Haunted ground

by Dale Jarvis

  Perhaps you have been walking in a crowd and have felt somebody kick your heel. I glanced back over my shoulder, and I didn’t see anything. When I got to the top of the hill and saw my sister-in-law’s light in the house, the sensation went, and I was perfectly natural again.

  What do you make of that? There was something there that kicked my heel. It gave me a fright. I never went there by myself in the night for four years after that!

  — Adapted from a story told by Mrs. Beatrice Toope of Ireland’s Eye to broadcaster Hiram Silk, 1969

  The Radiant Boy. Illustration by Horace Castelli, circa 1880.

  Ferries and Phantom Ferrymen

  Bell Island, St. John’s, and Trinity,

  Trinity Bay

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  I could never write about Newfoundland and Labrador folklore without including a few ghost ship stories. There is no shortage of stories of ghost ships from the province, and one typical example is that of a large white steamer, described by author Horace Beck.

  “She is usually seen in the offing making for a harbour too small to hold her,” writes Beck. “Nevertheless, on she comes under a full head of steam, enters the harbour, runs up on the shore, and keeps going ‘cross lots.’”

  Older readers with knowledge of Bell Island and surroundings may have memories of retired ferries like the Kipawa and the John Guy, but it was the ferry the SS Mary that had a run-in with another ghostly steamer.

  “Another famous name made its appearance in local shipping circles in the summer of 1907,” writes Addison Bown. “SS Mary was purchased in Quebec by the Bell Island Steamship Company and used at first as a freighter between St. John’s and the Island. When she arrived off the beach in August that year with her first cargo, she was too big to berth at the public wharf and the freight had to be discharged in boats and lighters. The Mary replaced the Progress on the Tickle in September when the latter went to St. John’s for refit.”

  The SS Mary was licensed to carry sixty passengers, and initial response to the ship seems to have been positive, though she soon ran into a few problems.

  Captain of a ship, unidentified. Photo 12.09.001, courtesy Sir Robert Bond Collection (Coll-237), Archives and Special Collections, Memorial University.

  The “Harbor Grace Notes” section of the Evening Telegram for August 27 of that year relates: “The Bell Island steamer Mary arrived from the Island on Saturday last with a number of passengers, men who came home to spend Sunday with their friends. The Mary is a most suitable boat for the service, and the workmen are delighted with the opportunity of spending Sunday at home. . . . On Sunday evening she returned to take the men back to the island, and while being berthed she struck the public wharf, damaging it somewhat.”

  By November, the steamer had run into trouble again. As the Evening Telegram reported on November 9, “Yesterday she grounded near the wharf that is built out from the beach at the island and had one of her propeller blades broken. Capt. Dawe asked us to say that if the wharf was ten feet longer it would not have happened, and he strongly recommends this addition.”

  The damage could not have been extensive, as the Mary was back in service by December, making runs to Harbour Grace, Carbonear, Bell Island, and into St. John’s.

  It was on one of these runs into St. John’s that the SS Mary had an encounter with what some of the crew believed to be a ghost ship. A few days after Christmas, the ship was almost run down by a ship which vanished in a strange fashion.

  On December 28, 1907—in a short article entitled “What Was It?”—the Evening Telegram reported the event as follows:

  The crew of the steamer Mary, which arrived from Bell Island at midnight last night, told us today that before they entered the Narrows, a large steamer was seen by them in the strain off Black Head with red and blue lights hoist in her rigging. She came like a flash toward them, and the engineer of the Mary thought that they would be run down. She passed, so he states, at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour, and the most mysterious thing about her was that they lost sight of her after she got near Sugar Loaf; she disappeared from view. They are conjecturing today what ship it was and whether it was a phantom ship or not. The engineer said that he never witnessed the like of such a scene in all the years he has been going to sea.

  “We thank the crew for this Xmas Ghost Story,” added the anonymous writer of the article.

  While ferry passengers around St. John’s might have seen a phantom steamer, the town of Trinity, Trinity Bay, has a ghostly ferryman. The story was originally collected by broadcaster Hiram Silk, as told to him by Beatrice Toope of Ireland’s Eye. In the early part of the twentieth century, an outport girl named Grace moved from her community to work in the town of Trinity, Trinity Bay. While there, she lived with her aunt and uncle.

  One evening in February, the aunt went up to a friend’s house and stayed to tea. When she went up, she did not intend to stay, so she did not have a light with her.

  Time passed, and when Grace came home from work, it was quite dark

  “Go up and carry the light and fetch your aunt home,” said her uncle.

  It was a slippery night, with ice snow on the ground, but off she set with flashlight in hand. Around seven o’clock, she came to the house with a white picket fence where her aunt had stayed for tea. As soon as she came in through the gate in the fence, a strange thing happened.

  Grace heard a little noise, and she looked toward the woodhouse. She turned her flashlight toward the woodhouse to see if there was anybody there, but she saw no one. Then she turned the light onto the fence.

  There, on the other side of the fence, she saw something like a man’s face and figure, with the body resting its arms on the face. She could not see the lower part of its body, but she saw a face with long, white whiskers. The figure wore an old-fashioned hat with a shiny bill, like the style of hat a captain might wear.

  Grace managed to get into the house, and when she came in, the aunt saw immediately that there was something wrong.

  “What’s wrong with you, maid?” the aunt asked. “Who was chasing you? What did you see?”

  “I didn’t see anybody living,” said the girl, after a pause.

  “I suppose you didn’t see anybody dead, then,” said the aunt, but the girl made no response.

  The two women said their farewells and left. They came down the path, and as they did, Grace flashed her light up and down the fence.

  “Put your light down on the ground,” said the aunt, uncomprehending. “That’s where I’m going to tread!”

  “When I get up over this hill, I’m going to tell you something,” said Grace.

  True to her word, when they got up over the hill, and away from the property, Grace described what she had seen, down to the whiskers and the billed cap.

  “But it was nothing living, with such a strange face,” said Grace.

  The next day the aunt decided to find out if someone had died in that house or if there was a similar story. She went over to a neighbour and asked who had died in the house.

  “Oh yes,” said the neighbour. “Old Bobby died there.”

  The aunt asked what he had looked like.

  “Well, he had long, white whiskers, and any time you saw him, he had a cap on,” said the neighbour. “He used to run the ferry that went up the Southwest Arm, and when he was an old man he went to live with his daughter. Every evening, just about seven or seven thirty, he’d go outdoors and lean on the fence and look up the arm, just to check on the ferry.”

  Mrs. King’s House

  Boyd’s Cove

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  How would you feel if a group of strangers suddenly moved into your house? If you are like Mrs. King, you probably would not approve.

  The Waterman family was building a winter tilt, and they had no place to
live while the work was under way. A nearby resident, Mr. King, had moved out of his house after the death of his wife, and as it was vacant, he offered it to the Watermans temporarily.

  “We went there one night and it was all right, best kind,” says Aunt Jessie Waterman. “Then the next night we went to bed, and someone came and stood over me, a woman. But I didn’t mind that. I just turned inside and went to sleep. I never spoke of it; it wasn’t a dream.”

  On the third night, however, things went from bad to worse.

  “Mrs. King was dead then. She didn’t want us there. She didn’t want anyone there,” says Aunt Jessie. “There was always something telling me not to touch anything that belonged to her.

  “And then the next night we went to bed and we had to get up. There was a wonderful noise in the house that evening, heaving chairs and everything. That’s what it seemed like, to us. So we had to leave that night, and get up and dress the youngsters and row across the cove in boat over to Mrs. Mugford’s.”

  It was raining, with the wind up from the east. But they put the children in the boat and made their way to the safety of the Mugfords’. When they arrived in the middle of the storm, Mrs. Mugford said she had known they were not going to last long in the King household. She told the Watermans that she too had seen the spirit of old Mrs. King, who would come down and lean over the fence, and then vanish up in the air like a ball of fire.

  “It didn’t want us to stay in the house,” says Aunt Jessie. “That was her way to get us out of the house. It didn’t want anyone living there. Even her husband, he couldn’t live in it.”

  The Ghost of Mrs. Pride

  Pilley’s Island

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  The community of Tilt Cove, Notre Dame Bay, was first settled around 1813 or earlier by George and Mary Winsor from the West Country England. Originally a fishing settlement, the town grew after the discovery of copper ore in the area in 1857 led to the development of a mine in 1864. The mine, opened by Smith McKay and C. F. Bennett, brought prosperity to the town, and by 1916, the population had grown to 1500.

  In 1986, ninety-eight-year-old Jack Mansfield, originally of Tilt Cove, was interviewed for a local radio program. The son of a miner, Mansfield, at age sixteen, moved with his family to Pilley’s Island, another mining community. The Tilt Cove mine, however, closed for good in 1908. Young Mansfield worked in the local sawmills, preparing wood for use in schooner building, and then later working on the railway, laying rails. Later in life, he worked as a teamster in the lumber camps for the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company.

  In the radio interview, Mansfield shared stories and memories of life in the early twentieth century. One of those stories was about the ghost of a woman by the name of Mrs. Pride, with whom he had an encounter in Pilley’s Island.

  “I came down over what they called The Route, down over Taylor’s Hill,” said Mansfield, who had been heading to a spot to get a drink of beer. Coming up the hill, he had passed a spot where a woman had been seen many times.

  “Tilt Cove, N.D. Bay looking outward—noted for its valuable copper mine,” photograph of an engraving, circa 1900. Image courtesy Archives and Special Collections, Memorial University.

  “She was there, coming toward me when I was going up the grade,” said Mansfield. “She was a dead person. . . . I could see her with her hair parted in the centre, that old-style part.

  “I knew it from the rig she had on,” he said, explaining how he knew her to be a ghost. “She had on what they’d call a nightdress, and long nightdress, right down, right down to her feet.

  “It never frightened me one bit! Only, I turned around and went on home.

  “When I looked over my shoulder, she was facing the road, looking up and down the road,” Mansfield related. “When I looked, she was looking at me going down the road. She turned around. I know she turned around. Anyway, I went down as far as I could, to see if she was going to go down the main road. She never went on the main road. She must have went back to the graveyard again, wherever the graveyard was.”

  At that point, she vanished.

  According to the folklore of Pilley’s Island, the figure of the woman in the nightdress was the spirit of a local lady, Mrs. Pride.

  “Mrs. Pride died in her house, just like anyone else,” said Mansfield, but for some reason she returned to haunt the community and was seen by “lots of young men.”

  “Some got frightened and ran away, frightened to death, fainted off, and all this,” he said. “I never did!”

  In the 1920s, Mansfield had a run-in with another ghost, that of an old French lumberman, while working in the woods on the west coast of Newfoundland. Mansfield saw the phantom logger coming along the trail at dawn, wearing lumbering clothes and a scarf about his neck, near the spot where he was said to be buried.

  Mansfield claims he knew the figure was a ghost, but he was not frightened by that phantom either, though some of the other loggers were spooked by the story.

  “I know a lot of the fellows wouldn’t get out of the bunk to make their water, they were that much afraid,” he said. “I thinks they’d seen something.”

  The Mortuary Wreath

  Crouse

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  Originally known as Cap Rouge, the little community of Crouse on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula housed an important French fishing station in the late nineteenth century. English and Irish settlement came later, and for years French fishing crews came from St. Malo to fish the waters off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

  The interactions between the French and the Newfoundlanders gave rise to many stories, including one particularly interesting ghost story. The story was recorded by Alicia Norris in the Atlantic Guardian magazine in 1946. Norris had learned the story from an old fisherman in Crouse, fluent in French, who had sailed with the foreign crews as a boy.

  In 1879, the French fleet arrived in early May, with the barquentine Sainte Marie being the first to reach land. Each ship tried to reach Newfoundland first, as the captain of the first ship would become the Admiral of the Fleet for that fishing season. Le Capitaine Henri Lajeunesse was captain of the Sainte Marie, but his tenure as fishing admiral was short-lived: after only a day in Newfoundland, Lajeunesse died.

  Sailing ships at anchor, 1857–59, South West Crouse. Photo courtesy Library and Archives Canada—Bibliothèque et Archives Canada PA-188223.

  The admiral was buried in Crouse, and the French fished all season, returning to St. Malo at the end of the year. But the next year, when they returned, locals were surprised to see them approach the shore with a priest standing in the rowboat. The priest led a procession to the grave and began a funeral service for the admiral, who had died the summer previously. At the culmination of the ceremony, a curious box was brought forward and opened.

  “With due formality, from its box and wrappings, was unfolded a huge, multicoloured, china mortuary wreath of indescribable beauty,” writes Norris. “It was lovingly inscribed from the wife and children of the dead seaman. The priest laid it on the grave and blessed it. The congregation sang ‘La Marseillaise’ and dispersed.”

  “An object of such beauty had rarely been seen in Crouse,” adds Norris. “People came from miles around to admire it with almost as much sense of possession as did the French sailors who stood pridefully by.”

  During the winter months, a local family was given the honour of moving the wreath from the grave to their house for safekeeping. Each summer, it was returned to the grave. This process continued unhindered for several years. But one summer morning, when the son of the family charged with the care of the wreath went to the graveyard, the wreath was missing.

  According to local legend, the wreath was stolen by some of the men of the fishing schooner Daisy May. It was a theft that did not go down well with some of the crew; one old
er gentleman was said to have crossed himself, denounced the men as desecrators, and predicted that bad luck would follow.

  True to the man’s prediction, ill luck followed shortly. The fish vanished, replaced with nothing but fog. The schooner ran up on a shoal, then later was caught in terrible storms. One of the best sailors on the crew was tossed from the rigging by unseen hands and fell to the deck with a smashed leg and broken ribs. Another young man was partially blinded after a close call with a bolt of lightning.

  Before long, the crew was certain that the enraged ghost of Le Capitaine Henri Lajeunesse stalked the ship from stem to stern. One sailor, terrified, looked up at one point to see a ghostly figure charging up the deck “like a ferocious lion” in a peaked cap and blue cape.

  The final moment came when a huge rogue wave smashed the decks, picking up the captain and cracking his head against a bulwark. The captain, stunned for a moment, eventually opened his eyes and addressed his crew.

  “Put her about,” he moaned. “We’re going back to Crouse.”

  That is what they did, even though the season had barely begun. The thieves replaced the now much-battered wreath back on the grave of Lajeunesse. And that, according to legend, was enough to lay to rest the ghost of the Frenchman. The Daisy May sailed back to Labrador and got a fair catch.

  According to Norris, one solitary white china rose hung forlornly from the grave of the Frenchman into the 1940s, all that remained of that precious artifact.

  “It was a beautiful wreath, that,” Norris’s old gentleman storyteller told her, “a beautiful, beautiful wreath.”

  The Legend of Kitty Casey