Bluenose Ghosts

by Helen Creighton

  A note with the next story says it was told with a twinkle in the teller’s eye, so you may take it or leave it as you please. “At the old foundation at Port Royal there is supposed to be a treasure. One time we took our picks and shovels and a little to drink. About ten the moon came up. By the corner of the barn where they used to see things, we were digging and joking and by and by when we were down about three feet we came to a flat rock. It was as big as the top of a table and we figured that was the top of the box that held the treasure. We shoveled it off and one fellow up-ended it and said, ‘There’s something else down here!’ It was one of those old iron cook pots. He was just going to tear the cover off when he looked up. He said, ‘Look there,’ and, as far as we could see was a big rock hanging above us by a rope as big as the Peggy’s Cove rock that could have fallen down on the three of us, and a big hound of a man with black scraggly whiskers on him and he had a handkerchief knotted in four corners and a big loose shirt and a belt and a candle. He was holding the candle against the rock that held the rope up and the rope was burning. His feet were bare and the moon was bright. The three of us all saw the rock with the rope holding it, and we skedaddled. We went back three Sundays afterwards and we couldn’t see where we had broken ground. It looked just the same as all the ground around it.” So said my informant from Tantallon.Was this an actual experience or a story that has been handed down? In one respect it reminds me of a story from Blue Rocks in which a woman asked a companion to help her dig. She said there was no need to be afraid because she would hang a stone overhead like a mill stone that would fall down and kill the ghost that was guarding the treasure. How you could kill something that was already dead, she did not explain.

  An interesting story, but one with an unsatisfactory ending, comes from Parker’s Cove, on the Bay of Fundy shore. This is a remote spot, accessible now by car over a mountain road, but reached at the time of our story only by horse and carriage or by boat. Any stranger appearing unannounced would be well looked over and questioned, for they would be few and far between. A woman turning up alone would be almost unheard of.

  “When my father lived at Parker’s Cove he dreamt three nights in succession of money buried at Big Pond. He even dreamt how to go and get it. He was to drain the pond and dig. The dream used to ask him, ‘Why don’t you go?’Years later an old lady came in one day and said she was on her way to the poorhouse. She asked for something to eat, and then said to my mother, ‘Would you like me to tell your fortune?’ She was a complete stranger. She said, ‘You’re going to have one more child.’ Then she said, ‘Your husband dreamt three nights running where to find money and how to get it, and if he gets it he can make a chain to go twice around Nova Scotia.’

  “After that they tried to dig but it was quite a job. They had to do it at night time unbeknownst to other people and that was hard, because the place was close to the road. It was odd that this woman appeared at all, and we could never find out who she was or where she came from. She said to my mother, ‘If he doesn’t get it, nobody else will.’ Well he didn’t try very hard, and I guess it’s there yet.”

  Dreams of buried treasure are not confined to remote villages. “Over a hundred years ago a sea captain from Chester Basin sailed to Boston and went with a girl there. She dreamed three nights running there was a barn at Chester Bay with a big granite rock and a piece split off one side, and that it was on an island. The girl had never been here. The captain was going on a trip and hadn’t time to look for it, but he told my grandfather and his brother about it. It wasn’t hard to find and one night four of them went out. They worked quietly and, after a while, they heard a noise like a bird whistling three times and then a sound like a rock thrown three times against the barn.

  “By the time they got to the flat rock they were supposed to find, they had to stop, but they cleared the ground above it for when they could come back. It was a little while before they returned. This time they put a crowbar down and they couldn’t believe their eyes when there was nothing there. The rock had gone and there was nothing but an empty hole. But about that time a man named Cleveland at Blandford got rich and he seemed to have everything he wanted. They never asked him, but they thought he must have rowed out to the island, found the hole, and discovered the treasure just below where they’d finished off. That island answered the girl’s description exactly.”

  Mr. Washington Harnish of Hubbards told of people from New York who hired a schooner many years ago as the result of a dream and took away a treasure from Shut In Island in St. Margaret’s Bay.

  Many years ago too, Mr. Albert Foley had met a man at Head Jeddore who told him about a treasure at Salmon River and said, “There will be enough there to make you and all this place rich, but you must follow instructions.” Mr. Foley thought about it and decided not to take the risk. But one evening when he and his wife were having tea late in the fall a rap came to the door. They were surprised to see a stranger there. They asked him to come in and sit down. He said, “There’s treasure buried on that island out there. You should go out and get it.” At that point Mr. and Mrs. Foley both had a creepy feeling which they had not felt before he began to speak. This increased as he continued, although he was dressed in ordinary clothes and there was nothing about his appearance to frighten them. He said, “You have to go after twelve at night on the second Tuesday and there must be two people. One will land and he will find three steps and a lead pencil. There will be a woman in white come with no head. She will try to get in the boat but the other man must push the boat away and not let her in. She would try three times, and the third time it would be all right to take her in and then she would lead them to the treasure.” After he had given his instructions, the stranger went away, but he left such an unearthly feeling behind him that the Foleys decided to leave the treasure where it lay. Yet at the same time they would see a light that came up the harbour to a spot just west of the Salmon River Bridge. It went from the west side to the east and back, and just a little up from the water and moving quickly. Different people saw it, and all thought it indicated buried treasure.

  Years passed and the story became well known, for the Foleys had told their experience. Eventually their son and a friend went out, deciding the place was Mackerel Island. They found the pencil and steps as indicated, but no headless woman came to guide them so they gave it up. Would that prove that no treasure had ever existed, or had her vigil expired?

  In another story from this district a woman in white not only tries to stop the treasure-seekers but she swims after them and tries to take the oars.This is an unusual feat for a ghost, for it is an old belief that they cannot cross water.

  At Victoria Beach a pall cloth such as those used for a funeral, has often been seen crossing a road. It comes up from beneath a rock, supposedly to convey the information that treasure is there. Another old belief is that you can secure a treasure for yourself by throwing your coat over it. A man tried this when he saw a chest crossing the road at the top of the Seabright hill, possibly the same chest mentioned earlier in this chapter. Immediately he was surrounded by a bodyguard of soldiers. He was so terrified that he shut his eyes and ran right through them, and never stopped running until he got home. The next morning he went back to the place. His coat was lying there but, alas, there was no sign of the chest.

  You will recall the ghost earlier in this chapter who begged to be taken off Clam Island. One night two men were digging there and one of them said, “I believe we’ve got the chest.” Immediately a whole army of soldiers appeared above them, dressed in the uniforms of pirates. (I was not aware that soldiers dressed as pirates, but let us not spoil a good story for the sake of a small detail.)

  At East Petpeswick too a number of ghosts have been seen. “My grandfather and grandmother were roving up the Narrows one handsome moonlight night and they saw a man-o’-war jolly boat. There wasn’t a sound. The crew were men-o’-war sailors. The boat kept on up the harbour and then turned in to the shore. They
lost sight of them then.” It was supposed they were on their way to their buried hoard.

  These stories could go on indefinitely, so let us end our chapter with a final one on this subject from Mr. Enos Hartlan. “Father was coming from Cow Bay one beautiful night and he picked up a collar in the sand at low tide. He was looking at it and he heard a sound, ‘Put it down.’ There was nobody in sight. He heard it a second time, and still he just stood there looking. But the third time the voice hollered and the whole earth shook, and that time he put it down in a hurry.”

  Chapter FOUR

  FORESIGHT AND HINDSIGHT

  FORESIGHT

  The Forerunner, as you have read, usually deals with sounds. Foresight, on the other hand, is visual. On the island of Cape Breton it is known as double vision or double sight and people who have the gift are said to be double-sighted. It occurs here mostly among those of Scottish descent although there are isolated instances among other groups. On my field work for the National Museum of Canada in 1956 I visited many descendants of settlers who came originally from the highlands and islands of Scotland, and was amazed to find this strange faculty possessed by so many people. Perhaps the word gift as applied here is inappropriate, for a gift is a pleasurable attribute. This is not, for the vision is usually that of a funeral. Stories, of which there are a surprisingly large number, go like this. I quote from the words of Mr. Hughie Wilson of Glace Bay.

  “There was a woman in Mira who could see a funeral ahead of time, even sometimes before the person had been taken sick, and she would know whose funeral it was. When it happened she would be walking along the road and would be pushed to one side by the crowd following the hearse. The experience would exhaust her because not only could she feel the passing procession, but also she could tell who were the people in it.”

  Another woman at Round Island had this same faculty and could describe the clothes the people would be wearing. Mr. Angus A. MacDonald of Loch Lomond, Mr. Peter McKeigan, Mr. Donald McPherson, Mr. Peter Morrison, and Mr. John MacDonald of Marion Bridge have all reported being pushed off to the side of the road by a passing funeral and some like Capt. Simon Lewis of Edwardsville, could distinguish the people in the carriages and tell where the horses would be placed for colour, John’s horse being grey and Peter’s brown. Similar stories have come from Big Bras d’Or, St. Ann’s, Boularderie, and Glace Bay; in fact from all over the island. In most of these cases everybody might feel what was passing, but only one could see it. That one would tell the others to step to one side as he did himself and, at the same time, he would bow his head and raise his hat in respect.

  “A Mr. McNeil of Bras d’Or was down by the shore one day when two younger men came along looking for a boat. He said they must not go out in the boat that day. ‘If you go one of you will not come back at all, and the other will almost not come.’ They laughed at his foolish superstitions, launched the boat, and chugged away but, sure enough, it happened. Their boat capsized and one of the men went under and was never seen again. The other would have been lost too if another boat hadn’t seen the accident and come to his rescue. He pulled him out of the water by the hair of his head as he was about to go down for the last time.”

  An amusing incident along these lines took place not far from Glace Bay. A man was on his way to kill a pig when he met a woman known to have second sight. She looked at him in distress and said she saw blood on him. He felt very uncomfortable but decided to go on with the job. He killed the pig but his knife slipped and before he knew what was happening he was covered with blood. Pig’s blood.

  The ability to see ahead is not the prerogative of older people only. Peter Morrison was only twelve when he saw a coffin-shaped light pass him low to the ground and turn in at the cemetery just before a fatality at a mine, and the same thing happened to Mrs. Allen Morrison and a friend when they were young girls. A boy at Point Edward heard digging in a graveyard when the ground was frozen too hard to be dug, and in all these cases a death followed within the week.

  On Cape Breton’s north shore, tools have been heard rattling before a death just before they would be required to make the coffin and, in the Morrison House at Marion Bridge, the box where funeral clothes were kept would open by itself just before being used.

  It is necessary to keep these manifestations in mind to comprehend fully the significance of the two following stories. The first comes from Mr. and Mrs. Bagnall, an elderly couple who live at Glace Bay.

  “When we were young people it was the custom for us to make the coffins for our own dead, but you couldn’t put the parts together without specially matched planes. My father was a contractor and had moved away to the States, but he had left his box of tools behind. They were in a chest with a cover and the box was bound with brass. Without the tools it would have weighed 150 pounds; it was heavy.

  “One cold night in February when we were twenty-two we had been out and, when we came home, we didn’t bother to make a fire but went upstairs to bed. Just after we got into bed we heard a noise. There was nothing downstairs to make a noise but the tool chest, and it was all packed up ready to be sent away. The crash sounded three times. Mrs. Bagnall said, ‘What noise is that?’ I said, ‘Something slipped downstairs,’ but I knew. I was familiar with it because I had heard it before and there is no other sound like it. I didn’t like this happening in my house and I said to myself, ‘This is one time that I trim it.’ (Overcome it.)

  “In the morning my uncle came across the street and told me that grandfather had died during the night. He said he was going to make the coffin, and would I let him have the planes? I said,‘No, you can’t get them.The trunk is packed to go away.’ He said, ‘I’ll go across to John Hardy’s.’That was fifteen or twenty minutes away, but pretty soon he came back. John’s planes were at the French Road twelve miles away. So he said, ‘Now I’ll go up to McKinnon’s. That was three miles away and no cars to drive him in those days. I was ashamed all this time because in five minutes I could have had them out but I thought if we could get along without using them, they wouldn’t make that noise the next time there was a death.

  “Well, after a while he came back again and by now it was three o’clock in the afternoon. He said, ‘We’ll make it without the planes.’ I said, ‘You can’t,’ and I knew he couldn’t, so I had to open the box and unpack the tools after all. Whether the tools ever jumped again at the time of a death I don’t know. I shipped them off the moment they came back, and I hope that’s the end of them as far as I’m concerned.”

  Next we have a story from Marion Bridge which contains most of the motifs already mentioned and a few more to boot. They follow one another in rapid succession, and each one is important in folklore. It was told by Mr. Alex Morrison, son of the blacksmith who plays such an important part in it.

  “A strange thing happened just before Sandy Munro fell over the bridge and got drowned. At that time Neil McPherson was just a lad and he was walking over the Marion Bridge one night with his mother. He stopped for a moment and said, ‘Come here mother and look at the little boy lying on the bottom of the river.’ His mother couldn’t see anything and told him to come along home. It was just after this that Sandy was drowned, but that wasn’t all that happened.

  “About that time they were seeing a light on a boat up the river at Grand Mira. The owner wanted to sell the boat but nobody would buy it, being suspicious that something must be wrong with it on account of the light. My father wanted it, light or not, so he bought it.

  “They always thought foul play had caused Sandy’s death.The night before he died the irons in the smith were making a great racket. You could hear them in the forge and they seemed to be jumping around. Sandy and the blacksmith were friends and the boy often did errands for him. Just before he died the blacksmith had asked him to take an axe across the bridge for him. He was doing this when he must have met two boys who were known to be bad and whose mother was said to be a witch. Someone saw the boys having a tussle on the bridge and, a
while later, the body was discovered lying in the water as Neil McPherson had described him to his mother.

  “They called on the blacksmith then to get the boy. The grappling irons he used to take him from the water were the ones that had jumped in the forge the night before, and the boat that he took to go out on the river was the one that had shown the strange lights and that nobody would buy but my father. After the body was recovered Sandy’s mother had a dream. She thought the boy came to her and pointed to the blacksmith’s axe as it stood in its place at the forge, and said, ‘That’s the axe that killed me.’ And when Sandy’s body was laid out on the bridge of the boat my father had bought, there were a lot of people from the village who came to look at him. One was the boy who was supposed to have murdered him. You know it’s an old belief if a murderer passes by or touches the person he has murdered, that blood will issue from the wound, and that is exactly what happened. The wound that killed Sandy was in his temple and, as the suspected murderer walked past him, blood flowed from the wound and stopped as soon as he went by. The thing was hushed up and the boys and their mother moved away, but that’s the way it all happened.”

  A story of another boat comes from Broad Cove in Inverness County. It was a good boat as far as the owners could see, and they had built it themselves. Soon after it was finished, however, people began seeing lights on it, and there was no accounting for them. Since no physical explanation could be found, the lights were taken as a warning and, one of the older men said, it must never be used again or it would drown its passengers. Consequently it was hauled up on the shore and left to rot until it was of no further use.

  At this time a young man named McNeil was building another boat and he looked at this derelict lying idle. He thought he might as well remove the steering irons and use them in his boat. The older people, he thought, were pretty superstitious. Why listen to all their foolish talk? So he took the equipment and he and his brother set out for Prince Edward Island. They were sailing close to shore with everything well under control when a squall came up so suddenly and so unexpectedly that it capsized their boat and they were drowned. Was this mere coincidence? We shall never know.