Hazel tried to obey, but her knees gave way under the smaller child’s dead weight. She realized that Olive was badly injured, perhaps dying, but try as she could to lift her, she found that Olive was too heavy for her to move any significant distance. Even so, she lovingly struggled with her unconscious burden as far as the street.
Knowing she was incapable of carrying Olive home, Hazel singled out a young man passing by and begged him to help her. He was reluctant, having urgent matters to deal with himself, but he did stop to listen. “How far do you need to go?” he asked. Hazel knew that if she said that she lived on Union Street he would never agree, it was much too far. So she stretched the truth a little. “It’s quite near,” the little girl assured him. He picked up the still-unconscious Olive, and every time he flagged under the limp burden Hazel urged him on, saying as convincingly as she could, “We’re almost there.”
The two of them hardly knew how to continue, but they pressed on. They passed through scenes of extreme chaos, as people in deep shock staggered from the ruins of collapsed buildings. Whole streets were on fire. They passed a house engulfed in flames and saw that a woman was pinned inside. No one could help her in time, and the sound of her screams remained with Hazel for the rest of her life.
The time came when the kindly young man was too exhausted to carry Olive any further, and he placed her on a mattress that someone had dragged into the street. Then he took off. They were by then on Needham Street, only a block away from Hazel’s house. Highly distraught, Hazel left little Olive lying on the mattress in the street and made it the rest of the way on her own.
When she reached Union Street, Hazel was horrified to see that the houses on both sides of her street were badly damaged. Fires were burning fiercely among the ruins. When she reached her own house, she called out desperately for her mother, but there was no answer to her cries. Her house, too, had collapsed and was ablaze. Even worse, it was deserted. When she had left for school her mother was at home with three of Hazel’s sisters. Ten-year-old Ruth was recovering from an operation on her ear, six-year-old Muriel was also sick, and the baby, Edna, was only three years old and always stayed with their mother.
Overcome by despair, Hazel curled up in a tight ball on the street outside. Had her entire family been killed? She could not bear to scramble among the ruins for answers. She felt terrified when a strange man suddenly swept her up in his arms, calling her name again and again. It took her a few moments to recognize her father — and then it was only by his voice — because the deep layers of soot that impregnated his skin, hair and clothes had so dramatically altered his appearance.
Sobbing and choking as she clung to him, Hazel explained what had happened at the school. Together they made their way back through the scenes of destruction to where she had left Olive. The little girl was still lying on the mattress, her condition unchanged. Blood seeped from the wounds on her head and she had not recovered consciousness. Hazel’s father was astounded by the resourcefulness and the sense of responsibility that she had shown in bringing her sister almost all the way back home. He now took both of them to the hospital, Olive in his arms, with Hazel trotting beside them.
Hazel’s mother and Ruth, Muriel and Edna were already among the crowd of wounded people waiting at the hospital for medical attention. They were overcome with relief and joy when they saw their father with Hazel and Olive.
After they had all stopped hugging and crying, the others told Hazel what had happened to them. Not only were they caught in the ruins as the house suddenly collapsed around them, but the heavy cast-iron stove was flung across the room, pinning their mother down. It landed on her legs and was too heavy for her to shift. The metal was also very hot, as it was winter and the coals were blazing.
The two older girls, Ruth and Muriel, knew that everything depended on them. Their mother was in great pain, but still conscious. With a superhuman effort, between them they lifted up the hot stove with their bare hands, calling to Edna to stay back like a good girl, as she was fussing to be picked up. They raised the heavy stove high enough off their mother’s crushed legs to enable her to pull free, but they saw at once that she was badly injured. At this moment their father arrived home from the railway yard and rushed the family to the hospital. As soon as they were in safe hands, he had returned to search for Hazel and Olive, desperate to know if they had survived.
The happy reunion was sadly cut short. It was already too late for Olive. She never regained consciousness, and she died the next day in the nurses’ quarters, where the homeless family was offered temporary refuge.
The Haunting of Richmond School
Although 88 children who attended Richmond School died on December 6, 1917, their story does not seem to have ended there. The demolished school buildings were replaced in 1921 when the Richmond area of the city was rebuilt. The family division of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court now stands on the site.
In spite of the fact that there is no longer a school there, some of the law court staff have seen or heard the spirits of young children thronging the building, especially around the date of the Halifax Explosion, on December 6 of each year. Some psychics believe that death occurred so instantly and so unexpectedly at the moment of the explosion that these children may not have understood what happened and became lost between worlds. Not realizing that their bodies are dead, their spirits continue to roam the former school site as if they are still attending school.
Most of the mysterious happenings occur at night or during the weekends, when the Supreme Court building is empty. Enough strange events have taken place over the years that some of the staff assigned the blame to a mythical Peggy. “Peggy is at it again,” they might say.
There is not just one mischievous ghostly child, though, but a group of spirits. Many people have heard children chattering and racing along the corridors, and glimpsed childlike figures standing at the top of the stairs or sometimes squatting on the steps. They play pranks on each other, and it is not uncommon to hear ghostly laughter. Lights are turned on or off when no one is near the switch, and heavy oak doors swing open and shut with no apparent cause.
Some of the pranks have thoroughly scared unsuspecting workmen, like the painter who was working at night. He found that objects kept moving around, although he was the only person in the room. Then when he descended his ladder and got ready to move it along the wall, the ladder moved on its own, as if someone was carrying it for him. Whoever this helper was, he or she remained invisible. The painter later recounted that he panicked and quickly packed up for the night.
The Halifax Explosion of 1917 occurred just as the first flurry of preparations for Christmas began. There is often quite a festive air to the haunting. Sometimes children are heard singing carols as they run up and down stairs, but there is also a group — a children’s choir — that practices carols together. Some who have heard the spectral practicing have felt intensely moved. The children sound so happy and excited as they prepare for the school-closing concert. One staff member who heard them late one evening said that the singing continued for at least five minutes.
Having the opportunity to participate in events that took place nearly 90 years ago, even if it is through a phantom existence, is at the same time a privilege and deeply saddening. It is a privilege to be allowed to share the normal, everyday life of these children as it was lived just prior to the disaster, and to understand something of what the preparations for Christmas must have been like for the children of 1917. It is deeply saddening to know now what was about to descend on them and how unsuspecting they were. Their innocence deepens the poignancy of the experience for those who have witnessed these otherworldly rehearsals.
A memorial plaque in the ground-floor hallway of the Court lists the names of those who died. Photographs hanging nearby show some of these children’s faces, and also the extent of the terrible devastation of the immediate area. The childr
en’s spiritual presence is also a reminder of the uncertainty of life for all of us. If we could offer a Christmas gift to these lost little souls, perhaps it might be to assure them of the reality of their death, and to let them know that they can choose to move on.
Chapter 7
Ghastly Flames and Fires
Fire Spook Invades a Lonely Farm
The site of Spook House at Caledonia Mills is greatly feared even to this day. Although the house itself has long gone, after dark locals avoid the area where it stood, and visitors are cautioned to take nothing home from the property.
The haunting of what once was an isolated old farmhouse, eight miles outside Antigonish, occurred in two phases. The first was spread over the period 1900 to 1921, and the second — much more intense — phase lasted only from January to June 1922. At that point the family who lived there fled the property. The empty building later burned down.
The farm, which belonged to Alexander (Black John) and Janet MacDonald, was the scene of powerful family tension and strife.
One recorded incident concerned the death of Janet’s mother in 1900. The old lady had been taken out of the poorhouse to live with Black John and Janet in 1899. Her escalating madness, however, tormented them. Janet locked her in her room and nailed the door shut. On April 27, 1900, Janet was overheard threatening the raving old lady. “I hope the devil in hell comes and takes you before 9 o’clock tomorrow morning!” she screamed. At these words, an evil-looking black dog appeared in the bedroom. By the next morning the old lady was dead. Twenty-two years later, at the height of an investigation into poltergeist activity at the farm, it came out (through an exercise in automatic writing) that Janet had murdered her mother that night. Whatever the truth, this information was kept secret until N. Carroll MacIntyre, author of the book The Fire-Spook of Caledonia Mills, learned of it.
The second curse concerned Black John’s brother Andrew. He was a heavy drinker, and in 1903, on a bitterly cold November night, Janet turned him out of the house. As he left, he looked back and cursed the family in Gaelic. He died seven years later in May 1910.
That same summer of 1910, Black John and Janet adopted a two-year-old girl, Mary Ellen. Their own grown daughter had previously married and moved away. At the time of the adoption, Black John was 63 and Janet 60. Shortly afterwards, strange happenings around the farm gradually increased, culminating in the outbreak of numerous inexplicable fires in 1922.
When neighbours discovered rolled-up mats from the MacDonald’s property against their fence the MacDonalds blamed the incident on the family dog. But a short while later heavy cast-iron pots were found in the same place, and articles around the house began to disappear and reappear in mysterious ways.
On the MacDonald property itself, cows and a horse were moved about in the locked barn at night, no matter how carefully Black John had secured them the previous evening. The terrified horse was once found with its head fastened to a cow’s stanchion. Even though Black John varied the knots and reinforced the ropes it made no difference. When Black John found that the horse’s mane and tail had been braided one night in the locked barn he finally accepted that he was dealing with spooks. As well as the interference with the animals, ashes were found in the stored milk, stones flew across the property for no apparent reason and clothes were torn off the clothesline.
Then, in the winter of 1921, after 12 years, these relatively benign disturbances abruptly ceased, to be replaced on January 7, 1922 with the malevolent manifestations that led to the house becoming known as “Fire-Spook House.”
On that first occasion Black John merely found a charred area in the kitchen above the stove. The second night Janet, scared by crackling noises, woke him at 10 p.m. He found several fires burning in the kitchen ceiling.
During a severe snowstorm on January 11, the outbreaks became alarming. Fires began to burn mysteriously in the ceilings and walls. The wallpaper in one of the bedrooms burst spontaneously into flames, and numerous other fires ignited throughout the house. When Janet and Mary Ellen fought their way through the storm to beg their neighbours for help, at least six fresh fires broke out while they were away.
That evening, the window blind in the parlour burst into flames and was partially destroyed. A calendar hanging on a wall, and a bed along with a dirty sheet under it, also caught alight. The pet dog’s cushion, which had been upstairs, was found burning in a corner of the downstairs parlour.
Fires now broke out so rapidly that Black John MacDonald sent one of the neighbours to the village for more help. The storm was increasing in intensity, damaging the electric wiring and isolating the remote farmhouse even more. On that terrifying night, between 5 p.m. and 8 a.m., 38 fires were extinguished throughout the house. Some occurred in the drawers of dressers and in an empty box. A sodden cloth lying in two inches of water ignited and burned to ash. Cotton rags mysteriously manifested and burned.
The MacDonalds moved out of the farmhouse the next day to a nearby property and Black John returned daily to feed and water the livestock.
By this time the bizarre and unexplained events had garnered immense public interest right across North America. The Halifax Herald and the Evening Mail of January 26, 1922, offered a $30 prize for the best explanation for the outbreak of the fires, and received 150 replies. One enterprising soul wrote a poem called The Story of the Illusive Ghost of Caledonia Mills, and it became a runaway seller at 25 cents a copy.
Detective Peter Owen (Peachy) Carroll and a Halifax Herald reporter, Harold Whidden, agreed to conduct an investigation. They took up residence on February 6, accompanied by Black John and several of the neighbours. That night an even fiercer blizzard blew up and the men were so cold they were unable to sleep.
The next night they were trying to rest when a heavy pounding started in the cellar, lasting for about five minutes, and strange noises came from the parlour. Loud footsteps shook the landing and stopped at the top of the stairs. Shortly after that Carroll felt a soft touch on his left forearm, and almost simultaneously Whidden was slapped hard above his left elbow. All the men got up but could find nothing unusual anywhere in the house.
After two nights, they were too cold to remain at the farmhouse any longer. In an attempt to scotch rumours and gossip about the family and neighbours, Detective Carroll made an official public statement that he could find no person responsible for what was happening.
The case was now receiving continent-wide interest. Dr. Walter Franklin Price of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) in New York offered his investigative services free on the condition that someone in Canada would cover his expenses. The editor of the Halifax Herald agreed to do this, and Price arrived at Antigonish on March 6, 1922, accompanied by two staff members from the Halifax Herald. It was a difficult journey by sleigh across the fields, beset as they were by bitter winds. Price was impressed by the lonely location of the house and the thick surrounding woods.
Nothing strange happened during the first two nights, and Price used the time to examine burn marks and interview witnesses to the 38 fires. On the third night he spread several blank sheets of paper on the dining room table and asked two of the witnesses, Harold Whidden and Donald McRitchie, to sit at the table, each holding a pencil poised above the paper. Price hoped that the haunting entity might express itself through automatic writing.
It wasn’t long before Whidden began to write furiously and continued to do so for two hours. Later he said he was entirely unconscious of what he had written and that his hand had felt numb. When he stopped for a rest the spirit kept pestering for more time. Exasperated, Whidden asked it to leave him alone, which it did, after writing “Goodbye.” The message transmitted through the automatic writing was so sensitive that all who read it were sworn to utter secrecy. Price reinforced this sense of the dramatic by refusing motion picture offers and by forbidding the taking of photographs outside the house.
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Dr. Price’s full report was published in the Halifax Herald on March 16, 1922. He stated that he believed the fires were caused by human hands in an altered state of consciousness (that is, by Mary Ellen), perhaps from an intrusion of discarnate (out-of-body) intelligence.
The “Black John” MacDonalds (Alexander, Janet and Mary Ellen)
The MacDonald family returned in May 1922, to sow the crops, and for a short while life seemed to return to normal. When the fires recurred on May 18 they stuck it out quietly until the first week of June 1922, when they left the farm for good. Black John died a year later, and Janet in 1930. In a bizarre twist of fate, Janet’s death was the result of burns. Mary Ellen moved to northern Ontario, where she operated a boarding house with no known recurrence of poltergeist activity. The empty farmhouse eventually burned down.
While researching his book The Fire-Spook of Caledonia Mills, author N. Carroll MacIntyre wandered through the ruins of the house. Although he had been warned not to take anything from the property he defiantly pocketed a painted eggcup that he found in the foundation. He placed it on a shelf in his summer cottage as a conversation piece. A couple of weeks later he held a party there and told spooky stories, and only a few hours after he left for home the cottage mysteriously burned to the ground — and the eggcup with it.
Strange as these events are, they are not unique. There is a recent and comparable report of an outbreak of multiple spontaneous blazes in the town of Canneto di Caronia, in Sicily. These terrifying fires, few of which could be rationally explained, continued for weeks. Scientists were brought in to investigate the cause, but modern scientific methods failed to identify the cause.
The residents of the town were convinced that they were under attack from demonic forces. On February 11, 2004, Reuter’s News reported: “A Sicilian town is struggling to work out why dozens of household items from (unplugged) fridge-freezers to furniture keep mysteriously bursting into flame, terrifying locals and sparking theories of demonic intervention…. Some fires have spread to engulf homes and police temporarily evacuated some 40 residents.”
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