by Steve Vernon
“Billy Regan has himself a fine bride,” Clancy said. “I bet I could steal her from him, if I put my mind to it.”
Clancy was the oldest brother. He had hair as red as a burning radish. Clancy was good with his fists and some say he had a temper as well.
“We don’t need to steal them, and we won’t have to work too hard to find them,” Rook said. “For I know of a spot where the women do grow wild on the beach.”
Rook was the middle child. Living in the middle had taught him how to use his wits. Rook’s hair was as black as a crow’s midnight shadow and some said he had the eyes of a thief.
“So what is your plan, brother?” Clancy asked.
“We’ll go down to the water tonight when the moon is fat and full and the selkies come up to dance,” Rook replied.
Now, as every good Cape Bretoner knows, a selkie is a being that lives in the water in the shape of a seal, but peels off its sealskin and comes ashore as a human on full moon nights. Then the selkies frolic and dance with one another until the night has burned down into morning.
“And we’ll steal their sealskins and hide them,” Rook continued as the three of them approached the rocky shore. “Then those selkie girls will do whatever we ask them to.”
“But what if we don’t love them?” Donald asked.
Clancy cracked Donald hard enough on the back of his skull to knock a few freckles loose from his cheekbones. “They’ll do whatever we tell them to do,” Clancy said. “What more does a man want of a woman?”
As the three boys clambered onto the shore, the moon looked down and winked just once as a cloud passed before it. When the cloud had finished passing, the boys looked out to see the water filled with selkies.
The three brothers held their breath and stared as the selkies rose up out of the water and shed their sealskins.
And who could blame them? There is no other beauty as true and as pure as the beauty of the selkie.
“I’ll steal the first one,” Clancy said. “For I’m a better thief than either of you.”
And saying that, Clancy crept and scuttled and stole along the rock and through the shadow until he found a selkie sealskin neatly folded in a cradle of kelp-draped driftwood.
“I’ll steal the second,” Rook said. “For it was my idea in the first place.”
And Rook stole up and found himself a sealskin that he believed to be even finer than his brother Clancy had found.
“I guess that leaves me,” Donald said.
And he walked down and picked up the first sealskin he came to.
When the moon sank down beneath the waves and the sunrise embered up from the distant hills, the selkies slid into their sealskins and slipped away into the early morning water—all but three of them, that is, which was how the three brothers found themselves their three selkie brides.
Mind you, it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The selkies were unhappy on the land, but because the brothers had their sealskins hidden away they had no choice but to learn to accept their new lives.
Once every month, when the moon rose high in the evening sky, the three selkie women would walk down to the rocks and watch their sisters dancing amidst the waves. They did not dare to approach any closer for they knew that if any of the selkies saw them they would tear them to pieces for the shame of losing their sealskins. Still, they had to come and watch.
The years passed by and each selkie woman gave her husband three fine children. One fateful morning, Rook bragged to his oldest son about where he had hidden his wife’s sealskin. The son, who was of course part selkie, immediately ran to his mother and informed her. “Your skin is hidden under a rock in the barn, beneath a bale of hay.”
And that night the selkie stole out to the barn and rolled the bale of hay away and turned the rock over and found her sealskin. As quick as you can say “flit,” the selkie pulled on her sealskin and returned to the water, abandoning her husband and her home and her children—even the son who had told her where her skin was hidden.
“More fool you,” Clancy laughed at his brother the next morning. “A man should keep his mouth closed around his children and his woman.”
The next night, Donald’s selkie bride came to him in tears.
“I miss the sea,” she told him. “And I miss dancing in the waves with my selkie sisters. Won’t you give me the skin for just one night? I promise to return when the full moon has passed and serve you as your wife.”
“How do I know you won’t run away?” Donald asked.
“I only want to dance with the waves just one more time,” the selkie said. “Or else I may die.”
And Donald, being a soft-hearted man, handed the sealskin to his bride and watched as she walked back into the water and turned into a seal. Tears rolled down his cheeks because he knew, deep in his heart, that she would never return.
“More fool you,” Clancy laughed at Donald the next morning, even louder than he had laughed at Rook. “A man should share nothing that he cannot afford to lose.”
But the thought of how his brothers had both lost their selkie wives worried Clancy to death. So that night he built a great fire. Then he unlocked the trunk that he kept his selkie wife’s sealskin in, pulled the skin out, and threw it into the flames, believing that if he burned it to ashes his wife would never be able to return to the sea. But as soon as the sealskin hit the flames, the oil in the skin ignited in a blazing inferno. The fire rose up so quickly and menacingly that Clancy couldn’t control it. The fire devoured Clancy’s house and Clancy’s children and then Clancy himself died screaming in the flames.
The next morning, Donald’s selkie bride walked up out of the water and back home to him. She had decided to come back to the land because she missed the man who had given her the freedom to dance.
As for Rook, he lived alone the rest of his days. Not even his children, who blamed him for the loss of their mother, would speak to him anymore. He spent long, lonely years staring at the waves of the cold Atlantic shoreline, wondering just how in the world his younger and ever-so-stupider brother had turned out to be so much smarter than him.
The White Point Resort Lodge is a well-known centre of hospitality and comfort, located about one hundred and fifty kilometres southwest of Halifax on Highway 103. White Point Lodge first got into business back in 1928 as a private fishing and hunting lodge. At that time, the resort consisted of a few scattered cabins on the beach, a dining room, and an eight-room main lodge built in a traditional rustic manner.
In 1931, the lodge added its very first tennis court. A golf course was set up shortly afterward. Since then, the lodge has blossomed into a popular year-round, 160-bedroom resort.
The lodge has a history of ghost sightings, with three distinct ghosts making occasional appearances. Each has its own story and truly unique personality.
Ivy’s Roots
Howard Elliot had enjoyed a long history in the hospitality business. He’d spent years running both the Sword and Anchor in Chester and the Dresden Arms in Halifax. In 1928, he helped found the White Point Resort Lodge. Accompanying Howard in this endeavour was his lovely wife, Ivy.
Ivy immediately set to work managing the resort’s food and beverage department. She proved herself to be an extremely difficult boss to work for, maintaining the strictest of standards for dining room staff. Ivy was tough and uncompromising. If a piece of cutlery was set in the wrong place, she would spot it and would very certainly bring it to the offending waiter’s attention. She had a bad temper and would often throw kitchen utensils when she was angry—being the founder’s wife meant that you could get away with that sort of behaviour.
No one remembers just exactly how or when Ivy finally died, but it was likely after her losing her temper just one too many times. And apparently even in death Ivy hasn’t been able to find peace. It is said that to this day she still haunts the lodge, throwing tempe
r tantrums just like she did when she was alive.
The Three Ghosts
Most of the employees at White Point have encountered Ivy’s ghost in one way or another. Some of them have heard footsteps coming from the front of the dining room towards the kitchen. Some have watched as doors swung open suddenly or slammed shut, lights have turned on and off at unexpected moments, and spoons and ladles have jumped off their s-hooks and clattered noisily to the kitchen floor.
Others have reported actually seeing Ivy. Hotel employees have seen her walking across the floor in a long, flowing white pantsuit. Groundskeepers have seen her walking through snow or along the rocks of the beach. Ivy is notoriously shy and is usually only spotted in the deep winter, and almost never appears before hotel guests.
Ivy’s isn’t the only ghost haunting the grounds of the White Point Resort. There have also been reports of a ghostly caretaker roaming the area. “Many people believe the ghost of an older gentleman named Danny roams White Point,” Bruce Clattenburg, who has been the night engineer at White Point Lodge for the last ten years, reports. “Danny was the caretaker here in the wintertime and the chef in the summer. He stayed in Cabin 20. Today it is unit 137. I worked with him between 1978 and 1979 and he was a great guy and a really good friend.”
According to Bruce, Danny and Ivy were close friends. After Ivy died, Danny would often be spotted having long conversations with thin air. Sometimes he was seen sitting in his cabin or at a picnic table sharing a drink and a conversation with someone who could not be seen. Danny swore that it was Ivy. He maintained that she came back at every opportunity and spent time with him.
There is also a third ghost at White Point Lodge, the spirit of a young boy whose family lived in the area in the 1920s. The boy reportedly drowned while rafting off White Point, although his body was never found. He was nine years old at the time.
The boy’s ghost is seen rarely, but he is always described as wearing old-style overalls and a white shirt. He is usually spotted on the rocks of the beach or occasionally out on a raft or a boat.
Sid’s Story
One of the best stories I’ve ever heard about Ivy was told to me by a bartender named Sid, who was working as a waiter at the time of the sighting.
On the night in question, Sid was working late to get ready for a large convention banquet being held the next day.
“I was tired,” Sid told me. “And I misplaced a dessert spoon on the table arrangement. By the time I had realized my mistake I was nearly done setting the entire dining room and would have to go back and reset each of the tables.”
Sid shook his head ruefully.
“At that point the lights shut off. It took me a good five minutes to find my way to the proper switch and turn them on again. When the lights came back on I was surprised to see a dessert spoon flying at me. It clanged off my forehead and nearly rose up a goose egg. I picked the spoon up and looked again and was amazed to see that all of the misplaced cutlery had been corrected for me.”
He grinned at this point and threw me a wink.
“I don’t really know if there is such a thing as ghosts,” Sid said. “But I do believe that Ivy was looking out for me that night. She reset the tables properly and then flung that spoon just to remind me not to make the same mistake twice.”
It was a cold and bitter day on Wednesday, February 18, 1880, when Dr. William Fraser and a pharmacist by the name of James Jackson hitched up a wagon and clambered aboard to make the rough and dangerous seven-kilometre journey from New Glasgow to a tiny Nova Scotia settlement that was known back then as Little Egypt. The snow was blowing straight at the men as they drove, which made it awfully hard to see.
“Horses, you keep your eyes open,” the doctor warned his team. “Or we’re most likely apt to pass right by the homestead and keep on riding right into the open mouth of Little Harbour.”
The horses must have been listening closely because they eventually found their way to the doorstep of sixty-five-year-old Adam Murray and his thirty-seven-year-old wife, Marie. According to Dr. Fraser, Marie Murray was a strong and healthy woman who was already the mother of seven children, and was about to give birth to five more—at the same time. Unbeknownst to her, Marie Murray was expecting quintuplets.
Within an hour, all five children were delivered. There were three girls and two boys, each as tiny and petite as a little china doll.
The news of the births spread throughout the area within hours. Local folk were soon knocking politely at the Murrays’ door, dropping by to see the babies first-hand and to offer up small gifts of food and money to help the family with their unexpected burden.
Marie named the babies after the doctor and the pharmacist, two other prominent members of the community, and the children’s own grandmother. Elizabeth MacGregor Murray, the largest baby, was sixteen inches long and weighed in at three pounds, fourteen ounces. Margaret MacQueen Murray was fifteen and a quarter inches long and weighed a strapping three pounds, six ounces. William Fraser Murray reached fourteen and a quarter inches and weighed three pounds, four ounces. James Jackson Murray was fifteen and five-eighths inches long and weighed three pounds exactly. Finally, the smallest of the lot, little Jeanette Rankin Murray reached a length of thirteen and a half inches and weighed in at two pounds, eight ounces.
Sadly, because the babies were so small, their chances of reaching maturity were fairly slim. Three died before the first evening had passed. A fourth died the following morning. And the fifth, little Elizabeth MacGregor, lasted three days before closing her eyes and breathing out the strains of her final lullaby.
An hour before Elizabeth passed away, a newspaper reporter showed up at the Murray residence and persuaded her grieving parents to allow him to line up the five babies—the four dead and the one living—for a photograph that would appear in newspapers across Canada. The publication of this photo raised quite a commotion for the Murrays. This was the first birth of quintuplets recorded in Canada—over half a century before the famous Dionne quintuplets were born in 1934 in Corbeil, Ontario—and the news soon grabbed the attention of people across the country.
Shortly after the photo was published, the Murrays received an offer from famed circus showman P. T. Barnum, who wanted to buy the five tiny bodies—which the Murrays couldn’t bury until the spring thaw came—and have them mummified for display in his circus. The Murrays refused Barnum’s offer flatly. When he continued to pressure them, they buried the children in their basement, fearing that a public burial site might be pilfered by unscrupulous grave robbers.
Soon afterward, a local New Glasgow businessman, who preferred to keep his identity strictly anonymous, came forward and offered to bury the infants in an unmarked portion of his family plot in New Glasgow’s Riverside Cemetery so that they could lie in sanctified ground. The Murrays gladly accepted the man’s offer, and the five babies were finally laid to rest in a proper grave.
But to this day, local residents swear that on certain nights you can hear the gentle haunting sound of five tiny infants wailing for their mother from the heart of New Glasgow’s Riverside Cemetery.
The stormy petrel was long considered to be a harbinger of bad weather and worse luck.
Maritimers often refer to this little grey bird as the
“Devil Bird” or “Mother Carey’s Chicken.”
Stormy petrels are seen year-round from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to South America and even as far east as the African coast. Flocks of these dark, swift-flying birds will shoot down out of the clouds and wing past a ship to land in its wake, hoping to catch whatever scraps fall from behind the stern of the vessel.
Some would say that naming a ship after these bad luck birds is a sure way to invite the worst kind of misfortune. Captain David Douglas would likely agree.
A Lumber Run
One fine day in 1890, the lumber barque Stormy Petrel, heavily laden with a
cargo of freshly felled timber, unfurled its worn and battered canvas to the cruel Bay of Fundy winds as its captain, David Douglas of Maitland, steered it patiently into the open Atlantic. Captain Douglas was bound for the Bordeaux coastline in far-off France.
The weather was kind to Douglas over the first part of his journey. He was heartily glad of this, for he had his wife, his three-year-old-daughter, and his five-year-old son on board.
Little Eddie Douglas, the captain’s son, got along well with the crew of the Stormy Petrel, playing games of hide-and-go-seek and tag with them whenever he could. One day, as they were midway across the Atlantic, Eddie splashed water at a crewman and went running from him, giggling. The laughing sailor chased him in good-natured pursuit. Unfortunately, as Eddie was fleeing, he caught his foot in a lashing and tumbled headlong into the open sea.
“Man overboard!” the cry went out.
Captain Douglas heard the call from down in his cabin. He raced to the deck as any good captain would. He took one look at his brave little boy bobbing in the powerful waves and ordered the vessel turned around. Then Captain Douglas dove overboard, without a thought for his own safety. He hit the waves and began swimming strongly, aiming himself towards his floundering son.
Meanwhile, the deckhands quickly got the lifeboat ready and put it over the side. But when the lifeboat hit the waves, it took on water and sank.
In the water, Captain Douglas was having a hard time reaching his son. No matter how hard the captain swam, the current kept taking the boy farther and farther from his grasp.
On the ship, the crew was now being kept busy holding back the captain’s wife, who was determined to throw herself overboard after her husband and boy. Her screams of grief and frustration rose high over the waves like the seabird that the vessel was named after.