Bluenose Ghosts (3 page)

“Well, we mailed the letter, and then we sat alongside the road opposite the house and talked. It was a bright night with a full moon, and it was too nice to separate and go home so early. The Riordens' grass was about three feet high at that time, and there was a turnip field behind it. We heard a hoe strike against a rock and it attracted our attention. We sat forward then and looked and, to our surprise, we saw a Thing come crawling on its hands and feet from the southeast corner of the house. Then it stood up and we could see that it was a man. We were on the lower or south side of the road, and it was on the upper or north side. Then it went out of sight.

“In the country we often think a lot without saying anything, and anyway there's often no need of words between friends. So we just sat there and didn't say anything, and before long it came out again. We didn't move an inch, but we watched, and this time it came half-way across the road. The time for keeping quiet was over now, so I said, ‘Joe, did you see that?' He said yes, he did, and by this time it had gone back again. You might think we'd had enough, but we kept still and it didn't keep us waiting very long.

“The third time was like the others. It came out and went back. We still sat there and in a second's time it was back and it went under the cherry tree. There were more apple trees on our side of the road then than now, and they took to shaking and the apples fell to the ground. I was frightened by this time and I said, ‘Joe, I've got to go home.' That would have been all right if we'd both lived in the same direction. Probably we'd have left even before that, but we were braver together. We decided to go to Joe's house and we started to run. Joe wasn't very strong as I said, but he always thought he could run, and he could, and I was afraid I couldn't keep up with him. I guess the fear got into my feet because I ran just as fast as he did.

“When we got to his house we stood in the road and talked. We were young men and curious, and we didn't like to leave it there because it would always pester us and we'd never know what we'd seen. It didn't seem like a prank, but if it was, we wanted to settle it. Finally I said, ‘Let's go back; I'm not afraid.' I wasn't either, so long as Joe was with me. Nothing was going to hurt the two of us and besides, it's easy to be brave when you have company. ‘We'll see what it is,' I said. So we walked back and pretty soon we saw it and it was coming to meet us. It was half-way between the Riordens and the Cronins, and that's the next house, the one in between. I said, ‘There it is; don't leave me.' As I said, I figured that with two of us it couldn't do much harm and I wanted to find out what it was. I meant to touch it and then I'd know for sure if it was real. When we were within twenty feet of it I said again, ‘Joe, don't leave me,' and then I walked up till my face was close beside it. I'll never forget that moment as long as I live.

“It had on black pants, a white shirt with a hard bosom front, and black braces. Its head was bare and he was of medium size. It looked as though its eyes were deeply sunk in, and they were very bright and penetrating, and the only thing it looked like was a skeleton. I didn't touch it, although I would have even then, but Joe gave a scream and ran, and I was scared. I wasn't long overtaking him, and from that time Joe had a hard time to keep up with me. It followed and kept twenty feet behind us. There were bars on the Holmes fence. We jumped them, and the Thing cut across the field to head us off, but we got there first. We stood in the doorway and watched it for half an hour. There was a stone wall with a rotten pole on top of it, and it stood on this pole. In the morning I went out and felt that pole and, do you know, it was so rotten it just crumbled up in my hands. Why that pole was so rotten it couldn't have held a bird.

“As I said, I'll never forget that racket as long as I live, and as for Joe, he would never talk of it except to his mother and to me. A year later he was taken sick and a while later he died, and he always claimed this was a forerunner for him. We were both sure it couldn't have been anybody playing tricks because the moon was full and we could see everything as plain as in the day.

“Then a strange thing happened. Joe died of a tubercular throat, and he died hard, but he never rambled in his mind. It was always clear right to the end. But one day not long before his death Joe said to his mother, ‘My throat won't hurt me any more. He (the apparition) was here and rubbed it.' The pain had been almost more than he could bear, but from that moment it stopped and he never felt it in his throat again. I sat up with him every night, and do you know what he looked like when he died? He looked just like that man, for he was pretty well wasted away.”

Was this then the explanation, and had Joe seen his own apparition as he was to appear in death? Was that the meaning of it all?

When Mr. Thorne was through we sat quietly and, after a while, I said jokingly that he would be telling me soon what colour the man's eyes were. To my surprise he took this seriously and pondered the matter. Finally he said, “No I can't quite do that,” but his hesitation showed how vivid the experience was even to that day which would be forty or more years after the event.

When the story was over Mrs. Thorne gave us a hot drink and some cookies and we started back to Victoria Beach. The country road was very dark that night and there was no moon to comfort us—nor to show us this unwelcome figure either. As we came to the Riorden house Miss Thomas said, “Now that is where they sat,” pointing to the bank on the south side of the road, “and that is where they saw it,” pointing north.

“Yes, Martha,” I said, pressing the accelerator a little harder.

“And this,” as we approached the Cronin house, “is where it stood in the road and they saw it clearly.”

“Yes, Martha,” driving faster still.

“And that is where it must have stood on the wall,” she said as we reached the Holmes property. I relaxed a little then glad enough to be away from that district, for I wanted no more of the supernatural that night.

A year later I attended a service in the Karsdale church and the Thornes stood almost opposite me as we sang that lovely hymn, “Unto the Hills.” When we came to the line, “No moon shall harm thee in the silent night,” I looked at Mr. Thorne who has been a nervous man since this incident and thought, “But the moon did harm him.” Or at least it revealed what the ghost was like, and the effect has never worn off. Would his nervousness be due only to the fright of a moonlit night in his youth, or does he fear that when his time comes the apparition will appear as his forerunner too? It is a question I have never liked to ask him.

Let us turn now to another kind of forerunner, and for this we will leave the Annapolis Basin and go to Clarke's Harbour on the southwestern shore, a settlement peopled largely from Cape Cod. Here in the old days, as in many other places, they used to have boards to lay people out on when they died. “A woman's mother-in-law had been sick, and one day as she was sitting in her kitchen she heard the sound of boards at her window. She got up and looked all around but she couldn't find anything to account for the disturbance. When the older woman died, her daughter-in-law heard the boards being put in the window, as sometimes happened when the main entrance was too small for them. She recalled her forerunner then and said, ‘There's my boards.' ”

Clarke's Harbour reported another event that was heard before it happened. In Miss Evelyn Swim's home a sick boy was sleeping in the front room downstairs. “He was not thought sick enough to die,” she said. “Mother was stitching, and Aunt Julie had just come from her room when they heard a little knock. Mother said, ‘You go see who that is.' Aunt Julie went, but she came back and said, ‘Levie, there's nobody there.' Then came another knock. She looked out and still there was nobody there. She went back to the child's room then and everything seemed in order. The knock came then for the third time. They couldn't understand it unless it was somebody playing a prank, but there was no sign of anybody anywhere. In a few days the baby passed away, and shortly afterwards the coffin maker came to get measurements. He put the child's body in the coffin and he used a hammer to drive little brads into the coffin. This happened three times and was so exactly like the sounds they had heard that they realized it had been a forerunner.”

Another story came from the same house. It was told by a woman who had grown up here, then had married and lived in the United States and now was returning as a widow to settle in her childhood island home. This island, Cape Sable, is exposed to all the vagaries of weather from the Atlantic Ocean. The coniferous trees are small, and the island has a wind-swept look. Weather is a factor that can never be forgotten because fishing is the main industry, and most island men spend the greater part of their lives upon the sea. Now that a causeway has been built to connect it to the mainland it seems slightly less remote, but until very recently it could be reached only by boats which struggled against strong currents and pulling tides.

This is the widow's story told as she, Miss Evelyn Swim, Miss Beth McNintch and I sat together one evening.

“Father used to go to sea in the winters. When he left this time there were two little boys in our house. They were perfectly healthy and beautiful children. Mother didn't like staying in the house alone, so a cousin used to come and stay all night with her, and they slept together in the corner room. One night at twelve o'clock something woke them up and at first neither of them spoke. Finally my cousin said,

“‘Aunt Isabel, do you hear anything?' She said yes, she did. It was a frosty night, and what they heard was a rumbling coming down the road, rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble. It rumbled by the house like a wagon going over a frosty road. They were frozen in bed because it seemed to be coming straight towards our house, and that's what it did. It came rumbling around the house and stopped by the front door. They clung together in terror. Then they heard a knock like somebody pounding on something that was frozen. Then it sounded like something being thrown away. By and by it started again and turned around and rumbled back over the road until the sound was lost in the distance. They couldn't figure it out because they knew the sound of every wagon and who owned it, and who would that be driving up the road and turning off and stopping at their very door?

“They were up then, and they were afraid to go back to bed. Ma said, ‘I'm going to get Maurice.' He was their neighbour, but Serena was afraid to go out. At the same time she wouldn't stay in the house alone, so both of them went and they woke Mr. Nickerson up and he came and stayed all night. He looked around but he couldn't see the track of any horse or wagon, so they thought it must be a forerunner and that my father was going to die. Ma cried and took on something awful, but the forerunner wasn't for my father. It was for one of the little boys who was taken sick and in a week was dead from diphtheria.

“The day he was buried was frosty and cold, just as it had been that night. He had been prepared in the house for burial.Then the hearse started up the road for the funeral, and it made exactly the same noise they had heard.All the people in the house could hear it coming over the frosty ground, and it came rumbling up the frozen road and rumbled right up to the house.Then it stopped before the door just the way they'd heard it. Ma and my aunt couldn't speak. They were listening for the next thing to happen.The hearse had a door at the back with a lock, and the undertaker couldn't get the lock open, so he picked up a rock and hit it. Then he threw the rock away exactly as they'd heard it that night. Everything was repeated in detail, and it happened about sixty years ago.”

Miss Swim nodded her head in agreement, for she too knew the story well. It had often been told on the island.

At Marion Bridge on Cape Breton Island, they told of a child's death and of the tapping noise of the coffin maker being heard before the fatal brain fever had even begun. Another story came from a Mrs. McGillivray who had spent most of her life in this pleasant village.

“Father was a builder and was working away from home, and mother was expecting him to finish his work and come back. She would not have been surprised if he came at any minute. One bright moonlight night she was sitting in her rocking chair with one ear cocked expectantly when she heard wagon wheels outside. Then everything was quiet until she heard him take the butt of the whip and give three strokes on the door, but he didn't come in. She went to the door to open it for him, supposing he might be carrying a load and didn't have a free hand, but there was no one there. She went out to the barn then, but the horse and wagon were not there, and apparently had not come into the yard at all. She was very alarmed then, thinking something must have happened to my father. Everybody knew what three knocks meant and nobody at the door when it was opened, so it was with a feeling of great relief that she heard his wagon wheels very soon afterwards, and saw him in the flesh as he appeared in his usual good health and spirits.

“My mother puzzled over this and wondered what it meant, and later it was explained to her. At that time the body of a man was found up the Salmon River Road. The men who found it stopped at our house to change horses.They arrived at night, and at the very hour when she had heard them before, and they came to the kitchen door and knocked with the butt of the whip three times. Everything was repeated.”

Forerunners come sometimes as a kindly form of preparation where the shock of sudden death might be too great. An Amherst couple, for instance, lived happily together, and both were in excellent health. There was no reason to suppose any change would come to alter their unruffled lives. The house they lived in was very old and had bolts to fasten the doors. One night Rachel and her husband went to their room and he bolted the door as he always did. They were no sooner settled than she asked him to shut the door. He said, “I did.” She said, “It's open,” so he got up and closed it a second time. Once more they prepared themselves for sleep when again Rachel pointed out that the door was open. This time after closing it he got back in bed, but crawled in beside her and shivered and shook. She said, “What did you see?” but he refused to tell her. Finding him so greatly upset, and not being able to discover the reason, she appealed to her brother for help. “No,” her husband said, “I won't tell you now, but if it ever comes to pass I'll tell you then.” The next day Rachel took sick and a few days later she died and it was all very sudden and distressing. She was laid out in a white dress and, when her husband saw her like this, he said,