176: Foreign Fatalities: Ambrose Small

Corpus Delicti

CDM Productions

True Crime

4.5 • 608 Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ambrose Small was a theater tycoon, swooping up opera houses across Canada. Eventually he sold them all, making the biggest deal yet. Except that very night, he disappeared - never to be seen again. Some say he was killed. Others say he ran off. Others say his spirit still haunts the theater.

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Music by:

Kai Engel

"Daemones"

Blooper music by:

Art of Escapism

"Coal Miners"

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Sources:

What Really Happened to Ambrose Small? | Maclean's | January 15, 1951 (macleans.ca)

He was a scoundrel with a jealous wife and a troubled mistress. He made the deal of a lifetime — then vanished | The Star

Ambrose Small Case | The Canadian Encyclopedia

The Mysterious Disappearance of Ambrose J. Small | Grand Theatre London

The Grand Mystery of Ambrose Small (torontoghosts.org)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone. it's Jen. And this is Lindsay. And this is Corpus Delicti the podcast. We are knee-deep into foreign fatalities. Yeah, so this is our new series that we just started last week where we are covering crimes from all over the world.
0:40.2	We are going to go to lots of different countries and talk about some of the wild things that have happened abroad.
0:47.0	And Jen found the one for this week, which is really interesting.
0:50.8	We are actually going to go to Canada to talk about one of their greatest
0:54.7	mysteries to this date. It's almost like a D.B. Cooper type of mystery. Yeah, yeah, where one of those
1:02.2	that just really lasts and stands the test of time and it's actually almost like a cultural
1:08.0	reference there because a lot of people, and I hate to say this, but a lot of people
1:12.5	do joke around about it and reference it a lot. Right. So this week's episode, as Lindsay said,
1:19.1	is we're going to travel to our northern border to Canada and we're going to journey back until
1:24.6	1919. It is around this time in place that Ambrose Joseph Small
1:29.9	mysteriously disappeared and he may or may not have had a million dollars in his pocket when he
1:37.3	did. Now this is not every day now or then that people have 1.77 million. So to get to that part of the story,
1:47.4	we have to start at the beginning. Ambrose was born January 11, 1866 in Newmarket, Ontario,
1:56.4	and he was the son of Irish Catholic immigrant settlers who moved to Toronto. So in Toronto, his father
2:04.4	set up a hotel slash saloon, and his dad had a very strong work ethic, which he passed on to
2:11.4	his son, Ambrose. His dad, who was named Daniel, became the proprietor of the Grand Hotel on Adelaide Street West.
2:21.0	So from a very early age, he's teaching his son, Ambrose, you know, you got to work hard for what you want.
2:25.5	He was a self-made man.
2:27.4	He owned his own business.
2:28.6	And so that was instilled in Ambrose at a very young age.
2:32.5	To the Lindsay's point, Daniel, his dad, actually started with a very, very small sub-hotel,
2:40.4	and he worked hard and he acquired a whole bunch.
	...

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