Bluenose Ghosts (12 page)

Mrs. Hirtle came honestly by her ability to see things. Her mother had the same faculty for she had been lying in bed one night when she felt a cold hand come down and pass over her face. She sat up in bed greatly startled to see her aunt standing over her. The aunt said, “Fare thee well.” Mrs. Hirtle's mother was not frightened enough by the occurrence to call the family but, in the morning when she came downstairs, she announced that her aunt was dead. Word came later than this was so.

At Annapolis Royal a woman of English descent was given a visual warning. She had an eleven-month-old baby, to all appearances in perfect health. “One night I was awakened from my sleep and saw a little white coffin in front of the bed. I woke my husband and said, ‘I'm afraid something's going to happen to my baby.' He laughed at me, supposing I'd been dreaming. The next day for no known reason my baby died in my arms.”

A woman of French descent at Boutilier's Point had this to tell. “My mother had been sent for to stay with my grandmother who was dying. One night all of a sudden the lamp shade at our house came apart and the crinkly part at the top flew up two feet and then came back and set on top of the shade. Grandmother died at Indian Point at that time.”

A mother at Oyster Pond said, “The night my husband's father died there were several of us here. I went upstairs to see that my babies were all right and the three-year-old opened her eyes and said, ‘Mama, was grandpa here because I saw him beside my bed and he looked right down on me but didn't say anything. He had on a white shirt.' He was very fond of the children but, as for being in a white shirt, that seemed very strange because he so seldom wore one. The child was sure she was awake when she saw him. That night he died and of course, he was laid out in a white shirt.”

Tancook Island, where the people are largely of German descent, reported this amazing phenomenon. “When Sebastian died, when his last breath came, the whole shape of him came out of his mouth like he was a young man, no longer old and wrinkled, and it went out the door. Just before he died three little taps came to the door, just a couple of minutes before. He must have heard them because he looked to the door. Sebastian's mother was seen twice by two women after she died.”

A young man at Jordan Falls had gone to sleep after walking home from Lockport and was wakened by a light in his room. A picture of a girl friend, though not the one he was engaged to marry, floated through his room. It was not a dream, but a vision, “and later he learned she had died at that time.”

Two extraordinary stories were confided to me in the summer of 1956, both by rather shy, gentle ladies of more than usual intelligence. The first story I think had never been told to anyone before, but I was permitted to use it here as long as no names were mentioned.

“My husband had multiple sclerosis. He has always been a good-living man but has never been particularly religious. He is well educated, but not an intellectual. The doctors thought an operation might help him and he was sent to Montreal. He has always been perfectly clear in his mind. He has only once mentioned what happened, and has never referred to it again. I respect his silence because it must be a wonderfully precious memory. He said that one night Christ came and sat upon his bed. No word was spoken, but he felt a deep peace.”

Think of it. A person like that does not make up such a story, nor did the next one, told by the second lady.

“When Rev. Mr. Hares was in Windsor I attended a Whitsunday celebration of holy communion in the Anglican church. He was a deeply spiritual man. As he was preparing the elements I looked up and was startled to see a brilliant tongue of flame that rested for a brief period on the top of his head and then vanished. It did not move nor flutter, but lay flat, just as it must have done on the heads of the disciples. I watched in fear and my knees trembled. Then I looked to see what the other parishioners were making of it but I realized they hadn't observed it. The vision seemed to be for my eyes alone and I was greatly upset. For a long while I kept it to myself, then finally told Mr. Hares. He was most disturbed. We discussed it and agreed it couldn't have been a shaft of light through a stained glass window, nor was there anything else to explain it. This took place about a year before he died.”

The stories of Christ's appearance and the tongue of flame came to me by the merest chance, for I had never met either of these ladies before. I have wondered since how many people have seen or heard things which they have kept locked in their own hearts for fear that the telling of them might result in their being ridiculed or misunderstood. A vision is not a thing to be talked about lightly, so it is possible that there are others who have experienced equally extraordinary phenomena about which we will never hear.

HINDSIGHT

We have just seen
how some people have visions of future events. There are others who have looked back and have seen before their astonished and unwilling eyes a scene from out of the past. Mr. Earl Morash of East Chester who has had one such experience, calls it looking back into time. This is far more unusual than the perception of things to come, and it can be terrifying. It is best explained by a life-long resident of Annapolis Royal who told it as a legend of her family.

“When my grandmother was a young girl about the year 1830 or 1835, there were soldiers here. One evening when the officers entertained as they so often did in those days, she met a young man and danced with him all evening. They jokingly made an engagement to go horseback riding the next morning and, although they had spoken in jest, my grandmother took the invitation seriously, as indeed was intended. She therefore got ready and waited with more than usual pleasure for the young man to appear. Time went on and he failed to come and she was very displeased. When he finally arrived he looked ashen and distressed. He was full of apologies and told a story that none of them believed. He said, ‘I spent the night at the Inn and, after I had been asleep for a while, I woke up and heard somebody fumbling at my door. The door was bolted on the inside, so I knew nobody could get in. But they did get in, not only one man but two. I noticed particularly how they were dressed. They both wore top boots turned down, long military coats, and tricorn hats with plumes. (Uniforms of this kind might be French or English of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Both were garrisoned at different times at Annapolis Royal.) They appeared to be very gallant gentlemen. Then without a word to me, or any sign that they were aware of my presence, they took off their coats, drew their swords, and had a duel right there in my room. I was in such a state of terror that I couldn't speak, and I could do nothing but watch in a horrid fascination. The duel went on until one man ran the other through with his sword, and then wiped the bloody blade on the counterpane. Then, as though that were not enough, he picked the body up and threw it out the window.'

“Well, how my grandmother laughed, for she supposed the young man had made the story up as a means of retreat from an embarrassing situation. Nothing would induce her to take it seriously although his white face and nervous demeanour should have been indication enough. The story has been told in our family ever since, and years later when the Royal Bank was built, the body of a man was found dressed as this officer had been described. The Inn where he spent the night, was near this spot.”

It is questionable whether the body that was found was this man or another, for at this point the story becomes confused. There must have been two incidents, for this is what Miss Charlotte Perkins, historian of Annapolis Royal, and I concluded after talking together. In the story that she has written, the man glided into the room and came over to the bed, holding up the stump of a bleeding arm. Then he suddenly disappeared. Several people saw him, and their description is quite different from that in the first story, for he was dressed in a torn and defaced uniform of the Royal Engineers, and wore a helmet that was thrown back and was suspended by the chinstrap over the right shoulder. Spurs sounded as he approached the bed. Miss Perkins reports that “his face was deathly white and his eyes were bulging with pain. He seemed to be searching for someone and, in his left hand, he carried an unsheathed cavalry sword. He then raised his bleeding arm which was severed at the wrist.”

Miss Perkins' account is that of an unhappy spirit who was probably unable to rest until his body was found and given proper burial. The first story however is an illustration of the extraordinary faculty a few people possess of seeing the reenactment of an event that has actually taken place a great many years before. And, if we are to believe one story, the other is just as credible.

Another story in which a clash of arms may have played a part was told me by Mrs. Fred Redden of Middle Musquodoboit. I had been collecting folk songs from her husband for some time before she could bring herself to talk about it, because ever since it happened she has been trying to put it out of her mind. She realized however that I would be interested, and she finally gathered up enough courage to relate her experience. It took place in our own time, during the Second Great War.

“At that time accommodation was hard to find in Halifax, but it was necessary for me to spend a few nights there. I had a friend who was living in an apartment on Barrington Street towards the north end of the city. They occupied three small rooms on the ground floor that opened out from each other and were in a row. Frances and Alex slept in one room and I slept with their child in a bed that was placed so that my head was close to the wall nearest them. There was nothing between but a thin partition. A gentle tapping on the wall from my side would have awakened them. It was poor accommodation, but the best they could get at that time.

“I must have been asleep for some hours when I was wakened by the sound of bottles clinking, knives slashing, and men talking, and they were right there in the room with me. I was terrified but, after a little while, I forced myself to open one eye to see what was happening.To my surprise I saw four men sitting around a card table. I only looked long enough to get a vivid picture of one of them. He was probably the leader. I can still see him plainly today. He was a big man with an oily look about his face, and he had a dark moustache. He was a swarthy man. One thing that I distinctly noticed was either a bright red kerchief that he was wearing, or it might have been the sleeve of his shirt. He held a long knife in his hand and the blade was silver. It was the sound of cards and the whisky bottles that woke me up.

“I saw all this in one quick look. Then I closed my eyes and lay there, paralyzed with fright for the rest of the night. I was even too frightened to call my friends or knock on the wall to wake them up.When daybreak came the noise stopped, but I still didn't open my eyes until my friend's husband came through my room on his way to work. I kept saying to myself, ‘You're not asleep, you're awake. It isn't a dream.' When Alex went through I looked up. Men, tables, and bottles were all gone, and there was nothing in the room that hadn't been there when I went to sleep, and there was no sign of any disturbance.

“When morning came I didn't say anything to my friend because I didn't want to frighten her. I'd never had an experience like that before, but I've had other things and I know I can see and hear things that don't happen to other people. I could tell that she hadn't been disturbed. I made an excuse to leave that morning, and I knew I would never sleep in that room again under any circumstance. After I got away I went to see another friend and there I told what I had seen. This friend knew the place well and said it had been a hotel at one time with a window that opened out on an alley way. At that time the apartment was all one room. One man would take it and let others in through the window and they would drink and play cards. At one time, he said, a lad of sixteen was stabbed there. Whether I would have seen the stabbing if I had kept my eyes open I don't know, but I must have looked back on an event that took place perhaps a hundred or more years before.”

As we often say, nothing is stranger than people. Mrs. Redden has often since then seen the couple whose apartment she shared with such devastating results but, although they have moved from there long since, she has never asked them if they ever had a similar experience there. Perhaps it is not so strange though when her one thought has been to forget it. Yet she has promised to do it now and, if they have anything to report, I hope to have it before this book is finished.

Mrs. Redden's story came to me long after I had taken one down from French Village that might be related to it. There is no way of checking up on the address because the man who told it is no longer living. It will also be noted that while one incident took place upon the ground floor, the other came from the top of the house.

“I slept in the attic of a house in Halifax one night and I heard bottles being moved at the end of the room where I slept and later I heard leather boots coming towards me boom boom bang, and then I see him. He looked like a big man. When I told the woman of the house in the morning, she said I wasn't the only one who'd seen him.They told me there had been a murder in that room.” Another house? Another murder? Well, possibly.

The experience of Mr. Earl Morash to which I have already referred, is of an entirely different nature, and it was shared by his charming wife. I sat in their pleasant home overlooking beautiful Mahone Bay and noticed particularly how convinced they were themselves about what they had seen. Before beginning the story I should mention that there are many islands in this bay and, in the days of sailing ships, there were many adventures experienced here.

“Years ago Indians came out of the woods and scalped the crew of an American fishing vessel. All the crew went ashore on one of the islands and the Indians killed them. The cook and the flunky were the only ones left aboard and they escaped by taking the boat and cutting the anchor rope and joining the other boats, in the harbour.