Haunted ground

by Dale Jarvis

  “Kids used to trout, so one night down at Quidi Vidi between Field’s old house and the bandstand I caught a four-pound brown trout (graveyard worms were the best). My friends playing spotlight near Conway’s old stone house heard about my prize, and all rallied with poles to the head of the pond. Six of us lined off along the shore on a misty November night, with our spotlight fighting over a few worms. When Tommy looked up, he saw this man slowly walking toward us. We spoke to him, but he did not answer, so we shone the light in his face, and the beam seemed to go right through him. He was scruffy and dressed in turn-of-the-century clothes: a light-coloured jacket with light-coloured pants, laced-up boots, and an old hat pulled down over his forehead. He did not speak but kept intentionally walking toward us. Tommy shouted out to us that he was wearing a mask. At that point we all looked at this ghostly figure and dropped our poles and ran. When we looked back he had vanished.”

  The six friends gave a statement to the Criminal Investigation Division of the Newfoundland Constabulary, and the police were on scene approximately fifteen minutes later. They recovered the boys’ fishing poles and flashlight in a search of the lakehead. The police also conducted a search on Circular Road and Empire Avenue that did not turn up any pedestrians that night.

  “We know he did not get past us on the dimly lighted boulevard,” added Harry. “If we were ever to see him again we were to phone the police, they said.”

  But nothing happened. The scruffy figure in his old-fashioned clothes and hat had vanished from the Boulevard, never to be seen again.

  Or had he?

  Fifty years later, “Karen” had a strange experience while driving alongside Quidi Vidi Lake, shortly after midnight on Remembrance Day in 2011. Karen was in St. John’s, from out of town, and had just dropped off a friend when a strange apparition came up onto the road in front of her car.

  “I was driving along the Boulevard by Quidi Vidi Lake, between the bandstand and military base,” Karen remembers. As she did, something caught her eye, moving very quickly up the bank from the direction of the pond.

  “I saw a smoke-coloured figure come over the bank and onto the road directly in front of my car,” she describes.

  Thinking she was about to hit a person, the woman reacted immediately.

  “I slammed on the brakes,” she describes. “ I’m glad there was nobody behind me, because I would have gotten rear-ended.”

  When she did, the figure in front of her simply dissolved into the midnight air.

  “I did not just see that!”

  “It happened all in a matter of split seconds,” Karen says. “It was very, very fast. It was just like somebody walked right out in front of my car. I’d never seen anything like that before in my life. I couldn’t believe it had happened. I was on my way over to my sister’s house, and I told them as soon as I got there.”

  While she had experienced strange things in the past, meeting the figure on the Boulevard was Karen’s first time seeing a full-bodied apparition. She was shocked by how detailed the figure was.

  “It was a man about 5’9 and slim build, dressed in older-style clothing, wearing a salt and pepper cap, linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, suspenders, and linen trousers. His clothing appeared to be messed up, or worn in. I could see that he had dark hair and stubble, and he looked to be in his thirties.”

  Karen describes the man as being a dirty, smoky colour, almost more like he was an antique photograph than a real person. Her description is remarkably similar to the haunting reported in the 1960s.

  “He looked like he was in a black-and-white picture, and when he dissipated, it was just like cigarette smoke!

  “I will never forget it,” she says.

  So we are back where we started, with a question. Is that stretch of the Boulevard home to one ghost, or two? If that particular monochromatic haunting only occurs once every fifty years, you might need to wait till 2061 to find out.

  In the meantime, a location closer to the historic Mount Carmel Cemetery may also be haunted. Consider what happened to Cindy Pearson and her friend Rhonda Whalen in the fall of 2012:

  “She was in the passenger seat and I was the driver. As we were driving past the graveyard heading west toward King’s Bridge Road, she yelled at me to watch out. I didn’t see anything. I asked her what the heck was she yelling about. She replied by saying, ‘Didn’t you see the guy who just hopped the graveyard fence and ran across the road?’ I asked what he looked like, and she described him as being in his mid-twenties with blond hair in a mullet-style haircut, wearing tight jeans and a jean jacket.”

  Pearson had seen nothing pass by the front of her car; her friend was convinced she had seen a ghost in denim, straight out of the 1980s. It might be easy to dismiss it as a singular event, but others in that spot have also witnessed a ghost taxi pulling out of the graveyard late at night.

  From the ghost of the ’80s, to phantom taxi cabs, to our mysterious black and white ghost, there is clearly something spooky happening along the Boulevard.

  Chapter Five

  Darkness and the Light

  The settlers had many superstitions and were obsessed by a belief in the presence of ghosts. It was common to hear of a man, who, while rowing across the harbour, had seen a phantom French ship, with many soldiers aboard, also crossing. Others had seen an Indian ghost following them from one settlement to another.

  Their superstitions were legion, and I shall mention only one. During the seal hunt, if a successful hunter saw anybody throwing blood out of his boat into the boat of another, a fight was sure to follow, because the hunter believed that his luck was being stolen.

  — J. Morgan, “Recollections of Harbour Deep,” 1957

  “Smarra.” Illustration by Tony Johannot, 1846.

  The Devil at the Dance

  Brigus and Spaniard’s Bay

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  I was in Bay Roberts having a chat with Mike Flynn, a local historian and author. We were talking about the Newfoundland of yesteryear, and Flynn was a wealth of knowledge, sharing some great bits of local folklore, including legends about ghosts and buried treasure.

  “There’s a flat rock by the side of the road near Beaver Pond in Brigus, and there is a footprint in it called the Devil’s Footprint,” he told me.

  “Were there stories about people meeting the Devil?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact, now that you’ve jogged my memory, my mother was telling me one time they were at a dance in Spaniard’s Bay. There was a girl at the dance who apparently wasn’t all that attractive to males.

  “‘I’d dance with the Devil himself, tonight, if he was here,’ said the girl.

  “A few minutes later, this guy came along and asked her for a dance,” says Flynn. “And when they were out dancing, waltzing, she looked down, and he had hooves rather than feet.

  “These are scary stories, you know, for a kid!” Flynn added.

  Scary, but fabulous. For a folklorist and storyteller, when I hear a story like that, it is like a prospector striking gold. It is another great example of a contemporary legend, or what some people might call an urban legend, though they are not always told in an urban context. And while they might be contemporary in their telling, the stories sometimes go back a long, long way.

  “Pas de Deux.” Illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1907.

  The Devil at the dance story is one of these stories. I have heard and read various versions over the years, some set in Newfoundland, and many others from other places. Some of those stories go back centuries.

  One of my storytelling friends is Gail de Vos, who teaches at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. She is also a great storyteller, whose specialty is telling contemporary legends. In her book, Tales, Rumors and Gossip, de Vos includes a European version of th
e legend that dates back to 1875. In her version, a servant woman went dancing at a ballroom on one of the last Sundays before Lent.

  “Around midnight, she saw a handsomely dressed stranger with black hair and eyes that glistened like onyx, coming toward her to ask her for a dance,” writes de Vos. “She took his arm with pleasure as they began to dance with perfect grace, but faster and faster.”

  One of the musicians noticed that the dashing stranger, like the one in Spaniard’s Bay, had cloven hooves. He changed the tune from a waltz into a hymn. The dancer whirled the girl across the ballroom and right through a window.

  “The girl was found lying on the green grass in the garden covered with broken glass,” writes de Vos. “The Devil had disappeared.”

  He is a tricky character, Old Nick. So, if you are out for a time in Spaniard’s Bay, or enjoying a walk through the picturesque streets of historic Brigus, and you happen to meet a handsomely dressed stranger, just remember this tip from the stories of old:

  Check out his feet before you agree to a dance.

  Reading the Cards

  Joe Batt’s Arm

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  Every so often, I get emails or letters from people with stories about strange happenings or odd bits of Newfoundland and Labrador folklore. It is one of my favourite perks of doing what I do. Sometimes, like with the note I received from Francis Furlong, they grab me immediately.

  “Hi,” wrote Furlong, “have you ever heard stories about playing cards coming to life?”

  Could a folklorist or storyteller wish for a better opening line in a letter?

  Furlong told me that his mother has a lot of stories from Joe Batt’s Arm, featuring ghosts of British redcoats, children’s voices in the house, people walking around all hours of the night, a local monster with only eyes on its face, a man whose hair turned white after an encounter with the fairies, and the Virgin Mary in her blue dress helping children lost in the woods.

  He told me that while his mother’s memory is not as great as it once was, she has one story that stands out in her memory in particular. His mother’s name is Leone Miller, maiden name Etheridge.

  “She grew up on Etheridge’s Point in Joe Batt’s Arm and always told us stories from there,” he explains.

  “Mom tells a story about growing up in Joe Batt’s Arm. She was walking to a friend’s house, and she had her mom’s playing cards, also the same cards that her mother would read like tarot cards. As she was walking, she dropped the cards and they scattered on the ground. All of a sudden, all the kings, queens, and jokers of all the suits came off the cards, like little people, and started dancing around her, then they fell back into the cards they came off of. She has told us this all our lives and swears to it to this day.”

  Joe Batt’s Arm, June 10, 2016.

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

  Playing cards in Newfoundland oral tradition often carry a whiff of something supernatural. I have heard stories about the Devil appearing at card games, and even of a family near Burgeo who vanished mysteriously, house and all, after playing cards on a Sunday.

  But cards coming to life is a new story for me, and it reminds me tremendously of Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was always one of my favourite reads as a child.

  The deck of cards in Furlong’s story had something of a history in family lore. Furlong said that, according to family stories, these were the same cards his grandmother would put on her nightstand before she went to sleep.

  “She would wake up later to find the cards spread out over her perfectly, like a blanket, each card end to end in perfect rows.”

  Wicked Witches

  St. John’s, Joe Batt’s Arm, Comfort Cove, and Colliers

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  I have been collecting and sharing supernatural stories for a long time, and people know that I am always interested in hearing new stories. So, it is not unusual for people to approach me out of the blue, as they did with the previous story, with information they would normally not share with a complete stranger. The plumber who came to fix my bathtub had a story; the security guard at the airport had another.

  One evening, a gentleman approached me and told me about a leaping witch in downtown St. John’s.

  The average person might not think that often about witchcraft in Newfoundland and Labrador. While ghost stories and fairy stories are more common or more popular in the telling today, there is a long history of witchcraft belief in the province. And while there are many good and sensible witches and new-age pagans in the world today, the term “witch” is still used to describe some aspects of the supernatural that are dark, strange, and mysterious, and which have nothing to do with the more modern incarnations of witchcraft.

  Downtown St. John’s, you would think, would hardly be a place where folk belief in spells and witchcraft would linger. But at least one dramatic story about an acrobatic witch and her actions survives from the area around Balsam Street, which runs between Queens Road and Livingstone Street.

  The gentleman who told me the story said he heard it from his grandfather. The grandfather, as a boy, had lived in a row house across Balsam Street from a woman who was suspected of being a witch. The boy was up late one night, looking out his bedroom window on the top floor of the house. Peering across the street toward the house of the suspected witch, he saw the woman climbing along the outside of the building, close to the roofline.

  Astonished, the boy watched as the woman clambered across the eaves. The woman, as if she knew she was being watched, suddenly turned to stare straight at the boy. The boy was petrified as their eyes locked across the dark downtown street.

  Turning slightly, the woman tensed for a moment. Then with a great, superhuman spring, she jumped from her house, all the way across the street, and landed on the window ledge right in front of the terrified boy. She landed on the sill with such force that she cracked the window glass from one side to the other.

  The boy fled. When he returned with his family, the woman was gone, but the crack in the window was still there. The window was not repaired, and the crack remained in the pane for years after as proof of the witch’s feat.

  A different jumping witch legend comes to us from the town of Joe Batt’s Arm, on Fogo Island. Dean Penton learned the story decades ago from his great-uncle, who has since passed away.

  “Legend has it that in the mid to late 1700s, residents of Joe Batt’s Arm decided on a witch hunt, to banish all remaining witches from the community,” writes Penton. “During the hunt, they came across the most powerful witch any man had ever seen. As they chased her to the edge of the sea on Etheridge’s Point, she was cornered.”

  Sign marking the location of the witch’s footprint, Joe Batt’s Arm. Photo courtesy Dean Penton, joebattsarm.ca.

  In order to escape the angry mob, the witch leaped to an island in the middle of the harbour, leaving behind a molten hot footprint in the rock. From there she leaped once more to Brown’s Point and was never seen again.

  “Some say the witch drowned in her attempt to escape, others state she simply disappeared into the darkness and was never seen again,” Penton adds. “However, numerous strange sightings and even screams of an unknown woman have been witnessed by many people over the centuries on Etheridge’s Point.”

  Today, the impression of that witch’s foot can be seen on a rock located at Etheridge’s Point, and if you search carefully you can find the footprints left behind by her prodigious leaps.

  The Etheridge’s Point footprint is the most readily accessible, and if you are feeling brave, you can take off your footwear and try to match your bare foot to the print left in the stone. If it is a perfect fit, you might have some explaining to do, since the print features the mark of six longer-than-average toes.

  Co
mfort Cove, near Lewisporte, is home to yet another witch legend, which came to my attention thanks to Kate Rideout. There, the witch is said to haunt a section of Comfort Cove Road. While her legend is not widely known in the region, a few local people know the story, and at least one man refused to drive the road alone because of it. Rideout and a few other people from Comfort Cove have seen the spirit first-hand.

  The “witch” takes the form a strange green glow, slightly hidden behind a small hill along the stretch of highway. Local folklore maintains that once you see the witch’s glowing form, a devilish presence will be your passenger in the back seat for the remainder of your ride home. The passenger is said to be either an unknown dark figure or the spirit of a dead person who had wished you harm when they were alive.

  “I’ve seen a few ghosts before, and this one was the most worrisome I’ve seen,” says Rideout. “She was just a green glowing light, and from the headlights I could see the parts of her that weren’t glowing were black, like a dress. Once we passed her, my heart sank, and I was forced to look in the back seat. There was a man back there with a burnt-like face, just sitting looking straight ahead.”

  Once she got home, Rideout was reduced to tears and did not sleep that night, overcome as she was with the feeling of that strange man following her.

  Rideout’s father also had a run-in with the green witch of Comfort Cove Road, only a few hours before her encounter.

  “He turned whiter than a sheet and just sped the rest of the way,” she describes. “He didn’t talk the rest of the night and just shakes his head when I bring it up.”

  Encounters with dark forces or strange figures led many Newfoundlanders in the historical period to come up with complex counter-charms and rituals to keep witches at bay. One type of counter-charm was the use of a witch bottle.