Bluenose Ghosts

by Helen Creighton

  “On the eastern rocks there were the numbers XIX, so we supposed that meant we should walk nineteen paces in a direct line from the eastern to the western clift. I was only eleven then but I’d been hearing treasure stories all my life. I went out about sundown and I took a long bolt with me. I measured off my nineteen paces and then I stuck the bolt down in the ground. I hit something, and it was half a grindstone. I dug away and felt something else and by and by came to an old French brogan, or shoe, and I got that up. The earth was all red around it. I suppose the shoe belonged to the man buried with the treasure. I dug a little spell longer but it was getting dark by then so I took the brogan and grindstone and showed them to the men. By and by I saw something coming and I thought it was a woman except that there wasn’t any woman out there and no way for one to get on the island without being seen. I tied the door shut to keep her out. We had two big Newfoundland dogs and two camps with turf all around. From just above where I had dug we heard an awful sound and the two dogs started and they’d drive their paws into the ground betwixt the two camps and they kept it up. It made a comical noise like a man or a woman, but not comical enough to make us want to keep it around any longer. It was either the dogs or the ghost all night, and when one stopped the other began. The next day they made me take the French brogan and the grindstone and bury them both in the hole and, for all I know, they’re there yet.”

  As we scrambled again over the rough weather-beaten rocks every detail of Mr. Doyle’s story was in my mind. I looked again at the numerals XIX and wondered if the fishermen’s interpretation had been right. The other markings were all initials that formed no word and therefore seemed to serve no purpose. We wandered on to the place where Mr. Doyle had dug and observed that the earth had been freshly turned. Perhaps it would be safe now, and the ghost’s vigil over. On the western end we saw where the butterfly had rested. I looked at the peaceful scene about me on this glorious summer day, and also at my companions. A friend, Mrs. Frank MacDonald from Dartmouth, was with me. The rest were all close relatives of Mr. Doyle, people completely trustworthy and fine in every respect. I tried to picture the island in a storm with the wind shaking the low scrub and the rain beating furiously against the rocks. The night would be dark then and there were men in the world of a very different calibre from my good friends the Doyles. I shuddered and thought with pity of a ghost destined to stay in such a lonely exposed spot as this for as many years as the pirate captain chose to consign him. Or was this a woman ghost, since it was a woman Mr. Doyle had seen? Poor unfortunate soul.

  The children scampered happily like mountain goats, jumping from rock to rock, caring little for such thoughts. I shook my mind free and looked instead upon Mr. Doyle as he stood tall and straight for all his eighty-two years. The wind caressed his white hair, almost with tenderness as he waited patiently for the children to finish their fun. As he turned his kindly blue eyes towards me to make some further remark I breathed a prayer of thankfulness that my visit to Goose Island had been made under such auspices, that there were people in the world, like the Doyles, and that I had been privileged to know them.

  Let us turn now to the Micmacs whose stories follow a not dissimilar pattern.This was told by Louis Pictou’s wife Evangeline as she twined the ash sheens into the basket she was making.

  “Years ago there used to be people who buried treasure. My father had built a house in back of my grandmother’s. There was a little porch and three doors to open before you could get into the bedroom. I was just a child and I slept in a corner of the bedroom that we all shared. This night the others were laying there talking and about twelve o’clock the door opened and in came a soldier with his head off. He says to my father, ‘Andrew, I’m tired keeping the money for you. I’m not going to keep it any longer. My time for guarding it is up.’ Daddy says, ‘How am I going to find it?’ The headless soldier he says, ‘You follow southwest and you go twelve o’clock at noon and you got to take your wife and you got to take your daughter and when you get there, there’ll be something strike you and where you fall, that’s where you are to start digging.’

  “So we went and he fell and there he started digging. He came to the pot that held the treasure and was just bending down to get it out of the hole when my mother said, ‘Oh Andrew, look at the little monkeys on the fence,’ and daddy went to look and the pot went down in the ground. So he said, ‘I’ll try tomorrow,’ and he did, and he had the pot up in his hand. They claim you must either take money out or put money in before it is yours and he thought maybe if he took it out it might hurt me or my mother. He decided we were getting along all right as we were and, rather than run the risk of something happening, he let it go back in the ground. Every so often since then something comes back and tells him to go and get that money.”

  There are several interesting features about Evangeline’s story. For instance the lack of a head did not prevent the ghost from speaking. A suggested explanation for this is given in the chapter on Headless Ghosts. Then there is the appearance of monkeys. In so many cases the diggers keep faithfully to the ban against speaking but, at the moment of finding their treasure and succeeding in their quest, they are startled by something so surprising that they speak without thinking. This happens over and over again in these tales, but this is the only instance I have of monkeys making an appearance. These animals would indeed be startling because monkeys are not indigenous to our Province and certainly would never be seen in our woods unless they had got loose from a travelling circus, a most unlikely event. Where the story varies from the usual pattern is in the treasure still being available the next day. Once it goes back to the earth it stays there as a rule for seven years, and it is useless to start digging before that time. The belief that in order to get treasure you must put something in the hole or take something out, is known in Sandy Cove and Victoria Beach.

  The most famous spot in Nova Scotia for treasure digging is Oak Island on the southwestern shore. Immense sums of money have been spent in trying to solve the mystery of various wooden platforms placed beneath the sod by men of an earlier time. Digging always proceeds just so far when the sea comes in and the place cannot be kept dry. Various expeditions have arrived with the latest scientific equipment and men have dreams of great wealth hidden in the island’s depths. For this island was covered with oak trees at one time, and there are supposed to be oaks where Captain Kidd buried his gold.

  Having heard of an iron tackle being found on a branch of an oak tree years ago, one of the local men decided to go out and see what he could find. Friends went with him. They were digging and had just struck something when they saw a boat rowing in with eight oars, four on each side. Knowing by their dress that the men were not of this world one of them spoke, and the object their picks had touched vanished before they could see what it was.

  One man said, “My brother was digging on Oak Island once and he got so far and had to quit. The next time he went back a man in a red coat came to meet him. He said, ‘You’re not digging in the right place,’ and he disappeared down the very hole where he’d been digging.”

  Again, “On December first, twenty-two years ago a party of us went digging on Oak Island. We heard a noise like a heavy fence mallet hitting the ground with a hard thump. It began a hundred yards towards the shore and kept coming nearer and nearer. One of the men broke his shovel and spoke, so we had to leave. We’d begun at twelve, so we went to bed till four and went out again before daylight. We got five feet down in hard pan and we found seven or eight live frogs. We could never understand how they got there where the earth is so hard and dry. As we dug, the treasure seemed to go down further. We bore holes six or eight inches but we couldn’t seem to bore through the hard ground. The last noise we heard was on the shore about six feet away. There was thin ice there and it wasn’t broken, so that didn’t account for it. The sounds followed the line the pirates would have taken in burying their treasure. We had to give it up at daylight but coming home, we saw somethin
g tall and white three-quarters of a mile up the shore. It went up the field and disappeared. In the middle of an afternoon in 1950 my wife saw it again in the same place. It was like a tall white pillar.

  “My brother wasn’t the only one who has seen a man in a red coat. A lightkeeper’s daughter when she was a little girl was supposed to have seen him and later, when she was thirteen, she told her father she had seen two men over the hill. He went down and looked, but there were no men and no tracks in the snow. One time a boy from Chester Basin borrowed a boat and went out and when he came back his mother saw how white he was and said, ‘Did you see anything?’ and he said, ‘If you saw what I saw!’ for he too had seen the man in the red coat.”

  Another story comes from East Chester. “Twenty years ago a fellow named Mills came and asked me for the loan of my boat to get some clay, and he wanted to go to Oak Island for it. I said it wasn’t clay he wanted, but the treasure, and the man admitted he had a mineral rod. After a while he came back, rowing for all he was worth and as white as a sheet. He said, ‘I went out there and I had the mineral rod and first thing a man spoke to me and here was a soldier with a musket on his shoulder and he said, “You’re in the wrong place,” and he took me to another place and disappeared.’ But they went out again, Mills who had seen the soldier, and a man, and a boy. They started to dig and before very long, on the other side of the island, was a sound like a man with an anvil driving fence sticks. The boy quit and so did the man and last of all Mills and, when they got to the boat, something came down to the shore and it looked like a four-legged animal draped as though it had a sheet over it and it came to the water’s edge and was still there when they rowed away.”

  At Wolfville I was told, “A big bright light comes up at Oak Island and they can see the men come up as though they were hiding the treasure (an example of “looking back into time” or hindsight). One family moved from the island on account of it and that was about 1921.

  “Old man Joudrey lived on the island for years, but he moved away and it was supposed he went because it was haunted. He said when he was ploughing he would hear unexplainable noises.”

  The story of Oak Island has been written up many times and will continue to be a subject for speculation as long as its mystery remains unsolved. But if those who come here wonder why it is so difficult to find local men to take part in their excavations, the reason is not far to seek. Let visitors from other parts approach them with the most modern and costly equipment possible as they have often done and the local men will scarcely lift an eye–brow in response. But let them bring in addition some foolproof charm for quieting the guardian phantoms which so far they have failed to do, and they will show as adventurous a spirit as anybody. A man can pit his strength against the known but against the unknown he would rather keep a respectful distance.

  There is a place at Pubnico with the odd name of Dick’s Noise, an unusual name in a French settlement. It came from a man called Dick being the first one to hear it and report it. The story was told by Benedict d’Entremont.

  “Many years ago a dory was seen coming into Pubnico and there were four men in it. They were supposed to have buried a treasure there and also a man to stay with it. Their reason for thinking that was because when the boat went out again there were only three men in it. Since then there are sounds like loads of stones being dumped, chains rattling, big iron-heeled boots walking around, and horses and carts. Some men took dogs down there once and the dogs were scared. The sound is not heard all the time; only on the first of December.”

  Mr. Enos Hartlan said, a wistful look in his pale blue eyes, “My mother nearly had a treasure once, true as I’m a-settin’ here. She dreamed a dream three nights runnin’ that there was money in back of Cow Bay. (Such dreams usually come in cycles of three.) Yes, she dreamed this dream three nights. The next night after she had her work done she took her hoe and shovel and walked through the woods. She found the spot all right and then she started digging, and she had just dug a little bit of a hole when a groan came up out of it. She kept diggin’ though and soon there was annuder groan, and she got timid. (This is little wonder for she had been brought up on the foregoing beliefs and this would be a lonely spot even in daylight, with low spruce trees all around her and the surf pounding heavily on the beach nearby.)

  “Her little dog had come with her and, after the third groan my mother stopped because the dog took after the sheep. (Here again is that counter-attraction to make the seeker speak.) She told the dog to keep away from the sheep and then she heard a jingling in the hole. She remembered then that she had spoken and that the ghost could do anything to her it wanted now. She was almost too frightened to run, but she did run though. She run all the way home.

  “Afterwards she got two men to go out and dig again. Not that same night, but some time afterwards but all they found was two sticks. The treasure had gone back in the hole and she said it wouldn’t come up again for seven years. Yes, treasure comes up every seven years for a bath, you know.” (This was said in all seriousness.) They did not return in seven years because rushes had grown all over that particular spot. It is odd that they were content to leave it there though, because they knew the formula of the rooster and hen. Perhaps they were not as ingenious as the man in our earlier story, and did not realize that a miniature plough and harrow would do. Like so many others, they were content to dream and to satisfy themselves with the thought that pirates’ money is bad money, and no good can come of possessing it.

  Mr. Horace Johnston, farmer and fisherman at Port Wade, used to say, “Some times I tell the truth and sometimes I don’t.” This is supposed to be one of his true stories (I think). The setting is beside the Annapolis Basin.

  “When I was a young man, a Scotchman came here and claimed his father had sailed with Kidd. He had a chart and he supposed Kidd had hid his treasure at Hudson’s Point. Four of us went with him to dig but, for all I know, the treasure is there yet. I saw the chart and went once to find it, but I’ll never go again.

  “These treasures are supposed to be dug at night, so we went at ten o’clock. We could tell exactly where it was by the chart. In those days when the treasure would have been buried a man was killed and buried with it to stand guard. The Scotchman had hunted up some pretty brave fellows to help him and he was a-digging on even shares. I was young then and I didn’t fear the devil or anyone else. If he came along and I couldn’t cope with him, I figgered I could run. We had a man named Corneil, Ike Fleet, the Scotchman, and me. That made four.

  “Well sir, we hadn’t been digging long before we had an extra man with us. We had five, and he was there all night. While we was a-digging in the hole with pick and shovel and throwing stones, we didn’t notice the fifth man but, when one of the party crawled up out of the hole and looked back, there were still four below. He dassn’t speak, but beckoned up us, all but this extry man. Then we went away and talked it over.

  “Who’s the fifth man?” he says. We went back and there he was all alone in the hole now and still digging. All at once there was the devilishest noise I ever heard. The ground trembled and the rocks shook. I began to get tender-footed and the rest were shaking some, but we had one brave man among us.That was Ike Fleet. When it got too tough for us and we mentioned leaving, Ike said,

  “‘No, I’m not going to leave. We’ve come to dig a treasure. We heard a little noise, but that’s thunder. Maybe it was this extry man digging deeper and rolling a big stone that made a noise like thunder. Anyhow I’m going back,’ and, mind you, he did. It took a brave man to do that, and a foolish one. We were twenty feet from shore and the tide was a hundred feet out as it often gets in the Annapolis Basin. First thing we knew Ike was in the waters of the Basin to his neck, and none of us knew how he got there. He wasn’t hurt, but we didn’t have any trouble getting him home after that.

  “What did the extry man look like? He looked like any of the rest of us working at night. He was a medium height and he was digging with pick
and shovel just like we were doing. Whether he really put Ike in the Annapolis Basin or not I don’t know but, if he didn’t, how did he get there all of a sudden over 120 feet away? I’d like to know the answer to that, but I’m not going back to find out.”

  A story from Stillwater says, “Some men were digging at Port Hilford Beach in Guysborough County and they came to a box. One of the men spoke and the box went out of sight, but they dug again till they found it. Night came on, so they left it, planning to take it away with them in the morning but, when they went back, there were half a dozen men standing around it with no heads, so they couldn’t touch it.” In Mahone Bay when they dig for treasure in a certain place it thunders, no matter how fine the day.