Nightmare on Elm Street

For the past month, a lone protester has been standing watch just outside the wooded patch near the entrance to Marian Hall, a privately run senior's residence on Elm Street in Beaconsfield.

Deborah Hughes, who said she lived at Marian Hall from 1970 to 1976 when it used to be a protection school for young girls, is a very quiet protester. There are no constant chants through a megaphone and marches up and down Elm.

Instead, a large tarp is mounted on a makeshift clothesline, "Marion Hall-my nightmare," scrawled over it, along with photocopies of various newspaper clippings from the 1970s covering controversies and reforms surrounding juvenile social service centres at the time.

"I am trying to protest against Marian Hall for the abuse I received there," Hughes told The Chronicle during an interview.

According to her, these alleged abuses included being picked on and teased. "(Staff members) didn't give me my shower stuff," she said, instead choosing to tease her with it. "They would kick you, they'd push you, they'd pull your hair," she added.

Hughes also bemoaned the opportunities teenagers there lacked. "There really was nothing to do," she said. "You could get a pack of cards if you could find all the cards," she said with a laugh.

"I never saw the outside," she added, stating teenagers were locked inside the hall 24 hours a day.

Among other things, that led to self-mutilation for some, according to Hughes, including her. She pointed to thin knife scars on her elbows and wrists as proof.

At least some of Hughes' testimony is backed up by a report submit in December 1975 to the provincial Ministry of Social Services at the time, which has since then folded in with the Health Ministry.

The report was written by a committee headed by Manuel Batshaw, after whom the current social services organization for English youth in Quebec is named. It recommended a series of reforms to youth services in Quebec after visiting several different centres, including Marian Hall.

On June 21, 1975, Batshaw and another committee member visited the hall and met with officials there. "Everyone has the feeling that there is not enough money for even basic needs," the report reads, highlighting how there was a car for trips, but no budget for anybody to drive it.

The report also claims that from January to April 1975, five fires, 19 self-mutilations, and 17 "attacks on staff" took place, though these are not described in more detail.

"We did abuse (the staff)," Hughes admit, but she said this amounted to sometimes locking up staff in the living room and then attempting to run away.

Hughes said she and several other girls have tried to run away over the course of the years. "I ended up turning myself in," she said, being unable to live on her own outside.

Hughes also said she vaguely recalled one girl dying while attempting to run. The report confirms this. "One girl was killed while on a run," it reads, adding "many" ran away, with six never returning, nine being arrested, and the rest returning "after a few days."

Hughes seems to think those who ran Marian Hall are still responsible for it today, pointing to a group called St. Patrick's Montreal Orphanage. Nobody The Chronicle contacted was able to even confirm anybody involved in administration in the 70s is still alive, much less actively involved in running it.

The hall closed down after the Batshaw report, re-opening in 1978 as a seniors' residence.

William H. Wilson, who sits on its administrative council as president, said nobody on the council, including him, were around at the time. "I'm old, but I'm not that old," he said with a laugh, when asked if he was part of the hall's council in the seventies.

Wilson added that he heard Hughes had changed her story at one point. According to him, she first claimed she was protesting against Batshaw, until she was told the place she was in front of was Marian Hall.

The building's current manager, Jude Chen, said he has worked there for 15 years, never hearing of any other trouble stories from the hall's past days.

"To my knowledge, there is none," he said, asked if anybody from an older administrative council is still around.

According to the Batshaw report, day to day operations at Marian Hall were run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, an English Catholic group, up to 1972. Afterward, "the nuns were replaced by child-care workers."

A member of the Sisters who claimed she worked at Marian Hall at the time spoke to The Chronicle on condition of anonymity. "We left there in '72," she confirmed, but denied knowledge of any abuse. "It certainly was not our philosophy," she said. She seemed sceptical that anybody could have escaped. "If I remember the building, it would have been a very difficult thing to do," she said.

And whereas copies of old bylaws for Marian Hall dating from 1962 indicate an indirect tie to the Roman Catholic Church, this too was shot down.

"The affairs of the corporation shall be managed by a board of directors, consisting of 10, one of whom shall be the Ecclesiastic exercising the office of Roman Catholic Bishop of the Archdiocese of Montreal or his representative who shall be appointed and replaced at will by the said Ecclesiastic," the bylaw reads.

However, a spokesperson for the Roman Catholic Church, Eric Durocher, said that does not mean the church was tied to the board. "The Diocese did not tell religious communities how to run their affairs," he said.

Frequently, he added, organizations that used to have strong church involvement and would become secular kept a member of the church on its board of directors out of respect for tradition.