Canada

1/ Tecumseh Suicide, February 1852

A strange suicide took place in this Ontario town. A woman named Williams was being physically abused by her drunken husband, so one night she took an axe to bed and rubbed it against her neck until the windpipe was severed.

2/ Grand River Steamboat Disaster, Ontario, June 1878

3/ Winnipeg Murder/Suicide, June 1898

An English boy of thirteen years of age has committed a dreadful crime. He was told by his master that he couldn’t attend a picnic, so in an act of revenge, he killed his master’s four-year-old son, then shot himself. (The boys name was not mentioned)

4/ Little Rideau Murders, January 1883

5/ Steamboat Disaster- London, Ontario, May 1881

6/ St Eustache, Quebec May 1868

A man named Leban, with his wife as an accomplice used to rob then murder travellers who stopped at their house, at St Eustache, near Montreal, in Canada.This backfired when they attacked one such gentleman, with Leban armed with an axe, and his wife with a cut-throat razor. The stranger knocked Leban down and in the following kerfuffle Mrs Leban cut the throat of her husband by mistake.She was arrested and then confessed all other previous crimes that she and her husband had committed. Dead bodies were buried in the grounds, and police have since excavated three human skeletons.

7/ Dawson City Fire, Yukon Territory, May 1899

Dawson City Fire May 1899

According to advice from Dawson City, three-quarters of the city has been burned down and the loss is estimated at somewhere between one million, to four million dollars.The fire was caused by an upsetting of a lamp.

8/ Dawson City, Yukon Territory June 1899

9/ Nootka Sound, British Colombia, (Crew Murdered) May 1869

It has been ascertained that the crew of the barque,”John Bright”, which was wrecked in Nootka Sound, in British Colombia, were undoubtedly murdered by the Indians. The headless bodies of a number of white men were discovered in that area and it is now deemed necessary that the Government will send a gunboat there to protect the whites.

10/ Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, January 1885 (Orangemen Murdered)

(The riots actually occurred in 1884, and three men were killed.)Nineteen of the Catholics from Riverad, near Harbour Grace, have been acquitted of the murder of the Orangemen in riots in St Stephen’s Bay. They were, however, recommitted on the charge of murdering three others.

11/ Cape Ray, Newfoundland, (Lighthouse Fire) April 1885

A telegram from Ottawa says that the lighthouse at Cape Ray, Newfoundland, has been destroyed by fire. There will be no light at that point until further notice. (Fire in a lighthouse?)

12/ Chatham Fire, New Brunswick April 1899

13/ St John Fire, New Brunswick, May 1899

14/ Toronto, Ontario, (Childrens Bodies Found) July 1895

The bodies of two children were found buried in a cellar of a house in Toronto. They were identified as the children of the man named Pietzel, who were brought to Toronto by a certain Holmes. Mr Holmes has been in prison in Philadelphia for a number of months on charges of the murder of Pietzel and for defrauding an insurance company. (What happened in the end?)

15/ Battleford/Frog Lake (Indians Hanged) November 1885

A telegram from Battleford states that eight of the eleven Indian prisoners, who were tried for being concerned in the massacre of settlers at Frog Lake and were condemned to be hanged, were executed at Battleford today.

16/ Canadian Shipwrecked Crew, August 1890

17/ Anticosti Island Tragedy, January 1873 (Family Wiped Out)

Imagine an island the size of North Yorkshire, in the freezing waters of the Gulf of St Lawrence, then instead of the 600,000 population that North Yorkshire has, it has around 250, maximum.That is Anticosti Island, and that just says it all in a sentence, when describing the sheer vastness of Canada. The Jane Merriman, a fishing schooner reached Gaspe Bay in Quebec after being stuck in East Cape on Anticosti during a storm, on November 26th,1872. The Jane Merriman was badly damaged and laid up here until repairs were made. Captain Hay found the population in a complete daze due to the tragedy which had just occurred on the 3000 square mile island. The highest lighthouse on Anticosti had been destroyed by the hurricane which hit the coast. It was that severe, that even the base and foundation were swept away, just a pile of debris was left in the general area where it once stood. The home of Edmund Barter and his family was attached to the lighthouse, but Edmund, his wife, and his six children were wiped out.Their bruised and battered corpses were all that remained.They were taken to another inhabitants house, and some effort was made at a religious service for all eight of them.

18/ Newfoundland, (Ships Collide) June 1885

19/ Matane, Quebec, July 1885

A cablegram to the owners of the Beaver Line steamer, Lake Champlain, states that when off Matane, Quebec, she collided with the steamer Dentholm, which sank. The Lake Champlain arrived at Quebec yesterday comparatively uninjured. No lives were lost. The Dentholm was an iron vessel built in Sunderland in 1883, of 1221 tons and was owned in Maryport.

20/ St Thomas’s, Ontario, September 1885 (“Jumbo” killed)

A telegram from New York says intelligence has just been received of the death of the celebrated elephant “Jumbo”, which was brought to America from the London Zoological Gardens by P.T.Barnum. The beast was killed in a railway collision at St Thomas’s in Ontario.

21/ Caledonia Mines Explosion, Cape Breton, June 17th, 1899

Caledonia Mine, Cape Breton June 19th, 1899

22/ Newport, Nova Scotia, April 1891 (Man Finds Out he Married Sister)

This is a truly awful tale from Nova Scotia. The husband’s name was Lucien Duval, and his father left his wife and went to live on Prince Edward’s Island. Subsequent to his leaving a baby girl was born, but the mother never mentioned it to her outgoing husband that a child was even born.Later on in life, the child was adopted by another family and moved to Newport where she met Duval, and they ended up getting married. In an effort to find out his wife’s parentage, he uncovered the hideous truth. She went completely mad and she drowned herself, while Duval killed himself by hanging.

23/ Irishtown Strange Suicide, New Ross, (New Ross is the old name for Nova Scotia) April 1889

24/ Manitoba, July 20th, 1885

25/ Manitoba July 20th, 1885

26/ Stratford, Ontario, December 1864 (Discovery of Murder Twenty-Seven years ago)

An ostler made a confession which was relative to a murder that was committed twenty-seven years ago. At that time, he stated, he worked for a landlord and his wife at their tavern when one evening a pedlar turned up and then vanished shortly afterwards. His horse and his effects were sold, and he told police that he had been murdered, then chucked in a well.The tavern has since been burned to the ground, and on the site where the well was, there is now a brick store. The landlord died and his widow re-married. The servant girl who observed the murder, then told the ostler what had happened, s also dead.The ostler knowing what he knew all these years, nearly went mad and kept thinking about the murder. It is not known whether to take him seriously or not but when people in the area were questioned about the matter, they distinctly remember the pedlar going missing.

27/ Long Point, Lake Ontario, (Loss of Ship) June 1889

28/ Newfoundland and Labrador, (Violent Storms) October 1885

29/ Halifax Explosion, Nova Scotia, December 1917 (Explosion- 2000 deaths)

This must rank as one Canada’s worst disasters, where the town of Halifax in Nova Scotia suffered a massive explosion that could be heard over 150 miles away, when the S.S Mont Blanc, collided with the S.S.Imo and ignited the ammunition and explosives on board the Mont Blanc. The result was two thousand dead and nine thousand injured. Around three or four thousand houses were completely destroyed and twenty thousand were made destitute. Schools were blown up, with teachers and children in them and the tidal wave, caused by the explosion, was around forty feet high, drowned the ones that hadn’t been blown to smithereens or burned to death. Damage was estimated at a massive £6,000,000, with the surviving crew members arrested while the Admiralty investigated the disaster.