Although many of those who so relentlessly punished the children entrusted to them are now dead, the effect of their savage punishments has outlived them. Not only were little children brutally punished for speaking their mother tongue, reducing them to years of speechlessness, but the Mi’kmaw language was constantly referred to as “mumbo jumbo” as if it were some form of gibberish. The ruthless banning of Mi’kmaw in the school drove a wedge between family members. Freda Simon, for example, remembers that when she arrived at the school two years after her older sister they were completely unable to communicate with each other since Freda spoke only Mi’kmaw and her sister spoke only English. The punishment for speaking Mi’kmaw began on our first day at school, but the punishment has continued all our lives as we try to piece together who we are and what the world means to us with a language many of us have had to re-learn as adults.
Ghosts and Hauntings
Many students who attended the school feel that it was literally haunted and can find no rational explanation for some of their strange experiences there. Many more are haunted by memories of the inexplicable cruelty they witnessed. One man who attended the school in the late 1950s can never forget the sight of a tiny orphaned baby the nuns were taking care of whose crib stood by the door of the boys’ dormitory:
That poor baby — always crying, always filthy — always crying — we used to touch the baby as we went by. When the nuns weren’t looking or weren’t around we’d try and comfort it. That’s the one thing that really sticks in my mind — that little crib right by the door. I felt so sorry for him. Constantly crying. The nuns would come and slap him — all in the name of God — the Sisters of Charity.
From the very beginning, stories circulated that the school was haunted. From time to time the Bishop would come down from Halifax and bless the whole building. He would lead a procession praying and sprinkling holy water. He was followed by Father Mackey, the ten nuns and all the children. Despite these efforts, most of the children who attended the school can recall some sort of eerie happening. The school had a spooky atmosphere even when nothing particularly odd was going on. Meeting a nun at night in one of the dark corridors was especially scary. I never heard them walking — then suddenly a black-robed figure with a white cap and collar would come out of one of the many doors and appear in front of me. More frightening still was the glimpse of a black figure disappearing into another room because I was never sure whether I was imagining it or not.
One of the things that scared me most as a new arrival was the strange smiling clown faces that I would see staring down at me in bed every night after lights-out. I just stared back until I fell asleep, thinking that if I looked away they would come down and get me. But they just kept smiling as if they were mocking me. When Sister moved me to another bed in another row, I didn’t see the faces anymore. Other children saw other kinds of figures which seemed to mock them. Rita Howe recalls that many children saw a little man dancing on top of the presses at night and that it was already a well-established story in the school when she first went there:
When I first went to the Residential School in 1946, the story was already going around about the little man whose eyes lit up while he was dancing on top of the presses at night. We were all afraid to go to the bathroom after dark because someone said the little man would get us. This character was created by kids who were frightened and it represented their fear and the fact that he was dancing indicated that he was making fun of them.
In the girls’ dormitory a frequent phenomenon which seemed to panic the nuns nearly as much as the children was the way that the tall closets which we had been taught to call the “presses” would swing open at night, despite the fact that the doors were secured with swivelling latches. I’d hear the floor squeaking, like footsteps walking along in front of the presses. In the morning, when we got up for Mass, the presses would still be open. Someone told the Sister that the press had opened during the night and when she asked who opened it we told her that it was a frequent occurrence and that nobody had opened it. “The next time you see those presses open during the night, you knock on my door and we’ll get to the bottom of this.” One eerie night, the wind was softly blowing through the open window and footsteps started walking along the front of the presses. Rosie and I were sleeping in the front row, and the footsteps walked right at the foot of our beds and went right by, down to the end of the dormitory. I was closing my eyes really tight and lying very still trying to ignore them when Rosie shook my shoulder and whispered in a scared voice, “Isabelle, Isabelle, wake up. Look at the presses opening. Somebody just went by and the presses opened.” I looked up and one of the press doors was slightly ajar even though they had the kind of knob you had to turn to open the door. All I could see inside the press was darkness. No form. Nothing. A girl in the back row whispered, “Wake Sister up. Knock on her door.” I could hear Sister’s sleepy voice behind the door. “Yes, what is it?”
“You told us to wake you up when the presses opened. The presses are open.”
“Okay, wait a minute. I’ll be right there.”
For once I forgot how terrified of Wikew I usually was. Her voice that night sounded like an angel’s coming to fix everything and put it all right again. When she appeared, she walked directly to the press and asked, “All right who’s the smart aleck who climbed up here and opened the press door?” And while she was facing us, the door behind her opened just a little bit. She turned around and asked, “Is it my imagination or did this door open just now?” And we all chorused, “The door opened.” “Mother of God, help us,” she prayed. “The souls in Purgatory need our prayers and those of you who are awake, (which was everybody by this time) kneel by your beds and let’s pray for those who have died and need our prayers.” And we all began to echo the words she prayed:
“Out of the depths I have cried unto thee 0 Lord. Lord hear my voice.”
To me the prayer sounded even more scary than the footsteps because I wasn’t sure what the word “depths” meant. I imagined that we were in those dark dank depths — crying out for God to listen to us. And there was the nun’s figure walking back and forth where the footsteps had walked just a couple of minutes before. The dormitory was dark but a light shone from her door and cast an eerie shadow on the floor as she walked back and forth holding her rosary and praying. All of us girls dressed in night-dresses kneeling on the cold floor were shivering either from cold or fear, or a combination of the two, glancing over our shoulders occasionally toward the press door which the nun had slammed shut. Once in a while, Sister would stop the rosary and describe the souls burning in Purgatory. The next day, the priest blessed the dormitory by sprinkling holy water all around, and everything remained quiet for about a year when another series of footsteps and opening presses had to be dealt with.
Betsey Paul remembers similar unexplained events:
God Almighty that place was haunted! If it wasn’t one thing it was another. I felt my bed shake many times and somebody walking toward me. Always somebody going between beds and shaking them. It seemed like your bed was crumbling or shaking or something like that.
Rita Pictou is the one who told me about the knockings in the presses. “Maybe someone is trying to scare us,” I said. “No, around about midnight, on a full moon night when the whole dormitory is all lit up, you can see for yourself.” The dormitory had many windows with no curtains, just window blinds, and this one night, we both stayed awake to hear the knockings. I got tired and dozed off because I didn’t hear anything. Then all of a sudden, I heard this great big knocking — BANG, BANG, BANG. Oh my God, the ghost is here but I wasn’t too scared because everything was lit up, so I bravely got out of bed and saw the open press door and I thought that one of the girls had climbed up there. So I crawled back in bed. Then I heard it again, bang, bang, bang. Out of the darkness came Rita’s whisper, “See, what did I tellya? The ghost is here.” And then the girls who had heard the knockings started waking up other girls,
“Are you awake, are you awake? The ghost is here.”
Rita Joe suggests the reason why we heard so many knockings and saw so many apparitions was because we were putting it into each other’s minds: “I know when I was there, other children often saw something that I did not see. Maybe I did not want to see it. Once we were walking down the hallway when one of the girls asked me, ‘Do you see what I see?’ I looked in the direction she was pointing and said, ‘No, I think I see it but I’m not sure.’ She said it was a man kissing a nun.”
While some of these occurrences may well have been the result of active imaginations stimulated by the daily stress of life in the school, other still defy explanation. Betsey Paul recalls one such event:
Bridget Ann Paul and I were working in Sister Cyprian’s classroom one dark rainy miserable day. Sister was nice and always had a smile for us, and she came in, sat down at her desk and began correcting papers. Next to the classroom was a reading room with a piano in it which was always kept locked and which the children were not allowed to touch, but which we used to pick open with a bobby pin because we wanted to learn how to play it so bad. All of a sudden this piano started playing — dum-da-da dum-dum. It was playing real nice and it was strange because we knew that no one plays that well except Sister Eleanor Marie and she was nowhere around. Sister Cyprian said to me, “Go next door and see who’s playing that piano.” There was no light on; it was dark in there. So I turned on the light and saw that the lid was closed. There was nobody in sight so I turned off the light and went back to report to Sister Cyprian. No sooner had I picked up my broom when the piano played another melody. The nun looked at me and told me to check again and I said, “No, Sister, you go.” But she didn’t go. Instead, she told me to keep the door open so she could catch the boys who were playing tricks on us. This time the piano played again — la-de-da-dadadadadadum. It was like a slow waltz going up the scale and down again. It sounded beautiful. This time she said, “There is somebody in there playing the piano. Come,” and the three of us went to check and when Sister turned on the light and tried to open the piano lid, it was locked.
Another time, Sunday school was in session when the front door bell rang. I was sitting in the front desk in the front row because I was the smallest one in class and whenever something was going on in the hall, my classmates expected me to look out and report back. When the bell rang, everyone stopped what they were doing and looked puzzled because it was such an unusual thing to happen in the middle of the afternoon. Father Mackey had a strict rule not to have any interruptions during class hours. Sister Adrian sent a boy to answer the front door. Then she stepped out into the corridor to knock on Sister Superior’s door and ask her, “Are all your students in today?” And after a quick check, it was clear nobody was missing. And while they were standing around asking each other the same question, “Who could that be in the middle of a Sunday afternoon?” I jumped up from my seat and peered out the door to see what was going on. I saw Sister Cyprian standing outside of her classroom at the other end of the corridor with a questioning look on her face. The three nuns were asking each other if anyone from their class was missing but no one was. With hushed voices, they were asking each other if they heard the doorbell ringing. The boy they had sent to open the door for the guest came back all out of breath and reported, “There’s no one there.”
Then one of the nuns said, “Well, somebody must have rung the doorbell, it can’t ring all by itself. Maybe Father answered the bell and let someone in, I’ll go check.” She took off down the hall at top speed with her veil trailing behind her. I ran back to my seat and told everybody, “Nobody rang the doorbell.” But by this time, everyone had seen the nuns were acting strangely, whispering and going in and out of their classrooms. Everyone was in an uproar because they knew it was skit’ekmuj [a ghost]. Then Sister Superior came out of the priest’s office with her face pale and out of breath said, “Father is not in his suite.” Sister Adrian turned paler than the skit’ekmuj she was named after and asked, “Isabelle, are your parents coming today?”
“Yes, Sister, but they’re not allowed to come before 3:30.”
For a moment, she looked as if she didn’t know what to do. Then she recovered and sent one of the older boys to check the grounds. After a minute he came running back, with a puzzled look on his face, saying, “There’s no one out there. I even looked behind the trees on the lawn.” Then Sister Superior said, “Somebody needs our prayers and we’d better pray for the souls in Purgatory.” And so we all filed into the church and prayed “Out of the depths …”
Some have suggested that there may be a connection between these strange experiences and the fact that the school was built on a site which had long been of cultural significance for the Mi’kmaw, or on a former Mi’kmaw burial ground. There is one account that when the site was excavated for building, human bones were found. Most of the stories of odd phenomena, however, seem to have more to do with events that took place in the school itself.
Some children’s recollections of eerie events are closely associated with the intense psychological stress they experienced.
I was in the small girls’ dorm and my bed was right by the door. I woke up one night and saw myself right off the bed. I could see my bed was on the floor but I was up — above the bed. And I screamed and cried and I screamed some more and the nun came running out and I was put down again. I tried to tell the nun, “I was up.” And she said, “Oh, you’re just dreaming.” I said, “No, I wasn’t dreaming. I was up.” But she didn’t believe me.
One former student recalls that the physical symptoms he suffered after his father died were accompanied by peculiar psychic phenomena:
I used to suffer from stomach cramps when my father died — I couldn’t sleep. I’d be doubled up with pain and then I’d lie back — and I used to see a light. It seemed like this light from the window used to engulf me. I used to be scared to go to sleep. It went on for months and then it would go away again.
Often peculiar things would happen in the midst of the most ordinary tasks. One student remembers:
Everyone was given chores after supper and four girls were usually assigned to folding bedspreads. One evening they were running up the four flights to the girls’ dormitories and when they opened the door, they saw a girl folding spreads in the third row of the little girls’ dormitory and they could see the wall and windows right through her.
Other people say that they heard a baby crying. A man who worked at the school for many years was walking his dog behind the school long after it had closed down.
When I came to the boys’ side, I heard a child crying, “Mamma, Mamma.” Even my big German shepherd stopped what he was doing and looked around. I looked up at the infirmary windows even though I knew the school was empty for over twenty years. I swear to God, I thought I seen a boy looking out one of the windows. I didn’t tell anyone because I knew they would say I was nuts.
While the school was still operating some children saw or heard ghost children in the building. Bernie Knockwood remembers how he reacted:
Late at night, after everyone was in bed, I’d hear children in the stairway. It sounded like in the morning when all the kids were going down the stairs — noisy and relaxed and carrying on. I’d lay there and listen to them all night. It only happened at certain times and I never figured out why. One night, I started down the stairs. When I was half way down it got real quiet. Emerson and I sneaked over to the door and we could hear somebody crying, “Kiju, Kiju.” I don’t know who it was. This happened three times. The third time it happened I sat there and prayed for the little boy and said, “I hope your grandmother finds you. Be happy.” And he never came back. Maybe that was the part they were trying to quash in us — the ties with our ancestors.
Another student remembered seeing a forerunner of a death in another girl’s family:
One spring morning when it was just coming daylight, I was walking toward Sister Mary Leonard’s door to wake he
r up because she didn’t hear the bell. I happened to glance around to see if anyone else was awake. On Grace’s pillow, I saw the face of an old man with long white hair. I didn’t know whether I should go over to the girl and tell her or not. Just then she took her blanket and turned around in her sleep and covered the old man’s face with it. I was so scared I ran back to bed. The next day, Grace got word that her grandfather had died. He had come to say good-bye to her and what I had seen was a forerunner.
The Mi'kmaq Anthology Page 17
