Two Toronto Nurses & One of the Most Terrible Nights of the First World War

One dark night in the summer of 1918, the HMHS Llandovery Castle was steaming through the waters of the North Atlantic. She was far off the southern tip of Ireland, nearly two hundred kilometers from the nearest land. It was a calm night, with a light breeze and a clear sky. The ship had been built in Glasgow and was named after a castle in Wales, but now she was a Canadian vessel. Since the world had been plunged into the bloodiest war it had ever seen, the steamship had been turned into a floating hospital. She was returning from Halifax, where she had just dropped off hundreds of wounded Canadian soldiers. On board were the ship's crew and her medical personnel — including fourteen nurses. They were just a few of more than two thousand Canadian women who volunteered to serve overseas as "Nursing Sisters," healing wounds and saving lives and comforting those who couldn't be saved. As the ship sliced through the water, big red crosses shone out from either side of the hull, bright beacons in the dark. The trip was almost over. Soon, they'd be in Liverpool.

But then, without warning, the calm of the night was shattered by a terrible explosion. The ship had been hit by a torpedo. All the lights on board went black. The wireless had been knocked out, too; there would be no S.O.S. And when the captain ordered the engines reversed, there was no reply; the engine room had been hit, the men inside were already dead or wounded. So the ship continued to surge forward into the waves, filling with water as the prow plunged beneath the surface of the ocean. Within minutes it was clear: the Llandovery Castle was doomed.

The order came to abandon ship. Lifeboats were lowered over the sides and the evacuation began, but it was dangerous work. As the decks pitched forward and the ship lurched through the waves, two of the lifeboats were swamped with water, broken, and swept away. Others had already been destroyed by the explosion. The crew kept at it, though; they were calm, no one panicked. Within a few short minutes, it's thought that every single person who had survived the blast had been ushered into a lifeboat and lowered to the water below.

Mary Agnes McKenzie

Mary Agnes McKenzie was in one of those lifeboats. Her friends called her Nan. She had been born and raised in Toronto. She went to school in St. Jamestown as a young girl — at the Rose Avenue School, which is still there today. She lived in the neighbourhood of Rathnelly, on Macpherson Avenue, near Dupont & Avenue Road. She was still just a teenager when she decided she wanted to become a nurse. She got a job at a hospital here in Toronto and, in the years before the war broke out, got some experience working at the Military Hospital in Halifax. When the war did come, she volunteered for duty. She was originally posted to the Ontario Military Hospital in England, built by our provincial government, and then found herself serving on board the Llandovery Castle. While the ship had been docked in Halifax, she'd hoped for a chance to come home to Toronto for a brief visit with her family. But all leave had been cancelled. She promised her mom she would try again the next time they were back in Canada.

And she wasn't the only nurse from Toronto in that lifeboat. Carola Josephine Douglas had been born in Panama, but grew up with relatives in Toronto after both her parents died. She graduated from Harbord Collegiate before training to become a nurse. When the war broke out, she too volunteered to head overseas — filling out enlistment forms that still assumed all new recruits were "he" and the "man." Soon, she found herself in the thick of the action in Europe, tending to the wounded at one of the most dangerous military hospitals in France. As you might expect, the work she did there took a toll. After more than two years helping to stitch people back together near the front lines, she became a patient herself, recuperating from exhaustion. After that, Douglas was assigned to the Llandovery Castle.

The hospital ship was supposed to provide the nurses and other personnel with something of a rest — a relatively easy assignment for those who had already seen more than their fair share of stressful duty. But now, McKenzie, Douglas and the other nurses found themselves back in danger, lowered over the side of the doomed vessel, along with a few men from the crew, in Lifeboat No. 5.

And Lifeboat No. 5 was stuck. After it hit the water, it still was held by ropes to the side of the sinking ship. As they pitched in the waves, the small boat kept smashing against the hull of the big steamer. One of the men — Sergeant Arthur Knight from London, Ontario — grabbed an axe and tried to cut the lifeboat free. But it was no use; the axe broke. So did the second one. After that, they tried to use the oars to brace themselves, to keep from being crushed. One by one, the oars broke too. Until, finally, mercifully, the ropes snapped and they were free.

The lifeboat drifted away, but it still wasn't out of danger. They realized in horror that they were being drawn back toward the stern of the ship, caught in the suction as the Llandovery Castle sank beneath the waves. They were being dragged into a whirlpool. And there was nothing they could do.

HMHS Llandovery Castle

One of the nurses — Matron Margaret Fraser, daughter of the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia — turned to Sergeant Knight as they drifted toward the swirling vacuum. "Sergeant," she asked, "do you think there is any hope for us?"

He later described those dreadful moments, stranded in a lifeboat with fourteen women who had spent much of the last few years up to their elbows in blood and guts, but whose entire gender was still dismissed by many Canadians as too frail for that kind of work, too weak and emotional to be trusted with an equal say in the world. "Unflinchingly and calmly," he remembered, "as steady and collected as if on parade, without a complaint or a single sign of emotion, our fourteen devoted nursing sisters faced the terrible ordeal of certain death—only a matter of minutes—as our lifeboat neared that mad whirlpool of waters where all human power was helpless... In that whole time I did not hear a complaint or murmur from one of the sisters. There was not a cry for help or any outward evidence of fear."

It took only ten minutes from the time of the explosion to the moment when the last of the Llandovery Castle disappeared beneath the waves. And she took Lifeboat No. 5 with her. Everyone on board was flung into the churning water. The nurses were all wearing life jackets, but most — if not all of them — were probably drowned right away. Sergeant Knight never saw any of them ever again. He was only saved by a lucky explosion — maybe the boilers exploding as the ship sank toward the ocean floor — which propelled him back to the surface. If McKenzie or Douglas or any of the other nurses did survive, they found themselves stranded in the dark waters, clinging to the wreckage as the night's final horrors got underway.

The U-boat wasn't finished yet.

The captain of the submarine had just committed a war crime. It was illegal to attack a hospital ship. The red crosses on the sides of the Llandovery Castle had been brightly lit and easy to see. The Germans hadn't given any warning or tried to board and search the ship first — which would have been within their rights. Instead, they'd simply fired their torpedoes. That was against international law and against the standing orders of the Imperial German Navy. So now, it seems, Captain Patzig was anxious to cover his tracks.

At first, the U-86 submarine seized one of the lifeboats and accused the Canadian crew of harbouring American flight officers or of shipping ammunition. But the crew denied it. And when it became clear they weren't getting anywhere, the Germans let that lifeboat go. As it rowed away to safety, Captain Patzig tried a new approach: the U-boat turned on the other survivors. 

U-86

For the next two hours, while those in the water clung to the wreckage and cried out for help, U-86 sailed between them, ramming the lifeboats that were still afloat, firing shells at any that weren't completely destroyed. Then, once all the Canadians had been forced into the water, the machine guns opened fire. They killed everyone they could find. If McKenzie or Douglas or any of the other nurses had managed to survive their initial plunge into the water, they didn't survive those guns. There had been 258 people on board the Llandovery Castle. By the time the night was over, the only survivors were the 24 lucky enough to be on board the one lifeboat Captain Patzig couldn't find. They would spend the next 36 hours alone in the middle of the ocean, until they were finally found.

Later, the captain of a British ship sailed through the wreckage. "[S]uddenly," he remembered, "we began going through corpses.... we were sailing through floating bodies. We were not allowed to stop — we just had to go straight through. It was quite horrific, and my reaction was to vomit over the edge. It was something we could never have imagined... particularly the nurses: seeing these bodies of women and nurses, floating in the ocean, having been there some time. Huge aprons and skirts in billows, which looked almost like sails because they dried in the hot sun."

Nearly a century later, the sinking of the Llandovery Castle is still considered to be one of the greatest atrocities of the First World War. And it immediately began to a play an inflammatory role in the hatred and violence between the Allies and Germany that would keep the world drenched in blood for decades to come. In the days that followed the attack, Toronto's newspapers were filled with cries of outrage. The Daily Star denounced "this latest exhibition of Hun deviltry." The Telegram went with "Hun savagery." Their words were officially echoed by the Canadian government, which decried the "savagery... and the utter blackness and dastardly character of the enemy..." Whether or not any of the nurses had survived long enough to be shot, Allied propaganda posters showed them there in the water as German submariners mowed them down.

Canadian propaganda

For the remaining days of the war, the Llandovery Castle became a rallying cry for Canadian troops. About a month after the sinking of the ship, the Allies began their final major push — The Hundred Days Offensive — which drove the Germans back out of France and finally to their surrender. The Canadians played a leading role. At the Battle of Amiens, they used "Llandovery Castle" as a code word. One brigadier from Moose Jaw told his men "the battle cry... should be 'Llandovery Castle,' and that that cry should be the last to ring in the ears of the Hun as the bayonet was driven home." Some say the outrages of that night in the North Atlantic helped to inspire some Canadian soldiers to commit their own — choosing to kill surrendering German troops rather than take them prisoner.

In the wake of the war, the Allies insisted that the German officers responsible for the sinking of the Llandovery Castle face charges. The case became one of the Leipzig War Crimes Trials, held by the German government to prosecute their own troops. As Captain Patzig fled the country, two of his lieutenants were tried and convicted to four years of hard labour. But they escaped on their way to prison and were later acquitted on the grounds that only their captain was ultimately responsible for their orders.

For many people living in Allied countries, the Leipzig Trials were seen as an example of the Germans being too lenient with their own war criminals. But many Germans saw the trials as yet another example of the unfair peace terms imposed upon them by the Treaty of Versailles. Some Allies had committed war crimes, too, but it was only the Germans who seemed to be forced to face the consequences. Those who stood trial in Leipzig were hailed as patriotic martyrs.

Many historians believe the anger over the peace terms — including the Leipzig Trials — eventually helped to propel Adolph Hitler into power. And when Hitler launched a Second World War, there was a familiar face on his payroll. Captain Patzig had been welcomed back into the German navy. And this time, he was in charge of an entire flotilla, training a new generation of German submariners how to wage war.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

The Albertan writer and editor Debbie Marshall has a blog dedicated to the stories of the Canadian nurses killed during the First World War. It's called Finding the 47. She has posts about Nan McKenzie here and here, and about Douglas here and here and here.

McKenzie is still remembered — along with a few other nurses from the Ontario Military Hospital who died in WWI — with a plaque inside Queen's Park. And she's also remembered in a memorial at her grade school, Rose Avenue School, which you can learn a little more about here. The Toronto Star tells her story here. An historian from Rochester tells it here (she trained to become a nurse in Rochester). You can find her page on the Virtual Canadian War Memorial (including a form she filled out, press clippings, etc.) here. And her page the Canadian Great War Project here. Her exact address was 290 Macpherson Ave, which I don't believe exists anymore.

Douglas' photo still hangs in the halls of Harbord Collegiate as part of their war memorial and a memorial to all their former students who died during the war stands outside the school. Her page on the Virtual War Memorial (with some pics, filled out forms, etc.) is here. And the Toronto branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society has posted some information about her and the sinking of the Llandovery Castle as part of the "For King & Country" project here.

Another one of the nurses who died that night had family in Toronto. You can learn more about Mae Bell Sampson thanks to Finding the 47 here. There's a photo of her here. And a great photo of another of the nurses — Mary Jane Fortesceue of Montreal — here.

The Wikipedia page for the HMHS Llandovery Castle is here. Versions of the story are collected by the British Commonwealth Shipping Company Limited here. The Canadian Great War Project tells the story here. And the Canadian government version from 1920, pieced together from the witnesses, is here. If you've got a Toronto Public Library card, I think you'll be able to check out a Toronto Star article about McKenzie and the attack from July 3 1918 here. And from the day before that, just about the attack, here. 

Canadian soldiers were apparently known for being bad with POWS. According to the English writer, Robert Graves, who served on the front lines: "The troops with the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners were the Canadians..." Though he also added, "How far this reputation for atrocities was deserved, and how far it could be ascribed to the overseas habit of bragging and leg-pulling, we could not decide." Some of it is blamed on the reaction to the propagada story of a Canadian solider crucified by German bayonets.

The first propaganda image come via Wikimedia Commons. The photo of Nurse McKenzie via Vicki Masters Profitt's Illuminated History blog. The photo of the Llandovery Castle via the Historia y Arqueologia Marítima. The photo of U-86 is also via Wikimedia Commons. And the second propaganda poster is also also via Wikimedia Commons.

Uh Oh, Everyone's Dying Of Cholera, Parts I & II

Front and Simcoe, 1834

This is the second in a series of posts telling the story of William Lyon Mackenzie and the birth of Canadian democracy. You can read the first part here.

York had changed a lot in the decade since William Lyon Mackenzie first set foot here. It was no longer a tiny little town alone in the middle of the woods. The population had skyrocketed from 1,600 to  nearly 10,000. The first few blocks around the St. Lawrence Market had spread all the way west to Bathurst Street. And  with a new Lieutenant Governor, John Colborne, aggressively encouraging immigration, there were more people arriving all the time.

What they found here was a disgusting mess. There was no sewer system or running water.  People dumped their garbage everywhere. They emptied their shit buckets into the street. King and Yonge and Queen were a muddy soup of excrement and filth. And there were no sidewalks, either; you'd just wade through it, track it into your homes. Francis Collins (who published one of the big liberal Reform newspapers, the Canadian Freeman) wrote about "[s]tagnant pools of water, green as a leek, and emitting deadly exhalations". He called the lake water, where people would just dump whatever gross crap they wanted get rid of, "carrion-broth". In the winter, he said, "[a]ll the filth of the town—dead horses, dogs, cats, manure, etc. [was] heaped up together on the ice, to drop down, in a few days, into the water". That was their drinking water. That watery pig corpse horse shit juice. Soon, it would kill Collins — one of the great Reform heroes, a man who'd spent months in jail for criticizing the Family Compact too harshly. It would kill his wife, too. And his brother. And hundreds more.

It had all started in India, five years earlier and more than 12,000 kilometers away. It came from the spot where the Ganges meets the Bay of Bengal, one of the most fertile places on earth. The river widens out into an endless expanse of swamps and streams, of lush mangrove and bamboo forests. There are tigers and elephants and leopards and pythons. And there's also cholera. It's been in the water for as long as anyone can remember. Millions upon millions of deadly bacteria lay dormant in the silt and come alive in the monsoon season when the conditions are right. But in 1826, of course, they didn't know that's what was happening. They just knew that people were dying. And that the cholera was beginning to spread.

Cholera strikes Paris

It was slow at first. People started to die further up the river. And then all across India, wherever the trade routes led. It took a year to get to China and another to get halfway across Russia. But when it hit Europe and the Middle East, things sped up. Three thousand Muslims died on their pilgrimage to Mecca in 1831. Thirty thousand deaths were announced in Cairo and Alexandria. There would be 100,000 dead in Hungary. And in France. Bodies piled up in all the cobblestoned capitals of the Old World. Death struck without warning. One survivor, who had suddenly fallen ill while walking down the street, said it was like being "knocked down with an ax. I had no premonition at all." Heinrich Heine, a German poet, was in Paris when the plague sweep through a masked ball: "suddenly the gayest of the harlequins collapsed, cold in the limbs, and underneath his mask, violet blue in the face. Laughter died out, dancing ceased and in a short while carriage-loads of people hurried from the Hotel Dieu to die".  The deaths came so quick, they ran out of coffins. All over the world, corpses were being tossed into mass graves by the thousands.

In England, they were shipping cholera back directly from the source. Their British East India Company had been gradually conquering India for more than a hundred years. And when they shipped tea back home, they'd scoop up bilge water from the Bay of Bengal, carry it halfway around the world and dump it into the Thames. More than six thousand people died in London. More than fifty thousand across the UK. Ireland was hardest hit. In places like Dublin and Limerick and Cork, terrified refugees packed into ships and set sail for the New World. They crowded together in squalor, sharing cholera-ridden water and cholera-ridden piss buckets for weeks on end. By the time they reached the Canadas, some ships had already lost dozens on board to the disease. Officials in Lower Canada, where they arrived first, did their best to screen passengers and quarantine anyone who showed signs of the sickness, but it didn't seem to do much good. Cholera would devastate Quebec City that summer, killing more than two thousand. In Montreal, doctors rushed through the streets all day and night. The apothecaries stayed open around the clock. The army fired blank artillery shells at nothing — a desperate attempt to drive the cholera out of the air. More than a thousand died in a single month.

As cholera marched west, York braced for the terror. Lieutenant Governor Colborne declared a day of "Public Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer" in an attempt to stave off the disaster. The government formed a Board of Health, led by the most famous doctor in town, the staunch Reformer William Warren Baldwin (the same guy who built the first Spadina House on the hill overlooking Davenport and had Spadina Road carved out of the woods south of it so that he'd have a clear view all the way to the lake). Baldwin's Board of Health had a doctor check all new arrivals before they left their ships. They washed buildings and outhouses with lime. They shut the bars at ten. But it was no use. Eleven thousand immigrants came to York in the spring and summer of 1832. And many of them were sick. By late June, it had begun.

Cholera victims

It was terrifying. Cholera fucks you up good. Those bacteria are resilient little bastards; they can survive the acids in your stomach and make it all the way to your small intestine. There, they swim over to the intestinal wall and start to produce a toxin. It sucks the water out of the rest of your body and forces you to expel it in an endless onslaught of watery diarrhea. You can shit out 20 or 30 litres in a day, clear liquid with chunks of your intestine in it. And you vomit, too. A lot. You lose so much fluid that your hands go wrinkly. Your eyes sink back into your head. Your skin changes colour. Then you die. And it happens fast. You can go from healthy to dead in just a few hours. And all of that excrement your loved ones have tossed into the street and into the drinking water is filled with the next generation of bacteria ready to do the same thing all over again.

For the rest of that summer, our city was filled with people dying sudden, grotesque deaths. Hundreds more got sick and thousands fled to the countryside in fear. The Board of Health tried to fight back, but they didn't really know what they were fighting. They asked everyone to burn tar and sulphur in their yards to drive it away. They told people to hide under blankets at night with the windows closed. To cut back on vegetables and drink lots of coffee. To switch from cotton socks to wool ones. And even the good advice — to get rid of standing water, take a bath every day, clean up the garbage, go to the hospital if you're sick — was being ignored. They couldn't force anyone to do anything, since the Board of Health had no real power. And Colborne, who wanted to protect his authority and make sure no one screwed with his open immigration policy, refused to give them any. They reported nine deaths in the first week of the outbreak. Twenty-four in the second. The numbers went up quickly from there. By the time the plague finally died out in the fall, they figure there were at least two hundred fresh corpses in town. One out of every twenty people who'd stayed in the city was dead. It was the worst thing that had ever happened in the town.

Strangely, those horrifying few months also brought us an important step closer to democracy. In the wake of the plague, people were terrified. Cholera was still wreaking havoc all over the world. And if there was a chance it might come back, even some Tories thought the Lieutenant Governor should share some his power. Scared and overwhelmed by the soaring population, the Tory-dominated,  Mackenzie-hating, democracy-bashing legislature voted to turn the Town of York into the City of Toronto. There would be a city council elected by the people. A mayor. A new Board of Health. And they'd all have real power. They could tax people. Pass bylaws and enforce them themselves. All without having to ask the Lieutenant Governor first. This was a Big Fucking Deal.

We had our first elections in the spring of 1834. The Reform Party won. They picked William Lyon Mackenzie to be the very first mayor of Toronto. And the head of the new Board of Health.

Mackenzie's year in power is best remembered for helping Toronto to establish its own new, Canadian identity. The old British name "York" was done away with in favour of the original, native "Toronto". (No more calling us "dirty little York" to avoid confusion with New York or the English York. Plus, "Toronto" just plain sounds cooler. As one Reform leader put it, "Toronto for poets — York for men of business".) Mackenzie also gave us our own coat of arms. And our own motto: "Industry, Intelligence, Integrity." More importantly, he and his Reformers started to clean up the city. They put in sidewalks. Made it illegal to let your pigs run free in the streets. You weren't allowed to toss your shit out into the road anymore. Or to throw your garbage anywhere where you liked. There'd be garbage pickup now. And new regulations about how to dispose of corpses.

Silly cholera preventive costume

But it wasn't enough. Toronto was still a pretty gross place. And all of those big, famous doctors really had no idea what they were doing. They didn't wash their instruments. They treated most sick people with bizarre cures: concoctions of charcoal, hog fat and maple sugar; crushed deer antler and red wine; leeches. They could do little to fight the wave of disease that arrived with the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of new Canadians who were still pouring off ships at the waterfront. Too many of those ships were pulling around the islands and into Toronto Bay flying a yellow flag from their mast — a warning that there were cholera victims on board.

The outbreak that summer would be even worse than the first one. Hundreds more died. Maybe as much as ten percent of the population. Most of the city's richest citizens fled to their park estates north of Queen and up onto the escarpment, but the greatest of Toronto's leaders — Reform and Tory alike — stayed behind to battle the disease. Some of them, like Francis Collins, would die. The garbage carts became ambulances, and then death carts. Mackenzie volunteered as an attendant. And so did John Strachan, the Anglican Archdeacon and leader of the conservative Family Compact. They would both tour the town, loading the dead onto their carts and burying them en mass in a pit beside Strachan's church, an earlier version of St. James Cathedral. They're still there, those victims, maybe as many as six thousand of them, buried together in the ground beneath the park at King and Church. It was dangerous work. Mackenzie fell sick, nearly died, and was lucky to survive.

The disease did peter out here eventually. But in some parts of the world, the pandemic raged on for years. Millions died. And it would take another worldwide outbreak before a doctor in London made the first major breakthrough: in 1854, he mapped out the cases in Soho and tracked the source to a water pump. For the first time, people realized that contaminated water was the problem. Still, there would be another four cholera pandemics after that one, the most recent in the 1970s. Cholera is easy to prevent: just don't drink any water with feces in it and you'll probably be okay. But more than a hundred thousand people still die from it every year because they just don't have that option.

Toronto would never suffer at cholera's hands like that again. To fight it, the Family Compact and the Reformers had found more common ground than you'd expect. The Tories had helped to create a new city with new, democratic powers. And the Reformers had shown that while they might not support the monarchy, they still believed in the power of good, strong government. But the two sides still hated each other's guts. And on the road to Canadian democracy, things were going to get a whole lot worse before they got better. Our colonial overlords in England were about to name a new Lieutenant Governor for Upper Canada. And Sir Francis Bond Head would prove to be one of the biggest enemies of democracy Canada had ever seen.

Continue reading with part three in this series, "Bond Head The Bonehead", here.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

I pieced this together from a ton of articles, but some of the best ones are here (about cholera's impact on the founding of the city -- you need a free trial for that link, but you can find it other places too) and here (about the 1832 outbreak and the Board of Health). But they're both pretty dry. I also got lot of more fun and gross information from The Toronto Story, which is super-great kids book about our history. You can buy it here. And one of the coolest online sources is from the Toronto Public Library. Here they have a saaaaad letter from the son of one victim and other writings and images from those terrifying days.

The Star looks back at the outbreaks here. Toronto EMS looks back on their part of the history here. And there's more about how cholera swept through the rest of the world here and here and here.

Another interesting bit I didn't think I could cram into the main post: people were really suspicious of the hospital. It was at King and Peter, two-stories tall, and the precursor to Toronto General. The Board of Health begged them, but people preferred to die at home. And there was a rumour that the officials there had tried to bury at least one person alive. There was also a makeshift treatment centre in John Strachan's old blue grammar school at Jarvis and Lombard, a precursor to today's Jarvis Collegiate and Upper Canada College. I also thought it was kind of interesting that they tried to evacuated the area around Market Lane (now Market Square, where the Rainbow Cinema is). But none of that, of course, seemed to help much. As Strachan himself put it: "In short, York became one general hospital."

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837

College and Spadina in 1902

College and Spadina in 1902

Yeesh. I keep trying to just quickly post these photos without spending much time on them, but every time I do, I accidentally discover a crapload of interesting history related to them and end up getting dragged into more research. Here, for instance, are some workers doing some construction on Spadina Avenue in 1902. The photo is looking north from College toward that old U of T building in the distance (which is still there today in the middle of the roundabout). So I figured I should probably do a  quick check to see what the building is called and make sure there was nothing I should tell you about it. Mistake.

It's called 1 Spadina Crescent and it was built in 1875 as Knox College, a Presbyterian theology school, which soon became part of U of T. When the college moved out at the beginning of the First World War, the building became the Spadina Military Hopsital, where injured soldiers were treated. And, as it turns out, a young Amelia Earhart worked there as a nurses aide—which is the first I've heard about her living in Toronto and is a story which is clearly going to need its own post someday soon.

Then the building continued on as a military hospital until the 1940s, when it was turned into a medical research laboratory. It soon became one of Canada's main hubs for the development of new drugs, including vitally important contributions to Jonas Salk's polio vaccine. I get the feeling there's a whole post in that story, too. 

Then, in the '70s, the lab moved and the university turned 1 Spadina Crescent into an academic building. That sounds boring and you'd think it would be the end of all the interesting stories. Except that a professor was murdered there in 2001; the crime is unsolved and his ghost is said to haunt the building. And then, last year, someone searching for his ghost fell from the roof and died. Oh, and as if that weren't enough, it's also home to the Ontario division of the Eye Bank of Canada, which is exactly what it sounds like: the place they keep dead people's eyes until they're transplanted.

Seriously. All I wanted to do was post a  pretty picture.