Bluenose Ghosts (23 page)

This story sounded to me as though it might have centuries of tradition behind it, so I wrote to the Irish Folklore Commission and asked if they could throw any light upon it. The archivist Mr. Sean O'Sullivan, wrote in part, “The word Caney does not refer to an Irish clan. From the context, it is evident that it is a form of the Irish word caoine, which means a cry of grief or mourning. In Irish tradition the banshee (wailing fairy woman; synonymous with Death) was supposed to wail when a member of certain families (e.g. O'Keefes, O'Sullivans) died. Her wail was quite distinct from the mourning cries of the near relatives or of the “keeners,” who were in olden days employed or called upon to mourn a dead person.”

Our thanks to Mr. O'Sullivan for giving meaning to this strange custom.

The next story comes from Mill Cove. “I was coming down from Hubbards by the bridge and I saw a man. I was going to speak but I didn't know who he was. There weren't as many strangers around then as there are now. His face was like that of an ordinary man and he wore a suit of overalls and a dark hat. He just stood there and didn't move and there was something about him I didn't understand. I told another man about him and he knew. He was dead.”

Mr. Bert Power of East Ship Harbour shook his head and said paradoxically, “I don't believe in ghosts; never did. But one time there was diphtheria at my sister's house and the doctor said it would be all right for me to go in if I had rum or brandy first, so I asked Will Chisholm to get me a gallon of brandy in Halifax. He went by boat and was due back on Friday before going to Spry Bay, so I went down to meet him. On the road there was a spotted dog in the wheel rut and I walked right up to it. The dog never moved, but looked right up at me. I walked all round him and then went on and when I got down about fifty yards there was this same dog in the centre of the road and a chill come over me and I walked around him again. Then something else caught my eye and I looked towards the lower gate and a barrel rolled up the hill right in front of me. I could of picked it up but I got that scared I went home and my father said, “What's wrong?” but I wouldn't tell him. I couldn't sleep all night and first thing in the morning we got word me chum Will was drowned. He was drowned right alongside his own door, and that barrel, it could have been the brandy. So I don't believe in ghosts, but there was something come—something to it.”

A man at East River Point was so troubled by a “black thing” that blocked his passage on the road that he went back to his house for his gun, intending to shoot it and be done with it. His family would not let him have the gun, for they were afraid of what might happen. He may have been well advised because at the Allen Hartley's house I was told of a man who used to pass a graveyard at Eastern Passage on his way to work. He kept seeing a man there and decided to speak to him. There was no reply so he told his wife about it and said he was going to shoot the ghost. He would say, “If you're dead I can't hurt you, and if you're alive you should be out here on the road and not in the graveyard.” He did this, and got the worst of it. The next morning it was not the ghost that was found, but the man who had shot him. He was lying dead in the road with three bullets in his heart.

In the same house they told of a man down the eastern shore who borrowed something from his neighbour which he had not returned when the neighbour died. Every night after that when he came home from work he would meet the dead man and he was greatly troubled. He said to his wife, “I've got to speak to him,” and he did. Nobody ever knew what happened, but the consequences were plainly seen, for when he returned “his two eyes were twisted and his mouth was twisted, and he never spoke again.”

Here too I learned of an old belief in the Hartlan family where I had gone for my first songs. It probably came from the German side of their family, and was said to have been practised by some of the older generation. They had claimed that if they put the lights out on Christmas Eve and sat in a room together, the dead of the family would come back and sit with them. Not, I should think, the most pleasant way to spend a Christmas Eve.

There is an old belief that grass will not grow on certain spots, and this is borne out by another story from this source. They said that there had been a mutiny at sea many years ago and several men were hanged for it on George's Island. One of these men said he had nothing to do with the killings on board; he had only taken some of the gold. His protests did no good, and he was hanged with the rest but, before the noose was drawn, he declared that the ground upon which the people stood to watch his hanging would never be able to grow grass.

Mr. Richard Hartlan, who gave me much of my first instruction in folklore, at one time owned a five dollar gold piece which he kept wrapped in a black handkerchief. There was a stone wall on their property where a ghost used to like to sit and it was near the Ghost House that they later abandoned. Mr. Hartlan enjoyed sitting there too and one day he took the gold piece along and sat with it in his hand. He may have been dreaming of the pirate ships that had left chests on Moser's Island and Back Cole Breaker on the Cow Bay shore. At any rate he absent-mindedly laid the coin and handkerchief down and forgot about them. When he remembered them a few hours later he hastened back, but handkerchief and coin had disappeared. The whole family came out to look. In those days there would have been neither visitors nor prowlers, so they assumed the ghost had taken it, particularly as it made only one more appearance and was never seen again.

A man at Upper Tantallon said, “My father had to cross a brook to see my mother when he was courting, and it's an old belief that a ghost can't cross water. Everybody knows that, and another thing everybody knows is that animals can see a ghost that humans can't see, and they see it sooner. This time he had a little black dog with him. They were coming along the bank and this little dog was fighting something all the way. It was behind my father but he couldn't see anything at all and when they came to the brook it stopped. Father always felt that he'd have got hurt that night if the dog hadn't been there, because he was sure it was a ghost and that it would have attacked him. That was the only time it ever happened to him.”

Some years ago Dean Lloyd of All Saints Cathedral in Halifax passed away and he was mourned greatly by all who knew him. Two weeks after his death one of his fellow clergy–men was attending the Sunday evening service when he saw the Dean go into the pulpit and look over the congregation as he always did. He thought his affection for his old friend and his sense of loss in the place where he had seen him so often had caused him to imagine this, so he made no mention of it. Some time later, however, one of the ladies of the congregation told him she had experienced a strange thing, and described exactly what he had seen. They checked the time and the service, and they were the same.

Seabright seems to go in for very tall ghosts. “A Seabright man used to go out every night. He was a bold old fellow and he'd never go home till twelve. He got to Prang's Lot by a brook one night and it was light enough for him to see an awful big man standing there. He was as tall as a tree and had arms like logs and he was all speckled. The Seabright man was very frightened but nothing happened to him and he was able to go on his way. There had been something happen there once like a death.”

At Sambro the Gilkies told of a Scottish soldier who hanged himself at Sambro Light and, after that, people saw his ghost for years, and they could hear him throwing casks around. Enos Hartlan may have been right when he said “a person that takes his own life isn't happy.”

A mystery from Sheet Harbour goes this way. “As kids we used to go back to Heffler's gold mine and one day there was a chap from Halifax named Fraser with us. A storm was coming up that might have caused it, though I don't see how it could, but the most beautiful music I've ever heard came from the sky. The boys heard it and were petrified.”

A Shelburne mystery did not take long to solve. “A number of us went out once with a buckboard and coming home we had to get out to fix the harness. While we were there a man with a long grey overcoat came out of the ground and stood with his arm on the wagon and looked at us. Then he went to the buckboard and did the same. There were prominent people among us and they were all mystified because he was so well dressed, and it would seem that some one would have known him. It was not until we left that one of them said, ‘Do you realize that was Morvan's Hill we were on?' We remembered then that this hill had a ghost.”

I have mentioned before that many pedlars seem to have been murdered in this Province. One was on the Hollow Mountain Road and passersby say they hear a singing and it says, “Don't kill me.” The pedlar at Thorne's Cove is satisfied to jump out and frighten people, while another at Green Oak in Colchester County does no more than make an appearance. About a mile from the Causeway linking Cape Breton with the peninsula a dog that is not a dog is supposed to be the spirit of a murdered pedlar, while another pedlar whistles. They never seem to be vindictive, but just want to draw attention to their sorry plight.

Mrs. McGillivray of Marion Bridge said, “Cousin Catherine was dying and I was there. The pillows were behind her and we were supporting her, and as she was passing she said in a surprised voice as though she were greeting some one she hadn't expected to see,‘Papa!' Was she seeing her father through the veil that separates this world from the next?” This story makes me think of my own father's passing and how he suddenly sat up in bed, weak as he was, and looked far beyond me as at some distant goal. In that moment I became aware that I could be of no further use to him. He seemed to be struggling to keep his hold on the life he had loved, but a force far greater had taken possession of him. This must have lasted for several minutes during which time he breathed but was no longer a part of this mortal life. It is not at all uncommon for the aged to see their loved ones around them before they die. My mother saw various deceased members of her family. Whether they actually see them, or just go back to childhood memories, who of us can say?

HEADLESS GHOSTS

Spectacle Island
lies about ten miles south of Yarmouth and ten miles west of Pubnico. Mr. Stanislas Pothier said, “The story was given by word of mouth from an old Frenchman who told some friends of mine to go to Spectacle Island and they would find a treasure. First thing they would find an oak tree and they would find a big flat rock with a row of beach rocks all around it. They were to go down further until they found another rock and, a little beyond that, they would come to Captain Kidd's gold. Seven or eight men went and it came out as he said, and they dug to the third rock. He had said if they found the rock there would be snakes and lizards come out, but they were not to mind them but to grab the gold. It was all going nicely when one man got out of the hole and he put a bucket over his head. They looked up and thought he was a headless man and they were so scared they ran away. But many times since then they've seen men walking around on that island when there wasn't supposed to be anyone there. Two different men were on the island and they knew they were alone and they saw a third man. He was seen again only a couple of years ago by two men who were sleeping on the island, but there was nobody there. There used to be sounds of a ship's anchors, but that hasn't been heard for years. One Monday morning a bunch of fishermen and many women and children saw a man on the island and there was no dory and nobody there. They used to make a lot of it.”

One evening I climbed up a very steep hill at Glen Margaret where a charming woman lived who told me a number of stories. Among other entries in my note book is the following. “Father said when he was a young man he used to go out in the evenings. At the first end of Hackett's Cove at Devany's Brook there was a story that people were always seeing a woman come up out of the water with something white over her like a sheet and she had no head. One night he met two girls running towards him and they said at the three brooks—Devany's Brook that is—they had seen this woman come up out of the water with no head. That's all I know about it. I guess nobody stayed long enough to find out anything more about her.”

Another headless woman is one of my rare cases of suicide. This was a Mrs. McLaughlin of Victoria Beach who got up one morning many years ago and washed and dressed all the children, including the baby. It is so long since it happened that the motive for her suicide has been forgotten if, indeed, it was ever known. After finishing her chores she walked to the cliff and jumped over. Since then a headless woman wearing an apron has been seen there. Also, but probably having no connection with Mrs. McLaughlin, dogs without heads have appeared there.

At the foot of the long hill going to Seabright a headless woman has been reported, but nothing else is known about her.

Liverpool is the scene of our next story. “At Cape La Have a man had to go out at twelve o'clock at night on the first day of March to put a buoy down. From the same village another man went out at the same time to mow a swath, and what you mowed was your own piece. Well, this night as they were going to their different businesses they met, and it was at the spot where there is an old cannon. They both swore they saw an old-timer sitting on top of one of the old cannons in old-fashioned clothes and no head on. He was wearing a long split-tail coat.”

Another headless man was reported from Victoria Beach. “He used to be seen up by Big Pond. They claim there is money there and the headless man is an indication.”

The headless man who appeared at Upper Granville came mounted on horseback. He could be seen riding past a certain house with his head carried under his arm, and people often refused to pass over the bridge at night for fear of seeing him.You could hardly blame them.Twice I was told about this unwelcome visitor in Granville but he seems to have done nothing more than frighten the beholder. At Elgin, New Brunswick, I heard of a covered bridge at Bennett Lake where the ghost of a headless man used to come out.