Bluenose Ghosts (34 page)

“In this factory the place was full of cages with just enough alleyway to go through. We went upstairs to the boss's room. There were some big boilers abreast of that room and the window was clear so there was plenty of light while it lasted. We went in and sat down and sang songs. I'd sing and then my brother'd sing. There were three of us. After a while we decided to lay down and go to sleep and we each found a bag to use for a pillow. By and by we heard a boat rowing. It was moonlight then and calm and my brother went to the window but he couldn't see any boat. We got laying still and we heard it again and it was getting closer and we still couldn't see any boat. Then we heard it next to the window. It was light as day, but no boat to be seen. Then we heard it again and this time he was up to our dory.

“By now we didn't like it much but we laid down and tried to get some sleep. Then punkedy punk we heard the man from the boat in the factory below. He carried on for an hour and I couldn't get any sleep. I was lying there looking towards the door and first thing I see a tall man with a slouch hat and two tossels hung down from the hat and his face was white. He stood and looked down at me brother Joe quite a spell. Then he came to me and I looked right up at him. Then he looked at Cedlock and he went to the window and done the same thing coming back. You couldn't hear a sound from his feet as you would of if he'd been human. When he left us and went downstairs again I took the gun and woke the other men. By this time he had stopped his noise so we decided to sit up and make a fire in the stove.

“At last I got so hungry and thirsty that I couldn't stand it any longer and I went out those long steps and through that alleyway and when I opened the door it shut behind me though I had purposely left it open. I got to the dory and I got a big drink of water. Then I got the grub and got the door open again; I kept going and it was just like he was grabbing me from behind. All the time I felt something trying to pull me back, but I kept going and finally reached the other men. For the rest of the night we took watch about and kept the fire on but towards daylight Joe said, ‘It's all right now,' and he went sound asleep and he knew nothing more till he found himself standing up on the floor. He never knew how he got there, nor did we. My brother Joe died quite a spell after that and he was the first to go. Whether this had anything to do with it or not I don't know, but I have often wondered if that was why Joe was the first one he looked at.”

In the days when Devil's Island had some fifty inhabitants there was one house that was noted for the extraordinary things that happened in it. This treeless little island at the mouth of Halifax Harbour, one mile in circumference, was then a thriving fishing community. Small boats were used, and men would fish singly or with a companion. The Atlantic Ocean was at their door, so they did not have far to go.

One day when Henry Henneberry was out, his wife heard him return and walk into the kitchen. The flopping of his rubber boots was a familiar sound. At that particular moment, as she heard him moving noisily about, he was drowned. In his absence she had been painting the floor, and his footsteps appeared in the fresh paint. She had also washed a mat that morning and had left it lying on another floor and his footprint was plainly outlined here as well.

Fires used to occur in this house in a mysterious manner. You could put your hand on the shingles and they would not be hot even though you could see the fire burning. All of the people who have lived in the house have been Roman Catholics, and they always put palm in the rafters for protection. This palm, blessed in the church and given out on Palm Sunday, would never be touched although the fire would burn all around it. Different families lived in the house, and they all had the same experience. One man described the fires as five or six blue blazes that were not “natural” fires. One family insisted that the house collapsed on them one night and that they got out of bed and said their rosaries after which the house went back to its proper shape again. They even tried putting the house on a different foundation but it still caught fire, this time under the roof. Here, with no water supply except from wells, it would be a major calamity to have a house catch fire because it would be almost impossible to put it out, so this is further proof that the fires had some strange unexplainable quality.

One day another Mrs. Henneberry was sitting beside the kitchen window with her baby daughter Henrietta beside her when she saw her husband fall out of his boat. He must have been knocked over by the boom because the boat kept coming towards the island as though he were still in it. She was very ill after he was drowned and lived only a few years but, during that time, she often heard her husband and mother calling her. Friends staying with her would hear the voices too, while others would hear nothing. She could not be left alone, so one evening two of the men went over to sit with her. “I was sitting by the window on the south side when all of a sudden there was one of the awfullest odours that ever could be smelt by anybody came in through the window. It came and went, almost like a flash of lightning, and we both smelt it. When her mother died Henrietta was hale and hearty but when we came back from the funeral she was sitting up in her high chair dead and nobody knew why. After that they locked the house up for nine months and then Dave Henneberry moved in. One night his friend Alf Welch was visiting him when they jumped almost to the roof from the sound of lumber moving. There was lumber in the house at the time, but it lay neatly in its place. Mr. Welch was so frightened that he had to be taken home.”

Dave stayed in that house three years and then his brother John moved in. During John's occupancy there were three fires and the family heard unaccountable noises. Then Mr. Edwards took it and tried shifting furniture around upstairs and all manner of things to make it habitable, but the ghost would not be quieted. One midnight as they were leaving after a party one of the men had his hand on the door latch when he heard three knocks. They were heard only by the owner and the man who told about it. They came a second time, but there was no one asking for admittance and anyhow, on this island where the people were all related, nobody waited to knock but just walked in. The third time the knocks came they were heard from inside the house and by all the assembled company.

These, however, were mild compared with what the children told. Some were frightened because they saw a man in oilskins walking through the rooms, but the worst experience came to a young son of one of the occupants. He would come to his father in the night and say there was a baby in bed with him all dressed in white and that he couldn't pacify it. This baby was supposed to be Henrietta.

The house was finally demolished, but some of the neighbours decided to make use of the wood from which it had been built. Almost immediately they had bad luck. Nobody ever liked the house. One couple who lived there always had something happen on the twentieth of the month. The Islanders say that one of the early owners of the house was drowned while he still owed a small debt upon it and they think if someone had settled the debt the disturbances would have stopped. As far as I am concerned personally, I regret that I was not more interested in the house when I was staying on the island. Every waking moment was devoted to collecting songs. Fortunately I jotted down most of the things they told me, and I can recall the fear in the voices of both men and women as we walked by and they talked about it. I am sure there were many more experiences that I might have had first hand if I had realized then the importance of every slightest detail connected with the haunting of a house. In those days it looked to me like a bleak, unpainted, and unfriendly frame dwelling, and I was glad to leave it to the wind and the weather and any family unfortunate enough to have to live there. “The house is gone now and so are the people; there is no one left but the lightkeeper and his family.

People brought up on stories of the spirit world do not necessarily look for them at every corner. Nevertheless when things take place that follow certain familiar patterns they are not slow in coming to a conclusion. Men who hunt and fish and spend most of their lives in the woods or on the water are not as a rule afraid of the dark. They are accustomed to bunking down in all kinds of places and give it little thought. I have been amazed however in talking to retired sea captains to have them occasionally admit that there are certain houses they would never sleep in again, due to visitations they have experienced there. Guides too have their stories like this one from Moser's River.

“I was up early in the fall one year on the trapping ground and I got acquainted with a fellow and he let me have his camp. It was brand new and beside a big lake; Liscomb Lake it was and I went up early in the afternoon. There was an old dam there, and by the outlet there was a boat turned over and no oars in it. I needed the boat because the camp was on an island. I hunted up a pole to use for oars and tipped the boat over. Then I let the water out and rowed the best I could with the pole to the island. When I got there the door of the camp was open and I thought that very strange. I cut myself some wood for the night and then I went inside. There I saw a bench upset on the floor and a cup and saucer and a piece of bread with one bite taken out of it. A bucket of water stood on the floor and there was a bag with bread in it that must have been a month old. I began to think about the boat having drifted down to the dam and the door being open and things so upset and I thought it must have been left in a hurry. I remembered too that the owner hadn't been out for a long time, so whatever it was; he wouldn't know about it.

“The door was big and heavy and I thought I'd feel better if I closed it and I even put a bar against it. There were strawberries there in a bottle and I ate these with some bread I'd brought with me and I put a fire on and made a cup of tea. There were no blankets, but I'm used to sleeping in the open, so I had a smoke and then laid down on the bed and went to sleep. It didn't seem that I'd been asleep long before I woke up and felt cold. I got up and found that the door I'd closed and barred so carefully was wide open. I had set the table on its legs and put the mouldy bread back on it, but now the table was upset, the bread was back on the floor just as I'd found it, and the wood that I'd moved was back where it had been when I arrived.

“I shut the door again and put another big bar against it and I piled all the wood I could get and put it on the table and shoved that against the door too. I had another smoke and went to sleep a second time and again I woke to find the door open and all the things put back as I'd found them. No animal could have done it, and certainly no human being, and anyhow a guide like me wakes up at the slightest sound and it wasn't noise that woke me but the cold air from the open door. I got up and closed the door again and made up another fire, but this time I decided I'd had enough sleep for one night. After that nothing else happened and I left after daylight.

“The next year I went back, but this time I had a friend with me. When we got up to the camp we saw a sign on the door and the sign said, ‘This place is haunted.' Somebody else must have slept there and had the same experience. I never was able to get to the bottom of it.” (If this had happened to those of us who live in the city we would at once have written to the owner and started an investigation. Many of our country people are not like that but will await a hoped-for meeting. If this fails to take place nothing more is done about it, even though the desire to talk it over is very great. Our guide and the owner had never crossed paths again, and so the mystery remained unsolved.)

We go now to what was known as the old Robinson cottage on the New Ross road. Mr. Croft said, “We'd been told that it was haunted but we were young and not afraid. One night we were sitting in a large room on the ground floor when we heard what was like a man with heavy boots on going upstairs. There were people living on the other side of the house and I wouldn't have thought anything about it if I hadn't heard stories about the house, so I thought I'd see if one of them had gone up. They hadn't, so we got axes and knives and clubs and went upstairs but we couldn't find our man. Some weeks after, we heard him coming down the stairs again.

“One night I'd been shopping at Chester Basin and had just come back when I heard some womankind run through the hall and brush against the wall. Women wore long skirts then, and hers made a swishing sound as she ran. I thought it was a friend of my wife's playing a joke, so I went through to the kitchen. I said to myself, ‘I'll put my parcels down and light a lamp and find her.' I hunted through every part of the house and, all the while, our little dog was barking so hard I thought it was going crazy. I couldn't find anybody.Then I thought it must have been my wife, but she'd been in the next house all the time.

“That was bad, but the worst of all happened to a man from a vessel who stayed here before we took the house, and he used to sleep upstairs. There had been a child born in that house and it was known to have done a lot of screaming. This man heard the child in the night and in the morning he asked the woman of the house what was the matter with her child that it screamed and cried all night. At that time there were a lot of ships' knees here and they were stored in the house,When the last ones were finally moved away they found what they thought must be the body of this child. It must have been murdered and hidden away. My wife heard of these stories and they got on her nerves so much at night that she would dream of a child with nothing but bones coming down the chimney hole asking for food. We decided before long that we'd had enough of that house and we moved away. In time it was burned down because no one could live there for long.”

The next house is still standing so I cannot reveal its location. “I was born in Amherst and, when I was a few months old, we moved to a great shell of a house. It had been partly built by a man whose son went overseas in the First World War. It wasn't finished when he left, and his father kept working on it until the son was killed. He abandoned it then and eventually sold it to my father in 1919. Daddy was a carpenter, so he made a very nice looking dwelling of it.