A mystery of the most creepy and dark nature — there is good story fodder here for a very dark book…

 

Could it be true?

 

Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836)

(The Public Domain Review)

 

Awful disclosures of Maria Monk, as exhibited in a narrative of her sufferings during a residence of five years as a novice, and two years as a black nun, in the Hôtel Dieu nunnery at Montreal. By Maria Monk; in London.

 

“In the prevailing anti-Catholic atmosphere of early-nineteenth-century America, and fresh after the Ursuline Convent riots of August 1834 in Massachusetts (in which a convent of the Roman Catholic Ursuline nuns burned down by the hands of a Protestant mob), the publication of Maria Monk’s revelations of her time at the Hôtel-Dieu convent in Montreal became a sensation. With nuns forced to engage in sexual acts with priests and being locked in the cellar as a punishment for disobeying, the story had similarities to the popular Gothic novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Maria also tells of how any babies that were born as a result of these liaisons were immediately baptized, strangled, and buried under the convent. It was from this fate that she wanted to save her unborn child which led her to escape and consequently publish her exposé.

 

Although the preface claims the events and persons described to be real, after the initial sensation died down some began to question the veracity of Maria’s tale. American journalist William L. Stone traveled to Montreal and visited the convent, later writing that the descriptions found in Maria’s book bore no resemblance to the actual building…”

 

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