Ep. 59 - Allen Memorial Institute Mind Control Atrocities

We have shared on previous podcasts that there were asylums that had sterilized patients without their knowledge and without their consent. Now, ratchet that up to doing mind-altering experiments on these patients without their knowledge or consent. That is the Allan Memorial Institute. This building had once been a home, but for a time it was like a prison. The atrocities that occurred here have left behind an immense amount of spiritual residue and this nearly always leads to paranormal activity. 

The Allan Memorial Institute started off as the Ravenscrag Mansion. The mansion sits perched on the slopes of Mount Royal and was built by Sir Hugh Allan in 1863. Allan was a Scotsman who had made much of his money in banking and shipping. At one time, his business controlled 12% of the ocean-going trade for Montreal. He purchased 14 acres on Mount Royal and hired architect Victor Roy of William Spier & Son to design the mansion, which was in the Italianate style. Allan gave his home the name Ravenscrag Architect John William Hopkins added reception rooms, a ballroom and a greenhouse in 1865. When completed, the mansion had all the amenities including a water tank built above the residence, in the mountain, that supplied water through all three stories. There was hot water and gas lighting. An Italian painter was hired to paint murals in the 34-room house and Montreal sculptors created the Carrara marble fireplace mantel in the living room. The property also had stables and a gate house. A billiards room would later be moved to another space by the ballroom and the old room turned into a library. Some of the murals were covered over by bookcases and rediscovered in 1993. Carved decorations were fashioned in all the rooms and most of them feature mascarons (mass kuh ron) sticking out their tongues as a way to tease or scare evil spirits. Mascarons are face ornaments. 

Sir Hugh Allan died in 1882 and Ravenscrag passed to his son Hugh Montagu Allan. Allan Jr. knew how to throw a party and he would host balls, one of which was called the social event of the season. A hospital was set to be built next to Ravenscrag and Allan Jr. wasn't happy about that prospect saying, that "the idea was not a very nice one to have a hospital next to a private house. [...] If a more suitable site could be chosen, I should doubtless prefer it." During the time he owned the mansion, Allan Jr. added another wing, enlarged the stables and rebuilt the conservatory. A prince would be a guest here, as well as the brother of the Emperor of Japan. When World War II broke out Hugh Montagu and his wife left the mansion and offered it to the Royal Victoria Hospital. In 1943, the hospital decided to transform the mansion into a psychiatry department as Canada had never had anything like that before. The mansion was renamed the Allan Memorial Institute in honor of the Allan family. The institute opened its doors on July 12, 1944. The first director would be Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and a place that was once a warn and welcoming home that hosted balls everyone talked about, became a place of horrors and atrocities. 

Donald Euan Cameron was born in Scotland in 1901 and he attended both the University of Glasgow and the University of London on his way to earning his doctorate in psychological medicine. His career started at the Royal Mental Hospital in Glasgow. Cameron would eventually end up at McGill University in Montreal in 1943. He was a professor of psychiatry and chairman of the psychology department at the university and also the director of the Allen Memorial Hospital. To give you listeners an idea of what Cameron would bring to the hospital, let me just say, MK Ultra. He was the man behind the Montreal Experiments, which were experiments using various types of brainwashing. Cameron would eventually work with the CIA in regards to MK Ultra Subproject 68, but it is uncertain that he actually knew that some of the money funding him came from the CIA. Cameron's main contribution to this research was in something he called "psychic driving." What would prove to be a type of torture, started in a place of wanting to help cure schizophrenia. Cameron believed this form of mental illness was caused by repressed memories. The CIA would try to use these techniques of Cameron as a type of military torture. These experiments took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s and were not approved by an institutional review board at the university. Patients had not consented either. 

This doctor honestly believed that mental illness was contagious. Cameron would write that mental illness was transmitted generationally and thus we had to be careful who we allowed to marry and procreate. He felt that the mentally ill should be quarantined. Cameron believed the only cure for mental illness was to eliminate its "carriers" from society altogether. Otherwise people would begin to produce symptoms of mental illness after being around someone with it. Dr. Cameron used sensory isolation and depatterning to do something he coined as psychic driving. Sensory isolation is pretty self-explanatory. Depatterning was his theory that people's patterns of behavior could be erased and replaced. All he had to do was erase memories and the personality. Dr. Cameron was getting a god-complex, believing that he could break down a person's personality and then reconstruct it. This would allow him to control the mind and thus, the person. He was interested in studying the effects of LSD on the brain, as well as hypnosis, to see how effective they were in depatterning. He would hypnotize patients and then ask them to perform certain tasks, revealing that he could make them do whatever he wanted. The ultimate goal was to psychic drive a patient. This form of psychotherapy was successful in breaking down the patients personality and then reconstructing it. Powerful drugs were used to basically put patients in a coma for up to 30 days and these people would be forced to listen to pre-recorded messages on a loop for as many as sixteen hours a day. The hope was to implant these messages in their brain and give them new personalities. This kind of stuff should chill you if anyone offers to do Neuro-Linguistic Programming on you. You know, like Tony Robbins stuff. Same kind of deal.

To give you an idea of what this guy was willing to do, here is an excerpt from Jordan Torbay's 2023 paper "The Work of Donald Ewen Cameron: from psychic driving to MK Ultra": "This 1934 study is a prime example of how ethics can be neglected when researchers are set on finding answers. Being exposed to 40º C heat for an hour could put a person at risk of heat exhaustion, and it would certainly not be pleasant to endure. Another paper published by Cameron (1931) examined the effects of dehydration on epileptic patients. They were put on a low-water diet where they were allowed as little as 600 ml of water per day, and even given diuretics to decrease water retention. Results showed no significant differences in number of seizures between the low-water group and the control group. However, it was observed that patients would become so desperate for water that they would steal food and drink, even attempting to drink out of flower vases and consume snow from windowsills. Patients experienced severe weight loss and acidosis from increased blood urea nitrogen. One patient, known only as ‘Patient 11’, died during the experiment."

Dr. Cameron started his experiments in mind-control at The Allan with 22 paid student volunteers who were put in lighted cubicles that had these narrow beds. They were given opaque goggles to wear and their arms were put in these cardboard handcuffs and they would lie down with their heads embedded into a U-shaped foam pillow that limited audio stimulation. This was to give them sensory deprivations and most of the students stopped after a couple of hours. These proved to be successful to the doctor as the students seemed to have parts of their identity broken. Dr. Cameron decided to move onto his next phase, which would require patients who didn't have the free will to stop or to leave. He basically needed prisoners and that is what these patients at The Allan would become. The first patients he chose were those with lesser mental issues, people with a little anxiety or postpartum depression. Cameron would use a variety of things to accomplish his goals including a combination of drugs like barbiturates, hypnosis, and electroshock therapy. He convinced the patients that he was helping them and many figured he wouldn't do anything to hurt them, right? Many of the patients were never the same again. They suffered from severe memory loss and cognitive deficits and some even claimed to develop multiple personalities.  

Val Orlikow was one of the patients at The Allan because she had been suffering from Depression in the 1950s after giving birth. After arriving, she was given LSD. At the time, she didn't know what LSD was, but a psychiatric nurse friend of hers checked into it with a psychiatric doctor and he had said not to take it because it caused poisonous psychosis. Val had been willing to take it because she knew Dr. Cameron was well-respected and she figured he wouldn't do anything to harm her. After the first shot, she realized that the psychiatric doctor had been right. She described feeling like her bones were melting and she said, "I just wanted to scream that I wanted to get out of there and I saw the squirrels outside and I thought, 'They're not the squirrels, I'm the squirrel. I'm in this cage and I can't get out and I started to throw myself from side to side in the room and I couldn't write. They had given me a pencil and paper and asked me to write down some things, but I couldn't write. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't focus." Val also shared a story about a 30-year-old man who was being treated with psychic driving with these tapes that would play under his pillow at night as some kind of sleep therapy and one day he was walking around smiling and saying goodbye to everybody and then he climbed to the roof and jumped off. When she finally got back home, she was suicidal and her Depression was even worse. She eventually found out what happened to her because her husband became a member of Parliament.

Another woman named Janice went through the same treatment for the same thing, taking up to 40 pills a day. When she tried to stay home after going on a weekend pass, the Institute threatened to send the police to bring her back. She has been left with lifelong pieces of amnesia, an inability to concentrate and weeklong migraine headaches. Every patient interview I listened to talked about how much the patients feared Dr. Cameron. Several patients would be restrained and forced to take medications and another female patient said that she had been frustrated that no one would intervene for them. You know, shouldn't the government be helping them? Then she later discovered that the Canadian government and American government were condoning and funding the research and experiments. 

Another patient who came to the Institute in the 1960s for treatment for postpartum depression was Esther Schrier. The CBC podcast "Brainwashed" shared details of her treatment through her son Lloyd Schrier in 2020, "'She had her 30th and last day of sleep on March 24th,' Schrier said as he read from the 1960 hospital record. 'They gave her all the drugs … about four or five barbiturates and amphetamines at a time." Esther Schrier received electroshock therapy, massive amounts of drugs and so-called psychiatric treatments that sound as if they were lifted from the pages of George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four." Making this narrative more startling is the fact that Esther was pregnant with Lloyd at the time of her treatment.

A man named Robert had been sent to The Allan when he was 18-years-old. They put him on sleep treatments, which entailed keeping him asleep for up to 23 days. During this sleeping time, he was administered electro-shock therapy and they would play tapes with subliminal messages. Some of these messages said that he had killed his mother. He was given LSD one time, over and over, and told to go back and back in his memories and he felt like he went back to when he was born. He ended up with severe Depression and his reason for going to the hospital was severe leg pains. A doctor had thought that the pains were all in his head. 

As a side note, because I imagine many of you are asking the same question as to where the government and these hospitals were getting all this LSD, American pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly was paid by the CIA around $400,000 to make and supply the drug for the MK Ultra Subprojects. Dr. Cameron served as the director at the Institute for 21 years. He retired in 1964 and went to Albany to work at the Albany Medical School. He died three years later from a heart attack. A study was commissioned in 1967 at the Institute by Dr. Robert A. Cleghorn, the man who became director after Dr. Cameron. We imagine it was because he was troubled by what he had heard about these experiments. This study found that many of the tested patients suffered permanent amnesia, incontinence, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and even thinking their interrogators were their parents. Many of these victims didn't even realize or discover what had been done to them for a couple of decades. And the fight for compensation has been difficult as Canada has never provided a list of the victims. No government has admitted liability. Fortunately, some victims or their families have received some payments. 

Despite the nightmares of its past, the Allan Memorial Institute remains open today as a psychiatric facility. But there are no beds here anymore. Everything is through out-patient care. There can be no doubt that ultimately, MK Ultra proved to be very successful in proving torture techniques to be effective. Many of the methods used to "cure" the mentally ill, have been used at places like Guantánamo Bay. A documentary named "Eminent Monsters: A Manual for Modern Torture" was produced in 2020 revealing the extent to which these experiments conducted by Dr. Cameron have continued to this day. It is no wonder that rumors persist that the Allan Memorial Institute is haunted. 

One of the reasons for hauntings is that people died here. A victim named Ann Diamond believed there were unmarked graves in the forested area behind the Allan Memorial Institute. The Haunted Montreal blog share that she wrote, "These unmarked graves are a big secret. There has been no physical proof that kids are buried there but…some would have been First Nations kids in Cameron’s experiments between 1953 and 1964. Others came from broken homes, or were orphans…Obviously, they’re not laid out to attract attention but we think 17-25 children were buried there… Officially, though, it never happened…. Many, many records were destroyed however, and McGill has been very busy hiding the evidence and making sure witnesses and survivors remain silent." Of course, some suggest these are ramblings of a mind that has been tortured, so there is no proof of graves being there. 

The area were the unmarked graves could be has been visited by psychics and paranormal investigators and they have picked up on the childlike energy and captured EVPs of children crying, even sometimes hearing that as disembodied crying. The tower of Ravenscrag overlooks the McGill campus and there are those who claim to see a mysterious light emanating from it. Tortured, disembodied voices have been heard in the hallways of the Institute. The morgue is a place that janitorial staff have always been reluctant to clean. 

I myself will never stop been amazed at the cruelty that one human can inflict on another. Particularly those in a place of trust. Dr. Cameron used his glowing reputation to shield himself with a god-like impervious shell that drove staff and patients to do what he want. And the CIA loved the results. It is no wonder we have spirit residue left behind and I imagine I could find reams of personal paranormal stories if only they weren't tamped down in some way. I have no doubt that the Allan Memorial Institute is haunted. What do you think?