Ideas - New details on Canada's first documented 'demon possession'

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

A demonic possession, a do-it-yourself exorcism, and the execution of an accused witch — welcome to daily life in Quebec City, circa 1660. IDEAS digs into the story of Canada’s earliest reported ���demon possession caused by witchcraft’ case. *This episode originally aired on June 9, 2023.We appreciate your input. Fill out our listener survey here.

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing.

Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. In 1661, the town we now call Quebec City stood in exactly the same spot. Just like today, it had an upper town. It had a lower town and busy docks on the bank of the St. Lawrence River. The town's population was much smaller, of course, just around 700 people. most of them French, some of them Wendat.

Every resident professed to be a Catholic. Unless you count the demon. The gods. The town's authority figures felt concerned about the demon. They wrote letters to relatives in France mentioning their ongoing attempts at exorcism. It doesn't work. Things get stranger. And the servant does supply us with a name of who is responsible for sending the demons. Mary Cowan is a historian at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. She's been piecing together this strange story.

Canada's first documented case of a, quote, demon possession induced by witchcraft. Mary reports her findings to ideas producer Tom Havis. It must be fun to do this because you've got just enough information to put together a story, but enough obliterated that it requires quite a lot of imaginative. It's such a good historic novel, wouldn't it? Yeah. I know. I'm thinking Denis Wilnoe should direct this movie. Obviously, he did a good job with Dune, so he could do this.

He could pick his friend Timothy Shalameh to play whomever he wants. I'm completely in favor of this. Well, I mean, if they do make a movie of this, presumably you've got the job snagged as the historical consultant or whatever to make sure they probably have to yeah but if someone needs to play me I don't know Sarah Polly maybe yeah I'm open to suggestions I don't know if you get into I suppose you could be a weird haunting figure around at the time or do they frame it as the historian doing the work you see in here I don't know I don't know wouldn't be up to me a good place to start this story would be in

June 1659, which is when the central characters arrive. You can imagine yourself in the scene, riding a horse through the streets of Lower Town, clip-clopping over the cobbles. You would not be clip-clopping down the streets of Quebec City. Why not? There were no horses there yet. Oh. A single horse had been given as a gift to the governor in 1647,

but there were no more horses in New France until 1665. Oh boy, so if I was actually clip-clopping down, the street, I would have just stolen the governor's horse? If the governor's horse were even still alive. Oh, did it die? Do we know? We don't know. Oh. At least I don't know.

Okay, so we don't know I'm not clip-clopping down the street. We just, it's very unlikely. I suppose it's implausible. Implausible, you'd be clip-clopping down the streets. Mary's job is to consider the possible, investigate the plausible, and present us with the probable and the certain. It's called a micro-history, and it zooms you right in. when you walk down to the lower town

you'd pass by a fort of the Wendat some of whom had moved into Quebec City and upon arrival at the lower town right at the shore of the river you would see commercial buildings and also some houses house construction varied settlers brought what they knew from France

some of the houses would be in stone some would be in wood most would be in a half-timber construction and almost all would have steeply pitched roofs to shed snow How do we know this? Were there pictures or... We have some pictures. We have maps and plans from the time that include drawings of the buildings. We have descriptions of travellers and we have the archaeological record.

Our sources for the soundscape are not so direct as the sources for what you would have seen in Quebec in 1659. And a way to think through this is to remember that we tend not to note average everyday sounds. people did note sounds that were unexpected to them. So, for example, when the St. Lawrence River was deeply frozen, one February, and an earthquake happened, that ice cracked and made a very loud noise, and people were marked on that. Most of the time, though, we can imagine people would have heard river sounds. It would have heard water lapping against the shores, people loading and unloading vessels without recording those noises. We can still presume they heard them. They would have heard bells rung out from the church several times per day.

Once in a while, they might have heard cannons either firing to defend the town or to celebrate the arrival of new people. Microhistory is not fiction, but what Mary does resembles what an author does because she wants to immerse us in this historical moment, and so she considers all the sensory details. early modern travelers often remarked on the smelliness of towns they could smell the stench when they approached the town this is just everywhere many towns smelled strong to people's noses

Quebec probably smelled less strong than a lot of other towns explain well it was still fairly small it was still fairly new as a European settlement and it had a fast-flowing river into which they could dump a lot of refuse So when travelers came to Quebec from France, one thing they often noted was that it had a lot of clean air. They may have called it clean air because they weren't smelling strong smells. Right. We're talking about poo here, aren't we? It's just not.

Or maybe bodies in this. Could be. Yes, a few years later, we have evidence of a cemetery getting a little overly full and bad smells emanating or exhaling from the corpses. We're talking about the byproducts of light industries such as tanning, which could leave a pretty bad smell to. and human refuse, yep. Right. So the fact that even people pointed out that a cemetery was starting to smell,

can you even extrapolate from that and say, well, in Europe, that wasn't unusual? Maybe that shows that the air usually was better that they bothered to complain about this. I wonder. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. It's possible. They wanted to keep the air cleaner

than what they had known. You were promised a story about a demon. It's getting closer. Looking out from the docks of Lower Town, we see a ship on its way up the St. Lawrence. And if someone does ever make a movie about this, I imagine they will want to shift point of view here.

So we're on the boat now, yes? One of the things to keep in mind about Quebec City, this is still true today, obviously, but it's tidal. This is where the tide reaches from the St. Lawrence. My name is Colin Coates. I teach Canadian Studies in History at Glendon College, York University, and my main area of research is early French Canada.

Quebec City is this military site because of the hill at Quebec and the narrowing of the St. Lawrence that should allow an army to defend it against an invader. So it's a very good military position. At this early period of French settlement, the area around Quebec is still going to be very much surrounded by forests. There is a certain amount of farmland that has been cleared. Forests would be what would dominate.

If you were sailing up the St. Lawrence River and avoiding all the shoals along the way so you don't have a shipwreck, which is an ever-present danger, you're coming to Quebec. You are still going to see a ring of forests all around you. So just a small area of European settlement carved out. out of the surrounding forest. You could see everything from the shore.

Mary can't just speculate, but the rest of us can't, so envision a sullen-looking man on this boat. He seems to be a passenger, but none of the other passengers are hanging out with him. And we soon see why. A passing child slips on the wet deck. boards. This man does nothing to help. To make it worse, maybe he kicks a dog or a chicken or something. This man's face remains obscure. While we're waiting for the boat to arrive,

this would be a good opportunity in the movie for the camera to pan over to a supporting character looking at a map. New France will expand. over the next decades, in a sense that the French will claim lots of territory in North America, but in fact they don't really occupy it in a meaningful way. These are indigenous controlled territories still. Now another passenger comes over, and now these two guys are just discussing New France and the political context of 1659. Early on in this period, pre-1663, I would say the French are more in irritant. This is Scott Bertholet.

He's obviously not on the boat, is he? He's a historian at Queen's University. Samuel de Champlain sort of places the French as a belligerent power in 1609 when he participates in the first ever battle that the French will participate in against the Haudenoshone, the Battle of Lake Champlain in 1609, where Champlain fires his archibouce, this sort of early prototype of a rifle at the Haudenoshone, and he allegedly in this battle kills three Haudenoshone chiefs. We get the sense when Samuel de Chantplan makes his first alliances with the Innu,

the Wendat, and several Algonquin nations who live in the Ottawa Valley, that they are already at war with the Haudenoshone Confederacy. And to become allies and trade partners with these peoples, Champlain basically implicates the French in this ongoing conflict. However, there is a sense that in recent years, the violence and the warfare between the Haudenoshone and the Innu when that Algonquins has actually increased. From the indigenous perspective, we can overemphasize the importance of the Europeans in their midst. The Haudenosaunee are really interested in the other indigenous nations. around them, the Wendat. So when they displace the Wendat, one of the things they do is they adopt

many of them into their population. Indigenous people are dealing with massive declines in their population because of imported diseases that Europeans have brought over with them. And so the Haudenashoni, this is part of the Haudenishoni reaction, is to integrate other indigenous people into the group. They are a political power. You know, one way to conceive of this in this time period is that there's a French military power to a certain extent, but there's a very important Haudenishoni political power, the Dutch and the English as well. So there's different groups. And the Haudenosaunee are very astute at playing off different groups against the other. The French policy actually saves the Haudenoshone to a certain

degree. Early on, the French refused to trade firearms and other weapons with non-Catholics. And as it turns out, the Jesuits do not have a very successful conversion rate in their Wendat mission. Most Wendat's are interested in Catholicism. They're willing to experiment with Catholic rights and rituals and prayer, but for the most part, the Jesuits do not see the wholesale conversion that they are expecting, and therefore they refuse to trade firearms to a lot of their Wendat allies. However, the Haudenosaunee are trading with the Dutch out of New Netherland, what eventually becomes New York after the British conquer it. And the Dutch have no scruples with trading firearms and weapons with the,

well, primarily the Mohawks, who are the easternmost nation of the Haudenoshone Confederacy. So this divergent policy actually means, that the Haudenoshone are a lot more well-armed than the French allied nations. So the colony was feeling vulnerable. They were cut off from France, vulnerable for most of the year, and they knew they probably could not have withstood a sustained attack by, as they called them, the Iroquois. And that's before the arrival of a demon and a witch.

Mary's looked into it, and she certain the passengers on this ship in 16th, would have disembarked in deep water and climbed into smaller boats that brought them into the shallows, right up to the docks. And there, the weary travelers step onto dry land at last. And Mary's able to prove something for the first time. Among these weary travelers is a family with a last name Alley, and included in that family, a girl of about 13, whose name is Barb. We don't know when most migrants landed.

We don't have even a year, never mind a month or a vessel. But because strange things started to happen to this family, people recorded details about them we don't have for other people in New France. So for this family in particular, we have a letter by an Ursuline nun, Marie de L'Ancarnation, who wrote about very strange signs that began to appear in Quebec. And she attributed the origin of those signs to the arrival of witches and magicians. The nun's letter tells us that this family and the witch arrived at the same time as the bishop. Because the bishop was considered such an important figure, we know exactly when he arrived, and that was in June 1659.

Barb Alley, along with her parents, Matarine and Jean-Baptiste, and our older sister, Marie, and her younger sister, Elizabeth, hadn't completed their full journey. Jean-Baptiste had already visited New France a few years earlier, and he had signed a deal. with a seigneur to rent some land five kilometers down river. That said, it seems highly plausible to me. They would have needed to pause before heading off there, and they would have taken the chance to look around the town. The upper town was where most of the prestigious buildings were located. You would see a college of Jesuits, a convent for the Ursulines,

a hospital run by Augustinian nuns, and the residence of the governor. As she walked around, Barb would have definitely noticed something. She and her sisters were almost the only girls. There weren't a lot of female settlers at all. Depending on how we calculate the ratio, there might have been up to 12 marriageable French men for every marriageable French woman. And at 12 to 14, she was at the very low end of marriageable.

Someone else was taking note of all this. the sullen man from the boat. His name was Danielle Vuel. He was not Catholic when he left France. He was Huguenot, which is a French Protestant, a Calvinist. And Huguenot, settlers were not allowed in Quebec at this time. They were supposed to convert to Catholicism before they arrived. We don't know if he did or not,

but this Protestant past seems to have tainted him. In his favor, Danielle Lerner, wheel had skills, namely mill operator. Millers lived apart from most other people in the noisy mill. And they had a special close relationship with the lord of the estate often. They were milling the grain brought to them. And they were paid often in a proportion of that grain being brought. And they had a reputation for being dishonest about measuring how much grain they received

and how much grain they gave back. So he's suspicious for a few reasons, but mostly because of this religious past where he wasn't Catholic, and his occupation is a miller. Danielle soon scored a job. He began operating the mill on the estate of Signor Giffar of Bopor,

who also happened to be the L.A. family's new landlord. Why do you think they hired a Protestant miller, were there just not their many milling technicians? Well, they probably didn't hire a Protestant miller. By that period, he'd probably converted to Catholicism. Oh. So they probably hired a Catholic Miller, though later records indicate perhaps his conversion had not been sincere. Mary's main source here is a collection of letters by Marie Delancourt, the nun writing back to her son in France.

But the letters don't spell out the details and the timeline and some key plot points get missed. At some point, maybe it was back on the boat. Maybe it's much later after scoping out the marriage prospect. in Quebec. Who knows? Anyway, the Miller-Daniel of Wheel begins to take a shine to Barb L.A. I'm imagining him quite a bit older, but we don't have a way to establish his precise age. He was planning on getting married, and the minimum age for the marriage of men, as said in canon law, was 14. So he must have been at least 14 years old. Because he was a miller, I'm thinking he was older than that, since it would have taken him some time to learn the

skills of a miller and become physically strong enough to do the work. If we were going to just pick something that sounds plausible, 29, 30, 60? All possible? All possible. I think if he were 60, somebody would have remarked on that. For all of the attacks made against his character, nobody mentions his age. So he must seem to be a reasonable age as a witchy Miller looking to marry a teenager. 20s or 30s, maybe 40s.

Right, right, right. So basically what we have to work with there is the sort of the bounds of what was acceptable for marrying 14-year-olds. Yeah, which were up surprisingly and disturbingly wide. Okay. Okay, so this 12 to 14-year-old girl heads off to a suburb of Quebec City. Now a neighborhood in Quebec City. Yes, but at that time, maybe just a house. An estate. There were several buildings on the estate, and the main one was a manor house built in 1642.

That house was destroyed by a fire in the late 19th century, so we can't visit it now, but we can look at a photograph and an engraving from the 19th century that give us some idea of what this building looked like. Its facade was about 18 meters long. Its stone walls were very thick, its roof was steep, and it had several stone chimneys. inside the building was a living space for the family and their servants, a chapel, and an office for the seigneur's administrative duties as well as a public space for his judicial work. Oh, when you get, when you own all the property, you get to decide. He gets to have his own seigneurial court. Oh, nice job if you can get it again.

Anseigne regime privilege was pretty sweet. One day, bar ballet takes a job in that. Grand Manor House. She becomes a domestic servant to the Seniors family. This means she lives with them now. And at first, everything seems completely normal. She's doing a typical job in a normal place. Meanwhile, in Quebec town itself, life also normal, typical, at first. We get a sense that the French abitant, you know, the everyday French settler, they wouldn't have wanted to call them peasants, but essentially the peasant class, the farming class of the colony, that they did have a lot of fun.

Card games were played. Even in the winter we know recreationally, even ice skating was something that was practiced. But you know, I think in this era there was a lot of anxiety and insecurity that at any moment a Mohawk raiding party, you know, lay just beyond their very very much. ridges. I think, actually, if anything, the wintertime would have been more the season for fun and recreation than would be the summer when raids traditionally happened, because that's when you would have been able to move via birch bark canoe on a lot of these waterways. So I think winter would have been more the time for relaxing, as sort of severe and as cold as the

Canadian winter's war compared to France. Between the winter of 1660 and the end of the summer, weird stuff begins. Marie de Lankanassion, sitting in her convent on the hill, wrote about it to her son. In one of these letters, she mentioned some very strange signs that she and the other colonists had been seeing.

They saw a comet. In the sky, they saw a thorn. fiery man and canoe and crown. In the air, they heard lamentable cries and a horrible voice. The fiery man with a canoe in the sky? That sounds like the chess gallery story maybe or something. It does kind of. The man and the canoe were separate apparitions.

Oh, okay. But they were both seen and the crown. Okay. A mixture of European and North American images. All right. So this nun is either seeing some crazy things. Or she's nuts. Or she's reporting that other people are seeing these things.

Then she explained that these signs were linked to the arrival of witches and magicians in the colony. You know, the question is, you know, the French were so worried about demons, demonic possession, you know, Satan at work. And, yeah, indigenous peoples, when they encountered the French, they had their own, you know, very robust belief system. And a key concept, at least for a lot of Algonquin speaking people, like the Innu, the Algonquins and many Inishinaabe people of the Great Lakes, they had this concept of manitou or manadu describe an other than human person or power someone or something that exceeded human abilities that could control and manipulate the natural world in extraordinary ways and the french when they heard of this idea of manateau or manadu they would translate it sometimes to spirit sometimes to god sometimes to the devil because it was

outside of this sort of Catholic worldview. For the most part, a Nishinaabe people and other indigenous peoples had very flexible spiritualities. So they said, sure, let's pray to Jesus Christ and see what happens. They were very willing to experiment with Christianity. However, it was the Jesuits who were inflexible. So often you have exasperated Jesuits talking about, you know, devils and evil spirits and how sane.

is at work in these missions. And they're exasperated with these indigenous belief systems. And I think, if anything, this leads to further insecurity about, you know, witches and demons in New France. You're listening to a demon attack in Old Quebec on ideas, on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America. on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas.

You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospitals. staff 1,000 doctors all doing

so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day

your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book

at Spexsavers.cavers.caiastas.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.ca to learn more. Mary Cowan is a historian at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. She brings us details of a an eerie tale from Quebec in the 1660s. It's the topic of her latest book, The Possession of Barbalay, diabolical arts and daily life in early Canada. This microhistory involves an alleged witch,

a demon, and multiple attempted exorcisms by leading figures in the town. Readers of microhistory get to know about people and events from the past that they might not otherwise see in historians' accounts. A micro-historian, who need not be a small person, inspects their object of study up close with a careful and detailed reading

of whatever sources they can find. At the same time, this historian keeps in mind the wider context of those sources. Why were these sources created? What might be left unsaid in these sources? Which sources do we not have? As Mary Cowan sees it,

we needn't believe in literal demons and witches to find historical truths in this particular story. Just attempting to make sense of what Quebecers thought was happening gives us a vivid picture of the time, the place, and the French colonial mindset. Ideas producer Tom Howell is finding out how merry piece that picture together. It's autumn, the year of 1660 in Quebec. Barb Alley's 18-year-old sister, Marie. gets married.

Barb is now the oldest eligible daughter, and Danielle Vuille, the Miller, is extremely cross. The story that we are told by Marie de L'Encarnation is that he had wanted to marry Barb Alley and claimed she had been promised to him, but no one would listen to him because he was a man of bad morals.

So then, the marriage offer was refused. And when this marriage proposal was refused, he grew very angry and envious. He grew so angry that he turned to the tricks of his diabolical art to win over what he couldn't get through the right path. Okay, this is the story as told by a Catholic nun. That's right. People at the time, people at the French settlers in Quebec, would have found it believable that that level of resentment of being denied what you wanted could spur someone onto witchcraft. Wiches were thought to be envious, resentful people. And so it begins.

One terrible night while everybody is sleeping. Bar ballet wakes up. We are told in one source that demons and specters appeared that terrified her. People saw phantoms in the air, they heard strange music, and then they saw stones detaching themselves from walls to fly around by themselves. The place of the demur of this female were so infested that we saw the piers rolled to all over the way,

jetted by their minds invisible, without blessing who-seller, what they passed through a 20thens of people, with a noise and a force also grand than if she had had been pushed of a

puceant the place where this girl lived was so infested that people could see stones flying from all sides

thrown by invisible hands without hurting anyone even though they passed in front of about 20 people

with a noise and a strength so great that it was as if they'd been pushed by a strong arm. And they send priests to exercise the site.

They even send their bishop to exercise the site, but it doesn't seem to work. The one who came on the boat? The one who came on the boat. It does not work. Things get stranger. And the servant does supply us with a name of who is responsible for sending the demons.

The servant, Barb. Yes. Barb tells us that the demons are being sent by a witch named Daniel Ville. Okay, witchcraft. What's the difference between a witch and a demon? The witch is the human, who is using dark arts. The demon is a supernatural entity,

and sometimes demons are controlled by witches. Look, I think that generally they are extremely monstrous, grotesque, usually resembling some kind of. of distorted animal, possibly spewing fire or with claws and a long tail and of course horns. Sarah Ferber at the University of Wallingong, Australia, expert on the history and culture of demonic possession and exorcism within a Euro-Christian context. Sometimes part goat, part human, for example, all kinds of grotesque and terrifying images

intended to inspire fear in the viewers. Their demons are the demons of Catholic tradition and of Catholic medieval tradition, and that fusion of the idea of kind of little spirit demons with a very powerful enemy of God is something that happened over time in the first millennium and a half of Christianity. My interest is in what institutions do

when they are wanting to do good. So the medical institutions and religious institutions are singularly interesting in that respect. But in relation to demons specifically, their role in ill health is in a way to hide behind conditions that could be diagnosed, for example, as melancholy or later on in history as hysteria, for example, and through hiding behind apparent illness, in this tradition, devils are better able to do, to work against the goals of Christianity. So the job of the exorcist is actually to determine whether or not there is a real illness there or whether there's a demon there that needs to be gotten rid of because it is trying to, a, steal the soul of the person who it's possessing, but also to work on a wider front against, God in the world.

All right. Keep away. That's always mine. I think that the film The Exorcist actually shows some very clear pointers to how exorcism is practiced in its most dramatic forms. It can take the form of just simple blessings or prayers, for example. But in many of the cases, in the early modern period, a lot of them really resembled,

according to the literature, resembled the story in the film The Exorcist, which of course is based on a 20th century account itself. In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, by this sign of the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit. using the crucifix to force the demon out of the person's body, praying, making the sign of the cross, all of those things are standard parts of the repertoire. There are long written accounts of instructions to exorcist as to what prayers to say, to whom they should direct

their prayers, because it could be to God or it could also be asking a particular saint. to deliver the person of their demon. And this is a way in which early Christianity saints' cults were promoted because their relics cured the possessed. The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compels you.

There were many practices that were seen as acceptable to some people in the church, but not acceptable to our, others. Endless indulgence of letting the demon from the person speak, for example, was regarded by many elite members of the church as poor form, that this was entertaining the demon and allowing the demon have too much free reign. The principle is that the demon be silenced and expelled. But in fact, in the early modern period, demons were allowed to say a lot and in those contexts, that's when witchcraft accusations emerged, for example.

And they could be very clearly targeted at individuals as having that the demon would say, oh, I'm there working on behalf of this person or this witch sent me into this person to torment them and to ensure that they don't attain salvation. The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compares you. After the first attempted exorcisms fail, Barb gets transferred to hospital in Quebec.

Danielle Vuel also gets transferred to prison. People were put into prison to await trial, not as a punishment once they're found guilty. It's the place you await your trial. Mary visited the archives of the Seminare de Quebec to look at the original Journal of the Jesuits. These are handwritten documents by priests who were there at the time. She hoped there'd be full of details about the criminal proceedings against Danielle of Weal. They were not. However... While I was in that archive, I was also brought to another document, this inventory, compiled by the bishop,

about all of the pieces touching on a dispute that he was having with the governor. Among all of these pieces was a section about a certain girl infested with demons. And listed among those documents are items about the diabolical infestation, containing information on how that infestation was detected. Documents about why Halle was thought to be innocent and what proofs had been obtained against Vuel. There were also some documents about the judicial process launched against Vuel. This seemed like a really promising path towards finding out what really happened to Danielle Vuel.

Hooray. Right, this sounded great. But then I discovered we have this inventory. We have the original inventory to consult, but we do not have the documents themselves. The inventory is a list of documents that were sent somewhere, and we don't know where they were sent. They have not been able to track them down. Oh, boy. Do you think they exist?

I think they existed. Okay, that's not the same. Right at the time. They may still exist. I've looked in different places. I've looked in Canada and France and Rome and the Vatican and I have not found them yet. So this was disappointing at first, but it's an ongoing search.

Any movie adaptation will need to extrapolate wildly to show Danielle Vuel's trial. Mary's not even 100% sure he was charged with witchcraft. It might have been liquor smuggling. On the plus side, Barb L.A.'s story from this point onward is much better documented. She was brought into a hospital called the Hotel Dieu, and it was located in Quebec. By the time she got there, it was in the upper town at the same location that you would find it

today, in Quebec City. She was brought there by order of the bishop, and cared for by nuns who worked as nurses in the hospital. One of the sources we have about the hospital is a biography of the nun who's took charge of Alley. And this is the V or the life of Catherine de Saint-Han-Gustin, written by Paul Ragenaud, a Jesuit priest and Catherine's confessor. Raganot tells us that Catherine cared for Alley day and night,

and he characterizes the nun's efforts as worthy of a truly Christian heart. In the biography, she comes across as a brave fighter against supernatural threats, willing, maybe even eager to die for New France. He describes her as saying, she is nailed to the cross of Canada. And she's a champion fighter against demons. So how does she do it? Does the source tell us this? Well, at one point she sows a lay into a sack

to defend her against her demonic attackers. And at one point, Catherine's arm is as black as ink from the hits she had received. In a mother, padre, feel his spirit is haunting a man. From Barb Okay, but Barb We don't know We're just told us the demons

Okay, so Barb we can't get inside her head But now we've got essentially kind of a witness Or a corroborating thing Because now Catherine is interacting with this demon as well Catherine is interacting with this demon And the other nuns at the hospital are interacting with Alley She is put in a little room next to the parlor It's interesting that she's not put in the main room for the sick

they had a new room for the sick which was probably quite a beautiful room with high ceilings and many windows but that's not where Barb was placed she was placed to the side in a parlor and we are told that she was still agitated by demons at night but during the day she helped to care for the

patients well that really teaches me something because if I knew that you were infested possessed by demons they're not yeah infested is a nice it's a broader category than possessed but she's infested according to one source.

All right, but if someone said, Mary, here's Mary, she's possessed by an evil demon, we think it might be the scariest creature in the world. Do you want to have her over for lunch? I mean, you might not, or do you want her in taking care of your mother? But apparently this is not a problem.

What do you make of that? She's not considered very threatening when she's not showing signs of being controlled by the demon. Hmm. Did that surprise you at all, or does that just seem normal? No, I was surprised by that. I was surprised that she is being treated as a sick person, as well as a possessed person in this hospital, and they're not too worried either that she will harm the patients or that whatever is infesting Alley would be contagious and harm other people. Huh. Well, that teaches us something about demons, I guess. They're... It teaches us about what the people believed about the demon, at least. Catherine battled Barb's demonic possessions for months, possibly a year.

Sounds like a bad news story, but Mary wonders if Ragnot saw it as a public relations win for the colony. Kaganot was deeply disappointed at what had been happening to the Christian missions in New France. The ideals that he came over with were receding from view as the missions were often falling apart. Many of his friends had died, and back in France they were fighting to. to maintain support for these missions. The priorities were changing away somewhat from missions among indigenous peoples to trying to maintain the French Catholic community. And Catherine de Saint-Augustin was a good champion for that kind of mission.

Through her efforts, he could show that the stakes were still very high. Cosmic forces were still fighting over the fate of New France. And the missionaries serving at this site were still willing to sign. suffer and die for the fate of the colony. A cynic could say there's an element of like a letter to the investors here. Yep, yep. They were certainly aware of the need to raise funds and political support back in France. Which doesn't mean we can't trust the source.

It means we have to be smart about how we trust it. The source tells us a lot about the reputation of this nun. At the Hotel Jir, Barb's demons came back night. Afternight. In fact, it seems they were multiplying. They didn't even stop in the autumn of 1661. And you might have thought they would if Daniel Vuel was behind it all. Weill was executed in October 1661. Multiple sources confirm this. These sources do not all agree on the means of execution or the reason for the execution. Some say he was hanged, some that he was shot, some that his crime was blasphemy or another religious crime, some that it was illegal trade and liquor. There is one source in

particular that I think deserves special attention for its evidence. Among all of the sources, the Journal of the Jesuits was written closest in time to the event itself, and it was written for circulation only within the order, not for publication. Oh, it makes it more trustworthy. Might make it more trustworthy, yeah. You say closer in time, like within a year? Oh, at least. Yeah, yeah. The superior of the order usually wrote in this, if not daily, pretty close to it. He's writing as things are happening. And that immediacy in time is made really clear in the exact words that the scribe used. He said that Vuel was hanged or rather shot, as if he is correcting himself at the exact time that he is writing. Yeah, that's highly plausible. So he, so maybe hanged, does that tell you? tell us that hanged is like maybe the more common one. Hanged is more common.

Shot is unusual. And so I think the scribe was maybe not thinking all that clearly as he began to write the entry and then remembered partly through that this execution was different. Okay, cool. That doesn't help us figure out if they shot him for being a witch, though. It's not like witches get shot and regular traffickers get hung or anything. No, no, it's we don't know why he was shot rather than hanged. I want to know.

I do too. So far, we do not know. Oh. But it's possible he was shot for being a witch. It's plausible. It's possible. Okay. Barb's family brought her back to the estate at Bopor.

She even returned to her job at the manor house. After all, she seemed perfectly fine during the day. But still with the nighttime afflictions. Mary has a new source to work with here. The senor's wife, Mary Renewar, she wrote a memoir. We are lucky to have a record of Marie Renewar's own words. Renewaer's account says that on or about the 15th of October 1662, between 10 and 11 at night, Bar Balet was sleeping when a demon came to torment her, as was the demon's custom.

Marie Renoir got out of bed to help, as she was accustomed to do. This night, the demonic torment was worse than she had ever seen before, and it came into Renewar's mind to put a ribbone of the deceased Jesuit priest, Jean de Brébeuf, onto Alley's body. It's strange that I didn't come up before. She had tried relics of other saints, and they did not work. Hmm. Hmm. So here is how Renoir's account describes what happened next.

She placed the bone against the side of Alley. Immediately, the demon became agitated, causing Alley to contort her arms and her legs and her whole body. The demon told Renouard to remove the bone because it burned. Renewar conjured the demon and demanded that he tell her the name of the person whose relic she was using. Conjured? Demanded that he appear and answer her.

They argued. The demon said he would not answer, and Renoir said that she would not remove the relic until he did. They argued some more. Reignoire said she would not remove the relic unless he consented to leave the girl. The demon refused, saying the girl was his. Renewart was forceful in this response, saying, You have lied, damned spirit that you are. You have nothing. She is mine. Our good God and her father and mother gave her to me.

The demon continued to ask that she removed the bone because it burned. Rénieuard conjured the demon again, this time adding, that she was doing this with the merits of the saint whose relics she was using, and she ordered the demon to depart. That seems to have worked. Renewar saw something like a breath leave from the mouth of Halley, who began to say the names of Jesus and Mary and Joseph and make a sign of the cross on her body.

So the possession was over. Wow. How do you think the demon sounded when he was like, it burned? Apparently he had a low voice. It burns. And he uses masculine grammatical endings on his verbs. Yeah, well, I can't do that.

As opposed to the feminine endings that Alley uses. It's never called an exorcism. I think it's very carefully never called an exorcism. It's called a deliverance and a relief and a healing, though it looks an awful lot like an exorcism. Hmm. Well, I mean, those would be more medical words, healing. Yes, exactly.

Words more appropriate to a laywoman running her household. A laywoman who, because she's a laywoman, was not supposed to be performing an exorcism. Right, and yet it was clearly demon-oriented rather than a low serotonin or something. Yes, yes. She is clearly casting out a demon. She is using the forms of an exorcism. She's employing a relic given to her by a Jesuit. Her account survives in three copies. And the account mentions that other people had heard about this. So this was not done in secret. But it's carefully not called an exorcism. It's some form of health care.

real hero of the tale is not supposed to be Marie Renoir at all, but Jean de Brébeuf, the Jesuit whose ribbone is used in the ritual. And who some of us would like to be a celebrity that puts Quebec on the religious map in the Catholic world. Exactly. He becomes this champion for a colony losing support or at risk of losing support back in France. Gabriel Marcia Marquez wrote a wonderful novella called Chronicle of the Death foretold, which is really a microhistory, but written by a fiction writer.

And there's a line in it that I just love, which I think explains what historians try to do when they do any type of history, but micro histories in particular. Colin Coates has also written micro histories, so he knows what Mary Cowan's been up against. And the quote is, trying to put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards. And I love that praise

because it really is what the historian is doing. You've got little bits of information that you're trying to combine into something larger to explain a story. One fact we know for certain from the macro history of New France is that less than a year after Barb's deliverance from supernatural foes, thanks to Marie Renoir and the celebrity spirit of Jean de Beauboisbeuf,

the French king Louis 14th finally commits to supporting the Quebec project. And this means more attention, more money, more government, generally more support for this nervous settlement. In 1663, it's made a royal colony. turns around. Yeah. Is there any justification for saying that maybe this story helped swing it? I don't know.

Okay, fine. But it might have done. Plausible. It's possible. Okay. It's possible. Well, then if that's not the big conclusion that this demonic possession delivered Quebec into the administration of France,

what other big sort of bigger questions, bigger ideas do you think? emerge from this micro story. So although we can take it for granted today that New France would endure, after all, Quebec is in the same spot where it could be found in 1659, in reading through the sources from the mid-17th century, it's really clear that those colonists in New France were frightened. They worried about attacks. They worried the Haudenoshone might attack. They worried the English might attack.

They worried the Dutch might attack. They worried their leaders could not attract more people to come. They worried that those who did come were dissolute people with poor morals liable to do more harm than good. And they worried, in short, their entire colonial endeavor might fail. And as for Barb Alley herself? She turns out just fine. Works as a domestic servant in Quebec, goes back to the Hotel Dieu, but now as an employee, where she is paid for her work. She marries another servant from the hospital.

They move across the river. They've set up a farm. They have children. Their descendants are still there in Levy. She leads up from what we can tell, a happy and normal life for an Abitale. Just like Quebec. Yes, exactly. Happy life.

No, I know. I could see there being problems there, but that's for another show. Well, that's a great story. And thank you for unearthing it and for telling us all about it. Thank you very much for having me. Listening to A Demon Attack in Old Quebec. This episode was produced by Tom Howell. You can go to our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas,

to look at a picture of the demon-infested manor house at Bopar. Taken shortly before it burnt down. You can also learn about Mary Cowan's new book, The Possession of Barbellay, Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada. Technical production, Danielle Duval. web producer Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed.

For more social. CBC Podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.