Haunted ground

by Dale Jarvis

  “There was a certain way to tell a story, you know. Some had a knack for tellin’ stories, jokes, one thing and the other. They’d make a good story out of nothing. . . . One would try to outdo the other, you know. . . . Skipper Chris might tell a story about a man counted to be a good shot. Well, that would start it off, every man, then, have to tell a story that he heard. Some, you know, would add a bit here and there to make the story good. A good storyteller knew how to tell a story, keep everybody interested.”

  In November of 1989, folklorists Gerald Pocius and Mark Ferguson interviewed Barr’d Islands fisherman and former mayor Bill Godwin about his life and work with the fishery. In their chat, Godwin spoke about the role of storytelling on Fogo Island:

  “There’d be a lot of stories told, years ago, old-time stories. And you believed them stories! There’d be a lot of ghost stories, and things they seen when they were boys, you know. And they’d have you make believe this. Growing up, we’d be scared to come home at night in the dark, no lights, all we had was a lamp on the wall, an old lamp. And Mother would turn that right down if I was out, turn it right down low, you’d just see the flicker of it till I came in, and then I’d blow that out before I went to bed. . . . My uncles and my dad would be putting us on, so it would be interesting to us to pass away the time. Half them stories would be all probably made up or some damn thing. . . . They’d make up stories, and get us a little scared, and wondering.”

  This tradition of Fogo Island ghost stories is well documented, and in 1999, the Fogo Island Literacy Association added to that documentation with the publication of a small book called TaIes of Fogo Island, compiled and edited by Della Coish. The publication was designed as an easy-to-read book about local life and culture, for use with adult learners in literacy programs. The book contains short stories about losses and rescues at sea, historical tales, tragedies, remedies and cures, and a few ghost stories, including two Fogo Island stories about headless ghosts.

  The first headless phantom was spotted by a man named Lynch, of Island Harbour. Lynch was on his way from Payne’s Harbour to Butt’s Point when he met a man on the road dressed in a black suit of clothes. When Lynch spoke to the stranger, he got no reply.

  “This made him curious,” writes Coish, “so he tried to get a better look. Mr. Lynch almost jumped out of his skin when he realized that the figure in front of him did not have hands and did not have a head.”

  Before Lynch could shout out for help, the man in black vanished. He ran to his house and told his family. Once he convinced them of what he had seen, the family decided to call in the priest.

  “As it happened, the priest was in Island Harbour that evening and arrived at the Lynch home in minutes,” says Coish. “He asked Mr. Lynch to tell his story and describe where it had happened. Then the priest convinced a few people to go with him to the place where Mr. Lynch had seen the figure.”

  Upon reaching the spot of the haunting, the priest offered up a few prayers, and then all returned home. According to local folklore, the priest refused to ever speak of the event again.

  The story of Mr. Lynch’s vanishing headless spirit is mirrored by another tale from a neighbouring community. A woman from Fogo was walking home when she became aware of a man walking in front of her. Thinking it was her brother, Val, she called out to him.

  “The man stopped for a moment but then began to walk faster,” says Coish. “The lady picked up her pace to catch him, but the man also sped up. She soon became annoyed and shouted, ‘Don’t run away from me, Val, I knows who you is! Stop right now and wait fer me!’”

  “Val” refused to stop, even though she called out several times. She hurried to catch up, and as she did, she noticed that the figure she had believed to be her brother was missing his head.

  She caught up with the headless figure and, bravely, reached out to touch him. As soon as she did, the apparition vanished. Now properly frightened, she ran the rest of the way home. The following day, the family received sad news: a close relative had been killed fighting overseas.

  A different ghost story from Fogo Island concerns a spot named Banks (or possibly Banks’s) Meadow. Fogo native Barry Penton informs me that Banks was a Fogo name in the 1800s. According to the Anglican Church Diocesan Records, William Banks, a bachelor of Fogo, married spinster Jane Waterman at St. Andrew’s Church in Fogo on the fourteenth of April, 1844.

  “The last record I have is of a John Banks in 1883, who was a planter in Back Cove,” says Penton.

  Near Back Cove, there is also a Banks Cove. And given the family was in that area, it is likely the meadow was named after a member of the Banks clan.

  “It’s the field down below Brimstone Head,” says Penton. “Locals refer to it as Second Field.”

  The Banks Meadow story was recounted to broadcaster Hiram Silk by a woman named Julia Wells. According to Wells, one evening in the early part of the twentieth century, a girl and her aunt were going to a meeting. Flashlight in hand, they followed the path up through Banks Meadow.

  When they got partway across the meadow, they saw a man. He wore a little short coat like men wore at that time. As it was a cold night, he had the collar turned up.

  “There’s a man there,” said the girl, pointing him out to the aunt.

  “Yes,” she said.

  When they drew near him, the girl spoke to the man.

  “Good night, sir,” she called out, but he did not answer. The girl made to step one way, and he stepped back. The women passed by, and the girl looked behind them. The man was still there, standing still. She looked back again, and he was still there.

  When the girl looked back a third time, the man had vanished from the middle of the meadow.

  “Aunt Liz, that man is gone!” she cried.

  “Oh no!” said the aunt.

  “Oh yes he is, he’s gone,” said the girl. At that point, the two women made their way through the meadow as fast as they could.

  At that time, many people in the cove claimed to have seen the man in the meadow. It was said that he was more like a shadow than a man. Even those who got close to him could not recognize his features.

  One night in winter, the same girl was heading home, alone. The snow lay crisp and undinted. As the girl came up to the meadow, there was not a footprint to be seen in the snow.

  She could see the lights in the houses of the cove and could hear dogs barking, but for some strange reason, she couldn’t find the path to get home.

  No matter which way she turned, she couldn’t seem to find the path across the meadow. She turned around and went back to the place she had started from. Then she set out a second time, with the same result. When she got to the meadow, there was not a footprint anywhere, and no matter what she tried, she couldn’t find the path.

  The girl went back down to her cousin’s house instead.

  “You’ve got to go home with me tonight,” she told the cousin. “I can’t get home!”

  The cousin walked her back up to the meadow, and when they got there, they found that the snow was all trampled to pieces, just to one side of the path.

  When the girl looked, she saw a set of a man’s footprints alongside her own.

  “It don’t look like I’m the only one out tonight,” said the girl. “There’s someone gone astray there.”

  The Town of Fogo, June 11, 2016.

  Photo courtesy Paul Asman and Jill Lenoble, Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

  The cousin got the girl home safely, and she put the incident out of her mind. A week later, however, she was visiting the home of the only woman in the cove to have a radio. A group had gathered to listen to the radio and were telling stories.

  The group started talking about a man who got lost coming up across the meadow the week before. He had crossed it many times, but nothing strange had ever happened before.

>   The girl asked when he had gotten lost and discovered he had tried to cross it just before she had.

  “He wasn’t the only one,” she told the crowd, and then shared her strange tale.

  “There was something there,” she said. “I couldn’t get home.”

  The girl’s father told her that there had been a grave there on the meadow at one point but that nothing remained to mark it.

  The communities of Fogo Island have a strong link to their past, and the future of the island seems tied to its traditions, its culture, and its stories. While the location of that grave in the field might be forgotten by most, the spirits of the past have a way of lingering on and making their presence known. If you are one of the many who now venture to Fogo Island to experience its charms, take a moment to look back over your shoulder. You never know who you might see standing in the middle of that meadow.

  Those Bloody Rocks

  Tilting, Alexander Bay, New Perlican, Hant’s Harbour, and Red Indian Lake

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  It was a good day for gardening, and for murder.

  Michael Turpin and Patrick Murray were setting potatoes in their garden at Sandy Cove, Tilting, Fogo Island, on June 13, 1809. As they worked away, they were attacked by a group of Beothuk. Although he did not know it, Michael Turpin was about to become a part of both history and local geography for generations to follow.

  “The two men got such a fright that they ran in separate directions,” writes Della Coish. “Patrick Murray ran toward Tilting. The Indians followed close behind. They almost caught him when he got stuck in some mud near Reardon’s Rock. Luckily, he was running so fast that his shoes came off, and he continued running in his bare feet.”

  A woman named Foley caught sight of Murray running with the Beothuk running behind him. The woman had a spade with her, and she raised it up and pointed it at the pursuers.

  “They must have thought it was a gun, because they turned and ran away,” writes Coish. “Murray continued running until he fell at his wife’s feet with two arrows in his back. They removed the arrows, and Murray survived.”

  Michael Turpin, in the meantime, was in serious trouble.

  “He tried to escape by swimming to a schooner anchored in Sandy Cove. However, the Indians easily captured him and dragged him back to shore. There, they pushed him onto a large rock and chopped off his head. Michael Turpin’s blood ran over the rock and seeped into every crack and pore in its surface. The blood remained on the rock for many years, and it soon became known as Turpin’s Rock.”

  Dramatic stuff indeed, though other writers have presented the story with alternate details, such as a 1900 mention in a book by Devine and O’Mara which has Turpin scalped instead of beheaded. This version is repeated in later retellings, including a 1987 article in the Decks Awash magazine.

  These stories may have some origin in a historical event, and I was told by one man that he was the descendant of the woman who pointed her spade at the Beothuks. But there are other parts of the story that nudge it into the category of contemporary legend, particularly the bit about the bloodstained rocks, with gore in “every crack and pore.”

  The idea of a bloodstain which cannot be washed away is a recurring motif in legend and myth. What student of Shakespeare can forget Lady Macbeth’s struggle to get out, out, that damned spot of blood? In the Lady’s case, it is not just the visible reminder of the blood of which she cannot rid herself: “Here’s the smell of the blood still,” cries the Lady in dismay, “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh! Oh! Oh!” The motif is so well-known that folklorists even have a number and name for it: “E422.1.11.5.1. Ineradicable bloodstain after bloody tragedy.” The bloody image wells up time and again, not just in literature, but also in the folk tradition, and, in Newfoundland, local place names.

  St. John’s teacher and artist Bruce Brenton told me, “There was a place in the Alexander Bay area called ‘Bloody Bay Reach.’ Supposedly there had been a massacre having to do with Europeans and Beothuk. Not sure who massacred whom . . .”

  New Perlican has “Bloody Point”—a spot with its own story of violence related to the Beothuk people. As Dwayne Tuck told me, “Local history has it that that is near an area where aboriginals were drove onto a point of land and killed.” Grant Tucker wrote to tell me that “Bloody Point, New Perlican, probably gets its name from the reddish colour of the rocks (iron oxide), less romantic, perhaps, but more likely. A local tradition has suggested that there was a battle between the French and English or Europeans and Indians.” Some have put the blame for the blood-soaked rocks on the French naval leader Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, who attacked New Perlican on February 9, 1697, though there is no historical evidence of any great massacre.

  James P. Howley notes in his book The Beothuks or Red Indians that “(a)nother tradition was current to the effect that on one occasion 400 Indians were surprised and driven out on a point of land near Hant’s Harbour, known as Bloody Point, and all were destroyed.”

  There is little evidence outside of Howley for such an extermination. There are also doubts that there were even 400 Beothuk available in the area during that time period to drive into the sea. But people in Hant’s Harbour still believe that the massacre happened on a point of land in their community. One woman from the area told me, “I am not sure if that is called Bloody Point, but I do know that there were about 400 Beothuks driven in the water from a point in Hant’s Harbour, according to the history of Hant’s Harbour.” Grant Tucker concurs:

  “As a boy growing up in Hant’s Harbour, I often heard that the place where the Beothuks were driven into the sea was near where the lighthouse is today; it was never called Bloody Point but Custer’s Head. Local folklore recounts that one Indian was surprised by fishermen rowing along the shore; he went ashore and, with his canoe ‘on his back,’ scrambled up a gulch and disappeared in the woods.”

  Howley goes on to document a couple more bloody locations: another Bloody Point, at Red Indian Lake, where two marines were killed and beheaded in 1811 by the Beothuk; he also quotes the Rev. W. Wilson, who notes, “A place called ‘Bloody Bay’ on the north side of Bonavista Bay has often been named to the writer as a place where frequent encounters had occurred with the Red Indians.” There is yet another Bloody Point on or near Sound Island, Placentia Bay, and a Bloody Pond in the interior of the Avalon Peninsula, in the northernmost half of the Avalon Wilderness Preserve.

  Historical fact, oral history, and local legend often get mangled together to the point where it is difficult to differentiate one from the other. Most folklorists would agree that the stories we chose to tell say more about us, the tellers, than they do about historical truth. Newfoundlanders seem to love stories about Beothuk massacres. In an informal conversation with one local archaeologist, he stated quite firmly that most of these stories of battles and mass killings have no basis in historical fact. Ingeborg Marshall, the best-known expert on the history and ethnography of the Beothuk, is also clear on the subject. She writes,

  “Two recent histories of Glovertown (in the district of Alexander Bay) also claim that Englishmen, rather than Beothuk, were killed there. According to Harold Stroud, people in the area believe that the name Bloody Bay is based on the late-eighteenth-century killing by Beothuk of a family of Kearleys, or Carleys. Watson Lane was told that Bloody Bay may have received its name on account of the murder of eleven fishermen by Beothuk; a twelfth man who hid under his overturned boat survived. This is said to have occurred at Curley’s Cove, a small cove on the north side of Bloody Bay. These stories suggest that the names Bloody Bay and Bloody Point have spawned a number of conflicting traditions, all concerning bloody encounters; yet there is no actual proof that any of these tales—including that related to Howley in the 1880s—were based on facts.”

  And since there is no way that I can argue with Dr. Marshall’s k
nowledge on the subject, perhaps it is on that note that we shall end this whole bloody business.

  The Boulevard’s Black and White Ghost

  St. John’s

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  Two ghosts, separated by a gulf of fifty years? Or one ghost, who slumbered for half a century before returning to haunt the living? Come with me for a late-night stroll down the Boulevard, and you can judge for yourself.

  The Boulevard is located along the northwest edge of Quidi Vidi Lake in St. John’s, running between King’s Bridge Road and East White Hills Road. The Boulevard was created in the early twentieth century, following the gift of land to the city by a gentleman named Mr. Robert Cole, of King’s Bridge. Cole’s obituary, printed in the St. John’s Daily Star on the eleventh of December, 1918, noted the following:

  “A man of patriotic temperament, he took an active interest in civic and political life, and any movement for the betterment of the city or its people had in him a warm advocate, a fact which he demonstrated some years ago when he offered a considerable portion of his property to create a boulevard at the western end of Quidi Vidi Lake.”

  The Boulevard forms the southern boundary of the Mount Carmel Cemetery, at the western end of the street. The cemetery was consecrated by Bishop John Thomas Mullock on July 3, 1859, who wrote in his diary on that day: “Today I consecrated the cemetery at Quidi Vidi. Thousands were present. The weather awfully hot. Temperature 84 degrees in the shade.”

  As warm as it might have been on that day in 1859, there are a few things about the Boulevard that might give you the shivers, today. Several years ago, a gentleman named Harry contacted me to share a story of a strange experience which he and a group of friends had shared one November in the early 1960s. Harry wrote: