My grandfather left me 40 hours of cassette recordings before he died. I've been transcribing them. This is what he told me about the Montreal Experiment.

My grandfather Jim died last March at nintey-two years old, in a care home outside of Sudbury, Ontario. He had been non-verbal for the last two years of his life. Before that, he talked constantly — but only to a cassette recorder he kept on his nightstand. The nurses thought it was dementia. They let him do it because it kept him calm.

He left me thirty-nine cassette tapes and a note that read: \*"Don't play these until I'm in the ground. Then play every one. You deserve to know what your family came from."\*

My grandfather served in Korea. He told us that much growing up. He never said more. When I was twelve I asked him if he'd killed anyone and he looked at me for a very long time before he said, "That's not the part that stayed with me."

I didn't understand that until tape seven.

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The early tapes are ordinary — childhood in Timmins, his mother's cooking, the smell of the mill. Then Korea in fragments. Cold so permanent it stopped feeling like cold and became the baseline state of the universe. He talks about a friend named Réal who stepped on something in the dark and was just gone, and how the worst part wasn't the noise but the silence immediately after, which lasted about two seconds and felt like a year.

Tape six ends mid-sentence. Tape seven begins with him already crying.

I'm going to transcribe what I can. I've cleaned up some of the audio degradation but I've kept his phrasing exactly.

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\> "When they approached us it was 1953.They didn't say CIA. They didn't say government. They said McGill University, which was true enough that you didn't ask more questions. McGill was — you have to understand — McGill was \*serious\*. It wasn't some back-alley thing. It was a hospital. It was a man in a suit who used the word 'pioneering.' They gave us a paper to sign and there was a paragraph about 'mild disorientation' and 'experimental therapeutic techniques' and we signed because we were veterans and we had been trained our entire adult lives to trust the chain and besides, they were paying forty dollars a week and I had a daughter."

The project he describes — and I've since confirmed much of this is real, not something Jim invented — was run out of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. The doctor in charge, whom Jim calls "the Professor," was a real person. I won't use his name here. He had been president of psychiatric associations in multiple countries. He had a good reputation. He believed, with complete sincerity, that the human mind could be erased and rebuilt — like formatting a hard drive and installing better software. He called it "depatterning."

He was funded in part by the Canadian government and in part by the CIA.

This is not a conspiracy. It is documented. It is in the public record. The Canadian government settled lawsuits in the 1990s and admitted knowledge. I want you to understand that before you read the rest, because the horror here is not that it was hidden. The horror is that it wasn't, really. The horror is that it happened inside a hospital, to people who were told it was medicine.

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\> "The first week was pills. They called it 'sleep therapy.' You slept. That's all. But it wasn't natural sleep, it was pharmaceutical sleep, it was a kind of thickness that pressed you down and you couldn't always tell if you were awake or not. I remember lying in that bed thinking: I should be able to tell. I should be able to tell if I'm awake. And I couldn't. That was the first thing they took. Not memories. Not personality. Just — the ability to know which side of the line you were on."

Jim was not the only one. He describes roughly fifteen to twenty men on his ward at any time, some military, some civilians who had been referred for depression or anxiety or alcoholism. They were told they were receiving "accelerated treatment." Their families were told the same.

\> "There was a man across from me, middle-aged, a schoolteacher from somewhere in the Townships. He'd been brought in for what his wife called 'nervous exhaustion.' By the third week he didn't know his own name. I mean that literally. You'd say, 'Hey, what's your name,' and he would think about it — you could watch him think about it, you could watch him searching for it the way you search for a word in a foreign language — and he would say whatever name came out. Different each time. He wasn't lying. He just didn't know. And the nurses would write it down and nod and move on to the next bed."

The sleep therapy was followed by what Jim calls "the tape." This is real. It's called psychic driving. The Professor believed that a mind stripped down by sleep deprivation and drugs would be receptive to new patterns. They would play a looped audio recording — a message, sometimes therapeutic, sometimes just noise — for sixteen to twenty hours a day through a speaker beside the patient's head, or in some cases a pillow speaker pressed against the ear. The message could be the same sentence repeated thousands of times.

Jim's tape, he says, was his own voice.

\> "They had recorded me during intake. An interview, they said. Very friendly, very normal. 'Tell us about your childhood. Tell us about Korea. Tell us about what bothers you.' And I told them. And then they played it back to me for — I don't know how long. Days? It's hard to reconstruct. My own voice, my own words, but cut and rearranged so that the meaning was wrong. My voice saying things I hadn't said in the order I hadn't said them. It's very specific, what that does to you. It's not that you believe the tape. It's that you stop trusting your own voice as a reference point. You hear yourself say something that you know you didn't say, but it sounds exactly like you, and eventually the category of 'things I have said' starts to dissolve. You start to think: maybe. Maybe I did say that. Maybe I did feel that. Maybe this is who I am."

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Tape nine is the one that took me three days to get through.

It's not the worst in terms of what happens to Jim. It's the worst because of what he describes seeing happen to others. He talks slowly on this tape. Long pauses. At one point there is ten minutes of silence and I thought the tape had run out, but then he begins again.

\> "There was a boy — I say boy, he was maybe twenty-two — who had been brought in from somewhere up north. I want to say he was Cree. He didn't speak much English and the nurses spoke no French and certainly no Cree and so nobody talked to him. He had been referred through the Indian Affairs system. That's what they called it. Indian Affairs. He was categorized as 'resistant to integration' which I later understood was a way of saying he kept running away from the residential school system. He was twenty-two years old and he was in that hospital because the government had a file on him that said he was resistant to integration.

\>

\> I am telling you this because I want you to understand that the experiment was not unusual. The experiment was just a more concentrated version of what Canada had been doing for decades. The idea that a person's interior — their language, their memory, their sense of who they were — could be treated as a problem to be corrected. They had been practicing that on children for years. We were just the next iteration."

He doesn't say what happened to the boy. He says he doesn't let himself remember that part. He says there are specific things he put somewhere in his mind and bricked over and he is not going to unbrick them at nintey two years old because some things you survive by choosing not to survive them fully, and he hopes I'll understand.

I understand.

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The electroconvulsive therapy — ECT — is described on tapes ten and eleven. I'll keep this brief because I can't read it back without my hands shaking and I've already transcribed it twice.

What was done at the Allan Memorial was not standard ECT. Standard ECT, even at that time, involved calibrated doses. What the Professor used was called "Page-Russell," a method of multiple rapid shocks in a single session. Patients received it while in prolonged sleep states. Patients received it without informed consent, or with consent obtained in altered states, or with consent forms signed by family members who had been told it was "electroshock therapy to assist with the new treatment protocol" and who had no framework to understand what that meant.

\> "You don't feel it in the moment. They make sure of that. You feel it in the days after, which is: you don't feel anything in the days after. There is a word for what you are and I'll use it plainly. You are empty. You are a room someone has left. The furniture is still there — you can still dress yourself, you can still eat — but no one is home. And the interesting thing, the thing that makes it hard to explain, is that you're not unhappy. You're not in pain. You're just — absent. You understand intellectually that you existed before this room, that there was something in here before, but you cannot access any of it, and the absence doesn't hurt because the thing that would feel the hurt is exactly what's gone."

He came back. Slowly. Not completely. He describes the return of memory as unreliable — certain years of his life before the experiment are simply missing, not fuzzy but absent, like chapters torn from a book. He says he doesn't know if some of what he remembers from before is real or constructed in the years after, assembled from photographs and other people's stories.

"I have a daughter," he says on tape thirteen. "I cannot remember the first time I held her. I have been told it happened. I believe it happened. I have looked at photographs of it happening. But I do not remember it. They took that from me. A man in a good suit in a well-funded hospital in Montreal took that from me and called it medicine and the government paid for it and then when people started asking questions, the government paid out and apologized in very careful legal language that did not include the word 'sorry' and that was the end of it. That was the whole consequence."

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Tape twenty-three is the one I think about most.

Jim has moved off the experiment by this point and he's talking about afterward — decades of afterward, the rest of his life. He got out of the program in 1959. He was told he had completed treatment. He was given a small sum and a form to sign acknowledging he had "received services." He signed it.

\> "What I want you to understand is that nobody who did this to us was a monster. That's the thing I've had years to think about and that's what I keep coming back to. The Professor was not a monster. He genuinely believed he was helping. He wrote papers about it. He received awards for it. The bureaucrats who approved the funding were not monsters. The nurses were not monsters. The CIA handlers were not monsters, or if they were, their monstrousness wasn't required for this particular project — this project ran just fine on ordinary ambition and ordinary carelessness and the ordinary human tendency to treat some people as more interruptible than others.

\>

\> That's what I want you to take from this. Not that a bad man did bad things. Bad men doing bad things is a story with an ending. What I'm describing doesn't have an ending. What I'm describing is what institutions do when they are left alone with people nobody is watching. And the people nobody is watching are always the same people. Always. You could draw a straight line from the residential schools to that hospital ward and it would not be a complicated line to draw. It would be a very short, very straight line."

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He talks, on tapes about the years that followed. The silences at dinner that his wife eventually stopped trying to fill. The way he would wake at 3am certain that a sound was repeating — certain enough that he'd get up and walk the house room by room, checking — and find nothing. The years he spent not drinking and the years he spent drinking. His daughter growing up and him watching it the way you watch something through a window.

\> "The worst thing they did was not the sleep or the shocks or the tape. The worst thing was subtler than that. What they actually took was the sense of continuous self. The sense that the person who woke up this morning is the same person who went to bed last night is the same person who was ten years old in Timmins. Most people have that without thinking about it. It runs in the background like a heartbeat. They disrupted mine and it never fully came back, and the practical consequence of that is that you are always slightly a stranger to your own life. You watch yourself do things. You watch yourself love people. You know you love them. But there is a pane of glass."

He describes seeing a television documentary in the 1980s that vaguely referenced the experiments and sitting in his armchair and watching it and not feeling anger. He'd expected anger. He'd been waiting for anger for all those years.

\> "I felt recognition. That's all. I felt the way you feel when someone describes a place you've been. Oh, yes. That's the place. I've been to that place. And then the news moved on to something else and I turned it off and I went to bed."

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The last tape — tape thirty-nine — is fourteen minutes long. Jim sounds different on it. Quieter. The care home sounds louder; I can hear the PA system in the background calling a name I don't recognize.

He doesn't talk about the experiment on this tape. He talks about a creek near Timmins where he used to fish as a child with his father, and what it smelled like in June when the ice had finished going out. He describes it for about eight minutes in very specific detail. The colour of certain rocks. The exact way his father stood. The cold of the water up to his shins.

Then he says: "I kept this one. They couldn't get to this one. I don't know why this one made it when other things didn't. Maybe it was too small for them to see. Maybe they were only looking for the big things."

Then the tape ends.

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\*\*EDIT — 6 hours after posting:\*\*

Several people have asked for sources on the historical elements. The Allan Memorial Institute experiments are real and well-documented. They are part of the broader CIA project known as MKULTRA, subproject 68. Dr. Ewen Cameron ran the program. The Canadian government was a co-funder. A 1977 US Senate inquiry examined the program. The Canadian government settled civil suits in 1994. Survivors and descendants have continued to seek fuller acknowledgment. This is public record. What Jim added — his own experience, what he witnessed, what it cost him over 70 years — that part belongs to him. I am putting it here because he asked me to put it somewhere. Because he said: don't let it be a footnote.

\*\*EDIT 2 —

To everyone saying "you should go to the media" — I appreciate it. I'm talking to someone. I don't know what I want from this yet. Mostly I wanted people to know his name was Jim, and he fished in a creek near Timmins when he was a boy, and someone tried very hard to take that from him, and they almost did, but not quite.