On a spring evening in 1956, as 11 Sisters of the Villa St. Louis rest and convalescent home in Convent Glen were getting ready for bed, a munitions-laden CF-100 Mark V interceptor jet crashed into the building and exploded in a ball of fire.

All 11 nuns were killed instantly as was the aircraft’s two crew members, Flying Officer William Schmidt (age 25) and navigator FO Kenneth Thomas (age 20), Chaplain Richard Ward, and a lay-woman cook. Twenty-five other people, mostly nuns, managed to escape the convent with a variety of non-life threatening injuries.

It was the night of May 15, 1956, and the Villa St. Louis sat on the same location at the end of Hiawatha Street as the present-day Résidence St-Louis. The home was run by the Sœurs Grises de la Croix, an organization founded by Élizabeth Bruyère in 1845.

That evening, radar operators at CFB Uplands picked up an unidentified transport plane on their screens. When the aircraft didn’t respond to their attempts to communicate, two CF-100 jets were dispatched to identify and intercept the mystery aircraft.

After the aircraft was identified as a RCAF North Star cargo airplane, travelling from Resolute Bay in the Arctic to St. Hubert, near Montréal, one of the jets returned safely to the base. The other jet indicated that it would continue flying to burn off some fuel. That was the last communication ever sent from the aircraft.

The pilot and the navigator of the second plane gave no indication they were in trouble before the crash and there was no attempt to eject from the plane. Why they crashed remains a mystery to this day.

The plane fell out of the sky at 10:56 p.m. and plunged into the Chapel at a speed approximating 700 mph.

In an instant, the three-storey, brick building was shattered by a thunderous explosion that sent debris and flames hundreds of feet into the air. Eyewitnesses said the jet had plummeted to the ground in an almost vertical dive, the airplane spinning in tight circles, its wing lights flashing in the dark.

The fact that more people didn’t die that night was a result of pure happenstance. There should have been more people staying at the 70-room rest and convalescent home built just two years earlier for $1 million.

A group of sixteen student nurses who were about to start a two-week vacation at Villa St-Louis had delayed their arrival to see a play in downtown Ottawa that same day.

The blast could be heard fifteen miles away. A red glow in the sky was seen in distant Richmond and Manotick.

The Villa’s neighbours in the nearby residential area known as Hiawatha Park were thrown from their beds by the force of the blast that also shattered 24 windows in St-Joseph’s School a mile and a half away.

Within five minutes, the roof of the building collapsed. Two hours later, there was virtually nothing left save for a 40-foot chimney and steel girders twisted in the white heat of the blaze.

A new building was built up on the site by the Grey Nuns in 1965 and was turned into a hospice the following year.

In 2016, a memorial was dedicated on the site during a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the crash. There is no official ceremony planned to mark the 70th anniversary.