followed was a seven-month investigation that stretched beyond the murders of the Ottey sisters. Two unsolved sexual assaults, a seemingly unrelated killing at a Toronto subway station, that of TTC employee Dimitrija Trajceski, DNA evidence, and the largest manhunt in Toronto Police history ultimately exposed the truth behind a crime driven by obsession, control, and extraordinary violence.

Sources:
https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/1999/1999canlii14909/1999canlii14909.html
https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onca/doc/2003/2003canlii15438/2003canlii15438.html
https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onca/doc/2003/2003canlii32900/2003canlii32900.html
https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onca/doc/2003/2003canlii52177/2003canlii52177.html
https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onca/doc/2011/2011onca311/2011onca311.html
https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc-l/doc/2012/2012canlii5501/2012canlii5501.html
Guilty verdict in 1995 slaying of Toronto sisters | CBC News
Walk in memory of Agincourt Collegiate’s Ottey sisters
If anything happens to me: The murder of the Ottey sisters | Global News
Crime Beat: If Anything Happens To Me - The Ottey Sisters | S1 E8
Murder suspect appears in Canada court - UPI Archives
MANDEL: Killer of Ottey sisters granted 60-day unescorted pass
Rosie DiManno: Killer of the Ottey sisters, now out on parole, still has a life ahead of him, unlike his victims
MANDEL: Killer of Ottey sisters granted full parole despite risk
ISN CEO Revisits One of His “Most Challenging Cases” In Global TV's ‘Crime Beat’ Episode
88 Valley Stream Drive, Toronto, ON, CA

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Not Justice: Lynching Louie Sam Aug 17, 2026

Show notes

Episode 432: In February 1884, a Scottish storekeeper named James Bell was shot dead in his cabin along Telegraph Road in Washington Territory, just south of the Canadian border. Within days, a fifteen-year-old Semá:th boy named Louie Sam was arrested on suspicion of murder and placed in lawful Canadian custody on Sumas Prairie. He never made it to trial. On the night of February 27, a mob of seventy armed and disguised men crossed the international boundary from Washington Territory into British Columbia, took Sam from his cell, and hanged him from a roadside tree 169 paces north of the border. No one else was ever charged for Louie Sam’s lynching, and the investigation into Bell’s death seems to have stopped with Sam’s death.

Sources:

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