Bluenose Ghosts (11 page)

“A Mr. McNeil of Bras d'Or was down by the shore one day when two younger men came along looking for a boat. He said they must not go out in the boat that day. ‘If you go one of you will not come back at all, and the other will almost not come.' They laughed at his foolish superstitions, launched the boat, and chugged away but, sure enough, it happened. Their boat capsized and one of the men went under and was never seen again. The other would have been lost too if another boat hadn't seen the accident and come to his rescue. He pulled him out of the water by the hair of his head as he was about to go down for the last time.”

An amusing incident along these lines took place not far from Glace Bay. A man was on his way to kill a pig when he met a woman known to have second sight. She looked at him in distress and said she saw blood on him. He felt very uncomfortable but decided to go on with the job. He killed the pig but his knife slipped and before he knew what was happening he was covered with blood. Pig's blood.

The ability to see ahead is not the prerogative of older people only. Peter Morrison was only twelve when he saw a coffin-shaped light pass him low to the ground and turn in at the cemetery just before a fatality at a mine, and the same thing happened to Mrs. Allen Morrison and a friend when they were young girls. A boy at Point Edward heard digging in a graveyard when the ground was frozen too hard to be dug, and in all these cases a death followed within the week.

On Cape Breton's north shore, tools have been heard rattling before a death just before they would be required to make the coffin and, in the Morrison House at Marion Bridge, the box where funeral clothes were kept would open by itself just before being used.

It is necessary to keep these manifestations in mind to comprehend fully the significance of the two following stories. The first comes from Mr. and Mrs. Bagnall, an elderly couple who live at Glace Bay.

“When we were young people it was the custom for us to make the coffins for our own dead, but you couldn't put the parts together without specially matched planes. My father was a contractor and had moved away to the States, but he had left his box of tools behind. They were in a chest with a cover and the box was bound with brass. Without the tools it would have weighed 150 pounds; it was heavy.

“One cold night in February when we were twenty-two we had been out and, when we came home, we didn't bother to make a fire but went upstairs to bed. Just after we got into bed we heard a noise. There was nothing downstairs to make a noise but the tool chest, and it was all packed up ready to be sent away. The crash sounded three times. Mrs. Bagnall said, ‘What noise is that?' I said, ‘Something slipped downstairs,' but I knew. I was familiar with it because I had heard it before and there is no other sound like it. I didn't like this happening in my house and I said to myself, ‘This is one time that I trim it.' (Overcome it.)

“In the morning my uncle came across the street and told me that grandfather had died during the night. He said he was going to make the coffin, and would I let him have the planes? I said,‘No, you can't get them.The trunk is packed to go away.' He said, ‘I'll go across to John Hardy's.'That was fifteen or twenty minutes away, but pretty soon he came back. John's planes were at the French Road twelve miles away. So he said, ‘Now I'll go up to McKinnon's. That was three miles away and no cars to drive him in those days. I was ashamed all this time because in five minutes I could have had them out but I thought if we could get along without using them, they wouldn't make that noise the next time there was a death.

“Well, after a while he came back again and by now it was three o'clock in the afternoon. He said, ‘We'll make it without the planes.' I said, ‘You can't,' and I knew he couldn't, so I had to open the box and unpack the tools after all. Whether the tools ever jumped again at the time of a death I don't know. I shipped them off the moment they came back, and I hope that's the end of them as far as I'm concerned.”

Next we have a story from Marion Bridge which contains most of the motifs already mentioned and a few more to boot. They follow one another in rapid succession, and each one is important in folklore. It was told by Mr. Alex Morrison, son of the blacksmith who plays such an important part in it.

“A strange thing happened just before Sandy Munro fell over the bridge and got drowned. At that time Neil McPherson was just a lad and he was walking over the Marion Bridge one night with his mother. He stopped for a moment and said, ‘Come here mother and look at the little boy lying on the bottom of the river.' His mother couldn't see anything and told him to come along home. It was just after this that Sandy was drowned, but that wasn't all that happened.

“About that time they were seeing a light on a boat up the river at Grand Mira. The owner wanted to sell the boat but nobody would buy it, being suspicious that something must be wrong with it on account of the light. My father wanted it, light or not, so he bought it.

“They always thought foul play had caused Sandy's death.The night before he died the irons in the smith were making a great racket. You could hear them in the forge and they seemed to be jumping around. Sandy and the blacksmith were friends and the boy often did errands for him. Just before he died the blacksmith had asked him to take an axe across the bridge for him. He was doing this when he must have met two boys who were known to be bad and whose mother was said to be a witch. Someone saw the boys having a tussle on the bridge and, a while later, the body was discovered lying in the water as Neil McPherson had described him to his mother.

“They called on the blacksmith then to get the boy. The grappling irons he used to take him from the water were the ones that had jumped in the forge the night before, and the boat that he took to go out on the river was the one that had shown the strange lights and that nobody would buy but my father. After the body was recovered Sandy's mother had a dream. She thought the boy came to her and pointed to the blacksmith's axe as it stood in its place at the forge, and said, ‘That's the axe that killed me.' And when Sandy's body was laid out on the bridge of the boat my father had bought, there were a lot of people from the village who came to look at him. One was the boy who was supposed to have murdered him. You know it's an old belief if a murderer passes by or touches the person he has murdered, that blood will issue from the wound, and that is exactly what happened. The wound that killed Sandy was in his temple and, as the suspected murderer walked past him, blood flowed from the wound and stopped as soon as he went by. The thing was hushed up and the boys and their mother moved away, but that's the way it all happened.”

A story of another boat comes from Broad Cove in Inverness County. It was a good boat as far as the owners could see, and they had built it themselves. Soon after it was finished, however, people began seeing lights on it, and there was no accounting for them. Since no physical explanation could be found, the lights were taken as a warning and, one of the older men said, it must never be used again or it would drown its passengers. Consequently it was hauled up on the shore and left to rot until it was of no further use.

At this time a young man named McNeil was building another boat and he looked at this derelict lying idle. He thought he might as well remove the steering irons and use them in his boat. The older people, he thought, were pretty superstitious. Why listen to all their foolish talk? So he took the equipment and he and his brother set out for Prince Edward Island. They were sailing close to shore with everything well under control when a squall came up so suddenly and so unexpectedly that it capsized their boat and they were drowned. Was this mere coincidence? We shall never know.

When Donald McDougall saw a black boat sink in a vision, he and his friends all supposed a boat of that colour would be seen by him some day. When Archie Gillis bought a blue boat they concluded the old man had made a mistake and had seen black instead of blue. The blue boat, however, proceeded on its way without accident. What Mr. McDougall had seen was a black car, but he had the vision before automobiles were known. In the place where he had foreseen it, a black car went through the ice.

Another Cape Breton story is perhaps more forerunner than foresight, and is very like the Fourchu story in that chapter told by Rev. Grant MacDonald. “One winter night the people of Boularderie were disturbed by the sound of noises on the shore. Drift ice was in, but this was a different sound. They invited their neighbours to come and listen, and they could all hear a murmur of talking and a rattling of ropes on boats. They were greatly puzzled.

“The following summer three men were out in a boat and they tried to land, but the sea was so high that they failed in their attempt and the boat capsized. Two of the men were drowned. It was at the exact spot where the sounds had been heard the winter before, and the noise made by the people who gathered there after the accident was exactly the same as they had heard then.”

A man from Sydney Mines was coming home one night and was passing a house where the inside stairway was very narrow, too narrow for anything large to be taken outdoors that way. In such cases windows were sometimes used instead. A daughter of the house was lying at that time upon her deathbed and, as he looked towards the house, he distinctly saw her coffin coming out through the upstairs window. In a few days the girl died and her coffin did come out that way.

Rory was double-sighted. It happened that a young man died and, when people went to see him, they remarked that he hadn't lost his natural colour. It was also noted that his fingers were supple. At that time there was no such thing as embalming. One day Rory came to the lad's home and said to his father, “And you buried your boy alive.” The father was most indignant. Rory said, “If you don't believe me, dig him up and you'll find him on his face.” The mother was so distressed that somebody suggested they open up the grave and find out, but she replied, “If I did and I found Rory was right I'd never come out of the grave.” So the doubt has always remained, but the benefit is given to Rory.

A woman in Sydney got up one morning and said to her husband, “I had a horrible dream last night. I dreamed your sister Martha was dead and you were summoned home. I dreamed I saw the funeral and, when the casket was being taken in the double doors, they couldn't get it through so they had to take it back, put it down, get a hatchet, and chop enough away to make room for it to go through. The horses were grey, not black as you would expect for a middle-aged person.” That morning, shortly after the dream had been told, a telegram arrived saying, “Mother died, funeral Tuesday.” Now the dream had said Martha, but the telegram said Mother.

The husband left at once for Yarmouth and, when he had gone as far as Windsor, he met his brother-in-law. Feeling that he might have further information he said, “John, what happened to mother? She was fine when I heard from her just the other day.” John said, “It isn't your mother. It's Martha,” and it turned out that the operator had made a mistake in transmitting the message.

They went on then to Yarmouth and the funeral was held on Tuesday. When they brought the casket in they couldn't get it through the double doors and they had to take it out again. In his haste, as John ran for something to open the door with, he picked up a hatchet and, as he began to use it, he thought of this dream.

Then the funeral was held and sure enough, the horses that drew the carriage were grey.

Visions of the future do not always deal with death, and may have a happy significance. “At Framboise a man was living in a new house and he died of TB (tuberculosis.) His widow and one son moved away and the house was left empty for some time. We could see it easily from our house and one night, when we happened to look out, we could see a light. Yes, there was a light in the house and there were people passing between us and the light. We saw it again, and nobody living there for a year and no way for anybody else to get in the house. The lights meant the house would be occupied again, and so it was. About five years later a family bought it up and moved in and we saw everything repeated exactly as we had seen it on those two occasions.”

At Port Hood I talked to two women who had one day seen a city and two churches on a site where there was a later drilling for oil. To date the city has not transpired, but it is expected to come some day. Train headlights were seen long before there was any train. At Wellington, Prince Edward Island, in December, 1885, a phantom train was seen by forty people.

Turning now to the peninsula of Nova Scotia, but still with people of Scottish descent, we have two women at Bridgeville in Pictou County. These sisters were awakened one night by the sound of a train and they got up and saw it running along the track. At that time there were no trains there and, although they were not far from Pictou, they had never seen a train in their lives. They described their vision and the following year surveyors arrived. Eventually the train ran where they had seen it. At Eureka in Pictou County a child had the gift of foresight and it came to her several times. She would say, “Do you see that light down there?” but nobody else could see it. At that time the railroad had not even been planned, nor did it come until she was grown up. She not only lived to see the train, but married one of the men who worked on it.

During my recent visit to Marion Bridge a huge piece of road-repairing equipment used to glide up and down the road like some great pre-historic monster. I never saw it without wondering if the Scots ever had a vision of its appearance in the community and if so, what a great fright it would have given them.

Although the Scots in this Province are far more double-sighted than other races, we also get stories like this from a Mrs. Hirtle of German ancestry who lived in Lunenburg County.

“We used to live at one time in Mahone Bay, and then moved away. One night I knelt down to say my prayers and the house in Mahone Bay came up in front of me and, as I looked at it, I saw a funeral procession leave the house and go through the field. I thought a great deal about it, but didn't mention it to anybody. The house was then occupied by people named Evans. In the morning my father came in and said, ‘Evans' little girl died last night.' I said, ‘What time?' He said, ‘Half past nine.' I had taken note of the time and it was at half past nine that I had seen my vision.”