5

THE
GHOST-HUNTER’S
WHISTLING GHOST

LIVERPOOL

In her 1968 collection Bluenose Magic, Helen Creighton tells of a lot of different ways that you can slay a witch or rid yourself of a ghost. Silver will do it; water will too. So will fire and salt. I’ve since heard the following old story of a rogue witch-hunter who used just such a technique to make a small living, although I have reason to believe that his motives were less than silvery pure.

Back in the early 1800s in the Liverpool area, there lived an old man named Hank O’Hallorhan. Hank was a bandy-legged fellow, not half as old as he looked, but as lazy as a fat frog wallowing in the bottom of a mossy well. Hank used to be a sailor, but no ship would have him for very long because of his bad habit of whistling too much. Hank was a nervous little man who found relief through whistling, something no sailor could stand due to the old superstition that an idle whistler could just as easily whistle up a storm as a tune. So Hank became a hunter, though of an unusual sort. He’d go from town to town and enter someone’s house, making sniffing sounds and saying, “I smell a ghost,” or “I smell a witch.”

If he claimed to smell a ghost he’d fire a charge of black powder up the chimney flue to frighten the evil spirits away. If it was a witch he was chasing, he’d beg a dime that he’d cut up into slices to fire up the chimney, because everyone knew that silver was the only thing that could slay a witch. He’d beg a dime at every house, but would only slice up the one; even a witch hunter needs to make some kind of living.

One day he showed up at an old woman’s house and swore he could smell a witch. Actually what he’d smelled was a brace of freshly baked apple pies cooling by the windowsill. Hank figured on making a bit of money and perhaps a piece of pie or two. He walked up to the front porch, whistling like a flock of lovesick canaries.

The old woman, whose name was Annie Tuckins, fixed Hank with a hard, sharp stare.

“Damn a man who whistles,” she said. “He’s either got some-thing on his mind, or absolutely nothing at all.”

“Oh grandmother,” Hank said, figuring he’d get farther by talking politely. “I smell a witch in your chimney. She’ll cast a spell on your baking for certain sure. Would you have a dime that I might use to banish her?”

The old woman looked up from her baking, half-amused by O’Hallorhan’s gall and half-bothered by his unasked-for interruption.

“Only a dime? Witches come cheap in these parts,” she said. “And how much would it cost me to banish you?”

“You may laugh,” O’Hallorhan replied. “But I tell you this true. There are witches in every corner of this sainted province. They’re easier to find than toads in a peat bog. Standing in the shadow of every black cat is a witch in waiting. They might be your neighbour or they might live a half a dozen counties away. There’s no telling where a witch’ll turn up, if she puts her mind to it.”

“So how can you tell if one is a witch or not?” the old woman asked, playing along with O’Hallorhan’s banter.

“Oh, there’s many a way you can tell if a person is a witch. For instance, if you lay your broom across your front doorway, the witch cannot cross it.”

The old woman snorted. “It sounds to me like a perfectly good way to trip yourself going into your house.”

O’Hallorhan laughed easily. An acre of brooms could not trip up such a sly-talking, fast-thinking man as he.

“And a young woman such as yourself would jig lightly over a palisade of brooms, now would she not? Heel and toe, you’re a light stepper, like the fog running in from the bay.”

“Flatterer. So here’s a piece of silver and that’ll buy your trick, won’t it?”

O’Hallorhan palmed the old woman’s coin and pulled out one of his own, a tin disc he’d bartered from a tinker. He cut the tin disc up with his case knife and carefully loaded the fragment into his musket, after filling the gun with powder.

He tamped the makeshift metal shot down securely with his ramrod.

“You ought to oil that rod before it rusts,” the old woman pointed out.

“It rams as straight as the day it was first hammered out,” Hank said with a wink.

He cocked back the hammer, inserted the firing cap, and let fly, firing the homemade ball of tin straight into the old woman’s fireplace. The cheap powder he’d used smoked the kitchen out.

“There you go, good grandmother. It’s done and done. The witch will bother you no more.”

The old woman laughed. “She never bothered me in the first place. So off with you then, you have my silver and my blessing. I’ll count it an experience and thank God for it tonight in my prayers. It’s reckoned fine good luck to help a beggar.”

O’Hallorhan bristled at the word “beggar,” but he said nothing about it. He had eyes for the old woman’s apple pie. “It’s better luck to feed one, Granny. Why don’t you carve me off a slice of that hot apple pie, and a wee nugget of cheese if you have it?”

The old woman’s humour hardened. “Be off with you. You’ve palmed my dime and fired that wee bit of metal you thought to pass for silver and you’ve fouled up my kitchen with your dirty cheap powder.” She grabbed her broom up from the floor. “Leave this house now, or I’ll put this broom to a better use than tripping up witches.”

O’Hallorhan wouldn’t have it. “I’ll have that pie before I go. I can still smell the witch, and she needs another blast or two.”

“You’ll have the end of this broom, and you’ll be picking splinters for a fortnight,” the old woman said.

O’Hallorhan looked her in the eye. “Well I’m walking that way,” he said, pointing towards Liverpool. “And there’s a lot of houses between here and midnight. It’d be a shame if word got around of how I smelled a witch in your house and you wouldn’t let me smoke it out.” He had her then. She knew the trouble that O’Hallorhan could start for her.

“Take the pie and be done with it,” she told him.

But O’Hallorhan would have nothing to do with that. In his eyes he had to earn the pie fair and square. So he loaded up his gun, but in his hurry and cheapness he slid in a plain lead shot, once again keeping the dime for the silver.

He fired a blast up the chimney but it ricocheted off the chimney stone, and struck O’Hallorhan square in the heart, killing him stone dead. The old woman was sorry to see O’Hallorhan dead, but not sorry enough to forget about retrieving his pilfered silver.

For years afterwards, the old woman would hear a whistle up the chimney flue, and even though most folks swore it was nothing more than a hole left by O’Hallorhan’s shot, the old woman swore it was the ghost of the old witch-hunter.

“Shut up, you old whistling crook,” she would yell, “or I’ll fire a whole barrel full of silver up that flue and finish you good and proper.”