by Dale Jarvis
Eanie Clarke, Blaketown, circa 1990:
Many years ago , a man and woman in their fifties found out they were going to be first-time parents. They were very excited as they thought at this point in time a child was not to be. The months passed quickly and, at last, he was born. Unlike most newborns, he was grotesquely deformed. He had webbed hands and feet and some other physical deformities: an unusually large head, for one, and long claw-like fingernails. News quickly spread, and he was nicknamed The Webber Baby after his oddly webbed hands and feet. The parents vowed to love him and protect their child. They decided to raise him at home and keep him inside at all times so no one could make fun of him. People forgot about The Webber Baby. As he grew he was unusually strong and hard for them to handle. In his teens he was too hard to control, so the parents moved him into the basement and brought food down to him. As the couple reached their seventies, they decided they could no longer care for him and protect him. They decided to bring him to Carbonear to a home that took people who needed care. They put him in the car and headed away from the only home he had ever known. Later that night, their car was found flipped over in the woods several feet from the road. The elderly couple were torn up and dead. When they were first found they were thought to be cut by all the glass, until they looked inside the car to see the material on the roof slashed apart by what looked to be a wild animal. Their son was nowhere to be found. He had escaped into the woods. He made sure he would never be locked up again by anyone. On occasions when you think you see someone up ahead on the road on the Barrens, only to have them vanish when you get there, it’s just The Webber Baby.
Jenelle Duval, Brownie camp outside Corner Brook, possibly Pasadena, 1992:
The Webber was born deformed, with webbed hands and webbed feet, and lived in isolation near Pasadena with his unwed mother who was embarrassed by his appearance. He was feral, lived outside, and when his mother passed on he still lived. He was said to feed on the children who attended the camp that was built on his mother’s land. It scared the piss out of us when we were kids. They said if you went by the water and wandered away from the camp, The Webber would get you.
Anastacia Hopkins, Camp Ashanti, Black Duck Siding, 1994:
An American couple were living on the base in Stephenville during WWII. They had a baby boy, and to their horror, he was born with webbing between his fingers and toes. They decided to fly back to the States to have the webbing removed, but their plane crashed just outside of town and the parents were killed. The baby survived and grew up to hunt children who were out wandering around the woods after nightfall. Depending on who is telling the story, the plane went down in the Fox Island River area or where there used to be a campsite mainly used for the Beavers and Boy Scouts, Camp Ashanti, in Black Duck Siding.
Matthew Howse, Silver Birches Cub Camp, near Pasadena, Spring 1994:
A family was involved in a car accident along the highway near Pasadena. It happened at night, and the car went far enough into the woods that no one noticed it for a few days. The kid survived the crash, but a bunch of birds attacked him and injured his hands as he defended himself. He couldn’t find the highway and went into the woods and raised himself up in there. His injured hands healed into duck-like webs, and he ate whatever he could find. He was particularly fond of young campers.
Kristin, Deer Lake, circa 1998–2002:
A boy and his family were driving to Corner Brook when they got into an accident near one of the off-ramps near Pasadena. Their car crashed and caught on fire; the parents died on impact, but the boy survived. However, he struggled to get out of the car, and the skin on his hands melted and burned while trying to escape. Once he escaped from the car, he didn’t know where he was and got lost deeper and deeper into the woods. Once his hands had healed, they were webbed. He has been living in the woods ever since and would prey on campers that ventured out alone.
Erin Boyd, Camp Ashanti, Black Duck Siding, 2002–2004:
A young couple from Stephenville were happy and excited to be expecting their first child. Early ultrasounds revealed that the baby had webbed hands and feet but was otherwise in good health. In the seventh month of pregnancy, the mother started to experience sharp pains and was rushed to Corner Brook late at night. But the ambulance never arrived. The next day the ambulance was found to have crashed off the highway just outside Black Duck Siding. A horrifying sight met the police officers’ eyes: the three paramedics were found clawed to death, and the mother-to-be was found with a gaping hole in her abdomen. The baby was nowhere to be found. For months police investigated the accident and tried to find a rational explanation. As time went on, they were eventually forced to close the case and come to a terrifying conclusion: the baby had somehow clawed its way out of its mother’s belly and attacked the paramedics, causing the accident.
The Webber, as the child came to be known, is rumoured to wander the woods around Black Duck Siding, attacking hunters, fishermen, and any lost souls who entered the woods. His favourite meal? The young campers who frequent Camp Ashanti with groups of Girl Guides, Scouts, cadets, and school trips. To this very day, he can often be heard circling the cabins at night, waiting for a brave child to venture out into the darkness, alone.
Other than living in the woods, lurking in ponds, and preying on helpless campers, what does The Webber do with his spare time?
Here, we move into the second half of The Webber’s narrative, and most of the legends I collected follow a pattern well-known to people who study contemporary legends. One good example comes from Ryan, who heard about the creature on the Northern Peninsula circa 1991. His best friend had returned from a trip to visit family in Labrador, and when he got back, he told four or five of his friends a cousin’s story. Ryan remembers,
“. . . a family had been camping in a gravel pit down a woods road, and when they went to leave, the car wouldn’t start. The mother and child stayed in the car while the father went to get help. It was very foggy and misty, and they fell asleep in the car. They were woken up suddenly when someone pounded on the window, but when they looked, there was just a webbed hand covered in blood. It went away, and after a while, a police officer showed up and helped the mother and child but told the woman not to look back. When she did she saw pieces of her husband strung up in the trees and the word ‘WEBBER’ written in blood across the hood of the car.”
Nadine from Stephenville heard a similar story circa 1987–88. In her version, The Webber lived in a shack along what was known as Igloo Road. She says,
“Igloo Road had many ‘make out’ spots. A young couple decided to head in up there for some alone time. After a few hours of romance they decided to leave, but the car would not start. The guy decided to go get a friend who lived nearby to get a boost, but the girl had to stay with the car. She fell asleep. Not long after she awoke to a ‘tap tap tap’ on the roof. It scared her so much she passed out but was awoken to police cars and an ambulance. The officer said, ‘Come with us, please, but do not look back.’ As she was led to the police car, her curiosity got the better of her, so as she entered the back seat she glanced back to see her boyfriend hanging upside down, dead from a tree, blood dripping from his mouth landing on the car going ‘tap tap tap.’ It was said that The Webber got him!”
Debbie Robbins has one of the earliest versions of the tale, which she heard in Carmanville in the summer of 1978:
“The last time it was in on the island, fourteen years earlier, it was suspected to be involved in a brutal murder of a young man. He and his girlfriend were driving along the road toward Gander when they ran out of gas. The man knew there was a station up ahead a couple or three miles so said he’d walk there, get some gas, and walk back. He told her that while he was gone she should lock the car doors and keep them locked. A two-mile walk there and back took a long time, and after a while the lightly falling rain made her sleepy and she drifted off. While she dozed she t
hought she could hear a steady tapping on the roof of the car; thinking the rain was coming down heavier, she ignored it and continued to doze. Much later she woke to the flashing of red and blue lights and an RCMP officer tapping on her window. She rolled down the window, and he told her to exit the car slowly and follow him and to be sure she didn’t look back. He asked her three times to promise him she would absolutely not look back. The woman did as she was told until she reached the cruiser. About to get in the car, her curiosity took hold and she finally looked back toward the car. There on the top was the mangled body of her boyfriend staring at her with large dead eyes. The tapping, she was told later, was indeed the rain, but it was striking a nerve on one of his torn fingers, causing it to tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .”
This story, which has appeared in a variety of modern pop culture retellings, is based on a contemporary legend which writer Jan Brunvand calls “The Boyfriend’s Death.” In his book The Vanishing Hitchhiker, Brunvand states that the earliest version of the story was collected in 1964 by folklorist Daniel R. Barnes from an eighteen-year-old at the University of Kansas, though it is related to older legends such as “The Hook” and “The Roommate’s Death.” The legend follows the same pattern as The Webber story: a parked couple, an abandoned girl, the mysterious scratching or dripping sound, and the daylight rescue. There is generally a warning (such as “don’t look back”) and then a breaking of that warning (she does look back, and sees her husband/boyfriend dead).
Memorial University professor of folklore Paul Smith included a British version of the tale in his 1983 collection entitled The Book of Nasty Legends. Smith’s story, called “Out of Petrol,” follows the exact same pattern, with the boy leaving the girl alone while he gets gas. She locks the door, falls asleep, and is awakened by a steady thump, thump, thump on the car roof. She is eventually rescued by police, who tell her not to look back. She, of course, does look back, and sees an escaped mental patient “bouncing her boyfriend’s decapitated head up and down on the roof.”
Brunvand notes that the telling of “The Boyfriend’s Death” often takes place “in spooky situations, late at night, near a cemetery, out camping, or . . . occasionally near the site of the supposed murder.” Brunvand goes on to write:
On a literal level a story like “The Boyfriend’s Death” simply warns young people to avoid situations in which they may be endangered, but at a more symbolic level the story reveals society’s broader fears of people, especially women and the young, being alone and among strangers in the darkened world outside the security of their own home or car.
The Webber story as told in Newfoundland is clearly a campfire story, told specifically in those spooky situations to frighten kids at overnight camps. Tellings of the story seem, with a couple exceptions, to concentrate around camps for children on the west coast of the island. Several storytellers remember learning about the creature at Camp Ashanti, currently run by the Newfoundland and Labrador Council of Scouts Canada. The camp’s website notes that the camp has a large waterfront, tenting sites, a cookhouse, and cabins which sleep thirty-six in bunks.
“The camp has streetlights,” adds the website, encouragingly, so as long as you stick to the lit paths you should be fine.
Other campers cited West Haven Camp near Pasadena as the point of origin. Angela Noseworthy learned the story in the mid-1990s at West Haven and told me she “always imagined The Webber as a child abandoned in the forest, swimming or crawling around in shallow streams.” One camper told me, “I think eventually the story got banned because kids were scared, but in the early to mid ’90s this one was a big part of camp at West Haven.” Kristin learned the story at the same camp and told me the campsite “had a saying that the first person to arrive and the last person to leave were always prime targets for The Webber. Everywhere on the bunks and in the cabins were creepy carvings, such things as ‘The Webber was here’ and ‘I saw The Webber and lived.’”
The stories continue to this day, with the gleeful help of a modern generation of camp counsellors. Alan Taylor is one example. He currently runs the West Haven Camp in Pasadena.
“I have been going to camp since 1988 as a young seven-year-old and have grown up with The Webber story,” he told me. “We have even had counsellors outside the bunkhouse at night scratching at the windows, and underneath the bunkhouse scratching on the floor.” His version of the legend ties the monster’s origins inextricably to West Haven:
“The Webber was an eight-year-old boy who came to West Haven Junior Camp one year. He was born with webbed feet and hands and had trouble making friends. His parents thought camp would be a good idea, as they had both gone to camp as children and had made some great friends. Unfortunately, he did not fit into camp and was teased about being different, so much so that one day during a camp favourite game, ‘Survival,’ he was last seen running down an old beaver trail. Once the game was over, he did not return, and a search party was sent out but could not find him. Eventually, the search was called off and the boy was thought to have drowned in Deer Lake or to have been taken by an animal. Since then, there have been many sightings of a boy with webbed hands and feet covered in mud running down the trail and off into the woods. The trail is now known as ‘The Webber Trail.’”
So there you have it, an internationally known contemporary legend, grafted onto a Newfoundland origin story, and told deliberately to scare kids at camp, complete with named geographic locations to aid in the transmission of the legend.
It is an entirely fictional story and nothing more.
That is what you would like to believe, at least.
While I was researching the history of the Webber legend and its multiple versions and variants, I got an intriguing note from Kharis Samms. She told me of something astonishing that had happened to her parents in Tilt Cove in 1973, the year before they got married, and five years earlier than the earliest version of the legend I had collected. She learned the story from her father, a man who, she says, is “as honest as they come.” He told her of his experience with deep conviction and was certain of what he had seen.
“Mom and he were out for a drive and decided to park on the wharf in Tilt Cove,” she told me. “It was dark and the car was left running, with the headlights shining out across the water. Then up over the edge of the wharf in front of them came a man-like creature with webbed feet and hands that stood up in front of the car on two legs. It used a ladder to climb up over the breakwater barrier at the end of Tilt Cove wharf. Its head had fins that came out of the sides of its face, and it was a blackish-green colour.
“My parents weren’t long getting out of there,” she adds. “I’d get no embellishments or tall tales from Mom. When I mentioned it, she matter-of-factly described the creature just as my dad had, like something from the ‘Black Lagoon,’ she said, and followed it up with the admission that she’d never told anyone because they would think she was crazy, something my mom most certainly is not.”
Samms went on to tell me that, three days later, there were reports of a similar sighting in a nearby spot called Indian Burying Place, now a resettled community. In the Indian Burying Place encounter, the creature climbed up out of the water into a punt that was moored in the harbour and then slid back out again, vanishing beneath the waves.
“I am sure my parents saw something that night,” she finished. “Perhaps it was your Webber!”
Chapter Four
Locations of Mystery
One evening in late fall, my boyfriend and I went for a drive up Signal Hill. It had been a nice fall evening, with a clear sky, and a brisk cool wind in the air. While we were parked by Cabot Tower looking down over the city, a shroud of fog crept in and quickly consumed the top of the hill.
When we realized how thick the fog had become, and that we could not even see the city or Cabot Tower, we decided it would be best to drive back down the hill. As we were driving around the fi
rst big turn going down the hill, I exclaimed “Watch out!” and my boyfriend slammed on the brakes.
There, in front of our car, facing toward us in the middle of the road, was a man barely visible through the fog. He was wearing a long, dark grey coat and a salt and pepper–style cap. Then, no sooner had we looked toward each other, the man turned to face the side of the road, took a few steps, and vanished before our eyes before reaching the other side.
Instantly we both froze and felt a cold shiver run down our backs. After a short moment we began to drive again in silence. Once we were close to the bottom of the hill, we broke our silence and asked each other in unison if the other had seen what happened.
To this day, whenever we see the fog roll, in we talk about the spectre with the salt and pepper hat we saw that foggy evening on Signal Hill.
— Adapted from a story told by Maggie Courish, November 2016
Packing Minted Money. Illustration by Louis Rhead, circa 1915.
Buried Treasure and Ghostly Guardians
Clarke’s Beach, Bay Roberts, Port de Grave, Torbay, Musgrave Harbour, Bonavista, Shoal Bay, and Money Point
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From where I sit writing this in Clarke’s Beach, Conception Bay, I can look out my front window and see the two ranges of hills that frame the harbour. To the south is Long Harry, which divides Clarke’s Beach and South River from Cupids. To the north I can see Vinegar Hill, with Otterbury and Bareneed beyond.
I love that I live in a spot where stories and place are so interwoven.
A man from Bay Roberts once told me a story about Vinegar Hill. His grandmother had lived in Clarke’s Beach, and when he would visit as a child, she would tell him ghost stories, including one about the hill. Local legend maintained that a pirate treasure had been buried on Vinegar Hill and that the ghosts of buccaneers lingered on the spot, forever guarding their unclaimed booty.