Haunted Harbours (11 page)

She tried to keep herself afloat and at the same time retrieve her children. It was an impossible task; the ocean was unforgiving. She gave up hope and was just about to open her mouth and let herself drown when she felt something moving beneath her. It was three seals, guiding her upward to the surface.

She looked around in utter confusion, not believing her eyes. There was Milton, atop a great bull seal, and baby Mairgret hanging tight-fisted to a grey seal's velvety hide. The seals carried Marjorie and her children back to the shore.

Safely back on land, Marjorie and her children stood before the most beautiful woman that they'd ever seen, with eyes that were wild and gray and hair that tossed behind her like the surf upon the beach.

“You tell your husband that the sea remembers,” the sea woman said. “You tell him that one spared to the water is worth three spared to the land.”

Her eyes flashed as she spoke, and for a moment Marjorie was uncertain as to whether she saw tenderness, fury, or the soft pang of regret there.

Marjorie and her children returned to Angus and told him of what the seal woman had said. Angus only nodded his head, hugged his wife, and kissed his two children. If there were any tears that fell, he blamed it on the sea mist.

Angus and his family lived for many a year in happiness and contentment, and on the nights when her husband would some-times walk long hours by the shores of Cape North, Marjorie did her very best to pay it no mind.

When Angus finally died, Marjorie buried him close to the rocks and the waves and the sea that he'd loved so dearly, but she left explicit instructions that she was to be buried close to her parents in the small town churchyard.

To this day the seals still cry and swim about Cape North, mourning the passing of Angus Lochaber.

16
THE SONG OF
THE PIT PONY
SYDNEY

My father was a coal miner. It wasn't the first job he had, but it was the one he held the longest. He worked in an open pit mine just outside of the little town of Blairmore, Alberta, a little collection of houses and trailers scattered in the foot-hills of the Rockies like a heap of forgot-ten toys.

Dad operated a large dump truck for a while. I still have a scrapbook photograph of him leaning his large frame against a tire nearly as tall as himself. He graduated from the truck to an even larger steam shovel. I still remember my grandmother telling me about how my dad broke a bone in his foot from falling off his shovel. In my twelve-year-old mind I wondered how much of a klutz my dad must have been to have fallen off a garden spade.

That is, as far as I know, the extent of my coal-mining ancestry, and yet I tell you truly that I can hear the ringing of a coal miner's pickaxe, deep in the caves and tunnels of my race memory. We all feel it, here in Nova Scotia. There's a little coal dust in your every inhalation within our provincial borders.

Men in the coal mines live closely with the shadow of death. You could die beneath a rock fall, or you could bust your guts swinging a pick. You could die of the damp. Death is just another foreman looming over you and there is no telling when he'll tap you on the shoulder and tell you to come with him.

There are very few ghost stories to be found in the mines. The men consider themselves a kind of living ghost, the coal dust nestling in their lungs, the dirt working into their pores, as they climb daily into the grave.

This is a tale of the old days, when men still marched into the mines with pickaxes, shovels, and hand drills slung over their shoulders, and lunch boxes clutched firmly in hand. In those days, coal was trucked out in cars hauled by stout little pit ponies.

The ponies they used were generally Maritime-bred, the only horses tough enough for such extremes. They were usually low-slung and thick of shoulder, chosen specifically for their ability to haul great strings of coal cars through low-roofed tunnels. They were chosen for their temperament; a nasty horse wouldn't get along well with miners and was just as likely to injure one of the labourers.

The mine where the story took place was a dirty place just outside of Sydney, dank and low-ceilinged with a heavy miasma of coal dust in the air and the ground soaked with foul cold black puddles.

The pony in this story was named Pete for the colour of the bog. He was coal black, and the miners hung a pie plate about his neck to reflect their lantern lights. You could hear his hoof beats moving through the mine, a patient clogging like the steady swing of a miner's pick.

Pete was driven by a pit boy by the name of Ethan Brantford. Young Ethan came from a large family, and most of his family worked in the mine. His youngest two brothers picked the slate from the anthracite coal, along with the men too injured to work. His three older brothers worked deeper in the tunnels, two of them picking and hand drilling, and the other performing the “dead work” such as clearing the coal as it was mined and hauling the timber for the shoring of the walls, work that wasn't paid for, but that allowed the older brothers time to bring in the valuable coal. A miner earned more than a labourer.

They all shared the same risks, always waiting for the next “bump.” A bump was when the rock shifted, or a pit prop snapped, or a built-up gas pocket ignited. A bump, as harmless as it sounds, usually cost someone his life.

Ethan earned seventy-five cents a day for leading his horse. This was fairly close to a working man's wages back then. He never beat the pony, not once. Beating a horse was generally frowned upon in the mines; a beaten horse tended to become cranky and could not be trusted. Still, even if this were not so, young Ethan and Pete were the best of friends.

To guide the pony through the darkness usually involved a series of spoken commands, but Ethan and Pete worked out a different system. Ethan would sing, and Pete would follow him through the long, winding tunnels. All of the miners got used to the sound of young Ethan walking through the darkness, singing “Barbara Allen”: “T'was in the merry month of May, when all the buds were swelling, sweet William on his death bed lay, for love of Barbara Allen.”

For three long and dark years, Pete and Ethan worked in a comfortable harmony. Then, one cold September morning as Pete was hauling his load of an even dozen coal cars, the pony stopped short dead in his tracks.

“What's wrong, boy?” Ethan asked.

There seemed to be nothing physically wrong with Pete. The little pony just stood there in the darkness of the mine, shivering softly. Ethan tried to coax him forward.

“Come on Pete. You can do this. I'll give you a carrot.”

Not even the promise of a carrot would make the pony move. At a loss for what to do, Ethan tried singing to the pony.

“T'was in the merry month of May, when all the buds were swelling, sweet William on his death bed lay, for love of Barbara Allen.”

It was no good —Pete would not budge. The inevitable traffic jam resulted as another load of coal cars rolled up behind Pete and Ethan. The pony and the boy were in the way of the others; the coal needed to get through. The miners had to meet their quota or else go a day without pay.

“Get in front and get ready to lead,” said one of the miners. “I'll make him move.”

Ethan didn't argue. He was thirteen, and boys of thirteen learned to take orders back then.

The miner uncoiled a bit of rope, looping it double.

“Pony,” the miner said. “We'll make quota today, and you've got to MOVE!”

He swung the rope hard against the pony's side, and little Pete jumped forward. He hadn't gone three more paces when the mine shook and a great load of timber and rock came crashing down on Ethan and Pete, killing them both. Those who witnessed the rock fall swore that the pony had sensed the deadly disaster before a single stone had slid.

The miners took the rest of the day off. It was always bad luck to keep working when someone had died in the mine. Sunday was the Sabbath, and there was no work then, but by Monday the mess was cleaned up, and they were ready to go back to work. They shouldered their pickaxes and clambered back down into the mine, talking softly for fear of rousing the dead.

When they reached the site of the accident, they saw a peat-black pony, dragging twelve heavily laden coal cars behind it. The wheels ground against the iron rails and the pony's hooves clopped like a hammer banging nails into a coffin. In the cloying darkness of the tunnel they heard a soft voice singing, “T'was in the merry month of May, when all the buds were swelling...”

As the pony reached them, the ghostly vision faded away, wagon and all. But this was not an isolated incident. Over the next year, whenever a miner crossed this spot, he would hear the horse's hooves clattering against the soft rock, and the soft eerie keening of the boy's last song.

The miners eventually got used to the ghost of the boy and his pony clattering by them in the darkness. Money and need are hard masters, and the fear of hunger can override even the fear of ghosts.

Eventually that tunnel was mined out and sealed off, yet the miners swore in the years to come that they could hear the sound of the horse's hooves clattering somewhere behind the darkness of the rock. Besides the hoof beats, there were those who swore they heard the haunting sound of young Ethan singing softly through every tunnel they passed through, “T'was in the merry month of May, when all the buds were swelling, sweet William on his death bed lay, for love of Barbara Allen.”

17
BLOOD IN THE
WATER, BLOOD
ON THE SAND
SABLE ISLAND

This is a tale that has been told many times and in many ways by such writers and storytellers as Thomas Haliburton, Helen Creighton, and Edith Mosher, among others. The dates attributed to the shipwreck in question have shifted as often as the sands of Sable Island.

So file this tale under “Traditional.” It's a tale that has been told so many times that I reckon it's grown straight true.

Sable Island isn't much to look at on the map — just a little strip of sand laid out in the ocean like a curl of bacon in the frying pan. There are some ponies that you've no doubt seen pictures of and a few houses, blown through by the tireless Atlantic winds. No one lives on the island now except for some members of the Coast Guard, a handful of meteorologists, and perhaps a ghost or two.

The island lies there like a fishhook in the water, just waiting for an unwary nibble. Its name, Sable, means sand in French, for a very good reason. Quite simply Sable Island is the world's largest water-bound sand dune, composed entirely of a peculiarly iron-stained quartz and raw red garnet, barely twenty miles long and a mile across. Sailors call it a trap and a snare because of the underwater sandbars that stretch out, like the arms of an octopus, sixteen to twenty miles in either direction of the island's extremities. Between these sandbars lies an unchartable obstacle course of deeps and shoals. The island itself is made entirely of sand, and changes shape as the years go by. The maps must be drawn and redrawn. Two lighthouses, one at each end of the island and built by the Canadian government, have been moved and moved again due to the shifting sands.

The island itself is a kind of shape-shifting ghost; fishermen fear it and sailors avoid it, because the waters about Sable Island seethe with ghosts. Nearly 150 ships have grounded upon the shoals, broken upon the rocks, and sank beneath the churning Atlantic waters surrounding this little stretch of sand.

In the late eighteenth century, the waters of Sable Island claimed a two-masted brigantine by the name of
Frances
. Yet the waters and the rocks were not the only ones that were to blame for the shipwreck. No sir, they had help.

In those days, men known as wreckers made a living salvaging whatever washed ashore. When the pickings were slim and the weather too calm to wreck many ships, there were always a few unscrupulous men who would lay false signal fires, remove warning buoys, and stuff shoal-bells with cotton, thus luring unwary ships to their doom.