—H. C.
Chapter ONE
FORERUNNERS
Forerunners are supernatural warnings of approaching events and, are usually connected with impending death. They come in many forms, and are startling, as though the important thing is to get the hearer’s attention. The most common forerunners are a picture falling off the wall or a calendar dropping to the floor at the moment when a distant loved one has died. Or you may hear your name called as I did when the mother of a friend died, although she had not called me at all. The three death knocks mentioned in the Prologue are forerunners and, to my knowledge, nobody has ever been able to explain them. Many people who disclaim any belief in ghosts admit to having had a forerunner which, after all, is just as much a part of the supernatural as the seeing of a spirit.
Although forerunner is the usual name in Nova Scotia, these warnings are known occasionally as tokens or visions. Whatever the name, the stories run the same way. I remember how my breath stopped momentarily one day when Mr. Eddy Deal of Seabright finished the folk song he was recording for me and said, knowing my interest in such things. “Did you ever hear of a man walking with himself?” I said no, I hadn’t.
“Well, there was a man here,” he continued, “who felt some–body walking beside him and when he looked, he realized it was his own apparition. He was so frightened that he couldn’t speak, for he knew the belief that this was a forerunner of death. A few months later he died.”
I remembered then having heard of a Capt. McConnell of Port Medway who was said to have had a similar experience, only in his case his own apparition walked ahead of him and would not answer to his call. Instead, it left him and turned in at the gate of the cemetery with the result that the captain went home and said to his wife, “I’m not going to be long for this world.” Soon after, he was stricken with pneumonia and died.
Returning to Seabright Mr. Deal recalled a man, named Henry Awalt, telling about being out on the back road when he met a tall man like himself. But, he said, he was so much taller than his own height of six feet that he could have walked between his legs. The apparition was carrying a lantern. Mr. Awalt recognized himself and in a few months he died, but not before telling his strange experience.
Here too a man named Pat is said to have learned his fate. Before his wife died he had promised that he would never marry again, but after a while he went courting. He was coming around the bend of the road at the top of the Seabright hill when he met himself. Knowing the belief, and looking upon it as punishment for breaking his word, he assumed this was his forerunner. He told the story before his death which happened three months later.
At Tancook Island in St. Margaret’s Bay a man was going to the shore one day when he met himself. He told about it and said he was going to die. He did soon afterwards, with diphtheria as the cause.
It is comforting to know however that death is not always immediate, at least according to this story from Tangier on our eastern shore, that is, east of Halifax.
“Mother lived on Tangier Island before I was born, and her sister, my Aunt Maime, was with her, a young girl at that time. One night Aunt Maime was looking out the window. The moon was bright. There was a little outbuilding nearby with a window in it, and she said to my mother, ‘There’s a woman looking out that window. It’s myself, and I have a baby in my arms.’ Mother went to the window and looked, and she could see it too. It was too far away for it to be a reflection, and anyway Aunt Maime wasn’t holding a baby at that time. But fifteen years later when she died she had a baby in her arms, and my mother recalled the incident.”
Usually with a ghost story or a forerunner you can find a reason for the happening, but there is one story that puzzled me for several years. I went back a number of times and made casual references to it, always hoping that a chance word might throw some light upon it. I was finally rewarded although the interpretation is still open to question. I will tell you the story and let you decide for yourself.
In the summer of 1947 I stayed at Victoria Beach where I was collecting folklore for the National Museum of Canada. I was told that I should see Mr. A. B. Thorne for an experience that no other member of his family would talk about. My companion was the author and poet, Martha Banning Thomas. The evening of our call was fine and pleasant, with a warm summer breeze drifting in our car windows. We drove the narrow, hilly road in the spirit of sweet companionship, little realizing that our return trip would be far from serene, or that our thoughts for many a night afterwards would be in a turmoil.
The Thorne house is at Karsdale, a white frame cottage with a garden that is always filled in summer with beautiful flowers. Mrs. Thorne is the gardener, and she knows the botanical name of everything she grows. The interior of the house shows the care of loving hands with its hooked and braided mats, antimacassars, cloths with crocheted edges, and embroidered cushion covers. She also has treasures of old china handed down in her family and cherished through the years. It is a dainty, pleasant house, and she and her husband are a gracious host and hostess, making their visitors feel at home immediately.
Mr. Thorne is a man of medium height with blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a rather sensitive mouth. Now probably in his sixties, he can still dig garden or ditch in a way that would shame many a younger man. Yet with work to occupy him, and an excellent wife to care for all his needs, he appears to be a singularly nervous man. This is little wonder, considering the experience of his youth which we had come to hear.
We had a short period of conversation until the proper atmosphere was established, and then we asked Mr.Thorne if he would tell his story. After a little hesitation he began.
“I hope I’ll never have to go through that racket again,” he said. “Well I’ll tell you. I had just come home from the States and I had a friend whose name was Joe Holmes. We were always together when I was home, but Joe wasn’t very strong. We were young men then, about twenty, and one evening we were together and I had a letter to mail. We hadn’t been drinking. I don’t want you to think we had because we hadn’t, and we didn’t imagine what we saw. About ten o’clock we took the letter to the post office. It was in the Riordens’ house, the way people often have them in the country. I lived at Thorne’s Cove this side of it, and Joe lived two houses away on the other side.
“Well, we mailed the letter, and then we sat alongside the road opposite the house and talked. It was a bright night with a full moon, and it was too nice to separate and go home so early. The Riordens’ grass was about three feet high at that time, and there was a turnip field behind it. We heard a hoe strike against a rock and it attracted our attention. We sat forward then and looked and, to our surprise, we saw a Thing come crawling on its hands and feet from the southeast corner of the house. Then it stood up and we could see that it was a man. We were on the lower or south side of the road, and it was on the upper or north side. Then it went out of sight.
“In the country we often think a lot without saying anything, and anyway there’s often no need of words between friends. So we just sat there and didn’t say anything, and before long it came out again. We didn’t move an inch, but we watched, and this time it came half-way across the road. The time for keeping quiet was over now, so I said, ‘Joe, did you see that?’ He said yes, he did, and by this time it had gone back again. You might think we’d had enough, but we kept still and it didn’t keep us waiting very long.
“The third time was like the others. It came out and went back. We still sat there and in a second’s time it was back and it went under the cherry tree. There were more apple trees on our side of the road then than now, and they took to shaking and the apples fell to the ground. I was frightened by this time and I said, ‘Joe, I’ve got to go home.’ That would have been all right if we’d both lived in the same direction. Probably we’d have left even before that, but we were braver together. We decided to go to Joe’s house and we started to run. Joe wasn’t very strong as I said, but he always thought he could run, and he could, and I
was afraid I couldn’t keep up with him. I guess the fear got into my feet because I ran just as fast as he did.
“When we got to his house we stood in the road and talked. We were young men and curious, and we didn’t like to leave it there because it would always pester us and we’d never know what we’d seen. It didn’t seem like a prank, but if it was, we wanted to settle it. Finally I said, ‘Let’s go back; I’m not afraid.’ I wasn’t either, so long as Joe was with me. Nothing was going to hurt the two of us and besides, it’s easy to be brave when you have company. ‘We’ll see what it is,’ I said. So we walked back and pretty soon we saw it and it was coming to meet us. It was half-way between the Riordens and the Cronins, and that’s the next house, the one in between. I said, ‘There it is; don’t leave me.’ As I said, I figured that with two of us it couldn’t do much harm and I wanted to find out what it was. I meant to touch it and then I’d know for sure if it was real. When we were within twenty feet of it I said again, ‘Joe, don’t leave me,’ and then I walked up till my face was close beside it. I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live.
“It had on black pants, a white shirt with a hard bosom front, and black braces. Its head was bare and he was of medium size. It looked as though its eyes were deeply sunk in, and they were very bright and penetrating, and the only thing it looked like was a skeleton. I didn’t touch it, although I would have even then, but Joe gave a scream and ran, and I was scared. I wasn’t long overtaking him, and from that time Joe had a hard time to keep up with me. It followed and kept twenty feet behind us. There were bars on the Holmes fence. We jumped them, and the Thing cut across the field to head us off, but we got there first. We stood in the doorway and watched it for half an hour. There was a stone wall with a rotten pole on top of it, and it stood on this pole. In the morning I went out and felt that pole and, do you know, it was so rotten it just crumbled up in my hands. Why that pole was so rotten it couldn’t have held a bird.
“As I said, I’ll never forget that racket as long as I live, and as for Joe, he would never talk of it except to his mother and to me. A year later he was taken sick and a while later he died, and he always claimed this was a forerunner for him. We were both sure it couldn’t have been anybody playing tricks because the moon was full and we could see everything as plain as in the day.
“Then a strange thing happened. Joe died of a tubercular throat, and he died hard, but he never rambled in his mind. It was always clear right to the end. But one day not long before his death Joe said to his mother, ‘My throat won’t hurt me any more. He (the apparition) was here and rubbed it.’ The pain had been almost more than he could bear, but from that moment it stopped and he never felt it in his throat again. I sat up with him every night, and do you know what he looked like when he died? He looked just like that man, for he was pretty well wasted away.”
Was this then the explanation, and had Joe seen his own apparition as he was to appear in death? Was that the meaning of it all?
When Mr. Thorne was through we sat quietly and, after a while, I said jokingly that he would be telling me soon what colour the man’s eyes were. To my surprise he took this seriously and pondered the matter. Finally he said, “No I can’t quite do that,” but his hesitation showed how vivid the experience was even to that day which would be forty or more years after the event.
When the story was over Mrs. Thorne gave us a hot drink and some cookies and we started back to Victoria Beach. The country road was very dark that night and there was no moon to comfort us—nor to show us this unwelcome figure either. As we came to the Riorden house Miss Thomas said, “Now that is where they sat,” pointing to the bank on the south side of the road, “and that is where they saw it,” pointing north.
“Yes, Martha,” I said, pressing the accelerator a little harder.
“And this,” as we approached the Cronin house, “is where it stood in the road and they saw it clearly.”
“Yes, Martha,” driving faster still.
“And that is where it must have stood on the wall,” she said as we reached the Holmes property. I relaxed a little then glad enough to be away from that district, for I wanted no more of the supernatural that night.
A year later I attended a service in the Karsdale church and the Thornes stood almost opposite me as we sang that lovely hymn, “Unto the Hills.” When we came to the line, “No moon shall harm thee in the silent night,” I looked at Mr. Thorne who has been a nervous man since this incident and thought, “But the moon did harm him.” Or at least it revealed what the ghost was like, and the effect has never worn off. Would his nervousness be due only to the fright of a moonlit night in his youth, or does he fear that when his time comes the apparition will appear as his forerunner too? It is a question I have never liked to ask him.
Let us turn now to another kind of forerunner, and for this we will leave the Annapolis Basin and go to Clarke’s Harbour on the southwestern shore, a settlement peopled largely from Cape Cod. Here in the old days, as in many other places, they used to have boards to lay people out on when they died. “A woman’s mother-in-law had been sick, and one day as she was sitting in her kitchen she heard the sound of boards at her window. She got up and looked all around but she couldn’t find anything to account for the disturbance. When the older woman died, her daughter-in-law heard the boards being put in the window, as sometimes happened when the main entrance was too small for them. She recalled her forerunner then and said, ‘There’s my boards.’ ”
Clarke’s Harbour reported another event that was heard before it happened. In Miss Evelyn Swim’s home a sick boy was sleeping in the front room downstairs. “He was not thought sick enough to die,” she said. “Mother was stitching, and Aunt Julie had just come from her room when they heard a little knock. Mother said, ‘You go see who that is.’ Aunt Julie went, but she came back and said, ‘Levie, there’s nobody there.’ Then came another knock. She looked out and still there was nobody there. She went back to the child’s room then and everything seemed in order. The knock came then for the third time. They couldn’t understand it unless it was somebody playing a prank, but there was no sign of anybody anywhere. In a few days the baby passed away, and shortly afterwards the coffin maker came to get measurements. He put the child’s body in the coffin and he used a hammer to drive little brads into the coffin. This happened three times and was so exactly like the sounds they had heard that they realized it had been a forerunner.”
Another story came from the same house. It was told by a woman who had grown up here, then had married and lived in the United States and now was returning as a widow to settle in her childhood island home. This island, Cape Sable, is exposed to all the vagaries of weather from the Atlantic Ocean. The coniferous trees are small, and the island has a wind-swept look. Weather is a factor that can never be forgotten because fishing is the main industry, and most island men spend the greater part of their lives upon the sea. Now that a causeway has been built to connect it to the mainland it seems slightly less remote, but until very recently it could be reached only by boats which struggled against strong currents and pulling tides.
This is the widow’s story told as she, Miss Evelyn Swim, Miss Beth McNintch and I sat together one evening.
“Father used to go to sea in the winters. When he left this time there were two little boys in our house. They were perfectly healthy and beautiful children. Mother didn’t like staying in the house alone, so a cousin used to come and stay all night with her, and they slept together in the corner room. One night at twelve o’clock something woke them up and at first neither of them spoke. Finally my cousin said,
“‘Aunt Isabel, do you hear anything?’ She said yes, she did. It was a frosty night, and what they heard was a rumbling coming down the road, rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble. It rumbled by the house like a wagon going over a frosty road. They were frozen in bed because it seemed to be coming straight towards our house, and that’s what it did. It came rumbling around the house and stop
ped by the front door. They clung together in terror. Then they heard a knock like somebody pounding on something that was frozen. Then it sounded like something being thrown away. By and by it started again and turned around and rumbled back over the road until the sound was lost in the distance. They couldn’t figure it out because they knew the sound of every wagon and who owned it, and who would that be driving up the road and turning off and stopping at their very door?
“They were up then, and they were afraid to go back to bed. Ma said, ‘I’m going to get Maurice.’ He was their neighbour, but Serena was afraid to go out. At the same time she wouldn’t stay in the house alone, so both of them went and they woke Mr. Nickerson up and he came and stayed all night. He looked around but he couldn’t see the track of any horse or wagon, so they thought it must be a forerunner and that my father was going to die. Ma cried and took on something awful, but the forerunner wasn’t for my father. It was for one of the little boys who was taken sick and in a week was dead from diphtheria.
“The day he was buried was frosty and cold, just as it had been that night. He had been prepared in the house for burial.Then the hearse started up the road for the funeral, and it made exactly the same noise they had heard.All the people in the house could hear it coming over the frosty ground, and it came rumbling up the frozen road and rumbled right up to the house.Then it stopped before the door just the way they’d heard it. Ma and my aunt couldn’t speak. They were listening for the next thing to happen.The hearse had a door at the back with a lock, and the undertaker couldn’t get the lock open, so he picked up a rock and hit it. Then he threw the rock away exactly as they’d heard it that night. Everything was repeated in detail, and it happened about sixty years ago.”
Bluenose Ghosts Page 2