by Dale Jarvis
Elliston
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The people of Elliston, formerly known as Bird Island Cove and located on the northeast edge of the Bonavista Peninsula, are no strangers to an eerie tale. One of their most famous local legends is that of a ghostly figure named Kitty Casey or Kitty Kazzer.
Kitty Casey was the wife of Paddy Casey. They lived near Casey Gulch, around Sandy Cove. She took her own life on September 26, 1862, as her husband stood trial for stealing fish. Historian Nimshi Crewe wrote about the case in a letter dated September 28, 1964.
“I have often heard of this tragedy,” writes Crewe. “Casey, who was a tanner by trade, was either an Irishman or a native of Hr. Grace. I think he came to Bird Is. Cove as a shareman with my great-grandfather, Richard Cole. He came to be a planter on his own account, his stage being in what is still known as Casey’s Gulch. He lived nearby, on the Point. His sister lived with him, and a child who married one Tom Sullivan, who lived for years as a fisherman there and, later, moved to St. John’s.”
Crewe learned some of the details about the fish theft from Lloyd Hicks of Elliston, who was then eighty-four years of age.
“Lloyd has told me of an episode of Paddy going into the stage of the brothers John and Big Tom Porter after night and stealing fish,” writes Crewe. “They suspected some theft and, lying in wait, caught Paddy in the act; he tried to escape by jumping over the stage-head and swimming, but they caught him and took him up to William Minty, the constable, who kept him in his kitchen all night and took him to the magistrate in Bonavista next morning.”
Elliston, 2012. Photo courtesy Kenny Louie, Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
According to local stories, Kitty was so overcome and distraught by her husband’s criminal deeds that she decided to commit suicide in a most dramatic fashion. The woman stabbed herself five times in the throat. Astonishingly, Kitty did not die immediately. She lingered for a time afterwards, and Crewe reports one gruesome detail of her final days: “raisins she attempted to eat came out through the cuts in her throat.”
A document sent to me by Marilyn Coles-Hayley, “The Day Book,” St. John’s, September 26, 1862, has a long letter from Bonavista, including this paragraph about a session of the Supreme Court:
Nearly the whole of today has been spent in the case of The Queen vs. Patrick Casey, the prisoner being found guilty. During the course of this trial, a messenger came from Bird Island Cove (where the prisoner resided) to say that his wife had just cut her throat and was in a dying state. She has since been visited by a Doctor, who says she cut herself in five places, and that there is no hope for her recovery. She is now dead. The prisoner, Patrick Casey, was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment.
Because she had taken her own life she was not buried in the local cemetery, as the belief of the day held that suicides could not be buried in consecrated ground. She was instead buried outside of the church, in the droke in Sandy Cove near Tilley Farm Road. The unmarked grave was covered with rocks.
There are those who believe that poor Kitty still roams Sandy Cove looking for peace and forgiveness. People have seen a strange figure coming out of the cold night fog, a mournful figure with a haunted, lost look on her face. Some have even claimed to have seen the gashes Kitty made to her long white throat. Others say she wanders the area, missing her head entirely.
If you are visiting Elliston in the fall of the year, take care where you walk in the evening. Most people will not venture down by the beach on foggy, cool nights, especially around September 26, when the sightings of Kitty are said to become more intense.
Time your excursion to Sandy Cove appropriately.
Astride a Pale Horse
Mount Pearl, Mattis Point, and Bay Roberts
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I have come across many stories of ghost horses from all around the world. Newfoundland has its own history of ghostly steeds, and my favourite local ghost horse is the one that belonged to Lady Anne Pearl.
Lady Pearl was the wife of James Pearl, after whom Mount Pearl is named. Part of their Mount Pearl farm included grounds set aside specifically for horse racing, including a benched gallery for spectators and a rounded track. After the death of her husband in Newfoundland, Lady Pearl left for England. She was fated never to roam her estate again in her lifetime. She took up residence in London and died there childless in 1860.
Soon after her death, strange reports began to circulate around the farms and summer cottages near the Mount Pearl holdings. As the legend is told, Anne’s love of horse riding was stronger than the confines of the grave. Starting shortly after Lady Pearl’s death, nocturnal visitors to her former riding grounds were witness to the figure of the lady astride a phantom white horse.
If a ghost horse is good, a headless ghost horse is even better. I came across a snippet of a story from the Port au Port Peninsula, which had been collected by students in the region and published in 1972. The students wrote:
There was a story told of a horse with no head that could be seen along the road. When a person encountered this horse he could not pass it until the horse disappeared. This phantom horse was supposed to be big and white.
Then, much to my delight, the students wrote the following addendum:
Another story was that a pig used to appear along the road. This pig seemed to stretch along the road as the person walked.
It is, I assure you, the only reference I have ever come across to a stretching phantom pig.
But back to the business of ghostly horses. Another intriguing yarn comes from Mattis Point. Originally known as Indian Head, the community of Mattis Point lies on Newfoundland’s west coast, located near Bay St. George.
Today, the old Mattis Point cemetery is overgrown with brush and alders. Its oldest legible gravestones date to the early 1900s, bearing local names such as Alexander, Bennett, Brumsey, King, Tobin, and Young. The cemetery may be older than the early twentieth century, as it also contains several unmarked graves and many white crosses and stones with no inscriptions visible. It is possible that one of those ancient graves is associated with an old ghost story.
The story involves a team of phantom horses hauling a wooden coffin up Mattis Point Hill. A team of horses appears around the bend in the road, pulling behind them a black wooden cart. As it draws closer, an object can be seen positioned on the back of the wagon, and as it draws closer still, the object can be identified. It is a single wooden coffin draped in black cloth. Pulling its silent and sombre load, the phantom horses pass by and climb up the hill.
“Alice” grew up in Mattis Point and is one of the people who remembers hearing about the ghostly procession. “It looked like a coffin in the back of the wagon,” Alice told me, but she is quick to add, “I didn’t see this, of course. I only heard of the story that happened years ago.”
On some occasions, ghost horses are not seen but heard.
A woman who lived near Church Hill in Bay Roberts heard something very eerie, which in her estimation led to a visit from the “Old Hag,” whom you shall encounter later in this book.
“One night in July of 2013, I decided to walk to the store. On my way back home around the Cable Building area, I heard what sounded like a horse galloping sound behind me. I looked back but didn’t see anything. When I got home my body felt drained and my eyes were closing, I felt that tired. So I lay down to sleep, and that night I got hagged the worst hag I had in my life.”
Ever since that night, the woman has been nervous to walk down Water Street around the Cable Building at night.
“I blame those horse galloping sounds I heard.”
There are many folk beliefs around horses, particularly white horses, which are often thought to be harbingers of ill fortune. Dreaming of a white horse meant a coming death, and in the New Testament, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rides astride a white horse. There w
as a belief around the Torbay area that a pregnant woman should never look at a white horse. To do so, according to the tradition, was to invite problems during childbirth.
I learned of one other “bad luck” association with horses from the late George Jones, originally of Riverhead, Brigus. A man who worked on boats most of his life, latterly as a ship’s engineer, Jones told me once that they would never talk about horses while at sea. To do so, he said, was to call up a storm.
Chapter Three
Historical and Contemporary
Legends
Once, there was a serial killer that used to go around Sunshine Park killing those who ventured onto the smaller, darker paths. The police could not find him, because he always wore yellow gloves and left no fingerprints. Eventually, the police tracked him down, and he was sent to jail.
In the years that passed, a camp started up at the park. Every year they held an annual campfire. Campers would stay there all night and either sleep in tents or in the chalet at the entrance to the park.
On the eve of the campfire, the police told the camp counsellors that they were releasing the serial killer.
“You can’t do that!” said the counsellors. “There are going to be a lot of kids here, and we don’t want him to do anything!”
“It will be fine,” said the police. “He is a changed man.”
They went ahead with the campfire, but afterwards, when they sat on the chalet stairs to do a head count, two campers were missing. So they divided up into groups and went back to the campfire area to search.
One kid got separated and in the dark tripped over something. To his horror, he found that it was a dead body, and he hurried back to the chalet to tell everyone. When he arrived, he found that everyone else had been murdered. Sitting there was an axe, and on the axe was a yellow glove, the signature of the Sunshine Park serial killer.
— Adapted from a story told by Emma Burry as part of the Young Folklorists Program in St. John’s, 2011
The Night-Time Review.
Illustration by Hermann Freihold Plüddemann, 1852.
Lights in the Fog
Nain, Tors Cove, Head of Bay D’Espoir, Harbour Breton, and Sandy Cove
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“It often happens that one hour is hot, the next hour is cold, then a Fogge afterwards clear, then Rain—so that it commonly falls out that you get Four or Five kinds of weather in one day.”
Able Seaman Aaron Thomas wrote that about Newfoundland weather in 1794, and for anyone who has lived in or visited the province, this rings as true today as it might have in the eighteenth century. It is said that one of the foggiest places on earth is the Grand Banks, that misty meeting place of the cold northern Labrador Current and the warmer Gulf Stream from the south. On average, Newfoundland and Labrador’s capital city gets about 121 days per year with fog, which is not nearly as bad as Argentia, which has been known to receive over 200 days a year of fog. So it is not strange at all that many local myths and legends revolve around fog, bad weather, and means of predicting weather changes.
While most of the stories presented to this point have been legends, stories which were perceived as being based in truth in the historical period, the next story is more cosmological in nature. It could be defined as an “etiological” myth. Etiological myths are origin or creation stories, which describe how things around us came into being. In this instance, it is one from Labrador which lays out the story of how fog came to be.
Miller’s Passage, Connaigre Peninsula, no date. Photo PF-328.117, courtesy Resettlement Photographs, Maritime History Archive.
The indigenous peoples of this province dealt with fog for centuries before the Europeans showed up, and it is no wonder that local myths evolved around that mysterious, misty stuff. In 2008, Dr. Hans Rollmann of Memorial University wrote an article in Newfoundland and Labrador Studies documenting a fog-related story written by Reverend Albert Martin in a 1901 Moravian magazine. Martin had lived in Labrador from 1888 until 1923 and had served as the Moravian superintendent of Labrador. Martin heard the story in Labrador, though there are versions of the story found across the Arctic.
“Once, a man went into the forest to get firewood,” writes Martin. “While he was working in the forest, he was attacked by a black bear who wounded him badly, so that the man fell to the ground as if dead. The bear sniffed him to determine whether he was still alive, but the man held his breath, so that the bear believed the man to be dead and put him on his back to carry him off into his cave.”
Eventually, the man escaped and ran away from the bear. The bear gave chase and found the hunted man standing on the other side of a river.
“How have you been able to cross the river?” the bear asked the man.
“I drank it all up,” the man answered.
“The bear immediately started to do the same,” says Martin. “He drank and drank and drank, until he burst. Then, for the first time, thick fog covered the land.”
All that fog shrouding the coasts and bays of Newfoundland and Labrador comes with its own attendant folklore. Weather lights are a truly persistent bit of Newfoundland weather lore, and stories of strange lights associated with bad or “dirty” weather can be found in every corner of the province. According to the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, a weather light is a gleam or flicker of light at sea thought to presage a storm.
The Dictionary gives a few examples of how the phrase is used. P. Delaney of Tors Cove is quoted as saying, “when you can see [weather] lights on the salt water at night, it is a sign of a storm ahead,” while E. Cokes of Head of Bay D’Espoir is quoted as reporting that “weather lights in the riggings of a schooner is the sign of a storm coming. The lights start at the bottom of the riggings and move gradually up to the top where they disappear.”
Another community home to these lights is Harbour Breton, on the south coast of the island. Doug Wells, a native of Harbour Breton, sent me a series of articles on local culture, thinking the ones concerned with strange phenomena might be of interest to me.
“I had my students write on local cultural and historical events,” explains Wells. “With a folklore background, I also encouraged students to write articles on folklore-related practices. The articles are folklore and folklife-related and represent Harbour Breton and some nearby resettled communities. Over the years of teaching Cultural Heritage 1200, students wrote approximately 150 stories.”
One of Wells’s students was Ryan Lambert, of King Academy, who wrote on the local tradition of what he termed “dirty weather lights.” Lambert documents two examples of this luminescent occurrence from the communities of Miller’s Passage and Harbour Breton.
“In Miller’s Passage the dirty weather light would float slowly in through the harbour, through the tickle,” says Lambert, “and as it reached Shoal Cove it would turn around, float out through the tickle, out the harbour and vanish. The next day, as usual, the residents would get wind and rain—a disappointing day for fishermen. People noticed that the dirty weather light would follow the same path almost all the time. It was a frightening experience at first, but people soon grew accustomed to it and expected bad weather to follow.”
A similar weather light was also seen in Harbour Breton.
“It would be seen mostly by people living on the north side,” writes Lambert. “The dirty weather light would float in over Deadman’s Cove Road and travel slowly as far as the present town garage. It would then stop, turn around, and head toward Deadman’s Cove again and then vanish. And again, probably as in all dirty weather light sightings, the weather would soon turn bad.”
Lambert also references a man by the name of Josiah Bullen, of Harbour Breton, who could vividly remember seeing the dirty weather light, both as a boy and as a married man.
“Mr. Bullen describes it as floating just above the ground as bright a
s a good-sized flashlight,” says Lambert. “Some members of Mr. Bullen’s family would be scared of the light, especially his wife, Meta, after she moved to Harbour Breton from Little Bay West in the early 1940s.”
Bullen noted that once houses were built in the area, the light was never seen again.
“He says that you could expect to see the dirty weather light when there was a bad-weather-look in the sky,” says Lambert, “and, most generally, the weather would not be fit for anything after the light was seen.”
These south coast examples are similar to stories from many places across the province. One intriguing variant, with some very specific details, comes from the community of Sandy Cove, in Bonavista Bay, not far from Eastport. One local woman told her daughter Mary about seeing a weather light in the cove, and I gave Mary a call to talk about her mother’s stories.
“She called it a weather light because bad weather followed,” says Mary. “My mother wasn’t a superstitious person. She wasn’t a person who believed in all of this stuff. She went to every possible extent to keep us from believing it. But she did tell us about that, and she said that she saw it. She had no other choice but to believe it.
“There is a real nice sandy beach there,” describes Mary. “It is a big beach, a bit curved, with a high bank at the top. When you stand on that bank you see down the bay.”
According to Mary’s mother, it was up through there that the light would come.
“The light would come up through the bay, up and up, and it would come to the bank,” says Mary. “I’m assuming she meant it came up on the bank. And then that would be it, it wouldn’t come any farther than that. That meant that the next day they were likely to get bad weather.
“I was talking to my sister a few days ago, and I said to her, ‘Do you remember Mom telling you about this?’ ‘Oh yes, Mom called it the weather light.’ And she did, she could remember our mother telling her about it as well.”