Strange & Supernatural

by Barbara Whitby

  Is it the ghostly figure of the Duc d’Anville? Or one of the other unfortunate victims of the disastrous expedition? And was it the presence of all the dead French soldiers and sailors that chilled the blood of Erica and Howard as they took their walk along the Halifax waterfront that blustery day in 2004?

  Chapter 5

  The Unsettled Dead

  Houses Within Houses

  Patrick and Jane were ecstatic. They had discovered the house of their dreams while they were exploring Nova Scotia’s South Shore one lazy afternoon. From the minute they clapped eyes on it they were both drawn to the beautiful building. Tall and spacious, it had all the graciousness that a century-old home could offer. Shortly after seeing it, they put in a successful bid on the property, upped stakes and enthusiastically prepared to change their entire lifestyle. Little did they suspect to what degree their lives would really change.

  Patrick and Jane moved from the city of Halifax into the seemingly peaceful old country house during a weekend. There was enough space for their two children, seven-year-old Roger and four-year-old Hannah, to have their own rooms, and in no time at all they were comfortably settled and ready to explore. There were lots of other children of their ages around the neighbourhood, and soon they could take off safely into the surrounding woods and countryside. The location was idyllic, thought their happy parents.

  After only three days, however — by mid-week in fact — they were uncomfortably aware that something was not right, but they were too embarrassed to share their anxiety. After three weeks, though, all their fears suddenly came tumbling out into the open.

  The situation came to a head one evening after supper when a mandolin they had brought with them, and which they had propped against a chair in the living room, began to strum in the hands of an invisible presence. Until that moment the little family had been clustered around the television together, but whichever channel they decided to watch switched off and another channel came on. They had put the odd behaviour of the television down to difficult reception in the countryside, but when the mandolin began to play on its own they could no longer avoid the truth — that the house was haunted. They were also forced to admit how scared and powerless they felt, as if they were in the grip of a force much stronger than themselves.

  The first sign that the house was haunted was the cold. Although it was summer, the place was always icy. The house was not just old and draughty, which could be expected of a property which was more than 100 years old, but there was a pervasive, numbing chill that affected the spirits as much as the body.

  The parents, as well as their two young children, were constantly gloomy and on edge. This was partly because it was so difficult to sleep through all the spectral activity at night. From nightfall to dawn, an invisible woman’s footsteps clattered across every room in the house as if she was inspecting the premises. Sometimes the heavier sound of a man’s footsteps could be heard in an upstairs bedroom, but these were more rare, and sounded furtive, Jane thought. Wherever the ghostly woman went she created a frightening din of slamming doors and crashing objects, and soon Jane grew scared that the ghosts might resent her family living here. But what could they do? They had bought the house. They were trapped.

  Soon Jane began to roam the house at night, terrified that something dreadful might happen to her family. When she heard Patrick talking nonsense loudly in his sleep she shook him awake and asked him what he had been dreaming about. He could not remember, only that he felt glad to be awake; he had been deathly afraid. The next time she heard him talking in his sleep she listened more carefully and recognized that he was not talking gibberish. He was speaking in German. When she asked him about it he was as mystified as she had been. He had never in his life learned the language and was not even familiar with common tourist phrases. The couple began to feel seriously worried that some evil presence was taking over Patrick’s body while he slept.

  It was not long before they became alarmed that something similar might be happening to the children too, while they slept. Every morning both Roger and Hannah awoke looking bleary-eyed and worn out, having coughed and moaned throughout the night. Occasionally seven-year-old Roger reeked inexplicably of rum. On one occasion Jane, who now slept exceedingly lightly, woke to hear a woman’s voice calling Roger by name, and her blood ran cold at the supernatural activity that seemed to be focused on the little boy.

  The ghosts intruded into the most private aspects of daily life. Whenever Jane went into the bathroom she was appalled to feel creepy fingertips move up and down her arm, as with an intimate caress. It happened so frequently that she began to dread going in there. Sometimes, too, she was lightly splashed with water, as if someone was mischievously flicking it to get her attention.

  Then Jane began to exude an awful smell. Her son, Roger, was the first one to comment on it and he was quite frank in his opinion. “You stink like smelly feet, only worse,” he told her. Jane was at a complete loss to explain the smell. She was also in pain. Her left arm and hand had hurt ever since she moved into the house, but she did not remember injuring it. She also had stomach pains she had never experienced before.

  Both Patrick and Jane became increasingly scared, but could not think what to do. When a neighbour from church suggested leaving holy objects throughout the house they purchased a number of crosses and asked the local priest to bless them. Both parents and children began to wear a small cross that had been sewn into an item of clothing, and a Bible was ceremoniously placed in each room.

  In spite of all their efforts the supernatural activity continued unabated. Desperately in need of spiritual counsel and advice, the family sought out a priest they knew well and spoke with him in confidence. They were taken aback when the good Father was very blunt and to the point. They needed to put it behind them, he said. To give these things serious attention might be to invite worse into their lives. He refused to have anything further to do with the matter.

  Deeply troubled and disheartened, the couple could not think where to turn next. They only knew they must do something to get rid of the unwelcome spirits in their home, and fast. The activities in the house and lack of sleep were making them ill. After talking their troubles through with friends, they came to the decision to ask a Toronto medium, Ian Currie, for help. He was well known for his success in exorcising haunted houses, and for his work as a past-life therapist. The only question was whether he would be prepared to travel from Toronto to rural Nova Scotia.

  Yes, he was prepared to come, Ian assured them, but he would need to bring his psychic partner Carole Davis with him. They always worked together. He felt that the case sounded so interesting that he would like to go public with it. He asked if the family would be prepared to allow a national program of the exorcism to be broadcast live on CBC Radio. Patrick and Jane were so grateful for his attention that they readily agreed, and the talk show host Arthur Black was recruited as a third member of the investigating team. The event was broadcast on CBC Radio on October 31, 1987, and the recording was placed in the CBC archives.

  What surprised Patrick and Jane most was the natural way in which the proceedings were conducted. Ian and Carole worked as a team to perform the exorcism. They sat with the family and Arthur Black around the dining room table so casually, Jane said later, that it was almost as if they were taking part in a coffee party. There was one great difference, though. Spirits were invited to the party, and they would speak with Ian through Carole’s voice while she was in a trance.

  There was silence while Carole settled comfortably into her chair and quietly began to meditate. Her body relaxed and the others could see that she had entered a deep trance. Once or twice she asked a question. “Is anyone there?” she called out to the spirits, who seemed to be in hiding.

  Then Carole was speaking again — but this time in a strange, guttural voice. A male spirit had made contact. He was ready to answer questions but was
extremely surprised by her first one. No, he replied, he had no idea that either he or his female companion was dead.

  Nor, it turned out, were they living in the present house, which had been built at least 100 years ago. The ghosts, when they were living, had occupied a much older house that had stood on the same site more than 200 years previously.

  Now he was able to throw light on the disgusting smell that emanated from Jane. He had been wounded in the left hand by a bullet, during a skirmish with the law, and it had turned gangrenous. He had suffered greatly. Carole explained to the group around the table that the smell of this infection had somehow been transposed to the living Jane. The pain in her left arm and hand were from the same source. So was the smell of rum on the little boy Roger’s lips. The male spirit had used rum as an anaesthetic to deaden his agony, and in a similar way to Jane’s smell, it had been transposed to Roger’s living body.

  The two psychics now began the work of healing the male spirit and explained to him that, since he was dead, his body need no longer feel or dwell on the excruciating pain it had in life. It was time for him to move on. He should accept that he was dead and walk towards the nearby spiritual light. This, they explained, should be the next step in his eternal development.

  He seemed to understand, because soon he departed and the female spirit, an elderly woman, had moved into his place. She was talking through Carole in her turn.

  She, too, was amazed to hear that she had died years ago. All she knew, she said, was that she felt very, very tired all the time. She had been forced to hide her male companion from the law. He kept waking her up throughout the night by knocking loudly against the bedroom wall, constantly demanding alcohol to dull his pain, she complained. She was sick herself, and suffered from tuberculosis.

  Carole was now able to associate Jane’s stomach pains with this illness, and also the children’s coughing and moaning in their sleep. They were all transposed symptoms, and no actual disease could develop from them.

  It was now time for the psychics to ask the old woman to accept the fact of her death and move on. She wanted to be absolutely sure that her male companion had left first, she said. Once she realized that he had really departed she took the courage to go too.

  That same night, Jane was woken by a light breath of air in her ear. Startled, she sat up in bed, then was surprised to hear loud gurgling sounds coming from both her own and Patrick’s stomachs. Feeling that there was something quite different about the house she woke him. A few seconds after, they both felt such an unaccustomed peace that they knew they were free of their ordeal. Their fearsome lodgers had departed forever.

  Chapter 6

  The Halifax Explosion

  The Explosion

  December 6, 1917, was a cold day in Halifax. The weather was clear. Even though it was early morning there was a great deal of wartime activity, especially down by the docks. World War I was at its height.

  Within hours, the city would be shrouded in black, noxious smoke, rising from thousands of raging fires, the result of the most powerful man-made explosion experienced until the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, 28 years later. More than 2,000 people would be killed almost instantly, among them at least 500 children.

  A Norwegian ship, the SS Imo, laden with war supplies, was slowly making her way out of Halifax Harbour. This harbour seemed an especially safe haven for transatlantic convoys because it is sheltered from the rough Atlantic Ocean and the water is very deep.

  Meanwhile a French ship, the SS Mont Blanc, loaded with 2,545 tons of explosives, was steaming in the opposite direction, towards the Imo. Normally ships were required to fly a red flag if they were carrying a dangerous cargo into the harbour. On this occasion, however, there was such a fear of espionage in the city that the nature of the cargo was deliberately concealed, and the red flag was not raised. Very few people realized the nature of Mont Blanc’s cargo.

  Suddenly, a small craft shot out near the Imo and she changed course to avoid it. This put her directly in the path of the Mont Blanc. Both ships shrilled their whistles and blasted their klaxons in warning but neither of them appeared to yield. Each continued stubbornly on its course until it was too late. At 8:45 a.m. they collided. It took about 20 minutes for the small fires that had broken out on board Mont Blanc to reach the volatile explosives. A little after 9:06 a.m., both ships and their cargoes exploded with such ferocity that the blast was felt and heard in Cape Breton Island, 240 miles away.

  The city’s schools were on a winter schedule, and so the school day did not begin until 9:30 a.m. The majority of school children were in the open, still on their way to their first classes.

  Initially the black smoke and flames from the harbour were so spectacular that they attracted enormous curiosity. Soon crowds were gawking from windows that had a view of the harbour, and from the waterfront. Some of the older children on their way to school could not resist the urge to run down to the harbour to find out what was happening.

  The explosion, which caught people entirely by surprise, created unimaginable terror. A huge fireball flashed across the docks, vaporizing many nearby onlookers as if they had never existed. Terrible whirlwinds followed, tossing and destroying everything in their path, followed by a deadly shower of shrapnel that sliced people and bombarded buildings. Freight cars were blown from the station and did not come to earth again until they were nearly two miles away. Windows throughout the city shattered instantly into lethal shards, slashing and permanently blinding hundreds of spectators. Even as far away as Truro, 60 miles to the north, windows were blown in. The water in the harbour adjacent to the explosion was violently sucked up to expose the sea floor, and returned in enormous, surging waves that overflowed the town on both shores.

  Finally, the next day, the misery of the 25,000 people who were now homeless was made almost unbearable by a severe blizzard.

  The Loss of the Children

  The district of Richmond, in the North End of Halifax, was one of the hardest hit by the blast. The entire area was almost completely flattened within seconds. Of the 420 students who usually attended Richmond School, two who had arrived early were instantly killed when the building blew apart, leaving only a heap of rubble. Another 86 children also died almost instantaneously. Some of them took the full force of the blast on their way to class, others were still at home and were killed by falling buildings and a few had already joined the throng of curious bystanders who had unknowingly put themselves in the path of danger.

  Among these was 14-year-old Victor. When he saw the spectacular column of smoke down by the waterfront he took off down the steep hill at top speed, hollering with joy at finding a good excuse to play hooky. As he elbowed his way among the spectators he was killed outright by the explosion, together with many others who were clustered in the area.

  Thirteen-year-old James Pattison was walking to school with his two brothers. He was knocked unconscious, but survived. He later remembered with amazement that he heard no noise at the time of the explosion, only the screams and hubbub that followed. His little brother Alan was killed outright as he walked to school, and his sister Catherine died at home when their house collapsed. His father worked in the sugar refinery and his body was not recovered until four months after the explosion. Another family, the Jacksons, who lived in the same district, faced the horror of finding that 46 of their relatives had been killed. The remains of many of these people, too, were not uncovered for months.

  Meanwhile, two little girls, Hazel and Olive Robinson, who were the daughters of a CNR railway yard machinist, had recently transferred from Richmond School to nearby Bloomfield School. The reason for this move was that 12-year-old Hazel was quite a little tomboy. Her story was recounted publicly for the first time in 1998, when one of her relatives by marriage, Darren Brackley, recalled it in a magazine article.

  Wreck of Richmond School in histori
c North End Halifax.

  On the way to Richmond School from their home on Union Street the sisters had to cross over a stream. Instead of using the bridge, Hazel found it much more fun to scramble over the slippery rocks and slosh through the water. Her attendance at school with soaking shoes and stockings did not go unnoticed. Hazel eventually developed a severe cold that threatened to turn to pneumonia (a disease that was a major killer before the discovery of antibiotics) so her mother warned her to cross only by the bridge. She told Hazel that if she discovered that she had been disobedient and walked through the water again she would transfer both the girls to Bloomfield. But Hazel just couldn’t resist. When her mother heard about it, she carried through with her threat.

  That was why, on the morning of the Halifax Explosion, Hazel and Olive were not in the street on their way to Richmond School, as they would have been previously. They had already arrived at their new school (which was at the edge of the Richmond district) and had entered the building.

  Hazel was gazing out of one of the windows when the panes exploded. A myriad of splinters and shards rained down upon her and became embedded in her hair and clothes. Fortunately, she was not blinded or badly cut, but she was stunned and terribly afraid. The disoriented child desperately looked around for her little sister Olive, who was only eight years old. The room was in a shambles. The floor above had collapsed into the room where she stood. There was a shocking mess of twisted metal and fallen beams. It was difficult to breathe and hard to see because of the clouds of plaster dust.

  As she peered around, trying to think what to do, she saw one of the teachers hurrying towards her with Olive hanging limply in her arms. The child had been knocked unconscious by a falling beam, and her head was bleeding profusely. The distracted teacher thrust the unconscious child into Hazel’s arms. “Get out of here. Get your sister home to your mother as quickly as you can,” she instructed the 12-year-old.