[URBAN NOTE] "An Empress Hotel Mystery"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn features an article describing a mysterious death in th Empress Hotel, a hotel that once existed on 335 Yonge Street.

On the evening of October 17, 1896, a room was booked by a man who signed the register under the name George Hall. The next morning, Hall discovered he was paralyzed on the right side of his body, which left him unable to leave his room. A physician was called in, but when he inquired as to details regarding the patient's family, Hall refused to answer any personal questions. Hall was soon transported to Toronto General Hospital, where he continued to rebuff anyone who pried into his background or questioned his activities prior to his sudden incapacitation. By October 20, the mysterious patient piqued the curiosity of city newspapers, who guessed that Hall may have been a lawyer from Sundridge. As for what might have caused Hall’s paralysis, the World cited a Dr. Rennie, who felt it may have been an apoplectic fit.

Over the next two days, Hall’s past slowly emerged. He was a thirty-four-year-old lawyer who had last practiced in the north, but in Parry Sound, not Sundridge. And his name wasn’t Hall but Wall—Guret S. Wall—whose legal career included stints with two Toronto firms (including one whose partners once included Sir John A. Macdonald) and a junior partnership in the practice of Parks and Wall. His mother had passed away in Smiths Falls two years earlier and left him with some property. What happened to Wall after her death was left vague in the newspaper accounts; a front page story in the Star indicated that his life was "rather eventful" and that he "first adopted the name George Hall to prevent his friends from knowing of his whereabouts."

But any old friends had little time to visit Wall. The night his identity was published, he passed away due to what the Telegram termed as an "acute congestion of both kidneys." No further follow-ups on Wall appeared in the papers, which leaves many unanswered questions. Why was his life so "eventful" that he decided to take on a new identity? What would have caused him to remain so tight-lipped about his past? Debauchery? Debts? Fraud? Murder? Social deviancy? Was his sudden paralysis a bad stroke of luck, the result of hard living, or caused by nefarious means?

Myself, I suspect it was suicide through some sort of long-enduring poison, and perhaps that he checked himself in under a false name so as to (mercifully?) leave people thinking he was still alive while he relieved himself of his life. This surmise leaves entirely untouched the question of why he did it.