Bluenose Ghosts

by Helen Creighton

  “One night I’d been shopping at Chester Basin and had just come back when I heard some womankind run through the hall and brush against the wall. Women wore long skirts then, and hers made a swishing sound as she ran. I thought it was a friend of my wife’s playing a joke, so I went through to the kitchen. I said to myself, ‘I’ll put my parcels down and light a lamp and find her.’ I hunted through every part of the house and, all the while, our little dog was barking so hard I thought it was going crazy. I couldn’t find anybody.Then I thought it must have been my wife, but she’d been in the next house all the time.

  “That was bad, but the worst of all happened to a man from a vessel who stayed here before we took the house, and he used to sleep upstairs. There had been a child born in that house and it was known to have done a lot of screaming. This man heard the child in the night and in the morning he asked the woman of the house what was the matter with her child that it screamed and cried all night. At that time there were a lot of ships’ knees here and they were stored in the house,When the last ones were finally moved away they found what they thought must be the body of this child. It must have been murdered and hidden away. My wife heard of these stories and they got on her nerves so much at night that she would dream of a child with nothing but bones coming down the chimney hole asking for food. We decided before long that we’d had enough of that house and we moved away. In time it was burned down because no one could live there for long.”

  The next house is still standing so I cannot reveal its location. “I was born in Amherst and, when I was a few months old, we moved to a great shell of a house. It had been partly built by a man whose son went overseas in the First World War. It wasn’t finished when he left, and his father kept working on it until the son was killed. He abandoned it then and eventually sold it to my father in 1919. Daddy was a carpenter, so he made a very nice looking dwelling of it.

  “From the time I was old enough to notice things I didn’t like that house. I was afraid of the living-room although it was light and airy and had a southeast exposure and six windows. I felt quite safe in the kitchen and dining-room, but I had literally to be paid to go upstairs on errands for one of the family. Mama always kept the light burning at bedtime because I was afraid of the dark. When I was nine my sister became engaged. One evening she and her future husband were keeping house and they were expecting mama to come in at any moment. When they heard the front door open they rose to greet her but the steps continued up the great stairs and they didn’t sound like her steps which were light. The stairs are three times wider than you find in houses built today. The person wandered into all the rooms but, when Vic and Freda called out, the steps ceased. They were young and afraid, but they knew I was sleeping alone up there so they took the lamp and searched in all the rooms, even going to the attic. They could find no one, so they went back to the dining-room. They had just got seated when the footsteps started again. They came down the stairs, through the dark kitchen, and then the door of the dining-room where they were sitting began to push open. They were terrified. Vic called, ‘Get out!’ The steps retreated to the front door. It opened and closed, and silence reigned. They made a dash then to see who was walking away from the house but there was nobody in sight and not a footmark in the fresh snow. Until then they had supposed it was a human who had walked in, but now they were really afraid and they were huddled together on the couch when mama finally came home. They told her about it and she only laughed at them but, from that time, Vic has never spent a night in that house. I often wondered after they were married why he always left the house at bedtime, and it wasn’t until I was twenty that I found out. Nobody had told me what had happened that night, so this had nothing to do with my fear of the house.

  “One Christmas there were six of us at home when a great crash sounded through the house. We pushed our chairs back and all rushed to the living-room crying, ‘The Christmas tree!’ for we were sure it had fallen over. There stood the tree in its finery intact, and not so much as a needle was out of place.

  “One fine summer day Freda, Hazel, and I were listening to the radio in the living-room when we heard groans as if someone were in agony. My dad had nightmares sometimes and that was what it sounded like, but he wasn’t home. The groans were terrible and Peggy, the spaniel, howled and the hair stood up on the back of her neck. She would always go anywhere with me for she was my beloved companion. I tried to coax her down the cellar with me but she wouldn’t go. This cellar was well lighted, so we three girls went down, following the groans until we came to an alcove and there they ceased. I was all for digging right there on the spot, and I’ve always felt if I had that I’d have found the cause of all our trouble. Perhaps someone’s bones were there, or the son who had been killed might have put something in the ground and wanted to tell us about it. We moved away soon after that, and mama would never let me ask the people living there today if they have heard anything. We were all glad to get out of that house.”

  Our next haunting took place in Tantallon. “My uncle married a crippled woman who walked with a cane. When her fifth child was born she and the baby died and, after that, my uncle tried to get a housekeeper but, no matter who he got, none of them would stay. One was a fine educated woman and the children liked her so much they wouldn’t sleep anywhere but in the room with her, and the little ones had to be right in the bed with her. She said that at night she could feel a hand reach across and cover the children in her bed.

  “When she left, he got a married woman who said she wasn’t scared. She said she’d take two children with her for the day, and the other two would go to school.They did that but, when they’d come back to the house at night, there would always be something in a different position from the way they left it. One night everything was upset, including the pantry door that wouldn’t stay shut any more. One evening my brother came home and said, ‘I saw a woman standing in Uncle Jack’s window with long black hair and a baby in her arms.’ She was the children’s mother. I was in the house a lot after that and I often thought I could hear her coming up the steps, and I could hear her cane.

  “For years the pantry door refused to close, so in time they tore the pantry out altogether and practically the whole of the downstairs was changed. To this day the oldest girl who lives in the States won’t go in that house by herself. It seemed as though their mother just wouldn’t leave them alone, but had to be around covering the children up at night and doing things in the house to make sure they would remember her.”

  Another Tantallon story is about a man named John Hershman who was supposed to have had money. When he was dying he said, “I’ll be there to watch it; I’ll be there to watch it.” “Years ago the old Halifax road used to come up around the shore and over the hill, and old Hershman used to take a short cut along this way. When my father’s house was built it went right over his footfalls, and father and mother would hear his footsteps coming in the front door and out the back, but he was never seen. Father had heard that if you moved the doors around a ghost couldn’t find its way out, so he moved the back door and a window. That didn’t stop it and the sounds went on until they felt they couldn’t stand it any longer and the house was torn down. He had a certain way of walking and, after they heard the sounds first and realized they were Hershman’s, they remembered those last words and that he had so often walked this road, so they felt that must be the reason for it.”

  In a Port Medway house where the family cherished its small holdings lights would be seen in the kitchen after they died. The saying in the village was, “Three lights in John McVicar’s kitchen. Where’s all his gold and silver now?”

  A Shelburne house was supposed to be haunted. “I can assure you it was, for when we were children our house was burned and we slept there. All the first night there were sounds of men running up and down the stairs and I said to my mother, ‘Why don’t those people keep quiet?’ I was only eight years old and my mother didn’t say anything. She couldn’t understan
d them herself, and she didn’t want to frighten me.

  “Another night a truck kept running up and down the steps, or at least that is what it sounded like. It was very noisy as you can imagine. Another time five of us were there when someone came to the door and asked for my father. We said he was out, and then the windows opened by themselves and shook, and this kept up for two hours. At the same time the heavy batten doors opened too. We thought there must be a lot of fishermen outside who were trying to get in. Then in the midst of all this confusion there came a little ring on the door as gentle as it could be. A woman was there and she was surprised when we told her what had happened because she had not seen a sign of anybody around the house as she had come up to it, and that was when the noises were at their worst. In the same house musical instruments played without anybody touching them, for they stood in the corner all the time. We couldn’t understand what it was all about until after we left, and then we heard that the place was haunted. We’d have been a good deal more frightened if we’d known that.”

  A house that used to stand on Henshaw’s Point had a reputation for being haunted, but the only thing anyone is known to have heard there was a man saying the Lord’s Prayer. In a Seabright house near there we find another tidy ghost like the one at Clarke’s Harbour who folded bedclothes in pleats. “A lame carpenter used to own this house and he had a lot of lumber. One night when I was fourteen I had just gone to bed when this awful racket started like a crippled fellow moving around upstairs. He’d hobble to one end of the room and back, and he’d drop the lumber bang on the floor, and he kept this up for a quite a while. Others in the house downstairs didn’t hear it. I was too frightened to get up and look, so I didn’t say anything. The man had been dead ten years. I wasn’t the only one who knew he came back because a woman who lived there before us said she saw him one night.” The mother then took up the story.

  “For two years whenever I put the clothes on the line I’d find them all knotted. There’s plenty of wind blows around here, but wind couldn’t do it like that, and there was no accounting for it and, when I’d go to put on my apron, it would be pleated as lovely as could be. Next thing the head of the lobster pot would be shoved out of place. There were nights when I couldn’t go to sleep for the noises. I often heard a fellow walking upstairs when there was no living person up there at all.” The sceptical reader may say the noises were caused by rats, but this is a house where I spent many hours and I am sure nothing of that kind would have been tolerated. In fact to me the house had a pleasant atmosphere, unlike some that I have been in. This of course may have been caused by the present owners who are kindly, giving people.

  Murder can be followed by something worse than hanging as one man could testify. He lived with a farmer in the Annapolis Valley, and there was a settlement of Negroes nearby. One day a Negro came close to the property and the farmer told his helper to fire at the coloured man. He only meant to frighten him, but the farmhand was a better shot than he realized and he killed the man. He was considerably shaken by his act and left the farm and went to Sherbrooke where he rafted logs. But there was no peace here because whenever he rafted them a black figure would climb up on his raft. He moved his house three or four times, thinking this might help, but he still came. Whether he changed his occupation or the ghost got tired my informant did not know, but he said it was a very frightening experience while it lasted.

  From Liverpool there is a story of a house at Brooklyn near Taylor’s Mill. A sea captain used to live there. “Two men were there when they both heard casks rolling upstairs and, when they went up, the casks were heard down below. This is quite a trick of a ghost and they decided to beat it at its own game, if this is what it was, so one went up and the other down. That only made it worse, for the sounds were heard everywhere. A while later a carpenter took the house and he had a man come to work for him and he gave him a room at the head of the stairs. In the night he woke up and heard someone come up the stairs and walk along the hall and get a piece of lumber and take it down again. He wondered about it because it was such a strange thing for a person to be doing in the dead of night. He supposed it was the carpenter and, in the morning, he asked him why he was up getting lumber in the night. The carpenter had to say something so he dismissed it lightly.

  “‘That’s nothing,’ he said, ‘I’ve often heard things like that.’ Then the workman asked if the house was haunted and the carpenter had to admit it was and after a while he too moved away.”

  A house reported from East Chester had the same kind of aggravating steps that moved to another part of the house as soon as the first place was investigated. They could never find out what caused the steps, and they concluded someone must be buried there, perhaps beneath the house. No one could live there in peace.

  In some places where a ghost is too active the family will build a new house on the same property hoping to live there without being disturbed, but this does not always happen. There was a house on the Georgefield Road between Kennetcook and Shubenacadie whose former owner was buried nearby. It was a big house and was occupied by a coloured family but, among other things, the doors slammed and things were thrown around to such an extent that they found the place uninhabitable. It finally got so bad that they built shacks all around the property. The former owner, whom they felt was responsible for the trouble in the big house, was not satisfied with this either, and followed them to their little homes. At last they decided they might as well give up the struggle and they abandoned the property. It is the only place in the Kennetcook area with a story of being haunted. This sounds like a poltergeist case, but I did not have an opportunity to meet any of the family, and so could not learn any further details.

  Victoria Beach reports a gun being haunted. The reason is that it has been in four different houses and they have all burned down. This seems more than coincidence, so the gun is held responsible.

  There are stories about the Sam Slick House in Windsor and the Uniacke House at Mount Uniacke, houses that were occupied by prominent families in earlier days, and have been restored by the provincial government and opened for public inspection. I have little information about the Uniacke house except that a former member of the family is supposed to have been seen on numerous occasions sitting in a chair in the beautiful garden that overlooks a lake.

  The Sam Slick House has Miss Flo Anslow, a lifelong resident of Windsor, as its curator. She loves every inch of the grounds and every tiniest splinter in the house. She told me that many years ago a number of the Black Watch regiment were marching through Windsor to Annapolis and they went through this property. As they were passing the pond one of the men dropped his watch. He reached over to get it, lost his balance and fell in. He was never seen again. The man was a piper, so the place became known as Piper’s Pond. “As children we were told that if we ran around the pond twenty times a soldier would come up on a horse’s back. People often ran nineteen times, but they always lost their courage on the twentieth. The old pond was reputed to be bottomless but it was cleared in 1939. It was fifteen feet deep. Wagon wheels were found in it and lots of other things, but no bones. They lined it with stones and put a mud turtle in, but the turtle wouldn’t stay.”

  From other Windsor sources I was told that Judge Haliburton was supposed to come out through a secret door in the panelled wall of the reception hall where he would wander around and then disappear through the panel again. Two former residents said they got quite accustomed to having him around. The house was in great disrepair before being restored, and children in Windsor used to hear the old people telling that it was haunted. They used to go up to the house and peek through the windows and they claim to have seen ladies and gentlemen of an earlier day dancing. Miss Anslow says she has stayed in the house many evenings and has never seen anything, but that does not prove anything because she may not have what we might call the seeing eye. However she did have a story of the panel. One former resident had a cutting made so that part of the wall wa
s movable, and a chair placed behind a panel so that when he saw a visitor coming he disliked, he would go in there and sit down. That may explain some of the reports of a man being seen coming and going there, but it would not apply to the two families who grew accustomed to having Judge Haliburton around. Another thing that a former occupant could never understand was that every evening at nine o’clock her dog would bristle up, for dogs are supposed to be aware of spirits that are not seen by humans.

  My own town of Dartmouth is not immune to ghostly visitations, but again I must be careful not to give the location away. Mrs. Hirtle said, “I lived in a house in Dartmouth when I was fifteen or sixteen. It was built on a hillside and had a basement kitchen and dining-room, both above ground. One day we were in the dining-room, father, mother, a visitor, and I, and I heard what sounded like a breathing just beside me. It frightened me so that I ran to my father and he thought I was crazy, but my mother stood holding the teapot in her hand and said, ‘Did you see that?’ She and the young man who was visiting had both seen it. This was a man without a head standing right behind me. We learned later that a pedlar was supposed to have been murdered in that house.” I was fortunate in knowing a man in the town who had lived there until his marriage, the same man who saw his father, as described under Helpful Ghosts. He had never heard of a headless man being seen, but he said there was one room where it was impossible to sleep. Sounds were heard and he has slept there himself when not only the bedclothes were taken off, but the bedspring itself would be lifted up off the bed. The family closed it off and it was never used again for any purpose while he was there.