Haunted ground

by Dale Jarvis

“I first noticed it when I was in nursing school, and we were orienting on the floor. We would go in a room with a patient, and I would smell this sickly sweet odour, and around a week later, the patient would be dead. It continues to this day. I have smelled Lord knows how many smells, but this one almost defies description.”

  Other nurses have reported the same thing, that they can detect a specific odour around patients about to die. Other people have reported the scent of roses as a sign that someone near to them will soon pass on.

  A short drive north of Spaniard’s Bay, about twenty kilometres or so, is the town of Carbonear. Here, too, are those who say they can pick out the scent of oncoming death.

  “I can smell it in the air of their room,” a Carbonear woman told me. “It lingers in the air.”

  The woman who told me this had been a care worker at a private nursing home in Carbonear. Her uncanny ability to sense when someone was about to die was something she discovered early on.

  “I noticed it was something I could tell at a young age. I used to ask my mom if she could smell it in the room, thinking it was something normal. It smells somewhat funeral-home-like: of carnations, roses, and incense. Usually, they have a grey cast around them. I used to tell my mom and my nan that, and they used to say that I should work with elderly people, or in a profession where I helped people. I worked for a little while with elderly people. I remember one lady, I went in to get her up for breakfast and I went in her room and that’s all I could smell. I knew; I told my mom when I went home. She died two days later.”

  Travis George Parsons lives in Grand Bank, but his mother’s side of the family were Chants from La Poile on the south coast.

  “We recently found out a couple of years ago that there is a lot of Mi’kmaq blood in the family up there,” he told me. “My grandmother, her daughters (my mother and aunts), and my sister have all experienced this experience of ‘smelling’ death.”

  For the ladies of the Chant family, it is best explained as a scent, or even a passing impression of a smell, which they pick up on before someone passes away.

  “It’s clear to them what they are ‘smelling’ as they smell it, even if they didn’t experience it before,” explains Parsons. “On several occasions, all of these family members have been in the presence of someone and had this happen. A short time after, something has happened to this person, or a friend or family member of this person.

  “I distinctly remember as a child that my sister’s friend was in my grandmother’s porch talking to her as she was leaving. When she left, my sister said she smelled death as her friend was talking in the porch. I was only young then, and it startled me. I asked a lot of questions about it as my entire life was consumed by these superstitions and omens. That night, that person’s uncle died suddenly. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Animals are said to be able to do this as well,” one of my interviewees told me, a statement which I heard from several people when asking about the ability. Dogs, cats, and even horses have been said to have the ability to sniff out certain cancers and to be able to identify the dying and nearly dead.

  The most famous of these animal prognosticators of death was a cat by the name of Oscar, who lived in a nursing home in Rhode Island, USA. The cat was said to be notoriously anti-social but would cuddle up to residents in their final dying days. Dr. David Dosa wrote about Oscar’s abilities in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 and later told the UK publication the Mirror Online, “He only comes to the ‘end of life’ patients who are near death. I think he is attracted in some capacity to them. I think he probably is responding to a pheromone or a scent.”

  Dosa wrote in his 2007 report: “His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families.” As of January 2010, Oscar was said to have predicted approximately fifty patients’ deaths.

  But you do not have to go all the way to Rhode Island to meet such a talented cat. A St. John’s cat named Purrl had a similar capability. As my friend Sara told me,

  “When Mom was in her last few days our old cat Purrl, who was probably about twenty-two at the time, came into her room and curled up at the foot of her bed. The cat didn’t move for forty-eight hours, and then a few moments after Mom passed, the cat got up, jumped off the bed, and walked to the other end of the house.”

  So, is smelling the scent of impending death a supernatural power, or a fine-tuned biological response to changes in pheromones or body chemistry? Only Oscar and Purrl know for sure.

  Saying Farewell

  Islington

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  If you were given the option to be able to sense when someone in your community was going to die, is that a gift you would want to accept? And how would you feel if you had no choice in the matter at all?

  In the fall of 2016, Pauline Chislett Masters mentioned to me in passing that she had a supernatural story to tell me. I am not one to pass up hearing a new story, so we arranged to meet at her office. There, she told me a story about a ghostly visitor and about an uncanny ability to sense an oncoming death.

  Masters grew up in the community of Islington, Trinity Bay. While her family never told ghost stories or spooky tales to frighten the children, they would oftentimes talk of tokens, supernatural signs of an impending death.

  “Mom mentioned a few times about seeing a token or hearing a token,” says Masters. “If something fell down in the back room, or something fell off a shelf, they’d say, ‘Oh, that could be a token; I wonder who is going to die this time?’”

  As a girl, she would go weekly to visit her grandmother.

  “I can’t remember a lot about her, but I know we used to visit every Sunday,” she remembers. “She was originally from Cavendish, but when she got well into her seventies, she went to live with Aunt Esther, at Eastern Corner in Whiteway.

  “Mom would gather up the troops, and she’d take us up to see Grandmother. I always sat on her lap. She always had her arms open for me when I walked through the door. I was probably three or four. She’d put me on her lap, and that’s where I’d spend my day, on Grandmother’s lap, and she’d be rocking in the rocking chair. That was the only thing I remember doing with my grandmother, because she died when I was eleven or something.”

  The day after her grandmother died, the girl went to bed, where she slept till she woke in the middle of the night.

  “I woke up and my room was all lit up,” Masters says. “I haven’t told this; even my family don’t know! I was on my side facing the wall. I turned, and there was my grandmother. She was sitting on the bed, and everything was all lit up. Now, at the time, Mom didn’t believe in letting children go to funerals. I wanted to go to the funeral, but she wouldn’t let me go. I was upset over it, certainly, but that was all you could do.”

  The ghostly grandmother looked at the girl and smiled.

  “She put her hand on my leg as if to say, ‘Everything is okay.’ I just kept watching her,” says Masters. “I wasn’t scared—you would think I would be—and she just stared at me with a big smile on her face and just faded away. That was very weird. I never said anything, because I know people would say, ‘Yeah, right!’

  “It was like she had come to say goodbye because I hadn’t been to her funeral. The last time I had seen her, she had Alzheimer’s, so she didn’t know who I was.”

  Since that eventful day, Masters seems to have inherited the ability to sense when someone near is going to die.

  “It’s creepy,” she confesses. “I don’t know who it is, but I know when someone is going to die. It is going to be quick, and most times it is tragic. It could be someone close or someone well-known. It is either someone tapping me on the shoulder or the feeling as if someone is following me around. It is the same sensation, all the time. It is
like someone is there, trying to tell me something. It actually feels like someone is right tight behind me. When the person dies, it goes away. I’ve never told anyone that, except a couple of my friends, but that’s it.”

  While visiting one of those friends, she was standing in the doorway getting ready to leave.

  “We were just chatting,” she describes. “I said, ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ and it felt like somebody tapped me on my shoulder. I turned around, I turned the other way, and I looked. I turned back and looked at my friend. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Yep,’ I said, ‘someone is going to die.’ ‘My God,’ she said, ‘I wish you’d stop doing that!’ Two or three days later, there was a guy from Heart’s Delight who was killed by a transport truck.”

  The premonitions have happened a few times over the years, with the last occurrence in September of 2016.

  “I was up berry picking behind the house in the fall,” she describes. “For the whole day it was like someone was following me, and I knew what was coming. Every time I go berry picking, my two cats come with me, and they wouldn’t come with me. They stayed home, and I thought maybe the coyotes were around again. I had to come down; I was creeped right out. It was like somebody was behind me.

  “When I got home, that night, my girlfriend called me and said this woman from Islington had passed away. They had found her dead in her own bed.

  “It’s very weird; I don’t like it,” she told me, when I asked what it felt like.

  “Can you make it go away?”

  One for Sorrow

  Marystown, Spaniard’s Bay, Bay Roberts, South River, Cape la Hune, and Doctor’s Harbour

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  What do you do when you see a single crow?

  “Oh, I cross that thing out right away!” laughs Christa Marshall. “It was something my friends and I did in high school, in Marystown. ‘One for sorrow, two for joy . . .’ I believe one of my friends had learned it from her mother.”

  Marshall is not alone in this custom. In many communities in Newfoundland, people have a tradition of “crossing out” a single crow, raising a finger to make the sign of a cross or an X in the air when one is spotted. One Mi’kmaq man told me he always crosses out a single crow and pushes it to the side.

  “Always!” he added.

  Some blink, so they “see” two birds instead of one. One woman told me she makes an X three times; another said she crosses it out nine times, and then, if she sees another, she licks her finger and makes a cross on something blue, a process which seems incredibly time-consuming to me.

  Others cry out “Hey Mr. Crow, where’s your friend?” while one man told me that every crow is born with a drop of the Devil’s blood, hence the need to make the sign of the cross in the first place.

  “I remember my aunt telling me that she crosses them out as well,” adds Marshall. “But to be subtle, she sometimes just winks one eye and then the other so that it’s ‘less noticeable!’”

  The magpie. Illustration by Thomas Bewick, 1809.

  All these winking, crossing, pushing, and licking traditions seems to have English origins surrounding traditional folk beliefs about magpies. According to a BBC website,

  . . . one magpie on its own is a sign of bad luck. There is no known reason for this superstition, but it is very common. There are various things you can do if you meet a single magpie in order to ward off the bad luck. These include taking your hat off and making the sign of the cross, spitting three times over your shoulder, and saluting the magpie with “Hello Mr. Magpie, How’s your lady wife today?”

  When settlers came to Newfoundland, there were no magpies, but there were plenty of crows, so the folklore shifted from magpies to the local bird.

  This adaptation can be seen in another bit of traditional lore, namely crow counting rhymes. Rhymes for counting magpies can be found in written form all the way back to the 1600s. Once the rhyme crossed the Atlantic, crows were substituted. The late Mr. Wesley Gosse, who was born in 1935 in Spaniard’s Bay, was a great source for old place names, rhymes, and folklore of the Spaniard’s Bay area. One of the rhymes he had collected caught my interest in particular. It was about counting crows as a means of foretelling the future, and as I remember his words, it went like this:

  One for fair,

  Two for wet.

  Three for sickness,

  Four for death.

  Five for a funeral.

  I had heard other versions of the counting-out rhyme, but I had never heard this particular version from Spaniard’s Bay. When I asked around, other people had heard many other versions, the most popular being:

  One for sorrow,

  Two for joy,

  Three for a girl,

  Four for a boy,

  Five for silver,

  Six for gold,

  Seven for a secret (or story) never to be told.

  One contact from Bay Roberts wrote me to say that “everyone in Newfoundland knows” that one crow equals sorrow; two crows, joy; and that three foretell a wedding. “Everyone” is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, and what seems more accurate is that the rhyme is found in various (and sometimes wildly different) versions in different communities and different areas. Paula Roberts of Clarenville learned a version from a cousin in South River as a child. Her rhyme started:

  One for sorrow,

  Two for joy,

  Three for a kiss,

  Four for a boy.

  In their book The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Iona and Peter Opie include the English counting rhyme, “one crow for sorrow, two for joy, three for a letter, four for a boy” and note that, in Wales, two black crows equal good luck. The longest version of the counting-crows rhyme I know came to me through Memorial University folklore student Rebekah Nolan, who had a fantastic version. She learned it in San Luis Obispo, California, circa 2003:

  One for sadness

  Two for mirth

  Three for marriage

  Four for birth

  Five for laughing

  Six for crying

  Seven for sickness

  Eight for dying

  Nine for silver

  Ten for gold

  Eleven for a secret that will never be told

  Twelve for darkness

  Thirteen for light

  Fifteen for morning

  Sixteen for night

  In 1895, a man by the name of George Patterson from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, wrote an article called “Notes on the Folk-Lore of Newfoundland” for the Journal of American Folklore. Patterson was primarily interested in superstitions and folk beliefs and collected many of his stories from one Judge Bennett of Harbour Grace. At that time and in that place, older magpie customs had shifted to another locally available bird, the pigeon.

  “Meeting a tame pigeon is unlucky,” wrote Patterson. “If a single pigeon crosses a lady’s pathway, she may anticipate sorrow as near, but two together is a sign of coming joy, three promise a wedding, and four a birth.”

  Another intriguing pigeon belief was reported in the same journal in 1896:

  “At Cape la Hune I heard more superstitions than I could tell in an hour. I was assured of . . . people unable to die lying on pigeons’ feathers, and the feathers removed, they die easily.”

  While counting pigeons or crows might be one way of foretelling the future in many Newfoundland settlements, in the early part of the twentieth century, a single loon was said to be a sign of trouble to come in the now-abandoned community of Doctor’s Harbour.

  Doctor’s Harbour was located in Fortune Bay between Rencontre East and Belleoram. A local legend concerned a loon with a very peculiar, shrill call. Sometimes in the spring or summer of the year, men out in their boats would see the loon come up out of the water, making i
ts unique sound. The loon would never be seen more than three times any given day.

  If the loon was sighted, it was a sure sign that rain and strong winds from the south would follow within one day. Belief in the ability of the loon to predict a storm was so strong that, if one boat came ashore saying they had seen the bird, everyone else out on the water would hurry to haul up his boat as well.

  One version of the legend says that the loon was no ordinary bird at all but was rather the ghost of a French fisherman. The unfortunate man had been stabbed with what is known variously in Newfoundland as a fish-fork, pew, or sprong: a long stick with one or two tines used in transferring codfish from boat to fishing stage.

  After his murder, the Frenchman’s body had been dumped overboard. For whatever reason, his ghost returned to haunt the bay in the shape of a loon. Some said that, after a dive, the loon took on the shape of a fish-fork as it left the water.

  While death-proof pigeon-feather beds and weather-predicting loons may be part of the folklore of the past, the practice of crossing out crows seems to be here to stay.

  Chapter Two

  Shades of Yesteryear

  My sister-in-law Grace was living in on the hill. It was a rainy night, and I thought “I better go in and see how Grace is getting on.” So I took the lantern and went on in; there were no flashlights in those days. I went in and stayed till eleven o’clock, and when I came out it was raining harder than ever.

  She came out on the bridge with me and watched me walk back down. I got down over the hill, and called back at her, “You go in the house now, because I’m not afraid.” I was quite brave, you know!

  She went in the house, and I walked perhaps twenty or thirty yards till I came to a little bridge across the brook.

  All of a sudden, such a funny feeling came over me, and it seemed as if my hair stood on end. I could scarcely move my legs along. At last I got down to turn up the hill toward home, and once I got opposite one of the flakes there, someone kicked my heel.