Haunted Harbours

by Steve Vernon

  Ruff justice, indeed.

  The Ruffs’ barn had tumbled down in a storm, but officials investigated the wreckage nonetheless. They discovered evidence of a chipped floor and bloodstains between the cracks of the floorboards, but that was a common sight in the days when farmers slaughtered their livestock indoors. The coroner exhumed Ruff’s badly decomposed body and ruled that although the wound to the skull could indeed have been caused by a malicious blow with an axe, it could just have easily have been caused by a poorly felled tree. This testimony was further substantiated by townsfolk who allowed that Ruff was a poorly skilled woodsman, a bit of a drunkard with a bad temper to boot. Another witness declared that he’d never believed young Benjamin was of a right mind.

  After further questioning, the judge ruled in the accuseds’ favour. He decided that the evidence presented by a delusional eleven year old wasn’t substantial enough to convict Andrew and Arthur.

  The blame was laid at the feet of the earlier magistrate’s failure to summon a coroner at the initial time of death. Lack of evidence was the final verdict, and the death of John Ruff, axe blow or not, was deemed accidental.

  The Ruffs soon left the island, not even bothering to sell the property. As far as the townsfolk of Five Islands knew, young Arthur never returned to the area. Yet lights have been seen to this day on Moose Island, strange dancing lights, like a lantern being held by a shaky man, or a ghost.

  Is it the devil, or the ghost of John Ruff? Perhaps it is the spirits of his murdering sons, doomed to endlessly repeat their crime. I dare you to spend a night camping on this island to find out the truth.

  12

  THE WEEPING

  CAVE OF

  PARRSBORO

  PARRSBORO

  This story was told to me by a Saint Mary’s University professor of Mi’kmaq descent. He was a bit of a wild man and taught me that a writer shouldn’t feel shackled by the chains of conventionality. One of my fondest memories was of him walking into class with a stick of high explosive and placing it on his desk.

  “Sometimes,” he said to the class, “a writer needs to use dynamite.”

  Of course, no English students were harmed in the making of this anecdote.

  The dynamite was a dud.

  I hope you’ll find this story isn’t.

  The shores of Nova Scotia are riddled with caves, the most famous being The Ovens sea caves of Riverport, Lunenburg County. Every year thousands of tourists make the climb down to view these spectacular rock formations and listen to the waves echoing their long lonely song.

  If you happen to travel to Parrsboro, the folk there will be glad to tell you about the mystery of the Maiden’s Cave, where the ghost of a young woman weeps and moans to this very day.

  You’ll find Parrsboro on the northern shore of the Minas Basin. It was named in the year 1784 in honour of Admiral John Parr, who was Governor General of Nova Scotia at the time. Before that Parrsboro was simply known as the Partridge Island settlement. It is reputed to have the world’s highest tides and has been celebrated as the home of Glooscap, mighty Mi’kmaq warrior and magician. The area is also well known for the amazing amounts of amethyst and agate that can be found on beaches and cliffsides. Legend has it that while creating the tides, Glooscap scattered his grandmother’s jewelry bag on the shores of Parrsboro, thus creating its abundance of natural wealth.

  In John Parr’s time, the waters of Nova Scotia were home to scores of ruthless pirates and privateers. One such pirate, a Sicilian by the name of Dionaldo, was making a fine living pirating the boats that passed by.

  Mention pirates and people will picture sashes, cutlasses, and golden hoop earrings, men shouting “Yo ho!” and swinging from ropes with knives in their teeth, or one-legged sea captains with gaudy parrots perched on their shoulders. That’s not how it really was. More often than not, a pirate would simply pull up beside your ship, possibly with two or three ships of his own, and point a cannon at your ship’s hull. You would be given the option to surrender, and perhaps become a pirate yourself. If your ship was deemed seaworthy, the pirate would seize it and hoist his own flag, thus increasing his flotilla. Pirating was a business, plain and simple.

  Mary Jane Hawkins sailed with her father on trading missions in his ship, the Red Hawk. Some swore that a woman on board a ship was simply asking for bad luck, but Mary Jane’s father held no such belief. Being both captain and owner of the ship, his word held sway over all the crew’s fears.

  Yet perhaps the crew had been right in this instance.

  The trouble began when Dionaldo’s vessel came aside of the Red Hawk. The captain would not surrender and so he and the crew were massacred. Mary Jane, however, was saved for other purposes. Knowing what her fate would be, she tried to fling herself overboard, but Dionaldo would have none of that. Had circumstances been different, this tale might have ended a little more abruptly. Possibly Mary Jane might have escaped or drowned herself. Perhaps Mary Jane might have married Dionaldo and lived as a pirate-captain’s wife.

  At least that was how Dionaldo saw it. You see, Dionaldo was a bit of a romantic. He believed that he could woo this daughter of the sea, and that in time she would certainly fall in love with him. He couldn’t fathom the notion of her holding a grudge simply because he’d killed her father and all of her friends. She was just a girl, after all, and as wayward as the restless sea. He was certain her mood would turn, and she would find her way to his bunk. You’ve got to love an optimist.

  For several months he kept her locked in a ship’s cabin, feeding her scraps and trying to win her over. He would let her walk the deck every evening, leashed with a stout rope tied at his side. He talked to her, telling her the tales of bravado and adventure that he had lived through. He told her of how in the long nights when he’d stood at the wheel, he’d looked up into the northern skies and seen the colour of her eyes. Our Dionaldo was also a bit of a poet, and a charmer to boot.

  “I will give you precious gemstones and make you my bride,” he swore.

  Yet Mary Jane could not forget the sight of her dying father. At the earliest chance, she stole a dirk and tried to cut Dionaldo’s throat. He was too quick, though, and took the knife away from her.

  “If you prefer the embrace of the sea to my arms, you shall have your wish,” Dionaldo swore.

  He would have thrown her overboard, but the sudden intervention of a British man-of-war saved Mary Jane from a watery grave. The pirate ship slipped away and found itself off the coast of Parrsboro, then uninhabited. Dionaldo took the girl ashore and accomplished his terrible revenge. He sealed her in a cave filled with raw amethyst and quartz, with a few salted pollack serving as her meagre provisions.

  “You see,” Dionaldo howled. “I swore I would give you gemstones, and so I have.”

  They sealed up the cave with rocks and covered the rocks with underbrush, and left Mary Jane to her lonely doom. Some say she died, some say she was rescued, and some say she is out there still.

  There are quartz crystals that can be found in this area that are grown in the shape of smooth teardrops. Some claim they are the last teardrops that Mary Jane wept.

  The Mi’kmaq shunned this area because of the cave, and at certain times when the wind is right the folks around Parrsboro claim that you can still hear the ghost of Mary Jane Hawkins weeping over her lonely fate.

  13

  THE HIDEY

  HINDER OF

  DAGGER WOODS

  ANTIGONISH

  Hip-deep in my research for this collection I came across a mention of a demon that was reputed to haunt the Dagger Woods of Antigonish County.

  I couldn’t find much more than a brief description of the creature, but it sparked a memory of a story that I’d heard of a Hidey Hinder that followed hikers around in the Cape Breton Woods. I had discovered two perfectly good pieces of two completely different jigsaw puzzles, and I decided they might fit together nicely.

  There are an awful lot of stories told about Dagger W
oods, just a long forest road about fifteen kilometres east of Antigonish. You can walk through if you like. By daylight it doesn’t seem like much, but nightfall brings another story. Residents will tell you of the strange and awful cries that sound throughout the woods. Others talk of a gray-clad demon wearing a bright red cap who will follow you around. They call it the Hidey Hinder, and it’s said that it will sneak up on unwary hikers and follow them on their way.

  You’ll hear it, sneaking and creeping up on you, just behind your left ear, but try as you might, you can’t see it. Turn as fast as you like, and the Hidey Hinder is that much faster. It’s worse than trying to catch a mosquito while blindfolded. The Hidey Hinder keeps in your shadow, hiding just behind you, and the only way you can save yourself is to catch a single glimpse of him. That’s the hard part. He always moves just that much too fast to be caught.

  Some say he’s just a fooler, a minor level trickster who is looking for a giggle on you. Others say that he will chase you until you panic and run, and that the bones of those who died of exposure and lie lost in the woods are usually scarred by the long-fanged hunger marks of the Hidey Hinder.

  Young Saundra Girard wasn’t thinking of anything but the fat August blueberries she would gather in her bucket. She couldn’t wait to hear that juicy plump hollow sound that the blueberries would make as she dropped them into her bucket – plunk, plunk, plunk. That was her favourite sound. She loved to hear the sound soften as the bucket slowly filled until at the very end of it when she would have to place each blueberry very delicately, one by one, for fear of over-spilling her bucket.

  Sometimes she would take a fruit basket left over from the groceries and fill it with white foam cups. Then she would fill each cup with blueberries, saving the fattest and the best for the very top. Once the cups were filled she would wait by the road for the bus and sell the berries to the hungry passengers for a dollar a cup. Her mother had done this as a child, selling the berries for twenty-five cents a cup, and before that her grandmother had peddled the blueberries for ten cents a cup.

  Today’s blueberries weren’t to be sold, however. Today’s blueberries were strictly for baking. Saundra had already decided what she wanted her mother to make with the berries: a great big feed of blueberry muffins. Saundra loved her muffins fresh and hot from the oven, just cooled long enough to handle without a mess. She’d slather them up with butter and eat them until her belly pretty nearly burst.

  That’s why she was out this far in the woods. She needed to find her berries, and the best ones grew thickest out in Dagger Woods. A lot of kids she knew stayed out of these woods, because folks thought they were haunted. Some people said that a man had died in a knife fight in these woods, and that his ghost still waited with a drawn knife, looking for revenge. Her Uncle Roderick said that there was a demon out here haunting through the shadows and searching for fresh meat.

  Saundra wasn’t scared. The only thing that scared her was the thought of how close it was to back-to-school time. She wasn’t looking forward to having to sit at a desk all day long. The schoolhouse frightened her more than any monster ever could. Just thinking about that big old schoolhouse with its doors hanging open like a dragon’s jaws was enough to scare the living daylights out of her.

  The woods didn’t scare her one bit. She never got lost and even if she did she knew how to find herself again. Her daddy had taught her that trick. “Lost is a surprise that sneaks up on you, just around the very next corner,” he always said. “Look for the water. Remember the track of the stream and follow it on back home. A good river or a stream can be just as dependable as a highway.”

  Saundra had listened. She knew that you had to be careful in the woods, and she always was.

  She kept on walking. She was close to where the blueberries grew fattest. This was her secret spot, out here in the pine trees. There’d been a fire ten years back and nothing grew blueberries like burned-over woodland.

  She knelt in a patch of berries. The rock she squatted on was a little tippy so she turned it over. A big fat red centipede scuttled out from under, all wet and nasty. She drew her breath in sharply and held it for a half an instant. In that half an instant she heard a branch snap behind her like the wishbone of a chicken.

  She turned, half-expecting to see a deer, a rabbit, or at worse a bear. Bears were hungry this time of year, looking for berries to fatten themselves up for hibernation. The cubs would be mostly grown, not needing their momma’s protection, so the odds were any bears would be more than happy to leave her alone.

  She saw nothing.

  And then she heard it again, softly to her left, a dead leaf crushed beneath an unseen pressure —a heavy footstep sounding very close indeed.

  She held still, not wanting to disturb whatever it was that had made the noise. She edged her glance backwards, slowly pivoting her head in tiny careful increments— nothing.

  And then she heard it, even closer, just behind her left ear, a soft damp giggle.

  “Jeremy?”

  She whirled around as fast as she could, trying to catch a glimpse of her mischievous older brother.

  Still nothing.

  “Jeremy if you’re trying to scare me it won’t work. You know I can hear you.”

  But that was the point. She was supposed to hear it, supposed to be terrified and to run screaming into the wilderness. Maybe fall down and twist her ankle and lie there starving to death. Perhaps she’d run into a tree or fall off into a rock cut.

  She felt its hot breath upon her neck. She shivered, as if she were cold. She remembered a time when she and Jeremy had found a dead dog beside the roadway. The dog had been covered in maggots that had made a soft sound like crackling cellophane. The stink had been terrible.

  This thing’s breath was worse.

  Now she was remembering her father’s voice. She was remembering a story he’d told about the Hidey Hinder, how it would creep up and follow hikers through the woods, scaring them into hurting themselves, or panicking and becoming lost. Her father had said that the only way to scare a Hidey Hinder off your trail was to catch a look at it; it couldn’t stand the sight of its own reflection in another’s eyes.

  Saundra felt something move closer to her. She heard a soft, rancid giggle, like someone snickering through a mouthful of bad butter. She jumped, just as fast as she could, whirling about three times fast, stopping at every whirl and trying to catch a look at the Hidey Hinder: nothing, nothing, and still more nothing. She jumped and whirled and jumped and whirled, trying to catch a glance at the elusive beast but all she caught was a really bad case of the dizzies. She nearly tripped and fell.

  “You’d like that,” she thought. “You’d like that a whole lot, wouldn’t you, Mr. Hidey Hinder? You’d like it if I tripped and fell and hurt myself. You’d laugh at me while I lay there and rotted down into something soft enough for your rotten old teeth.”

  She forced herself to be still. She waited for the world to stop spinning before her eyes. She forced her breath to slow down, and then that thing behind her stuck its slimy tongue against her ear.

  Saundra took off running like a sprinter at the sound of the starter’s pistol. She crashed straight ahead, twisting and turning and trying to look back over her shoulder to catch a look at the Hidey Hinder.

  It was no good. No matter how hard she tried, she caught no more than a fleeting glimpse of its shadow. The shadow looked large, larger than a shadow ought to be. It looked hungry.

  She kept running, and in the midst of her panic she heard her father’s voice, telling her to run for the stream. She knew it was over one more hill. She could hear the Hidey Hinder close on her heels.

  “I just have to stay ahead of it,” she thought. “It’s not trying to catch me. It’s just trying to scare me.” It was working. She was scared stiff. Her breath was burning her lungs, and her legs felt like they’d been poured full of sand. “Just a little further,” she thought. “Just up over the hill.”

  There it was:
the stream, bubbling and laughing around the rocks, the most beautiful sight she’d ever seen. She ran for it and fell to her knees, scraping one against a stone. She looked down into the water and saw the reflection of the Hidey Hinder, and that was all it took. There was a puff of foul-smelling smoke and that was the end of the Hidey Hinder. She was safe.

  Saundra hurried home as fast as she could. She hugged her brother hard, her mother harder, and her father hardest of all.

  “So what’d it look like?” they asked, after she’d told them what had happened. “What did the Hidey Hinder look like?”

  She wouldn’t say, or perhaps she couldn’t.

  It was a long time before she found the nerve to ever go back into the woods, and when she did, she always carried a pocket mirror, just in case that old Hidey Hinder came sneaking up behind her.

  14

  THE BLACK DOG

  OF ANTIGONISH

  HARBOUR

  ANTIGONISH HARBOUR

  Legends of eerie black dogs, with names such as Barguest, Shuck, Grim, Black Shag, Trash, Skriker, Padfoot, Ku Sidhee, are scattered throughout Celtic history. These dogs are frequently thought to be forerunners of death. They are seldom found very far from the sea, and some folklorists believe them kin to the man-eating water horse or the selkie seal people.

  Originally told in the British Isles, these stories migrated with the British and Scottish settlers, following them all the way to Nova Scotia.

  This is one I heard around a campfire. I’ve added a little to it.

  To say that Willis Dougall was a drunkard was a little like calling an ocean deep. Willis used to tell his friends that he’d been born in a drought year with a thirst that ran bone deep. He was, as folks would say, clearly under the care of the bottle, and he’d lost track of the cork a long time ago.