Haunted ground

by Dale Jarvis

  Uncle Jack decided to investigate, and though he could see the Brown Man, Uncle George could not. By the time Uncle Jack got close, the Brown Man had disappeared. He asked Uncle George about the stranger with whom he had been arguing.

  “I was swearing on the dogs because I was stuck here,” said Decker.

  Uncle Jack replied, “There was a man, right in front of your dogs, and your komatik never busted clear until that man moved away.”

  There is a debate in the area over who the Brown Man might be. Some say he dressed in buckskins; others say he dressed in a brown suit. Noordhof thinks he was a Viking ghost; others think he may have been a Beothuk or one of those angry Skraelings who shot Thorvald Eiriksson a millennium ago. Some say he has not been seen in years, ever since his favourite seat—a chair-shaped rock—was covered over when the modern road went through in 1966.

  Today it is hard to say how many of the various L’Anse aux Meadows legends are “traditional” and how many have been embellished over the years or influenced by stories told in print and television. The numerous tales are clearly related, though they differ on details.

  As for the ghostly Viking longship, debate continues on whether the haunting occurs in June, July, or August. If you are visiting the Great Northern Peninsula next summer, keep your ears open for the sound of those phantom oars hitting the water, and your eyes peeled for a glimpse of the elusive Brown Man of Muddy Cove.

  Red Eyes and Rod Stewart

  Glovertown

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  Looming just off Angle Brook Road in Glovertown is the impressive concrete ruin of an old pulp and paper mill. It is also the site of a sinister local urban legend about a mysterious spirit known as “Red Eyes.”

  The mill had been expected to open in 1922, but the owners, Terra Nova Sulphite Company, ran into financial problems. Their Norwegian investors had money issues at home, and they were refused a loan guarantee by the Newfoundland Government. Construction ground to a halt. In the fall of 1923, the property was purchased by Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company. The AND Company sent 1,300 cords of cut wood to the mill to test its operation and decided that the mill was too small for their needs. The mill’s machines and equipment were dismantled and shipped to Bishop’s Falls and Grand Falls, and today the mill still stands in its incomplete state, almost untouched since the 1920s.

  For locals, it was a creepy spot, tall and still, empty, and dark even in the daylight. “The Plant” became an after-hours hangout for teenagers. By the 1950s, stories began to circulate that someone had died during the mill’s construction. One rumour spread that a worker had fallen into a vat of lead, a great gruesome detail for an urban legend in the making.

  David Saunders works with Parks Canada at nearby Terra Nova National Park. A mutual friend connected us, suggesting that he might know something about the legend. I got in touch with Saunders, and while he was unaware of the modern version of the Red Eyes legend, he told me a story he had learned in the mid-1980s.

  The Terra Nova Sulphite Mill under construction, circa 1922. Photo courtesy Grand Falls–Windsor Heritage Society.

  “We were hanging out in the Old Mill area; I’m saying area because this story happened about a half-mile in the road from the mill at a gravel pit. A friend of mine had been ‘parking’ in his car, let’s just say his windows were steamed up, when he heard something scraping/scratching beneath his car. He cautiously lowered his window but saw nothing around the vehicle. However, to his astonishment, there was a figure standing on a large pile of sand about a hundred feet away. I remember him saying the character had his mouth open as if he were screaming, but he didn’t make a sound, and yes his eyes were glowing red. That’s the only story I heard. In fact, I thought this was a very isolated incident.”

  These two stories seem to be part of the evolution of the contemporary legend, and they provide two key elements that would define the stories that were to follow: a mill-related death and glowing red eyes. The story would continue to evolve, and the “vat of lead” from the 1950s was replaced by the late 1980s with concrete. It was also by the late 1980s that tales began to circulate about the spirit known specifically as “Red Eyes.”

  “Red Eyes—I am watching you” graffitti, 2016. Photo by Dale Jarvis.

  “Eyes are seen in the tower,” one woman told me, “red eyes that are said to be from a man who died while building the mill.” A second woman told me that people used to hang out at the mill and “would see a worker’s daughter who died there in one of the towers.”

  “I heard that, apparently, it was a man killed during construction,” a third woman told me. “He fell into a cement mixer or something like that, and I think he was built into the place. At night people would say ‘Be careful of Red Eyes!’ It was just an eerie place to be around, even in the daytime. I was only up there once at night, and not for long.”

  A Glovertown man who heard the story in the 1990s told me much the same thing: “He was a worker that fell in the pour when they poured the concrete for the tower. They never got him out. He got stuck in the walls, and he is still there.” Yet another man told me the spirit was one of the construction workers who was blown off the top of the building while the mill was being built. “You can see his red eyes glow from the top once a year on the date it happened,” he added. “Some people say he was pushed.” Others blame an explosion for the man’s death.

  The abandoned mill, Glovertown, 2016. Photo by Dale Jarvis.

  I posted a request for information on social media and was almost immediately contacted by someone on Facebook who wished to remain anonymous.

  “I’m born and raised in Glovertown and spent my teenage years in ‘the plant,’ as we like to call it,” he told me. “I’ve heard of the story, and I’ll tell you what I know if you want some info.”

  I wanted some info. So I called him up to get his version of the Glovertown urban legend, which he too had learned in the 1990s:

  “Most of my teenage years were spent at the plant, the old sawmill. There is a swimming hole next to it, and as teenagers, that is where we went. It is only a couple minutes off one of the roads, so it was just tucked away enough that your parents couldn’t see you drinking. The story has been passed down from the older kids to the younger kids, to scare the crap out of them. When I was a kid, the story was that when the mill was built by a Norwegian company, industrial safety was non-existent. One of the construction workers did not show up at the end of his shift, and they found his body where it had fallen down inside one of the towers. He died there, and they say that to this day his red eyes haunt the plant. If you were there by yourself, you would see these travelling red eyes following you around.”

  While the Red Eyes story seems to have started in the late 1980s, it continues today; like most legends, it grows and changes in the retelling. By 1997–1998, a new variant had emerged, possibly based on one of the 1980s versions involving a worker’s daughter. In November of 2016, a twenty-four-year-old resident of Angle Brook Road shared with me that version of the story:

  “During the construction of the old mill, one of the workers lived close by the construction site since he was from out of town. He remained in Glovertown on the weekends, and on one of his days off he took his young daughter to the Terra Nova River to go swimming. The man wasn’t a swimmer, so he would watch his daughter from a safe distance, reminding her to not go out too far due to the fast current. He took his eyes off his daughter for a split second, and when he looked back she was out farther than normal and couldn’t swim back in. He jumped in to save her, but not being a swimmer himself, he was unable to reach her, and she ended up being taken away by the current. She was never found. The father was grief-stricken, and not knowing how to cope with it, he climbed to the top of the mill. Some people say he hung himself in the tower, and others say he jumped. According to the legend, there were
reports of glowing red eyes at the top of the tower and in the tunnel that locals call ‘the two doors.’ Some say that on a quiet night you can still hear his little girl crying out for help, and sounds of him sobbing.”

  To make the corpus of Red Eyes stories just a bit more complicated, there is a sub-genre of local tales where the spirit is called either “Cement Block Sam” or “Cement Box Sam.”

  “His name was Cement Block Sam, and he was working on the mill,” Paula Feltham told me. “This was talked about mostly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was our generation who came up with him!

  “He fell and landed in cement and died. They continued to build the old mill, but Sam’s ghost was stuck in the cement. On a good night, his eyes would glow red in the cement. We always looked for him, and spent many days and nights hanging out in the mill, but could never find him. It was a huge deal during our teenage years. Though we always looked for him and talked about him, thank goodness we never saw him!”

  Whether you call him Red Eyes or Cement Block Sam, I am one hundred per cent certain that Glovertown’s glow-in-the-dark ghost did not actually originate in Glovertown. There are many stories worldwide about people killed on construction sites or buried alive in concrete, with their ghosts demanding attention ever after. I have written before about an almost identical legend which is told about the Main Dam at Junction Brook, part of the system that feeds into the Deer Lake hydroelectric station. The firm of W. I. Bishop poured a total of 26,000 cubic metres of concrete to construct the dam, and a man (also named Sam!) was apparently buried alive in the slurry. The Deer Lake version of the glowing “red eyes” is the ghostly light from poor Sam’s hard hat, illuminating his final resting place.

  The similarities do not stop in Deer Lake. The Manila Film Centre in the Philippines is said to contain workers within its concrete foundation, with their ghosts haunting the facility. A large concrete bridge at the edge of Sidney, Ohio; the concrete pilings of the US 190 Mississippi River Bridge; and the Norris Dam in Tennessee: they all have almost exactly the same story. The most famous of these “buried in concrete” legends relates to the massive Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, a legend which has been debunked time and time again but which still floats around as a “true” story.

  So, old Red Eyes is certainly an urban legend and one that from anecdotal evidence was not told in Glovertown much before the early 1990s. People who grew up in the town in the 1970s, for example, do not seem to be familiar with the legend.

  But the abandoned mill site is not the only potentially haunted location in Glovertown.

  “My mother sometimes used to say she thought the place was cursed.”

  Those are the words of “Molly,” who grew up in the community, and the “cursed” place was her family home. It was a small one-level building on Riverside Road. The house had been constructed by Molly’s grandfather and great-grandfather circa 1978. It was yellow with brown trim and had been built for Molly’s mother and father.

  For the period between 1980 and the 1990s, a series of strange happenings took place in the dwelling. The house had three bedrooms, but the weirdness was focused on the smallest bedroom in the house.

  “I think my mother thought it was strange, but she never really believed in those types of things,” says Molly. “She always brushed it off, maybe so we wouldn’t be frightened. When my oldest sister was around four, she slept in the smallest bedroom, and once she got older it became my room.”

  When Molly was about fifteen years old, she left her guitar leaning up against her bedroom wall while she was doing homework. All of a sudden, the guitar strummed by itself.

  “I wasn’t long running out of there,” Molly says.

  As a young girl, she had a recurring dream of a white gloved hand emerging through the wall near the closet. The hand would wave toward her as if beckoning the child to come closer. Unbeknownst to Molly, her sister had experienced the same vision in the room when she was the same age. Neither sister told the other at the time, and it was not until the girls were much older that they shared the story and found they had both dreamed of the same ghostly gloved hand, urging them nearer.

  “Neither of us knew we shared the same dream until much later in life,” says Molly, “which I thought was really bizarre!

  “This probably has nothing to do with it, but our house was constantly being hit by lightning,” adds Molly. “Broken VCRs, broken TVs, the telephone was hit once, and the light switch for the bathroom, all on different occasions.”

  Perhaps all that spare electrical energy had something to do with another strange happening in the house.

  “My sister and I were alone listening to a Rod Stewart tape in her bedroom,” Molly relates. “When we were finished, she got in the shower, while I went in the living room to watch TV. When all of a sudden, on comes the Rod Stewart tape. I thought, ‘Okay, I just forgot to turn it off.’ So I went in the bedroom and turned off the tape. I went back in the living room. A few minutes later, the same thing, on comes Rod Stewart again.”

  Molly knocked on the bathroom door and told her sister something weird was going on, but the sister didn’t believe her.

  “So I went and turned off the music again,” she continues. “We went back in the living room, and guess what happened? Rod Stewart again! This time my sister came out of the bathroom, and we were both pretty horrified.”

  “I can’t remember what happened after that, but I can never hear Rod Stewart again without getting the creeps.”

  If you are visiting Glovertown, you can take your pick as to which supernatural entity you want to spend your time with: Red Eyes, or Rod Stewart. I might opt for Red Eyes, personally.

  The Webber

  Western Newfoundland

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  One of the most intriguing contemporary legends I have come across from Newfoundland is the story of The Webber—a terrifying, woods-dwelling creature with webbed hands, who loves to catch and devour children, campers, and canoodling teenagers. I first heard the story from actor and writer Dave Sullivan in 2009. Sullivan’s version concerned a disfigured child born with a white face and webbed hands. The parents kept the child chained up, hidden away in a basement, so disgusted were they by what they had produced. The creature eventually escaped, a man was disembowelled on a country road, and a legend was born.

  Once I started to investigate the story further, I was intrigued. It is a story that is known in the area between Stephenville and Deer Lake but largely unheard of on the east coast of Newfoundland. The Webber seems to be primarily a west coast legend, and several of its older origin stories place it around the Harmon Air Force Base in Stephenville, which operated between 1941 and 1966.

  The legend has migrated north and east, with versions found along the Great Northern Peninsula and Labrador, and with one outlying variant told about the Heart’s Content Barrens area between Carbonear and Heart’s Content. The stories incorporate tropes found in other contemporary and urban legends like “The Hook Man” and “The Boyfriend’s Death,” but there are always similarities between many of The Webber’s origin stories—he is born with webbed hands (and sometimes feet) and then is either abandoned, lost in an accident, or murders his unfortunate parents. It then goes on to live in the wild and to terrorize, maim, and/or eat innocent passersby.

  The Webber made a special guest appearance on the Halloween 2016 edition of the Sunday Night Geek podcast. Sunday Night Geek is a Corner Brook–based Internet radio show about pop culture, fandom, and people’s geeky interests. The show is hosted by Jeff Keeping, Angela Street, and Sean Michelin. The trio were largely unaware of the legend, but folklorist John Bodner of Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus stopped by the podcast to share some tales, including a fantastic archival version of the creature’s origin story. Bodner’s version featured an ambulance accident, a shocking amount of blood and death, and the creatur
e clawing its way out of its mother’s womb. It’s worth a listen!

  Some stories about The Webber are short anecdotes, with very little in the way of narrative. Carolyn, who heard the story in the 1980s on Change Islands, via a fellow from Lewisporte, remembered the webbed hands and feet, and not much else, other than he “crawled out of the bogs and could swim anywhere, so we were not safe even out on Change Islands.”

  Other stories, however, are very detailed.

  These longer stories about The Webber break down into two rough sections, with an origin story or backstory, and then a contemporary legend about The Webber’s current activities. While the origin stories are similar, there are differences depending on the place and time the storyteller learned the story. Below are several different origin stories, presented chronologically and indicating the story’s point of origin.

  Debbie Robbins, Carmanville, summer of 1978:

  The Webber was a man-like creature covered in hair who migrated between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland every seven years. The creature had webbed hands and feet which enabled it to swim to and from Newfoundland.

  Nadine, Stephenville, circa 1987–88:

  A couple was having a baby and the lady went into labour. The couple were trying to find the quickest way from the Hansen highway to the hospital and took “Igloo Road,” which was a long dirt road that brought you quickly from Cold Brook to right next to “base” near the hospital. On the way, the ambulance broke down and the woman was forced to give birth right then and there on Igloo Road. The baby was born and had webbed hands and feet and had fangs and immediately bit off its own umbilical cord and scurried off into the woods, and was never seen again, until . . .