Just wanted to comment on the latest update for ‘Old Finch’. I live fairly close to that location and I can assure you there is no church on Beare Road (not Bear Road as in the article) and there never was. If the author of that report is to be believed then he would know that, as his family ‘lived there for generations’ and I assume he grew up in the area. The only church is the Hillside Methodist church, circa 1877. The story of a murderer writing with the murdered girls head also stretches credibility.

Our family has seen the large boulder that used to sit north of the Bailey bridge on Sewells Road, I believe. It was spray painted in red with ‘Happy Birthday Sue’ on it or ‘R.I.P. Sue’ at one point. It took some effort as it was quite large and at least 4 feet high and it was removed by, I assume, the City at least four years ago. I guess they got tired of removing the gruesome graffiti. I don’t know what wall ‘he’ is talking about. I’ll have to look again when I go that route, but there may be a stone railway bridge over Sewells.The stone support abutment may be the ‘wall’ he is referring to with all the graffiti. There was no murder of a girl by that name, so the removal was not for the sake of respect to her family.

 

There were farms in the area but all have been expropriated for Rouge Park. It is pretty sparsely populated with only a few homes east of the Hillside Methodist church and a few homes clustered where Old Finch dead ends at the Rouge Valley. It continues on the other side where Beare Road ends.

 

There is no rail line that crosses Old Finch either. Where the rail line passes north of Old Finch it is on elevated stone bridges that are quite old, making the school lbus crash impossible the way it’s told. The rail line does have level crossings on Reesor and Beare Roads, both again well north of Finch.

 

While I’m not on a mission to correct inaccuracies, this one hit ‘close to home’ and was so obviously sensationalized. Like your report concluded, the whole Finch Road stories seem to be the product of overactive teenage imaginations.