Located in Franklin, southwest of Montreal, the story of the now abandoned Dorea Institute is told by bits and pieces. Not that its story is marked by horrors (…or maybe it is?), but it is rather difficult to find accurate information on the Internet.

First of all, you should know that there isn’t a lack of stories told about this place. For the Ouija fans and Ghostbusters lovers, you'll probably be happy to learn that many believe that this place is haunted. However, not that I intend to destroy your illusions and hopes to see ghosts flying around your head, but during the four hours that we spent over there, we didn't feel or saw a thing.

In fact, the only thing we saw and felt, is the art puked on the walls by young graffiti artists. And just between you and me, they probably never studied grammar because this place was a paradise for misspelled words!

Anyway, back to the building’s history. In fact, I should probably call it a building complex because there are more than eleven buildings on this vast land. And that excludes the church destroyed by the ice storm of 1998.

So there are several buildings there: a high school, an elementary school, two dormitories for teenagers, and three buildings for children. One of those buildings served as a daycare center for children whose parents worked there. There is also a barn, a garage, a henhouse, many playgrounds, a hunting cabin and cottages. In short, it is a real small town in the middle of the woods, close to the U.S. border.

But the Dorea Institute is best known for the Duplessis orphans that were sent there. The Duplessis orphans were thousands of children who were falsely declared mentally unfit by religious organizations, so that these organizations would receive federal grants. In short, we are talking about a huge scam where the Catholic Church stole the government while abusing those kids mentally and physically, by raping, beating and torturing the thousands of boys and girls who were under their responsibility. And of course, those criminals never paid for their crimes.

Worst, the Church had the right, between 1942 and 1960, to sell the corpse of any unclaimed orphan to a medical school. Orphans have even said that some of their former fellow orphans were used as guinea pigs in medical experiments. In 2010, 300 to 400 orphans who were under the yoke of the Church were still alive. Fifty years ago, they were thousands.

To sum it up, the Dorea Institute, who was a non-psychiatric facility, is one of the listed institutions in the National Reconciliation Program for Duplessis Orphans that offers eligible victims a monetary compensation of $ 15,000. This program was implemented in 2007.