by Dale Jarvis
Molly (née Murphy) Quinn was raised in Philadelphia, but her family comes from Colliers and Conception Harbour, and she has spent her summers in Newfoundland since she was a girl. Quinn’s grandmother, Alice McGrath Murphy, died in 2007 at the age of ninety-two. During those Newfoundland summers, Grandmother Murphy told Quinn more than a few tales.
“My childhood was filled with stories of fairies, ‘Bloody Bones,’ and more stories than I can remember,” says Quinn. “My grandmother’s mother was the midwife of the community. Many tragedies occurred in childbirth, and most were attributed to bad luck, the wrath of God, and some to a witch or bad person.”
If you thought your bad luck was due to a witch’s influence, you could make a witch bottle to break the curse.
“I know you were supposed to put things in them to remove curses,” she says.
Generally, a witch bottle is made by filling a vessel with symbolic items like pins, darning needles, or fabric hearts, and in some cases, with urine. It was then corked. By trapping things in a bottle, the victim is meant to redirect suffering back on the witch responsible. Quinn’s story involves a woman who had experimented with witch bottles, but who was unable to rid herself of whatever curse had attached itself to her and her family.
“Years ago, a young woman lost her husband rather tragically,” Quinn relates. “She was always dressed in black and, having lost all faith in God, was said to have dabbled with witch bottles, believing her husband was taken from her wrongly.”
Afterwards, the woman was never the same.
“She could always be seen near the large boulder in front of the cemetery, dressed in black and forever weeping for her lost love,” describes Quinn. “One evening, a young married couple was driving across the cemetery hill in their sleigh. The woman was at the rock weeping.
“As the sleigh passed, she leapt in, touching the young groom with her hand,” Quinn says. “Her icy touch immediately killed the young man. Because of her actions, she was cursed to mourn forever at the cemetery, always seeking her husband’s return.
“I get shivers just thinking of it now,” says Quinn, “especially because I visit that cemetery each summer to visit relatives’ graves.”
The use of witch bottles originated in Europe and was later introduced to North America. Ruby Andrews Moore, writing about superstitions in Georgia in 1892, notes that “to keep witches off the place, a black bottle containing iron nails was buried under the front doorstep.”
One of my favourite witch bottle stories was recorded from around Chestertown, Maryland, and reported in the Journal of American Folklore in 1890. The witch bottles there were filled with what are known locally as “ground-puppies” or “ground-dogs.”
“These names are given to some common species of salamander (Amblystoma). As many ‘ground-dogs’ as possible are to be put into a wide-mouthed bottle and buried under the threshold of the person whom it is desired to conjure, at the same time making crosses with the four fingers on the earth above the buried bottle. After a time the ‘ground-puppies’ will burst the containing bottle, and then they will find their way into the stomach of the person against whom the spell is directed, and kill him. They can be driven out by taking internally a tincture made by soaking May-apple root, or snake-root, in whiskey. It is safest, however, to consult a ‘fortune-teller doctor,’ if one has reason to suspect the presence of ground-dogs in his stomach.”
Wise advice, I am certain.
Witch bottles in the Colliers area of Conception Bay may have a long history. Archaeological work in the nearby community of Cupids has uncovered remnants of Bellarmine bottles—a type of pottery jug with a distinctive human face design on the neck of the bottle. In the seventeenth century, they were sometimes employed as witch bottles.
An example of a sixteenth-century Bartmann (or Bellarmine) jug. Photo courtesy Museum August-Kestner in Hannover/Wikimedia.org.
A charred face from a seventeenth-century German-manufactured Bellarmine bottle was found broken on the cobblestones west of the dwelling house at Cupids. Archaeological work undertaken at Ferryland in 1997 also recovered fragments of Bellarmine jugs, and archaeologists Barry Gaulton and Catherine Hawkins reported in 2015 that roughly half of a large Rhenish stoneware Bellarmine bottle was found at Ferryland, and later pieced together in the lab. Bellarmine fragments were also uncovered from the Hefford Plantation, New Perlican.
Were these jugs used as witch bottles? We may never know, and certainly not all Bellarmine jugs were witch bottles. But some Newfoundland settlers knew of the tradition, and Bellarmine jugs seem to have been a favourite material for building counter-charms. In 1987, it was noted that of the 200 documented witch bottles found in England to that point, 130 were Bellarmine jugs. A similar bottle from the same time period as the Cupids jug was recovered from an archaeological site in the UK in 2004. Upon opening up the bottle, it was found to contain “bent pins, a nail-pierced heart made of leather, fingernail clippings, belly-button lint, and hair, all swimming in a bath of 300-year-old, nicotine-tinged urine.”
It sounds like the perfect concoction to keep a witch (or anyone, for that matter) far, far away.
The Cat Who Wasn’t There
St. John’s and Carbonear
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I got into a St. John’s taxi cab, and the cab driver looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“You’re the ghost man,” he said.
“I am the ghost man,” I agreed, and waited, because when someone starts a conversation with me in that manner, they generally have a story. Sure enough, I was not disappointed. We talked for a little bit about where he had grown up on the Southside of St. John’s, and I asked if he had ever heard stories about the fairies there.
“No, no fairies,” he said. “But I do know that story about the kittens who came back from the dead.”
This was a new one for me, and as we cruised down New Gower Street, I asked him to elaborate.
Apparently, a man on the Southside had a cat who had produced an unwanted litter of kittens. As was the custom in those days, the man put the kittens in a sack, took them down to the wharf, and tossed them into the St. John’s harbour. He watched the sack fly through the air, land in the water with a splash, and then sink beneath the murky waters of the harbour. He waited as bubbles rose up from the depths, and then, satisfied with a job well-done, he headed home.
That night, the man heard a noise at his window. He looked up, in horror, I imagine, to see a line of ghostly kittens peering in back at him from the other side of the windowpane.
I have to admit that I was torn. As an absolute lover of cats, I was saddened by their drowning. As a lover of ghost stories (and as a believer in the old adage that you reap what you sow), I was delighted to hear that the evildoer was haunted by those revenant kittens.
For as long as humans have shared the earth with cats, we have known that there is something unearthly about them. From the ancient Egyptians to the modern day, there is always the whiff of something magical about our feline friends. In his book of light verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the poet T. S. Eliot writes of the Original Conjuring Cat, Mr. Mistoffelees. In the book, the grandly named cat has the singular magical power to appear to be where he is not:
His manner is vague and aloof,
You would think there was nobody shyer—
But his voice has been heard on the roof
When he was curled up by the fire.
Amongst people who like to discuss the unexplained, this power is often referred to as “bilocation.” Bilocation is the ability to be, or to appear to be, located in two distinct places at the same instant in time. Many of you who know cats, like our friend T. S. Eliot, might have had an experience with a Mr. Mistoffelees of your own.
For one cat-owning couple in the Georgestown area of St. John’s, the phen
omenon might go one step further: they may very well have a ghost cat. Both the husband and wife have had run-ins with the property’s phantom feline. The house was built in the 1920s and was purchased by the couple in 1999. Since then, mysterious cat sightings have been a part of their daily life in the house.
“I’ve felt the cat brush against my leg,” says the husband. “I’ve also had numerous occasions where I’ve come into a room and have seen a cat out of the corner of my eye, but then upon looking, the cat is gone.”
The wife has had similar experiences.
“I would see a cat and think it was one of our cats,” she describes. “I’ve seen the cat when I’ve been in the laundry room. I said to the cat ‘it’s not time for you to be fed yet’ and when I walked out, all our cats were in the hallway outside the office. None of the cats had gone by me.”
On another occasion, she saw the cat in the living room.
“It jumped off the rocking chair,” she says. “There was no cat in the living room, and the rocking chair started to rock. That was creepy.”
In 2006, the couple had a visitor from Ireland, a woman who claimed to have some psychic abilities. She told the couple about several different spirits she could sense in the house. After a while, the husband asked the visitor if she could sense any animal spirits in the home.
“Oh yes,” the Irish woman said, matter-of-factly. “There is a ghost cat here, and his name is Septimus.”
So there you have it, a phantom feline with a very distinguished name. Mr. Mistoffelees would be proud, I am sure.
In 1992, Daniel Penney, originally from Carbonear, came home from school to find that his parents had gotten him a kitten.
“He was black with smoky-grey highlights going through his entire coat, so I decided I would call him Smokey,” says Penney. “He became a pet unlike any we have ever had, and we bonded closely.”
Smokey would usually sleep with Daniel in his bed.
“If he had been outside late and someone let him in the house while I was sleeping, he would push the door open in my room and hop on the bed,” remembers Penney. “Usually when he did this, he wasn’t quite ready to settle in. He would start by sitting by your chest, and if you didn’t acknowledge his presence, he would start to purr so hard and loud you could see him rock back and forth. If I still ignored him, hoping he would let me sleep and go to sleep himself, then he would bawl ever so lightly, just enough for you to hear him.”
If Penney did not give Smokey the attention he wanted, he would poke his owner’s arm. Penney would have to pet the cat till it fell asleep, in order to get any sleep himself.
“He and I were inseparable,” says Penney, “and if I went for a walk outside anywhere, he would tag along with me.”
In 2007, the beloved cat grew feeble and sick. Much to the dismay of the family, there was little they could do, and the cat had to be put to sleep by the veterinarian.
“I brought him home from the vet and wrapped him in his favourite blankets, laid him in a wooden box my father had made for him, and we buried him in our backyard. After fifteen years we were all devastated, and our lives and home felt empty. I felt so guilty for putting him to sleep, even though I knew it was the right thing to do.”
That evening, Penney fell into bed, exhausted. But he could not get to sleep right away; the bed felt empty without Smokey. Eventually, he fell asleep.
“During the night at some point, I rolled over in bed, and for a split second, I opened my eyes,” describes Penney. “Then I felt something hop up on the bed behind me. I heard the purring and decided to pet who I thought was my other cat, Rusty. But when I awoke and rolled over, it was Smokey looking right at me. When I reached out to pet him, he disappeared like he was never there.”
Penney sat up in bed. He tried to figure out what had just happened.
“Though I was grieving, I felt at peace,” he says. “As I was lying back down in bed to turn in, Rusty entered my room and hopped up on the bed and fell asleep. I’ve never seen Smokey ever again.”
Penney acknowledges that some may say he just mixed up one cat for the other, though the two cats were of very different colours.
“I can’t help but wonder if Smokey came back just to make my mind at peace, by letting me know he was okay and at peace himself, or if it was just lack of sleep with a mix of grief,” muses Penney. “If it was just a mix of grief and lack of sleep, then the only thing I cannot explain is the weight I felt in my mattress, and the tugging of the sheets like I used to feel when he sat next to my chest!”
People have strong bonds with their animals, and I am certain that Penney is not the only person in the province with experiences with a deceased pet. I am glad that the visitation gave him some peace, and I would probably feel the same if I was in the same boat. The drowned kittens, however, can stay where they are over on the Southside Road.
Heavenly Representatives
Carbonear, Bonavista, and Heart’s Content
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In 2014, an elderly lady from Carbonear underwent open heart surgery. The night after surgery, she saw an ominous dark figure hovering in the corner of her hospital room. The figure was formless, appearing like a large black cloud. It terrified the woman, who whispered a prayer to keep it at bay. The next evening, a ball of white light appeared as if in answer to her prayers. The dark form disappeared, and her health improved dramatically. After a few weeks, she was well enough to go home. She is still doing well and living on her own in Carbonear. Though the orb of light has not been seen since, the woman is happy to know it is out there, somewhere.
“It put her at ease,” the woman’s personal care attendant told me. “She felt like she had an angel watching out for her.”
Angelic figures or messengers from the other side often appear in end-of-life stories. Many people who have been around those close to death have either had strange experiences themselves, or have had those about to die confess to seeing otherworldly visitors, heralds, or guides.
Cindy Slaney-Miller experienced this when her mother, Betty, was in palliative care. One evening, while family were visiting, Betty informed them that there was another person in the room.
“She said her ‘representative’ was in the room,” Slaney-Miller explains. “He was wearing a white suit. The next morning when I arrived, she asked me if I had thanked him for showing up last night because he really didn’t have to be there, but she was glad he was, and again described what he looked like!”
The woman quizzed her mother about it, and she said that the man in the white suit was going to meet her later.
“It was a surreal thing,” she says. “She totally convinced me that someone was there.”
Nicole’s story is similar. In 2003, her mother was in the late stages of terminal cancer. She was in hospice care, and her wakeful moments were less frequent. During those times she would frequently speak of, or wave to, a woman in the room with her at the hospital in Bonavista.
“We were never sure when she would slip away,” says Nicole. “The only people she seemed to recognize were me and my dad.”
On several occasions during her periods of alertness, Nicole would notice her looking off into a corner of the room.
“Occasionally she would smile or nod like she was answering a question or agreeing to something,” Nicole says. “Finally, when it was her and I alone in the room, and after I had seen her smile and wave, always in the same direction, to her right, near the door to the room, I said, ‘Mom, who are you waving at? There’s no one there.’”
“I’m waving to the woman over there,” her mother said.
She pointed, and Nicole looked, but there was no one there.
“I asked her again who she was waving at, and she told me that there was a nice woman in white who was standing in the corner,” Nicole describes. “I tried asking her mor
e questions but was never able to get straight answers while she was lucid. She did continue to wave, smile, and nod, and occasionally mumble something over the following days. She passed on March 1, 2003. It did bring me some amount of comfort to think that maybe there was someone there with her during her final days.”
While the previous two stories featured a figure in white, not all heavenly representatives are so attired. Dee Payne’s grandfather told her of a lady in a blue veil who appeared at the foot of his bed in St. John’s on November 7, 1987.
“She took one look at my grandfather and shook her head,” Payne says. “She walked to my grandmother’s side of the bed and touched her on the head. The next day, my grandmother passed away due to a stroke.
“Grandfather often told us of the lady in the blue veil from that day, until he died himself eleven years later. It always struck the family as peculiar that the lady in the blue veil shook her head when she looked at my grandfather, and chose my grandmother, as my grandfather was always the one of poorly health, and my grandmother was as healthy as a horse.”
Sometimes these visitors from beyond are the spirits of those who have gone on before. That is what happened to one Heart’s Delight family during the last week of January 2000.
“The Sunday before my grandfather went to the hospital (we know now for the final time), he had a vision of my grandmother who passed just eight months before him. He looked a little downhearted when he came out of his room that morning, and seeing his expression, I asked what was troubling him. His response was, ‘I seen her as clear as I ever did standing alongside of my dresser. When I put out my hand to touch her, she was gone.’ I think she came to let him know they would soon be reunited.”
Bedtime with the Old Hag