Where will the ghosts go if their old haven is destroyed? Will they stay in their old place or move to neighboring houses? Residents of the city of St. John's on the Canadian island of Newfoundland will soon know the answer to this question.
The abandoned orphanage The Belvedere Orphanage, built in the 1850s, recently completely burned down, and according to local rumors, several ghosts of the tortured children lived there.
The building of The Belvedere Orphanage was empty before the fire for several decades. After the fire, the building was so badly damaged that it half collapsed, so it was decided to demolish the building completely. It is curious that the fire happened early in the morning and the cause of the fire was not reported in the press, it was only said that an investigation was underway.
Fire.
The fire broke out in April 2017 and demolition work was suspended several times due to funding problems. By this day, little is left of the former orphanage, but the house seems to continue to "resist" the destruction and it will not be completely demolished yet.
The orphanage building was the third oldest mansion in the city. In 1859, the Sisters of Mercy nuns purchased the building and set up an orphanage for girls. The orphanage quickly replenished with children and in 1885 the building was expanded to become larger.
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The orphanage was closed in 1967 after the overthrow of the Duplessis regime, and in the 90s, information appeared in the Canadian press that children were tortured and raped within its walls. This was the case in many Canadian orphanages of the era, and victims of abuse have gone down in history as the "Duplessis Orphans."
In addition to sexual abuse, children were subjected to inhuman experiments, new medicines were tested on them, they were lobotomized, used as free labor, and so on.
Children died in dozens and hundreds, and no one worried about them. Corpses were most often buried in unmarked graves near the orphanage. In 1999, a mass grave was discovered near one of the hospitals for "sick" children, in which the remains of more than two thousand people were buried.
After the closure of the shelter, the Belvedere Junior High School was established in its building. Nun Lorraine Michael worked in this school in 1971-1979 (in 1979 the school was closed) and after the fire she told reporters about the ghosts that lived in the building of the former orphanage.
According to her, the sound of someone's footsteps was constantly heard in the building, especially on the upper floor, while there was no one there. The doors in the classrooms opened and closed by themselves, and the employees of the institution were sometimes afraid to walk around the rooms alone.
After the fire and the destruction of the building, the souls of innocent children who died may finally find peace, or maybe a new one will be built on the site of this building and they will move into it.