Canadian Creepies

Send us a text, tell us your canadian creepy!

What happens when grief, science, and the supernatural all meet inside one Winnipeg home?

From the 1920s through the 1940s, physician Dr. T.G. Hamilton and his wife, nurse Lillian Hamilton, transformed their home at 185 Kelvin Street into a laboratory for investigating psychic phenomena. With cameras rolling, mediums in trances, and séances underway, the Hamiltons attempted to document everything from floating objects to ghostly figures and the strange, gauzy substance known as ectoplasm.

Their experiments attracted some seriously notable visitors, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, and left behind an incredible archive of photographs and research that still exists today.

This week, we’re heading Down the Crooked Path to Winnipeg’s infamous ectoplasm lab, where spiritualism met scientific experimentation and things got very, very weird.

🌱 PayYourRent.ca is an Indigenous-led grassroots initiative calling on settlers to engage in ongoing, voluntary financial redistribution in support of Indigenous land defenders, sovereignty, and community well-being.

This foundation supports urgent needs like housing, food security, legal defense, and cultural revitalization all grounded in the principle that land back also means resource back.

If you live, work, or benefit from life on stolen land, consider learning more or making a monthly contribution at PayYourRent.ca.

Justice isn’t a moment, it’s a commitment.

 Your next creepy obsession starts here. 

✨ This episode is brought to you by Fable & Frame Creative ✨
Fable & Frame Creative offers Niagara Region portraits and at-home newborn sessions, capturing not just how life looks but how it feels. Because your life isn’t ordinary. It’s a fable, and it deserves to be framed like one.

🕯️ You can find new episodes of Down the Crooked Path every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
Canadian content airs right here on the Canadian Creepies feed—so stay tuned, and stay on the path.

Edited by Kyle McDonnell 

Send us a text, tell us your canadian creepy!

This bonus episode corrects an important error from Episode 052, Dangerous Offender, Dangerous System.

Lisa Neve did not murder anyone.

In 1991, Rhodora Nicholas was severely beaten, robbed, and abandoned in a field by Neve and an accomplice. She survived the attack, but her survival does not diminish the seriousness of the violence or the lasting harm she endured.

In our original episode, we focused heavily on Lisa Neve’s trauma, systemic failures, and Canada’s Dangerous Offender designation. In doing so, we did not clearly distinguish what happened or sufficiently centre the person who was harmed.

This episode sets the record straight.

We revisit the 1991 assault, Rhodora Nicholas’s place in the case, and why that violence became central to Neve’s eventual Dangerous Offender designation. We also examine how two truths can exist at once: systems can fail someone profoundly, and that person can still be responsible for causing devastating harm.

Understanding how someone became capable of violence is not the same as explaining that violence away.

Edited by Kyle McDonnell 

Send us a text, tell us your canadian creepy!

There’s a stretch of Lake Ontario where ships have vanished, planes have gone down, and strange stories have lingered beneath the waves for generations.

This week, we’re heading Down the Crooked Path into the Marysburgh Vortex, a mysterious triangle said to be responsible for more shipwrecks and downed aircraft than the Bermuda Triangle.

We’ll dive into the legend of the ghost ship Bavaria, reports of UFO encounters, and the strange meteorite site said to be resting beneath the waters.

Is there something unusual hiding in this corner of Lake Ontario, or have decades of tragedy created a legend too compelling to sink?

Welcome to the Marysburgh Vortex.

🌱 PayYourRent.ca is an Indigenous-led grassroots initiative calling on settlers to engage in ongoing, voluntary financial redistribution in support of Indigenous land defenders, sovereignty, and community well-being.

This foundation supports urgent needs like housing, food security, legal defense, and cultural revitalization—all grounded in the principle that land back also means resource back.

If you live, work, or benefit from life on stolen land, consider learning more or making a monthly contribution at PayYourRent.ca.

Justice isn’t a moment—it’s a commitment.

 Your next creepy obsession starts here. 

✨ This episode is brought to you by Fable & Frame Creative ✨
Fable & Frame Creative offers Niagara Region portraits and at-home newborn sessions, capturing not just how life looks — but how it feels. Because your life isn’t ordinary. It’s a fable, and it deserves to be framed like one.

🕯️ You can find new episodes of Down the Crooked Path every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
Canadian content airs right here on the Canadian Creepies feed—so stay tuned, and stay on the path.

Edited by Kyle McDonnell 

Send us a text, tell us your canadian creepy!

Season 3 of Canadian Creepies is stepping onto the game show floor, where every door hides something strange, unsettling, mysterious or downright creepy.

From true crime and dark Canadian history to paranormal stories, bizarre mysteries and the cases that refuse to stay buried, you never quite know what’s waiting on the other side.

Canadian Creepies was created by Valerie Catharine & Ali Overholt, co-hosted by Valerie & Amanda Joy, researched by Christine Young and edited by Kyle McDonnell.

🎙️ Season 3 begins September 10th.

Pick a door, Creeps.

Just be careful which one you open.

Edited by Kyle McDonnell 

Send us a text, tell us your canadian creepy!

On a rainy night near University Boulevard, a driver picks up a quiet young woman wearing a light coat.

She says little, handing over a piece of paper with the address of UBC’s Main Library written on it.

But before the car ever reaches its destination, the passenger is gone.

In this episode of Down the Crooked Path, Amanda Joy explores the legend of the vanishing hitchhiker said to haunt the roads around the University of British Columbia.

The story has been repeated for decades, but unlike many ghost legends, there is no known police report, newspaper account, or historical record confirming that a young woman died in a fatal accident matching the tale.

So where did the story come from?

We look at the isolated UBC campus of the 1960s, when students regularly travelled along dark, forested roads and hitchhiking was a common part of getting to and from campus, and examine how those real conditions may have helped one of British Columbia’s enduring ghost stories take hold.

Sometimes the history behind a legend is just as interesting as the ghost.

🌱 PayYourRent.ca is an Indigenous-led grassroots initiative calling on settlers to engage in ongoing, voluntary financial redistribution in support of Indigenous land defenders, sovereignty, and community well-being.

This foundation supports urgent needs like housing, food security, legal defense, and cultural revitalization—all grounded in the principle that land back also means resource back.

If you live, work, or benefit from life on stolen land, consider learning more or making a monthly contribution at PayYourRent.ca.

Justice isn’t a moment—it’s a commitment.

 Your next creepy obsession starts here. 

✨ This episode is brought to you by Fable & Frame Creative ✨
Fable & Frame Creative offers Niagara Region portraits and at-home newborn sessions, capturing not just how life looks — but how it feels. Because your life isn’t ordinary. It’s a fable, and it deserves to be framed like one.

🦴 And don’t forget our boo-tiful friends at Back From the Dead Goods—resurrecting your wardrobe with creepy streetwear on Etsy & Poshmark.
👻 Use code CANADIANCREEPIES for 10% off!

🕯️ You can find new episodes of Down the Crooked Path every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
Canadian content airs right here on the Canadian Creepies feed—so stay tuned, and stay on the path.

Edited by Kyle McDonnell 

Send us a text, tell us your canadian creepy!

For decades, Indigenous families were expected to endure the removal of their children in silence. Eventually, survivors, parents, communities, and Indigenous leaders began forcing Canada to listen.

In the final part of our Sixties Scoop series, we begin with the 1980 Indian Child Caravan, when approximately one thousand people gathered in British Columbia to protest the continued removal of Indigenous children from their families and placement in non-Indigenous foster homes.

We follow that resistance into the courtroom, where survivors fought for recognition of what had been taken from them not only their families, but their names, languages, cultures, and identities. Their fight would eventually lead to a historic class-action settlement and the creation of resources intended to support Sixties Scoop survivors.

We also examine the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, its Calls to Action, and the difficult question that remains at the heart of this history: how much has actually changed?

Because the removal of Indigenous children did not end with residential schools or the Sixties Scoop. Today, Indigenous families continue to face profound overrepresentation within Canada’s child welfare system, leading advocates to describe the ongoing crisis as the Millennium Scoop.

Part 04 is about resistance, accountability, survival, and the fight to reclaim the family and cultural connections Canadian institutions attempted to sever.

The Sixties Scoop may belong to Canadian history, but its consequences and the struggle to change the systems that created it are not confined to the past.

Research for this episode and the entire Sixties Scoop series was completed by Christine Young.

Content note: This episode discusses colonialism, forced child apprehension, residential schools, racism, child abuse, family separation, suicide, mental health struggles, substance use, and intergenerational trauma.

🌱 PayYourRent.ca is an Indigenous-led grassroots initiative calling on settlers to engage in ongoing, voluntary financial redistribution in support of Indigenous land defenders, sovereignty, and community well-being.

This foundation supports urgent needs like housing, food security, legal defense, and cultural revitalization all grounded in the principle that land back also means resource back.

If you live, work, or benefit from life on stolen land, consider learning more or making a monthly contribution at PayYourRent.ca.

Justice isn’t a moment—it’s a commitment.

Edited by Kyle McDonnell 

Send us a text, tell us your canadian creepy!

Behind the walls of Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, respected psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron was conducting experiments intended to break down the human mind and rebuild it from the ground up.

Patients were subjected to powerful combinations of drugs, prolonged isolation, repeated audio messages, and electroshock administered at levels far beyond conventional treatment, all while many had little understanding of what was actually being done to them.

But Cameron was not working without financial support.

Canadian public money helped fund research at the institute while, at the same time, the CIA secretly financed Cameron’s work through a covert MKUltra subproject. When the experiments finally began coming to light, families searching for answers encountered incomplete records, missing files, and lingering questions about what Canadian officials knew and how such extreme experimentation was allowed to continue.

In this episode of Down the Crooked Path, Amanda Joy explores the disturbing history of the Allan Memorial Institute, the patients caught inside Cameron’s experiments, and Canada’s connection to one of the most infamous mind-control programs of the twentieth century.

Content note: This episode discusses psychiatric abuse, non-consensual medical experimentation, electroshock treatment, drugging, isolation, and psychological trauma.

🌱 PayYourRent.ca is an Indigenous-led grassroots initiative calling on settlers to engage in ongoing, voluntary financial redistribution in support of Indigenous land defenders, sovereignty, and community well-being.

This foundation supports urgent needs like housing, food security, legal defense, and cultural revitalization—all grounded in the principle that land back also means resource back.

If you live, work, or benefit from life on stolen land, consider learning more or making a monthly contribution at PayYourRent.ca.

Justice isn’t a moment—it’s a commitment.

 Your next creepy obsession starts here. 

✨ This episode is brought to you by Fable & Frame Creative ✨
Fable & Frame Creative offers Niagara Region portraits and at-home newborn sessions, capturing not just how life looks — but how it feels. Because your life isn’t ordinary. It’s a fable, and it deserves to be framed like one.

🦴 And don’t forget our boo-tiful friends at Back From the Dead Goods—resurrecting your wardrobe with creepy streetwear on Etsy & Poshmark.
👻 Use code CANADIANCREEPIES for 10% off!

🕯️ You can find new episodes of Down the Crooked Path every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
Canadian content airs right here on the Canadian Creepies feed—so stay tuned, and stay on the path.

Edited by Kyle McDonnell 

Send us a text, tell us your canadian creepy!

The closing of residential schools did not mean the end of Canada’s attempts to separate Indigenous children from their families, communities, and cultures. The system changed. The goal of assimilation remained.

In Part 03 of our series on the Sixties Scoop, we examine how changes to the Indian Act opened the door for provincial child welfare authorities to intervene on reserves, and how poverty created and perpetuated by colonial policies was frequently treated as evidence of parental neglect.

We look at the experience from both sides of the separation: parents who returned home to find their children gone, mothers whose newborns were taken from hospitals, and children who were adopted or fostered across Canada, the United States, and beyond, often growing up without access to their names, languages, families, or cultures.

Through survivor experiences, we explore the lasting consequences of this forced separation, including what researchers have described as a profound state of identity limbo: growing up disconnected from Indigenous community while never fully belonging in the white environments into which many children were placed.

But this story is also about reclamation.

We look at the ways survivors and Indigenous communities have worked to reconnect with family, culture, ceremony, community, and the land, restoring connections that government systems attempted to erase.

This episode, and the entire Sixties Scoop series, was researched by Christine Young.

Content note: This episode discusses colonialism, forced child apprehension, residential schools, racism, child abuse, family separation, suicide, mental health struggles, substance use, and intergenerational trauma.

🌱 PayYourRent.ca is an Indigenous-led grassroots initiative calling on settlers to engage in ongoing, voluntary financial redistribution in support of Indigenous land defenders, sovereignty, and community well-being.

This foundation supports urgent needs like housing, food security, legal defense, and cultural revitalization—all grounded in the principle that land back also means resource back.

If you live, work, or benefit from life on stolen land, consider learning more or making a monthly contribution at PayYourRent.ca.

Justice isn’t a moment—it’s a commitment.

Edited by Kyle McDonnell 

Send us a text, tell us your canadian creepy!

White supremacy doesn’t always announce itself with obvious symbols, slogans, or declarations. Sometimes it enters a relationship quietly: through jokes, conspiracy theories, changing language, increasingly extreme media, and a pattern of comments that becomes harder to ignore.

In this special solo bonus episode of Canadian Creepies, Valerie looks at some of the warning signs that a partner may be involved with or becoming influenced by white supremacist and extremist ideology, how radicalization can become normalized within relationships, and the manipulation tactics that can make those beliefs difficult to recognize.

This episode isn’t about labelling someone because of one bad opinion or uncomfortable conversation. It’s about recognizing patterns, trusting your instincts, and understanding when a difference of opinion has become something much more serious.

Content note: This episode discusses white supremacist ideology, extremist movements, online radicalization, abusive relationship dynamics, discrimination, and manipulation.

Edited by Kyle McDonnell 

Send us a text, tell us your canadian creepy!

In the 1850s, Georgina Pennee moved with her husband to Binstead Manor in Prince Edward Island, expecting to begin a new chapter of their lives. Instead, she found herself confronting something far more unsettling: the apparition of a woman carrying an infant through the halls of the manor.

Determined to understand what she was witnessing, Georgina began investigating the haunting, conducting what would become an unusually early paranormal investigation led by a woman. What she uncovered about the mysterious woman and child would reveal a disturbing story hidden within the manor’s past.

In this episode of Down the Crooked Path, we explore the haunting of Binstead Manor, Georgina Pennee’s investigation, and take a brief look at paranormal investigation groups across Canada.

🌱 PayYourRent.ca is an Indigenous-led grassroots initiative calling on settlers to engage in ongoing, voluntary financial redistribution in support of Indigenous land defenders, sovereignty, and community well-being.

This foundation supports urgent needs like housing, food security, legal defense, and cultural revitalization—all grounded in the principle that land back also means resource back.

If you live, work, or benefit from life on stolen land, consider learning more or making a monthly contribution at PayYourRent.ca.

Justice isn’t a moment—it’s a commitment.

 Your next creepy obsession starts here. 

✨ This episode is brought to you by Fable & Frame Creative ✨
Fable & Frame Creative offers Niagara Region portraits and at-home newborn sessions, capturing not just how life looks — but how it feels. Because your life isn’t ordinary. It’s a fable, and it deserves to be framed like one.

🦴 And don’t forget our boo-tiful friends at Back From the Dead Goods—resurrecting your wardrobe with creepy streetwear on Etsy & Poshmark.
👻 Use code CANADIANCREEPIES for 10% off!

🕯️ You can find new episodes of Down the Crooked Path every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
Canadian content airs right here on the Canadian Creepies feed—so stay tuned, and stay on the path.

Edited by Kyle McDonnell