Château Ramezay

Across Rue Notre-Dame from Montreal’s City Hall stands one of the oldest buildings in the city. Claude de Ramezay, governor of Montreal, commissioned the three-storey stone house in 1705, and it was finished the following year. After his death his heirs sold it in 1745 to the Compagnie des Indes, the French trading company that ran the colony’s fur trade, which enlarged it to roughly its present size after a fire in 1756 – hence its other name, India House.

Few houses in Canada have had so many lives. After the British conquest it was bought by the merchant William Grant and rented to the British as the governor’s residence; in 1775–76 the invading American Continental Army used it as its headquarters, and Benjamin Franklin stayed there in 1776 during his failed mission to win Quebec over to the revolution. Later it housed government offices, a teacher-training school and Laval University’s medical and law faculties. Threatened with demolition, it was saved by the city and opened as a museum on 1 May 1895, run by the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society of Montreal. It became Quebec’s first classified historic monument in 1929 and a National Historic Site of Canada in 1949.

Its ghost lore is modest, and that is part of its charm. The best-known stories come from the museum’s own staff and were collected by the writer Mark Abley in a piece the Montreal Gazette excerpted in 2016: employees unlocking the heavy doors in the morning to find a pile of brochures strewn across the floor, two books fallen from a shelf where nothing else had moved, and – the favourite – an evening when the building was closed up and the next discovery was that the front wheels of a prized exhibit, a De Dion-Bouton car from around 1900, had been turned while the back wheels stayed straight.

From those anecdotes the château has become a regular stop on Old Montreal ghost walks and a fixture of Quebec “haunted places” lists, which add footsteps, voices, apparitions and even a smell of sulphur – details that are rarely attributed to anyone in particular. No named ghost is attached to the house: tellers variously credit the restless governors, colonial soldiers or the generations of officials, students and merchants who passed through its vaulted rooms.

Treat the stories as what they are: affectionate workplace folklore in a building with three centuries of history. The real draw is the collection – some 30,000 objects from Montreal’s past – and the vaulted cellars, where the permanent exhibition recreates daily life in New France.

Objects found moved or scattered after closing (brochures, books, the wheels of an antique car), footsteps when the building is empty, and – in popular retellings – voices, apparitions and a sulphurous smell. The specific incidents were reported by museum staff; the rest comes from tour patter and listicles.

The exhibition halls and shop area where brochures and books were found disturbed, the gallery holding the early automobile, and the vaulted lower floor. Incidents are said to happen overnight, between closing and opening.

The château is a stop on Old Montreal ghost walks and appears in French- and English-language lists of Quebec’s haunted places. Its permanent exhibition, Life at the Château: Splendour and Misery in New France, occupies the vaulted chambers that feature in many retellings.