Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - Top 10 Weird Toronto Stories: Toronto Mike'd Podcast Episode 1905

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

In this 1905th episode of Toronto Mike'd, Mike chats with award-winning storyteller Adam Bunch about his top 10 weird Toronto stories. Visit https://bizarretoronto.com for the 2026 Festival of Bizarre Toronto History schedule and tickets. Toronto Mike'd is proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, Palma Pasta, Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball,Ridley Funeral Home, Nick Ainis, and RecycleMyElectronics.ca. If you would like to support the show, we do have partner opportunities available. Please email Toronto Mike at [e-mail].

It's Adam Bunch, me returning for the third time to the podcast to talk all things Toronto history as an author, professor, tour guide, speaker, all sorts of things, and creator of the festival of bizarre Toronto history coming up the first week of June. June 1st, 6 p.m. doors open at 5.30. Oh, this is the archival photos. Oh, we'll talk about everything. Toronto's strangest archival photos. Lots to discuss with Adam Bunch. Welcome to episode 1,905 of Toronto Miked, an award-winning podcast, proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery. Order online at Great LakesBeer.com for free local home delivery in the GTA.

Very soon, Adam will pop his, he's got a premium logger there. It looks delicious. He's going to crack it in a moment. Palma Pasta, enjoy the taste of fresh, homemade Italian pasta and entrees from Palma Pasta in Mississauga and Oakville. Visit palma Pasta.com for more. Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball, catch a game at Christy Pits this summer. No ticket required. Fusion Corp's own Nick Aienies.

He's the host of Building Toronto Skyline. And Mike and Nick, podcast that you ought to listen to. Recycle myelectronics.C.A. Committing to our planet's future means properly recycling our electronics of the past. And Ridley Funeral Home. Pillars of the community since 1921. Joining me today, yes, making his, I think it's an annual visit now, his annual return to Toronto mic. It is indeed Adam.

Adam. Welcome back, Adam. Thanks for having me back. And crack that GLB right on the mic there. It looks delicious here. Oh, yes, sir. Yes, guy. Okay.

Good to see you again, man. You too. Very excited to chat some more weird Toronto history. I feel like the last time I saw you was walking on Dundas. Like I was walking with my boy and it was one of those great Toronto moments where I said, oh my goodness, there is Adam Munch. Yeah, and just walking down the sidewalk in the junction. I think I'd seen you without seeing me at the dome during the Jay's postseason run too. Oh, I wasn't at the dome.

No. I didn't get, I've never been to a postseason Jay's game. I must have been toward the end of the season. I have doppel gangers. I have doppel. Yeah, oh yeah, maybe I did. My daughter takes me to a game. She buys me a ticket for father. I was near the end of the season. I was at the dome. Those games all sort of blend together in a bit of a haze. Well, Adam, I was worried I had a doppel ganger. I need to know if I have a doppelganger. Okay. It was bad enough when Chris O'Donnell was my doppelganger. I wish. Okay. So good to see you. by the way, I have more fresh craft beer for you to take home with you.

Amazing. So this is episode 1905 and I had episode 1904. So we're recording on Monday and this drops Tuesday morning. But earlier today I did an episode of toast and it was 904. And Jeremy Hopkins who says hello to you. Wonderful. He said to me, he says,

oh, the great Toronto fire of 1904. So then I said, oh, what if I did this for a bunch of episodes? So I learned that in 1905, the first Toronto Santa Claus parade was held. It is, I think it's the oldest children's parade anywhere in the world now. And is itself a pretty weird story, some of the early floats and stuff. There's like Santa Claus and a giant fish. They used to have a ladder that would go up from the fish or whatever float Santa Claus was riding to have Santa Claus climb up the ladder at the end of the parade

directly into the toy department where they said to, we're said to have always had a little bit of booze waiting for Santa Claus to down before dealing with all the kids. Well, it's funny, you said weird stuff, and I was thinking, well, when I was going to this parade every, you know, winter in early 80s, I was always freaked out by the upside-down clowns.

Yeah, me too. Like, I just found them, I just, I messed with my head These clowns walk, they look like they were walking on their hands. I'm not always, especially when I was a kid, not entirely thrilled with clowns right side up, upside down. You probably saw Poltergoyce. I feel like Poltergeis did a very great, and also I believe, not that we were aware maybe as kids, but like was a John Wayne Gacy? Yeah, John Wayne Gacy. It, like tons of terrifying clown stuff.

Right. No wonder we suffered such trauma, right Adam? Yeah, it wasn't irrational. It was founded, I think, in fact, history. Okay, so before we, I want to find out everything. I took a picture. It's a photo. It says Toronto's strangest archival photos.

So is that part of the festival of bizarre? Yes. So that's going to be for the first time this year, we're doing an in-person opening night at the city of Toronto Archives. It's going to be a free event that night in particular, where they're going to dig up the weirdest photos that they have in the archives to show us, give us a tour behind the scenes and chat a bit about those weird photos. So that's going to be the opening night.

And then that kicks off a whole week filled with weird Toronto history, where every weeknight we'll have online events, lectures, talking about kidnappings and tunnels and strangeness all over the place. And then on the weekend, the first weekend of June, it's all walking tours on weird themes. And it looks like on the Sunday night to close everything out, I'll have another free in-person event, which is going to be Bizarre Toronto History Trivia night.

It looks like we'll be doing that at Say What on the Sunday evenings or rampack week. This is all amazing what you're up to here. So the website to go to for all the details and to register and all that, bizarretoronto.com. So I order the TMU, the Toronto Mike Universe to head over to bizarretoronto.com. I was laughing to myself there because this is this opening night. the June 1st opening night, the Toronto strangest archival photos.

It just would be amusing to me if every photo was an upside down clown at the Toronto Santa Claus brain. I won't be surprised if a clown or two makes the cut. I heavily know some of them are going to be weird C&E related stuff, which certainly has some clowns.

It was you on a previous episode of Toronto, Mike, you talked about the clowns. We had a clown. A circus riot. Circus riot. I think maybe the weirdest single story in Toronto history. Hold that. Okay, I feel like I'm stealing our own thunder because we're going to present like what we're doing today

because we have a top 10 list for everybody and then we'll do a little catch up off the top. But what is the topic for today's Toronto mic appearance? Well, you gave me the near impossible and deeply cruel task of trying to rank my top 10 weirdest Toronto history stories. So that's going to be our theme for today. I'm making you work for that GLB and also because I have a. a frozen lasagna in my freezer for you, Adam. You got to work for that stuff, you know? It is.

Yeah, a deeply hard thing to try to just pick 10. There's so many weirdnesses, but it's a very good lasagna and very good beer. So I'll make the trade. So you mentioned, and then I mentioned, it's your third visit to the basement, the third time you had to check your head down here. First time, and it does seem to be

an annual May event, because you are here in May 2020. here's what I wrote at the time. In this 1,480th episode, 1480, Mike chats with award-winning storyteller, Adam Bunch, remind me, what award was this? This wasn't a Juno. What award did you win?

The Governor General's History Award for Popular Media, the Pierre Burden Award. Okay, so you're wearing a very cool t-shirt to commemorate Jackie Shane. And then I was telling you earlier about Rob Bowman's part of a like a documentary about this and very interested in the story of Jackie Shane. But I think you need a T-shirt that says award-winning storyteller. Like I would just wear that all the time. I'm not sure the Governor General gives them out to everyone who wins.

You got to make them. I made it my, I had my wife make a T-shirt that says award-winning podcaster. I did that. Okay. I feel like you just custom make it. We can hook you up. I have a custom shirt on today. Okay, so back to the description I wrote in May 2024. So we talked about, I called you award-winning storyteller, Adam Bunch,

about Toronto's fascinating history, his Canadian documentary series, the Toronto Dreams Project, the Festival of Bizarre Toronto History. Is that what it's called? Is that the full title, The Festival of Bizarre Toronto History? Yeah, okay. And then we talked for like 90 minutes. And then you came back a year later, May 2025 for episode 1698. and I wrote Mike Chats with historian Adam Bunch.

See, I downgraded you from award-winning storyteller, right? You got degraded there. Okay. Historian Adam Bunch about the ongoing history of Canada versus USA from a uniquely Toronto perspective. As I recall, in May 2025, I was ready to, I still am, by the way, but I was ready to take up arms and defend this sovereign nation from an invading force south of the border.

I do remember you saying that. Yeah, and there's like, that is a very long history. More of Toronto's history as a city has been sort of an era of tensions with our neighbors than it has been the more recent era of friendship. So there was tons to talk about in that one. So before we get to this very difficult top 10 list I assigned to you, how was doors open Toronto? It was great. Even though it was absolutely pouring, I think my shoes are still a little soggy from the sad. day.

Still got good crowds out to the, I was doing a, from the ward to Kensington Market walking tour all weekend, all about, so the foundations of Torontoian multiculturalism through sort of weird and unexpected stories and had good crowds the whole weekend. Even on the Saturday.

Yeah, even on the Saturday. That makes me feel good. It was nice. People were willing to brave a little bad weather, I think, to learn about their city. And it was neat to pass,

you know, some of the historic sites whose doors were open and see, lineups of people checking things out. It's a nice weekend to be out and about in the city and see in the spring every year. People head out to learn more about it. Love to hear it.

Now, does this tour end at the Elma combo with you explaining that Toronto Mike just made his headlining debut at this venue? I was thinking about that. We passed not far from the Elma combo. We had kind of around the corner in Kensington itself with a story that almost made our top 10 list for today, actually about the Paddy Wars when the government threatened to shut down all of Toronto's

Jamaican patty places because they said that they're so delicious. According to Canadian law, patties could only be hamburger patties. They call them the Patty Wars, ended with a Patty Summit where the owner of the Kensington Patty Palace, Michael Davidson hammered out the compromise that said Jamaican patty places in Toronto could call them Jamaican patties. They had a party to celebrate the anniversary of that party February 23rd is the day Toronto officially recognizes as Jamaican Paddy Day in our city every year

the day the Patty Wars ended back in 1985. So that great story did not crack your top 10? No. Okay, so we're going to get to that top 10. I'll just shout out that, you know, you referenced that we had a lot of rain on Saturday. And I got to say, we don't, it rained all day. Like, that's one of the, what I do is as a,

Adam, avid cyclist, Adam, I need to, like, I check the forecast and then I check the radar. And I'm like, okay, I think maybe at 4 p.m. I can go get a ride in there, like a 30K or something. That was a day when it just would not let up. And it wasn't quite warm enough for me to want to be soaking wet on a bike ride. Yeah, it was. I'm here to complain about the wedding night. The entire day. It wasn't a day where it comes and goes at all.

It was just like solidly pouring the entire time I was outside for, I don't know, six hours or something doing those stories. We don't get too many of those days. Like, you know, you get your rainy days and then it lets up and it lightens up. But this was one of those like, no, we're going to go all through this day. It's going to be raining. And it's, I had to go to my son's soccer match at Rennie Park and Swansea there. And I kept thinking, oh, well, maybe they won't play.

But of course they played and I'm standing out there for an hour. And I'm not really complaining except, Adam, when my socks get wet and it's cold out. I don't like it. I'm just here to say, I don't like it when my socks get wet. And it's like below 10 degrees. There, it was a challenge the next day to put the cold shoes back on my feet and head back out. There are very few things I do it for, but telling Toronto history stories, I guess, is apparently one of them. And yeah, did make it feel especially meaningful that people were coming out and we're still exploring the city.

That really warms the cockles of my heart to hear that you had a good crowd on the Saturday because, it was rainy. But speaking of rain, so I will tell you that I was all set to pop over to Christy Pits yesterday and catch some Toronto Maple Leafs baseball, but they postponed that game. I think it messes up the field when it rains that much. But, and I'm sure I gave this to you last year, and possibly the year before, but if you have a friend who would be interested, I do have another book about the history of Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball. Free games at Christy Pits. You know the score. Yeah, absolutely. One of the great

Torontoian baseball traditions, which is, yeah, my favorite sport. And one, I love talking about, too. I'm actually doing a lecture series for the Toronto Public Library right now once a month. I've got one more Toronto baseball history talk coming up. I think the week after

the festival, so it must be Friday, June, like 12th or something at noon. That's going to be all about the sort of founding era of the Blue Jays and how I think, if you believe in sports curses, they might have been subject to one back in the 80s. Okay, well, that explains 87.

That explains 85 as well, because we were up 3-1 in that series. As I recall. Exactly. Okay, but 87, I need a curse for that one. Charlie Moore passed away, and he played, he was, who went down? It was Ernie Witt went down with an injury. And Fernandez. Oh, Tony, yeah.

Mavath ended up at Mount Sinai Hospital within days of each other. Right. Injured, I think, at the same spot on the field by second base. The footage I saw was that there was this like small part. What a crabby field is to think about. There's this small hard thing sticking out. And the elbow of Tony landed right on it and shattered. Just the worst luck.

That's it. And it's an era of spectacularly bad luck that if you like to believe in curses, I'd argue might begin when Dave Winfield kills that seagull at Exhibition Stadium in 1983. And the Toronto police arrest him for animal cruelty and doesn't end until they sign him as DH in 92. and he gets the game winning hit in extra innings in the last game of the world series. Yeah, he hit that double in a 12th inning, right? Was it 12th or 11th?

I can't remember now. But the fun little tag to the Seagull story is who ends up with the carcass of that Seagull sitting at Exhibition Stadium keeping the Seagull for reasons he explained and I can't recall right now, do you know who it was? I don't.

I didn't know it was kept. He told this story in great detail in Toronto Mike. So when you go back into the archives and you listen to the debut of Sportsnet commentator, former play-by-play guy, Jamie Campbell. So listen to Jamie Campbell's debut on Toronto Mike, and he talks about,

he was at exhibition stadium, the seagulls killed by Dave Winfield throwing the ball, and Jamie somehow takes that carcass, and he has it with him on the bleachers. That's unbelievable. I don't know what he did. No, it is unbelievable. So every time somebody mentions the seagull,

because I grew up, we're similar vintage at him. That seagull was the lore, like everyone talking about the Seagull and Dave Winfield, etc., etc. But then Jamie Campbell tells me he got the damn carcass. Incredible. I know.

So Jamie Campbell must be partially responsible for everything that happened to the Jays between 83 and 92. But it is true. Dave Winfield gets the game winning RBI. And then I actually, so I did this one-man show at the Elmo, and I made this comment that the Blue Jays, the Rogers' own Blue Jays,

were so lucky. It was Timlin de Carter in 92 and not Alamara Carter because I feel it would mess up a lot of their documentary things in this 50th season that they're working on. So, Tim, Carter is the one who hits the home run. You think, right, right.

Yeah, and he's the good thing that Carter touched them all and not Alamar touching them all. So, okay, some good luck there for Rogers. Rogers, Blue Jay, oh, blog Blue Jay's there. Okay, so we're going to get to your top 10 now, but I want to say thank you to Nick Iienis for helping to sponsor this program, His podcast is called Building Toronto Skyline. There's actually a lot of Toronto history in that show

talking about the CN Tower and what's going up at One Young Street. We talked to the developers of One Young, and that's now already the tallest, I guess, residential building in the country. Lots going on here. And we have a, I want to give some thanks to who else gets a thing? Recyclemyelectronics.ca. If you have old cables, old devices, old electronics, Don't throw that in the garbage at them.

Go to recycle my electronics.ca. Put in your postal code and find out where you can drop that off to be properly recycled. I told you I have a lasagna in my freezer. I've got beer for you. Courtesy of Ridley Funeral Home. This is new because you probably got the green one last time. I'll pull that out for you. This is not just a measuring tape Adam Bunch.

This is also a flashlight and a bottle opener and there's a level in there. It's like the Swiss Army knife. of measuring tapes. Very fancy. Yeah. Courtesy of Ridley Funeral Home and they have a great podcast called Life's Undertaking that we record a new episode every two weeks.

Okay, I'm sick of my voice now, Adam. So I'm going to pop open a... I had a beer with the toast guys. I'm going to pop open a hop-pop. So a hop-pop is not a beer, but you buy it at Great Lakes Brewery. There's no alcohol in this thing too. So I'm going to enjoy this beverage.

while I listen to you, and maybe I'll chime in. I might have to say a few things along the way, but take it away, Adam Bunch. I love your visits. Well, thank you very much. We have actually talked already about the number one and two that I think about when I think about my list. So I should mention that up front, I suppose.

The first time I was on a couple of years ago, we talked about the circus riot when clowns and firefighters rioted on Front Street in the 1850s. We talked about Robert. Baldwin, too, who's the champion of responsible government of Canadian democracy back around that same era, who also was obsessed with his dead wife and had really weird burial conditions. He had his coffin chained to her coffin and his corpse given the same kind of cesarian section incision that had killed his wife. Deeply weird stuff.

Creepy stuff, man. Let's not bury the lead here. You get in the C-section that killed your wife. That's some weird stuff, man. People often, I think, point to responsible government is kind of why Canadian history is boring because we didn't have a revolution to get our system. But Baldwin's the weirdo behind that story.

So I think it is weirdly, morbidly fascinating, which some of these other stories will be too. So we're going to go from 10 to number three, since we already did the circus right in Baldwin, starting with one of the big Grizzly ones, I think. Okay, so I will just say that I remember that circus riot story that you told and people can find it in the Toronto mic. So you think that was two visits ago, right? Made 2020.

Yeah, I think. Okay, that's episode 1480. Pause this program. I order you to pause this program. Go listen to that. That's an unbelievable story. No wonder that was number one on your list. Yeah, it doesn't get much better than clowns and firefighters rioting after a fight at a brothel on King Street.

Just like one of those stories that's hard to believe is actually. true and really connects into a lot of how Toronto work back then. So it was also wildly educational. You learn a ton about Toronto back then too. So it's like the platonic ideal of a good weird story. Yeah, and just to clarify, those rioting clowns were not upside down clowns. As far as I know, they were right side up. Okay, I'm just clarifying.

Okay, back to you, Adam Bunch. So I think in number 10, it's very hard again to decide. so many candidates who didn't make it, but I landed on Toronto's first hanging and how it went wrong, which is a story I talked about in my first book, The Toronto Book of the Dead, which is all about history of the city through stories around sort of death and duels and executions and stuff. And it was in the late 1700s when Toronto was new as a settlement. So it was founded in the 1790s on this indigenous land, and just five years later, when they're still only a couple hundred settlers or so living here.

They haven't even gotten around to building a church yet, but they have made sure that there are places to drink. And a couple of friends go drinking at one of these taverns, a guy named John Sullivan, I think was an Irish tailor, a friend of his, Michael Flannery. They called Latin Mike, because he liked to quote Latin Proverbs. And they get so drunk on whiskey that they run out of money and are also so drunk they decide the thing to do

is to try to forge a bank, note so they can keep drinking. But they're also so drunk that I don't think they do a particularly good job of it. They're caught immediately. And while Flannery, Ladd & Mike manages to escape and keeps running all the way across the border into the U.S. to avoid getting captured, John Sullivan's arrested, I guess, on the spot, thrown into the city's first jail, a little wooden building that stood where the King Edward Hotel is now.

and on the edges of the first few blocks of Toronto as a settlement. Right. And he's put on trial and sentenced to, for forging this bank note worth about three shillings or something, I think. He is sentenced to death. Whoa. And while people in the city seem to have had no problem with the idea of executing a guy for forging a few bucks, they had a lot more trouble fighting anyone willing to actually carry out that sentence. No one had ever been hanged in the settlement before.

No one had any experience doing it. No one was particularly eager to start gaining that experience. But luckily for them, there was another prisoner inside the jail, a guy named McNight. And he ended up agreeing to carry out the sentence in return for a pardon for his own crime and a few dollars worth of a fee. And so the town gathers at dawn one day, in 1798 to watch John Sullivan hang,

but it's like not an easy thing to do to execute someone. Even the last execution in Canadian history that was carried out at the dawn jail, two guys were hanged in the 1960s, one of which Arthur Lucas were not even sure if he'd actually committed the murder he was hanged for and his hanging, even after all of the experience of more than 100 years of doing it,

it was botched too. Oh. So McKnight, who's not experienced, experienced at all, has no clue what he's doing. It's an exact science figuring out how long the rope should be. He gets the rope length wrong, and the rope snaps. So John Sullivan just lands on the ground, very much still alive. According to some sources, McKnight tries again and the rope snaps again, and that by the end, even John Sullivan's starting to get a little impatient with everything. You can imagine how stressful it is to keep thinking you're about to die and then get tossed on the

ground instead. They say Sullivan's final words were something along the lines of Mcnight. I hope to goodness you've got the rope right this time. And this time finally McNight did and the city's first hanging was finally completed. Okay, you want to mind

blow how this will tie nicely with the Joe touching them all? Okay? I can bring this back to the 93 Blue Jays. You ready? John Sullivan, apparently a different John Sullivan. John Sullivan was the blue Jay's bullpen coach from 1982 through 93.

So he's actually warming up a pitcher in the bullpen when Joe Carter touches them all in 1993. It does feel like it's probably a different John Sullivan. He was very old and he somehow survived that second. So he measured wrong again. He measured wrong with his Ridley funeral home measuring tape. Okay, John Sullivan, I can't believe. I know it was the 1700s.

Barely remember that century. but the fact that you could forge a banknote for whatever that amount is, that amount of money, and that would get you hanged. There's a long list of crimes back. When did we raise the bar for when we'll kill somebody? There was also sort of other physical punishments too, like the market square outside what's now,

the North St. Lawrence Market Building is where you could get whipped, I think, and they had the pillory, like the stocks where people could throw stuff at you while your head's through the hole. All sorts of grisly weird stuff in that early history of the city as a settlement. I'm not with the meetings like, hey, maybe we, maybe if you steal a bit of money or forge a note for some money, maybe that's not death. Like maybe there's something less than death for that particular crime.

It's like you could find something in between. Oh, my goodness. Okay, I love it. So we're off to a rousing start. Shout out to the late great John Sullivan, who was our bullpen coach for a solid decade there. My favorite decade of Blue Jays baseball, 82 through 93. They are mostly of the curse.

Yeah, most of it, but there were two World Series at the end of that curse. Thank you, Dave Winfield for that, Dave Winfield of that double. Okay, so number nine. So number nine, I believe, is the death of William Davies, which was another sort of strange, somewhat morbid story about a guy who actually started off his making his living at the St. Lawrence, market. So there's been a market on that spot since the early 1800s and sort of a precursor to that even older than that. It slowly grows over the 1800s and as the city's connecting into the outside

world and railways are getting built, the market's growing and growing. And there are also it's a small sort of family-owned businesses in Toronto that blow up and become huge international businesses. And William Davies is one of those people. He starts off with one, essentially a butcher's stall inside the St. Lawrence Market. And he became best known for pork products. It's the William Davies Company who invents the Pemial

Bacon Sandwich, which becomes Toronto's iconic dish that you can still buy at the St. Lawrence Market today. And they call this Hogtown. That's it. That helps cement that nickname. Love it. Because we also just had pigs running wild in the streets in the early 1800s.

But it is the William Davies company who helps cement that nickname through the pea meal bacon sandwich and by his huge slaughtering houses that are all not too far away right next to the distillery district today. So sort of in what's now the Canary District between the distillery and the dawn is where the William Davies Company was slaughtering huge numbers of pigs to feed this pork empire. At its height, the William Davies Company has spread all across Toronto, all across Canada, across England too.

At its height, millions of pigs are being slaughtered every year, making William Davies an incredibly wealthy man. He builds one of the first mansions in Rosedale, lives a very wealthy lifestyle, and those pigs, they never get their revenge on William Davies, but one of their barnyard allies does. At the end of his life, William Davies goes on a driving trip. the early 1900s now, goes on a vacation through the southern United States.

And at one point, he's driving presumably down some dusty road somewhere. And William Davies has to pee. So the car stops, the wealthy Torontoian gets out to relieve himself right there on the side of the road. And while he does, he's approached by an angry goat. He ends up winding up and hurling itself at William Davies, presumably maybe even midstream, with such force that the blow from the goat delivers a wound that William Davies never recovers from. He dies, I think just a few weeks later, from the injury sustained by the goat attack so that this guy who made his whole fortune off killing pigs ends up himself being killed by a goat. Oh my goodness. Okay, the irony, it's killing me.

I'm not sick, but I'm not well. Okay, I feel like that's a... I know that song, but I feel like it's a Bob Willett favorite that album. He says they're not one-hit one-ers. Okay. But the death of William Davies... So the slaughtering all these pigs, you said it was happening, like what we would call now,

the Canary District there. But when does all the slaughtering move to the stockyards? Like I mentioned I bumped into you in the junction, or on Dundas in the junction. And I grew up, and I'm sure you remember when the stockyards, area of Toronto stunk. It's still parts of it still smell,

but it really stunk. Like you had to hold your nose on St. Clair when you were driving by. Do you know when the heck that became the go-to place to slaughter your animals in the city? You think it's while you still have other ones in other parts of the city that the stockyards become the central one because of the junction is the junction of all those rail lines. It's a natural place to put that kind of industry.

So I'm not sure when the first one's open there, but certainly by the early 1900s, the stockyards are really growing in to become a thing. There's still my favorite ghost stories is they're said to be sometimes some haunting by an old cow at the stockyards, who is the, they called them Judas Steers, the cows they would get to lead the other cows.

Oh, because they betrayed the other cows. Yeah, so they're Judas. I went to Catholic school, I understand that reference. Stormy nights, they say. You can hear the Jews. Judas steer mooring away in what's now the big box parking lots of the old stockyards. Well, I just did a pickup. My wife sent me to pick up a t-shirt at Old Navy in the

stockyards and I just made that bike trip. One of the things I wish you could do this, you can't do this. By the way, you can't do this. I'm still working on inventing this thing. But like I want to, like this area that they know the stockyards for the big box stores and all this stuff. Like I'd love to be able to, hey, come visit it the way I saw it in 1982. Like just come and see what it was like Because what a radically transformed neighborhood that is Over the last, you know, 40 years. Yeah, it wasn't even that long ago.

Right. It was an completely different place. I'm trying to remember when the, uh, they decided, hey, maybe we, this doesn't have to stink like a burning flesh or whatever the hell that smell. It must have been sometime around the turn of the millennium. Because, you know, when I was going to school in the 90s, it was definitely still happening.

Okay. Okay. So that's William Davies. who got his comeuppance for all those pig murders, a goat finally did him in. I love that story. And your number eight is also a death. Gary Hoy,

who wasn't as famous of Trontonian as William Davies, but whose story is of his death is infamous. And well known enough, I'm sure some people listening have heard this one before. Lots of people actually think it's an urban legend because the story is so weird. It's hard to believe. And it comes actually from 1990.

this big year in Toronto, Joe Carter's going to hit his home run. It's the arrow and the city's really starting to try to think of itself as a big modern world-class city. And one of the big modern landmarks is the TD Center, those big black bank towers that are really the first ones that go up in Toronto designed by Mice Vandreau, who kind of invented the whole idea of the modern skyscraper. When they go up, there aren't any other ones. So they're like two black, like obelisks, black slabs dominating the skyline for quite a while. And they're incredibly thoughtful buildings. Like he's seen as a master.

He's a guy who kind of popularizes phrases like, God is in the details and less is more. The buildings are like symmetrical, the detailing. He creates a thought for them that's still used there today. His Barcelona chairs, iconic chairs are in the lobbies. They've still got round, clear vases with yellow, daisies in them because he said that's what you should have to match the architecture. And they're so thoughtfully designed, so well built that those buildings are one of the more prestigious addresses in Toronto.

I think the Japanese consulate might still be in there. Lots of very famous buildings plus TD itself, which has just merged the Toronto and Dominion banks at the time. They're looking for a new headquarters to celebrate all that. Even in the 1990s, it's a fancy place for your business to be. including one of the old. Hold on. I hate to interrupt.

I hate to do that. But you're talking 93. So now you're talking about an era. I don't remember the 1700s, okay? And I don't remember what happened with William Davies. I remember 1993. So you mean the merger of TD and Canada trust? No, sorry.

I mean the TD Center had been built earlier. Okay, okay. I thought you were saying like, okay, I understand now. Okay, okay. I'm with you. Toronto and Dominion Banks merge in the 60s and build these bank towers that are the first. Okay. So that's in 67.

Another big year for Toronto and Canada, centennial year and everything. And between 67 and 93, the skyline's kind of filled in, but they're still one of the fancier places you can be. Gotcha. Okay, I'm with you here. And that includes one of the oldest law firms in Toronto,

which has an office on, I believe, was the 28th floor of the first tower built. And it's where a lawyer named Gary Hoy worked. And Gary Hoye worked. like to show off how well built the TD Center was by pulling a stunt every year. The thing is, I'm going to brace myself. I know exactly where you're going here, and you're doing a great job,

but I got to, like, brace myself here because I know where this is going. Yeah, you won't be alone. I'm sure some people are listening will be, too. Because every year, they'd have a visit from articling law students who'd get a tour of the firm. And Gary Hoy, every year, when they gathered in, like, a big conference room or something, he'd pull a stunt to show off how well-built the tower was by getting a running start, sprinting across this boardroom and then launching himself into one of the windows to show that that glass would never break, just how well-built it was. He did this every single year, and in 1993,

he was having so much fun, I guess, that he decided he'd actually do it twice. He launched himself into it once, then got another running start, and did it a second time, showing the that the window didn't break. And Gary Hoy was right. The glass never did break. But the second time doing it in 93, while the glass didn't break, the whole

window pane popped out of the frame. So that it and Gary Hoy were both launched into the sky above King and Bay to fall to the concrete plaza below.

Gary Hoy would end up winning that year's Darwin Award for the most ridiculous self-inflicted death. It's, yeah, it's, yeah, tamed sort of the status of almost urban legend, because it seems too impossible to believe, though many times after I've given this story, people come up to me and tell me about personal connections they have to it, since it is this bit of recent history.

I remember it. I remember this in the news, yeah. Yeah, you can easily find stuff even still online about it, including articles about how just a few months later, that firm ended up going under. Gary Hoy kind of took one of the oldest law firms in Toronto down with them because it seems people didn't really want to trust their legal cases to a firm who had hired someone who would die.

That is a good point. Like if you would do that, then do I really want to trust my case with you? I could see that. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I can tell you, I have told all of my kids at some point or other,

I tell them the story of Gary. I'm not sure I ever remember the man's name, unfortunately. But I talk about that story. Like, to me, that is a remarkable Toronto story. And I could see younger people thinking this is an urban legend. But it happened, Adam. It didn't. How's the feel of one, though?

Yeah, well, 93, I feel like 93, it's too easy to, like, validate things and search things up from 93. But, yeah, at first you're like, okay, is that really? real. But it is interesting that it did, I could see this guy, I guess I see a bit of myself in this guy. Like, he was just so confident in the structure of that building and so sure that he was willing to do this stunt, because it was probably a great moment to do that in front of all these youngsters that are coming for the tour or whatnot. And you kind of, I am kind of surprised the window gave through. Like, I know he won the Darwin Award, posthumist. I guess everybody who wins a Darwin Award for the most ridiculous self-inflicted death is winning a posture.

But I am surprised that that window gave through and that he went down the 28 floors. But there are interviews with engineers after he dies asking them what had happened. And they seem to be pretty unanimous in everything I've read that windows just are not built for a fully grown adult person to hurl themselves against them year after year after year. He's not a 90-pound guy. Like this is probably like a, I don't know if he's a big guy, but he's at least average size. An adult grown-up lower guy who, yeah. who, yeah, weighed more than you're supposed to throw against a window. Yeah, I guess they don't test for that.

I guess they assume nobody's doing that. Interesting. That is a bizarre story, but we had a couple of deaths in a row. Let's maybe chill out a little bit with a nice old-fashioned kidnapping. Yes, everyone survives this one. Okay, few. And it's a story we're going to talk about actually during the festival because one of our online events is going to be the wildest kidnappings in Toronto history.

there are a good number of good stories. There's a Labat kidnapping from the 50s. The story about Mel Lastman's wife may or may not have been kidnapped. I remember this story. The 70s. But the story of the kidnapping of Robert Jaffray might be my favorite. It's certainly up there, which happens in the late 1800s. When Robert Jaffray is targeted for kidnapping

because he's one of the leading figures in the federal liberal party at that time. He's been part of politics in Toronto since the days before the liberals were even the liberals, the days of the Reform Party, and William Lyme McKenzie, our first mayor who tried to overthrow British rule here with his attempted Canadian revolution. Robert Jaffray seems to have managed to make quite a few political enemies during this career that ends up getting him targeted. One night he's at home when there's a knock at the day. door and he goes to answer it. And there's a guy he doesn't know standing on the front porch who says

his name's Detective Robertson, and he's from the secret surface. And he's been sent there by a judge who is looking into some of Jaffray's affairs, and he wants Jaffray to come to his summer home, which is on a spot looking out over the Scarborough Bluffs. Beautiful place. The detective even has a letter from the judge explaining this all, and that he needs to go with this detective. Jaffray invites the guy in, reads this letter, but he also reads it in the dim gas light of his dining room. Maybe if he'd had a little better illumination, he would have noticed that the letter's full of spelling mistakes.

It spells Jaffray's name different ways within just a few lines, and he might have been tipped off to the fact that this detective isn't actually a detective at all. He gets into the waiting carriage with the detective, and a second guy who's also pretending to be a detective and a driver, who then whisk him away to the east end. They're heading in the direction of the Bluffs for a while, but when they get over the Don River, they then turn north.

They don't head to the Bluffs. They hit to a spot not too far from the Danforth and Broadview, the edge of the Don Valley there, where the demand that Jaffray gets out of the carriage, he refuses because he knows he's not at the Bluffs or at the judge's house. They pull out a gun. Jaffray decides he will get out of the carriage. That's convincing.

Okay. And they tell him they can stop lying to him and reveal to him that they have kidnapped him on behalf of a secret conservative kidnapping society who, well, they don't tell him all the details, but they tell him that he needs to come to a meeting where they're going to get him to swear an oath and it'll just take a few minutes and then he can go home. He doesn't believe them for some reason. and we don't know much about them or the secret society. We know it's called the Canadian League

and that Jaffre wasn't the only one on their list of targets. They were going after big liberals, including him, but also George Brown, who's one of the big leaders of the party too. Someone actually had come knocking on his door a couple of nights earlier and he'd refused to go with them and managed to escape that way. They were also going to kidnap the Premier of Ontario. at the time, Oliver Moet, but Jaffray's the only one

they actually get to go with them. When they tell him they want him to come with him, though he, of course, doesn't believe them. And Jaffray, he's experienced with physical violence because he's a politician in Canada in the 1800s. His days of his youth,

as a member of the Reform Party, those are the days when Canadian elections often turn into street brawls. He has all sorts of stories about fighting his way through Tory crowds of conservative thugs so that his reformers can vote. Story about once getting a mob together to clear the way for even McKenzie himself, the old rebel mayor, to cast his vote in election, about having to fight his way through crowds while giving a speech at a church with George Brown so they get escape through the back window. He's a guy who's really experienced at a brawl. so when the guys insist he comes with them,

he spots a light in the distance, a cottage in the Dawn Valley, and ends up making a break for it, manages to fight the two guys off him. They don't fire their gun. They were probably bluffing because the gunshot would bring people running and they probably didn't want murder on their hands.

They sprint after him for a while, but he manages to reach a cottage and then a toll keeper's cottage not far away from that and manages to get back home. home to his family, while the search for his kidnappers begins. We end up learning that there are these guys, John and Thomas Deal, who are brothers, who are members of the Canadian League, his kidnapping society, who go on the run for a while. There are all sorts of articles in the newspaper about the police trying to hunt them down,

and they're eventually captured through, I think, one of the dumber mistakes in Toronto or Canadian history, which is they send their plans and their future locations in a letter to their mother and some letters for their friends too that they ask her to deliver. Her mom's name is Mrs. Rose, and they end up sending that letter filled with their plans to the wrong Mrs. Rose, not their mom. That'll win you a Darwin award maybe. Realizes what she has turns it over to the authorities,

and when they show up at a train station in Montreal, they're both arrested and put on trial. which is how we know the little we do know about the Canadian League is because of the testimony and the trial that followed, which was all reprinted in the newspapers. Okay. Coincidentally, I will also be at a train station in Montreal tomorrow morning. That's just more of a coincidence there.

And as I'm listening to you talk about this guy, and back then in Canadian politics, you had to know how to rumble a little bit. I'm thinking of the John Kretchen-Schwenigan handshake. Maybe the origins are here as well. Who knows? This is incredible how many stories of violence there are back in the day. It's one of the things that Baldwin, with this weird grave in the Caesarian section story,

made him and his Montreal ally La Fontaine, sort of remarkable for their time is that they kind of denounced violence and refused to engage in some of those street fights that is part of the story of how we got sort of responsible government. Love it. So Adam, while you get a sip or two in of that delicious Great Lakes beer there, on the live stream. We're live at, so,

normally I drop episodes about, you know, two and a half minutes after we say goodbye. That's my, you know, modus operandi. But because I just did this toast episode,

I'm dropping your episode tomorrow morning because like I said, I'll be off to Montreal and that way, you know, you get the whole day tomorrow. So I am live, though. We're live at live.

at live. tronomike.com and a couple of things here. So Yoni loves your shirt, Adam. Oh, thank you, Yoni. And for listening. And Yoni also clarifies.

I remember this, as I said it, but the Winfield double was in the 11th inning. I questioned aloud whether it was the 11th or 12th. And I do remember that now because Jerry Howarth was scheduled to call that inning, yeah, the bottom of the 11th in Atlanta. And he turned the mic over to Tom Cheek, who had been there since day one calling the radio game. So Tom Cheek could call the Timlin to Carter,

when Otis Nixon dropped down the bunt. So that was a gracious move by FOTM Jerry Howarth. So I remember that. And Jeremy Hopkins on the live stream as well. Of course, he loves your work. And he says, The Union Stockyards solidified in 1903,

and they lasted until 93. So we were wondering aloud about the years for the stockyards. And, yeah, early 90s is when that ended. And he, that story, that story, that, that, that, 1993 story, not the Touchem-all Joe's story, but the

TD Center story, he says, that's often told if you visit the TD Center on doors open, you'll get that story about Mr. Is it Hoy? Yeah. Gary Hoy. God, goodness gracious. Oh, and I kind of feel, you know, I do

definitely feel bad for, I feel bad for Gary Hoy because he died before his time in 1993. But then his loved ones who they must, you know, every time How did he die? Do they have to tell the story each time? And then do they have to like, you know,

they get a look or whatever? Or like, oh, that was a dumb thing to do. I feel bad for that, those people as well. I know as co-workers, too, have been told that they all received counseling after because this wildly upsetting. If you knew that person who did that, can you imagine they're doing this thing at work

and then they're going through the 28th. They're at, when is it, King and whatever, on the floor there. Okay. On the ground. My goodness, shout out to Ridley Funeral Home. Okay, we have, so we're going to do 6-5-3, sorry, 6-5-4-3, because number two is Robert Baldwin, who was covered on Toronto Mike, your first visit.

And number one is the circus riot. So let's get to number six. Remind me what number six. The anti-pest competitions. Oh, this is a good one. It could have ranked higher, I think, very easily. Controversial to have it at number six. I thought I might have had it at number four.

Well, you know, it's your list. You could swap it out. Do you want to do the demon ghost of Queen Street? No, we can stick. We can stick. Demon ghost is good. It's going to say, you're the boss around here, Adam. Toronto, a hundred years ago or so, was a pretty gross place.

That has been through a lot of its history. It's very much, though, in early days of its time as a settlement, but all the way into the 1900s, too. It's not until 1914 that we have more cars than horses, which means that we have a big problem, created by those horses, which is the manure that is everywhere all the time. There are hundreds of what they call scavengers on the city payroll who go around with little manure carts picking it up and taking it to central locations. That's a shitty job, Adam.

It's very much literally so. But when they took a lot of pride in, at one point there's actually a strike by the scavengers because they're flying flags on their carts and the city tells them they're not allowed to because it's disrespectful to the flag. It's during the First World War II when there's lots of patriotism. The guy flying the flag, it actually lost his son in the war. So it leads to a big showdown between the city and the scavengers because they take pride in their work and they don't think it's insulting for them to be

associated with the flag. And they're trying to clean up the city in the days when it's starting to take pride in how clean it is as we try to clean up the streets, literally. They're said to be a manure pile near Fort York by the tracks that's like three blocks long and a story and a half high. There's absolutely, of course, covered in flies. There's a big problem with flies across the city. And the city's chief medical officer of health, Dr. Charles Hastings, who's one of the big heroes of public health history in our city, had actually lost an infant to drinking some unpasteurized milk and a dedicated,

himself to try to make sure that didn't happen to anyone else. Actually worked without even a desk for a while. His budget was so low. He had just a wooden board on top of a radiator, an old city hall, gave out free, pasteurized milk, brought in new kinds of water fountains so that we're not all drinking out of the same metal cup the way that they used to.

All sorts of things to clean up the city. One of the things he wanted to do was to try to get rid of as many of these flies as part. so that he called on for six weeks one summer, every child in Toronto to kill as many flies as possible in a giant fly-killing competition, where all the top kids who killed the greatest number of flies would end up getting cash prizes in return for bringing death to these pests. So for these six weeks, kids are out there in the streets just killing and killing and killing and then showing up at Old City Hall, which was just plain Old City Hall back then,

with all these dead flies so they can be counted in like cigar tins and like, you know, biscuit tins and stuff. We have photos of Dr. Hastings on the front steps of Old City Hall with a big table and all these kids. They figured out how many flies goes in a pint glass. So I think it's something like 3,000. So they're counting 3,000 at a time. The kids are fighting because kids with friends. pressure flies. They say they take up more space in a pint class because they're juicier and the dried out or older ones from earlier in the week are taking up less space. They're all these fights. In the end, by the end of those six weeks, there's a girl from what's now Regent Park, Beatrice White, who the star nicknames is the angel of death because she's managed to kill more than half a million flies during those six weeks. They've been printing designs for traps in the newspapers.

So she and her dad have been making them using like rancid meat as a bait and getting all these flies to fly into the traps every day. The second place finisher actually staked out that manure pile by Fort York and managed to kill hundreds of thousands there. That's called shooting fish in a barrel. That is. I don't think that should be allowed. It's clever place to head, I think.

They bring it back the next year and they kill far fewer flies. So they declare it to be a success too. Beatrice White doesn't compete the second year because she has become more interested in boys now than dead flies. That's like when Michael Jordan said I'm not doing the slam-down competition anymore. That's it for me. But it's not the last competition kind of along those lines. Because by the end of the Second World War, Toronto has an increasing problem with rats. And so maybe inspired by the old fly-killing competition,

the mayor of Toronto declares rat eradication week, where all Torontoans of all ages are called on to kill as many rats as they can over the course of one week. And then the most gruesome detail is that they're then supposed to chop off the tails of the rats and mail them in to Old City Hall, where some poor civil servant or administrative assistant has to open these gruesome packages and count out the tails. The guy who wins has killed 100-something rats during just that one week.

At the end of the contest, he wins his cash prize, and the city then asks all Torontoians to keep on going, to kill a rat a day until their own home has no rats left and then help their neighbors and then move down the street into the surrounding neighborhood and just keep going until there are no more rats in Toronto, which is why Toronto has absolutely no rats anymore. A huge success. Is that true of Alberta?

Like there's no rats in Alberta? Yeah, it's been for a long time now. My wife's from Alberta. So I can tell you know, of course, you're joking. Toronto does have rats and I hear about the rats in Toronto. But I'm here to tell you here. If a rat, this has not happened since I moved here in 13 years. And I don't believe in jinxes.

So I'm just going to say this. But if we did have a rat in this home that you're in right now, Adam, I know my wife would have a for sale sign on the lawn the next morning. And like, I am certain of that. I'm certain of it. So I'm like, I'm just glad we've so far so good. I know Toronto's got rats, but maybe they don't come to sow the Tobacco. I don't know.

I don't want to, you know, I don't want to, I don't believe in jinxes. But still, yeah. There is, yeah, I think they are too big. I don't want them in the same living space. They don't get across the Humber. The threshold. But there are stories of them being here in New Toronto and in Long Branch. They said they were so big.

I think it was the ones here they said were so big. you could put a saddle on them and ride them down lake shore. And lots of stories of them being a problem in all sorts of places. Thank God my wife doesn't listen to every episode of Toronto, Mike. I'd have to take that part out here. So when you're talking about before the rat killing thing, when you're talking about killing all the flies, I was thinking that that would be something for the kids in New Toronto

and other neighborhoods in Toronto by Lake Ontario, that every May we should have the midge killing competitions. because, you know, the midges in this neck of the woods, Adam, as you might know, are pretty intense every single May. And April, by the way. Like, there is that fascinating part of the city's history, that navigating, living in this place and all the other things that live here. Some of which were here long before us, but rats, for instance,

they're an invasive species that didn't come over until the American Revolution. Norway, maybe? Are they Norwegian? I don't know. They have a Norwegian rat thing. And they don't seem to have been a problem here until around, I don't know, 125 years or so ago that they really started becoming a thing and weren't so much before that. Jeez, okay. And by the way, if I did enter the fly killing competition, if I did enter it, I would kill all my flies with chopsticks, okay, because I watched the karate kid and that's the way I would go.

Okay. So that's, that that is, that anti-pest competition story is amazing. I had no idea. the demon ghost of Queen Street will not be able to compete, but give it a go. I will do my best. I put it higher for a reason, though it is hard to rank them. And there are lots of really good ghost stories in Toronto, lots of supernatural stories, that I think whether you believe in ghosts or not,

I think they're a really powerful way to sort of explore the history of a place, and that these stories spring up often for a reason and often reflect. something about this history of the city at the time. And the story of the demon ghost of Queen Street is one from, excuse me, from the 1960s. And it's kind of connected to the history of both Queen West and Yorkville. So in the 60s, Yorkville is one of the greatest music scenes on Earth. You know, the scene that is producing people like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Gordon

Lightfoot and members of the mamas and the poppas and the loving spoonful and the band. Bruce Coburn, too. Bruce Coburn moves to Toronto in the 60s with his girlfriend, Kitty McCauley. They have met in Ottawa already by that point and started going out there. They meet while he's on stage playing in a blues band, guitar for them at an after-hour's coffee house called Leibu, which is a legendary coffee house in Ottawa. And Bruce Coburn, while he's on stage,

he gets the sense that someone in the audience is trying to cast a special, spell on him. And it's the 1960s. This is the hippie era. Bruce Coburn apparently knows many women who have tried dabbling in witchcraft. He knows what it feels like for someone to try to hex you. And he looks in the direction that he feels it's coming from. There's Kitty McCauley, sitting at a table watching him play with her boyfriend of the time. If Kitty McCauley is casting a spell on him that night, it seems to have been a love spell because she soon leaves her boyfriend and starts going out with Bruce Coburn instead. she's an art student, an artist, so she goes to OCD, just OCA back then while he comes to

Toronto and becomes part of this legendary folk scene in Yorkville. And because she's at OECAD, one day they go for a walk in that neighborhood around the AGO and OCD today through the churchyard of St. Patrick's Church, which is still there kind of right across the street from the AGO today, one of the oldest Catholic congregations in the city. And Kitty McCauley, who very much believes in the supernatural feels while they're walking through this churchyard at night that she feels a presence, like a spirit that feels like it's trapped there and is trying to reach out to her, maybe even trying to get her to take it with her. She's so freaked out that they leave the churchyard immediately and the next day she feels kind of silly about the whole thing. With the

sun out and the birds chirping and children playing, she feels like she's been a bit wimpy about the whole thing, she decides to go back to the churchyard to prove herself in the daylight that nothing was going on. But when she gets there, she feels it again, even stronger this time, and as if it's speaking to her, that it's saying, take me with you, take me with you. And it said that that's where the haunting begins. Not long after that, they move into an apartment on Queen West on the second floor of a little building that's now home to the Eurytsia boutique on the main floor. It's still there today, sort of a little turreted building where Queen West Sidewalk widens, just west of the old city building before you reach the horseshoe and the Rivley there.

And Kitty McCauley hates this apartment. Right from the very beginning, she feels like it's oppressive there. She buys bright curtains and houseplants, but it doesn't seem to work. And then she starts having really disturbing experiences. She goes to drink a glass of water one day. And it's the real feeling that has been poisoned that she shouldn't drink it, She does anyway and nothing bad happens, but now every time she goes to have a glass of water in this apartment, she gets that feeling stronger and stronger and stronger.

One day, when she's looking at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she gets a flash of an image of the bathroom, all bloodied, blood smeared all over the walls, and her own reflection, her throat cut in the reflection. She's deeply weirded out. She feels as if there's an evil spirit inside the house that's trying to take possession of her. and leave with her out of this apartment. And it gets worse when one night she has a conversation with her upstairs neighbor. Their upstairs neighbor is another famous folk singer.

Upstairs from them is Murray McLaughlin and his wife Patty. And one night Patty starts telling Kitty of the experiences she's been having upstairs. Apparently, unprompted, she says she's been feeling like glasses of water are poisoned. She's been getting flashes of bloody images of them murdered inside the apartment. Marie McLaughlin, who's the person we know all of this from because he wrote about it in his autobiography, he says he doesn't believe in the supernatural, but he's been having dreams of their murdered bodies in the apartment as he floats through it. And that during the day, he's been filled with the urge to head to the kitchen, grab a knife, and murder his wife. We love very much.

It obviously freaks them all out. They become convinced that these apartments are haunted. Now, some people have pointed out that these also sound a lot like some of the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning, and that maybe that's what was going on. But you might also be someone who believes in demons and ghosts, and it certainly scared them enough that it wasn't too long. It actually found also a cane in the closet under their stairs, where Bruce Coburn and Kitty McCauley's big wolfhound

with a wonderful name of Aru. He had been whining away at this door. They went inside and found a cane with a knob that had been carved into the shape of a fist with a thumb through the first and middle finger, which is called the fig, which is an ancient symbol from like ancient Roman festivals meant to ward off ancient spirits.

They figured the letters carved into the staff of the cane must be the name of the demon. who was haunting this apartment and trying to take possession of their bodies. Neither couple lasts much longer in that apartment. The McLaughlin's apparently left so fast they left all their stuff behind and never went back for it. Bruce Coburn and Kitty McCauley by a camper van load up all their stuff, and the wolf-owned a rue and set off on a cross-country trip that inspires a lot of Bruce Coburn's most famous songs about Canada, all while they're trying to flee from the...

this demon ghost of Queen Street. Wow. Okay. I feel like, I know, I hope to get this right, but I believe Bruce Coburn, he does the music for going down the road in 1970. And why do I think maybe this sequel has Murray McLaughlin doing the music? I feel like they're connected somehow to going down the road and Donald Shabib or something. This is me just brainstorming. Also, I know Murray McLaughlin's second wife is Denise Donlan. So from much music fame and Sony music,

and she's been down here. But wow, I had no idea about any of that. And I've had Marie in the basement. If I get him back in the basement, we're going to dive into that, brother. It's such a strange story. We've got to talk about this. Another one I wouldn't believe,

except that he wrote about it in the autobiography. So that's where this is all coming from. Now, the man did drink a lot, but I don't know how that affects these hallucinations or whatnot. But, okay, goodness gracious. Mackenzie King's trip to Berlin. So McKenzie King, he's another guy who really believes in the supernatural, right? He's the grandson of our old first mayor, William Lyne McKenzie with no king.

The rebel who tried to overthrow the government is he, while our rebel mayor is living in exile, has a daughter who then is the mom of McKenzie King, who becomes our longest serving prime minister. in part because his mom puts a lot of pressure on him to follow in his grandfather, the rebel mayor's footsteps. She dies when he's at kind of a political low point at the beginning of his career, the last thing that happens before she passes away is he loses an election. Her last words are something like poor soul about her son. Like the last thing she ever says to him is to be disappointed in him, which seems to have messed McKenzie King up pretty good.

He was a big weirdo anyway. But it's part of why he's so delighted, I think, when he attends his first seance. He's someone who believes in supernatural omens and signs that the shape of his shaving cream in the morning is filled with messages and the hands of a clock tell you something other than just the time. He's reading tea leaves in his cups at the Royal York Hotel. And now attending these seances where he speaks to his dead loved ones and mentors. The rebel mayor, his dead grandfather, his old mentor, Wilford Laurier, dead prime minister, and his mom, which means now those don't have to be her final words to her. He gets to speak to her through these psychic mediums.

He writes about it all in his diary, which when he dies, he asks his relatives to destroy, so that no one will ever learn any of this. But instead, after thinking about it for a while, they decide to publish it all. So it's now all available. You can search it online on the Librarian Archives Canada website, and you can see these detailed descriptions of these supernatural experiences that he's having, and these seances that he's attending, and even moments where he takes political advice from these ghosts.

The worst thing they ever tell him to do is that in 1937, he's attending a big conference in London, England. The Kings just died, and when that happens, leaders from all over the old British Empire meet in London to have a big meeting. And McKenzie King's there for that when the spirits tell him he should stay on in Europe a little longer and get on a train to go have a meeting in Berlin with the leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler. There's a wonderful book about it called Four Days in Hitler's Berlin about how Mackenzie

King spends four days in Hitler's Berlin meeting with big top Nazis. We have photos of our Prime Minister two years before the war breaks out with Nazis next to him doing, you know, the Elon Musk salute. And he's going to the opera with Goebbels or Gurring. He has a long meeting with Hitler. They hit it off, apparently. McKenzie King thinks he seems great. He thinks there are supernatural omens during this trip, too. When he's on the train heading into Germany, he looks up and sees in the clouds, the head of a lion.

like Mufasa in the Lion King. He figures it's a British lion, a symbol of the empire, including Canada, and it's looking toward Germany. So he figures it's a sign of friendship between the Germans and the British, including Canadians at the time. He even makes some partnerships with Hitler.

One of Hitler's weirdest plans is that when he takes over Poland, he's planning to push people out of a forest or kill them and then replace them with German. Germanic beasts, including a prehistoric kind of cow called an auroch. And Hitler is trying to recreate this extinct kind of cattle. And McKenzie King gives them some Canadian bison so they can be crossbred with German cows to create this ancient creature, which actually does give rise to a new breed of cattle, officially called heck cattle. They're still around today.

Most people call them Nazi cows that are said to be horrible. creatures, very angry, violent, giant horns that are descended from some of our bison that Mackenzie King had given to Hitler in 1937. He goes for a walk in the Tiergarten, the big park in the middle of Berlin, comes across a monument of a whole family of lions. He figures that's a good omen to, these British lions in this German park. I went to Berlin myself a few years ago and went and tracked down that same monument. And when you look at it, you don't even need to look that closely to realize that if it's an omen of anything, it's not a good omen. Because the monument is actually a dying lioness who has a shaft of an arrow sticking out of her shoulder

while her cubs are mourning her death. It's a monument about a German hunter killing a lion in Berlin. So if it's an omen of anything, it's an omen of what actually did happen next. which is the two years later, Mackenzie King finds himself being the prime minister leading Canada to war against Hitler, who he'd had that lovely meeting with in Berlin in 1937, on his way to becoming the longest serving prime minister in Canadian history. So, okay, I hope I'm not interrupting rudely once again,

but I have a quote from William Lyne, McKenzie King. This is a wild quote. So these are really, This is real. You can all verify this later. I would do his voice, but I'm not sure how he talked. Okay. Do you do a good William, Lyme, McKenzie King? Okay. The world will yet come to see a very great man mystic in Hitler.

I cannot abide in Nazism, the regimentation, cruelty, oppression of Jews, attitude towards religion, etc. But Hitler will rank someday with Joan of Arc among the deliverer of his people. That's quite the it's quite the quote. Yeah, something he did not have to say. And then I'm sure.

Big Hitler fan, this McKenzie King, big Hitler head. He seemed to, yeah, think the meeting had gone so well. And McKenzie King, someone whose legacy we've kind of been rethinking a little in recent years too, things he did during the war like the internment of Japanese Canadians

and refusal of Jewish refugees. Yeah, there's some anti-Semitic behavior without a doubt. He didn't admit the Jewish refugees, some of his policies here. And he's someone who's death's kind of strange too. He ends up dying in I think the

1950s and he's laid out sort of in state inside the center block of the parliament buildings on public displays so people can say goodbye to our longest serving prime minister. There are archival photos of him there in his open casket surrounded by flowers

because it was Ottawa in John. lie and within a couple of days the dead prime minister was starting to not smell so great. Then they loaded it up into a train car filled with ice, took him down the railway to, I think it's in Brockville where they switch him from one train to another and the dead of the night to another ice-packed rail car to bring him the rest of the way to Toronto where he's lay dressed in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. And then we get his diaries eventually. He's got his own great ghost story outside Ottawa too in Kingsmere, his old estate. which is filled with old ruins he kind of collected there.

It's a very atmospheric place where journalists said, well, sitting on a bench overlooking the lake right there, that he had a conversation with McKenzie King's ghost, that they chatted for 45 minutes, caught up on all the political gossip of Ottawa, and at the end, McKenzie King thanked the guy, because when the ghost had sat down next to him,

the guy had said hello. And he said that McKenzie King's ghost told him that there are ghosts around us all the time, but that the rules for them are just like rules for little children back then. You can only speak when spoken to, and then it was by addressing the dead prime minister that he was able to speak with him, which I think is a wonderful metaphor, kind of for ghost stories and for history in general. It explains so much, Adam, explain so much.

On our way out, we're going to go do one more here, and I will tease the one more by saying it is about the great Toronto Stork Derby. So that'll be our final story. But this, Frederick Blair, Frederick Blair was an immigration official in McKenzie King's party. And they asked him,

how many Jewish refugees would Canada admit after World War II? And the reply, this is the quote, none is too many. So we'll, there's some anti-Semitic policies from McKenzie King

and, geez. None is too many. It is a city in a country that did not embrace multiculturalism until much more recently than you might think, which is what my walking to is during doors open were kind of all about. Toronto was set up to be this incredibly British city. We talked a lot about that last year when we're talking about cross-border tensions. Toronto was supposed to be so British and so awesomely British that the Americans would get jealous and begged to be let back into the empire. We were incredibly stubbornly British for a really long time. It's really only after the Second World War that are literally race-based immigration laws start changing to be more like the system we have today.

We get people from around the world more and more really for the first time. And within just like the last 70, 75 years, we go from being this stubbornly white British city overwhelmingly into this multicultural city that is so proud of its diversity. Absolutely. Okay. Well, wow. We're learning a lot today and not, all of our his, you know, good bad and ugly. You got to give me the facts. Good bad and ugly. Okay. So one more to go here.

This is the great Toronto Stork Derby. And it's a story that fits into all of that too. And it's one, yeah, one of my favorite weird ones of all time. So I'm actually going to do a whole online talk just about the Stork Derby during the festival next week on the Thursday night. It's another one of the weirdest contests. So we covered it a little in the festival last year too when we talked about the flyer killing competition and the rat killing competition.

This one, though, is not about death, it's about birth. And it all starts on Halloween Day, exactly 100 years ago this upcoming Halloween, when a wealthy lawyer named Charles Vance Miller arrived at his office on Youngstreet one day to discover that the building's elevator was out of service, which meant that he had to walk up the stairs all the way to his office. Turned out his heart couldn't take it. When he got there, he had a heart attack and died and left behind the strangest last will and testament, I'm sure, in Toronto history. Because he wasn't just a lawyer, he was also a guy who loved practical jokes.

And his last well in testament is filled with pranks that he's playing, sort of poking fun at other Torontoians, especially people in positions of power. To three lawyers, he knows, who absolutely hate each other, he leaves them, a Jamaican, vacation home that they can only have if they all agreed to share it and go there at the same time. To a bunch of Anglican ministers in Toronto, he knows hate gambling. He gives them memberships in the Ontario Jockey Association. To other Anglican ministers who are deeply anti-Catholic and deeply anti-drinking. This is kind of the end of prohibition in Ontario. He gives them, and every orange lodge in the city, a very anti-Catholic society,

memberships, sorry, stocks in the O'Keefe Brewing Company, famously Catholic family founded brewing company so that all these ministers have to decide whether to stick to their principles or make money off Catholic beer. And his biggest prank is what he wants done with the rest of his fortune, the bit that hasn't been handed out

in all the rest of these clauses, which is that he says he wants it to go to whichever woman in Toronto has the greatest number of children, over the course of the next 10 years. And so that sparks what the press starts calling the great Toronto Stork Derby, since storks are the birds that bring us our babies,

as I'm sure you all know. I watch cartoons. Which is this sort of desperate scramble that a lot of families have to try to have as many kids as they possibly can to try to win this dead lawyer's fortune. It's an era where that fortune then also starts meaning even more to everyone, just three years after he dies, the stock market crashes,

The Great Depression starts. People are living in even more poverty than before. He also invest some of it wisely. I think he puts like $5 or something in the idea of building a tunnel between Windsor and Detroit, which seemed like a pipe dream at the time, but then happened, and that $5 turned into hundreds of thousands of dollars, which was enough to absolutely change any family's life, especially families living in neighborhoods like the ward,

which was a wonderfully multicultural place, but where lots of people were forced to live in poverty, lots of the families entering the Stork Derby or from that neighborhood. One of my favorite Torontoians to talk about ever becomes the first place, a woman in the final years of the contest, as we start getting updates on kind of the leaderboard

as we enter into the last couple of years, it's a woman named Grace Bagnato, lives in the ward, who had arrived here in Toronto as like a 13 or 14-year-old, had married a man named Joseph Bagnato from Italy, and basically an arranged marriage, Joseph was only able to speak Italian when he arrived, and she'd grown up in the United States

so she could only speak English, taught herself Italian so she could speak with her husband, discovered she liked learning languages, so kept learning them from there, so that she could speak to all her neighbors in the ward, this multicultural city, sorry, multicultural neighborhood in a deeply anglophone British city where multiculturalism wasn't appreciated,

it all. Grace Benyato, she can now speak Yiddish and Polish and German and Ukrainian. She's able to talk to all her neighbors and translate for them. She becomes essentially an unofficial immigration office, is eventually hired by the city to be a court interpreter for people. Really helps lay the foundations, I think, for the multicultural city, before the city leadership was interested in embracing that vision for the city's future. A time when there's actually a writer at the time who says he doesn't think there's a less diverse city in the world than Toronto 100 years ago. Wow. That you could barely ever hear anyone speak any other language than English in Toronto,

just 100 years ago. And so Grace Benito plays this incredibly, I think, sort of linchpin role in the community. And she's always wanted to have a big family. So she ends up having this huge number of kids all the way through these years. So that by the time we get to the last couple of years of it, she's in the lead. Wow. And that sort of reveals some of Toronto's prejudice at the time, too. The second place family, the Browns.

They say they can't let an Italian family win this contest in this British city that they're racing to have babies of Anglo-Saxon stock, because that's the kind of country that Canada should be. The Benyatos are incredibly generous in response. They say if they win, they actually want to share the money with the Browns and with all the other leading families, because they know just a fraction of this fortune is enough to change their lives. forever. And when this contest finally ends at Halloween 1936, there are all these court cases

that start breaking out over which kids count and which don't. The city's kind of brutal about the rules. So for one thing, all the babies need to survive the 10 years. So Grace Baniento, she's got 10 kids, which should have been enough to have her win the whole thing outright, but one of her children had died in childbirth. And so they decided it didn't count. they also brought some prejudices into those courtrooms. So any kids that were born out of wedlock were said to be ineligible. And Grace Bagnanto may be in part because she had that Italian last name in a city that was so British. She seems to have gotten enough scrutiny that two more of her children were ruled to be ineligible

because they didn't have the proper documentation. I think especially ironic for a woman who helped so many new Canadians in our city fill out. their documents that the city decided hers or the courts decided hers didn't count, which mean in the end she only had seven kids that counted, which wasn't enough to win. There ended up being four families who had nine kids in those 10 years who did qualify. They split most of the fortune. A couple other families got lesser amounts that they fought for in court, including a woman who actually thought she was in contact with the ghost of the dead lawyer

who had promised her she was going to win. The ward eventually gets demolished too, and Grace Bagnato loses her neighborhood. It's replaced by City Hall at Nathan Phillips Square. But I like to think that while Grace Bagnato loses the Stork Derby, she ends up winning sort of the greater war for the soul and the future of Toronto. She's helped lay those multicultural foundations for the city by helping those people get their start here. But she's also made the city literally more multicultural.

because she's had all these babies. The last baby she has for the contest is the last baby she ever has. She's in her mid-40s by then. It is her 23rd child. By the time the CBC looked into it in 2018, Grace Bagnato had 118 descendants. So she had also made the city more multicultural just by literally making more Italian-Canadians to live here.

Single-handedly. Well, I think Joseph might help too. I had no idea. idea, but the great Toronto Stork Derby. Those are such vicious rules, though. Imagine telling a woman, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, your child died. We're not counting that child. That's just like some, just the whole thing.

And I always wonder, like, oh, somebody's trying to jam their nephews and nieces in the mix or whatever. Like, I'm not sure how you could prove it was your children back then. I don't know. But, man, that's something. Do you have any sense of what the fortune was? like at that point that was Yeah, it's hundreds and thousands of dollars. In 1920, 1936 dollars.

1930's money. So each family of the four who split most of it is millions and millions of today's money enough that it absolutely changed all their lives. You know, Adam, it's your third May in a row that you've popped by and I'm already going to start counting the days until May 2027

because I love these episodes. episodes. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Johnny and Jeremy and everyone else listening. And maybe see some of you at the Festival of Bazaar History next week. Well, that's a website. I'm going to yell at the listenership right now because go to bizarretoronto.com.

Just go there. Bizarreterrano.com. And yeah, this Festival of Bizarre Toronto History, amazing. And this archival photos, the Toronto's strangest archival photos, I'm told it is more than just upside down clowns. There's a lot of weird picks there, and that's June 1st at 6 p.m. And again, you can register at bizarretrono.com. Keep it up, man.

You sound like you're busy. You're doing important work, and I love what you do. Thank you very much. And by the way, I don't drink a lot of the hot pop because usually I drink the beer. But this was delicious. I'm here to say, if you don't drink alcohol for some reason, none of my business why that is, but if you want a delicious beverage,

the hop-pop at Great Lakes is fantastic. How is your logger? It's wonderful, as always. Okay, we're going to take a photo by Toronto Tree so people can see that rad, Jackie, Shane T-shirt. Oh, my shirt. What does my shirt say? And that.

And that! Shut out the stew stone. And that brings us to the end of our, what are we at here? I should know this. 1,000, I should know this, right? Hold on, give me a second.

Come on, Mike, be professional. 1,9005th show, 1905. First year of the Toronto Santa Claus Parade. Go to Toronto Mike.com for all your Toronto Mike needs. I have a free, free as in beer, free TMLX event on June 25th. Adam, you should put this in your calendar. June 25th, 6 to 9 p.m.

at Great Lakes Brewery, which is here in South Atobico, not far from where we're sitting right now. Come by, your first beers on the house, and Palma Pasta will feed you. Just come hang with me, Adam. June 25th, 6 to 9 p.m. That's TMLX.22. Everybody's invited.

No ticket required. Much love to all who made this possible. Again, that is Great Lakes Brewery. Palma Pasta. I'm going to get the lasagna for Adam right now. Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball. I'll see you guys at Christy Pits. Recycle myelectronics.ca.

And Ridley Funeral Home and Nick Aienies. See you all. Okay, I'm going to drop my Alma combo set in its entirety. Tomorrow morning. Congratulations to my daughter, Michelle. She just graduated from McGill.