(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

So, I spent yesterday after work wandering the city in search of traces of history. Specifically, I was hunting down Griffintown.

I've had a nightmare of a time trying to get a hold of information on this vanished neighbourhood. It was an Irish slum that grew up around the Lacine Canal, but was pretty much rezoned out of existence after the war.

I went to the site of one of Canada's most infamous murders, the killing of prostitute Mary Gallagher, who was decapitated by her best friend with an axe in their little shack in Griffintown in 1879.

The shack is gone, and it's now a parking lot, but Gallagher's ghost is supposed to come back there every 7 years, looking for her head. In that dead industrial park, surrounded by rubble and empty buildings and abandoned by the world, it's easy to believe in ghosts.

Then I stumbled accidentally onto the ruins of St. Ann's church, the heart of Griffintown. Its stone foundations survive, so you can step inside and walk the aisle to where the choir and altar once were -- they're now a copse of trees, holier by far than any manmade site and yet seeming to add the ruins' beauty to its own.

Strange, the sort of eerie beauty that clung to that church that was becoming a forest, surrounded on all sides by expressway and factories. I'm always astonished at all the beauty around me, and how little it gets noticed.

Comments

[seal7.livejournal.com]

"Nichi nichi kore konichi" ?

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I admit -- I had to look that up.

I guess from a certain perspective, it is true.

'Of course, with that sparkly new icon, it's definitely true. Who is that?

[seal7.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I stumbled across it by accident too when I looked up John Cage (who's quite interesting). Just thought it might be something you'd say :P

He's actually just an illustration for the Knight class in Ragnarok Online, but he looks exaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaactly like one of the characters in my head.
Erm yeah, and according to some people, resembles me, too :P

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It's really cool. And it does look like you -- until I realized it wasn't quite your style, I wondered if it was one of yours, since you often draw guys who look like you.

[em-fish.livejournal.com]

Did history record the motive for the murder? It sounds pretty bizarre.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

At the trial, the prosecution made out the motive to be jealousy, because Mary Gallagher was considered beautiful.

Still, there a lot oddities. Even though she was found in the next room, and covered in blood, she claimed to have slept through the murder. She pointed the finger at Mary's trick from the night before, a man named Flanagan, who wound up being a witness at the trial. Some people thought it was Flanagan, not believing that a woman Susan's size could wield an axe so effectively -- Mary was quite tall.

Weirder still were Susan's reactions. She didn't seem very connected to reality, didn't react to knews that she was up for the death penalty, and people who interacted with her on a daily basis considered her insane.

Finally, some of her friends wrote to John A. MacDonald, and with the help of a noted alienist, convinced him and his cabinet to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. Susan Kennedy spent the rest of her days in the Kingston Penitentiary, mostly sewing outfits for the RCMP.

Interestingly, on the day she was supposed to have been hanged if she hadn't been given a reprieve, Flanagan died by drowning in a freak accident. Some people thought it was a sign that Susan was innocent, and Flanagan really did kill Mary Gallagher.

[sugar-spun.livejournal.com]

That's a little beyond the realm of coincidence...

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I thought so, too.