Bluenose Ghosts (20 page)

Another story along these lines came to me atVictoria Beach, where they told of a house along the Bay of Fundy shore where the son who was lost at sea used to come back at night and stand beside the mantel. In the morning a pool of sea water and seaweed would be there. This ghost apparently resented other people using his bed, for one guest reported his bedclothes had been pulled off in the night and he also said there were matches in his bed and on his pillows which certainly were not there when he retired.

The town of Lunenburg is noted for its seafaring men and many a rousing yarn has died with the old-timers. However there are still those who have adventures to recall and a reminiscent mood has a result like this: “Dad was in a four-master going to Quebec and at that time he was sailing as first mate. When they reached Quebec the crew were paid off and then they started to drink. The second mate was coming back to the ship for his clothes after being ashore awhile, and also to get money for the cook who had told him where to find it. He was too drunk to see where he was going and he fell between the boat and the water. He was seen, but even so they were several hours finding him. At last they got him out of the water and by this time everybody was sober enough. They gave him decent burial and informed his family and we supposed that was the end of it. It wasn't.

“That winter the ship was laid up in Quebec and dad stayed on it all alone. One night he was sitting reading when he saw a seaman come down the after-companionway, and then he came through the cabin. He went right on from there to the cook's room. Dad looked at him pretty hard, and it struck him that he was dressed exactly as the second mate had been the last time he'd been seen alive. He sat quietly and waited but nothing else happened so he left the ship and went ashore to see the captain.

“‘I saw the second mate last night,' he said.

“‘Don't be foolish mister,' the captain said. Mister was always the name used for mate. The captain wouldn't believe him so he went back, but several nights later the same thing happened again, so dad went ashore a second time. My dad was a reliable man or he wouldn't have been left in charge, so the captain began to think he'd better look into the matter. He went back to the ship and prepared to stay there a few days. Then sure enough, the figure came the third time, always dressed as he had been when he fell overboard. He didn't look to the right or left but proceeded directly to the cook's cabin. Nobody spoke, and nobody ever knew what brought him back. But they both saw him, and from that time he was never seen again.”

Looking back to the days of sailing ships, names of foreign ports like Buenos Aires and Hong Kong were often more familiar in our coastal towns than that of our own capital city of Halifax. This meant that there were long separations and, because life was dangerous, many sudden deaths. Bonds seemed to have been established between loved ones which were in no way dependent upon distance. An old man at Port Medway wished to drive this point home. As he prepared to tell his tale he straightened his rheumaticky back and sat up straight in his chair, his great hands clutching the arms as he spoke.

“My aunt was in a house and all at once an awful squash came against it as though a great wave had come across the window and against the pane. There's no sound in all the world that's like it. Her husband was away at sea at the time. When it stopped she lifted her apron to her eyes and the tears rolled down her cheeks.

“‘Judson's gone,' she moaned. ‘My man has gone.' And she was right. He was lost at sea at that very time, and the sound of the wave had come to tell her so.”

Going now to Cape Breton Island we come to Louisburg and Glace Bay. Many men went to sea from these ports and some brought home incredible stories. I am indebted to Mrs. Ruth Metcalfe, for this one which is her father's personal story. That being the case, it should be her privilege to tell it.

“This story goes back to 1862 when my father, Dan McPhee, was a prentice to John Hamilton, a shoemaker in North Sydney. He was only fourteen, but he was a big, sturdy lad. Sailing with him, but not so sturdy, was his cousin, Alex McKinnon. Together they shipped aboard a Norwegian. Some time later in Gloucester, Mass. they met a man prominent in shipping circles in Sydney, Sol Jacobs by name, and they were shipmates with him for many years.

“After a while my father had a chance to go with the Black Ball Line and Alex stayed with the fishermen, sailing from the home port. Father was with the Black Ball Line seventeen years during which time he married and had two children. When they were aged five and three he was on a trip returning from South America when they were becalmed off Port of Spain, Trinidad. It was a very close and humid night, and father was lying in his hammock on deck. He said he saw Alex come up the deck. He was easily recognized, if for no other reason than by a characteristic pose, for he had a habit of holding the belaying pin on his shoulders with each hand, and moving it up and down. He came straight to father's hammock and said,

“‘Dan, I have Flora with me.' Flora was father's wife's name. Father claims he sat up on his elbow and Alex disappeared. He thought he must have dreamed it. But he appeared to him again the same night in the same attitude and said the same words. This time they were more forceful.

“‘Did you hear what I said Dan? I have Flora with me.' With that father put his feet on deck, for he realized now that Alex could not possibly be on his ship. He was greatly disturbed and couldn't sleep all the way home.

“When they arrived in Boston he found news waiting for him at the shipping office, just as he feared. His wife had died at the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax on March twenty-eighth, and that was the night Alex had appeared to him. Father went down to Gloucester then to see if any of the Cape Breton boys were there who could give him a passage home. He met Sol Jacobs and, during their conversation, told him about his wife's death. Then he asked Sol if he knew where Alex was, and Sol said Alex had been lost off Sable Island that same spring. Father wondered what the date was, but Sol didn't remember. They looked it up in the shipping news and it was the same day that Flora had died, and could have been the same hour.”

One such story was enough for one sitting. I found that it kept coming back to me long after she had told it. I was grateful there–fore that she let me think about it for a few days before bringing up the subject of ghosts again. We had been recording songs she had heard in Cape Breton from her father and his friends, and one day as we put the microphone down she told the following story.

“On father's side they are highland folk, and one young man used to go fishing in the evening after working in the mine. He and another miner had an in-shore fishing boat and one night they went out in the boat and never came back. There were all kinds of stories made up about them. Some said they went on the Norwegian freighter that was in at the time, but none of the family believed that because there was no reason for their going. They were both happily married men. A few months after their disappearance my father and mother went to visit a sister of one of the men (father had married a second time, and I was of that family) and she told this story. On that night when they had disappeared, she had been lying on the bed with the baby. Her husband was on night shift at the mine, and she thought she heard someone call her name. Thinking it was her husband, she went downstairs, but there was no one there. It was some time later that she realized the noise had come from the skylight and not downstairs, and she always believed it was her brother who had called her. They were never heard of although the over–turned boat came ashore. There was no storm, so something else must have upset them. They were wearing rubber boots which might have weighed them down, but we never really knew and it remains a mystery to this day.”

Returning to the subject of knowledge being conveyed by strange means, we have a case from Shelburne.

Leander was a boy who wanted to go to sea, but his grandfather was opposed to it.The old man may have had a premonition of disaster, although it is more likely he wanted a better life for the lad than his had been. However Leander got his way but, before he sailed the grandfather said to the captain, “Now don't be too easy on him. I want him to get tired of it.”

One morning the grandfather came downstairs and said, “Leander's gone.”

“How do you know?”

“He came to me in the night and I saw the shipwreck.” It was quite right, for Leander's ship was lost that night, and he with it.

Such strange things happen sometimes. To the sceptical they are no more than coincidence. Perhaps that is the true explanation for the incident that follows. We will never know. A man from Victoria Beach was lost on a vessel and a pillow was washed ashore from the wreck. It had been made by his wife, and it was conveyed twenty miles against the tide to the shore beside his home and when it arrived she felt impelled to go down to the water. The pillow was the only thing washed ashore and it came all the way from Parker's Cove to Port Wade. How puzzled Mr. John Casey looked as he told me about it, and I could imagine people all along the shore trying to figure it out.

We have not had many stories from Liverpool. Here is one now about two brothers who were on the same ship. “A sailor named Big Henry made a great friend of the smaller boy. One day the bigger boy was swept overboard and drowned and that night Big Henry heard a voice saying, ‘Take good care of my little brother.' He was sure it was the voice of the bigger brother and, to give substance to that belief, a midshipman had seen a form standing in a doorway and had asked who it was. Then the figure disappeared.”

A story is told of a Tantallon family by the name of Silvers. “Mrs. Silvers was a widow with one son, Willie, who went away on a vessel to sea. One day his mother looked out the window and saw Willie coming up the driveway on a white horse. She said to herself, ‘Willie must be in, but where did he get that white horse?' She went to open the door, but there was no one there. Fancy Willie's surprise if anyone had told him that when he died he would appear to his mother riding a white horse!”

At Port Medway the night was still and not a breath of wind was blowing, a fact that is noticed in a seaport where everybody is conscious of weather during every waking moment. Suddenly there was an awful banging as though every door had opened and slammed. The noise was so loud that it woke up the whole household, and the house itself shook. “Grandfather got up and examined the doors but they were closed and locked, then he went back to bed and thought nothing of it. But grandmother was worried. They found out later that on that same night their son had been washed overboard.” In a story from French River where the son had suffered the same fate his father, at the time of his death struggle, paced the floor gasping for breath without being able to understand why he was being stricken this way.

A seafaring man has been seen at Myers' Point near Head Jeddore wearing a blue suit, bib cap, and having brass buttons on his coat. He was of medium height, and was reported by so many different people that some of the boys who took it all as a joke, decided to use him for their own purpose. They went skating on the pond, but it was too dark to see properly, so one of them called out, “Ghost, light up your light so we can put our skates on.” Imagine their astonishment when the ghost obediently complied and lit up the whole pond.

Some Seabright men had much the same thing happen to them. “A man named Holigan had died. A few days later some of the fishermen were out in a boat and they got to joking among themselves and, just for the fun of it, one of them started to call him. They all heard him answer, but it was from a distance. They hollered again and he came closer. They got frightened then and put for shore, and they'll never try that trick again.”

Mr. Sandy Stoddard from Lower Ship Harbour had a strange thing happen to him. “I was out lobster fishing at Wolfe Island, and there was a crowd out gunning at the Crick. They went ahead of me to camp.There was a good trail, but you had to cross a sand beach. I seen this man coming from the camp on the clear open sand beach, and I thought it was someone I knew comin' for water. I thought he had landed and was going up the trail to the Crick. His face and hands were white and I realized then that I knew him all right, only he'd been dead for two years. I was too surprised to speak, but I intended to if I ever saw him again, but I never did, and neither did anyone else.

“You don't expect to see a man on a beach dressed in his best Sunday clothes, but this man was, and that took my attention first. He had on a white full-bosom tucked shirt, a cutaway coat, and cuffs showed below his pants. I stepped to one side, but he was so close to me that my shoulders should have struck him on the breast. As he touched me in passing I felt a hot breath all over me, and then he disappeared. I looked behind and there were no tracks like a human being would leave on the sand. The next day I went to the camp and talked to a fellow who lived there but he had never seen him. Perhaps it happened to me because I knew him so well. At the same camp there used to be a very pretty woman come and look in the window and, a few nights after, an ugly one, who looked as though she had come up out of the water. The man who lived in the camp and saw her would never stay there again. Can't say I blame him.”

Clarke's Harbour has given us many stories, and here is one from a settlement near there called The Hawk. “Years ago a man was drowned at The Hawk inlet. He lived at the wireless station where there were five or six men with a cook and a housekeeper. There was a little hotel there at one time, and people used to come there ducking (duck hunting) and fishing. One operator was a South African, a veteran of the First World War, and he used to have heart spells when he would pass out for a while. He was a man who had travelled a lot and he used to watch for letters from home. In order to come to The Hawk for his mail he had to come by boat and, before he came, he would phone to see if there was anything there for him. Then if there was, he'd row over.