by Dale Jarvis
And so, whipped he was, our drummer boy, and the unfortunate lad perished from his wounds. The folklore of Bay Roberts maintains that his tortured soul returned to drum near the rock where he expired.
“Emmie’s mother used to say to her, ‘don’t go near that rock,’ because the legend has it the people over time would hear a drum being played near that rock,” says Roach. “She was told to stay away from it. Another lady said that people used to see a light coming up the path in the night toward Drummer’s Rock, and they would hear someone crying.”
In addition to Drummer’s Rock in Bay Roberts, there is also a shoal called Drummer’s Rock near Harbour Grace, and, slightly more farther afield, a Drummer’s Pond on the Fox Harbour Road between Fox Harbour and Dunville, near Placentia. The jury is still out on whether either of those places is haunted.
The ghostly drummer legend is related to other local legends about ghostly pipers. Indeed, ghostly musicians are so well-represented in supernatural literature that folklorists have assigned the trope its own number—folk literature motif E402.1.13, “Invisible ghost plays musical instrument.” Dover Castle, in Dover, Kent, England, is said to be the eternal home of a headless drummer boy in Napoleonic era costume who haunts the castle, for example.
The most famous Newfoundland example of the ghostly piper legend explains the name behind Piper’s Hole, near Swift Current on the Burin Peninsula, a story I documented in my book Haunted Shores. There, a ghostly piper has been playing his instrument for centuries.
Don Ryan described the legend thusly in 1957:
Legend has it that a squad of French soldiers, at the time when the French had set up their capital at Placentia, reconnoitred the inland reaches of the bay and found a rapidly flowing stream at the bottom of its northernmost reach. While exploring this river they came in contact with the English who were lying in wait for them and a skirmish took place. One Frenchman was killed, but for some unknown reason his spirit still lingered in the valley. Years later, villagers would hear this spirit piping mournful notes, but only in the late evening and on the wings of a northeast wind would the melancholy air reach the ears of the villages. For this reason they said that the valley, extending from Larkin’s Hill, was haunted by this phantom piper. Hence, they called the valley Piper’s Hole and the stream which flowed between the hills, Piper’s Hole River.
A 1992 edition of the Newfoundland magazine Decks Awash noted that the “story is told of the crowd of deer hunters who actually danced to the sound of the pipes.”
In the years since the publication of Haunted Shores, I have tracked down several other versions of the legend. One version, printed in 1901, tells of two deserters from the Royal Navy named Dick Huntley and Ned Fitzgerald. The two men encountered the sound of a piper near Rattling Brook, at the spot where it entered Piper’s Creek, on a fine evening in the month of September 1750.
That night they camped on an island in the lagoon and waited anxiously for a repetition of the same strange programme to which they had listened on the previous night. Sometime after midnight: the strange music again rang out on the clear night air, and apparently at no great distance. . . . They entered the boat and pulled in the direction of the music. On turning a point they came upon a strange scene. Seated on a huge boulder, the bright rays of the moon glistening on his snow-white hair and beard, and with his attenuated fingers clasping the chanter of his instrument, sat the piper. As the boat glided toward him, he finished off with a shrill burst of music, and to their horror they saw him plunge beneath the waves and disappear. For some time they remained as if spellbound, and as the boat was touching the shore they jumped out and made a thorough search but could find no clue to the mystery.
According to some, the phantom musician was a piper in the French army in the eighteenth century. In one version of the legend, the French and English clashed in battle at Garden Cove. Supposedly, the spirit of the French soldier lingers in the river valley, mournfully playing a tune. In other versions from the same area, the musician was a Scottish bagpiper, killed in a hunting accident by an Englishman.
What makes the entire set of stories complicated, but which also links them to the phantom drummer stories of Conception Bay, is that in at least one early version of the Piper’s Hole legend, the ghost plays both the pipes and a drum.
In a 1912 article called “Lore of Placentia Bay,” Richard S. Dahl wrote that the ghost had been a fifer and drummer in the army, a man named Kelly who confessed on his deathbed to being a murderer.
Kelly died and then began the nightly music that gave the inlet its name. On many nights the thundering roll of a mighty drum would be heard patrolling up and down the valley, or the shrieking whistle of a giant fife would be heard above the roar of the storm. And even in peaceful weather the drummer might pursue a belated traveller. The settlers became unnerved, and the settlement disappeared. When I heard the story I jotted it down and thought no more about it. When last fall I was anchored at Indian Cove, at the mouth of Piper’s Hole, we had wind and tide against us and would not attempt to negotiate the sandbanks, twists and turns of Piper’s Hole under such conditions. The night was light and about ten o’clock out comes a craft, spite sandbanks and tides, with every sail set and every man on deck. They had been loading firewood at dusk, at the mouth of Kelly’s Brook, when the drummer had come thundering down the ravine and the seven stalwart men had fled, hoisted the anchor, and set sail —in the year of our Lord 1911.
So, whether the legend is truly about a piper, a drummer, or some other type of ghostly musician, there is something about it that keeps people coming back to the story. Indeed, Sandra Roach and the Bay Roberts Cultural Foundation have taken the old legend and have updated it for the modern tourism age, incorporating the story into various cultural programs, including their popular “Toutons & Tunes” tour on the Heritage Walking Trail.
“We have a young boy run up the path, all out of breath, with his shirttail out, and a soldier chasing him with the cat-o’-nine-tails in his hand,” describes Roach. “He says to the crowd, ‘I was on that ship anchored out in the harbour,’ and we made up a little bit that he stole some bread. The soldier comes looking for him, then he runs off and you hear the cat-o’-nine-tails off in the distance, and him crying. Then we tell the story of how that happened, and how he was killed. We do it on the trail, near the old United Church School which was there on the Front Road. There is a rock foundation there where the school was. So we start there, about halfway down toward Bishop’s Beach.”
Roach also tells the story of Drummer’s Rock as part of the Bay Roberts Cultural Foundation’s show “The Haunting.”
“As people gather around I tell them all about the ships in the harbour, and how the boy came ashore,” she tells me. “We had a summer student with a little snare drum, and he used to sit over by the church, and as soon as I stopped telling my story he’d do a little ‘tap-tap-tap’ on the drum.
“People loved it.”
Mysterious Norsemen
L’Anse aux Meadows, Bay de L’Eau, Harbour Mille, and Muddy Cove
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I have been a fan of Viking tales and Norse mythology since I was very young. I still have my well-thumbed copy of the children’s book Eric: A Tale of a Red-Tempered Viking by Susan McDonald Bond, originally published in 1968. It tells the tale of Erik the Red, and his son Leif the Lucky, who went on to discover Vinland.
That early love of the old Norse stories has stayed with me. A return trip to the L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site of Canada and the nearby Norstead Viking Village enticed me to dig out my copy of the Vinland Sagas, searching for a half-remembered ghost story.
The town of L’Anse aux Meadows is home to the first-discovered European settlement in the New World. The remains at the Parks Canada site, discovered by archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.
While we may never know if Leif the Lucky himself walked the shores at L’Anse aux Meadows, we know with certainty that his countrymen did.
In addition to Leif, Erik the Red had three other children: a daughter, Freydis, and two additional sons, Thorvald and Thorstein. Unfortunately for the two other sons, they were not quite as lucky as their brother. Thorvald died and was buried somewhere in Vinland. He was shot in the armpit with an arrow fired at him by an angry Skraeling, one of Vinland’s aboriginal inhabitants, after Thorvald and his men had captured three Skraeling boats and killed their owners.
We saw the shore. Illustration by Mary Hallock Foote, 1877.
When Thorstein heard of his brother’s death, he was determined to sail to Vinland and bring back Thorvald’s body. He took twenty-five men, and his wife, Gudrid, along. But early that winter, disease broke out among the crew, eventually spreading to Thorstein himself. He died and was greatly mourned by Gudrid.
Things then took a turn toward the supernatural. What follows is the earliest-known European ghost story in North America. Gudrid was being consoled by one of the crew when the body of Thorstein Eiriksson sat up on the bench where he had been laid out.
“Where is Gudrid?” he asked.
His wife, perhaps rightfully terrified at this, said nothing. Three times the corpse spoke, asking for his wife. Three times she said nothing. One of the crew members, also named Thorstein, spoke up instead.
“What is it you want, namesake?” asked the second Thorstein.
At this the corpse spoke again, saying that he was anxious to reveal to Gudrid her destiny. He went on, prophesying that his wife would have a bountiful future, that she would remarry, have children, outlive her second husband, go on pilgrimage to Rome, return to Iceland, build a church, become a nun, and die there in her old age. As far as life predictions go, it is not a bad one, really.
Having said his bit, the corpse fell back onto the bench. The Vikings packed him up and sailed with him back to Eiriksfjord, Greenland, the town his father had established. Thorstein was buried there, and presumably did not speak again.
While Thorstein Eiriksson may have been the first Viking ghost in Newfoundland, he was definitely not the last. One Halloween, I sat down at a St. John’s coffee shop with Colin, who had a treasure trove of ghost stories from Harbour Mille and Grand Bank, the far side of the province from L’Anse aux Meadows. His family was one of the founding families of Harbour Mille, and he was full of stories about various members coming back from the dead to say hello or show displeasure about the actions of the living.
Today, Harbour Mille is a small fishing village of around 200 people in Fortune Bay, about twenty-six kilometres off the Burin Peninsula Highway. The town sits on an isthmus, and hills rise, saddle-like, to the west and the east. It has both a sheltered harbour at the north and a beach to the south.
Across the bay to the northwest is the now-abandoned community of Bay de L’Eau. Though separated by five or six kilometres of open water, the two communities are linked by a rather intriguing ghost story. Colin learned the Bay de L’Eau half of the ghost story from a friend, David, who also has roots in the Harbour Mille area.
As the legend goes, there was a group of fishermen in a schooner sailing into Bay de L’Eau. As they came close to land, they saw what they later described as a Viking ship coming out of the bay.
“The description that the sailors gave afterwards was very much like a Viking longship,” says Colin. “The men were wearing fur pelts and of course speaking a language which they didn’t understand.”
The two companies parted ways, and the longship vanished from sight.
“When David heard the story, he thought ‘they’re describing a Viking ship, with Vikings on it,’” says Colin. “This is rather interesting, because this ties into a story from Harbour Mille with my dear Aunt Sarah.”
Aunt Sarah was Colin’s great-grandfather’s sister-in-law, who lived in Harbour Mille in the late 1800s. Aunt Sarah was the source of the second half of the ghost story, passed down to Colin from his father and grandfather.
“She heard this ruckus, and she thought there was some kind of a social or whatever going on in the Orange Lodge,” recalls Colin. “This was at night. She looked out through her bedroom window, the second storey, and she said these men came in on a barge, into the harbour, got to the shore, lifted the barge up on their shoulders, and then walked out over the hills with the barge. So I’m wondering if this barge isn’t the same ship.”
Aunt Sarah heard the men talking but couldn’t understand them as it was a “foreign tongue.”
“That would have happened in the mid to late 1800s,” he adds. “‘Barge’ is not a word which we would have ever really used, so I don’t know where she got the word ‘barge.’”
His interpretation is that Aunt Sarah used the word “barge” to describe an unfamiliar long, flat boat.
The story of the men picking up the “barge” and carrying it across the hills is equally intriguing. Viking longships were constructed to be both light and strong; the crew of a small one could quite easily take down the mast, overturn the craft, and portage it over land to the next fjord or bay if needed. It has been argued that this capability added to the legendary suddenness and speed of Norse raiders.
L’Anse aux Meadows itself is also home to a ghost Viking ship, and there are several different versions of the legend. One local boy named Conor wrote up the story as it had been told to him by his great-grandmother, Mamie Taylor, who grew up in L’Anse aux Meadows. According to her version, the haunting would take place every year on the same night. On the evening of July 1, fishermen would hear the ghostly sounds of voices speaking in foreign tongues, the rattling of pots and pans, the rowing of oars, and the noise of footsteps on the shore.
Other popular versions of the story have the haunting occur once every thirty years in August. This rendition got a boost in 2006 when it was included in the popular Canadian paranormal television program Creepy Canada.
A fisherman was working late in his stage when he heard a strange noise. First, he heard the sound of oars hitting the water, and then he heard the sound of a horn. He looked out the door of his stage and saw a strange vessel being rowed toward the shore: a long, narrow open boat with one central mast and a single striped sail. Other versions have two teenaged boys witnessing a similar encounter with a long ship with a row of oars on each side heading toward land.
Local storytellers maintain that thirty years after these initial reports, a fisherman on the water encountered the same ghost ship. He had stayed out on the water later than other fishermen, but as the skies turned gloomy, he headed for the safety of the harbour. It was then that he too heard a noise in the water, like the sound of men rowing. He looked up just in time to see a great Viking ship bearing down on him. At the last moment, he heard the sound of a great trumpet blowing a battle call before the ship vanished into thin air.
Authors Maureen Wood and Ron Kolek offer up yet another version of the tale, though their story starts in Reykjavik, Iceland. On June 3, 1981, two American tourists saw two Viking longships, with a tall man with a long beard standing at the prow of one. When they told a local what they had seen, they were informed that they had been lucky enough to spot Iceland’s spectral longboats, which appeared annually on the same day. The authors go on to state that, “On June 23 each year, Viking longboats are supposed to appear off the coast of L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland—twenty days after they are seen in Iceland.”
There is one other curious figure in L’Anse aux Meadows that may have a Viking connection, “The Brown Man of Muddy Cove.” To get a local’s perspective on the Brown Man, I called up businesswoman and author Gina Noordhof, who is the owner of the Valhalla Lodge and Norseman Restaurant in L’Anse aux Meadows, and a fifth-generation resident of the area.
“It may have been a way of the locals e
nsuring that kids were home before dark,” Noordhof tells me. “They would say that the Brown Man was a man dressed all in brown clothing. Once, a man with his dog team and komatik were going for a load of wood, and though he was trying to move, he couldn’t. The Brown Man was holding the komatik, you see, preventing it from moving. A lot of people would tell these tales about the Brown Man of Muddy Cove, and I think that was a Viking story. The way that some people would tell it, it seems like it was a description of a Viking. They told those tales long before the Ingstads knew anything about the archaeological site.”
Researcher Kathleen Tucker collected several Brown Man stories as part of an oral history project she undertook for St. Anthony Basin Resources Inc. in 2014. She compiled those stories in a publication called Folklore: Ghostly Tales, Superstitions and Local Traditions & Customs. Several of the people that Tucker interviewed knew versions of Noordhof’s story. One of Tucker’s informants was a man by the name of Winston Colbourne, who named the gentleman who had run up against the Brown Man as Uncle George Decker. As Colbourne told Tucker:
“The komatik got stuck fair in the path, though the path was smooth as could be. He was singing out to the dogs to go ahead; the dogs were rising up in their traces; but no sir, they couldn’t move the komatik. Anyway, Uncle George was at it that long that Uncle Jack Hedderson over in Hay Cove took notice; he could hear the oaths coming out of him.”