The Night of the Phantom Air Raid

Plus, the history of Toronto ghost stories, a talk about body snatchers and more...

Oct 14, 2024

Collage by me, based on a painting of Toronto in 1914 by Robert Ford Gagen (via the Toronto Public Library)

Toronto shook and rattled and roared. It was the dead of the night when it started. An ominous, threatening hum broke the quiet of the wintry December darkness, waking people from their sleep. They sat bolt upright in bed as they listened to the dreadful noise. Windows trembled. Picture frames vibrated on the walls. And the people of Toronto knew perfectly well what must be happening. This was 1914 — the first year of the First World War. That terrifying rumble could only mean one thing: the German air force was descending upon our city. Toronto must be under attack.

Canada was thousands of kilometres from the frontlines of Europe, but Toronto was still deeply transformed by the war. Battalions marched through our streets. Factories were turned over to weapons manufacturing. Soldiers fought mock battles in the Humber Valley. And as tens of thousands of Torontonians left home to join the fight, those who stayed behind lived in fear of what might happen here.

Rumours of spies and saboteurs ran rampant. Paranoia spread across the country, heightened by anti-German propaganda campaigns. In some cases, neighbour even turned on neighbour. Thousands of ordinary citizens were rounded up and shipped off to internment camps as "enemy aliens" — most of them Ukranian-Canadians. The Stanley Barracks, on the CNE grounds, were used as a processing station for them. And when a drunkenly belligerent veteran was thrown out of a café on Yonge Street, it sparked days of rioting. Since the business was Greek and people falsely believed Greece supported Germany, thousands of xenophobic rioters attacked Greek businesses throughout the downtown core. It was the biggest riot in our city's history.

Fearful eyes also turned to the sky. When the war broke out, it had only been five years since the first airplane flew above Canada. It was still a strange, new and unfamiliar technology. And while no one had ever flown across the Atlantic — that wouldn't happen until 1919, the year after the war ended — people here were still afraid of the German air force. The United States was neutral during the opening years of the war, leaving Canadians deeply afraid that Germany would be able to launch aerial missions from American soil. People worried that at any moment, the Imperial German Air Service might soar across the border to spy on — maybe even attack — Canadian cities.

Those fears were stoked by British diplomats stationed in the United States. They repeatedly made dramatic claims that attacks were imminent, including bombing raids. One even claimed there were eighty thousand German soldiers training in Buffalo and Niagara Falls in preparation for an invasion.

There was a tiny kernel of truth to the unease. The Germans did have some debates about the possibility of attacks on targets in Canada — the most bizarre suggestion involved dressing up 650,000 soldiers as cowboys — and one supporter made a failed attempt to blow up a bridge on the New Brunswick border. But none of the warnings ever proved to be true. No German airplanes ever flew raids over Canadian cities. And yet, that didn't stop people from believing they were seeing them.

Sociologist Robert Bartholomew, who studies cases of mass hysteria, wrote about those fears for the Canadian Military History journal back in 1998. His research found that even though there were no German planes flying through our skies, people still thought they saw them all over the place. Montreal. Quebec City. Hamilton. Niagara Falls. Decades before the UFO craze, it seems that any strange object in the sky was assumed to be a German pilot. Witnesses imagined they spotted them on reconnaissance missions, scouting railroads and canals and reservoirs, and secretly dropping off passengers with mysterious plans. Soldiers in London, Ontario could swear they saw a plane with a big spotlight pass above their barracks. In Windsor, hundreds watched a biplane soar through the air; those who used binoculars claimed they could even see the pilot. A factory in a town on the Ottawa River turned off all its lights after one reported sighting, scared they might be the target of an attack. When a group of unusual lights were spotted in the sky above Brockville, heading in the direction of Ottawa, the local police chief sent a telegram to the prime minister. The Parliament Buildings were kept dark for the next two nights and sharpshooters were stationed around Parliament Hill.

Sometimes, those tensions boiled over. Shots were fired more than once. A Canadian guard patrolling the border outside Sarnia shot down a German aircraft only to discover it was actually a pair of paper balloons. Guards at the Sault Ste. Marie Canal opened fire on a real airplane before realizing it was American. Soldiers had orders to shoot down any plane that came within fourteen miles of any wireless radio station. There were even calls to arm civilians against the phantom flyers.

Yonge & Richmond in 1914 (Toronto Public Library)

Toronto wasn't immune from the panic. One morning in October, just weeks after the war began, downtown traffic was thrown into chaos by a strange object in the sky. While some people stopped dead in their tracks, others dove for cover fearing it was a German air raid. Cars were forced to come to a sudden halt, stalling out as they avoided hitting distracted pedestrians. In the end, it proved to be yet another false alarm. The object was a just a weird kite. The incident was proof, according to The Toronto Daily Star, of "the nervous state into which even Toronto is thrown by the talk of war and of raiding aeroplanes."

The night of the threatening rumble came a few weeks later, on the third of December. It began around midnight and was heard for hours, all over the city, miles in every direction. The first to hear it seem to have been residents of Cabbagetown; four hours later, it was waking people from their sleep in the west end. "Half of Toronto," the Star reported, "sat up in bed and held its breath, listening to the Germans in aeroplanes flying about over the roof." Similarly worrying noises had been heard on and off since the war began, but on that night the fear reached new heights. "This morning the Star office was deluged with reports," the newspaper continued, "which included window rattling, purring noises and everything but bombs."

"I woke at four in the morning," one west end resident explained, "and heard the unmistakable 'chut-chuttering' of an aeroplane. There is no mistaking the noise, like a blind being drawn down — and never reaching the windowsill." People across Toronto must have had visions of biplanes soaring through the night, German pilots in their goggles peering down at the city below, or imagined the titanic shadows of enemy zeppelins flying between sleeping bank towers. The sounds continued until dawn drew near. "Toward five o'clock," according to the Star, "when the milk wagons commenced to rattle as usual … the noise died down."

Of course, there were no German airplanes above Toronto that night. So, the reporter looked to the waterfront for a more rational explanation. The true source of the racket, it seems, was a sound familiar to generations of Torontonians: the rumble of construction work.

"Probably our cyclone dredge," one engineer suggested. He was part of the team digging the Keating Channel, a new concrete mouth for the Don River. And not far away, the Polson Iron Works were active around the clock. "We have a Gantry Crane running all night," an engineer there explained. "It makes a noise just like an aeroplane… On a still night the noise would carry a long way over the city.… Our Gantry Crane would make a good impression of a Zeppelin all right."

And so, it seems that the vibrations felt around the city were nothing more than the ordinary sounds of a growing metropolis — mundane noises made terrifying by the state of the world. In his paper, Bartholomew calls the phantom air raids over Canada, "Classic examples of a collective delusion… Human perception is highly unreliable, and people are prone to interpreting objects in their environment [in ways] that reflect their mental outlook or world-view at the time."

That night would be far from the last hard night of the war. There were nearly four years of fighting left. Thousands of Torontonians would die in the trenches, leaving thousands of grieving families back home. But as that Friday morning dawned above the city at the end of that long and uneasy night, Toronto came to life as it always did. Streetcars began clattering through the streets. Businesses opened their doors. People headed to the office towers, to the factories, to the recruiting stations and the training camps. It didn't matter if everyone spent the night in fear of an air raid, there was work to done — and a war to win.

You can read Robert Bartholomew’s paper, “Phantom German Air Raids on Canada: War Hysteria in Quebec and Ontario during the First World War,” here.

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A Spooky New Walking Tour: The History of Toronto Ghost Stories!

Toronto has a long history of ghost stories. They’re connected to many of our most beloved old buildings and reflect some of the most dramatic events in our city’s past. They’ve also evolved over time, from the Victorian settlers who claimed there were no spirits haunting Canada to the séances that drew big crowds less than a century later. So, for this Halloween season, I’m creating a brand new walking tour filled with supernatural stories that will let us trace the evolving history of our city’s most haunting tales.

When: Saturday, October 26 at 5:30pm.

Where: Meet in the Grange Park — by the mansion on the north side at the back of the AGO. The tour will last about 1.5 to 2 hours and end near Yonge & Dundas.

Price: Pay what you like.

I’m Talking About Body Snatchers This Week!

“Back by popular demand and just in time to ring in the spooky season, Adam Bunch will present ‘The Body Snatchers of Toronto.’ Toronto's dead haven't always been able to rest in peace. There was a time when our city was plagued by graverobbers. As local medical schools developed a ravenous appetite for fresh bodies, grisly scenes played out under the cover of darkness. Join Adam to learn about how Victorian Torontonians were left horrified by reports of empty coffins and missing corpses.”

When: Thursday, October 17 at 7pm.

Where: Toronto’s First Post Office.

Price: $17.31 for members of The Town of York Historical Society; $22.63 for non-members.

LEARN MORE.

QUICK LINKS

The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…

SPIRIT GARDEN NEWS — A new Indigenous spirit garden has been unveiled in Nathan Phillips Square, serving as a reminder of the history of residential schools. One of the calls to action that came out of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission was to install a residential school monument in each capital city across Canada. The garden opened on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Read more.

SENSELESS DESTRUCTION NEWS — There’s been more heartbreaking news from Ontario Place since the last edition of the newsletter. The Ford government brought down hundreds of trees last week as they continue to turn much of the public park into a private megaspa. And we’ve learned more about their shady deal with Therme, too. Read more.

WE’LL APPARENTLY HAVE LESS TRAFFIC IS EVERYONE IS FORCED TO DRIVE NEWS — And while we’re taking about Doug Ford… With the provincial government taking aim at bike lanes, Jamie Bradburn wrote about Toronto’s original bike lane wars for TVO. Read more.

PIE-IN-THE-GROUND NEWS — And with Ford also also announcing his mega-budget dream of digging a tunnel beneath the 401, Jamie also shared a brief history of Toronto’s other “pie-in-the-ground” tunnel schemes. Read more.

VICTORIAN STARCHITECT NEWS — The Stuart Building was designed by E.J. Lennox, our city’s most celebrated Victorian architect, the same guy behind Casa Loma, Old City Hall and the King Edward Hotel. There is now a new plan for the building, which would see it become part of a 60-storey tower of student housing. Read more.

GHOST FIREHALL NEWS — The clock tower on Yonge Street just north of College has been a landmark for 150 years. Most recently associated with the St. Charles Tavern, an important hangout for the city’s LGBTQ+ communities beginning in the 1960s, the tower was originally built as part of a firehall back in the 1870s. Now, it has been preserved as part of a new condo development, and an echo of the firehall has been brought back to the streetscape with a glass rendering of the old facade. Jack Landau wrote about it for blogTO. Read more.

BRIDGE NEWS — I recently wrote about the loss of the Eastern Avenue Bridge, which has spanned the Don River for nearly a century. Shawn Micallef composed an ode to the bridge for The Toronto Star, “one of the city’s last great ruins.” Read more.

WEIRD NAME NEWS — Not Smooth Steven on YouTube shares the history behind some of the city’s strangest place names. Watch it.

DOLLHOUSE NEWS — The Leslieville Dollhouse is no more… but said goodbye in style. The new owner of the kitschy east end icon threw a farewell shindig, allowing neighbours to take home one of the dolls in return for a donation to charity. Global News was there to report on it. Watch it.

TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS

HURRICANE HAZEL FLOOD IN RETROSPECT

October 15 — 7pm — Lambton House – Heritage York

Hurricane Hazel flood in retrospect, the seventieth anniversary at Lambton House, a 1954 Hazel search and rescue site. Heritage York’s 2004 video with interviews with first responders at 7pm. Speaker Rhianydd Phillips (Communications Coordinator, Flood, Risk Management Engineering Services) at 8pm to talk about “Hurricane Hazel and the Evolution of Ontario’s Flood Forecasting & Warning Program: 70 Years of Progress.”

The Toronto Time Traveller