Bluenose Ghosts

by Helen Creighton

  “I’ve thought quite a lot about that ghost. They say the dead don’t come back unless they want something. It was a nice point of land to be buried on, but I guess he didn’t like his feet sticking out that way. Mebbe Jim should have stayed long enough to tuck him in; cover them up with earth. I wonder if he ever did get that message across to anybody.”

  As you have seen, the disposal of the body and one’s effects may be disturbing to the dead. It is therefore a rash and un–imaginative person who will deliberately disobey their wishes, particularly if they have been expressed in words or on paper. We might go further and say even if they are only surmised. Not only must they be buried according to their desire, but they also expect to have any trinket they have specifically mentioned buried with them. The most hair-raising story in proof of this comes from Lunenburg.

  “A woman was buried here with a diamond ring on her finger.Three young men at the funeral saw the ring and decided to go and dig the remains up and take the ring for themselves, and nobody would be any the wiser. It was a daring scheme but not too dangerous if there had been only the living to contend with.

  “They went to the grave and it was a simple matter to remove the earth and open the coffin. They then proceeded to extract the ring but at that moment the dead woman sat up and spoke. One man died there and then. The second only lived for a short time, but the third survived the shock. By this time, however, the woman was so revived that she got up out of her grave and went home. When she knocked at the door and announced her presence her family could not believe she had actually returned. She remained there for some years with all the attributes of a living person except that she neither smiled nor spoke in all that time.” Stories similar to this have been reported from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland, Africa and other countries where the person wandered about until a second death followed by complete disintegration in the grave.

  We go now to Seabright, a little further down the road from the home of Mr. Boutilier who introduced this chapter. Here we meet Mr. Oliver Hubley whom I visited many times for both songs and stories. I often think of his remark when he first heard his voice returned to him from the magic recording tape. His face got very red and he said with a mixture of delight and shyness, “You know, I’m just a little proud of myself. His singing voice was responsible for that. Here is one of his recorded stories, but only first names are given as some of the descendants are still living.

  “Nearly ninety years ago there was a young man named Allie who was a very wicked fellow and he contracted a disease that was incurable at that time. His sister Lillian used to tend him. He had a ring that she would a liked to had, and he also had a pack of cards he used every night, along with four or five other young men. As he was getting pretty low and his sister knew he wouldn’t last much longer, she asked him if he would give her the ring and also the pack of cards. She said, ‘I could wear the ring, and the cards would be nice to get my friends together with.’ He says, ‘No, that ring stays with me and when I’m gone, I don’t want that ring taken off my finger. And as far as the cards are concerned, I want you to open the stove and throw them in and burn them up. I don’t want you to use those things.’ She said that she wouldn’t bother just then, but she had made up her mind that she was going to take that ring off his finger. The day came that he passed away and she took charge of the cards and also the ring.

  “Ten days after Allie died Lillian was at my mother’s house where she and my aunt often spent their evenings. They were all good friends together. So she said, ‘Barbery, what say if I bring down my cards next time and we have a little social game before we go to bed at night?’ Mother says, ‘I never play cards, but it would be all right for an hour or so. Bring them down, Lil.” So she did. They had just played two or three games when first thing they heard a knock on the side of the house. It started in the corner and went round about a foot at a time, right around till it came to the door. Then it was just like it struck the latch and jingled it. Mother says, ‘That’s somebody trying to playa trick. Don’t bother noticing that.’ So they kept on playing and the knocking got louder and it got up around the eaves of the house. It was so beautiful moonlight, and mother was never afraid of anything, so she said, ‘Look, I’m going to open the door.You and Lil run one way and I’ll run the other.’ There were the three of them, you see, so they bolted out the door and round the house and it was nobody. She says, ‘Are you sure you didn’t see anybody run and hide?’ ‘No, I didn’t see anybody.’ So mother says, ‘It’s only somebody playing us a trick anyhow.’ So they went in and started to play again. This time the noise come down round the door latch and it shook the door latch so that you’d swear the door was going to go to pieces. At last she said, ‘It’s time for us to go to bed anyhow,’ so they stopped playing.

  “The next night they started to play again and until then everything was quiet, and you know how quiet it can be away out in the country on a still night. Then first thing the noise started in again but instead of going round the eaves of the building, it took the door and shook it hard. Mother said, ‘Whatever fool that is will tear the door right off the hinges,’ and she went out and she opened the door and she said, ‘You coward, whoever you are get out of there,’ because she couldn’t see a sign of anyone outside. As soon as she closed the door the noise came back and this time it hit the door three or four times in succession. Mother says, ‘The devil, we’ll close up and go to bed.’ My father was away and they were all sleeping there together.

  “The next morning she says to Lil, ‘Lil, where did you get that pack of cards?’

  “‘Why,’ she says, ‘they were Allie’s,’ and then she said, “He told me not to use them but to burn them but I wouldn’t listen to him.’

  “‘You open that stove and put them in,’ my mother said, so she got the cards and they all watched while she put them in the fire.

  “‘Now,’ my mother said, ‘have you anything else belonging to him he didn’t want you to have?’

  “‘Yes,’ she said, ‘his ring.’

  “‘Well,’ she says, ‘you’ll have to make away with that ring.’

  “‘No,’ she says, ‘he wouldn’t like that. The last words he said was that he wanted that ring to remain on his finger.’

  “‘Then he’s got to have it,’ my mother says, and do you know what Lil had to do? She had to go to the graveyard at twelve o’clock at night and punch a hole in his grave until she struck the coffin and drop that ring down to him and that’s all they ever heard of him. That ended it.”

  A story on these same lines, but told in considerably less detail, comes from Glen Margaret, just a little further down this same shore.

  “Uncle McDonald lived at French Village. When he died he was wearing his mother’s wedding ring. He had said that he wished to be buried with it, and the people in the house knew this very well. Nevertheless they decided to keep the ring, and it was taken off his finger and he was buried without it.

  “After his burial things began to happen in his house. For one thing his big rocking-chair rocked in the night and doors opened and shut and there was no peace for anyone. They realized then that there was only one thing to do, so they dug him up and put the ring back on his finger. After that nothing happened any more.”

  Still on this shore, but nearer the main road, this story comes from Glen Haven.

  “A man named John had a sister who wanted to be buried in the Methodist burying ground and they buried her in the Church of England cemetery instead. She used to come back and shake the whole house. It got so bad they had to dig her up and put her in the Methodist burying ground and then there was no more trouble.”

  Sometimes the stories take a ludicrous twist like this one from the Negro settlement of Preston.

  “People passing the cemetery years ago were troubled by the appearance of the ghost of a man who was buried there. They decided he wanted a drink, so they got some rum, bored a hole through the ground to the coffin, and poured the rum down t
he hole. After that they were not afraid to pass the cemetery and they were never troubled again.”

  On a more serious note, there is a story from our neighbouring Province of New Brunswick about a nun who appeared to a man on a bridge at Morrison’s Cove. Her home must have been in France, for she wished her body to be taken there. She told him that if he would obey her wishes he would make so much money, and he must take a pick and shovel and dig up her remains, and he would have to do that alone. He promised to do it, but failed to carry out the task. Whether it was from conscience, fear, or the touch of her fingers upon his head we will never know, but soon grey streaks appeared in his hair like five finger marks.

  For a reason that was never determined, a nun also appeared on the old highway between Chester and East Chester, according to my friend Mr. Earl Morash. Later it was seen at Zinck’s Road on the same night. “There would just be time for her to get from one place to the other. She was first seen by a man on horseback, and then by a father and his two boys.” It may be that in both of these cases their burial wishes were not carried out.

  Some of the dead go so far as to disapprove of changes in their old homes. A fisherman at Victoria Beach said, “When Mr. Walters bought his house and was making repairs, a carpenter dressed in a pepper-and-salt suit would appear and say, ‘Don’t do that. Why are you doing it this way?’ He was supposed to be the original builder who wanted his house left as it was.”

  At Victoria Beach Mr. Sam McGrath was building a house and was half finished when he would hear a noise like a wall being ripped down. It bothered him so much that he made inquiries about the lot and found that an Indian had been killed and was buried on that site. He knew the old belief that the dead do not like anything built over their resting place and, if I remember rightly, he told me that he moved to another location.

  Mr. Archie McMaster is an elderly Scot who lives at Port Hastings. It is a joy to visit his house and to listen while he and his wife sing Gaelic songs together, sitting with their finger tips touching, and their arms moving back and forth with the rhythm of the music. In his younger days he used to go to the lumber woods of Maine and there the men would sit around of an evening spinning yarns and singing songs. A good story-teller and a good singer were great assets in any lumber camp and competition in both of these arts was keen.

  The following story which he picked up there, may have originated upon this continent although it has an old sound and may have come over with early settlers who handed it down. It is a good example of the theme we have been following. Much of the charm of the narration is lost in the printed word. I only wish I could bring you his pleasant Scots accent along with this tale. The house he tells about must have been a very desirable dwelling judging by the trouble the son went to after his father’s death to make it habitable. Of the happenings that took place after they moved to the paternal roof Mr. McMaster said—

  “They didn’t get no rest at all, at all.They moved out as quick as they moved in. It was so bad that he twice hired a man to sleep there and see if they could discover what was wrong, for nothing had ever caused a disturbance in his father’s day. In both cases when morning came and he went to see what kind of a night they had put in, he found that a man was dead. He offered a large amount of money then to anybody who would sleep in that house and about that time a soldier came along.

  “That feller, the soldier, went in and stayed all night. He heard a little noise about eleven o’clock at night from the other side of the house and there was a skeleton come down and he started playing around on the floor. He watched him for a while, but he got tired of looking at him and he walked down to the other end of the house and went to bed, leaving the skeleton rolling around on the floor. The next morning the son who owned the house but couldn’t live in it came to see if the soldier was still alive. When he saw that he was living he said, ‘What did you see last night?’

  “‘I didn’t see nothing or hear nothing that would scare me,’ he said. ‘I want to stay here for a couple more nights before I have anything I can tell you.’

  “The second night was pretty much the same as the first but, on the third night when the skeleton was dancing and tearing around, the soldier said, ‘What in the name of God kind of man are you?’ So the skeleton said, ‘I’m glad you spoke to me like that. I wouldn’t touch you. I didn’t touch the other fellows who were here but they got frightened. I could tell the first time I seen you that I could get you to speak. (Many people think the ghost can speak only if the human opens the conversation.)

  You’re not a coward at all.’

  “Then he told him that he was the man who had owned the place, and that his son was scared his funeral would cost him money, so he hadn’t buried him right. He’d made a cheap funeral. He said, ‘You talk to my son, and tell him to dig into the graveyard and take my remains up and make a wake for me and notify all the neighbours around. Then when he notifies all the neighbours he is to make a good funeral for me and, if he does that, no one will hear nothing from me any more.’ So the son did as his father wished, and the family lived peacefully in the house forever after.”

  There is no doubt about the locale of the next story, for it happened in the north end of Halifax. One day my furnace was being serviced by a man with the appropriate name of Burns. This included checking the thermostat. I had been working on this book and did not wish my train of thought disturbed and besides, upon this subject, anybody is grist to the mill. He must have been surprised therefore, when he came to my sitting room and, instead of the usual form of conversation I said, “Do you know any good ghost stories?”

  “Ghost stories?” He hesitated while he made sure that I was serious, and then said, “You should have been around when my father was living. He was full of them.” Seeing my interest he went on, “He used to tell about a house on Windsor Street where they couldn’t keep the doors closed. They even put nails in them and the doors would still open.” In this story he was feeling his way along, getting his mind in order for the following tale, and trying to assemble the facts. He finished his work on the thermostat and then hesitantly continued his story.

  “There was one thing happened that my father always thought was queer. My brother could tell you about it better than I can.” He then told the story as he remembered it and later, his brother filled in the missing parts. All, including the brother’s wife, had often heard the incident discussed and they assured me their father had always insisted it really happened. It is a different kind of “leave ’em lay,” with a ghost having a proprietary attachment to a bed you would think he would be only too glad to forget.

  Many years ago Mr. Burns’ great-aunt and uncle kept a boarding-house in the north end of Halifax. Their name was McLaughlin. They bought what appeared to be a very handsome bed at an auction sale, but nobody could sleep in it peacefully. The disturbance took the form of hair-pulling and turning down the bedclothes. One of the boarders who used the bed had heard of such things happening and decided there must be a ghost in the room. He therefore asked the spirit what he wanted. The answer came that the ghost had been murdered in that bed and his body had been thrown in Halifax Harbour at Deep Water; that is, just off of Pier 2. This seems to have been the full conversation, and the Burnses were sure he had made no request.

  In those days beds were often made of the finest wood, and the McLaughlins wondered if this might be mahogany. If it were, they could not understand why it had been painted over, so they decided to scrape the paint off and see for themselves. I would have thought this had happened before the ghost disturbed the sleepers, and that this might have accounted for his activity, but the elder Mr. Burns was sure it came later. At all events the mystery was soon solved for, upon one side of the wooden frame, they discovered human bloodstains. Try as they would by rubbing and scraping they could not get those stains off and they decided then they were better off without the bed.They therefore consigned it to the flames and were glad to be rid of it.The incident has never been
forgotten, however, and the story has come down through the family. The owners died about twenty-five years ago, and we presume the ghost rests peacefully, now that the bed that saw his death and retained his blood stains can no longer be used by others.

  Chapter THREE

  GHOSTS GUARD BURIED TREASURE

  When Nova Scotians tell their stories of buried treasure they assume you know the legend of the ghost that guards it. Treasure is a favourite topic, especially in rural districts. As you know, we are almost an island here and all along our shore line there are sheltered coves, bays, and beaches, with woodland growth coming close to the water’s edge. These would all make excellent hiding places for pirates of the early days or others who may have wanted to dispose of their booty for a time. So, too, would the islands within the bays. A sea captain with a quantity of gold and silver in his possession may well have favoured hiding it until some future date, rather than risk being robbed of it upon the high seas. Or pirates may have preferred to commit it to the ground for a while and come back for it later on, marking the spot with great care by map and chart. Then again there were the Acadians who left their homes hastily. Some had time to confine their possessions to the good earth until they could return. There were others later who mistrusted banks and hid money on their property secretly, intending to reveal its whereabouts before death, but being stricken suddenly without having done so. This was said to have happened at Port Mouton, but the son was fortunate in finding the $2,700 his father had buried. It was in a three-legged iron pot and lay two feet under ground.

  The greatest inspiration however stems from the fact of Captain Kidd’s fabulous treasure, and many people think that it lies in Nova Scotia. Some say it is buried in a bay that has three hundred and sixty-five islands and that both Mahone and Argyle Bays answer to these requirements. Rocks have been found bearing the name of the famous pirate. At Glen Margaret in St. Margaret’s Bay there is a rock bearing the words “Kapt Kit.” Oak Island in Mahone Bay, made internationally famous by the many unsuccessful attempts to find treasure there, has another. It bears the letters “200” and the word “Kidd.” When first discovered it was in a field but was later dragged by ox team to the shore. Another lies at Marion Bridge. It is shaped like a tombstone but is not so large. It is not near any highway or waterway, and is set upright in the woods. It gives the year and date of his death chiselled in the rock, and these words, “Captain Kidd died without mercy.” It was discovered by a man who was hunting and trapping and it was covered with moss, showing that it has been there for a great many years. A rock on White Island on the eastern shore has letters and a hand pointing to the tip of the island. Just why this name appears with its different spellings in such widely separated parts of the Province we will never know, for there is little likelihood that Captain Kidd was ever here.