I asked how old the house was, to which he replied, “That’s a long story. Listen! I’m off at six. That’s our house next door. I always have a beer after work. You and your wife join us, and I’ll answer any questions that I can.”
We had an evening’s essential housework planned, so we arranged to visit the next day.
In their large family kitchen, with the evening meal on the stove, Isaac and I took the first taste from the end of the working day beer. Barb was fascinated by the country kitchen, and was quickly distracted by Isaac’s wife’s offer of a look around the whole house.
“I grew up there, you know,” was Isaac’s opening statement from across the table. “There were 10 of us and I was the seventh. When dad died, we let mom have the house. When she passed, we sold it.”
“How did your mom and dad feed the 10 of you?” I asked.
“Well, we fished. Everybody down the Passage and onto the island fished. There’s an old government wharf at the end of your driveway. We had a cow for milk, couple of goats, chickens for eggs, and we grew all sorts of vegetables. That’s why it was so easy to grow strawberries later. Dad and my grandfather, and probably his father before that, kept a small farm there. Lots of seaweed and lobster shells for fertilizer and more seaweed to insulate the new house, when it was built.”
“New house?” I asked.
“Yes. The original one burnt down one January. My dad would often tell that story. That’s how I know how old the house is. My dad was only seven when it happened, and he was born in 1875. In a couple of years, the new house will be 100 years old. The two add-ons that were to replace the kitchen came a little later.”
Another drink and then he added, “For years after that fire, my mother swore that the place was haunted.”
Barb’s attention switched, as she returned from the tour of the Crozier’s house.
“What happened?” I asked, trying to keep the excitement from my query.
“Mom swore that sometimes, late at night, she heard Uncle Bill coming down the stairs and into the kitchen. He’d open the oven on the old wood stove, and look for his boots that were often put in there overnight, to dry. That’s how they think the fire started.
“Someone forgot to damp the fire down that night and the boots caught alight. Bill, who was never able to leave home, was my granddad’s much younger brother. Herman and Elizabeth, my grandparents, got all the kids out: four girls and two boys, but the youngest died soon after. He was Bill, named after his uncle. Old Bill was awakened, but he never made it out of the building.”
“Did you ever see or hear the ghost of Uncle Bill before you left there?”
“No!” Isaac laughed. “With 10 of us, the place was too noisy for ghosts. Dad never knew about it either. Mom only saw and heard it when she lived there alone, late in her life. She swore it was Uncle Bill. She spoke to him, but he never answered, just looked for his boots and went out the door.”
“We saw him!” blurted out Barb. “The first two nights, before our furniture arrived, we camped out in the living room. Both nights, at about three-thirty, he came down the stairs, into the kitchen, looked for his boots in the oven, then left through a door that we still haven’t been able to open.”
“Did he say anything?” interjected Isaac’s wife.
“It was strange,” I answered. “He kept repeating the same two words, as if they meant a lot to him. He’d say, My booooots!!” I tried to imitate the ghost’s plaintive voice.
“Those are the only two words your mom ever heard him say,” said Lois.
Her husband nodded in agreement. He told us that his mother only saw Bill at those times when the once bustling house was quiet, usually very late at night
He continued. “Dad always said the fire happened in the small hours of that January morning, probably about half past three.”
It was quiet for a moment. Isaac interrupted, laughing, as he said, “Wait till I tell my brothers and sisters about this! Like me, none of them were ever quite sure about mom’s ghost.”
He went on to tell us that his family first settled our property in Shore Section, sometime after his widowed great-great-grandmother came from Barrington in 1830. She, her own children and some of the 13 her husband’s first wife had borne, were on the 1838 census record as living there. The original house had probably been built about then
His wife asked one more time if we wanted to stay for supper. Regretfully, we had to decline. All the work we had to do and a meeting with the electrician took priority. Besides, we’d had the mystery of our “visitor” solved and we knew more than the bare bones of our new house’s history.
Over the three years that we lived there, Isaac, and others, whose families had lived in the community for generations, put flesh on the property’s historical bones. Some even believed the story of the ghost, which I only told after the rum bottle came out, by which time I no longer cared if my “I don’t believe in ghosts” position was threatened by the telling.
Did Uncle Bill ever reappear?
One night, when Barb was away in Montreal, I thought I heard something downstairs. But we had two cats and I assumed one of them was down there eating. The oven door, of the old, old stove we’d retained and restored, was open the next morning. When Barb got back she asked why the door at that end of the kitchen was unlocked. It was still a door we never used and the key to the replacement lock we’d fitted was still hung on the nail, hidden in the kitchen cupboard.
When my teenage children visited, my daughter slept downstairs. One morning, she asked who’d come down to the kitchen in stocking feet and then gone out of the door in the middle of the night.
That evening, we lit a fire down on the beach, and I told them the story of Uncle Bill’s Boots. They assumed it was one of the ghost stories that I often made up.
I think it’s the only one that I might just believe in myself.
Postscript:
The house exists. The original was destroyed by fire. It was the home of the land grantees, the Kenney family. I don’t know if there was ever a Bill in the family. One of the Kenney’s did run the local service station. He told me about the fire as he pumped gas for us one day.
It took us two years to restore the house and tame the undergrowth that threatened to engulf it. We loved the summers, but the winters were hard. We became as much part of the community as anyone did who “came from away”, unless the “away” was Cape Breton. But we missed city proximity and conveniences and we did not have the many skills needed to improve the century old house. “The Crude But Effective School of House Restoration” had reached its limits.
We painted it blue, kept the surrounding grass trimmed and the alders at bay. We canoed and even tried swimming off our property. I think that was our final mistake. Lakes are to swim in. Everybody on the shore knows that. Besides, I didn’t hunt, was bored by fishing lakes and streams, and you wouldn’t get my seasick prone body on the ocean in a Cape Island boat.
We put the house on the market, and it sold to Montrealers looking for a summer retreat. We met them but, for fear of jeopardizing the sale, I did not tell this fictional story.
The now 130-year-old house is still used by the Montrealers every summer. In the winter, it’s cared for by a neighbour. It shares the land with an all-weather tennis court and a boathouse, where winters a Cape Islander cruiser. There is also a newly built, luxury house on the shore, next to the “new” old Kenney House. The owner keeps the older house for the younger overflow of summer visitors she invites.
One story says that she built the newest one because field mice kept infesting the old house.
I wonder if their rustling at night might disguise the sounds of poor old Bill, still looking for “My Boooooots!” in the decorated and enamelled, wood burning range that still dominates one end of the kitchen.
~~~***~~~
Making it Happen
Art White
Our beautiful boy came quietly into the world on July 1, 1978, my twe
nty-fourth birthday. His eyes were mine; the red mop up top came from his Scottish father. We called him Joules (pronounced jewels), a term electricians, like his dad, toss about when talking shop. When Hansen McPherson first held his ruby-haired son and gazed down on his own likeness looking back, my rough-cut husband whispered ever so gently, “Oh, Ruby, he’s a jewel, a God-given jewel.…”
Joules was the apple of all our eyes, including his older sister, Ruby, who shares my name, or did until her baby brother dubbed her “Rudie” and it stuck. In turn, she, three days short of being his senior by four years, called my newborn her “Darling Child” and it fit.
Deuteronomy says, “He found him in a desert land, in the howling wilderness and led him about, instructing him, keeping him as the apple of his eye.” The prophet, Zechariah, enlarged the endearment, “Thus saith the Lord of hosts… he that touches you touches the apple of his eye.” Joules was God-given all right, and his gift rubbed off; he touched us, drew us out, and brought us deep, leaving an inner satisfaction, pleasure and peace.
During breakfast on our shared birthday in 1997, Joulie told me, “This may be our last birthday together for a while, Mum. I’m going west with Reg to join Larry. He got us jobs paying twice what we’re making here. I just gotta give’er a try, at least earn a wad of money so’s I can come back and live in the basement ‘til the pogey runs out.” He was his usual light-hearted, fun-making self, but I tell you, Joules’ announcement settled like a cannon ball in the womb that bore him.
I reached for his hands, squeezing back tears as my brand new 19-year-old said words that thereafter became a soothing mantra in good times and bad: “We’ll always be together on Our Day, Mum, I’ll make it happen.” Typical Joules. “I’ll make it happen.” He’d said it ever since preschool and always seemed to deliver. Joules had me believing he’d do it now.
And he did. The next year I received a single, long-stemmed rose at my door with the card, “Lo, a Rose E’re Blooming.” We never figured how he got the florist to deliver on a holiday. Three days later, his big sister opened her door to a singing messenger bearing 20 pink carnations: “One for each year of being your Darling Child.”
He was intimately thoughtful.
The next year it was a registered letter: “Do not open until our birthday!” It contained a $400 gift certificate to the Pines Resort Hotel. On the backside he’d scribbled, “Take Dad out for a day of golf and fine dining, then stay the night.”
Rudie got her own hand-delivered letter, also with a cheque for $400. “You said your arms were too short to read the phone book. Here’s half a day’s pay to buy some fancy glasses for old folks. Your Darling Child.” It was like he was right there with us.
On Halloween Day, 1999, at five in the morning, the phone startled us awake. It was Larry Feener. Joulie had died in a bunkhouse fire at the tar sands site, along with their best friend and schoolmate, Reg Conners. I can hear young Larry’s quivery voice in my head right this minute.
Joules, our darling child, the apple of our eyes, was gone in a phone call, snuffed out like a cigarette under a shoe-heel. I never recovered. We never recovered. No one does. We know that now. But, in the strangest of ways, none of us feel without him either. It’s as if Joules is just out at the cottage for the weekend.
The next year, on the July day Joules had said we’d always be together, I got up early. I planned to start some bread, then pick a bumper crop of sugar snaps in the cool of the forenoon.
“Hey, what’s going on, here?” There were no lights in the kitchen, no red numerals on the stove, no hum of the fridge. The rest of the house had power—the kitchen was dark. I put off making bread, telling myself, Hansen’ll fix it, and went out to pick the peas.
“I can’t find anything wrong,” he said when I returned, consternation written across his tired face. “Let’s go to the cottage for your birthday, Ruby. This’ll all be here when we get back.” We wrapped the fridge and freezer in blankets to save the frozen food and headed to the Lake. The next morning, we returned to a kitchen bright with lights and a glowing burner on the stove. Unaccountably, all the clocks had kept perfect time.
A year-to-the-day later, we woke to the same scene: power everywhere but the kitchen. With hesitation, Hansen said, “When this happened on your birthday last year, I got to thinking. Joules re-did the wiring in that kitchen for your birthday, remember? Said an electrician’s house ought not blow a fuse when the microwave and toaster are going at the same time. ‘Sorta like a cobbler’s kids going shoeless,’ he said. Remember?”
I did, and I remembered, We’ll always be together on our Day, Mum. I’ll make it happen… Could it be? Just a coincidence? Hansen couldn’t find anything amiss either time. The blackouts occurred, and lasted, only one day a year. The clocks never lost time that day either.
I phoned Rudie and told her what her dad and I had been talking about. “Oh, sure,” she said, “I thought that the first time you told me, Mom. Somehow he’s always with us; it’s no coincidence. I feel him now. I can’t wait ‘til next year when we can test the theory, can you?”
I didn’t know what to say, and when I did I wasn’t sure. “I can’t speak for your father, Rudie, but… I’m not planning to be home on my next birthday. There’s no theory to test. I’m satisfied knowing what I know….”
Postscript:
“Making it Happen” is based on a real family with a “real” paranormal experience, including the son’s death as described and his yearly “visitations.” I was told this story in the nineties. I have taken literary license to make a story shell for this amazing sequence of facts, commonly held to be true. Names are contrived.
~~~***~~~
In Good Company
Janet Doleman
Scene 1 – Date Night
As the crow flies, the Mount Pisgah Cemetery is less than a quarter-mile from Andy Murray’s farm. To get there by car, one has to take the main road for about a half-mile and turn onto the tree-lined lane leading into the cemetery, which is set back in a clearing in the woods. Mount Pisgah is a pleasant enough place in the daylight, with stands of birch and maple accenting groups of headstones, and grassy lanes running in between. A sharp turn at the front of the cemetery requires the large, hulking hearses to do a three-point turn to navigate the corner.
Behind the farm, a dirt road leads to a small, abandoned quarry, deep and filled with water. It lies in a hollow where the road ends at a large shelf of granite known as the Big Rock. It’s a popular spot for impromptu picnics or just lazing on the sun-warmed surface. The rock and quarry are surrounded by a mixed brush forest of spruce, fir, and hardwoods, with one huge old oak tree standing above the rest, having withstood the winds of coastal storms and generations of climbing children. Neighbourhood kids hang out there. It’s their swimming hole in summer, skating rink in winter, and the site of innumerable games of hide-and-go-seek, or King-of-the-Castle. The rules laid down by parents state they are never to go there alone, and to always be on the watch for snakes, which might be enjoying their own sun baths in the crevices of the Big Rock.
***
This cemetery is pretty enough in the daytime, Jimmy thought, as he geared down and turned into the tree-lined lane. He’d been to Mount Pisgah before to visit his grandfather’s grave, so he was familiar with the neat groupings of gravestones separated by narrow grassy laneways and shaded by the occasional tall spruce, sturdy maple, and white birch.
Jimmy also knew it was a favourite place for guys to bring their girlfriends on Friday nights, slipping the chain off the gate ahead of time, and dimming the headlights as they drove toward the secluded glade. Tonight, with Marie finally agreeing to go out with him, here they were, doing exactly the same thing.
Marie sat on the far right of the front seat, hands demurely folded in her lap. She was the second-prettiest girl in his class; the first was already going steady with Kenneth Colson. As he drove up the lane, he glanced her way and was rewarded with a shy smile. When they reached the
cemetery grounds, he carefully navigated the sharp turn and proceeded along a lane, stopping near a grove of birches. It was perfect timing: the sun had gone down and the last light in the western sky had faded to nothing. The only light was from the car headlights.
“This is a real nice place at night, with a great view of the stars,” began Jimmy.
“Oh, do you come here often?” asked Marie, innocently, it seemed to Jimmy.
“Ah, well, no...some of the guys have been here…,” he haltingly said, “and I’ve really only been here with my folks to see my grandfather’s grave. It’s over there, past those trees.”
“Mmmm,” she strained to see. “I can’t really see much past the car lights. Maybe we can come in the daytime,” she suggested. “Maybe you could show me where he’s buried sometime...if that’s all right with you.”
“Sure, sure…anytime.” Jimmy was eager to grasp another opportunity to spend time with the lovely Marie. “I’d just have to see about getting my dad’s car.” He paused. “But at night, when you turn off the lights, you can see the stars, millions of them. Want to try it?”
“Um…well, okay, but just for a few minutes. I have to be home by ten o’clock. My folks are pretty strict about that.”
Jimmy turned off the engine, left the lights on for a minute longer, then dramatically turned off the switch.
“Ooh! I’m scared!” Marie said with a giggle. She inched a little closer to Jimmy. He wondered if she’d been here before.
Blackness closed around the car like a cloak. The streetlights along the main road were too far away to cast even a faint glow. It was very dark. The car’s engine noises died away, and the only sound was their breathing and the squeak of Jimmy’s leather jacket as he raised his right arm and laid it along the back of the seat.
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