A strange festival is returning to Toronto this week, and it’s dedicated to the city’s history — with a twist. No snoozefests here: touted as “strange history for curious people,” attendees will get to learn about some of Toronto’s weirdest, wackiest, most bizarre history. The Festival of Bizarre Toronto History began in 2023, and was clearly such a hit with lovers of weird history in the city that organizer Adam Bunch decided to make it an annual event.
The inaugural festival included online lectures, panels, interviews and walking tours hosted by some of the city’s greatest storytellers and historians, and this year’s festival will follow a similar structure — all with a goal of getting Torontonians interested in our own history.
“It’s easier to get interested in a story that is unexpected and surprising,” Bunch said. “What better way to do that than by looking at some of the strangest stories that our history has to offer, so that you’re learning something deeply weird and unexpected? And also, hopefully, what it can teach us about the city and its history.”
This year’s schedule features some fascinating and eerie talks and tours, beginning with The Secrets & Séances of Canada’s Strangest Prime Minister on Monday. Historian and William Lyon Mackenzie King expert Allan Levine will lead the discussion. Other wacky highlights include a talk about Toronto’s strangest contests (such as a girl who bizarrely once killed over half a million flies), a community walk about the secrets and scandals of a certain Toronto rapper’s neighbourhood, Forest Hill, and an exceptionally gruesome tour of downtown Toronto that will have educator Alex Sein digging up some truly morbid stories.
Bunch, who wrote The Toronto Book of the Dead and The Toronto Book of Love, said that Toronto has earned itself a reputation of not taking its history very seriously. “Toronto started off as this British colony on what the British considered the edge of the world, but was actually home to Indigenous nations for thousands of years. And it was as far as possible from what the British considered the centre of the world, London,” he says. “And in more recent times, we’re next to the giant elephant that is the United States, which looks to New York City as the centre of the world. Toronto spends a lot of time comparing itself to these two cities, and as a result maybe think that everything interesting happens elsewhere.”
Bunch previously told Streets of Toronto that he hoped to challenge that narrative with the Festival of Bizarre Toronto History, and with a lofty goal — to help Torontonians learn to care for our city again. “Once you know those stories and that history, it becomes easier to care about this place and about making it a better place for people to live in the future. And the more you know about how it ended up this way, that gives you more power to know how to change it, what should be preserved, what should be reformed, and hopefully build a stronger, happier, more inclusive Toronto, armed with the stories that are entertaining and fascinating and illuminating, all at the same time.”
The bizarre history is a good way into learning more about the city’s history as a whole, Bunch said. If you attend this year, you’ll come away with a new wealth of knowledge about everything from Toronto’s Don Jail to this city’s role in the Civil War.
“There’s a new wave of current storytellers in Toronto doing a great job of sharing the city’s history, so it’s going to be great to bring them all together for one event,” Bunch says.
The festival is on from June 2-8, and you can find a full rundown of the schedule here and grab tickets to individual events or a pass for the entire festival.
