Haunted Canada 9

by Joel A. Sutherland

  Some people come to dance their blues away. Others come to dance … and leave three shades paler than when they’d arrived.

  I’M INNOCENT

  St. Andrews, New Brunswick

  In the fall of 1878, Thomas Dowd and Eliza Ann Ward were taken to the jail in St. Andrews and locked in separate cells. The jail had a horrible reputation. It had been purposely designed in 1832 to be as uncomfortable and inhospitable as possible. Each cell was cramped, dark, poorly ventilated and unheated in the winter — in fact, prisoners needed to be let out of their cells on the coldest days so that they wouldn’t freeze to death.

  Thomas and Eliza were charged with the axe murder of her husband, and their trial was held in the courthouse next door. Thomas maintained his innocence throughout the entire trial, but both he and Eliza were found guilty of the heinous crime. Thomas was sentenced to death by hanging, but Eliza was pregnant so she was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. Unaware that Eliza was to be spared the hangman’s noose, Thomas eventually confessed that he alone had killed her husband in order to spare her life.

  On January 14, 1879, Thomas Dowd was hanged. Eliza was permitted to watch through a window in the jail. The execution brought her to tears.

  It wasn’t long before the jail became even more bleak and forbidding than it had been before. The guards heard strange sounds at night. One saw a mysterious beam of light appear on the wall of Thomas’s cell and float in an odd, fluid pattern. Another couldn’t believe his eyes as he watched a ghostly hand scratch a shaky proclamation on the wall:

  I’m innocent

  Eliza served her seven-year sentence but died shortly after she was released. She left behind a letter that was discovered by the authorities. In it, she confessed that she had been the only person responsible for the murder of her husband. As Thomas had claimed — both during the trial and in the afterlife — he was innocent.

  There is another ghost who haunts the Old Gaol and Charlotte County Courthouse, as they’re known today. He is also named Thomas, but unlike Thomas Dowd, this ghost is neither innocent nor docile.

  Thomas Hutchings was an English sergeant in the Royal Air Force stationed at Pennfield Ridge, and was convicted of murdering a local girl in 1942. Like Thomas Dowd, Thomas Hutchings was hanged for his crime at the jail, and his ghost is most often seen in the courthouse next door, where he was sentenced. These days, tour guides lead people through both buildings while Hutchings does his best to make them flee.

  One morning a tour guide arrived early to make sure everything was in order for the day. While checking on the main area of the courthouse, she heard a loud banging noise coming from the bathroom. But the noise stopped as abruptly as it had begun, so she went about her business and tried to forget all about it. When the banging started up again, she rushed to the bathroom to investigate. It was completely empty. It’s believed Thomas Hutchings was venting some of the anger that he had saved up for decades.

  Later that day, once a group of people had assembled in the courthouse, the guide began the tour. But some of the participants couldn’t see it through to the end. The first was a man who lagged behind the others and remained in the courtroom as the group moved to a different area. Thomas Hutchings suddenly appeared sitting in the defendant’s chair, glaring at the man with a look of pure hatred. The man was so scared that he abandoned the tour and ran outside. The second was a woman who stopped to admire some old photos on the wall. As she looked at one in particular, a man’s handprint suddenly formed in the red velvet that framed the picture. She also couldn’t stand to be in the courthouse any longer and ran outside. The third and final person who had a supernatural encounter during that same tour was an elderly man who spent a little time examining a collection of old city maps in one of the back rooms. First he heard the sound of footsteps coming from above, and then Hutchings appeared, standing in the corner of the room, his face twisted in anger. The old man ran from the courthouse as fast as he could and found the other two people a safe distance from the building. They shared the stories of what had happened to each of them and couldn’t believe that they all had had similar experiences. One thing was clear: Hutchings didn’t appreciate their presence. Elaine Bruff, who used to lead Heritage Discovery Tours in St. Andrews, admitted that when people would discuss Thomas Hutchings within the courthouse, bad things would often happen.

  Tour guide Felicity Cooper and Charlotte County Archives archivist and manager Janice Fairney claim that people have seen coat hangers move on their own and blinds open and close in the judge’s chamber. Women’s necklaces have been lifted off their necks by invisible hands. Cooper says that she regularly feels someone touching her back as she shares stories from the courthouse’s history.

  As scary as Thomas Hutchings’s activity in the courthouse can be, what he does in the jail is far, far worse. In 2009, filmmaker Paul Kimball spent some time with his friend Holly in Hutchings’s cell late one Saturday night. The Old Gaol has occasionally allowed guests and tour participants to be locked in the old, dank cells to see if they’re visited by the ghost. But Paul was a self-proclaimed skeptic and didn’t believe in spirits from beyond the grave. He was sure Hutchings wouldn’t be able to do anything to him, so there was no reason to be concerned. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  After a little time had passed, Paul began to joke around and challenged Hutchings to appear in the dark jail cell. Nothing happened. The seconds ticked by. He and Holly fell silent. And that’s when things took a turn for the worse. Paul began to feel a cold sensation around his neck. It didn’t feel normal at all. It felt like the cold was wrapping around his throat.

  Just as he was going to tell Holly about the odd feeling, she cried out. She had seen a shadowy figure float through the cell. Despite the fright they’d both had, they tried to remain in the cell. But seven minutes later, Paul once again felt the cold wrap around his neck. That was enough, and they went out into the hallway.

  Once they had told their tour guide what had happened, she smiled mischievously. She told them that she hadn’t said anything before because she didn’t want to influence their experience, but many people have reported that they have seen shadows in Hutchings’s cell and felt ice-cold hands try to choke them.

  The Charlotte County Jail

  There’s a sign on one of the Old Gaol’s outer doors that reads,

  Thomas likes to hold the door “shut!”

  Please push hard to open and come in!

  Thank you

  The sign doesn’t make it clear which Thomas, Dowd or Hutchings, which raises two chilling questions: Is it Dowd who is trying to protect people by keeping them out? Or Hutchings who is trying to terrorize people by keeping them trapped within?

  GHOST TOWN

  Chance Cove Provincial Park, Newfoundland and Labrador

  There used to be a tiny village named Chance Cove, in what is now a provincial park, on the southern shore of the Avalon Peninsula. All that remains of it are ruins, the nightly disembodied wails of people dying and ghosts.

  Chance Cove was a small fishing settlement of approximately fifty people in the late 1800s, nearly completely cut off from the outside world — and that’s exactly how its residents liked it. Their privacy was very important to them and allowed them to live less than savoury lives. It allowed them to get away with murder.

  Only one person, a delivery man from a distant community, was regularly welcomed to Chance Cove, but more out of necessity than friendship. For many years he travelled the path through the woods by horse and buggy, bringing food and supplies to Chance Cove every few days.

  As the man rode into town one day, he was surprised that no one welcomed him. The streets were empty. All was quiet. Although it struck him as odd — the townsfolk always rushed out to greet him and look over his latest shipment — he shrugged it off and figured that everyone must be in their homes or down by the shore. He carried on to the spot where he always unloaded his wares, but still no one came out to help him wit
h the cargo.

  Beginning to grow more than a little uneasy, the man approached the nearest house. He knocked on the door. No one answered. He peered in a window. He couldn’t see a soul. He called out loudly. No response. He checked every single house in Chance Cove — it didn’t take long — and even let himself into a few of them. But there wasn’t a single person to be found; no man, woman or child.

  Now scared, the man noticed laundry left drying on clotheslines, buckets of water that had been tipped over, and tools scattered all over the place. Having heard rumours over the years that Chance Cove was haunted, he began to believe that the spirits who were said to appear out of the ocean after nightfall had stormed the town, and that everyone had fled in terror. The delivery man raced back to his horse and rode out of Chance Cove as quickly as possible, never to return.

  The townsfolk, it was later discovered, had indeed abandoned Chance Cove in a mass evacuation. They walked to Trepassey and boarded a ship bound for America. They settled in Maynard, Massachusetts, and tried to begin their lives anew. But the memories of what had happened in Chance Cove haunted them all to their dying days. They couldn’t talk about it with anyone who hadn’t been there, and took the details of the event that drove them away from their home to their graves. It seemed plain to everyone who was familiar with the town that something supernatural had happened that night.

  People trace the origin of the town’s haunted history back to 1863, the year of the tragic wreck of the Anglo Saxon. The Anglo Saxon was a three-masted steamship used to bring immigrants from Great Britain to Canada. It departed Liverpool, England, on April 16 for Quebec City.

  The ship didn’t arrive at its destination. On April 27 a thick fog enshrouded the coast of Newfoundland, and the ship struck the shore near Clam Cove, roughly fifteen minutes south of Chance Cove by foot. Chief engineer William McMaster and other crew members attempted to get all 444 people off the ship by rigging a studding sail boom from the ship’s rail to a nearby rock. They succeeded in getting 97 to safety, but everyone else drowned when the ship broke apart and was washed away in the waves. More than 100 bodies washed ashore and were buried on the banks, while the rest were lost forever.

  At the time of the wreck, Chance Cove was uninhabited, but soon after a few families settled in the area. They made their living fishing, growing potatoes and turnips, and building boats. But whispers spread among some outlying communities that the people of Chance Cove were not to be trusted. Ships continued to run aground on the southeastern shore of Newfoundland with alarming frequency, and some believed the townsfolk were responsible. It was said they lit large fires on the cliffs and beaches, confusing sailors about how to navigate around the coastline. When the ships ran aground, the townsfolk stormed them and murdered everyone on board. They then took everything of value and allowed the ocean to consume the rest, including the dead.

  But the dead didn’t stay in their watery graves. Legend has it that the ghosts of the drowned surfaced every night to torment the people of Chance Cove. And the ghostly activity tends to be worse every year on April 27, the anniversary of the wreck of the Anglo Saxon. Spectral wails and cries erupt on the shore, but when the living run to investigate, believing another ship to have been wrecked, there is never anyone to be found.

  A writer named John W. White visited Chance Cove after it had been abandoned and described what he had witnessed in an 1898 article for the Newfoundland Quarterly. He ruled out poverty and any other rational explanation for the mass exodus, since the homes were left in such pristine condition and fully furnished. The only explanation he could think of was that the ghosts — “inhabitants of the other world,” he called them — had driven the townsfolk away. Their heart-rending screams from the shore and their nightly appearances on the streets of the town must have grown too awful to live with.

  During the summer of the same year that White wrote about the town, a group of northern fishermen sailing in schooners discovered Chance Cove. They decided to stay in the houses for the season, setting off to fish early each morning. But like the original inhabitants, the fishermen soon found the town to be too frightening. They set fire to the buildings before leaving, hoping to eradicate the evil that dwelled there.

  It didn’t work. Chance Cove was turned into a provincial park in the early 1970s, and all that remains of the buildings are foundations, cellars, and a graveyard nearly completely swallowed by the woods. Residents of the Southern Shore continue to report activity whenever they venture too close to Chance Cove. They hear the ringing of ships’ bells and the cries of people drowning. Some see strangers walk out of the night mist before disappearing. The activity continues to be most prevalent on April 27.

  If you visit Chance Cove, chances are very good you won’t be able to last through the night.

  DOWN IN THE DEPTHS

  Bell Island, Newfoundland and Labrador

  On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in 1966, a group of Bell Island locals were completely unprepared for the sight that was about to confront them. They saw a procession of men in miner’s gear coming from the mines as if their shift had just ended. But that didn’t make sense. The mines didn’t operate on Sundays, and all of the men who worked there were at home resting.

  The miners walked slowly past as the people stared at them in silence. Then, without a word, the line of men vanished into thin air. That’s when the group realized that the men were miners who had died on the job.

  Starting in 1895, when iron mining began on Bell Island, the mines claimed the lives of at least 106 men. Miners etched white crosses into the tunnel walls as a grim reminder of the fallen. But the fallen have their own way to remind the living of the many tragedies that have taken place over the years.

  In the 1940s, the mining company began to use a more powerful type of dynamite. One day two men set a charge that resulted in a blast twice as large as they had predicted. They hadn’t been a safe enough distance away, and one of the men was killed. It was a miracle his partner survived.

  After recuperating, the survivor returned to work in the mines and was even considering returning to the explosives crew despite what he had lived through, but then he saw something that changed his mind forever. His deceased co-worker appeared in the shaft before him, his face bloody and scarred. The ghost reached out his hand and then vanished. The incident left the miner so rattled that he never touched explosives again.

  Other miners saw the same ghost for many years after. He’d often be spotted standing near the area where he’d lost his life. When approached he always turned and passed straight through the rocky wall.

  Once the ghost made a rare trip out of the mines and into the light of day. His wife had been overwhelmed by grief and spent most afternoons standing at the exit to the shafts, watching the men stream past on their way to their homes, forever hoping — no matter how unlikely it seemed — to catch one final glimpse of her husband. She got her wish, but not how she’d imagined. Once the other miners had cleared out, she spotted one last man standing a short distance away. Although his back was turned to her, she knew right away that it was her husband; she could tell by his clothes and by his stance. Before she stopped to consider that what she was seeing wasn’t possible, she raced to his side and called his name. He turned around slowly, and she gazed at him. Just as others had reported, his face was covered in blood.

  Men working at the mine in Wabana, Bell Island

  Another ghost that has been seen by many is that of an eighteen-year-old man. The spirit, easily mistaken for a living person, often joins miners at the beginning of their shifts. One miner recalls the morning that the young man walked beside him and struck up a conversation, excitedly sharing that it was his first day on the job. A moment later the older miner watched in shock as the younger man disappeared.

  The confused and frightened miner told a co-worker what had happened, and that man then shared a story of his own.

  Years before, a young man had been put on scraping duty on his first d
ay in the mines, tasked with removing loose stones from recently dug sections of the mine. A falling rock struck him on the head, but he was wearing a helmet, so he figured he was okay. Eager to make a good impression on his first day, he didn’t tell anyone and carried on working. Later he became very dizzy and collapsed. Another miner ran to his aid, but it was too late; shortly thereafter the young man died from the head injury. In the years that followed, many people saw the ghost of the young man who had died on his first day of work, and he always disappeared before entering the tunnel where the accident occurred. He appeared so frequently that, according to Bell Island historian Henry Crane, #2 Mine needed to be shut down permanently.

  Although all of the mines have been closed for many years, the ghosts continue to haunt the island. In fact, since Tourism Bell Island began offering tours of the mines, ghostly encounters have increased.

  Strange noises come from deep within the shafts, such as the clangs and bangs of picks and shovels striking rocks, voices talking and calling to one another, and an odd hissing sound that no one can explain. People are often touched on the shoulder or back by invisible hands, and cold spots glide through the darkness.

  In 2015 Melissa McCall was touring the mines with her family. As they were about to enter, the guide told the group that back when the mines were still in operation, women weren’t allowed to enter — it was believed to be bad luck. Melissa was in the back of the group and stayed behind to take a picture as the others moved along. “Girls aren’t allowed in this area,” she said in a mocking tone, and laughed at how ridiculous that was. But when she looked through her photos later in the evening, she couldn’t believe what she found. In the picture she’d taken, there was a man staring at her from out of the darkness — a man who had definitely not been there before.