Haunted Harbours

by Steve Vernon

  The journey was a costly one. Their supplies quickly ran out and they were forced to subsist upon a diet of berries, fresh fish, and whatever game they caught. Dysentery broke out among the refugees. They were at the mercy of the elements without benefit of any kind of medical aid.

  They hid in the Aylesford hills and began digging a series of graves for the increasing number of their dead that eventually came to be known as the French Cross Burying Grounds, a makeshift graveyard in a barren sandy field near where they camped. The refugees lacked even a clergyman to sanctify the burials.

  The Mi’kmaq helped the Acadians as best they could, bringing in the game and medicines they foraged. Thus, the Acadians were supplied with deer and moose, and they were able to for-age mussels from the rocks of the shoreline. Partridge and rabbit supplemented their meagre diet. The Mi’kmaq steeped alder leaves to treat fever and stomach ailments and to wrap about festering wounds; boneset, bearberry, and poplar leaves were used to treat colds.

  The Acadians continued to hide as the autumn dragged slowly into the winter. The Mi’kmaq kept them fed and informed of the goings on in the outer world. They decided that their best plan of action was to stay at French Cross until the early spring, and then to cross the Bay of Fundy and journey on towards Quebec where the French were still welcome. They erected their winter tents over the graves of their people by a brook that emptied itself down into the waters of the Bay of Fundy, where they remained safely concealed from the English forces. They could watch the sea and chart the course of the English sailing vessels. They waited there until the spring. Throughout the winter the Mi’kmaq had helped the Acadians construct enough canoes to travel safely in. They worked through the winter, peeling the birch trees and laying the bark.

  By the spring the Acadians were ready for their escape. They said goodbye to their rudimentary huts and hide tents and the graves of their fallen loved ones. They erected a large wooden cross to watch over the makeshift graveyard, then loaded into the canoes and paddled across the tumultuous spring waters of the Bay of Fundy.

  No doubt many looked back and saw that large wooden cross make its silent promise to keep watch over their dead. The Acadians made their way to New Brunswick, and most never bothered trying to travel any further. There were friends and family and farmland aplenty. What more did they need?

  In later years the British found the graveyard. Perhaps in the heat of war they might have laid waste to it, but years after the old war had ceased, they simply viewed it as the remains of a sad story. Yet night after night, for years to come, the treasure hunters would make their way into the darkness of the French Cross Burying Grounds. Treasure-dowsers and vagabonds alike would root through the bones and the dirt, hoping to find the remnants of French treasure. It was whispered that before fleeing Acadia, the refugees had buried what treasure they couldn’t transport in a large coffin-shaped iron box that was supposed to be buried somewhere in the graveyard.

  Again and again, the treasure hunters sought out the fabled French Cross iron box, yet all who searched for it ended up poverty-stricken. Men swore that their picks and shovels and pry bars bent and twisted in the hardened Acadian dirt, and many claimed that they were chased from the burial grounds by a long yellow spirit. Others swore that every time they dug down with shovels, they would strike the iron box, and it would travel through the dirt. No matter what the story, the end result was always the same. The treasure was impossible to find.

  There are many guesses as to what this treasure might hold. Most talk of golden coins, rare gems, and other valuable collectibles that a typical Acadian dirt farmer might have tucked beneath his seed corn and plow.

  For myself, I think the treasure might have been something far more prosaic — perhaps a cherished French psalter, a chalice and candle sticks, or maybe even a portrait of great-grandpère. Who knows? The treasure may be out there still, ready to be dug. Or perhaps it’s just a ghost of a treasure, a fantasy wish that’s destined never to be found.

  10

  THE PIPER’S

  POND PIBROCH

  WINDSOR

  I have been a member of the Halifax Storytellers’ Circle for a very long time. I first joined when the group met every month at the Alderney Gate Library in Dartmouth. Back then, it wasn’t much to speak of, just a friendly little group of folks who got together to tell tales to whatever audience might show up. We’ve been to a lot of places since then, telling our tales to whoever cares to listen.

  This is a story I heard back in 2004 at the Haliburton House Halloween festival just outside of the little town of Windsor, about sixty-six kilometres northwest of Halifax. The Storytellers’ Circle was telling tales in support of the event. We were performing outside in the middle of the woods, in a comfortable open canvas tent. The wind was blowing softly through the autumn leaves, and it was perfect weather for ghost tale telling.

  Our host told this tale to two separate tours with the help of a ghostly bagpiper who showed up at the appropriate moment. I didn’t get to hear this presentation because I was busy telling my own tales in the tent.

  It wasn’t until afterwards that our host kindly related the tale to me again.

  Thomas Chandler Haliburton was born in Windsor, Hants County, in 1796, and gained fame as an author, a lawyer, a politician, and a judge. He is best known for the creation of his cantankerous tale-telling Yankee peddler, Sam Slick, whose clever quips, “barking up the wrong tree,” “quick as a wink,” “raining cats and dogs,” and “facts are stranger than fiction,” are perhaps better known than their author.

  In January of 1833, Thomas Haliburton purchased forty acres of land located on Ferry Hill, just overlooking the town of Windsor, Nova Scotia. He took it upon himself to name the estate “Clifton” after his wife’s own home in Bristol, England. There he and his wife lived happily in their modest one-and-a-half story home.

  Today the house looks very different than it did in Haliburton’s time. Successive owners have altered and added to the house, but the memories still remain. Some say that the ghost of old Thomas Haliburton still walks these halls and winds his clocks, but that tale belongs to another story entirely.

  There is a pond not far from Haliburton House and there is a tale that the locals have been telling for years.

  Long before it was called the “birthplace of hockey,” Windsor was known as Pesaquid, a Mi’kmaq term meaning “junction of waters.” This name referred to the convergence of the Avon and St. Croix rivers which flow into the Bay of Fundy.

  The British blockhouse of Fort Edward was built and fully garrisoned in the mid-1700s in Windsor and it is here that we first pick up our tale.

  His name was Jamie Donaldson, and he was a piper in the Highland Regiment. He’d been stationed at Fort Edward for some time, and while he was there he fell madly in love with a miller’s daughter. Her true name is unknown but for the sake of this story we’ll call her Donnalee Jenkins. Let’s make her beautiful, as all great loves are, give her curly hair, the colour of a raven’s wing, with eyes as sharp as needles and painted the pale haunting blue of summer forget-me-nots.

  Every night while he was supposed to be keeping watch Jamie would meet his lover by the pond. It was a dangerous business, skipping out on his duty, but he was young and reckless and madly in love. Soon, orders came down and Jamie Donaldson’s regiment was scheduled to ship out.

  “I’ll run away with you,” Donnalee Jenkins swore.

  They made a pact to meet that night by the pond, but as fate would have it, the young piper was caught trying to sneak over the wall. He was fortunate that it was only a sergeant who caught him trying to slip away with a bouquet of incriminating forget-me-nots in his hand, picked from beside the stockade wall; his bagpipes were tucked under the other arm.

  “And where do you think you are going?” the sergeant asked. “It’s a wee bit late for the picking of wildflowers.”

  Jamie opened his mouth and closed it, trying to remember how to speak, but the sergean
t only smiled.

  “Got yourself a wee colleen, do you now?”

  Jamie shrugged and sheepishly grinned.

  “And are you going off to say goodbye to her one last time before we ship out?”

  “That’s it,” Jamie said. “One last time before we ship out.”

  The sergeant fixed him with a gaze as sharp as any bayonet.

  “And you wouldn’t be harbouring any wild notions about running off and deserting your post, now would you?”

  “Oh no, sergeant, sir,” James said, shaking his head so hard he thought it might fall off. “Nothing of the kind.”

  The sergeant’s face darkened like a storm cloud. “Don’t you ‘sir’ me, boy. I work for a living,”

  And then he let slip another smile.

  “I’m thinking that this post might be a wee bit overprotected. Perhaps it’s best if you take some air while I keep an eye out for hostiles. Mind you, be back before roll call. If the captain catches you out playing tomcat, it’ll be both of our heads that roll in the dirt.”

  So over Jamie went, clambering down the rope he’d slung with the help of the kind-hearted sergeant who lowered his bagpipes down to him. The forget-me-nots were tucked into a pocket in his tunic. Off he went, headed for the pond where Donnalee stood waiting.

  Only she hadn’t waited. The sergeant’s untimely delay had held her lover up just long enough for Donnalee to lose hope.

  “He’s not coming,” she said. “They’ve caught him and they’ve hanged him, or he just doesn’t love me enough.”

  She walked six times around the pond as she waited, before finally working up her courage enough to do what she had in mind. She laid her baggage down and picked up a large chunk of granite. Using the ribbons from her hair she tied her skirt up around the rock. Then, holding the dress-bound granite in her arms like the baby that she and James would never have, she leaped into the deep end of the pond.

  At the last she thought better of it and kicked for the surface but the rock was far too heavy and bound too tightly. It carried her straight to the bottom. She tried to scream and swallowed dirty pond water and her face turned a colour that nearly matched her forget-me-not eyes.

  Not more than five minutes later young Jamie came by the pond.

  “Donnalee!” he shouted, but there was nothing but the laughter of an unseen moonlight whippoorwill that answered his call. Jamie circled the pond seven more times until he nearly fell over Donnalee’s luggage. Fearing the worst, he knelt and peered down into the water, searching until he saw her staring up at him, her face a pale blue moon of sorrow.

  He knelt there and wept until his tears had cried themselves dry. Then he stood up as straight as a trooper on dress parade. He straightened his uniform and scuffed the loose dirt off with his hands.

  He scattered the forget-me-nots he’d picked upon the waters of the pond. Then he blew on those bagpipes, a long last haunting pibroch — a lament for the dead. He marched around the pond, playing his last pibroch until the coyotes howled and the hoot owls called back at him. And then he marched straight into the pond, playing the bagpipes right up until the very end.

  The forget-me-nots still grow around the Piper’s Pond, scattered like a thousand pale blue tears. The legend says that if you run around the pond thirteen times in a counter-clockwise direction, six times for her and seven for him, or once for every full moon in a year, the piper will rise up out of Piper’s Pond and begin to play the bagpipes.

  Is it true? As Sam Slick was wont to say, “Facts can be stranger than fiction.”

  11

  THE MOOSE

  ISLAND DEVIL

  FIVE ISLANDS

  I first heard this tale told over a pitcher of good draught beer at the Lord Nelson Beverage Room in Halifax, a lowly tavern made famous by the fact that it was only the second pub in Halifax to allow women inside its doors. More recently, the pub has served as the first stopping point for many a college student working their way down Spring Garden Road towards the livelier downtown bars. It was fine fishing grounds for a wandering storyteller; the talk was cheap and the beer even cheaper.

  The man who told this tale to me gave me nothing more than the barest of bones to work with. Such is a storyteller’s lot. A few days worth of digging at the Archives enriched the facts, and I’ve painted in what details history saw fit to leave out.

  Moose Island is the largest of a fistful of islands that jut into the Bay of Fundy at the base of the broad and low Economy Mountain, near Five Islands, Nova Scotia. There’s fine hiking here, and in the autumn the turning leaves will tell you stories I could never dream of.

  The Mi’kmaq tell us that Glooscap created these islands while throwing stones at the beaver across the bay from the top of Cape Blomidon. The legend goes that the beaver had built a dam between Advocate and Blomidon, causing water to flow into Glooscap’s Blomidon home and drown out his medicine garden. Glooscap set a trap to catch the beaver, but the wily animal escaped his device. In a fit of rage Glooscap then threw five great boulders at the beaver, who escaped, but not without a flattened tail.

  More practical sources will tell you that the five islands have been christened geometrically for their shape — Diamond, Long, Egg, Pinnacle, and Moose. Moose Island is so named because it looks just like the hump of a big old bull moose rising up from out of the gray waters of the Atlantic.

  Upon the granite coastal wall of Moose Island is crudely carved the face of an angry bearded man. Locals call this cliffside Ruff’s Ghost after a long dead Irish settler who went by the name of John Ruff.

  Back in the mid-1800s Moose Island was the only island of the five that had been settled. John Ruff lived there with his wife Susannah. Together they raised six children – Isaiah, Noah, Andrew, Arthur, Anthony, and Benjamin. Sadly, John was not the best of men. A drinker and an abusive father, he frequently beat his wife and was known in those parts as a bit of a bully. In the late summer of 1842, John and four of his sons were working on Moose Island. Susannah was enjoying a much-needed vacation from John’s bullying ways at the settlement of Five Islands. The two oldest sons, Noah and Isaiah, had grown and fled the unhappy family.

  On that day in July 1842, the oldest son Andrew rowed the family dory into Five Islands with his father’s corpse laid in the stern. John Ruff’s head was broken open as if by a bad blow and a single maple leaf was found embedded in the gory wound.

  “It was a maple tree did it,” Andrew swore. “Father had been drinking and he felled it badly.”

  As I’ve said it was a long-known fact that John Ruff was overly fond of the bottle, so no one was surprised to hear this story. The case was quickly dismissed as a simple accidental death, and the town of Five Islands began busily burying the memory of John Ruff and his abusive ways.

  But one person could not forget. Young Benjamin Ruff, nine years old at the time of his father’s death, was haunted by bitter memories of that day on the island. He was kept awake at night by visions of his father standing with an axe over his bed. For two long years, young Benjamin feared the coming of nightfall and the blind baleful stare of the Atlantic moon. Then, two years from the date of his father’s death, young Benjamin felt compelled to make a startling confession to the authorities.

  “It was Arthur and Andrew who murdered Father, and Anthony and I saw the whole thing happen.”

  The two older boys were brought in for questioning, but it was taken to be a bad sign when Arthur Ruff fled the district. The truth came out when young Benjamin told a Supreme Court in Truro of what had happened on the night of his father’s death.

  “Father had been drinking,” young Benjamin said, “and he’d gone to lay down in the barn with my older brother Anthony. He was asleep when Arthur went and got the axe. Arthur stood over Father for a long time, waiting for him to wake up. When he opened his eyes, Arthur brought the axe down on his head.”

  Benjamin further stated that Arthur and Andrew had dragged their father’s corpse out of the barn to the woods,
where they prepared a crime scene, felling a heavy maple tree and placing their father’s corpse next to it. While Arthur arranged the corpse, Andrew went back to the barn and used a hand adze to hew and gouge out the bloodstains on the floorboards.

  “Why did they do this? Why did you say nothing until now?” the prosecuting attorney asked young Benjamin.

  “I didn’t want my brother to hang. It wasn’t any of his fault.”

  “Whose fault was it?”

  Young Benjamin’s eyes grew strange and flat and he stared over the courtroom in a cold and distant fashion.

  “We saw something strange that night before the killing — a dark figure dancing about the barn,” Benjamin said. “I think it was the devil.”

  The other sons confirmed that there had been many times in the past when this devil had been seen upon the island.

  Was it one more lie? The product of a deluded boy’s vivid imagination? Or was it perhaps the truth?

  “The devil likes it there on the island,” Andrew swore. “He whispers in the night. I think it was his idea that Arthur kill father.”

  “And was it the devil’s idea that you hide your father’s murder in such a fashion?” the prosecuting attorney sarcastically asked.

  “No, of course not,” Andrew replied. “We didn’t want to see our brother hang. One death in a family is bad enough, don’t you think?”

  “We saw the devil once before,” Benjamin later added. “My sister saw him behind the water barrel when my father was going to kill Mother with his knife, but when Father saw the devil looking at him like a hungry man watching a stew pot steep, he couldn’t do it.”

  Further questioning brought to light the fact that the boys had originally planned to throw their father over a cliff and had gone so far as to practice by throwing a sheep over the cliff. Because the sheep was only crippled by the fall, they decided to find themselves another plan.