Haunted Harbours

by Steve Vernon

  Mabel sat and sipped her tea. She knew what a forerunner was. To dream of death in such a way meant death was certainly headed straight for you.

  “You must stay home,” she told him. “Nothing but bad luck will come of such a dream.”

  Ephraim Doane was a stubborn Nova Scotian man, and Mabel knew that arguing with him was about as productive as ordering the wind to rest from its constant blowing.

  “There’s fish out there for the catching,” Ephraim said, “and these bills won’t be paying themselves.”

  “Well then, wear this,” Mabel said, pulling her grandmother’s silver crucifix from her neck.

  “I can’t take this,” Ephraim said. “It belonged to your grandmother.”

  “Bring it back to me, then,” Mabel fiercely said, clasping the tiny silver cross about her husband’s neck.

  So the next morning before the crows had even gotten out of bed, Ephraim Doane pulled on his two pairs of socks and his gum rubber boots and made the journey down to the pier. His ship sailed that morning, heading for the fishing grounds, but Mabel refused to watch it sail away.

  There’s a stillness that seems to hush the very air just before a big storm rushes in on the sea or the shore. You can feel it as the sky seems to hold its breath in dread of what is about to come.

  On board Ephraim’s ship, the captain warned, “Batten the hatches and make fast all lines. There’s a heavy guster coming in hard and strong.”

  The watchful crew had already begun setting about the necessary preparations. It was good to hear their instinctive certainty confirmed by the captain’s unmistakable orders. When all of the preparations had been tended to and all of the loose hatches made fast and the lines tied and retied there was nothing left to do but to hold on tight and see if the ship could outlive the blow.

  Ephraim wasn’t worried. He’d been a sailor and fisherman his whole life and he had long ago sworn on the Southern Cross that he’d be buried on the dry land. Yet the other night’s dream kept bothering him. It haunted him so much that when he heard the mainmast snap he looked straight up, hoping beyond hope that he was still swimming in the depths of his nightmare.

  All hands went down with the ship. The December waters in the Atlantic are cold enough to freeze the very blood in a man’s veins. The storm took everyone; not a single survivor remained.

  Back on land, Mabel had no such doubts. She knew what a forerunner meant. Just as soon as Ephraim left that morning, she cried for a full half hour. Then, deciding that her husband would suffer through more than his share of salt water and sorrow, she busied herself brushing off his best jacket and pants and preparing for the bad news she felt certain would come.

  Three days and three nights passed without a sign of Ephraim’s vessel. Everyone in the town presumed that the ship had sunk without a trace. Such events were common in coastal towns.

  On the fourth morning they found him washed ashore, still clinging to all that remained of the mainmast. Tucked in his fro-zen hands was Mabel’s silver crucifix.

  He’d come home to his wife, as he’d promised, bringing her crucifix home, as he’d likewise promised, and he was buried on dry land as he’d sworn so long ago upon the stars of the Southern Cross.

  7

  AS PALE AS ICE

  AND AS HARD

  AS STONE

  MUD ISLAND

  About eighty kilometres southwest of Shelburne, you will be certain to notice three ill-formed islands located in the heart of Lobster Bay and called Seal, Mud, and John’s.

  Seal is named for the great herd of gray seals that make their home there at certain times of the year. I really don’t know who John was. Perhaps a sailor who drowned close to the island, or an early settler. Perhaps it was once the site of a convenient outdoor privy.

  But I can tell you about Mud Island, holder of the murky secret of the cold stone woman.

  Back in 1833, the brig Victory set sail for New York City carrying a cargo of Cape Breton granite. The brig was helmed by one George Card of Campobello, New Brunswick and had a crew of seven: five sturdy sailors, a cook, and his assistant, a young red-headed girl named Maggie Flynn.

  The weather was calm that day and they’d travelled far and the captain decided to drop anchor in the sheltered lee of Mud Island.

  That night, following a long calm, one of the worst nor’easter gales on record slammed into the still waters of Lobster Bay, lashing her full fury on the unwary Victory.

  The captain, fearing that the force of the storm would tear the ship from her anchor and turn her, ordered the ship’s cook and young Maggie Flynn into a dory.

  Now it might sound like a strange notion, sending a person from a large and sturdy brig to the dubious shelter of a dory in the heart of a gale, but the captain knew what he was doing. A dory was an awfully hard thing to sink. If the weather was bad enough, the sailors would seal the dory up with canvas, and they would ride the storm out, hunkered down in its belly, bobbing along like a cork in the waves.

  The waves were rough as young Maggie stepped into the dory. She nearly slipped as her feet caught on a poorly laid rope.

  “Sit down!” a sailor called, but the sea was too loud for him to be clearly heard. As Maggie turned toward the sailor, a great wave smashed up against the side of the dory and threw her into the water.

  One sailor jumped down into the dory to try and rescue her. He could see her in the water, tossed like a child in a blanket game. “Grab hold!” he shouted, reaching his arm out over the water.

  He looked back once, hoping for a little help from the rest of the crew, but the other sailors were far too busy trying to keep the Victory afloat.

  “Come on!” he shouted.

  Maggie managed to hook one arm up about the bow of the dory. The young sailor worked his way down to her. He could see her face, pale and staring like a death mask, from the heart of the storm-tossed Atlantic and the sight moved him. He worked his way forward and tried to grab on to Maggie’s arm. Another wave rocked the dory, the sailor plunged into the angry waters. Dressed far more heavily than Maggie, he sank like three-day-old biscuit. The dory broke against the ship’s hull and Maggie was lost.

  The storm turned the Victory over and stove her in two like a rotted barrel. The captain and the entire crew were lost to the angry waters. After the storm eased up, searchers found the hulk of the ship grounded in the mud flats surrounding Mud Island. The corpses of the five dead sailors, covered in dead eel grass, were strewn around the wreckage of the Victory, like the points on a compass. The captain was still clinging to the wheel, his dead hands frozen hard to the spokes.

  They buried the sailors on the shore of Mud Island. The ground was wet and soft for the digging. Shortly after the last grave was dug, a searcher stumbled across the body of poor Maggie Flynn, lying face upward in the shallow water, her arm still hooked about the broken bow stem of the ship’s dory. Her face was as pale as ice, her flesh as hard as stone.

  This hardness was far more than simple rigor mortis. Young Maggie was petrified, like a hod of sculpting clay that had hardened in the heat of the sun, as if her flesh had turned to granite.

  Some said it was something in the water; others claimed it was something in the mud, while still others blamed it on the unseasonable chill of the cold gray Atlantic waters. Whatever the reason, the body of young Maggie Flynn was as cold, hard, and pale as any marble church sculpture.

  At first the sailors who had found her were afraid to touch her strangely altered flesh.

  “We’ll turn to stone ourselves,” one swore. “Don’t touch her.”

  “It’s devil’s work,” another said.

  “She is a Maritime woman who has died at sea,” their leader pointed out. “She’ll get a decent Christian burial, even if she was turned to hot burning glass.”

  They quickly fell to their work and in a short time had churned the dirt deep enough to lay poor Maggie safely at rest.

  They ended the day at a local tavern where ale loosened
their tired tongues.

  “Digging is thirsty work, and an ale or two will wash the taint of grave dirt from our throats,” said one.

  “Aye,” agreed another, “and a tot of rum will wash the taint of ale from our lips.”

  It goes without saying that drinking leads to gossip as sure as all rivers lead home to the sea. Soon enough the entire tavern had heard the tale of Mud Island’s petrified woman. Before too long, a boatload of drunken sailors were rowing themselves out to see the petrified remains of poor Maggie Flynn. They dug her up and had their fill of staring, burying her back down in a careless and shallow manner.

  Soon word got around to the whole town that a stone woman had been buried in the dirt of Mud Island. Entertainment like that was clearly hard to pass up in nineteenth-century rural Nova Scotia and soon the midnight boat tours and excavations became a regular event. Curiosity seekers from far and wide stole out to take a look at the woman made of stone.

  Finally, an old couple who lived on the island took it upon themselves to dig up Maggie Flynn’s grave and rebury her in an undisclosed spot. They said it was the only Christian thing to do, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they had had enough of the nightly rambles of young drunken thrill-seekers.

  It has been said by more than a few storytellers that if you pass over a certain part of Mud Island you will feel a chill in your bones, as if you’d climbed into a meat locker. I don’t know about that, but I do believe that somewhere on Mud Island, about fifteen miles from Clarke’s Harbour, the mortal remains of one Maggie Flynn are lying beneath the soft black dirt, as pale as ice and as hard as stone.

  8

  THE CAPTAIN’S

  HOUSE AT

  YARMOUTH

  YARMOUTH

  I was born and raised in northern Ontario. At the age of seventeen I took it into my head to travel from my home to Yarmouth to meet my mother, whom I hadn’t seen since I was a young child of three. I lived in Yarmouth for most of a summer, working at the imo fish plant and the Domtec cotton mill, and very quickly I fell in love with the Atlantic coast.

  I can remember landing in Halifax and getting off the plane, expecting to see the ocean. I’d forgotten to adjust my watch for the time change, and I missed my connecting flight to Yarmouth. So I walked out of the airport, planning to hike to Yarmouth. How far could it be? Nova Scotia was such a tiny spot on the map; certainly it couldn’t take more than an hour or so to cross on foot.

  I walked as far as the first mileage sign that told me the true distance separating Halifax and Yarmouth and eventually, I found my way to a bus.

  While I was celebrating my eighteenth birthday, my brother and sisters decided it was time I heard the following tale. Unfortunately, having just attained the legal drinking age, I didn’t remember much more than a snippet of the story. When I was putting this collection together, I decided to hunt this story up and after much research, I tick-tacked this version of it together.

  The old Stott house, also known as the Captain’s House or the Widow’s Walk, was built in the early 1800s by an enterprising young man named Thomas Dalton, who sadly died intestate. The Captain’s House sits at the top of a long, low hill on Main Street, overlooking Yarmouth Harbour. The large rectangular structure of one and a half stories was accompanied by a single large flat tower in the Victorian style that was added on in later years. This tower was crowned by a widow’s walk, and so gave its name to the imposing manor. For those who don’t know, a widow’s walk is that wee little iron fence you sometimes see atop a large old sea mansion. It surrounds a small railed observation platform and is custom-made for folks who have a reason for watching the sea.

  Back in the 1880s, the house was nearly lost in a brush fire which completely destroyed a neighbouring house and barn. The furniture of the Widow’s Walk was hastily removed for fear of losing it, yet the brush fire turned away from the house at the last minute. One eyewitness swore that it was “as if the house had simply refused to burn.”

  Following a surprising number of sales and transactions, the house eventually fell into the hands of Captain Jacob K. Hatfield. Hatfield was born on June 16, 1823, the eldest of seven sons, all of whom went on to become successful ship masters. Jacob himself was the master of a clipper passenger ship sailing between England and Australia for many years. He was often away from his family for long stretches at a time. Such was the life of any sailor, yet Hatfield wanted to be certain that his wife and children were safe. So he purchased the Widow’s Walk and installed his family in their brand-new home.

  Jacob Hatfield’s wife, one Eleanor Jane Hatfield, called Gramma Jane and eventually Gramma Jake, was a tall and hand-some woman, although somewhat overweight with age and the strain of raising a large family mostly on her own.

  Her heart was broken at the loss of her second son, who sailed away in his late teens to follow in his father’s footsteps. He never returned. Some say he was lost in a Caribbean storm, while others claim that he simply fell in love with the open sea and never returned to Yarmouth.

  Whatever the case, there was an empty space in the life of Gramma Jake that none of the good intentions and kind words of her neighbours, friends, and family could ever hope to fill.

  She kept her son’s bed made, set a place at the table for him, and walked and watched for many long hours upon the high and lonely widow’s walk.

  Her husband died before her and so added to her grief. Her walking continued. Folks would see her up there, as constant as a lighthouse, with memories as her only companions.

  Eventually Gramma Jake passed on. Some say that she fell from the widow’s walk, while others simply claim she had died in her sleep.

  Since her death, the house has been haunted by the apparition of a tall and stately woman dressed in gray or white, in the fashion of the Victorian age. Others have spotted strange lights dancing upon the iron railing of the widow’s walk, like the phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s Fire. There are some sailors who claim that these mysterious dancing lights have helped guide them into Yarmouth Harbour on foggy nights.

  The woman’s figure has been seen standing atop the tall staircase up to the widow’s walk, and has even been reported to have kissed the cheeks of two young children as they drifted towards sleep.

  As lately as the early 1980s there have been reports of strange lights dancing across the widow’s walk and the sound of a ghostly bagpipe lament wailing softly in the night.

  More recently, the lower floor of the Captain’s House has been occupied by a golf shop and later a tole painting shop, but neither prospered. The house is currently inhabited, but even so most folks in Yarmouth steer clear of the Captain’s House.

  9

  THE

  IRON BOX AT

  FRENCH CROSS

  MORDEN

  I am a writer of horror fiction and a teller of ghost stories. I like nothing better than to put a good old-fashioned scare into people. Still, there are events in this world far scarier than my meagre pen can dream up. One such event was the expulsion of the Acadians.

  During the late 1600s a population of about one hundred French families settled in Acadia, which at that time consisted of the territories of northwestern Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and eastern Quebec, as well as part of modern-day New England.

  At the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, a beaten France was forced to sign the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, ceding Acadia to the British, who decreed that Acadia would now be known as Nova Scotia.

  At first the occupation was peaceful. The trouble began in 1754, in the middle of the French and Indian War, when the British government demanded that all Acadians living within the borders of Nova Scotia take an oath of allegiance to the British crown.

  When the Acadians refused to sign the oath, the British government decided to deport the remaining Acadians and the expulsion officially began.

  Hundreds of Acadian homes and settlements were burned to the ground. Families were torn apart and the Acadians were systematically shipped to new
homes on both sides of the ocean. They were dispersed to the thirteen colonies, France, Georgia, England, St. Pierre and Miquelon, and Louisiana, where the refugees formed thriving “Cajun” settlements.

  In later years, the government officially apologized to the Acadians, yet the expulsion remains a black mark on the scrolls of Canadian and Maritime history.

  I found the roots of this story buried in the pages of a short article I found in the March 18, 1889, Halifax Herald. It takes place in a little town called Aylesford, situated midway down the north shore of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley.

  On the northern shore of Nova Scotia, facing the Bay of Fundy, is a massive and formidable wall of cliffside, a naturally formed defence against the sea and any invader. Unfortunately the cliffside seawall also makes a particularly nasty fence .

  Directly across from the town of Aylesford is a break in the seawall that the old folks used to call French Cross. Some say it earned its name because of the large cross the Acadians left behind them as they fled their British expellers, while others believe that the name is meant to simply mark the place where the French crossed the Bay of Fundy. Nowadays this location is better known as the town of Morden, a name that echoes strangely the French word for death: mort.

  In 1755, Acadians living in Grand Pré and Canard were forced to surrender to the British army.

  Several hundred of them were held prisoner in the confines of the Grand Pré parish church, surrounded by a legion of well-armed British redcoats. In the harbour a small flotilla of British ships were eagerly waiting, ready to bear the surrendered remains of the Acadian population to an as yet unknown destination.

  The news flashed down the Gaspereau River, spreading like a plague that touched the heart of every Acadian inhabitant in the region. A meeting was called to decide how the remaining Acadians in the area would deal with the British victory. They were split between flight and surrender. About sixty Acadians headed up the river, keeping away from the roads and the clear waterways for fear of the British.