Bluenose Ghosts

by Helen Creighton

  “‘There’s nobody lives in that house can live there in peace,’ he said, ‘because there was a family there once who had turned their own father out and had treated him cruelly. While he was still alive things began to happen. First a son had gone to sleep when he heard a racket like someone at the window, so he got his gun and went out on the road. It was a beautiful moonlight night and he couldn’t see anyone about, so he went back to the house but he didn’t even try to sleep. Nothing happened until another night when he was reading the paper. After a while he got sleepy and laid down on the couch. The paper was still in his hand when it was whipped off on the floor. There was no wind to have blown it there. He picked it up and put it on the table and whip, off it went again. This happened three times,’ he said. ‘When this same son was buried and they were ready to take the coffin out, there was the awfullest racket under the house like a beam falling. Everybody heard it, and three men went down to investigate, but nothing was out of place. It happened just under his body. They allowed that whatever it was, went out of the house with him. It had been a very unhappy house and something of that must have remained when Jack and Elsie were there, but it must be all over now because the people in the house today have never heard anything.’ ”

  Cornwall tells of a fine old couple who had been treated badly by their sons. After they died, voices were heard at night, and the sons were forced to build a new house. They moved out, but the house continued to show signs of occupation by showing lights at night as though they were still living there. In Charlottetown Mr. Dougald McKinnon said that it was a belief that the spirit of a person who oppressed the poor might be around for generations. It would be heard going through the house slamming doors and moaning, but it would not be seen, and it could not rest.

  There is a house at Thorne’s Cove where slaves used to be kept and were said to have been treated cruelly. Also at this same spot a pedlar lost his life. Pedlars seem to have been fair game, judging by the number reported to have been murdered. It must have been a temptation, for they carried what money they made with them, and they would be defenceless on a lonely road. One man who passed this particular house would do so only in daylight because he said when he went there at night a pedlar always came out and chased him. Whether it was the pedlar or the slaves who caused the hauntings inside the house has not been determined, but the doors rattled there, their latches lifted, and there were strange noises that had no meaning. Mr. Abram Thorne came home one night and had just got into bed when he heard a sound in the hall “like the jumping and shuffling of two men. I thought it was my father playing a trick but when I got up to see, father and mother were both asleep in their bed and there was no one to be seen. I often seen doors open and close in that house and no explanation for it. Only certain ones would hear and see them. Others would live in the house for years and never hear a thing.”

  A curious legend has grown up about a stick that murdered a pedlar at a place in Cape Breton called Slios a Bhrochan. Here, according to my informant, a professor, the stick can be chopped up at night but, in the morning, it is always back in its place intact.

  An interesting haunting took place in a house about a mile and a half from St. Croix towards Ellershouse, where Mr. Freeman Harvey is supposed to have been murdered by an Englishman named Stanley. “This Stanley used to do a lot of buying and selling. He was a small man, very polished and polite, but he must have been strong because Mr. Harvey was strong too, although at that time he was deaf. We think they must have had quite a tussle. This would be about seventy years ago.

  “The reason Stanley murdered Harvey was because he wanted to buy his place. Mr. Harvey was a tax collector and Stanley got in with him and then wanted to buy him out. Harvey got talked round to selling, but he wasn’t in any hurry about it and thought he’d like to go away first on a trip. Stanley didn’t like that idea and he got impatient. Maybe he didn’t intend to go that far but he killed him, and cut his head off as well, so he must have been carrying a knife.

  “When Harvey was dead, Stanley had nothing to take the body away in so he pushed it into the cellar under some potato bags and he put the head in a bag under a bucket—a wooden measure.Then he moved a family in with him named Fisher and told them Harvey had gone away.They had a friend named McCarthy who lived with them and they all drank a lot. They were there for a whole week and ate potatoes from the bag without knowing what was under it.

  “After the murder, noises began in the kitchen at night that sounded like wrestling. The Fishers would investigate and the noises would move to another room. They allowed the fight had begun in the front hall because there were splashes of blood there and there was a bloody imprint on the wall that nobody was ever able to cover over. It would come through paint or whitewash or whatever they put on. It was the same in the cellar later on, for no matter how much they dug, the blood could not be dug out of the spot where Stanley had put the body.

  “After a while the Fishers got suspicious and McCarthy informed on Stanley and suggested that Harvey had been murdered. Nobody paid attention until one day when Fisher went down the cellar. Until then Stanley had always got the potatoes himself and wouldn’t let anybody else go down, but they decided it was time they looked around themselves. The first thing they found was a boot under the potatoes, and then they gave the alarm. Stanley had bought a wagon intending to take the body away, but it was discovered before he could get it off his hands. He confessed then, and it all came out. Other people lived in the house later but, until the time that it burned down, the blood stains remained to remind them of the murder.”

  In another old house in the same village the owners used to hear knockings on the floor and table, and the local people thought there had been sudden death here following a fight between the French and English. The sounds went on for quite a while and then stopped.

  Nova Scotia fishing craft have always sailed beyond our own waters and on one of these cruises Mr. Doyle of West Jeddore was in the crew. “I saw a man. We were in the Labrador. We started down there in a barque and she went ashore. There was a little island with a factory on it so we went in there to spend the night and we left our provisions in the dory.

  “In this factory the place was full of cages with just enough alleyway to go through. We went upstairs to the boss’s room. There were some big boilers abreast of that room and the window was clear so there was plenty of light while it lasted. We went in and sat down and sang songs. I’d sing and then my brother’d sing. There were three of us. After a while we decided to lay down and go to sleep and we each found a bag to use for a pillow. By and by we heard a boat rowing. It was moonlight then and calm and my brother went to the window but he couldn’t see any boat. We got laying still and we heard it again and it was getting closer and we still couldn’t see any boat. Then we heard it next to the window. It was light as day, but no boat to be seen. Then we heard it again and this time he was up to our dory.

  “By now we didn’t like it much but we laid down and tried to get some sleep. Then punkedy punk we heard the man from the boat in the factory below. He carried on for an hour and I couldn’t get any sleep. I was lying there looking towards the door and first thing I see a tall man with a slouch hat and two tossels hung down from the hat and his face was white. He stood and looked down at me brother Joe quite a spell. Then he came to me and I looked right up at him. Then he looked at Cedlock and he went to the window and done the same thing coming back. You couldn’t hear a sound from his feet as you would of if he’d been human. When he left us and went downstairs again I took the gun and woke the other men. By this time he had stopped his noise so we decided to sit up and make a fire in the stove.

  “At last I got so hungry and thirsty that I couldn’t stand it any longer and I went out those long steps and through that alleyway and when I opened the door it shut behind me though I had purposely left it open. I got to the dory and I got a big drink of water. Then I got the grub and got the door open again; I kept going and it wa
s just like he was grabbing me from behind. All the time I felt something trying to pull me back, but I kept going and finally reached the other men. For the rest of the night we took watch about and kept the fire on but towards daylight Joe said, ‘It’s all right now,’ and he went sound asleep and he knew nothing more till he found himself standing up on the floor. He never knew how he got there, nor did we. My brother Joe died quite a spell after that and he was the first to go. Whether this had anything to do with it or not I don’t know, but I have often wondered if that was why Joe was the first one he looked at.”

  In the days when Devil’s Island had some fifty inhabitants there was one house that was noted for the extraordinary things that happened in it. This treeless little island at the mouth of Halifax Harbour, one mile in circumference, was then a thriving fishing community. Small boats were used, and men would fish singly or with a companion. The Atlantic Ocean was at their door, so they did not have far to go.

  One day when Henry Henneberry was out, his wife heard him return and walk into the kitchen. The flopping of his rubber boots was a familiar sound. At that particular moment, as she heard him moving noisily about, he was drowned. In his absence she had been painting the floor, and his footsteps appeared in the fresh paint. She had also washed a mat that morning and had left it lying on another floor and his footprint was plainly outlined here as well.

  Fires used to occur in this house in a mysterious manner. You could put your hand on the shingles and they would not be hot even though you could see the fire burning. All of the people who have lived in the house have been Roman Catholics, and they always put palm in the rafters for protection. This palm, blessed in the church and given out on Palm Sunday, would never be touched although the fire would burn all around it. Different families lived in the house, and they all had the same experience. One man described the fires as five or six blue blazes that were not “natural” fires. One family insisted that the house collapsed on them one night and that they got out of bed and said their rosaries after which the house went back to its proper shape again. They even tried putting the house on a different foundation but it still caught fire, this time under the roof. Here, with no water supply except from wells, it would be a major calamity to have a house catch fire because it would be almost impossible to put it out, so this is further proof that the fires had some strange unexplainable quality.

  One day another Mrs. Henneberry was sitting beside the kitchen window with her baby daughter Henrietta beside her when she saw her husband fall out of his boat. He must have been knocked over by the boom because the boat kept coming towards the island as though he were still in it. She was very ill after he was drowned and lived only a few years but, during that time, she often heard her husband and mother calling her. Friends staying with her would hear the voices too, while others would hear nothing. She could not be left alone, so one evening two of the men went over to sit with her. “I was sitting by the window on the south side when all of a sudden there was one of the awfullest odours that ever could be smelt by anybody came in through the window. It came and went, almost like a flash of lightning, and we both smelt it. When her mother died Henrietta was hale and hearty but when we came back from the funeral she was sitting up in her high chair dead and nobody knew why. After that they locked the house up for nine months and then Dave Henneberry moved in. One night his friend Alf Welch was visiting him when they jumped almost to the roof from the sound of lumber moving. There was lumber in the house at the time, but it lay neatly in its place. Mr. Welch was so frightened that he had to be taken home.”

  Dave stayed in that house three years and then his brother John moved in. During John’s occupancy there were three fires and the family heard unaccountable noises. Then Mr. Edwards took it and tried shifting furniture around upstairs and all manner of things to make it habitable, but the ghost would not be quieted. One midnight as they were leaving after a party one of the men had his hand on the door latch when he heard three knocks. They were heard only by the owner and the man who told about it. They came a second time, but there was no one asking for admittance and anyhow, on this island where the people were all related, nobody waited to knock but just walked in. The third time the knocks came they were heard from inside the house and by all the assembled company.

  These, however, were mild compared with what the children told. Some were frightened because they saw a man in oilskins walking through the rooms, but the worst experience came to a young son of one of the occupants. He would come to his father in the night and say there was a baby in bed with him all dressed in white and that he couldn’t pacify it. This baby was supposed to be Henrietta.

  The house was finally demolished, but some of the neighbours decided to make use of the wood from which it had been built. Almost immediately they had bad luck. Nobody ever liked the house. One couple who lived there always had something happen on the twentieth of the month. The Islanders say that one of the early owners of the house was drowned while he still owed a small debt upon it and they think if someone had settled the debt the disturbances would have stopped. As far as I am concerned personally, I regret that I was not more interested in the house when I was staying on the island. Every waking moment was devoted to collecting songs. Fortunately I jotted down most of the things they told me, and I can recall the fear in the voices of both men and women as we walked by and they talked about it. I am sure there were many more experiences that I might have had first hand if I had realized then the importance of every slightest detail connected with the haunting of a house. In those days it looked to me like a bleak, unpainted, and unfriendly frame dwelling, and I was glad to leave it to the wind and the weather and any family unfortunate enough to have to live there. “The house is gone now and so are the people; there is no one left but the lightkeeper and his family.

  People brought up on stories of the spirit world do not necessarily look for them at every corner. Nevertheless when things take place that follow certain familiar patterns they are not slow in coming to a conclusion. Men who hunt and fish and spend most of their lives in the woods or on the water are not as a rule afraid of the dark. They are accustomed to bunking down in all kinds of places and give it little thought. I have been amazed however in talking to retired sea captains to have them occasionally admit that there are certain houses they would never sleep in again, due to visitations they have experienced there. Guides too have their stories like this one from Moser’s River.

  “I was up early in the fall one year on the trapping ground and I got acquainted with a fellow and he let me have his camp. It was brand new and beside a big lake; Liscomb Lake it was and I went up early in the afternoon. There was an old dam there, and by the outlet there was a boat turned over and no oars in it. I needed the boat because the camp was on an island. I hunted up a pole to use for oars and tipped the boat over. Then I let the water out and rowed the best I could with the pole to the island. When I got there the door of the camp was open and I thought that very strange. I cut myself some wood for the night and then I went inside. There I saw a bench upset on the floor and a cup and saucer and a piece of bread with one bite taken out of it. A bucket of water stood on the floor and there was a bag with bread in it that must have been a month old. I began to think about the boat having drifted down to the dam and the door being open and things so upset and I thought it must have been left in a hurry. I remembered too that the owner hadn’t been out for a long time, so whatever it was; he wouldn’t know about it.

  “The door was big and heavy and I thought I’d feel better if I closed it and I even put a bar against it. There were strawberries there in a bottle and I ate these with some bread I’d brought with me and I put a fire on and made a cup of tea. There were no blankets, but I’m used to sleeping in the open, so I had a smoke and then laid down on the bed and went to sleep. It didn’t seem that I’d been asleep long before I woke up and felt cold. I got up and found that the door I’d closed and barred so carefully was wide open. I had
set the table on its legs and put the mouldy bread back on it, but now the table was upset, the bread was back on the floor just as I’d found it, and the wood that I’d moved was back where it had been when I arrived.

  “I shut the door again and put another big bar against it and I piled all the wood I could get and put it on the table and shoved that against the door too. I had another smoke and went to sleep a second time and again I woke to find the door open and all the things put back as I’d found them. No animal could have done it, and certainly no human being, and anyhow a guide like me wakes up at the slightest sound and it wasn’t noise that woke me but the cold air from the open door. I got up and closed the door again and made up another fire, but this time I decided I’d had enough sleep for one night. After that nothing else happened and I left after daylight.

  “The next year I went back, but this time I had a friend with me. When we got up to the camp we saw a sign on the door and the sign said, ‘This place is haunted.’ Somebody else must have slept there and had the same experience. I never was able to get to the bottom of it.” (If this had happened to those of us who live in the city we would at once have written to the owner and started an investigation. Many of our country people are not like that but will await a hoped-for meeting. If this fails to take place nothing more is done about it, even though the desire to talk it over is very great. Our guide and the owner had never crossed paths again, and so the mystery remained unsolved.)

  We go now to what was known as the old Robinson cottage on the New Ross road. Mr. Croft said, “We’d been told that it was haunted but we were young and not afraid. One night we were sitting in a large room on the ground floor when we heard what was like a man with heavy boots on going upstairs. There were people living on the other side of the house and I wouldn’t have thought anything about it if I hadn’t heard stories about the house, so I thought I’d see if one of them had gone up. They hadn’t, so we got axes and knives and clubs and went upstairs but we couldn’t find our man. Some weeks after, we heard him coming down the stairs again.