A Grisly Past

By Doreen Marion Gee

Beware of walking in Beacon Hill Park at night! Dreadful ghosts will rise up and scream at the moon. You will see grisly apparitions of murderers and spectres of tragedies and horrific events. Who knew that our innocent emerald gem has a coloured past with shadows of violence and mystery? Behind those sun-drenched leaves and delicious floral landscapes, awful ghosts flutter in the breeze. The history of Beacon Hill Park is the stuff of Hollywood. Killings. Midnight stealth. Drownings. Deranged killer. Innocent victims. Take a deep breath and read on - if you dare.

The history of Beacon Hill Park is not always as pretty as its splendid floral meadows. Its past is stained with brutal killings of wildlife. Swans were a common target. Their numbers dropped dramatically from 1920 onwards. With increased numbers of visitors and dogs, ten swans were poisoned or stoned to death in the 1930's and thirteen were stolen or murdered by people and dogs in the 1940's. Several of the poisonings were due to pure ignorance and salted peanuts.

On a grim Monday morning in August 1981, Beacon Hill Park staff made a gruesome discovery. The bodies of forty-eight exotic birds lay still on the floor of their cages in the park aviary. Some were disembowelled, others decapitated. The senseless slaughter scene revealed that twenty-nine ringneck doves, nine budgies, nine canaries, and one cockatiel were clubbed and stabbed with a pointed stick. A small number survived and a lucky few escaped to the skies.

Why would anyone commit such an evil and cruel act on defenceless creatures! The local SPCA at that time concluded that a lone perpetrator did the foul deed. There was only one set of footprints in the tiny aviary space. The aviary lock was destroyed and a ladder found - probably used to access birds in the top tiers. City Hall offered a reward of $1000 for any information to catch the villain. The 'perp' was never caught and the mystery remains unsolved.

Many people have met their maker in the calm elegant waters of our treasured park. The first incident was in 1915, when a sixteen year old boy fell through the ice in Good Acre Lake and drowned. For one very unfortunate family, horrible tragedy repeated itself through the generations. On March 16,1950, the Special Constable for Beacon Hill Park found the body of a two year old boy who had drowned in Fountain Lake. Then on January 28,1951, another sixteen year old boy, Charles O' Sullivan, drowned in Good Acre Lake. This brave young boy was a true James Bay hero. He died while assisting his buddies to save another youth who had fallen through the ice. In a terrible chain of events where rescuers scrambled to save the teens who all crashed through the thin ice, O' Sullivan went unnoticed. After his mother reported her missing son to police that night, his body was retrieved. Sometimes, the gods seem cruel : O' Sullivan was the uncle of the two year old who drowned in1950. Skaters had been thoroughly warned of the treacherous thin ice in both incidents on Good Acre Lake.

Please do not despair dear readers! The vast majority of historical events in Beacon Hill Park are wonderful and glorious and make us all proud. And our beloved park oasis is still one of most resplendent natural green areas on this planet.

But if you walk in the park after dark, watch your back!

A heartfelt thank you to Janis Ringuette, whose website was an amazing research source for this article. Please see her website: www.beaconhillparkhistory.org.