Haunted ground Read online

There were no roads between the different fishing rooms, only rabbit paths, which added to the sense of isolation. The girl’s brother and one of the other fellows used this fact, combined with the girl’s newness to the Labrador, to tease her and make her even more nervous than she had been to start.

  “Now Louise, if you see a bear come ashore, go into the porch and throw the whole hundred pounds of beef out,” they told her. That way she could run away and let the bear eat the beef, instead of her, presumably. As a result, she was scared to death. She was so frightened to be alone that she would get up out of her bed and crawl into her father’s after everyone had left.

  Every morning when the men went off fishing, she would get up and take out her father’s twelve-gauge shotgun. She did not know how much powder went into it, so she poured in a generous helping, a bit of wadding, and a bunch of shot. With the loaded gun beside her, she felt much safer. Then each day before the men came back, she would go down on the stagehead, pull the trigger, and let it roar out over the water.

  As the cook for the room, one of Louise’s jobs was to make bread every day. To do this, she used one hundred pounds of flour a week. Around seven thirty in the morning, after she had made the bread for the day, she would go down to the stage to jig for fish.

  One day as she went down on the stage, after she had been there for about a week, she heard a voice say, clear as day, “When are you going home?”

  The girl didn’t think there was anyone in that area and looked around to see if someone had come up behind her. There was no one to be seen. The next day, she went back out on the stagehead. Once more, the unseen person called out asking, “When are you going home?”

  The girl thought to herself, I have to go and find out about this.

  Off she went, exploring. It was not long before she walked down into one of the nicest-looking places she had ever laid eyes on. It was a little gulch, with a beautiful sand beach and hills on both sides. Not more than fifty feet back from the beach were three grave markers. Try as she might, Louise could not read what was on the headstones, as they were far too weathered. She gently straightened the old headstones and headed back to the house.

  Later her father told her that in the 1800s, a family had died in Emily Harbour of smallpox and that the family was buried on the Labrador. The little gulch that she had discovered was named Graveyard Cove. Up to this point, the girl had been scared, but she was not scared after she learned the story. She returned to Graveyard Cove and placed wildflowers on the three graves every day. The ghostly voices stopped, and the girl returned with flowers until the end of the summer when she sailed back home to Conception Bay.

  In the 1950s, Louise returned to Emily Harbour with a husband and children of her own. She went down to the stage one morning and heard a baby crying. She had two children by this point, but the crying was not coming from either of her own. The sound was coming from a distance away, up on the back of the hill. So once more off she set in exploration and found that there was no one there.

  For two or three days in a row, she heard the baby crying. Finally, she asked some of the older people about the unseen baby and its phantom cries. They told her that many years before, a woman in the community had buried a baby up on the back of the hill. Louise looked for the grave but was never able to find it. Local legend maintained that she was not the only one to hear the unearthly cries and that they were a common sound in the air of Emily Harbour.

  Today, the entire community of Emily Harbour is a ghost of its former self. What was a bustling collection of fishing rooms is now a quiet place, its days of business and community life long faded. Its stories, however, echo to this day.

  Poor Joe Benoit

  Garia Bay

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  While researching stories about ghosts and tokens, I discovered a tale from a community about which I knew nothing. Not a well-known name today, Garia was a small town located in Garia Bay on the south coast of Newfoundland, halfway between the communities of Harbour le Cou and La Poile.

  The origin of the town’s name was probably from the French word for “station.” Explorer James Cook recorded one fishing stage in the area in 1765, but the first record of permanent inhabitants was the 1836 census, which indicated twelve inhabitants living in the town. The population peaked at just under 200 people in the 1860s, but in 1873, roughly three-quarters of the population left for work on Anticosti Island. McAlpine’s 1894–97 Directory for the Burgeo and La Poile District shows only two inhabitants for Garia Bay, Joseph Collins and George Collins, both fishermen. Sometime after 1911, the place was abandoned.

  In 1886, at the time when the community was in its decline, it was home to a telegraph repeating station for the North Line running to Bay St. George. The line had been established only a few years previously and would last for only a few more years. Christmastime of that year, a series of strange events unfolded in the dwindling town.

  We know the story of what transpired in Garia Bay because of the writings of one man, Michael Francis Howley, a Roman Catholic priest, archbishop, and author. For many years, Howley lived and worked out of St. George’s on the west coast, where he was a public figure in the social, economic, spiritual, and political life of the area. He was a contributor to many publications, and one of his stories about Garia was published in 1915, the year following his death, in a journal called Christmas Bells. The seasonal magazine was published by Gray and Goodland and contained assorted articles, stories, bits of poetry, and photographs.

  “The distance from Garia Station to Sandy Point was about fifty miles,” wrote Howley in the publication, “and is certainly one of the most dreary and dangerous sections in Newfoundland, passing, as it does, right through the heart of the country over the lofty ‘Long Range.’”

  In 1886, the Garia telegraph station’s company consisted of the operator with his wife and children, the line repairman Paul Benoit and his wife, Paul’s younger brother Joe, “a fine strapping young fellow of twenty one years of age, newly broken in to the repairing business,” and a few Mi’kmaq trappers in from their lines.

  With the crew gathered there, word came in that there was a break in the line north of the station. The repairman, Paul Benoit, did not relish leaving the station and his wife at Christmastime. His brother Joe said that he would go, and off he set, borrowing both Paul’s gun and his dog.

  Here, we shall let Archbishop Howley take up the tale.

  “On the following night, about two o’clock, when all at the station were locked in slumber, Paul and his wife were awakened by hearing the well-known short, quick step of Joe on the crisp ground without. Then they heard him approach the door and turn the knob. They also heard the dog scraping at the door and whining. Paul was out of bed in a minute.”

  “Get up,” he said to his wife, “and make down a fire, here’s Joe—l’d know his step among a thousand.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I heard him. I’ll have the kettle boiled in no time; I suppose the poor fellow is starved.”

  While she was making the fire and getting some supper ready, Paul went out. He opened the door but found no one there. He went around the house, but there was no sign of either dog nor man. He called out loud and went along the path some distance, shouting, but found nothing. He returned to the house breathless and pale.

  “It’s all over with poor Joe,” he told his wife.

  ‘”What is it? Where is he? Why don’t you bring him in?” she asked.

  “Oh, he’s far enough away from here,” said Paul. “But he’s dead as sure as I am alive, and that was his death token we heard.”

  They did not sleep again that night, and at daylight, Paul started off along the line with a pounding heart. Fourteen miles out, he discovered signs of Joe’s presence. Joe had made a splice in the telegraph line and had stopped into a nearby tilt, a small rough cabin. But there was no sign of Joe, s
o Paul kept going.

  Toward evening he found himself in a thick grove of woods. When night fell it was dark, without moon or stars. But strangely, the pathway before him was lit by some unseen source. First Paul found his gun, placed across the path in such a manner that it would be impossible for one to pass by without stumbling over it. Then he found Joe’s snowshoes, one on top of the other across the path.

  Paul came to a low gulch or valley about fifty yards across, where the strange light seemed brighter than ever. There lay his brother, lying peacefully across the path, with the dog standing over him and whining piteously. Howley describes the sad scene thusly,

  “He had kneeled down to pray; the mark of his knees was in the soft ground. His left hand was stretched out and his cap near it, showing that he had taken it off to pray. His right hand was by his side and held his Rosary beads. . . . He did not die of hunger; he had plenty of ‘grub’ with him. There was some porridge left in his can, and he had bread enough.”

  Paul tore off a piece of his shirt to cover Joe’s face. He then took his brother on his shoulders and carried him back to the tilt, laid him out, and waited alongside the corpse till daybreak.

  In the morning, Paul started for Garia.

  “It was then the faithful dog began to show the most pitiful signs of sorrow and attachment,” writes Howley. “He would run ten or fifteen yards from the tilt, then stand on hind legs, paw the air, moan and whine in the most heart-rending manner and run back to the tilt, looking backwards towards his master as if it were beseeching him not to abandon the poor dead man. It was with the greatest difficulty Paul got him away from the tilt.”

  On arriving at Garia, Paul telegraphed his family in Bay St. George. A party of men set out carrying boards and nails to make a coffin. By the time Paul returned to the tilt, he found about fourteen men there. They made a rough coffin, and slinging it on a couple of rails, set out on their long funereal procession back to Bay St. George.

  “And here again, it is the belief of all present, from many of whom the present writer has frequently heard it, that the supernatural element entered in,” states Howley. “For they travelled without the slightest difficulty the whole length of that long thirty miles, bearing their heavy burthen through swamps, over brooks, across snow-banks, without difficulty or accident of any kind, and without in snow or bog in a manner which under ordinary circumstances would be altogether impossible.”

  The cause of death for poor Joe Benoit was never determined, and his last days remain shrouded in mystery. He was, in the final words of the archbishop, “a good and innocent young man. He now sleeps in peace in the blessed ground of the little graveyard at St. George’s awaiting the trumpet-call, and the reward of ‘the good and faithful servant.’”

  The Premonition of the Southern Cross

  Trinity and Birchy Cove, Trinity Bay

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  Every part of Newfoundland and Labrador has its own tradition of strange nautical tales, and Trinity Bay is no exception. A number of local spirits were recorded for posterity in 1925 by William White (1860–1949). A native of Trinity, Trinity Bay, William White devoted much time in his later years to the collection and recording of local and church history, and he documented a number of ghost stories, including a ghost ship seen by a local man nicknamed “Crusty Harry.”

  Stories of wrecks and ghost ships continue to be told in Trinity Bay. Garland Bailey of the Trinity Historical Society told me of a skeleton-like ghost ship that was said to appear sailing up Trinity Bay. What made the story novel to me was that the ship was said to only have its wooden ribs, missing its planking.

  One of the more intriguing shipwreck stories I have heard from Trinity Bay was one I learned from Shirley Ryan of Birchy Cove. Her tale is a mysterious one, involving one of Newfoundland’s famous lost ships, the Southern Cross, and the different fates of two friends, Edmund Ryan and Leonard Skiffington.

  “Now, Edmund Ryan was my girlfriend’s grandfather who lived just down across the garden, so to us he was Uncle Ned,” she explains. “Uncle Ned always told the story about how he and Leonard left Birchy Cove, where he lived, to go across to Catalina. They were really lucky; they had gotten a berth on the Southern Cross.

  “They left Birchy Cove and they made their way to Catalina,” she describes. “I think they went over on a dogsled, maybe, because there were no cars to bring them at that time, and the road across the country was little better than a path.”

  The two men arrived in Catalina and were about to sign on.

  “They had their berth already promised,” says Ryan. “They went into what he used to call a tavern. I’ve never known a tavern to be there, but maybe in them days there were. They went into this tavern to get a drink. Water was all they could afford. They had no money. So they asked the woman there for a glass of water each, and she gave them the water.”

  When Uncle Ned turned, his arm knocked the glass onto the floor, breaking the woman’s glass.

  “You have to pay for that glass,” she said to him.

  He said, “Madam, I can’t pay, I have no money.”

  “Where are you going?” the woman asked.

  “We are going on the Southern Cross. We have a berth on the Southern Cross.”

  “If you’re wise, you won’t go on that journey,” the woman said, “because you won’t return.”

  “Now, he was a man of great superstitions, and he took what she said to heart, and he came home,” describes Ryan. “But his friend Leonard wouldn’t listen to him, and he went on that ship.”

  The Southern Cross was built in Norway in 1886 and was originally named the Pollux. She was sold to the Newfoundland firm of Baine Johnston and renamed the SS Southern Cross around 1901, and she took part in the seal hunt every year from 1901 to 1914. While returning from the seal hunt in the final days of March 1914, the Southern Cross fell out of normal communication. She was last heard off Cape Pine, and then, nothing.

  Expedition ship SS Southern Cross, 1898.

  Photo courtesy State Library of Tasmania.

  The Southern Cross vanished at sea, along with the 174 sailors and sealers on board her, part of the great sealing disasters of 1914. Eventually, a marine court of inquiry determined that the ship sank in a blizzard on March 31, but the details remain, for the most part, unexplained. No crewmen nor record of the ill-fated voyage survived. Among the list of the dead was one Leonard Skiffington, originally of Newman’s Cove, Bonavista Bay.

  “Uncle Ned told us that story over and over and over,” says Ryan. “It’s a true story. He told it over and over, about how he took what she said as serious and accused her of being a witch. Well, lots of people were accused of being witches them days! But he said the woman that owned that tavern was a witch, and when she said that, that was enough for him. He didn’t go.

  “But Leonard did go, and, well, Leonard never returned,” Ryan states. “Nobody ever returned, eh? That’s my little story.”

  The Newfoundland sealing disaster is such an important part of our literary and oral traditions in the province that it is unsurprising that a number of supernatural tales have attached themselves to the disaster. I suspect the story here is just one of many told by the descendants of the men who were lost on the ice or in the wreck of the Southern Cross.

  A Smell of Death

  Spaniard’s Bay and Carbonear

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  Often, the stories I hear about the supernatural or the paranormal are either visual or auditory. People see ghostly figures or hear strange noises in the night. Sometimes people might have some kind of tactile experience: a ghost might touch someone on the shoulder, or a haunted house might develop strange cold spots.

  Smells are another way people experience the unknown. I have heard eerie stories about someone catching a whiff of their long-departed grandfather’s pipe tobacco o
r their auntie’s favourite perfume. People have told me stories of smelling smoke where there was no fire and smelling a dead brother’s cologne.

  In 2014, folklorist Lisa Wilson and I worked with students at Ascension Collegiate in Bay Roberts, helping them research local folk beliefs. One student from Upper Island Cove, Ryan Adams, wrote about a strange odour associated with a night terror.

  “I woke up and I couldn’t move and there was a weird smell, like old clothes, and it felt like someone was in the room with me,” Adams wrote. “I believe it was just a dream.”

  A few years later, I was back in that part of the province, giving a talk on folk belief and superstitions for the Heritage Society in Spaniard’s Bay at the Wesley Gosse Memorial Building (the old United Church). There was a lively discussion from the crowd, with many stories told about various bits and pieces of local folklore. Afterwards, one woman approached me and asked if I had ever come across a story about someone who could smell death approaching.

  She went on to explain that a woman she knew had been born with the ability to smell death. From time to time the woman would smell a very particular scent, and each time the odour appeared, a death would follow.

  One day, she told her husband she had smelled that scent again, but stronger than she had smelled it before, almost enough to turn her stomach. A short time afterwards, the woman herself died, perhaps unaware that the death which she had smelled approaching had been her own.

  It was a tiny story, but it immediately caught my imagination. A lot of the stories I hear follow predictable patterns or incorporate common motifs, but the idea of a smell being a token or premonition of death is not one I had previously come across.

  I went looking for others with this strange ability. Sure enough, on the online nursing forum allnurses.com, one registered nurse wrote the following: