Legends, Lore, (and a little bit of Gore!)
Urban legends are specifically modern stories of obscure origin that have little or no supporting evidence, and that typically have elements of humour or horror attached to them. A story starts with a grain of truth that is then embellished and retold until it has passed into the realm of myth. One such example is a newspaper report from the Stratford Beacon Herald stating how wild pigeons were seen around Stratford in flocks of hundreds, but one year disappeared and never came back. No one really knows why!
While Perth County itself is not old enough to have achieved myth-making status, it is still full of interesting (and sometimes scary!) stories that have become legends in their own right.
There are stories of a boy who died at Fryfogel Tavern, Perth County’s first settlement along the historic Huron Tract. He was buried somewhere on the grounds of the inn. His tombstone was allegedly brought into the basement and his ghost is said to haunt the basement.
Probably the best known ghost story in the county is that of Henry Derry. In 1876, the headless body of a then unidentified man was found floating in the Avon River in Stratford. Reports started soon after of a headless ghost that wandered along the riverbank looking for his missing body part. Newspaper reports at the time discovered that a local medical student from Mitchell had confessed to ‘snatching’ Derry’s remains from a local cemetery, in order to further his anatomy studies. A skull was found in the vicinity in the 1980’s, and local reports believed it to be Derry’s. Using cadavers for dissection purposes was an illegal offense in 1876, but was a common occurrence. There are reports of empty graves in Upper and Lower Canada as early as 1829, and as late as the turn of the century. The first Anatomy Act of the Provinces was passed by the Legislation of the United Canadas in 1843, but clearly the supply of bodies was inadequate for the medical students of that time. What’s interesting to note is that there is not much mention of the medical student, yet Henry Derry’s name has become, in its own right, a Stratford legend.
In Listowel’s cemetery lays the remains of the victim of “the most diabolical crime ever committed in this country”, according to police reports at the time. Local lore has it that the ghost of 13 year old Jessie Keith, murdered by a vagrant in 1894, still lingers around her gravestone, topped by an angel that is said to emit piercing red lights from its eyes, some say in search of Jessie’s murderer. There are also rumours that Jessie’s ghost haunts the Capitol Theatre, now a movie theatre. Jessie was murdered at a time when Jack the Ripper was still at large in England. The details of her death were so horrific, that police requested that Detective Murray, in charge of the Ripper investigations in the UK, come to Listowel, as some feared that Jack himself was at large in Perth County. Police eventually arrested and charged Almede Chatelle with her murder. Chatelle became the first person to be hanged in Perth County in 1894.
In 2010, two bodies were discovered next to the Stratford City Jail during building upgrades. The two bodies, it turns out, belonged to the only two men ever hanged at the Stratford Jail – Almede Chatelle, or the Listowel Ripper as he became to be known, in 1894, followed 14 years later by Frank Roughmond. Both remains were moved to unmarked graves in Avondale Cemetery in the fall of 2010. There have been unsettling reports in the past about ghostly occurrences at the Jail. One wonders, with this final move to a cemetery, if these unsettled spirits have now finally found peace?
Perth County’s rich and colourful history makes for some interesting stories. To learn more about the factual accounts, explore the local Archives and Museum branches in Mitchell, Listowel, St. Marys, and Stratford. To learn more about the more fanciful side of Perth’s legends, plan on attending Perth County’s Heritage Weekend on June 3rd-5th. The St. Marys Storytelling Festival will hold its “Stonetown Ghost Storied Tour & Pub Crawl”, hosted by storyteller Gail Fricker on Thursday, June 2nd 2011 at 8pm. The Stratford Tourism Alliance will also present a “Pubs, Spirits & Pilsners” tour of some of Stratford’s more haunted locations on Sunday, June 4th at 2pm. For ticket information on both of these tours, visit www.stmarysstorytelling.org, and www.visitstratford.ca.
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