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Montreal has been called a city of words, a city of design, a city of neighbourhoods, the city of Mary.

A few years ago Gilbert Rozon, founder of the Just for Laughs Festival, suggested it should rebrand itself as a city of creativity. Good slogans, all of them; nice phrases. But the more you look at the long and tangled history of our mountainous island, the more it seems clear that at heart, Montreal is a city of ghosts.

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There are the ghosts of Stanley Cup champions and political failures. There are the ghosts of business empires won and lost, of artists and writers in two languages and more. There are the ghosts of the St-Lawrence Iroquoians, the first known inhabitants of this island; they discovered Jacques Cartier sailing upstream in 1535, but three generations later, when Samuel de Champlain passed by, their fortified town on the mountain had vanished.

And then there are the other kinds of ghosts. The ones who baffle and excite us. The ones we fear. The ones people shy away from talking about in public, in case they are made to look ridiculous.