Strange & Supernatural

by Barbara Whitby

  When her husband suddenly died unexpectedly two years later, he was surrounded and nurtured by an especially loving family. At his funeral Anna moved the assembly to tears by her prayerful thanks for the forewarnings. Although the foreshadowings had been dreadful, she admitted, they had cemented the family’s relationships, and enabled them to build many happy memories by the time the end came.

  After her father died, said Paula years later, all the strange phenomena ceased.

  A Father’s Goodbye

  Augusta and her daughter Charlotte stretched wearily. It had been a long and tiring meeting, the second day of April 1978 at Conne River, a remote outport on the south coast of Newfoundland.

  At mid-morning the assembly had taken a break in between workshops, and Augusta and Charlotte were among those who decided to step outside for a breather.

  The weather was bleak and bitterly cold. They huddled into the warmth of their parkas, gratefully snuggling scarves up around chilled cheeks, and burying their noses into soft hand-knitted wool. Together with the other participants who had come outside with them, they swung their arms and stamped the snow, stirring up mud where it had been trampled. It was a freezing, wintry scene, no matter how one viewed it.

  It was with great surprise then, that Augusta suddenly caught a strong whiff of spring flowers through the folds of her scarf. At first she thought that the scent might be air freshener eddying from some air vent within the building, or perhaps traces of fabric softener clinging to her scarf, but this was no synthetic perfume. It was a fragrance that could only have swirled from fresh blooms clustered in a magnificent stand of spring flowers. She was strongly reminded of the lilacs in the garden of her childhood home in England.

  It wasn’t long before Charlotte noticed Augusta fidgeting and sniffing, and asked her what was wrong. Augusta began to feel ridiculous, and to worry that other people might notice her restlessness too. She could hardly tell them that, in this wilderness of snow and mud, there was an amazing scent of flowers. Augusta put her experience down to imagination.

  No sooner had she assured Charlotte that nothing was wrong, than she caught the fragrance of the flowers once again, even more strongly. The sweet perfume eddied around her, bringing back happy memories that almost overwhelmed her. This was how the purple clusters hanging thick on the lilac bushes in the back garden of her childhood home in London had smelled. Her father had tended them so lovingly. Purple lilac was one of his favourite blooms. But another more chilling memory suddenly surfaced too. Her mother cut and displayed these purple lilacs in the house, but she would never allow white lilacs over the doorstep. “White lilacs bring misfortune,” she always warned.

  Augusta wondered why the perfume of fresh blossoms was so persistent and why it made her think so strongly of the past. It felt uncomfortably real, even though the scent was so unlikely in this stark landscape. Finally, feeling unbearably unsettled, she decided to take Charlotte into her confidence, and to laugh it off. She was surprised when Charlotte took her story seriously. “I’ve been smelling the same thing for quite a while, Mum,” Charlotte answered. “It’s really bizarre. Scary actually. Let’s see if we can find out what it is.”

  Together they scoured the area, but they could discover nothing that might account for the scent. The surrounding winter landscape was uniformly bleak and stark. Stumped, Charlotte and Augusta began to ask the other members of the party if they could smell the flowers. No one else knew what the two women were talking about, although their questions were intriguing enough to start everyone peering around them for answers.

  An elderly woman, Joanna, who had the gift of second sight, suggested that it might be a spirit trying to attract their attention. “Is anyone close to you sick?” she asked. Joanna herself had experienced strange smells from time to time, and had come to associate these extraordinary, out-of-place happenings with the supernatural.

  Both Augusta and Charlotte shook their heads. As far as they were aware, no one close to them was sick, but since no other explanation seemed reasonable, the two agreed that this was a remote possibility. On Joanna’s advice, they acknowledged the experience with thankful hearts and accepted that a good spirit must be passing by. They wished it well and a safe passage on its journey, and felt strangely blessed and peaceful.

  By the time they returned to the meeting the scent was no longer noticeable. The experience had faded as quickly as it had begun. They were too busy to give it much more thought, apart from instinctively noting the hour and the minute. The conference wrapped up later that day and they returned by plane to Halifax.

  By the time they got back to their apartment it was early evening. They were both dying to get indoors, kick their shoes off and make a comforting cup of tea. As Augusta struggled with the key she could hear the phone ringing inside the apartment. Charlotte sprinted to pick up the receiver. She felt a sickening lurch of apprehension and fear. Was it bad news? The strange experience with the flowers had subtly affected her after all.

  Her apprehension was well-founded. She was deeply shocked to hear her uncle’s voice on the line from England, telling her that her grandfather had died earlier that day. “When? When did it happen?” she asked urgently. Allowing for the time difference between England and Newfoundland, his death had taken place at precisely the moment they had noticed the fragrance of the spring flowers at the conference.

  Once they began to come to terms with the unexpected death, their memory of the wonderful smell of flowers and of their sense of the presence of a beneficent spirit beside them was deeply comforting. Their memories of how Grandad had especially loved lilacs convinced them that his spirit had found a way across continents and oceans to spend a final few minutes with them. What made the experience the more striking was that neither he nor they had ever visited this remote Newfoundland outport before, and he had not been told of their plans to attend the conference. They believed, though, that he had been there with them, and

  that in his own way he had lovingly found a way to bid them both “goodbye.”

  Chapter 3

  The Titanic Tragedy

  The bow of the enormous ship settled low in the water and her stern rose high against the moon before she plunged to the ocean depths. There were not enough lifeboats to take all the passengers and crew, and the icy sea was crowded with debris and swimmers crying out for help. The lights in the hull winked out one by one, leaving the survivors in near darkness, acutely vulnerable.

  The unthinkable had happened. It was close to midnight on April 14, 1912, when the “unsinkable” wonder ship RMS Titanic struck a 60-foot iceberg in foggy weather on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. She was forging ahead at high speed through the ice fields off Newfoundland in an attempt to set a new transatlantic world record.

  As half-loaded lifeboats pulled away from desperately clutching hands, panicking men, women and children clung to wreckage in the freezing water and begged for help. Ghostlike in their white life preservers, they bobbed helplessly on the surface. It was a full hour before an eerie quiet replaced the din. Then there was only the sound of oars and the whimpering of 720 survivors. Some repeatedly called out the names of lost loved ones, “Are you there …?” “Are you there …?” and received no reply.

  There was neither food nor water in the lifeboats and it was questionable how long the survivors could last on the open sea. Many were wearing only nightclothes or whatever they had been able to quickly throw on. Some were retching, miserably seasick. All were soaked from spray and the winds were bone-chilling. Occasionally someone held up a lit newspaper to signal a lifeboat’s position, and once a dry straw hat. All strained for sight of a rescue ship. By the time SS Carpathia arrived on the scene shortly after dawn, out of a total of 2,228 passengers and crew, 1,522 had died.

  A Ship of Dreams

  One evening in 1907, Bruce Ismay was invited to dine with Lord and Lady Pirr
ie at their home in Belgravia, London. Lord Pirrie was chairman of Harland and Wolff, the successful Belfast shipbuilding yard that had built ships for the White Star Line for many years.

  These two powerful men, who had long been close friends, lingered over an extravagant meal. When the ladies withdrew after dinner, Pirrie and Ismay settled down over cigars and brandy to chat. It was hardly idle chatter that engaged them, however. The two men were planning the construction of a fleet of three super-liners such as the world had never before seen. Even the names of the vessels were chosen to sound powerful in the tradition of classical Greece: Olympic, Titanic and Gigantic. (After tragedy befell the Titanic, the name Gigantic was changed to the patriotic and less fate-provoking name Britannic, although she in fact also met a terrible end when she struck a mine in 1916.)

  Bruce Ismay

  No ship the size of the Titanic had ever been built before. At 46,328 tons she outclassed even her sister ship the Olympic, herself a world’s wonder at 45,324 tons, outweighing Cunard’s prize ship SS Lusitania by almost 14,000 tons.

  Titanic was breathtaking. She was the length of three football fields and the height of an 11-storey building. One observer described her as “so monstrous and unthinkable that [she] dwarfed the very mountains … a rudder as big as a giant elm tree, propellers the size of windmills … everything was on a nightmare scale.”

  Much more significant than her size, which was simply designed to make the ship economically competitive, were the new state-of-the-art safety features. The huge vessel had a double watertight bottom, and 16 supposedly watertight compartments separated by steel bulkheads that could be closed off from each other by watertight doors. These could be operated both remotely from the bridge at the touch of a switch, thanks to the marvels of electricity, or manually.

  An article in the New York Times in October 1910 praised the design of the SS Olympic and claimed that she must be “practically unsinkable and absolutely unburnable.” The first of the fleet to be built, she was almost identical to the Titanic. Harland and Wolff also invested in a campaign of wide publicity about the astounding new safety features of their ships. A brochure they published in 1911 assured the public that “as far as it is possible to do so, these two wonderful vessels [Olympic and Titanic] are designed to be unsinkable.” Even her captain, Edward J. Smith, boasted that if the Titanic were to be cut into three pieces, she would still float.

  When one of the indoctrinated crew, however, carried the hyperbole a step further and enthused that, “God Himself could not sink this ship,” his words sent shivers of apprehension down the spines of many who heard him.

  The Dream Becomes a Nightmare

  Despite all the rosy predictions, the RMS Titanic was dogged by misfortune and foreboding from the very beginning. During the launch ceremony of May 31, 1911, supports bearing up the hull collapsed onto one of the shipyard workmen, and he was killed. There was an even greater buzz of apprehension a few days later when a rivet counter died after he fell from the hull to the dock.

  Then on March 30, 1912, just prior to the Titanic’s sea trials, a table inauspiciously collapsed during an official luncheon that was put on for the press. The bad omen occurred immediately before the speeches were scheduled to begin, and caused loud murmurs of presentiment among even that hardened crowd.

  Captain Smith himself had the reputation among fellow seamen of being unusually unlucky. He once confided to J. P. Grant that he felt jinxed. As ill luck would have it, he was scheduled to retire after the Titanic had completed her maiden voyage, but he died when the ship went down. Captain Smith had served the company for 38 years at the time of his death.

  More bad luck dogged the Titanic when she arrived at Southampton after her launch and sea trials. She had already been delayed by 24 hours due to mishap and bad weather, and Captain Smith planned to compensate for the time lost by hurrying the loading at Southampton. However, further delays were caused by a disruptive coal strike throughout the United Kingdom. Titanic had to top up her bunkers from other White Star ships that had been forced to cancel crossings because of the strike. Some of the affected passengers from these vessels were transferred to the Titanic. Many of the 1,700 men who were out of work in Southampton because of the strike jubilantly signed on as crew in what seemed like a golden opportunity.

  Even before she cleared the harbour at Southampton, Titanic was involved in an incident that almost resulted in serious damage. The nearby American liner SS New York was sucked from the wharf by the immense displacement of water caused by the Titanic’s huge bulk. The seven steel hawsers attaching the smaller ship to her moorings twanged and whipped up with alarming force, and snapped like

  cotton threads.

  As she was drawn inexorably towards the enormous ship, the captains of the tugs Vulcan and Neptune sprang into action. Had it not been for their quick thinking the smaller vessel would have rammed the Titanic with considerable force. As it was, the tugs were able to tow New York out of harm’s way.

  Even as the passengers boarded, the Titanic’s boiler room crew found themselves secretly fighting a fierce fire below decks in bunker No. 6. Twelve boiler men, two men from each watch, were assigned to four-hour shifts from the day the ship left Southampton until the blaze could be brought under control. This never happened, however, as the fire was still raging when the ship collided with the iceberg.

  The stokers were extremely worried about the conflagration, and anticipated that they would have to bring in the fireboats that were stationed in New York Harbour after the passengers disembarked. Hundreds of tons of coal were stored in the bunker. Normally, it was kept wetted down, but in this case the coal underneath had dried out and had become a raging inferno. Fortunately, the wet coal on top had so far prevented the flames from breaking through.

  One of the firemen, J. Dilley, could scarcely contain his anxiety and was privately wondering if the situation was an omen of disaster. Surely the voyage should be delayed, he thought. Any other course of action would be insane. But, in spite of the serious situation, the ship’s officers were

  adamant. “Keep your mouths shut,” they warned the men. “No one, repeat no one, is in any way to alarm the passengers.” The secret was kept until Dilley told the story after his rescue.

  Of the hundreds of instances in which people claimed to have had a premonition of the Titanic disaster, maybe 50 of them were strange enough to defy rational explanation. One family’s baffling experience with precognition is representative of many others: Esther Hart’s daughter Eva, who was seven years old when the Titanic sank, retold her eye-witness account many times throughout her 91 years.

  Benjamin Hart was elated when he booked passage for his family on the SS Philadelphia to emigrate from England to the New World. He had sold his home and building business in Essex — the business was not doing well — and planned to move his family to Winnipeg, Manitoba, to start a new life.

  In contrast, his wife, Esther Hart, felt unaccountably strong forebodings of disaster at the thought of the ocean crossing. When she discussed her fears with her mother, they both knew that Esther’s concerns were much greater than the normal anxiety one would expect when facing a separation from loved ones and homeland. Dealing with it in the only practical way open to her, Esther several times entreated Benjamin to reconsider sailing, but he decided that they had gone too far to draw back.

  Their plans ran into an unexpected hitch when Benjamin was informed that their bookings on the steamship Philadelphia had been cancelled due to the nationwide coal strike. Esther could not hide her feelings of relief, but they were short-lived. The resourceful Benjamin soon managed to transfer the bookings to the Titanic. He was ecstatic at the chance to sail on the wonderful new ship whose praises were on everyone’s lips.

  When Benjamin told her about the revised bookings, he found it hard to fathom Esther’s anxiety. Esther herself found it difficult to
understand her response. When he told her he had managed to re-book, shivers of sheer horror again ran down her back. She was later to say that she had never had a premonition before and never had one again, but this one made her entire body rigid with fear.

  Benjamin was quite amused at her reaction, which was so unlike the usually practical Esther. Pulling herself together after the unexpected jolt of panic, Esther tried to make the best of things. Looking him full in the eyes, searching his expression, she said uncertainly, “That’s the ship they say is unsinkable.” Realizing he needed to reassure her, her husband put his arms around her shoulders, hugged her close and replied, “No, my dear, that’s the ship that is unsinkable.”

  Kindly though it was intended, Benjamin’s reply did nothing to comfort Esther. She was immediately filled with superstitious dread. It seemed to her that such a cocky public attitude displayed an insolence that defied the authority of God. It made matters worse that the White Star authorities were so sure of the ship’s security features that they could boast their Olympic fleet would never sink or burn. Such arrogance would surely bring disaster. “That is flying in the face of God,” she burst out in a response that later went down in history. Tears streaming from tired eyes, she went on, “and now, at last, I know why I am so afraid. That ship will never get to the other side of the Atlantic.”

  However real they were, Esther’s fears appeared irrational to her husband and he insisted on keeping the bookings. He viewed it as a privilege to have secured berths on such a prestigious and luxurious liner, especially on its historic maiden voyage. His wife’s feelings never let up, however. When the little family reached Southampton and caught their first sight of the towering RMS Titanic, Benjamin exclaimed with awe at the beauty of the ship. Still deeply anxious, Esther begged piteously once more to go back home.