When I was growing up, my eyes watered with fright each time ghost stories were yarned around the kitchen table. To the ghost spinners who told these cuffers, they were true.
Ernest Lear spent a lot of cold, windy nights with Richard, his father, who was keeper of the lighthouse on Green Point, Hibbs Cove. The lighthouse, built in 1883, was first manned by Robert Andrews and then by Richard Lear. Ernest climbed the narrow steps of the round iron tower many times to help his father with his duties in keeping the gas lamp in shining order. Whenever he went to step on the spiralling stairs he always stepped to one side to allow “the ghost” to go first. He sensed – rather than saw – the ghost.
No one ever knew who the ghost was. There were stories of shipwrecks and lives lost, creating the belief that the ghost of a drowning victim took its place in the lighthouse to help ships passing in the night keep clear of threatening rocks. Perhaps it was the ghost of Peter Easton. According to legend, the pirate had a ship wrecked on the rocks out from the lighthouse, and his treasure trove was buried on Green Point.
Mary Peddle, my maternal grandmother, was courting my grandfather, Christopher Upshall, in the kitchen of the Upshall home. Christopher was lying down with his head in Mary’s lap as she sat on the settle. Mary looked up when a cold breeze swept across the floor. A shiver went through her as she watched a little woman move lightly across the kitchen and light the lamp on the table. Then she disappeared like smoke.
Mary described the woman to Christopher. He was startled that Mary could describe Sarah, his mother, who had died a long time before. Sarah had come back to a home she had lost through death. Perhaps she was introducing herself to her future daughter-in-law, who would gain the Upshall home through marriage. Or maybe she was letting her know who really owned the house.
My grandparents, Jacob and Elizabeth (née Maley) Kennedy, were in bed about midnight when they heard the latch on the garden gate lift and fall. They listened as the gate was opened. Their ears perked as they heard heavy footsteps, sounding like those of William, Jacob’s father, come up the gravelled path and stop on the steps. They waited for William to open the door and come in. There was silence, as if William had come to the door and stopped. Elizabeth and Jacob fell asleep without thinking any more about it.
Again, the next night, about midnight, they heard footsteps. This time the sound of footsteps didn’t stop until they were inside the house. Jacob’s brother, George, who lived with William on top of Kennedy’s Hill, had come to the house to tell them that William had just died.
In a studio photo Elsie (née Kennedy) Ralph of Sandy Cove looked like the heroine in a love story. She was tall and dressed in a long, black, high-necked velvet dress, with a little purse at her tiny waist. Her coiffured black hair was swept off her neck. Out of her love came a tragedy.
When her little girl, a late-in-life baby, was sick in the hospital, a white bird pitched on Elsie’s bedroom window leaf three times. She remarked: “My little girl or I will die.”
Little Violet died just after she came home from the hospital. Raymond, her older brother, did not forget about his little sister who had died. When he grew up and married his sweetheart, they had a baby who became little Violet’s namesake.
Catherine “Kit” Snow was hanged July 21,1834, after she had been convicted of having her husband, John Snow, murdered. She always claimed she was innocent, and so did many of her neighbours. The residents of Bareneed and Salmon Cove often saw a light on the water between the two places. It was known as Kit’s Light. Through several generations, residents had reported seeing Kit’s Light. Finally, a priest blessed the waters to put Catherine’s spirit to rest and the light disappeared.
An incident my uncle Fred told me about his brother triggered a story in Widdershins, my short story collection. (I’ll keep his story name.)
Young Josh had stayed too long at his cousin’s house. It was getting dark, and he decided to take a shortcut across the marsh. According to him, an old woman with an Aladdin’s lamp caught hold of his hand. She didn’t let go until they had crossed the marsh; then she disappeared. When Josh got home he was in a state of shock. The fright must have turned his blood. He swelled up like a poisoned rat. His mother had to press his tongue down to get water in. When the old doctor came, he told Fred, who was only a youngster then, to “run quick and get some twigs.” The doctor twisted the twigs into a Cross, and then he made the Sign of the Cross over Josh. He asked what time the spell had taken him. Then he shook the clock and did widdershins.
He turned back the hands of the clock to the time Josh got the fright; then he wound the clock contrariwise until the spring broke. That was the doctor’s way of breaking the spell. It was a lovely grandfather clock, but it never told the time again. It was kicked around outdoors for a long time. The doctor left a flask of whisky for Josh’s nerve. He told his mother to keep the flask in his pocket every day, so his nerve would get strong. The doctor never told Josh’s mother when to stop giving the boy a flask. She always made sure he had one. Josh got frightened by one spirit, then ended up with another one fixed to him for life.
One night Elsie Porter rose up on her elbow to the sound of three knocks. “Get up, Fred, and see who’s at the door,” she urged her husband.
Fred went down the stairs and opened the door. There was no one there, so he came back to bed and the couple settled in for the night. Three mornings later, Fred got up feeling a foreboding. He called friends to see if anyone had died. No one had died that morning. However, that afternoon he got a call telling him that Gordon Tipple, his close friend, had died 2:30 that afternoon. It had been 2:30 a.m. three days earlier that Elsie had heard three knocks: a knock for each day.
It wasn’t Fred’s first-time encounter with the unexplained. He went in the woods one Saturday to cut a load of firewood. He filled his horse cart then stopped at a river to let his horse drink. All of a sudden, he heard chopping sounds where there were only the stumps of cut trees.
Later he told a woodsman about the strange experience.
“Ah,” said the man, “that’s where poor Joe died. He was cutting a tree down and it fell before he was out of the way.”
My grandmother Upshall became night blind in her forties. This was very upsetting for her. Nighttime was when she did her sewing and knitting, but she could no longer see well enough to do those tasks. One night she had a dream. A man stood at the foot of her bed. He told her that if she killed a rooster and took the blood from the comb and made the Sign of the Cross she would be cured. While he was saying this he moved closer and made the Sign of the Cross on her forehead. She felt then that the man was Jesus. When she awoke, her dream seemed so real that she believed it had some significance. To her amazement, when night came her night blindness was gone.
Mary Upshall believed in her miracle and she told it to her children, and they told it to their children as a strange-but-true event.
Grandmother Upshall’s son, Silas, later claimed that he became night blind for “so long.” He was told by a natural healer that if he would eat the liver of a robin, he would no longer be night blind. That became Uncle Silas’s cure.
A Little Harbour couple was having a new home built. After the chimney was installed, the neighbours noticed that a white bird went down the chimney every morning. After the house was completed enough to live in, the young family moved in. However, when the young mother died in childbirth, the father moved out.
Grandfather and Grandmother Upshall moved their family into the house while theirs was being built. There was a ladder to the second storey, and one of my uncles slept up there. He didn’t mind the cold. An old sail was put up in the doorway as a makeshift door. Every morning it was knocked down.
My uncle, then a small boy, said that a woman walked by his bed every night. He was not afraid of her, but she appeared to be very sad. The way he described her fitted the description of the mother who had died in childbirth.
Lillian Upshall, my mother, left her home in Little Harbour, Placentia Bay, when she was 11 years old to go to Grand Falls. She stayed with Elsie Waugh, her older sister, who was expecting a baby. Reuben, Lillian’s older brother, who was boarding at Elsie’s, told her that he would give her money to go to the circus that had just come to town.
There was one problem. Reuben kept his money in Elsie’s trunk, and she had gone to Windsor to visit her friend, Olive Single. The key to the trunk was in Elsie’s purse. Reuben told Lillian to go to Windsor for the key, and when she returned he could get her money for the circus.
Lillian was instructed to keep on the main road and she would come straight to the gate leading to Olive’s house. She arrived at the house without mishap. She got the key and went on her way back to Grand Falls, daydreaming about all the strange things she would find at the circus. She had heard that she would see a man covered in hair, and a woman who had two heads.
She was thinking so hard about what it would be like to have two heads to do her thinking that she didn’t realize where she was going. She came to herself in the thick of the woods. (Superstitious people would later wonder if fairies had led her astray.) The leaves on the birch trees were turning and falling in the cold autumn air, but there were large spruce trees around her and she couldn’t see far. She wandered around until she became so exhausted that she sat down on a rock and sobbed. She stayed there afraid and alone. By this time her stockings and the hem of her dress were torn, and her legs were scratched and bleeding.
She wasn’t used to praying, but, feeling desperate, she looked up into the empty blue sky that looked as lonely and as far away as she felt. With tears streaming down her face she prayed, “If there’s a God up there, will He please help me get out of the woods?”
When she opened her eyes there was a path in front of her. It seemed to open up as she went. She followed it out, now and then looking behind, puzzled that there was no path behind her. She came right out to the road. It was too late to get money for the circus. That night she didn’t go anywhere.
Lillian has never forgotten her strange experience, nor the prayer that opened up a path that led her home.
Lillian grew up to marry Clayton Kennedy. Three years after the marriage, Jacob, Clayton’s father, took ill. The sweethearts were sitting at the table one evening when they heard a buzzing in the wall.
“Hear that?” Clayton asked Lillian. She nodded with the comment, “There must be a bumble bee in there.”
Later that week, when the young couple went to see Jacob, who had suffered a stroke, they looked at each other, startled. The same sound they had heard in the wall was coming from the dying man’s breathing.
Elizabeth Kennedy would say, “We’re going to have a storm. The Blue Jacket is out tonight.”
The Blue Jacket, a steam packet, crossing from Brigus to Portugal Cove in the summer of 1862, caught fire off Horse Cove, St. Thomas’s, and had to be abandoned near Kelly’s Island. Willis Lear was adamant that he saw the Blue Jacket one evening when he was out on the water in his own boat. The ghost ship bore down on him and he feared she’d run him down. Instead, the Blue Jacket went under his boat and came up on the other side.
On occasions when people heard the Blue Jacket blow her horn, it was like the sound of a loon. They answered and the sound got nearer. They stopped answering the boat, thinking that if they continued to respond, the Blue Jacket would rise out of the water and come ashore. Once when the boat seemed to be coming nearer, a minister recited a prayer and laid the ghost of the boat to rest.
Out from clay, rocks, and a scattering of berry bushes on Kelly’s Island, the remains of the Blue Jacket lie sunken in the ocean bed. However, the brass and iron pieces of its engine were brought ashore by a diver without stirring the ghost of a boat many people claimed to have sighted over and over.
This classic Tib’s Eve pisogery (piseogaíochr) was often told when I was a child. I already knew, on the authority of adults, that the Devil was a busy fellow. He had been identified as having left his hoof marks burnt into cliffs, and his footprints on winter windowpanes.
One Saturday night – as Grandmother Upshall’s version of the Tib’s Eve story went – there was “a time” at someone’s house out in Harbour Buffett.
The dancers had been “planking ’er down” and “kicking it out” when someone brought a halt to the “scuff ” by announcing that “The Lord’s Day” was in sight and it was time for everyone to up and leave.
This didn’t sit well with those who were caught in the zing of a scuff. When the God-fearing musician left the house, one spirited missy declared that she was going to find someone to dance with, even if she had to find the Devil to play the organ. A fellow showed up in the room who was willing to play – and he did. When he got up from the organ, it kept on playing. No one seemed to notice.
The missy who had shown no interest in observing a day of rest found herself dancing with the energetic fellow who seemed to be light on his feet. However, he wanted her to keep on dancing even after she said she’d like to take a spell. She happened to look down, and to her horror, she saw that her smooth dancer had hoofs. She let out a scream.
The young missy couldn’t stop dancing, even when the Devil left her to dance with someone else. Soon all the dancers were trying to stop dancing. They started screaming when they couldn’t. No one ever came out of the house, and no one outside dared go inside for fear they would never get out. Even when the house dropped from age, the music and the screams didn’t stop.
And they won’t! Not until Tib’s Eve – which is never.