Episode's summary
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…
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…
Episodes
Spooktober 2026: Keeper of the Light — John Radelmüller’s Ghost
ListenedEpisode 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…
Spooktober 2026: Headless Mary — The Ghost of Griffintown
ListenedEpisode 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 LegendMary Gallagher | Haunted MontrealMary Gallagher – The Ghost of Griffintown / WKT2 26Calling all ghost hunters: Headless Mary may return to Montreal tonight | CP24Headless Mary | ScholasticMeurtre de Mary Gallagher | WikipediaThe Gazette,…
Spooktober 2026: Road Trip — The Possessions at Loudun
ListenedEpisode 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 CerteauThe Devils of Loudun by Des NiauDocuments pour servir à l’histoire médicale des…
The Expulsion of the Acadians: Grand Pré
ListenedEpisode 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…
Over the Wall: The Ty Conn Story
ListenedEpisode 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…