by Dale Jarvis
Mary’s grandfather had been a sea captain, and she surmises that a belief in things like the weather light was part of the family’s seafaring culture.
“Weather was very important to them at that time,” she says, “especially when you didn’t have anyone telling you every evening what it was going to be like tomorrow. I guess that anything that they could use for signs of weather, they used it. That probably was one, this particular light that used to come up.”
Another local curiosity that Mary remembers her mother talking about was the similarly themed “weather axe”—a phantom axe that people heard on the eve before the arrival of bad weather.
“You’d wake up in the middle of the night sometimes when it was very still and you could hear it,” says Mary. “There were woods on the back of our house, and you could hear somebody chopping wood—chop, chop, chop. My mother used to talk about that as well, the weather axe.”
Weather lights seem to be something common in many fogbound Newfoundland and Labrador communities, but Sandy Cove boasts the first weather axe story to swing my way.
The Haunted Trestle Revisited
Clarke’s Beach
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The American folklorist Robert A. Georges once wrote that a legend is “believed to be true by some, false by others, and both or neither by most.” It is a definition I would agree with, and Newfoundland is full of examples. Almost every town has a story which is partly true and partly not. As a collector and lover of stories, they are my favourite kind. I think everyone has a spot in his heart for a story which, though fantastic, might possibly be true.
What I love more than hearing a local legend is hearing a legend that has multiple versions. Sometimes these are migratory legends which crop up in different forms in different communities. Sometimes, however, legends are tied to a very specific place and are largely unknown outside of their home communities.
Clarke’s Beach has one of these legends, which I initially wrote up in my book Haunted Shores. Around 1984, three girls were out late one night, walking along the abandoned railway line that cuts through Clarke’s Beach. The girls were walking from Wilsonville Avenue along the track toward an old railway trestle over North River.
As the three girls drew closer to the river, they could see a fourth girl sitting on the edge of the trestle, drying her hair with a towel. Drawing closer still, they could see that the girl was dressed in an old-fashioned bathing suit. The bather paid no attention to the threesome, and it was not until they stepped onto the wooden beams of the trestle itself that the mysterious figure lowered her towel and turned to look straight at them.
The old railway trestle between Clarke’s Beach and North River, May 2017. Photo by Dale Jarvis.
The threesome stopped dead in their tracks. The girl gazed upon them, her eyes glowing with a brilliant red light, shining strong in the moonlight. The creature’s gaze was enough to send the three young girls screaming in terror back to the relative safety of Clarke’s Beach.
Theirs was not the first sighting of the midnight bathing beauty. In conversation with an elderly man who lived on Wilsonville Avenue, he learned that the form was the spectre of a local girl. The girl had arranged to meet her sweetheart for a late-night rendezvous and swim. When he did not arrive, she took to the waters. Then, tragedy: the bathing beauty slipped beneath the silent waves and drowned alone in the darkness.
Apparently, the girl’s ghost returned from the netherworld to haunt the spot of her demise, doomed to spend the sweet hereafter waiting by the railway line for a love fated never to arrive.
It is a great story. It was published, and then it faded into the background of my memory.
A decade later, folklorist Lisa Wilson and I started a project in co-operation with the Bay Roberts Cultural Foundation to document the folklore, legends, traditional cures, fairy stories, and folk beliefs of Bay Roberts and surrounding area. Part of the collection work involved the students of teacher Kimberley Welsh at Ascension Collegiate. Students were encouraged to go home, learn traditional stories from family and neighbours, and then report back.
I was delighted when two of those students returned with variants of the Clarke’s Beach trestle story. One student, Brittany Corbett, shared a fairly succinct version.
“The trestle in North River was known to be haunted,” wrote Corbett. “In the night you should stay away because there was a girl killed on it. She haunts the trestle and she will try and kill you.”
Another student, Josh Russell, offered up a slightly longer version. He wrote,
“At Clarke’s Beach Pond where the metal bridge is, there is a hill that leads into a pond, and behind is a forest where dirt bikes and quads go past. Years ago a lady was knelt down by the pond washing her old clothes, because back then there was no washing machines to clean your clothes like there is today. She lost balance and fell into the pond, and because she didn’t know how to swim, she drowned. It is said that if you go on the bridge where she drowned, you can see her ghost with red eyes on the hill washing clothes.”
While both these are different from the version I wrote up in 2004, there are intriguing similarities, particularly in Russell’s telling of the story. The glowing red eyes and the drowning are intact. One could even draw a parallel between the towel in the early version and the washing in the more recent one.
Today, the abandoned train trestle remains to cross the river, even though the tracks themselves have long since vanished. Intriguingly, the glowing-eyed spectre is not the only ghost to have been reported in that vicinity.
One fine evening in 1907, a Clarke’s Beach man decided to take a stroll along the railway track. As he did, he heard a familiar sound. He turned, and there in the distance was a steam locomotive, chugging toward him.
The train drew closer and showed no sign of slowing down to stop at the station. He watched as it moved closer and felt the vibration of the great engine shaking the earth as it roared past. From where he stood, he could see several people on board, staring out through the windows. He raised his walking stick in greeting, but no one waved back, the passengers’ eyes fixed on something in the distance.
Puzzled, he decided he would stop in at the railway station and ask about the train that had just gone through. The station was empty except for the ticket agent.
“No train has passed through here,” said the agent.
The agent checked the timetables and found that a train had not been scheduled, nor was one expected. News of the phantom train was telegraphed up along the line, but no train arrived at the station in Bay Roberts. The story was made known in the community, and others corroborated his story. They too had seen the strange train. However, no explanation was ever found. The railway hands who worked that section of the line were somewhat spooked by the story and from that point on were always nervous about meeting the ghostly engine somewhere on the tracks.
Ghostly trains are a recurring theme in contemporary legends, and the locomotive itself is an example of folk literature motif E535.4—“Phantom railway train.” The Clarke’s Beach example may not be the only phantom train in the province. While he remained vague on specific locations, Newfoundland writer P. J. Kinsella noted in 1910 that, “there is a phantom train that runs along near a certain station, and the villagers, who often hear its weird whistle, have much reason to entertain a strange superstition in connection with its nightly progress.”
While the phantom locomotive story is probably an example of a legend with variants found around the world, what is curious about the Clarke’s Beach trestle is that it seems to be a focal point for local supernatural stories. The adjacent Clarke’s Beach Salvation Army Cemetery, incidentally, is said to be haunted by the ghost of a man wearing a top hat. Though I have looked more than once, I have never caught sight of this rather debonair ghost.
Hark! Phantom Drummers and Piper
s
Marysvale, Brigus, Bay Roberts,
and Swift Current
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Imagine a calm night, with only a little wind moving the clouds overhead. Everything is quiet, but then, out of the stillness, you hear a noise. Listen very carefully. At first, it sounds like a distant tapping, but as it draws closer, you realize it is the sound of a drum, a tattoo beaten out with military precision. But who would be playing a drum there, in the middle of the night? If you are in the right spot, at the right time, it might be a ghostly drummer.
The Feildian was the magazine of Bishop Feild College, a Church of England academy for boys. The magazine ran from 1893 to 1960 and was created to foster school feeling and to chronicle College affairs. It was the first publication of its kind on the island and included news, letters, sports, and reports from school alumni.
In a 1905 article entitled “What About Ghosts?” a writer identified only as “H.” claimed to have put to rest a story about a ghost. Sadly, the mysterious author did not mention the location of the ghost story, only that it was at the mouth of a bay, “on the bank of a river close to a mountain gorge containing a lagoon.”
“The lagoon was reported to be haunted by a deserter from a French warship,” writes H., “who had died in a fisherman’s cottage in the bay, after several years spent in the woods, in fear of recapture. He had been a drummer on the ship, and he swore to the woman who had nursed him on his deathbed that he would haunt the lagoon, a weird and lonely spot. For years his drum was heard beating at certain periods, as his spirit marched through the woods, and many a time parties visiting the place fled in terror from its supernatural roll.”
One evening, the author was sitting in the twilight after supper, camped on the reportedly haunted spot.
An English drummer boy. Illustration by George W. Joy, 1902.
“My guide was at the brook washing up, and I was placidly smoking, seated on a stone,” writes H., “with my back against a telegraph pole, the line of which ran through this country for many miles. Suddenly in the dreamy silence broke the beating of a drum, and my man came running back with a scared face. I at once recognized the sound, but could see no ghost, so . . . I kept my head and began to look for the spectre.
“I soon noticed that angry gusts of wind were coming down through the gorge,” he notes, “and as these passed, the drum rolled out, I observed a tremor in the telegraph pole. This gave me a clue, and immediately afterwards I saw the ghost in the wire. In short, the drum was the wind playing on a mile of telegraph wire, and reverberating in the cliffs as the ‘spouts’ came down the gorge from the North East.”
The ghost story that H. wanted to debunk may have been part of a regionally famous set of ghost stories clustered in one very particular geographic area: a section of Conception Bay defined by Marysvale to the south and Bay Roberts to the north.
If you turn off that stretch of the old Conception Bay highway and explore the community of Marysvale, formerly known as Turk’s Gut, you will find the Turk’s Gut Heritage House at the end of the road toward the water. The building is home to the Turk’s Gut Heritage Committee, where Mrs. Bride Power has been working hard to preserve the oral history and folklore of the community. It was through Bride that I tracked down the details of the Turk’s Gut version of the phantom drummer.
Local folklore maintains that the drummer lived in Turk’s Gut in the early part of the 1800s. Exactly where he came from is something of a mystery. Some believe that the drummer was a prisoner of war, while others hold that he arrived as a stowaway on a sailing ship. No one in Turk’s Gut knew where the man had come from, nor did they know his true name. The man himself could offer little assistance, for he seemed to know just as little about his own identity. The man had some sort of amnesia, and it was thought by the local people that he had suffered some sort of memory loss, perhaps due to a war injury.
While the stranger could not remember his name or where he was born, he did retain one impressive skill. He did remember how to play the drum, and so was nicknamed “The Drummer” by the local residents.
The drummer was taken in and shown great courtesy by a local family, the Simmses. After living in Turk’s Gut for many years, the drummer passed away. The Simms family buried the man on their property and laid a flat rock over his grave to mark his final resting spot. That rock was said to be located about seventy-five feet from where the Turk’s Gut Heritage House stands now.
Eternal rest, however, seemed to elude the drummer. Long after his death, his ghost could be heard playing an invisible drum. Before long, stories began to spread that when people in the drummer’s adopted home passed away, the drummer could be heard for miles around.
The noise of the drummer was heard only during the night when all was quiet. It was also rumoured that on the eve of a local person’s death the drummer could be heard playing the drums under the windowsill of the person who was fated to die.
In 1956, a different version of the legend was written down by a man named Don Morris, who published the article in a magazine titled Here in Newfoundland. Morris claimed to have learned the story from Leo English, a curator at the Newfoundland Museum.
Morris’s version placed the recurring haunting in Brigus and concerned a phantom drummer said to play at funerals. The Brigus variant claimed that an English drummer had once made a promise to an old Brigus settler that the musician would drum the old man to his grave, and that he would also drum at the funerals of all his direct descendants. Soon after, the old man died. Morris writes,
And true to his word, the drummer followed the coffin to the grave beating solemnly on his drum. He performed the same ritual for other direct descendants . . . and then the drummer, by this time an old man himself, passed on to his eternal reward. But mysteriously the drumming went on . . . and is going on. . . . And since then in Brigus, whenever a direct descendant of the drummer’s benefactor dies, the beating of a drum can be heard while the funeral procession is en route to the graveyard.
The northern edge of the drummer’s Conception Bay territory seems to be Bay Roberts. Folklorist Lisa Wilson collected one short version of a phantom drummer story in 2013 from Audrey Sparkes, of Bay Roberts.
“There used to be the front road school and we went up to our W.A. [Women’s Auxiliary] meeting, myself and two other ladies. See, I had just moved. I wasn’t familiar with anything. We were walking home and there’s a rock there . . . and it was called the Drummer’s Rock. And we’re walking home and it is a wild night, and this noise, and one said to the other, ‘The drummer is playing on the rock tonight.’ I was ready to fly but I just walked on with them.”
The exact location of Drummer’s Rock seems hard to pin down, though the Bay Roberts Guardian newspaper noted, on Friday, August 10, 1928, the August 7 death of Robert C. Bradbury “aged 80 years, who was born at Drummer’s Rock, French’s Cove, July 12th, 1848.” This notation would seem to place the rock at the northeastern end of Bay Roberts.
I was told that the best person to talk to about the location and legend of Drummer’s Rock would be Sandra Roach. Roach is the general manager of the Bay Roberts Cultural Foundation, and one of the people responsible for keeping the Drummer’s Rock story alive.
Her version of the story came from her husband, Harry’s, mother, Emmie May (Crane) Roach. Emmie died in August 2016, at the age of ninety-six. She had grown up in the area around Crane’s Hill in Bay Roberts East, and as Emmie’s grandfather lived on Crane’s Hill Road, it is possible that the hill is named after her branch of the Crane family.
The path to the Drummer’s Rock, Bay Roberts, May 2017.
Photo by Dale Jarvis.
According to Emmie’s story, many years ago, British warships patrolling for enemy vessels occasionally anchored in Bay Roberts harbour, off French’s Cove. On board one of these ships there was a young seaman who serv
ed as their drummer. His duty was to play reveille, to call the sailors for meals, or to call them to arms if they were approached by an enemy ship. This boy decided he did not want the life of a drummer, and he jumped ship. He either swam or rowed ashore in French’s Cove and ran up the path which locals called the Front Road.
“When the soldiers on board discovered that he was gone, of course they came looking for him,” describes Roach. “When they did find him, he was hiding behind a large boulder which became known as Drummer’s Rock. When they found him, they flogged him to death with a cat-o’-nine-tails.”
The cat-o’-nine-tails is a type of whip and was described in a 1911 criminology journal in this way:
The cat as now in use consists of nine cords attached to a handle. At the extremity of each cord are three or four knots. The prisoner is tied to a sort of frame, the arms above the head. A prison guard wields the cat with all his force so that the knots strike the prisoner between the shoulders. . . . It is rare that the flesh is not so torn that permanent scars are carried by the prisoner.
It was a common naval punishment in the era of naval exploration, and David D. Porter, admiral of the United States Navy, wrote this about the naval use of the cat-o’-nine-tails in 1890:
On my first acquaintance with the navy, in 1823, there was but one kind of punishment for the men in vogue on shipboard. That was by the use of the cat-o’-nine-tails, a relic of barbarism handed down from the time of good Queen Bess, who prided herself on the navy which repulsed the “Invincible Armada” of ten times its own strength. Under the discipline of early times, of which the press gang and the “cats” were such potent factors, the British navy captured or destroyed nearly everything opposed to it. Whipping was considered the best means of disciplining a crew, whereas, in fact, it made mere brutes of the sailors, who in those days had perhaps scarcely sentiment enough in them to appreciate the degradation to which they were subjected. . . . It is strange, but true, that many old seamen who were partial to the service for the sake of the grog, which they received three times a day, were equally opposed to the abolition of the “cat.” The “cat,” they argued, was a wholesome terror to worthless loafers about decks, and the only means of making them do their duty.