Mary Gallagher & an enduring tale of murder in 19th-century Griffintown

Since 1879, legend says that a ghost returns every seven years to a street corner in Griffintown to reclaim the head of a murdered woman: Mary Gallagher.

It’s one of the more enduring stories of the neighbourhood’s Irish working-class past of chaotic streets rife with activity, now buried below condos and what’s left of brick exterior buildings and Irish street names.

Back then, Griffintown was a 19th-century industrial slum filled with “warehouses, flour mills, smelting works, and the pulse of transient life between taverns and stables,” wrote Patrick Lejtenyi in 2017.

The neighbourhood then was filled with families, laborers, and characters like prostitutes like Mary—a weathered, aging woman—whose death was not only brutal, but rare: Crime wasn’t unheard of in Montreal, but her death was an anomaly. Montreal hadn't witnessed a murder since 1877, and the identity of the murderer was believed to be an acquaintance of Mary’s, Susan Kennedy.