The Gothic Montreal mansion where the CIA broke minds with LSD and electroshock

There's an Italianate villa perched on the slope of Mount Royal, just above the Golden Square Mile, that was built in 1863 for railway baron Sir Hugh Allan: The Ravenscrag mansion, all stone grandeur and Victorian ambition speaking to old money and older power. For decades, it housed the Allan Memorial Institute, where some of the city's most prominent psychiatrists treated patients seeking help for depression, anxiety, grief.

Those patients didn't know that the institute's director was running a parallel operation funded by the CIA, conducting experiments so brutal they would destroy lives, shatter families, and eventually provide the blueprint for torture techniques used at Guantanamo Bay and CIA black sites around the world.

The respected Montreal hospital they visited would become ground zero for one of the darkest chapters in Cold War history, and more than 70 years later, neither the CIA nor the Canadian government has ever formally apologized for what happened.