Bluenose Ghosts (33 page)

For the present that is where the matter rests. They have promised to let us know if the sounds return when we will go there for a night or more if necessary. This ghost is unpredictable and never comes at specified times. I cannot say that I look forward to it with any great joy, but I would like to get to the bottom of it. I shall probably face it with chattering teeth and knocking knees, but not alone. Oh no! I'm not that brave. And who knows? With a prayer of exorcism in hand we may be able to release some poor earthbound soul to an eternal rest and, at the same time, make life a joyous thing again for the present owners. Confidentially however I will admit that if this can be done by other means than mine I will not cry with frustration. Would you?

This is not the only case we have of houses in which blankets have been removed at night. They are usually pulled off rudely and without warning. A Clarke's Harbour ghost seems to have been given to tidy habits. Here Miss Beth McNintch was sleeping in a room where an older woman had died two years before. Up to that time all had been quiet here. This night however she had her cat at the foot of the bed. “It was daylight, about eight o'clock in the morning, and suddenly the clothes were pulled off and folded over evenly as though in pleats. They went all the way to the foot of the bed and at this moment the cat jumped and fled from the room.” This was not repeated because she made no attempt to sleep again, unlike the father of my New Brunswick singer Mr. Dornan, who was sleeping many years ago in a New York house. He was wakened with a heavy weight on his chest; then the bedclothes were pulled down. He pulled them up and went back to sleep only to have them pulled down again, this time to his feet. Now fully awake, once more he pulled them up, and had a good grip on them. He held them as tightly as he could, but they were jerked away and he was left completely uncovered. He asked who was there but received no answer so he swore at the unseen intruder, also without any response. He never slept there again, and he said it was his one encounter with the supernatural.

The story is told of a man who taught school in Antigonish and who roomed a short distance from the town. In this house the lights would flicker and go out, the bedclothes were lifted above the bed, and the bed would shake. He said nothing to the people who owned the house, but he found a room elsewhere and left. Eventually he told some of his friends about it and they thought it very funny. They dared him to go back, so he did. The owners were delighted and probably wondered why he had left and then returned. By this time the ghostly visitant had retired and nothing more occurred.

Another house with a history of bedclothes being removed was at South Uniacke. This was a big two-and-a-half-storied flat roofed house that used to be a tavern, and a woman is said to have been killed there after a fight. “At night we would hear a rumbling. There was a winding stairs in that house that went all the way to the roof and there was a nice place up there to sit. When we first moved there we would hear a noise on the roof and go up to investigate but, by the time we got there, the noise would be downstairs. It sounded like a barrel going bumpety bump when it was downstairs, but like cats when it was on the roof. The light in our room would go out and there'd be nothing wrong with it, and once, when I was there alone, the door opened and shut.

“My husband knew something about the house he wouldn't tell me, any more than that I was not to go to the back end of it. Any time we went up to the roof we always took the baby with us because we didn't like leaving it alone. The people who had lived there before us couldn't stay, and we heard later that children who slept there after we left had the clothes ripped right off their beds. When we were there I provided meals for lumbermen and sometimes the men slept there. It was a big house and in good repair. One night there were so many of these men that the place was full and some of them had to sleep on the floor. They were still awake when a sound disturbed them and, from the one dim light that was kept burning, they saw six men in old-fashioned clothes walking through the house. They used to say too that at milking time people would hear the tinkling sound of cowbells, and several nights when the men were playing cards the door would open and shut with no wind, a stout latch, and no person to touch it.”

There are people who get used to sounds made in their homes by phantom visitors and look upon their arrival as a sign of good fortune. At East Ferry near Tiverton one house had an occasional welcome ghost of this kind and another, where a man lived alone, had one that was there most of the time. It was company for him and, although they never talked together, he was glad to have him around.

Such cases are the exception and certainly did not apply to a house in a residential section of Halifax. About seventy years ago a well-known family named Tuttle lived there. Miss Tuttle, who was elderly at the time she talked to me, remembered as a child being in a room and something white going through it which left a cold breath of air in its wake. She was old enough at the time to notice when this happened that the older women in the house were very frightened. When she grew older, her mother told her that the fire tongs were often moved about in that house and that in one room they were particularly active. Also that often she had no sooner put the children to bed than the clothes would be off them, but not cast aside as a child would do. This was a frequent occurrence. (I often pass this house today and wonder if these things still happen. I doubt it, for it has been occupied continuously and has a prosperous look.)

The cold breath of air left behind by the figure in white reminds me of an Oyster Pond house and an icy hand felt there. “My daughter and her husband had a rented house. They had a little boy and they wanted me to stay with him one evening while they went to a big supper and dance at Head Jeddore. It was a rainy night and I didn't like being there alone so I told them to be sure to shut all the doors and windows and, when they left, I tried them to see that this had been done.

It was some time before the baby went to sleep but, after I'd got him settled, I thought I'd lay down on the couch in the kitchen beside him. After I'd been there just a little while, and before I'd had time to fall asleep, there was a hand like ice came over my face. I opened my eyes and it went swish into the next room and over the piano. I got up and thought, ‘What can that be?' I didn't think of a ghost, but I was very frightened and I got the baby ready to leave in case we had to get out for any reason. When the young people came home at twelve o'clock and I went to let them in, my teeth were chattering. Jack said, ‘You're cold. Why didn't you keep the fire going?' I didn't tell them what happened but I had to sleep there because it was pouring rain, and the room I slept in was just above the dining-room where the icy hand had seemed to come from.

“Soon after that I was at Aunt Lide's house. She was going there to stay and I said, ‘Aunt Lide, I wouldn't be you and stay in that house tonight,' and her daughter said, ‘Aunt Jessie, what did you see?' I told them and then Aunt Lide told what had happened to her one time when she was there. She said she was sitting by the window and the window pane took to shaking. Her hand was steady, so she tried holding it against the window but the pane still shook. She said the same thing had happened one night when Elsie and Jack were there alone, while, at the same time, the pump kept running and nothing they could do would stop it. The house had a name of people moving out almost as fast as they moved in and somebody asked the owner one time why that was.

“‘There's nobody lives in that house can live there in peace,' he said, ‘because there was a family there once who had turned their own father out and had treated him cruelly. While he was still alive things began to happen. First a son had gone to sleep when he heard a racket like someone at the window, so he got his gun and went out on the road. It was a beautiful moonlight night and he couldn't see anyone about, so he went back to the house but he didn't even try to sleep. Nothing happened until another night when he was reading the paper. After a while he got sleepy and laid down on the couch. The paper was still in his hand when it was whipped off on the floor. There was no wind to have blown it there. He picked it up and put it on the table and whip, off it went again. This happened three times,' he said. ‘When this same son was buried and they were ready to take the coffin out, there was the awfullest racket under the house like a beam falling. Everybody heard it, and three men went down to investigate, but nothing was out of place. It happened just under his body. They allowed that whatever it was, went out of the house with him. It had been a very unhappy house and something of that must have remained when Jack and Elsie were there, but it must be all over now because the people in the house today have never heard anything.' ”

Cornwall tells of a fine old couple who had been treated badly by their sons. After they died, voices were heard at night, and the sons were forced to build a new house. They moved out, but the house continued to show signs of occupation by showing lights at night as though they were still living there. In Charlottetown Mr. Dougald McKinnon said that it was a belief that the spirit of a person who oppressed the poor might be around for generations. It would be heard going through the house slamming doors and moaning, but it would not be seen, and it could not rest.

There is a house at Thorne's Cove where slaves used to be kept and were said to have been treated cruelly. Also at this same spot a pedlar lost his life. Pedlars seem to have been fair game, judging by the number reported to have been murdered. It must have been a temptation, for they carried what money they made with them, and they would be defenceless on a lonely road. One man who passed this particular house would do so only in daylight because he said when he went there at night a pedlar always came out and chased him. Whether it was the pedlar or the slaves who caused the hauntings inside the house has not been determined, but the doors rattled there, their latches lifted, and there were strange noises that had no meaning. Mr. Abram Thorne came home one night and had just got into bed when he heard a sound in the hall “like the jumping and shuffling of two men. I thought it was my father playing a trick but when I got up to see, father and mother were both asleep in their bed and there was no one to be seen. I often seen doors open and close in that house and no explanation for it. Only certain ones would hear and see them. Others would live in the house for years and never hear a thing.”

A curious legend has grown up about a stick that murdered a pedlar at a place in Cape Breton called Slios a Bhrochan. Here, according to my informant, a professor, the stick can be chopped up at night but, in the morning, it is always back in its place intact.

An interesting haunting took place in a house about a mile and a half from St. Croix towards Ellershouse, where Mr. Freeman Harvey is supposed to have been murdered by an Englishman named Stanley. “This Stanley used to do a lot of buying and selling. He was a small man, very polished and polite, but he must have been strong because Mr. Harvey was strong too, although at that time he was deaf. We think they must have had quite a tussle. This would be about seventy years ago.

“The reason Stanley murdered Harvey was because he wanted to buy his place. Mr. Harvey was a tax collector and Stanley got in with him and then wanted to buy him out. Harvey got talked round to selling, but he wasn't in any hurry about it and thought he'd like to go away first on a trip. Stanley didn't like that idea and he got impatient. Maybe he didn't intend to go that far but he killed him, and cut his head off as well, so he must have been carrying a knife.

“When Harvey was dead, Stanley had nothing to take the body away in so he pushed it into the cellar under some potato bags and he put the head in a bag under a bucket—a wooden measure.Then he moved a family in with him named Fisher and told them Harvey had gone away.They had a friend named McCarthy who lived with them and they all drank a lot. They were there for a whole week and ate potatoes from the bag without knowing what was under it.

“After the murder, noises began in the kitchen at night that sounded like wrestling. The Fishers would investigate and the noises would move to another room. They allowed the fight had begun in the front hall because there were splashes of blood there and there was a bloody imprint on the wall that nobody was ever able to cover over. It would come through paint or whitewash or whatever they put on. It was the same in the cellar later on, for no matter how much they dug, the blood could not be dug out of the spot where Stanley had put the body.

“After a while the Fishers got suspicious and McCarthy informed on Stanley and suggested that Harvey had been murdered. Nobody paid attention until one day when Fisher went down the cellar. Until then Stanley had always got the potatoes himself and wouldn't let anybody else go down, but they decided it was time they looked around themselves. The first thing they found was a boot under the potatoes, and then they gave the alarm. Stanley had bought a wagon intending to take the body away, but it was discovered before he could get it off his hands. He confessed then, and it all came out. Other people lived in the house later but, until the time that it burned down, the blood stains remained to remind them of the murder.”

In another old house in the same village the owners used to hear knockings on the floor and table, and the local people thought there had been sudden death here following a fight between the French and English. The sounds went on for quite a while and then stopped.

Nova Scotia fishing craft have always sailed beyond our own waters and on one of these cruises Mr. Doyle of West Jeddore was in the crew. “I saw a man. We were in the Labrador. We started down there in a barque and she went ashore. There was a little island with a factory on it so we went in there to spend the night and we left our provisions in the dory.