Bluenose Ghosts

by Helen Creighton

“I know it,” he replied, and reflected that if he had been alive he would have stopped and spoken to them. Instead he seemed quite unaware of them, never raising his eyes nor looking at them. After they got by they talked it over and recalled that this man had a nephew who might look enough like him for a mistake to be made, and possibly he might be wearing his uncle’s clothes. To settle the matter they called the nephew’s sister but she quickly dispelled any such idea. “Would he have any resemblance to your uncle?” they asked.

  “That’s foolish,” she said. “He’s only thirty-five and our uncle was seventy-five.” They realized that she was right, but why he had appeared to them in broad daylight they could not imagine. And for those who say that one or two people, but never three, may see a ghost, this theory is again refuted.

  About four years ago the family in our previous story lost a son, a doctor, by death. It was, of course a grievous blow. His mother said, “One day Mr. Bagnall and I were sitting reading when I felt somebody close beside me. I put my book down and looked up, and my son was standing by the oil stove, the one who had died. I looked behind me and Mr. Bagnall was still reading, not realizing what was happening, and I made no sound. When I looked back my son ran his hand through his hair as he often did, and smiled at me. He did this twice, smiling each time. I was a different woman after that.” I have often noticed in our stories how the dead make themselves known beyond any doubt by some article of wearing apparel or a characteristic gesture. The running of his hand through his hair was evidently something that she always connected with him. Unlike Jack Carson’s appearance to his mother, this son did not speak. His happy face was sufficient to assure her that grief was superfluous.

  Clothes seem so important in our Nova Scotia stories that this description from Richard Hartlan of South East Passage cannot be ignored. He had no idea who the man was or why he appeared to him one “starlit night about ten o’clock. I could put me hand onto him when he got up close. He had a pair of white duck pants on, a black waistcoat, and a pair of fishin’ boots. I just cast me eyes down, and when I looked up he was gone.”

  What a useful thing snow is to prove that one has seen a ghost. Mr. Edward Gallagher, retired lightkeeper at Chebucto Head, said, “We were fishing at Sambro and we went to a pie social. It was a moonlight night and there was snow on the ground. Two hundred yards from Sandy Cove road there is a clear bit and, as we were walking home from the pie social, we saw a fellow ahead of us all dressed in black. I said, ‘There’s one of the Finks or Nickersons, we’ll catch him up.’ There is a place called Clay Hill where chains have been heard rattling, boats have rowed up by the Head, and lights have been seen. It was always thought these things meant pirate money was buried there.

  “When this man got to the top of Clay Hill he went off into the bushes. We could hear him but we couldn’t see him. I said, ‘Let’s go and find him,’ but the other fellows wouldn’t go. Next day it blew a gale so we didn’t go fishing, and I was curious about what we’d seen. No new snow had fallen and, although I knew exactly where he had turned in from the road, there wasn’t a footmark. Another time I saw a light on the top of Clay Hill like a candle, but when I went up to investigate there was nothing there.”

  The Harclan estate, you will remember, was at the eastern approach of Halifax Harbour and, in the old days, it had a steep bank close by the sea. Mr. Richard Hartlan said, “My father was settin’ by the windy a-lookin’ along the public road and he sees a man comin’ towards the house and he watched him a-comin’. He didn’t come to the door. He just went around the house and when he did that my father went out and watched him goin’. There’s a big bank where we live and he went over to the edge of the bank and just kept on goin’. My father said, ‘That man’s killed himself,’ but when he looked over the top of the bank there was nothing there at all. If he’d been real, his body would have been lyin’ on the rocks below.”

  The next apparition was seen by four people, and I heard about it at Tantallon. “There were four men in a boat, Lester my son, Doc Fader, James Boutilier, and one other. They had been on a trouting trip and they were coming down Big Indian Lake in a boat. One of them faced ahead and he said, ‘Look, what’s that on the dam?’ They put down their oars and looked, and they all saw a man in a rubber coat and a sou’wester walking along the dam and, when they got almost to where he was standing, he was gone. They landed and could find no sign of him although the four men had all seen him plainly. They found out later that the same thing had happened to one of the operators there and, when he saw the man, he was just as puzzled and investigated and couldn’t find a thing. The dam goes right out to nothing, so there is nowhere for a man to go. They kept it quiet for a long time till somebody else reported it, and then they told what they had seen. It came out then that two women and three men had been drowned at that place quite a while before, so they always thought that might be one of them. They could never forget it.”

  “There was a man at Glen Haven named Josey Joe, and a crowd would collect at his house and tell ghost yarns until every–body was scared to go home. One night my mother was being taken home from one of these evenings and, going through the woods, a terrible row come up. They thought it was a bear, but nobody had seen a bear around there for a long time. She said it made a roaring sound. The next day they went into the woods at the same place and they couldn’t see a thing out of place. The bushes weren’t broken down and there weren’t any tracks.” A man named Williams was going from Jeddore to Ostrea Lake when “something came in front of him like a great big horse. He was terrified, but kept on going and there was nothing there at all.” A Seabright man heard footsteps by a bridge but could find no person.

  Then, “I was coming from Tantallon one winter’s night. I was by the hemlock tree when something started right at the top of that hemlock tree and it was the most hideous sound I ever heard in my life and it sounded as though it broke every branch. It commenced at the top as if it was up there with a three-ton truck and it was loaded and dropped down that tree.

  I never slackened my pace. I had to pass it, and when I got close beside it, it happened again and, as I got a little further away, it happened the third time. The next day I went back and there wasn’t a broken branch, nothing to account for it. It was close to the Bel Snickle Road where people used to see a man with no head, just half a mile before Glen Haven.”

  The next two stories are enough alike to be considered together. “I was going to Albert (New Brunswick) about eleven o’clock. I was walking and alone and I had to go down a little hill. I heard a horse and carriage behind me and I looked and could see a man driving it. I said to myself, ‘That man will give me a drive when he goes by,’ but he came up abreast of me and disappeared. They came down to me and never passed me.”

  The twin to this happened at Blue Rocks and was told by Rev. Mr. Gretorex. He used to go out there at times and, if he were very late, he would stay until morning. This night he decided to walk into Lunenburg and sleep there. As he was walking along the country road that skirted the sea he saw a team ahead with a couple in it. He supposed they were lovers and thought if he could catch up with them that they would take him in. He therefore called out to them, hoping they would hear his voice above the sound of the wheels but instead, the whole thing disappeared. (No interrupting of love’s sweet young dream for them!) The next morning he told of his amazing experience and was informed that he had seen the Blue Rocks ghost. The team with the couple driving to Lunenburg had been seen by other people. The incident happened many years ago, and it is quite likely this would be an ox team since it was moving slowly enough for him to catch up with it afoot, and the ox was used by so many people in that community.

  Another “nawthin” story comes from Seabright. “One time I had to go to Hackett’s Cove and the fog shut in and they told me I’d have to stay all night. About ten o’clock we started to bed and I stepped outside and the stars were a-shining and I said, ‘I’m going home. If I wait till morning I’ll
meet all the boats coming out from Glen Margaret.’ So I sailed home and I put my boat up, and then I had quite a little walk to my house. As I started up the hill I saw a man ahead of me. I hastened my steps and caught up with him but he didn’t stop. When I got abreast of him I put my hand out to touch him and there was nothing to touch.” His mild blue eyes looked into mine and he said, “Now what was the meaning of that?”

  Another Seabright man said, “When I was sixteen my father went to Hubbards in the boat. After he’d gone I came down the hill and although he was in Hubbards by that time I saw him and then the barn hid him and, when I came in sight of the wharf, he wasn’t there. I said to my mother, ‘Is father home?’ and she said no. What made me see him when he wasn’t there? I even saw the smock he used to wear when he went fishing. It wasn’t a forerunner because there wasn’t any death after it. I could never understand it.” This man was well up in his eighties. Perhaps then there is some truth in the statement that “if you see a person who isn’t there it means you’ll be a long liver.”

  Mrs. Sadie Clergy of East Petpeswick has never been able to understand a strange thing that happened once to her. She said she had gone to a dance one evening and had talked to an old friend who was stout and was wearing a black dress. When Mrs. Clergy left, her friend said she thought she would stay at the dance a while longer but, when the Clergys came to a bend of the road, they heard her voice behind them saying “Sadie, why don’t you wait for me?” She said to her husband, “Here comes Mrs.Young.” Mr. Clergy turned around and couldn’t see anybody, but Mrs. Clergy saw her plainly. She said it was her friend Mrs. Young all right but, instead of being dressed in black as she had seen her, she now had a white silver shawl over her shoulders, and her hair was snow white. Then she disappeared. Mrs. Clergy asked her the next morning if she had been on the road that night behind her, but she had not left the dance hall for a long time. The incident which happened many years ago, has mystified her to this day.

  Although Mr. Clergy’s eyes were closed to the apparition seen by his wife, he saw a vision of his own. About a mile below his own house at ten-thirty one night as he was returning home, he saw a boat in the air above him coming from the west and going in an easterly direction, although there was nothing east but woods. He said it was a low, flat power boat that went racing through the air without making any sound. As far as he knows nobody else ever saw it.

  Sandy Cove had perhaps the strangest story of all. “One time a man named Hiram was coming home from hunting and it was hazy and at night. There were trees all along the road and, as he came towards a little hill, he saw a white form that seemed human, yet reminded him of pictures of angels. It was going back and forth on the road. He was puzzled and stopped to watch it and after a while he began to think he would speak to it and he did and it made no sound. Then he said, ‘I’m going to bring you down. I’ve got a gun loaded with big shot, and I’m going to shoot you.’ He fired and whatever it was vanished. A short while after that his wife, Pheban, died and he grieved from that day. Although he hadn’t recognized her, he felt that was who he saw on the road and that he had killed her.”

  In every one of these stories, the person telling it had a furrowed brow. The event had puzzled them at the time, and had disturbed them ever since. While some ghost stories came easily at a first meeting, these personal mysteries were saved until a firm friendship had been established and they could be related as a confidence. The tales all had one thing in common, a shaking of the head at the conclusion and words to this effect, “I could never understand it.”

  Chapter TEN

  GHOSTS AS ANIMALS AND LIGHTS

  ANIMALS

  In many of our stories ghosts appear as animals, with the dog the most common. The Hartlan men used to tell about dogs six feet high, but they are not always large. They may be very little dogs, and they may be black, white, or spotted. Horses come next in favour, and we also have three pigs.You will recall the rejected lass in Prince Edward Island who followed her lover’s carriage in the ungainly form of a pig. Port Wade had a place called Pig Bridge, so called because on a very dark night a phantom pig used to be seen there. Our third pig came into a house now demolished, but once owned by the Allan Hartlings at South-East Passage. It ran through the rooms to the terror of one of the children, and his mother had to take him from room to room to prove that there was no pig there. He is a grown man today and still insists that he saw it. Incidentally that same house had doors that opened mysteriously when nobody was near the old-fashioned wooden latches to lift them. It also had a number of bottles of preserves stored upstairs. One night Mr. Hartling had just got into bed when there was a terrific noise as though all the bottles were upset but, upon examination, nothing was out of its place. It was a house his wife had never liked because of the unexplainable things that happened there.

  We have stories of kittens and cats, and we also have a gopher. I heard of it from Mr. George Perry of Ingomar when he was working at Ragged Islands Inn. He was a great talker, and had often regaled Miss Arnold’s guests with his stories. “The gopher was something that appeared at Ingomar and people wouldn’t go near the place where it was seen. Nothing had ever happened there to account for it as far as anybody knew, but they dassn’t pass it. It died away after a while, but not before frightening a lot of people.

  “One night a woman was going down past this place and she wasn’t scared of anything. It was a pretty moonlight night and, when she got that far, she looked across and there stood a big yellowish coloured dog with handsome dark on it. She went over and put her hand on it and it disappeared. She thought, ‘that’s funny,’ and she went on a little way and then come back and the dog was still there, but headed in the opposite direction. So she went up again and patted him and said, ‘There, there, little dog,’ and it wasn’t there. She said, ‘I was just as sure it was a dog as I am a woman.’ Whether it was this gopher or a dog or what it was I’m blest if I know.”

  Whether their gopher light had anything to do with this animal I could not determine, nor could I understand why it was given this name.

  “There were two boys out gunning (shooting birds)” Mr. Perry said, “at Cape Negro once and they both got shot by accident. Ever since that time up to forty or fifty years ago, and never before, a gopher light has been seen. It would come over the water before a storm in the place where the boys shot themselves and would go back at the same place. It would start small and would get big as a washtub, and there was a man in the light swinging a lantern. One time three men went out in a dory to see if they could find out what it was. They took a gun and started to row and they got just so nigh and the light would diddle up and down and it took down the harbour and they couldn’t catch it, so they shot at it and gave it up. People got scared of it because after a while it began to move around the shore. It would go down and come up and you could see this man swinging his lantern. When you saw it you always knew there would be a storm. One woman told her man that if you watched it, the light would come right across the harbour for ten minutes, but he wouldn’t believe it. So she said, ‘Will you get up if I call you when I see it?’ He said ‘Yes,’ so the next time she see it she called him. The gopher light was coming right towards them and it dilly-dallied up and down and then went back.

  We will have more stories of lights later on. Let us look again at our dogs. A Seabright fisherman said, “Father was in a house once where in the first part of the night there was a big dog in the kitchen under the stove and he couldn’t get it out. He said, ‘I’ll get it out!’ and he took the horsewhip. He lifted it up and was going to strike and it disappeared in a little flash of fire. That house was haunted.”

  Do you remember the dog in an earlier chapter that used to put its paw in a doorway and was supposed to be the devil? And the forerunner that came in the form of a halibut?

  “I was coming home one calm moonlight night at twelve o’clock. Just below the church I seen a white dog with its tongue hanging out, and a black ring
round its head and tail and I had to step out of the road. If I’d looked over my left shoulder I wouldn’t have been frightened (this evidently would have dissipated the power of the ghost). Then I saw a man with a split-tail coat peeking round the building. It was a man I knew when he was alive, and now he was dead. It was funny that he’d come as a dog first and then as a man.” So said a Negro at Sackville. I have often wondered why so many of our phantom men appear wearing split-tail coats. It must have been the garment they were buried in.

  At Scotsburn it is said that dogs hear a phantom called a Black Dog. Other dogs get very excited, but nothing can be seen by humans. It is also believed there, as elsewhere, that horses see things before people. It is a Victoria Beach legend that a big dog used to appear at the top of Parr’s Hill. Then if you went to Andrew’s Hill at the right time every seven years you would not only see a dog but you would hear him rattling his chains. Nobody knows why he came or what the story is behind his appearance. His time has been up for some years, for he is not seen any more.

  Many stories of dogs appearing in the dark may seem far-fetched, and the reader thinks of all kinds of physical explanations. At Port Wade one day I was talking to a kindly old man and his wife and they told that they were coming home once when they saw a strange dog. It followed them so closely and so persistently that the man got cross and kicked it. Imagine the surprise they got when his foot went right through it. They both assured me this was so, for both had seen it. Much the same thing happened at Glen Haven to one of my elderly singers, Mr. John Obe Smith.

  “I seen something over here one night coming home. I seen a big black dog coming towards me and his eyes as big as two fists. I went to fire at him and the rock went right through him. I threw another one then and it disappeared altogether. By this time I was pretty scared and I was only young anyhow so I took to me heels and ran. There was supposed to be somebody killed by an Indian years before and this was its ghost. Lots of people saw it about seventy-five or eighty years ago.”