Bluenose Ghosts

by Helen Creighton

  Bluenose GHOSTS

  Helen Creighton

  Helen Creighton

  Bluenose

  GHOTS

  Copyright © Helen Creighton 1994, 2009

  E-book © 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

  Nimbus Publishing Limited

  PO Box 9166

  Halifax, NS B3K 5M8

  (902) 455-4286

  Interior design: Aaron Harpell, Hammerhead Design

  Facsimile of the 1976 edition

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Creighton, Helen, 1899–

  Bluenose ghosts / Helen Creighton ; introduction by Clary Croft.

  First published:Toronto: Ryerson, 1957.

  ISBN 978-1-55109-717-6

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-55109-806-7

  1. Ghosts—Nova Scotia. 2. Legends—Nova Scotia. I. Title.

  GR113.5.N69C743 2009 398.2509716 C2008-907174-3

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Canada Council, and of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage for our publishing activities.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE

  1 FORERUNNERS

  2 LEAVE ’EM LAY

  3 GHOSTS GUARD BURIED TREASURE

  4 FORESIGHT AND HINDSIGHT

  5 DEVILS AND ANGELS

  6 PHANTOM SHIPS AND SEA MYSTERIES

  7 GHOSTS HELPFUL, HARMFUL, AND HEADLESS

  8 SO MANY WANDERING WOMEN

  9 THERE AND NOT THERE

  10 GHOSTS AS ANIMALS AND LIGHTS

  11 HAUNTED HOUSES AND POLTERGEISTS

  EPILOGUE

  FOREWORD

  What is it about the tales in Bluenose Ghosts that continue to make the book so popular?

  Helen Creighton didn’t set out to collect tales of the supernatural. They initially came her way as sub-topics offered while she was collecting traditional songs in the Maritimes. But people became very comfortable with Helen and began sharing their most intimate experiences of ghosts, witches, buried treasures, and forerunners.

  Not everyone can get people to open up and talk about things others might find odd or even evil. It’s a rare gift. Helen offered a sympathetic ear and, eventually, grew to have a strong belief in the supernatural herself, as she wrote in her autobiography, A Life in Folklore: “Having had a number of strange things happen in my own life, I suppose I am in tune with the subject.” Those who shared their stories with her felt comfortable in knowing they wouldn’t be derided. One man from whom Helen collected told her, “You have a way about you. You could charm the devil!”

  Charming, no doubt—but she wasn’t so certain the book was a good idea when she completed it. What she had assembled was a most remarkable collection of tales. Many of the people who had shared them thought they were true. But how would the public receive these stories?

  Bluenose Ghosts hit the bookstores in time for the 1957 Christmas market and was an instant hit. Readers began to send Helen more tales, and she soon became known as “The Ghost Lady.”

  Numerous editions and projects developed as a result of the book’s success. In 1959, CBC Radio began an eight-part series dramatized from some of the book’s most bizarre tales. In 1966, CBC Television shot a film, Lady of the Legends, that followed Helen as she collected songs and stories from Maritimers, and the movie used several examples from Bluenose Ghosts. The book has been the subject of countless school book reports and continues to be a summer camp favourite that still scares the wits out of young people. This year, the Alderney Gate Library in Dartmouth will hold its twentieth Annual Ghost Story Writing Contest for young writers, inspired by the tales in Bluenose Ghosts.

  Scholars have had high praise for the work as well. American folklorist Horace Beck said it was “perhaps one of the most worthwhile studies of the occult and its effects upon a people that has been done in some time.” In 1982, Helen’s friend and eminent folklore scholar Herbert Halpert wrote to her that “Bluenose Ghosts is one of the most scholarly books we have on the subject in North America because it’s human...It isn’t type and motif numbers and annotations that make a book truly scholarly, but the approach.”

  And that, I believe, is the strength of Bluenose Ghosts—Helen’s approach. The stories found in these pages were not invented, nor did she write them in the literary sense. What she did was transcribe them from actual oral narratives. I have listened to all of the original recordings Helen made of these tales and, truly, the words you read were those the narrators spoke. Helen’s strength in assembling these tales was her innate ability to tie them together with empathetic introductions.

  Unlike today’s horror genre, these tales are not thickened with gory plots of murder and blood and guts for their own sake. Rather, these stories are told as truth—real or imagined. And that makes them all the more terrifying. Tales told as truth are far scarier than invented plots.

  Besides, they aren’t all dark. Helen certainly had a light side when it came to sharing some of these stories. Many Dartmouth citizens remember childhood visits to Helen’s family home, Evergreen, on a dark Halloween night. After knocking on the door of the large Victorian mansion, they would be welcomed into the vestibule by Helen, dressed as a witch. There, Canada’s “Ghost Lady” would sit and regale the trick-or-treaters with tales from her book.

  Helen Creighton died in 1989, but her legacy lives on. We may not be able to hear Helen tell these stories in person any longer, but the voices of those who shared their tales of the supernatural are captured forever in Bluenose Ghosts.

  Clary Croft

  Author of Helen Creighton: Canada’s First Lady of Folklore

  October 2008

  PROLOGUE

  The telling of ghost stories was not a part of my early experience in life. These tales came as a new and unsought adventure when I began my search for folk songs in Nova Scotia in 1928. Once I entered the home of my first singer, Mr. Enos Hartlan, there was no escaping them. The high point of land on which he lived, overlooking the eastern approach to Halifax Harbour, proved a fitting place for an introduction to this subject, for there were spruce trees around most of the property and several small houses built near a larger abandoned and unpainted dwelling.

  “You see that house?” old Enos said proudly. “That’s our Ghost House. No one don’t live there no more.” Then he explained that the house had been built of wood washed ashore from wrecks, and that where there has been sudden death there is likely to be a return of the spirit. Standing as we were in an exposed spot, with the surf pounding on the rocks below and the fog drifting in from the sea and wrapping itself around the trees and dwellings, it would seem that anyone with imagination could see anything. But what of sounds like heavy knockings where no human stood to knock, and bedclothes ripped off the sleeper night after night as though the ghost objected to his occupying a bed?

  Many were the stories centred around this Ghost House, some of which will be told later in greater detail.

  We would sit of an evening beside the old deal table in the kitchen until Mr. Hartlan’s voice would fail him and he would say, “I can’t sing no more tonight.” But even though his singing voice grew husky he could still talk, and he told story after story of “apparitions” seen by himself or told about by his uncle. Then when I visited hi
s brother Richard I was told more stories, and gradually I realized that I was not immune to supernatural manifestations myself. Through the tutelage of the Hartlan men I understood for the first time the meaning of a strange event in my own life that had occurred not too long before.

  This had happened just prior to the death of my eldest brother’s wife. It had been a long illness, one that was very hard on both the patient and her family. We turned to anything that would distract the children, and one evening three of us sat in the drawing-room playing cards. Suddenly we were interrupted by a loud knocking. We all heard it and stopped playing. I made the obvious remark, “There’s someone at the door.”

  “There can’t be,” Kathleen said. “There isn’t any door on this side of the house.” That was quite true, for the house was built on a hill, and that side, although on the first floor, was high above ground. Nevertheless to satisfy me Barbara went to the nearest door.

  “There’s no one there,” she said in a tone which inferred this was no more than she had expected. We were mystified but I forgot about it until the Hartlans took on my education. Then I realized that what we had heard were the three death knocks. These are heard in certain houses or by certain people and they come as a warning of approaching death. Whether my sister-in-law died on the day following the knocks or a few days later, none of us could recall. Kathleen remembers the incident, but Barbara was too young. Certainly at the time, we all heard it—three slow deliberate knocks that insisted upon our attention.

  I have heard the knocks only once since then, and in a different house. I was sitting at my desk one morning shortly before twelve o’clock when I was startled by three distinct knocks. In my house there are many noises caused partly by the steam-heating system, and partly by people in other apartments. But there was something about these knocks that disturbed me greatly. I rose at once and called to Susan in the next apartment. There was no reply. I then opened another door, one leading to the hall. She was passing through, so I asked if she had knocked. She looked surprised and said “no.” So I said, “I just heard three knocks,” but I did not say three death knocks nor even admit that to myself.

  Earlier that morning I had been with a friend who was ill but her condition was not considered serious. Now I was alarmed. Surely nothing had happened to her. I jumped in my car and has–tened to her house and, on the way, wondered why I was driving and not walking this short distance. After writing for an hour or more I needed exercise, but I was possessed by a feeling of urgency, and time seemed important. She was all right of course, so I returned home but found it impossible to settle down. I seemed to be waiting for something to happen. It came when the telephone rang. The husband of a very dear friend had died suddenly in his car. Checking up, the time coincided with the warning and, when his wife was asked whom she would like to have with her, she had asked for me. Knowing she would want me, and all three of us being very close, I suppose he had been trying to get through to me.

  Some years ago we had in Dartmouth where I live an Anglican clergyman, Venerable Archdeacon Wilcox. He was a boyish, lovable man, greatly esteemed by people of all faiths and ages. To our grief he developed cancer, and the time came when death was imminent. One morning I awoke very early and then went to sleep again. I dreamed that I was walking along a street and that I saw the archdeacon walking towards me, but on the opposite side. Normally he would have seen me, for he loved people and was always aware of them around him. He would have waved his hand and then raised his hat in a friendly greeting but, on this occasion, he seemed to be unaware of anything around him. Instead he was walking steadily ahead with his eyes on a goal at about the height of the house tops. I said to myself in my dream, “Archdeacon Wilcox is much too ill to be out walking,” and then still in my dream explained it to myself by saying, “That’s not the archdeacon; that’s his spirit,” and I was satisfied. He had died during that second period of sleep, probably at the time when I had seen him.

  In the summer of 1954 I was at Indiana University. I have a sister for whom I am responsible since she is not well and cannot look after herself. I had only just arrived when word came that she was ill. Should I return at once, or was that necessary? She was constantly upon my mind until one day while walking across the campus I was for a fleeting moment in the house where she was living, and I had a picture of life proceeding normally. Someone walked quietly through a room and no one was disturbed in any way. I knew then that the trouble had righted itself, and subsequent letters showed this to be true. It seemed almost as though I had been transported to that house in far off Nova Scotia long enough to witness its interior and to calm my fears.

  It was during my twenties that I became aware of a guiding spirit, a hunch if you like, and surely everyone experiences hunches. One day in Halifax I knew I should cross to the other side of the street. There was no apparent reason and the side I was on was less congested and more pleasant. Nevertheless the urge was strong and, for curiosity’s sake more than anything else, I obeyed. The reason was given immediately when a friend got off the tram and upon seeing me looked greatly relieved and said, “I’ve been trying all day to get you on the telephone.” The message was important.

  Ever since then I have listened when this advice has come. It is not a voice that I hear nor a vision that I see, but a knowing that a certain thing is advisable. If I heed it, the reason is soon apparent. If I decide to go my own stubborn way I soon see my mistake. This gift I believe may be encouraged and developed. Or it may be confused with wishful thinking, and that can be dangerous. But when it comes in the manner I so often experience, and usually when least expected, it is something to be treasured and respected.

  If experiences of this kind are rare, I fancy it is because most people think a hunch is no more than a fortuitous thought that just happened to come along at the right time. Obedience does not mean that you think no longer for yourself, but rather that when advice comes from a higher source you apply your own intelligence to the help that is provided and work with this guid ing spirit as a team. What, for instance, but guidance could have told me to duck under the bedclothes at the moment of the 1917 Halifax explosion when part of the window casing with the nails facing down imbedded itself in my pillow where my head had been seconds before? My own common sense? No, I was too inexperienced. And why do I so often know how a thing is going to turn out and whether or not I should attempt this or that? Something outside is helping me all the time. Haven’t you felt it too?

  Another strange thing happened when I went to Toronto in March, 1956, to do the narration in a special broadcast of folk songs. A number of the songs on that programme had come to me from the singing of a fisherman, Mr. Ben Henneberry, who had died five years before and, in introducing the songs, I had talked of him and his island home. I have always toiled against a handicap of exceptional fatigue, and I always get worked up over any performance in public. Consequently when we were about half way through I began to feel a little shaky. Then to my great astonishment Ben Henneberry was with me. I neither saw nor heard him, but I received a message and knew it was from him. It said, “You’re doing very well. Just keep it up.” How did I know it was Mr. Henneberry? That I cannot tell you for I do not know myself. I certainly was not expecting him to come to me in the middle of a broadcast, but come he did. He had never appeared before. I was all right immediately and the broadcast proceeded with no one else realizing what had taken place. It was an encouraging experience, and proves that if your mind is receptive those whom we have perhaps befriended in life or loved, can and do help us in moments of need.

  This recital of my own phenomena may seem lengthy and personal, but I trust it has impressed you with the sincerity of my belief in them. The same sincerity lies behind every tale in this book. They have come from many sources and from all walks of life, for ghost stories are found among people of the highest as well as of the lowest intelligence and education. They all have one thing in common. The people who told the stories were convince
d they had happened, just as I believe in my own personal experiences that I have outlined. They have not been added to for the purpose of lengthening them, for a true ghost story is nearly always short. Many are given exactly as they were told, and all are by word of mouth and not from printed texts.

  I have heard it argued that a ghost story is of little value unless it can be substantiated, but how can you prove something that has taken place only once and may never occur again? For myself I consider well the integrity of the informant, if he is temperate in his habits, and how much his outlook upon life has been coloured by a superstitious environment.

  Whether you read this book for entertainment or for serious research, I hope you will be rewarded for the time you spend. The material covers the whole Province and has been taken down over a period of twenty-eight years. The diversity and extent of our people’s belief will, I think, surprise you. Here you will find ghosts in the form of big dogs and little dogs, lights, balls of fire, phantom ships, a man on horseback with his head under his arm, a boatload of pirates wearing old-fashioned clothes, soldiers and sailors in uniforms of a past era, women in white and women in black, an old sailor sitting on a cannon wearing a split-tail coat, a man covered with eel grass from the bottom of the ocean, a woman with a pair of stockings in her hand who stopped and put them on, a dead mother who came back to advise a sympathetic stepmother in a child’s illness, a horse, a kitten, a pig, a barrel of brandy, and so on.

  I do not suggest that all the stories are actually true. Some are the result of imagination, superstition, and fear, but there are many others whose authenticity cannot be questioned. I have purposely refrained from making comparisons with similar cases from other parts of the world because this book is devoted to the thinking of our own people. Any conclusions I reach have been based on what they have taught me, and not from outside reading.

  I wish to thank Dr. F. J. Alcock for his unfailing interest and co-operation during the ten years that I worked for the National Museum of Canada when he was its chief curator; Miss Phyllis Blakeley, Miss Marion Moore, and Mr. G. D. H. Hatfield of the Canadian Authors’ Association, Nova Scotia branch, for reading this manuscript and giving helpful advice; also the people of this Province who have generously shared their supernatural experiences with me, even though it meant that I often left their homes with a tingling in my scalp and a too rapid heartbeat.