WICKED

WOODS

Ghost Stories

from Old New Brunswick

Steve Vernon

Copyright © Steve Vernon 2008

E-book © 2010

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Vernon, Steve

Wicked woods : ghost stories from old New Brunswick / Steve Vernon.

ISBN 978-1-55109-666-7

E-book ISBN 978-1-55109-810-4

1. Ghosts—New Brunswick. 2. Legends—New Brunswick. I. Title.

BF1472.C3V476 2008 398.2097151’05 C2007-907556-8

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) and the Canada Council, and of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage for our publishing activities.

I’d like to dedicate this to my mom, who was Yarmouth’s storytelling lady long before I figured out which way to swing a vowel; and to my dad, who didn’t have nearly enough time to tell me all his stories; and, as always, I’d like to dedicate this book to my wife, Belinda, who puts up with everything I dream up.

Stories grow like forests —

the best of them

run their roots bone-deep.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 The Dungarvon Whooper (Dungarvon River)

2 Footsteps Leading Nowhere (Richibucto)

3 The McNamee Swinging Bridge (Priceville)

4 The Moncton Witch (Moncton)

5 Clutch and Claw (Wolf Point)

6 A Treasure Dowser’s Boomerang (Apohaqui)

7 The Codfish Man (Saint John)

8 The Keyhole Mine of Red Head Harbour (Saint John)

9 A Rope for Madame La Tour (Saint John)

10 The Barking Dog (Kingston)

11 There Will Be Blood (Catons Island)

12 Ghost Hollow (Carters Cove)

13 Ghost Rock (Lorneville)

14 The Pickle Barrel Wife (Campobello Island)

15 The Lake Utopia Sea Monster (Lake Utopia)

16 The Bloody Stump of Bonny River (Bonny River)

17 Ghost Hill (Lynnfield)

18 The University Ghost (Fredericton)

19 The Howling Ghost of Howland Ridge (Howland Ridge)

20 The Dark Chuckle (Lower Woodstock)

21 The Shiktehawk Vikings (Bristol)

22 Echoes in a Covered Bridge (Johnville)

23 Malabeam of the Maliseet (Grand Falls)

24 The Cannibal She-Queen of New Brunswick (Dalhousie)

25 The Phantom Ship of Chaleur Bay (Bathurst)

Last Words

INTRODUCTION

Listen closely.

There isn’t a single one of us, man or woman or child, who doesn’t have our own kind of ghost story. Some of you will tell me that you’ve never seen a ghost. Some of you will say that you don’t even believe in them.

But we’ve all got them — ghosts and dreams and memories that we carry with us wherever we go. I’m talking about unfinished business, and that’s what most ghost stories are all about. Break it down into bare bones and you’ll see what I’m saying is surely true. The trea–sure that was never found, the burning ship that’s forever trying to safely find its way to shore, the fellow looking for his missing head — they’re nothing but examples of unfinished business. And unfinished business leads straight to regret.

Not too long ago I was camping in the New Brunswick woods regretting that I hadn’t brought along some marshmallows. The campfire had burned itself down into a lovely bed of glow that just cried out for a marshmallow or two, and there I was with nothing but a tin of beans.

I leaned back against a rock and listened to the campfire talk–ing. Campfires can tell you stories if you learn to listen hard enough, but there’s more to a campfire than just the sound of the thing. There’s the glow and flicker of the flames musing over the coals and painting elusive pictures on the faces of those who cluster about it. There’s the warmth and the way the firepit seems to pull everything together on a lonely dark night.

Yes sir, there’s a gravity and a wisdom in that trembling focus of light, heat, and sound that comforts a wandering man. The fire will laugh at you and listen to your songs and stories, and wink at you from a sleepy bed of coals. It reminds you that despite the encroaching darkness, there’s a reason to smile. It assures you that in spite of the screech owl and the rusty crickets and the hungry, lonely howl of the coyote, there’s nothing in these woods to fear.

Except maybe ghosts.

Only I wasn’t thinking about ghosts just then. The campfire was burning there in the heart of a dark New Brunswick forest clustered with cedar and poplar, birch and maple, and the faster-growing spruce and fir. I was hunkered down amongst clumps of wild roses, pitcher plants, cranberry, bakeapple, blueberry, and raspberry bushes, and curled green fiddleheads. Yes sir and yes ma’am, a man could live fat and easy in those woods if he knew what to look for. It makes me hungry just talking about such abundance.

I was really wishing I’d brought those darn marshmallows.

I startled as the snap of a fat resinous pine knot cracked loudly in the laughter of the campfire flames.

“You startle easy,” a voice from the darkness said.

I looked around and was surprised to see the shape of an old man standing there in the shadows of a lonely Jack pine.

“Mind if I come on in?” he asked.

“A campfire has a lot of sides,” I said. “Pick one and sit yourself down.”

He stepped closer and I could see him. He was dressed in fringed buckskin like an old-time trapper, and he was wearing some of the nicest moccasins I’d ever seen. You don’t see that much any more. Folks wear sneakers and hunting boots and gum rubbers when they go walking in the woods. They hardly ever wear something as humble and comfortable as a pair of worked-in moccasins.

He walked on into my camp, smooth and quiet, like he was born to the forest. I could tell this man had lived in the woods for a very long time.

“Are you hunting?” he asked. “It isn’t the season, you know.”

“Hunting for stories,” I said. “I’m a storyteller.”

“A storyteller?” the man asked. “You mean a liar, don’t you?”

I smiled, not taking his comment personally. With the work I do, you learn to grow a sense of humour early on or you don’t make it through at all.

“I’ve been known to stretch the truth a bit, now and then,” I answered, “but I try and stick as closely to the historical facts as I can.”

“Truth’s made to stretch,” the man replied with a shrug. “Sometimes, so is history. So what are you going to do with these stories you’re hunting, once you catch them?”

“I write them down in books,” I said. “I’m working on one right now.”

“You write them down? I thought you said you told them?”

“I tell them too, but my voice isn’t loud enough for everyone to hear and these stories are awfully important.”

“Important?” he said with a snort. “Who says so? They’re noth–ing but stories, aren’t they? Just a pack of lies wrapped up in a happy ever after? Who says they’re good for anything at all?”

He asked the question like he didn’t believe in stories, but I had the feeling he was just testing me.

“They’re history and geography and folklore,” I answered, just the same way I’d answer a sixth grade student who asked me the same question in a school. “They’re a piece of the country where truth and imagination come together. They’re stories folks have been telling for a long time. It’s important that folks keep on telling them. In this day and age of computer games and colour television folks need to slow down and hear the magic of the spoken word.”

“History?” he laughed, but not in a mean kind of way. “You know what history is, don’t you?”

I knew he had his own answer to tell me, but I figured he wanted to hear mine first.

“It’s a recording of past events,” I said. “Things that happened long ago, some told and some written down.”

He laughed all the harder. There was something in his laugh— a little summer thunder and a shivery kettledrum rumble that made me want to laugh right along with him.

“I’ll tell you what history is,” he said. “History is a campfire. It’s a many-sided creature, but we usually only get to see the side that belongs to whoever won the war and talked the loudest about it. History is just what it says —his story. That’s why sto–rytelling is such a dangerous practice to indulge in. Folks fight entire wars just for the right to tell their own stories in their own kind of way.”

“That’s true enough,” I said. “But storytelling is knowledge as well. Better to have one side of a story than no story at all.”

He shrugged. “You have a point.”

I thanked him for that acknowledgement.

“I know a few stories,” he said.

“Well, why don’t you tell me one?” I asked.

“I don’t tell my stories to just anyone,” he said with a sly grin and a wink. “I need to know that you’re all you say you are.”

I nodded. It was going to be a test. I’d played this sort of game before.

“So who do you tell your stories to?” he asked.

“I tell them to anyone who’ll listen,” I said.

“Well, I’m listening now. Why don’t you tell me a few?”

“I believe I’ll do just that,” I said.

And with that I leaned back and let out an unearthly whoop–ing yell that startled the old man out of about six years’ worth of growth.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“That’s to start things up. Or maybe just to see how easily you startle. For now, just give a listen and you’ll see,” I said, and this time it was my turn to slide him a wink and a grin and leave him wondering.

“We need marshmallows,” he said. “Campfire talks louder with a bag of marshmallows.”

“Shh,” I said. “Listen closely.”

And that’s when I began to tell my first story, while the camp–fire kept talking slow and low.

1

THE

DUNGARVON

WHOOPER

DUNGARVON RIVER

Folks have been spinning this yarn for as long as the waters of the Dungarvon River have been flowing deep and cold and wide. This is a tale that’s best told over the guttering coals of a campfire, when the night sounds are creeping closer to you and the moon is haunting high overhead.

I shouldn’t have to remind you not to forget your marshmallows.

Between the winding tracks of the Bartholomew and the Renous rivers snakes the Dungarvon, as it flows down into the salmon-heavy stretches of the Miramichi River. According to famed Canadian botanist, historian, and car–tographer William Francis Ganong, a local boy, Michael Murphy, who hailed from Dungarvan, Ireland, named the Dungarvon River. Murphy swore that when he danced in Dungarvon, New Brunswick, Ireland shook. No one has yet explained how an a became an o between Ireland and New Brunswick. Still, no matter how you spell it, there’s an awful lot of beauty hanging breathless in Dungarvon’s neck of the woods.

In the mid-1800s, the life of a lumberjack was as hard as any life could be. Lumberjacks headed out into the woods in early fall and didn’t set back until spring came rising up from the southland.

You may very well ask why lumberjacks didn’t work in the sum–mer. The fact was the trees were easier to fell when the under–brush thinned out as it does in the winter. Frozen wood was easier to cut, and fresh-cut timber skidded nicely over frozen ground. So that’s why the winter woods rang with the hard chopping song of steel against pine.

Some versions of this tale call the camp boss Ryan and some say that was the cook’s name. Perhaps both men were named Ryan, but for our purposes, we will hang it upon the cook and be done with it. One can’t fuss over too many knots and tangles when one is trying to unravel any particular yarn.

Ryan was a young lad, tall and strong and dark of hair, with eyes as clear and blue as a flowing summer stream. He was a bet–ter cook than a lumberjack, so he served his time in the camp kitchen. He was well liked and respected for his fine booming roar of a voice. You see, leather lungs and a strong bellow were prerequisites for a lumberjack in those days.

“I don’t have a lick of use for a man who whispers ‘timber,’” the camp boss said. “If a tree is falling my way, I want to hear about it quickly and not two minutes too late.”

The camp boss was a hard man, as most bosses are. He could squeeze a shilling until the king blushed red and turned blue for lack of breath. He measured his days in coin and profit, and suf–fered an idler not. He prized a penny more than he valued any lumberjack and that’s where the trouble first began.

“I want to hear those axes ringing,” he would say. “The Dungarvon Woods should never fall quiet. I hear money clinking in the sound of every falling tree.”

He valued the camp cook, though, for it is a man’s belly that will carry him into the woods and back again. A lumberjack’s legs and the swing of his axe were nothing more than extensions of his growling hunger. He’d work harder and go farther on the promise of a good meal.

You must bear in mind that a lumberjack was expected to awaken at four in the morning for a breakfast of pork and beans, or pancakes, or both. The whole mess was washed down with piping swallows of tea tainted with the taste of the iron sulphate used to purify the water. They would hike miles into the woods looking for the timberland, toting cold lunches, and then hike back at about eight or nine in the evening for dinner —a meal of pork and beans, or pancakes, or both.

The camp cook was expected to be up before any of them, in time to have everything ready when the lumberjacks awoke. He would rise while the crows were still snoring in their trees and cook up both breakfast and dinner. Next he’d awaken the men by banging a broken peavey, a logging tool that looked a little like a spear with a hook on it for moving fallen timber, against a rusty iron wheel rim and singing out in his big booming voice, “Daylight in the swamp! Rise and shine, rise and shine.”

Ryan was a good lad who never wasted his time or money in the far-off town of Renous. He kept his wages tucked safely inside a fine buckskin moneybelt that he buckled tightly about his belly beneath a layer or two of flannel and a pair of red cotton long johns.

The money was meant to be hidden, but secrets are hard to keep in the closeness of camp. Some of the more cynical lumber–jacks referred to Ryan as a “cheap-hearted spend-you-not,” but the majority of the fellows knew him better than that. The truth of the matter was that Ryan was saving enough of a grubstake to marry a young girl in Miramichi. Whatever the reason, the weeks flew by and young Ryan’s moneybelt grew fatter and fatter.

Then, one fateful winter morning, the camp boss sent the men out to work.

“Aren’t you coming, boss?” the camp’s number two man asked. “I have work to be done right around here,” the camp boss answered, and because he was the boss, no one dared to com–plain. They took their share of cold grub and some freshly baked bread and headed off into the New Brunswick woods.

“Head for the far stand of trees,” the camp boss ordered. “I want some tall timbering done today.”

It was a good day for working the woods. The crew felled many a tree and limbed them clean, preparing them for skidding down to the river. It was a day like any other day —only when they returned to camp, Ryan lay dead upon the floor of the kitchen with his skull broken open.

“He took sick,” the camp boss said. “He pitched himself a fit and fell down and died. Wasn’t anything I could do, it hap–pened so fast.”

“Where’d the blood come from?” somebody asked.

“He hit the stove when he fell,” the camp boss answered.

“He didn’t look sick at breakfast,” one man said.

“Maybe it was something he ate,” the camp boss said with a shrug and a sneaky little grin. “He sure looks sick now. Sick to death.”

It was a bad joke and the camp boss was a bad man. The fact of the matter was the camp boss had murdered Ryan. Pretty nearly everyone in that camp knew it, on account of the fact that Ryan’s moneybelt had mysteriously vanished. But because the camp boss was the camp boss, and there wasn’t any proof Ryan had been murdered, no one said a thing.

If the truth were told, the camp boss had caught Ryan by sur–prise, coming up behind him with an axe handle and busting his skull wide open.

“We need to bury him,” the camp boss said. The old bugger was all too eager to be rid of the evidence.

“Bury him where?” the number two man asked. “The ground is frozen harder than a banker’s heart. There’ll be no digging until the spring thaw.”

“Bury him in a snowdrift,” the camp boss commanded. “The snow will keep his body from rotting until the ground thaws. We’ll turn him a fresh grave in the spring and bury him good and proper. Just mark the snowdrift well and clear so we can find him come April.”

So that’s just what they did. They loaded Ryan’s body up onto a sled, dragged him deep into the woods, and heaped him in a snowdrift. They hung Ryan’s bright red toque in a nearby tree and marked its location in their memory. That sounds trickier than it was. A lumberjack knows his trees as surely as a father knows his own sons. Yet in the springtime, when they returned to bury Ryan’s body, something had happened. The toque was there, but there was no sign of Ryan.

“A bear dragged the body off,” the camp boss decided. “It’s the only explanation.”

“Yup,” the number two man wryly noted. “There’s a whole lot of bears wandering these here winter woods, aren’t there?”

“What are you trying to say?” the camp boss asked.

“What I’m saying is that there aren’t that many bears out there who don’t know how to sleep through the winter. I’m saying it wasn’t any bear that made off with young Ryan’s leftovers.”

The camp boss scowled. He didn’t much like being disagreed with, especially when he was in the wrong.

“Painter,” he said. “It was a painter that took him.”

By painter, the old camp boss meant panther, of which there were quite a few in New Brunswick in those days. They were big cats, a type of cougar that lived off deer, and cattle, and whatever else they could scavenge up.

At that moment, a terrifying screech shattered the silence of the woods around the lumberjacks. It sounded like a cross between a man, a devil, a squealing barn door, and a tomcat torn inside out.

“Hunh,” the camp boss said with a nasty grin. “There’s the proof of it. A painter, if I ever heard one.”

Most of the crew agreed that the camp boss’s explanation didn’t sound all that convincing.

“Doesn’t sound like any panther I’ve ever heard,” the number two said.

“It sounds more like a devil to me,” another man said. “A devil with a twisted tail.”

They all considered this.

“A screech owl, then,” the camp boss decided.

Only it wasn’t any screech owl, no sir and no ma’am. It screeched again and as that second whoop faded away, the boss’s hair turned from its usual coal black to snowy white.

Now these were tough, hard men, used to long winters and rough working conditions, yet the sound of the screaming whoop terrified them.

“It’s a painter and a screech owl,” the camp boss said, clearly grab–bing at any explanation his imagination could offer. He kept scram–bling around for a reasonable answer, but no one was convinced. The screech sounded a third time, and as that third whoop died, so too did the camp boss. He dropped to the ground stone cold dead. It might have been fear. It might have been guilt. Maybe he just took sick, with the same sort of sickness that Ryan had. Whatever the reason, the camp boss fell to the dirt and moved no more.

And then the screech sounded again —like the sound of a saw blade running over the buried stubbornness of an unforgiving steel nail; like the sound of the wind blowing through a dead man’s bones; like the sound of a spirit screaming out for vengeance.

The crew buried the camp boss at what was supposed to have been the cook’s gravesite and carved out a handmade cross. Each man said a short prayer as the Dungarvon Whooper howled again and again throughout the entire ceremony.

“All of the praying in a month of hot Sundays won’t lay this spirit to rest,” the number two decided. “He’s screaming for jus–tice, or his lost moneybelt, or maybe just for his breakfast.”

Later that day, the crew packed up their gear and paddled down the Dungarvon to the town of Renous, deciding that it would be a fine time to take up cod fishing or horseshoeing or anything else besides lumbering. These old boys were scared into retirement and promptly gave up the trade.

A second and third crew made the long trip to the logging camp of Whooper Spring and left before a week was up. In time, there wasn’t a lumberjack in all of New Brunswick who would care or dare to spend a night in the Dungarvon camp.

“The camp is cursed,” they said and left it at that.

At the turn of the century, an idealistic young parish priest of Renous decided to do something about the Dungarvon Whooper. The priest’s name was Father Murdoch. He was a handsome man by all accounts, but folks say that his journey to the camp, and his attempt to lay the ghost to rest, wore ten long years off the man in ten short minutes. He said the necessary sacred words, sprinkled the ground with holy water, and waved a blessed crucifix about every inch of the camp — all the while the Dungarvon Whooper continued to raise his unholy racket.

The local folks claim that the Dungarvon Whooper haunts these woods to this day. They claim that there isn’t a speck of underbrush or a wildflower that will grow upon the shared grave of the camp boss. Storytellers swear that the Whooper will lure men out into the woods and frighten them away. They will tell you to beware the scent of freshly baked bread and the sound of frying bacon, which precede an ungodly whooping noise. Horses rear and dogs howl and not even so much as a chipmunk dares walk these woods.

Or so they say.

The Whooper has made such an impact on the area that in the early 1900s, the first train to run from Quarryville to Newcastle was called the Dungarvon Whooper. Some said because of its eerie whistle, while others thought that it was because of the ungodly ruckus raised by the lumberjacks riding the train to and from town on the weekends.

Around that time a strange hermit was spotted twice in the Dungarvon Woods. Some folks believed that he was the one making all the noise, while others wondered if maybe the hermit wasn’t Ryan himself somehow raised up from his empty grave.

Whooper or whopper, you decide. Folks in the Miramichi area still warn travellers against camping anywhere close to Whooper Spring or the deep flowing Dungarvon River, and that’s all the warning that I need to hear. The Dungarvon Woods will never fall quiet.

Now whoop it up good and loud —because I believe you’ve been holding your breath for awhile.

2

FOOTSTEPS

LEADING

NOWHERE

RICHIBUCTO

On the eastern shore of New Brunswick, about midway between Miramichi and Shediac, lies the little town of Richibucto. The history of the town goes back to 1604 when Samuel de Champlain decided to establish a col–ony there. The harbour was good and it provided access to the New Brunswick interior. Some folks claim this was the first European community to be estab–lished in North America, although that is still open for debate.

It is funny, isn’t it, how much of his–tory is open for debate. So much of what we read is just educated hearsay. The historians of the world are nothing more than a pack of learned storytellers, with a chalkboard instead of a campfire, spinning yarns and telling tales. It’s that touch of uncertainty that teaches you never to take the world at face value.

The name Richibucto is derived from a Mi’kmaq term mean–ing river of fire. It is said that the Great Spirit sent the first people here to live, telling their chief that there existed a wonderful land buried deep behind the sunset, warmed by a fast-flowing river of fire.

There is a story they tell of a barque that sailed out of Richibucto Harbour back in 1860. The barque’s name was Amity and it was built near the town of Sackville, New Brunswick, and owned by a cartel of Nova Scotian businessmen. The name Amity brings to mind thoughts of harmony and friendship, but let me tell you that barque was about as far removed from peaceful as could be imagined.

I should start by telling you just what a barque is. A barque is a sailing vessel with three or more masts, mostly square-rigged. They were primarily used for hauling cargo. They were slow and sturdy and cheaply built. They were considered a perfect invest–ment for any enterprising merchant, as well as prime targets for pirates and brigands of all shapes and sizes.

Our story begins as the Amity set sail from Richibucto Harbour with a cargo of softwood packed into the hold. It was a fine sunny day and the captain was confident of a safe and rapid journey. However, the Amity lost an argument with a sandbar and ran aground. It was stuck, hard and fast.

Unloaded, the ship would have been easy to move, but all attempts to move the vessel, filled with heavy softwood, green and freshly timbered in the New Brunswick woods, failed. Despairing of ever recouping their losses, the Nova Scotian cartel sold off the ship and cargo to Jack and Robert Jardine of Richibucto. The Jardines had been established in the shipbuilding business for several decades. The family firm was responsible for building dozens of ships. I suspect the salvage operation was nothing more than a lucrative side venture for these hard-working salts.

The first thing the Jardines did was pay off the entire crew of the Amity. The crewmen were more than happy to take their money and get as far as possible from what they’d come to believe was a jinxed ship. Of the entire crew, one man failed to show up to get his pay. It was assumed that he had deserted the foundered ship and taken up work in another port, perhaps under another name.

The Jardines then set about unloading the Amity, figuring that once it was relieved of its burden, they could easily float it off of the sandbar and patch up its hull, netting a handy profit. However, Mother Nature and Old Man Neptune intervened.

The winter set in and the harbour froze up. The Amity wasn’t going anywhere.

The Jardines weren’t worried. They hired a sturdy watchman to keep an eye on the Amity over the winter, for fear of piracy or pilfering. It turned out that there was a lot more to be afraid of than simple larceny. After keeping an eye on the cold and empty ship for very few nights, the watchman walked into the Jardines’s office, demanding that they settle up with him.

“I hear noises every night,” the watchman said.

The Jardines wanted to know what kind of noises he was hearing.

“Footsteps,” the watchman said. “Slow and heavy, like the sound of a man walking to the gallows.”

Rats, the Jardines told him. That was nothing but the sound of rats.

“There isn’t a ship out there without a few rats, especially when they’re harboured. We’ll fetch you a cat.”

“What kind of rats can live off of softwood?” the watchman wanted to know. “These are footsteps, I tell you.”

The watchman refused to go back on board the Amity, and by now word had gotten around that the ship was haunted. The Jardines couldn’t find a replacement so they built a small shack on the shore close to the vessel, where the watchman could sit and keep an eye on things. They weren’t all that happy about this compromise. It was better than nothing, but it wasn’t as safe as having a man living on board.

The winter passed on as Maritime winters do, moving from a snowy March into a slushy grey April. The Jardines hired a crew of out-of-town boys who hadn’t heard the rumours of the ship’s haunting, and set to work unloading the Amity. Night after night, the crew complained of hearing those eerie heavy footsteps, thump-thump-thump, like nails being driven into a coffin. They searched the ship by day and night and couldn’t find the source of the disturbance.

“It’s the devil, come looking for the soul of a sailor,” one said.

“It’s Neptune himself, come up to inspect our vessel,” another theorized. “He fancies it for his own and plans to sink it down under just as soon as we set sail.”

Fear continued to fester like gangrene in a dirty wound. The men talked of quitting or even burning the ship. The Jardines knew they had to move fast. They did everything they could to hurry the workers on.

Finally they had unloaded enough of the softwood cargo to float the boat free. If they had only looked a little deeper they might have found what was hidden in the lower levels of the cargo hold. A new crew was sought and brought on board to sail the Amity off that sand–bar. They reloaded the ship and set sail for Britain. All across the Atlantic, men heard those fateful footsteps, thump-thump-thump.

“It’s just the cargo, shifting in our hull,” the captain said.

The men, however, were not impressed with his assurances. They were dangerously close to mutiny when the ship finally pulled into Liverpool, England.

Here, the cargo was completely unloaded, and as the last few tons of softwood were hauled free, the dock workers made a ter–rible discovery. Deep in the hold, where the cargo had shifted, they found the remains of a human body, sticky and nearly mum–mified from the resin of the pine.

At first they thought this was surely the original crew mem–ber who had apparently deserted. However, further investigation proved that this was not the case. Who was this man? The captain tallied his sailors and found that he wasn’t missing a single one. Word went back to Richibucto, yet when they checked back there they couldn’t find a single missing person, which when you think about it would have been a pretty good trick.

There were no signs of foul play. As far as the captain and the crew and the authorities could tell, the cargo had shifted suddenly and trapped the man. But who was he? He wasn’t the deserter or a member of the crew. Everyone on the ship’s roster was accounted for.

Perhaps the deserter had killed the man for some unknown reason and hidden him down in the hold underneath the cargo. Perhaps the man was simply a stowaway with an unfortunate sense of timing. Yet if that was so, how had he gotten on board without anyone catching him?

The crew wrapped the body in sailcloth, rowed it out to sea, and dropped it into the water. Some folks say that this was the traditional response to death on a ship; however, one has to won–der if the body was in such bad shape that they simply didn’t dare bury it in a public graveyard.

The mystery was never solved. The Atlantic swallowed all of the evidence and any verdict was trapped beneath fathoms of cold and uncaring waters. The sound of the phantom footsteps were never again reported on board the Amity. Years later, when the ship was decommissioned, they cut it up for firewood rather than risk using its timber on another ship.

Yet up around the shores of Richibucto Harbour, men still pause at the sound of footsteps. They pause and they listen and they wait.

3

THE MCNAMEE

SWINGING

BRIDGE

PRICEVILLE

I ought to tell you about the bridge that swung a little too low and too close to the mighty Miramichi River. The McNamee Swinging Bridge spans nearly two hundred metres across the Southwest Miramichi River. The bridge can be found off of McNamee Road, between Doaktown and Boiestown, crossing to the village of Priceville.

Back in May 1938, one year before Europe erupted into World War Two, tragedy struck the little village of Priceville. There had been an abnor–mally heavy spring thaw and the Miramichi was overflowing. The low–est point of the bridge, which had been constructed in the late nineteenth century, hung close to the higher than usual river. The builders had constructed the cable-suspension bridge so that it stretched from Wilson’s boathouse across to Price’s Hill without the benefit of a centre support pier.

On the best of days, crossing the bridge took more than a lit–tle nerve. It was a sure cure for anyone suffering from a fear of heights. Five men were stepping out that day: Jimmy Stewart and Lawrence, Willard, David, and Tennyson Price. The five of them were heading across the river, planning to meet the train. The next day was Tennyson’s wedding day and he was anxiously await–ing the delivery of his brand new suit.

The bridge was a nasty swinging contraption at the best of times, but on that day it was in worse shape than ever.

“Should we take our chances?” Stewart asked.

“Why not?” Tennyson said. “Let’s all go together.”

There was a limit to how many travellers were allowed upon the bridge at any given time, but folks rarely paid attention to it, considering it a foolish government regulation.

A sign at each end of the bridge clearly stated that only three people should walk on the bridge at any time. However, this was a group of four fearless young men and one stubborn seventy-year-old man —none of them would wait for anything. They stepped out onto that swinging bridge just as bold as you please.

Actually, they waded up to it as the ground before the bridge was flooded by excess river water. It was a good thing they were all wearing rubber boots at the time. David Price was wearing hip wad–ers, although he had them rolled down to his knees for comfort.

“Hey, look,” young Willard, who was only seventeen, said, “there’s a rainbow.”

There was indeed the arc of a rainbow formed by the sunlight shining through the spray of the river below them. Not that the river was that far from the bridge at this point in time. With the spring runoff there was only a hand span between the river and the bridge at its lowest point.

“Do you think there’s a pot of gold at the end of it?” Lawrence asked.

“If there is any gold down there,” old Stewart said, with a cheeky wink, “it’s a filling in the mouth of the last fellow who drowned here.”

He was being a wise guy and they all knew it. No one had drowned in the river for years.

“I sure don’t want to go down there to the river bottom and have myself a look,” David Price said.

The river was fierce that day, engorged and spilling over to swallow nearby fields and a siding of the railroad. Still, they could see the local fishermen angling for brook trout, bass, and the pos–sibility of a late-running salmon in the river below. Folks around here were used to living next to the river and weren’t afraid of it one bit.

Perhaps they should have been.

As the five travellers crossed the first third of the bridge, it began to swing and dip in the wind. The added weight of the five didn’t help matters and before the five of them knew it the bridge was swinging down so low that it was skimming across the river.

“Should we chance it?” Tennyson asked.

“You don’t want to go back, do you?” Willard said.

“Come on,” old Stewart said. “We could all use a wee foot bath before the wedding tomorrow.”

There was no more time for second thoughts. The bridge swung again and at that moment, a cable snapped under the strain, pitching the five to their knees.

David would have been torn away by the torrential force of the river, except he had a death grip on one end of the snapped cable. Lawrence was hopelessly tangled in the bridgework and bouncing like a bobbing cork in the water. Old Stewart hung onto the bridgework, harder than any barnacle. Tennyson kicked and dangled, his hands wrapped around a rope, his feet caught up in the current behind him.

“I’m going to swim for it,” young Willard called out as he let go of his grip and struck out into the Miramichi. By all reports he was the first to go. The water took him, tossed him up and under, and he washed ashore miles down the river. As far as the townsfolk could tell he had drowned just minutes after he hit the river.

David Price continued to inch along the cable, pulling him–self in as it whipped about in the river water. His heavy hip wad–ers filled with river water and threatened to drag him under. He remembered swearing to God above that if he could be saved from this mishap he would never sin again.

Meanwhile the folks on the shoreline could only stare in hor–ror as the bridge slowly tore itself apart, urged by the spring tide and the weight of the men. Some looked away in revulsion, while others tried in vain to throw rescue ropes.

The terror of the moment intensified as Tennyson’s hands lost their grip, and he was carried off by the Miramichi. There would be no wedding for this poor young man, who no doubt went to his death dreaming of his wife-to-be. Lawrence thought he saw tears in Tennyson’s eyes as his grip failed him, but it might have been nothing more than river spray.

The next to go was old Stewart, whose hand cramped up and betrayed him.

“I guess I’ll have to go now,” he was heard to say, as if he were only stepping out for a short swim.

Meanwhile, David continued to whip about in the water, drag–ging himself closer to shore. His fingers were numbed chunks of dead meat, nearly frozen by the icy tide. A pain shot through his left leg and he was afraid that the impact of hitting the river had broken it.

At that moment, he heard a quiet voice calmly calling to him.

“Take your time, David,” the voice said. “You’ve got all the time in the world.”

He swore that he knew that voice, but for the life of him, he could not place it. He kicked his heavy water-laden boots free and continued to inch his way towards the shore. He could see the fishermen now, and the screams of the onlookers urged him closer. No one was more surprised than he, when he felt his bare feet stick into the sludge of the muddy shoreline.

Now there was no one left but young Lawrence, tangled hard in the wire work of the bridge. He could not last much longer out there. The freezing river current would chill his life away.

“Oh God,” his mother called from the shoreline. “Won’t some–one try and save him?”

“I guess it’s up to me, then,” Tom Wilson, a local fisherman, said as he tried to push a dory into the water.

“You’re not alone in this,” his friend Claude said, as he took the other side of the dory.

The two of them struck out, hauling hard at the oars. They were determined to save the boy. It was a battle rowing the dory out into those waters, and it nearly took the two of them with it. They rowed the dory closer, then Claude steadied it as Tom Wilson reached out with a pair of hand pliers. Working at the bridge wiring, he nearly dropped the pliers twice, before finally managing to cut young Lawrence Price free.

As hard as cutting the wire had been, dragging Lawrence into the dory was even harder. They managed the trick, and rowed Lawrence back to the shoreline and the arms of his waiting mother and anxious family. They say he shivered for two whole days, but in the end, both David and Lawrence lived good long lives.

For days afterward folks swore they could still hear the cables of the bridge swinging wildly in the wind. Sometimes at night the local townspeople say they see three figures walking by the river towards the distant ocean. Maybe they were only shoreline hik–ers, but folks around Priceville still remember and talk about that fateful May morning.

They rebuilt the bridge with a sturdy centre pier and it’s per–fectly safe since its reconstruction. People still love to walk across the bridge, but the older townsfolk who still remember that day have probably wondered to themselves as they walk slowly across the McNamee Swinging Bridge.

4

THE

MONCTON WITCH

MONCTON

Moncton is the second largest city in the province of New Brunswick — it ought to be chockablock full of ghost stories and so it is. Monctonians in the know will tell you of the Capitol Theatre, the site of the city’s only recorded death of a firefighter in the line of duty. On March 6, 1926, a raging fire took the life of Alexander H. Lindsay, who became the theatre’s infamous resident ghost. Theatre staff will tell you that they’ve often seen the shape of someone moving behind the ticket booth after everyone else has left. Noises have been heard, and the smell of smoke sometimes per–vades certain areas of the theatre, but the ghost is dutifully quiet during any performance. Some folks will tell you that it is the ghost of a little girl who was also killed in the fire, but I’m not so sure about that. I imagine you’d have to ask the ghost the next time you see it.

However, we aren’t here to talk about theatre ghosts.

The city of Moncton was named after Robert Monckton, the British military commander who captured nearby Fort Beauséjour in 1755 and went on to oversee the infamous and ruthless depor–tation of the Acadians. The missing letter k was dropped in 1786 due to a typing error directly attributed to an overworked clerk. Don’t you love bureaucracy in action?

If you ask around town for ghost stories, folks will tell you the story of Rebecca Lutes, the Moncton witch. Others will tell you that Rebecca Lutes was just a farm girl who died of tuberculosis back in 1876. That’s not the way I heard it, however. Let me tell you the tale as it came to me.

Pull up a rock and give a listen, would you?

It was an evil time in Moncton, New Brunswick. A plague of consumption was sweeping the area, claiming lives wherever it touched. Crops were bad and unexplained fires razed more than a few barns and farmhouses. Farm animals were stolen and slaughtered. Strange lights were seen dancing in the dark night sky, and rumours of demonic rituals were whispered about town. All of this pointed to the work of a witch and certain members of the town set out to find a handy scapegoat.

No one is quite sure just how the trail of evidence led to young Rebecca Lutes, but a mob of concerned citizens dragged her out of her home one night, forced her into the woods, and hung her from a tall, old poplar tree. Afterwards, convinced that they had done what was right, they buried her face down at the foot of the tree, so that if by some devilish power her body should return to life, she could claw down to that hot cellar that old Satan keeps burning for folks who like to dabble in magic.

“That’ll fix her,” they swore.

Apparently that simple burial wasn’t enough for some deter–mined witch hunters, who thought further and stronger measures of protection were called for when dealing with such arcane power.

“She’s too powerful a sorceress,” they claimed. “She’ll find her way back to us, even if she has to dig herself clear to China.”

So the witch hunters decided that the best way to protect them–selves from Rebecca Lutes was to pour a large slab of concrete directly over her grave. That way, they figured, she’d be sealed up tight and would bother them no longer.

So how did Rebecca Lutes die? Official records list one Rebecca Lutes as indeed living in a farmhouse on this very road and dying on the date in question, January 2, 1876; however, her cause of death is listed as consumption.

A mysterious concrete slab can be found along the Gorge Road, just before you arrive at a local rock quarry and an aban–doned cement and culvert company, but another explanation has been given for this. The Lutes’s farm was apparently sold after Rebecca’s death, and the new owner was unhappy to discover that provincial statutes declared that the gravesite became the responsibility of whoever purchased the land beside it. So, the story goes, the farmer poured the slab over the grave and fenced off the site to prevent possible vandalism, and damage to his farm equipment if he inadvertently ploughed over the slab. In later years, he moved on. The farm fell into disuse and the outbuild–ings and farmhouse were condemned and torn down.

The legend of Rebecca Lutes sprung up in the minds of local teenagers who swear that the gravesite is haunted by the spirit of a jet black cat with red fiery eyes —presumably Rebecca’s famil–iar. Strange bloodstains have been found on the cement only to vanish shortly afterward. Eerie lights are seen and mournful sounds are heard up this road, and passersby will tell you that they feel a distinct and uneasy chill as they walk past the concrete slab by night.

So was Rebecca really a witch or was she just a simple farm girl whose memory unjustly suffers from modern-day teenagers’ restless imaginations? The storyteller in me has already made his decision, but I’ll keep that verdict buried under a yard or two of freshly poured concrete for now.

5

CLUTCH

AND CLAW

WOLF POINT

New Brunswick’s forests hold an awful lot of secrets. The woods are full of life and death as green shoots push up through the ground cover of dead branches, pine needles, and rotted leaves. More bone–yard than forest, never are you closer to the secrets of life and death than when you travel these winding paths through the woods. The wind is a whisper gossip–ing with the trees. Listen hard when you travel alone in the woodland. There’s just no telling what you’ll hear.

The Bay of Fundy stabs upwards into the Maritimes, slicing a watery barrier between Nova Scotia and New Bruns-wick. As it approaches Westmoreland County the bay is split in two by one long peninsula, forming Shepody Bay on the side closest to New Brunswick and Cumberland Basin on the Nova Scotia side.

The waters here are anything but calm, surging upwards to create the world famous tidal bore of the Petitcodiac River. I have seen this bore, and to my overactive storyteller’s imagination it looked as if a sea serpent was speeding straight up the river, cut–ting a wild, strong wake behind itself.

On the shores of Shepody Bay a little cape juts out into the surge of the Atlantic Ocean. This cape is called Wolf Point, and though you won’t find it on too many maps, the local folk may be able to point you to it. They will warn you of the quicksand and boggy terrain that abounds in that part of the countryside. Some folks believe this dangerous terrain is caused by the Fundy tides working their way through underwater passages, while other folks will talk of darker doings.

Let me take you back to the days of the American Revolution. Britain was on the tail end of a defeat and the Loyalists, who remained faithful to the monarchy and the British Empire, were in retreat. They travelled up to the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland, seeking shelter and hoping to find a little peace.

One of these Loyalists, whom we shall call Miles, landed in a small skiff upon the shores of Wolf Point. He was accompanied by a trusted servant, Dougal, who had chosen to follow Miles to this new country rather than remain in America. Miles, like a lot of Loyalists, had to flee on very short notice. He carried his cash in a moneybelt tucked beneath his shirt.

Miles purchased a horse from a local farmer and rested near the shoreline, trying to gather his thoughts. Along with nearly fifty thousand fellow stubborn lovers of the crown, he had fled his home of New York following the end of the American Revolution and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. He had left everything behind, taking only what he could carry. It was a scary situation and he was doing his best to cope. He decided to make camp beside a twisted apple tree and a cool running stream.

“Prepare a meal,” he told Dougal. “We’ll rest here for now before travelling inland.”

Dougal was a little tired of his master’s constant orders, and he was weary from the long journey as well. Still, he had served this man for ten long years. He went to the bags and got out the provi–sions they’d brought, following his master’s command.

Old habits die hard.

Except fate stepped in. Dougal, tired from the journey, stum–bled as he was bringing Miles his meal and spilled the food upon the ground.

“You clumsy cur,” Miles cursed. He was a proud man, upset that he’d been reduced to such circumstances. Pride leads to anger —and you know what comes next.

Miles beat Dougal again and again with his riding crop. Dougal lost his temper and grabbed hold of a winter-fallen branch of an apple tree. He beat Miles into the dirt, taking out the years of frustration caused by his obedience in one mad act of violence. A poorly swung blow crumpled Miles’s skull like an overripe water–melon. Miles fell to the ground and didn’t stir.

Dougal stared down at Miles. Fear clutched him in its tight, bony grip. He hadn’t meant to kill the man. He had just lost his temper and found it too late. He knelt and attempted to scoop out a hasty grave, using the end of the bloodstained apple-wood branch as a makeshift shovel. It’s hard work rooting in the dirt with a stick. It took a good half-hour to make any kind of impres–sion in the ground.

Finally the grave was dug. Dougal stood, grunting as he straight–ened his back. He still didn’t know what he could do. He was safe enough, he supposed. His master had fled New York in the safety of the night without telling anyone where he was bound. There was no record of him ever living here in New Brunswick. How can you murder a man who wasn’t ever there?

The nearby stream seemed to laugh at his predicament.

“It wasn’t my fault!” Dougal shouted. “He drove me to it.”

Then he shoved his master’s body into the grave, kicking him in because he couldn’t bear to touch the corpse. He scooped what dirt he could over the body and scattered dead branches and leaves and pine needles overtop, kicking them into a mound.

And that’s when Dougal remembered the gold.

How could he be so foolish? All that money lying there, wrapped around the gut of a dead man. It was such a waste to leave all that gold for the digging of the bears and the churning of the worms.

Dougal knelt down slowly, as if in prayer. He reached toward the makeshift grave, pawing the dirt aside. Gently now, bit by bit. A grave was a sacred place, he told himself. You can’t be rooting at it like a sow at slop.

And then, just as he touched the bag of gold, feeling the hard edges of the coins pressing against the soft leather sack, Miles rose up from the grave, grabbing at Dougal’s extended hands. Dougal shrieked and drew back, snatching up the branch and beating Miles back down. Then he rose to his feet and leapt onto the waiting horse, which was prancing nervously at the sound of the battle. The horse took off, very nearly braining Dougal with an overhanging pine bough.

Dougal fled, leaving the gold behind with his master. There was no way on this good green earth that Dougal would dare try his hand at that gravesite again. The gold could stay there and rot for all he cared.

Years later, Dougal could still feel his master’s dying grip upon his wrists. He didn’t sleep well and he took to drink when–ever he could scrape up enough to pay for it. Sometimes he stole the needed beverage. Sometimes he stole from others in order to get the money he needed to buy a jug or two of numb–ing amnesia.

Eventually he was caught at his petty thieving and sentenced to jail. While he was in there he talked with far too many eager listeners, telling whoever would listen his tale of woe. He told his audience of the murder and the apple tree and the laughing little stream that ran by Wolf Point.

“It was all his fault,” Dougal would tell them. “I’m not a violent man. I wouldn’t raise a hand to save my life. He drove me to it. He’s the reason I’m lying here rotting in prison. He’s laying there still —him and all that gold just waiting for me to drop dead.”

“Well, why should we keep him waiting?” Lambert Rogers asked. Lambert was a hard man who had grown up the hard way and he’d never seen the need to pass up an opportunity that offered itself to him as readily as this.

He strangled Dougal in his sleep. True to his word, Dougal did not raise a hand to save his own life. Lambert was pleased. He knew that Dougal had told many of the prisoners about bury–ing Miles along with his gold, but he figured that most of them wouldn’t have listened as closely as he had. People talk a lot in prison. There’s not much else you can do with your time.

A year later, Lambert was released. His sentence was served and no one who mattered knew that he had killed Dougal. Murder in prison back in those days was nearly as common as idle talk.

Lambert rounded up a crew of three trusty friends and they rode out to Wolf Point on stolen horses. It took the four of them most of a summer to track down Dougal’s apple tree and stream, but Lambert knew it when he saw it.

“This is it,” he said. “This is where the gold lies.”

They stepped down from their horses, crushing dead branches and dried pine needles and rotted leaves beneath their boots. They knelt and they dug like dogs in the dirt.

“Deeper,” Lambert said. “We’re almost there.”

For just an instant of time, Lambert swore that he saw a tat–tered muslin sack and the taunting glint of gold. He reached for it and two bony hands pushed out of the dirt and caught him fast.

His partners ran off into the night, leaving Lambert there in the darkness beneath the twisted apple tree, screaming his lungs raw. They did not stop running until they had reached the town, and they sat and drank in the rear of a local tavern, staring off into the shadowed corners of the room, not daring to meet each other’s stare.

Nobody ever heard of Lambert again. For all I know, he’s out there still, now a skeleton himself, the pieces fallen and scattered, his wrist bones caught fast by a pair of long bony hands reaching out of the dirt. Perhaps the apple tree has found new life in the decay beneath its grasping twisted roots, and the stream rambles on, not caring a whit for the doings of men, laughing to itself in the cool summer breeze.

6

A TREASURE

DOWSER’S

BOOMERANG

APOHAQUI

If all the tales that have been told about Captain Kidd are true, I bet the Canada Revenue Agency would give an awful lot to lay their hands on his ghost. It seems like all that man ever did was bury trea–sure across the Maritimes. There are rumours of a trove tucked away some–where handy to Dark Harbour on Grand Manan Island; there’s a stash buried deep near Belleisle Bay; and of course, many of you have heard of the world famous Oak Island money pit in Nova Scotia.

It seems to me that a man who loved to dig as much as Kidd did ought to have taken up the trade of farming, or maybe coal mining. These careers may have been far more stable, with fewer occupational hazards, such as rope burns and ring around the collar. Rumours of his many buried treasures in New England, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick are still whispered along the Atlantic coast. With very few exceptions, these rumours are quite unsubstantiated.

Even harder to verify is another tale of buried treasure that was found in an old Apohaqui diary, and retold in Stuart Trueman’s excellent collection of New Brunswick ghost stories, Ghosts, Pirates and Treasure Troves: The Phantoms That Haunt New Brunswick and numerous other sources before him. The story, which takes place outside of the little town of Apohaqui, about eighty kilometres northeast of Saint John, involves a treasure-dowsing blacksmith who dreamt of Captain Kidd’s treasure, and the commander of Fort Howe.

Fort Howe was built in 1777 to help defend New Brunswick against the incursion of the American Revolutionary forces. The blockhouse fort is still found intact in Saint John, over–looking the harbour. Back in 1777, it was manned by a Major Gilfred Studholme, who sometimes spelled his name Gilford or Guilfred. Historians haven’t been able to ascertain which spell–ing was correct. Record keeping back in those days was haphaz–ard, at best.

The story begins long after Major Gilfred had passed away and was buried outside of Saint John. One evening in the early 1800s, a blacksmith in Apohaqui, whom we shall call Thomas Greene, claimed to have had a dream about a large treasure bur–ied at Major Gilfred’s gravesite. Now that wasn’t much to go on, but it was enough for him to gather up an expeditionary force to unearth the treasure through ceremony and secrecy.

He gathered four of his friends and a local Saint John boy who was familiar with the graveyard and they set out in a hired car–riage. One can only assume they journeyed by night, as grave robbing wasn’t something that folks usually condoned.

Greene’s only compass was a divining rod made of a hollow stick filled with various alchemical compounds and wrapped in whalebone. Greene carried the rod chest-high with his palms up. As he approached the treasure, it began to jiggle and bounce, like a fishing rod with a rainbow trout nibbling at the hook.

“Water witches” would use the rods to search out likely well sites. Dowsing or divining rods are still used today and many a Maritime well-digging company keeps the name and phone number of a reputable water witch close at hand.

Greene strode on pompously, stiff-legged like a trooper on parade. He led his band of treasure hunters uphill and down before settling his aim upon a large, craggy Jack pine in the heart of a field of buckwheat.

“Here it is,” Greene said. “Dig here.”

“Are you certain?” one of his cohorts asked. “The ground seems awful hard for digging.”

“Gold will draw dirt down, surer than dead meat draws flies,” Greene asserted. “You can dig in the bog if you’d like, but the treasure lies here.”

So saying, he drew out a large and rusted naval cutlass.

“Did you bring the hen?” Greene asked one of the men, a farmer who right now would have rather been digging for turnips in a barren field than out here beneath this dark pine tree. “We’ll need a hen to sacrifice.”

“I had a chicken ready and waiting,” the farmer said, “but he jumped into a pot and my wife boiled him up for supper.”

“Fool,” Greene said. “I told you to bring it.”

“Digging’s hungry work,” the farmer said. “I can’t shovel on an empty belly.”

There was nothing to be done.

“Dig there,” Greene ordered, “and we’ll buy all the chickens we ever need.”

So saying, he jammed the tip of the cutlass into the dirt and scraped out a large circle completely surrounding the tree and the treasure spot.

“Must the hole be that big?” the farmer asked.

“The circle is to guard against evil spirits,” Greene said. “Any fool knows that. Once it has been drawn you must not say a word for fear of chasing the magic away. And not a dirt nor clod nor clump must pass through the circle or else the spell will be bro–ken for sure.”

“For a blacksmith you sure seem to know an awful lot about treasure digging.”

“It’s the banging of the metal that does it,” Greene explained. “People tell me things while I’m banging on the metal at the forge, mostly because they don’t figure I’m listening to them.”

“Oh, well that explains it,” Thomas said. “I never listen to a word you say either.”

“Dig, damn you,” Greene ordered, “and not a word once the circle is drawn.”

The four men began digging, while the boy shook as much from the night’s chill as from fear of evil spirits, and Greene danced about the circle brandishing the cutlass. It wasn’t clear if he was perhaps warding spirits away from their work or just show–ing off his questionable swordsmanship.

The moon looked impassively down upon them. The buck–wheat whispered in the wind. The shadows of hemlock, spruce, birch, and beech stood over them like mute giant sentinels. A screech owl hooted and the boy startled in terror.

“Shhh,” Greene commanded.

At that moment, a shovel struck something that sounded hard and wooden and hollow.

“A keg,” one man said.

“A casket.”

“A treasure,” the boy whispered.

“Shhh,” Greene hushed them. He brandished his cutlass fiercely, as if the evil spirits that surrounded this darkness were preparing an assault.

They continued digging in fevered silence, working their spades like pistons, already counting and spending their pilfered gold. Whatever they had heard the shovel strike evaded their fran–tic digging. Several feet further down their efforts were rewarded with the clang of metal hitting granite bedrock.

“Bottomed out,” one man said disgustedly. “I don’t believe there’s any treasure here at all.”

“Now you’ve done it,” Greene snarled. “It’s all your blasted talking that has scared the gold away.”

“You can’t scare gold.”

“Sure you can,” Greene averred. “Why else do you think it’s so hard to find the stuff?”

They allowed he had a point.

“We’ll begin again,” he said.

He sheathed his cutlass and picked up the dowsing rod, sol–emnly raising it to his chest. The rod quivered for a moment, then rose mutely skyward as light as a hot-air balloon.

“What’s that mean?” one man asked.

“The treasure’s in the tree?” the boy guessed.

“A bird got it,” the man said.

“No, you idiots. The treasure moved.”

“Now how does a treasure move while you’re digging for it?”

“You spoke too soon. You weren’t supposed to speak until the treasure was dug. Your complaining and questioning wished the treasure away.”

“So how do we find it again?” the man asked doubtfully.

Wordlessly, Greene resumed his dowsing and pacing.

Twenty minutes later the rod twitched again, hard, jerking downwards as if tugged by an invisible rope. They were not more than ten paces from where they’d originally dug.

“There,” one man shouted, swinging his pick. “We dig here.”

No sooner had the man’s pick slammed into the dirt than the divining rod drifted slowly upwards, pointing impotently at the night sky.

“What’s wrong now?” he asked.

“You dug too soon,” Greene said. “You should have waited for me to mark the circle with my cutlass.”

“So do we dig?” the man asked.

“There’s no point,” Greene said. “The treasure moved again.”

“Should I go back for a hen?” the boy asked, in truth just look–ing for an excuse to run back home to his bed.

“No,” Greene said. “We keep looking.”

He raised the divining rod and resumed his tracking. This game went on for three more tries.

“If we don’t find it this time,” the man said. “I’m digging myself a hole and you can all bury me in it. The boy can say a prayer and that damn divining rod will make me a fine grave marker.”

The boy didn’t laugh. He was getting spooked by now. The New Brunswick woods were a scary place to be wandering at that time of the night, but there wasn’t much to be done about it. They marched a fourth time, determined to keep quiet. This time the divining rod pointed at the roots of an old maple tree.

The diggers waited restlessly as Greene carved his fifth circle of the night. They kept sullenly quiet as they dug. The boy pitched in as the men knelt to scrape some of the roots away. He reached down into a tangle of maple roots, and in the chill darkness he felt a cold, bony hand clutch his.

“Aaaaah!” the boy screamed, flinging a chunk of root far out into the darkness.

“That’s done it for sure,” Greene said. “You’ve broken the silence and broken the circle.”

“Then I might as well break the rod and be done with it,” the farmer said.

He grabbed the divining rod from Greene’s belt and bent it over his knee. Before anyone could say a word, he flung the rod into the darkness of the wicked New Brunswick woodland.

“There,” he said, “that finishes that.”

Before anyone could speak or say a word, the rod landed back at their feet.

They screamed and ran off into the night, leaving the bent rod, the rusted cutlass, their shovels, and the unfindable treasure in the darkness of that Saint John forest. They didn’t stop until they hit town, where they told their tale.

Hopeful treasure hunters still comb the woods dreaming of finding that cutlass and the bent rod and all the gold their pockets will hold.

And folks around here are telling this story still.

I kid you not.

7

THE

CODFISH MAN

SAINT JOHN

Well, if you don’t have any marshmal–lows, nothing tastes better over a camp–fire than a wee bit of fish. Here’s a fish tale for you to chew over. Mind the bones.

Way back in the early 1800s, the life of a Maritime fisherman was a terrible hard thing to endure. They would set sail from port on a schooner to the distant cod banks. Once there, the schooner would launch up to a dozen two-man dories. The fishermen would then row out to their respective station and begin stringing out handlines baited with bits of fish.

Often these handlines were baited with seabirds that the men caught for this purpose. This early practice contributed greatly to the even–tual extinction of the great auk, a rather large and ugly flightless bird that died out in the 1840s.

In addition to the death of the great auk, dory fishing contrib–uted to the death of an awful lot of Maritime fishermen. Although a dory was a stout enough craft and could be sealed up tight with a waterproof tarpaulin during a storm so that it would theoreti–cally bob about like a cork while the fishermen hunkered down inside, many thousands of men drowned at sea while fishing from a dory.

This is a tale of one such fisherman who died at sea while search–ing for the promise and profit of codfish— like any Maritimer, he was too stubborn and loyal to know when to quit.

Young Daniel Keymore was a hardy Saint John fisherman who wanted nothing more than to haul in enough codfish to provide a regular sort of living for his wife Emily and their two children, Danny Junior and Clancy.

The fishing fleet sailed out of West Saint John on the fine, bright morning of Tuesday, April 16, 1822. There was nothing but blue for as far as the eye could see. Blue above and blue below.

“It’s a fine, clear day for fishing cod,” Daniel Keymore said.

Of course, weather changes fastest on the clearest of days, and an unexpected storm blew up from the Caribbean and swept across the Atlantic, landing smack dab in the Bay of Fundy. Fortunately, many of the fishermen saw the storm coming on and made it back to the harbour alive. In fact, when the heads were tallied, there was only one man who failed to appear. Daniel Keymore, who had hazarded far out onto the banks in hopes of making a big catch that day, was not to be found.

“He’ll have holed up through the storm,” the captain predicted cheerfully, “hauling his tarp down and holding tight. Many’s the time I bobbed and reeled under such a circumstance. He’ll be fine, I tell you.”

Now of course not a man among them believed him, includ–ing the captain himself. He was only speaking to raise people’s spirits, particularly Daniel’s young wife, who stood anxiously wait–ing at the dockside along with her two young children.

That night, the Keymore family received a strange surprise gift. A record-sized, freshly caught codfish lay flopping and taking its last few salty breaths upon the green-painted pine boards of their front stoop.

Some folks believed that it was the work of an anonymous Samaritan who had seen fit to look out for the family in need. The fact was, the town would do its level best to see to the keeping of the Keymore family, but death at sea was so common a hazard in these here parts that there was no way the little town of West Saint John could hope to support all of its widows.

Yet little Danny Keymore Jr., who thought his father had hung the moon and sown the seven seas with salt, swore that on that very night he had seen his father trudging up from the West Saint John waterfront, bent double beneath the weight of a fresh-caught codfish.

“He walked slowly as if it were hard for him to move,” young Danny Jr. said, “and his back was bent and stooped and curved over like a fish hook.”

A couple of days later, Daniel Keymore’s dory was discov–ered adrift in the far deep channels of Fundy, overturned but still afloat, a stark witness to the hardiness of the little craft. Unfortunately there was no sign of Daniel Keymore. The local fishermen decided that his dory had been overturned in the gale before he’d had the chance to make her fast, and he’d gone under and drowned.

Yet every April 16 after Daniel Keymore died, as regular as the changing tide, his spirit was seen trudging up from the West Saint John waterfront, bent beneath the weight of a codfish so enor–mous that it hung over his shoulders and its tail drooped down about the hollow hinge of his knees. He was said to be clad in the traditional fishing garb of oilskins and a stout sou’wester cap. Folks reported a foul and heavy odour of fish and rotting flesh that pervaded the area. It had to be some high kind of a reek to rankle the nostrils of a Maritimer.

Eventually, as the years passed and the tides turned, the widow Keymore remarried, perhaps for love or perhaps because she was tired of living off of the charity of the town and the local church and her phantom fishing husband. She married a young lumber–man, because she swore she had seen enough of the sea and its thieving fish-stinking ways.

“Take me from here,” she told her new husband. “Take me so far that we don’t hear the sound of the waves.”

“I’ll carry an oar with me,” her new husband promised her, “and the moment someone asks me just what the heck that thing is on my back, I’ll tell him it’s a shovel and use it to dig the foun–dations for our brand new home.”

And so the family left West Saint John, the widow’s new hus–band as good as his word, carrying an oar over his back the whole way. They were never seen in the town again, yet that wasn’t the end of the story.

Three days following their departure, the Keymore family home burned down to the ground in a mysterious night blaze. Nothing but ashes and ruin remained of the home, but in the morning amongst the charred beams and studs, the townsfolk found a freshly caught codfish draped across the heart of the home, baking slowly in the heat of the lingering embers.

No one would touch that fish, and in fact, some folks swore that the seagulls and town tomcats wouldn’t go anywhere near it. In the end, it rotted away or maybe some fastidious Saint John citizen hauled the fish off and buried it.

Since then there have been no more codfish sightings, but West Saint John’s residents still swear that early in the month of April you’re apt to see Daniel Keymore, the Codfish Man, mak–ing his way up from the sea, still hunting for his missing wife and family.

8

THE KEYHOLE

MINE OF RED

HEAD HARBOUR

SAINT JOHN

Travellers have been hunting for fossils and raw agate and amethyst along the shore of Saint John for a long time now. Back in the late 1800s, folks were hunting for a little different sort of glitter. There have been an awful lot of tales about the Klondike Gold Rush and the men who mined in the midnight sun, but this story is about a case of silver fever brewed up at Saint John’s Red Head Harbour.

Samuel de Champlain originally gave Red Head Harbour the name Cap Rouge back in the early seventeenth century, probably because he’d watched the sun burning the sky into black ash, and the cinder-spark of starlight before the evening climbed in and said good night. Over two hundred years later, a trio of prospectors also saw red and silver here on the heavily wooded shoreline of old New Brunswick.

Dark things grow in the New Brunswick woods and Red Head Harbour was no exception. Some swore you could hear the hoof beats of the old devil himself creeping through the green-tinged shadows. Three men named Bill, Tom, and Joshua decided they weren’t afraid of a few spooky stories. They’d tried their hands at fishing and hadn’t met with much luck. They’d tried their hands at sailing and never took to it. So they decided they’d give pros–pecting a shot.

“It’s easy work,” Tom swore. “Just swing a pick and drag the gold out to the bank.”

“It’s been my experience that the words work and easy have never really coupled together all that well,” Bill noted.

“Bill, I reckon you were born in the middle of the week and have spent most of your life looking for the day of rest,” Tom said.

“I swear I’ve never met a man so lazy as you.”

Bill knew it was true, but he would be burnt, sunk, and blasted before he’d ever agree with the other two.

“Take a look in the mirror, sometime when you think of it,” Bill said. “If you’ve a mind to stare into the face of laziness.”

“Come on fellows,” Joshua said. “We’re burning daylight at both ends of the fuse.”

Joshua was the youngest of the trio, and was in this game mostly for the fun and adventure of it. He’d met the other two men in a Saint John tavern and once they found out he had a bit of experience in black powder blasting, they talked him into coming along.

“There’s gold off the coast,” Bill had said. “The Mi’kmaq I talked to told me they’d found shiny rocks glittering and shining in the dark of the woods like stars in the night sky.”

The truth of the matter was that old Bill could talk a drowning man into draining a glass of water before he went under. He was a fine one for talk, although not much for following through. Yes sir, he was all blow and no go, our Bill.

“Gold, you say?” Joshua had asked. “My pockets are light enough to float these days. I could do with a little golden lining.”

“All you want,” Bill promised. “Gleaming like fireflies on a foggy moonless night.”

So the three men pooled their wherewithal and bought an old dory. Well, that isn’t quite the truth of it, but that’s how Bill and Tom told Joshua the story. The fact was, Bill bought a cou–ple of bottles of rum with Joshua’s money while Tom stole an old dory, and they set off from the coast of Saint John, hoping to find glory.

When they’d rowed about as far as they felt they had to, Tom pointed into Red Head Harbour and shouted out, “We land here.”

Joshua, not knowing any better, rowed the two rascals in. They dragged the dory up and looked around in the darkness.

“Look at that rock formation,” Bill said. “That looks just like a keyhole, doesn’t it?”

“That’s a good sign,” Tom swore. “The gold will lie right on through there, you bet your life.”

“Well what are we waiting for?” Joshua asked. “Let’s get her done.”

So the three men made their way into the woods around Red Head, following their noses and trusting to luck.

Now perhaps this had started as a bit of a lark, but the three soon found a new purpose in their enterprise. They set to their labours with a will that was astounding for a couple of ne’er-do-wells and one starry-eyed youngster. They staked out a claim and dug as deeply as they could into the stubborn New Brunswick dirt. When the digging proved too difficult, Joshua stepped in and blasted it free with a judicious application of black powder and fusing.

After the dirt was loosened, the two scoundrels, Bill and Tom, leaned back on their shovels and let Joshua do the majority of the digging. They found silver, not gold, but it would spend just as readily, and when it came time to divide it up Bill and Tom were happy to do the counting and the double-checking.

The three men prospered. They dug for silver in the spring, summer, and fall. In the winter, when a blanket of snow covered the New Brunswick forest, they boarded with local residents. It seemed they would make a go of it.

Tom and Bill took easily to their prosperity. They ate well and drank when they could. However, Joshua caught a fever of sorts. He forgot all about fun and took to the notion that the degree of their success depended solely on his effort. He began to skip meals and spend his spare time digging in the mine. He forgot to shave and wash and wore the same suit of clothes for digging as for sleeping.

Conversations around the campfire circled around the next day’s digging.

“We should be at it,” Joshua would say. “We should be up and digging. There’s no time to sleep.”

“That silver’s been there a long time,” Tom and Bill would tell him. “It’ll wait for us to catch a little shut-eye.”

“Silver runs away like a dog in the night if you don’t keep at it,” Joshua said.

“It’ll keep,” Tom said.

Joshua wasn’t so sure of that. He began to imagine that his partners were stealing away while he slept, digging the silver and pocketing it for themselves. It was foolishness on his part. What need did they have to pocket what he dug for them so freely?

Now silver is a tricky thing and a vein can disappear into the darkness of the dirt just as readily as water spilling through sand. After a time the vein ran out, and the three men were left rooting about in a played-out mine.

“She’s done for,” Tom decided one night.

“She doesn’t hold any more silver than a hoop full of hope,” Bill agreed.

Joshua didn’t like the sound of that thinking.

“You’re trying to cheat me,” he said. “There’s plenty of silver left down there.”

“Cheat you? How, boy?”

Joshua stared at them angrily. The glint of the fire danced in his partners’ eyes. Their eyes looked like silver dollars running away, to Joshua.

The three men argued until Joshua picked up a small keg of black powder and held a torch close to it.

“You two are trying to rob me blind,” he said. “I’ll blast us all to kingdom come if you don’t stay away from my mine.”

The two men stared at their young partner. They had been so busy spending their profits that they hadn’t seen how far Joshua had disconnected from reality. They tried to talk a little sense into him, but he called them names and cursed at them. Finally, they’d had enough.

“The mine is yours if you want to keep it,” they told him.

“That’s fine by me,” Joshua answered.

The two men packed their kit in silence and left the camp to the silver-obsessed Joshua. After walking a few miles towards the shoreline, they had second thoughts. It seemed they had a con–science between them.

“We can’t leave him out here,” Tom said.

“A little space and time will do him good,” Bill replied. “We can come back in a day or so when he’s had time to regret his rash temper.”

Just then a gout of smoke and thunder roared up from the direction of the keyhole mine. The two men raced back franti–cally, but when they got to the mine site it was too late. There was nothing to be seen but a flooded pit of rubble. Joshua must have gone down into the mine with the entire keg of black powder, determined to unearth the vanished vein of silver. His rashness had brought the whole mine in on him and opened up an under–ground stream to boot.

“That’s the last of him, I reckon,” Tom said.

“It’s his mine now for sure,” Bill said.

Twenty years later, a pair of local fisherman working a fish weir off of Red Head heard a persistent tap-tap-tap, like a man bang–ing a sledge deep in the darkness of the mine. Since then, folks around Red Head Harbour swear that in the woods they can hear a strange repetitive pounding, like the sound of a man banging out a hole for a powder blast.

Is it the ghost of young Joshua hunting for his missing silver lode? The answer to this question remains as elusive as the silver vein that ran away from Bill and Tom and Joshua like a dog in the night.

9

A ROPE FOR

MADAME

LA TOUR

SAINT JOHN

Shakespeare tells us that all the world is a stage and all the men and women upon it are merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and their cues, and one person can play many parts. Consider then, the life and death of Saint John’s Madame La Tour.

Françoise Marie Jacquelin was de-scribed as a beauty by all who knew her. There was something in her eyes, something that burned and would not be beaten. She was, from all accounts, a successful actress, treading the theat–rical stages of Paris with a conqueror’s bearing. Still, time creeps and steals from us all. At the age of thirty-two, Françoise became worried. She wasn’t being offered the lead roles that she had been accustomed to any longer. In fact, she wasn’t being offered any roles at all.

So she looked for another offer. She accepted a marriage pro–posal that was brokered by a reputable Parisian agency from a man she had never met. His name was Charles St. Etienne de La Tour. He was a French fur trader and seigneur, the holder of land originally granted to the king of France. The marriage offered security to a woman who was running out of choices. She sailed to meet him at his palisaded wooden stronghold at the mouth of the Saint John River in New Brunswick.

La Tour had grown up in the Maritimes, arriving on the east coast at the age of fourteen, in the company of his father. Back then, as you know, the people of Acadia were tossed like driftwood upon a raging sea, yet La Tour and his father stubbornly remained where they had taken root. La Tour grew up and was appointed to serve as the governor of Acadia by the King of France, Louis xiii. The seigneur built Fort La Tour in 1632, establishing the area’s first European settlement.

The trouble began when a bureaucratic foul-up and the application of many francs to a few slyly greased palms led to the awarding of a second governorship to La Tour’s archrival, the Sieur D’Aulnay Charnisay. D’Aulnay ensconced himself within a stronghold similar to La Tour’s directly across the Bay of Fundy, in Port Royal, Nova Scotia. This feud was brewing as Françoise Marie Jacquelin sailed across the Atlantic and braved the roaring Fundy waves as she headed into the mouth of the Saint John River.

She took to the role of matriarch and wife as if she were born to it, becoming an equal partner in La Tour’s trading business and accompanying him on his journeys. It is said that she had a fine eye for pelts and could haggle with the best of them.

When D’Aulnay tarnished the La Tours’ reputation in France by declaring that the pair had crossed over to the British, a death sentence was placed upon their heads, should they be caught within French borders. Even so, Madame La Tour journeyed to France in 1642. She appealed to the throne, swearing that both she and her husband had turned down all British advances. In the end the monarchy believed her and the death sentence was overturned.

At one point during the long siege, Madame La Tour was sail–ing home from France aboard a chartered ship commanded by one Captain Bayley, whom she had commissioned to see her safely back to Fort La Tour. However, when D’Aulnay’s blockade ships headed Bayley off, he locked Madame La Tour in the hold of his ship and swore that it was nothing more than a law-abiding trading ship bound for Boston Harbor. To prove this, he turned his vessel around and headed straight for Boston, where Madame La Tour disembarked and promptly sued the captain for violating his charter. She was awarded two thousand pounds in compensation and used the money to charter three sturdily built New England vessels to brave D’Aulnay’s blockade, while carrying supplies and arms to the besieged Fort La Tour.

Once there, Madame La Tour advised her husband to sail to Boston and declare himself to be a good upstanding protestant.

“Ask for a minister to preach the word of God to the men at Fort La Tour,” Madame La Tour told him. “And promise that if the Bostonians will help us conquer D’Aulnay and rule Acadia then we will share our conquests with them.”

Charles La Tour eagerly took his wife’s advice and sailed out of Saint John Harbour in April 1645. No sooner had he gone than Madame La Tour started an argument with the friars of the fort, no doubt hoping to clear the way for the expected protestant minister and his accompanying reinforcements. The friars were indignant with her show of anger and set out for Port Royal, taking eight sturdy soldiers with them. The soldiers in question were far too Catholic to remain long in a fort where friars were unwanted.

The friars and troops were made welcome at Port Royal and D’Aulnay plied them with smooth talk, good wine and food, before asking many probing questions that finally brought to light the important fact that Charles La Tour had left the fort under the protection of his wife and forty-five troops. Not much of a number to withstand a concentrated siege.

D’Aulnay rallied every man he could in Port Royal, sailing them across the Bay of Fundy and erecting a hasty fortification on the west side of Saint John Harbour. He set up his cannons and in the process captured a small vessel bearing an important message for Madame La Tour. It read that her husband Charles had been delayed and was not returning to the fort for another month.

This was all the news that D’Aulnay needed to hear. The fort was his, as far as he could see. He ordered Madame La Tour to surrender the fort, but she ran up a red flag of defiance that some say was sewn out of a worn red petticoat. Whether commanding a troupe of actors or a troop of soldiers, Madame La Tour was more than ready for the task. Her troops hurled insults and cannon–ades from behind the walls of Fort La Tour, defying D’Aulnay’s attempts to overrun the fort. For three days, they maintained their resistance in spite of D’Aulnay’s superior numbers.

But on the fourth day, a guard turned traitor and allowed D’Aulnay’s forces access to the fort. D’Aulnay took the fort in a day, promising that the forty-five defenders would be spared if they laid down their arms. Yet D’Aulnay proved to be treacherous with his word.

He made Madame La Tour watch as the turncoat guard was forced to hoist and hang each of his fellow defenders at the end of a rope. One by one, her brave soldiers swung and dangled under the New Brunswick sun. D’Aulnay decorated the walls of the fort with corpses of hanged men as Madame La Tour stood by help–lessly, her hands tied and a noose draped about her own neck. The crows gathered for a feast and a feed —some say that the crows that live in Saint John today still wait hopefully for a similar mass hanging.

Madame La Tour was allowed to walk freely in the captured fort; however, when D’Aulnay caught her in an attempt to send a message through friendly Natives to her missing husband, he locked her in a cell. Three weeks later, Françoise Marie La Tour was dead. The romantics will tell you she died of a broken heart. Others believe that D’Aulnay poisoned her. Who can know?

Fort La Tour was razed and its exact location lost in the vaga–ries of unrecorded history. D’Aulnay, now aware of what dealings Charles La Tour was making in Boston, demanded reparation for the help that Boston had offered. The Boston governor awarded D’Aulnay the gift of a sedan chair that had been captured in a privateer’s raid, simply because the governor had no use for such a contraption.

D’Aulnay, however, was satisfied to receive what he saw as an admission of Bostonian guilt. He planned to parlay this admission into a lucrative trading opportunity, but fate intervened. On May 24, 1650, D’Aulnay and his valet tipped their canoe in the basin of Port Royal. They clung to each end of the overturned boat for an hour and a half before succumbing to the chill of the early spring Atlantic. He was buried with all honours and survived by his grieving wife.

This was Charles La Tour’s chance. Through a series of political intrigues he seized ownership of Port Royal, and turned D’Aulnay’s wife and children out to fend for themselves. Three years following the death of her husband, D’Aulnay’s wife agreed to marry Charles La Tour. D’Aulnay’s four sons grew up, and served and were killed in the wars of Louis xiv, and his daughters all became nuns. Thus, not a drop of D’Aulnay blood remained in the territory of Acadia. Charles La Tour was the final victor.

Françoise Marie La Tour is believed to have been buried somewhere handy to the ruined fort, however, as the exact location of the fort is a mystery, so is the gravesite. A 1950s archaeological dig on the eastern side of the harbour turned up a handful of cannon barrels, musket balls, and shards of crock–ery. The cannons appeared to have been double shot with two balls jammed in against each other, and to have had their fuse holes spiked so as to render them useless. This is an undeniable sign of cannons that have been captured and destroyed, or else destroyed before capture.

Since then there have been several claims, all unsubstantiated, regarding the discovery of Madame La Tour’s remains. One man claimed that he found her body bricked up in the cellar of an old house; however, the majority of Saint John’s older houses were built upon posts and lacked any form of brickwork in the cellar.

A Saint John shipwright tells of how, during the construction of the shipyards, a woman’s body was unearthed. She had long hair and the clothing of a person who was well-to-do, but no signs of identification were present. The workmen who dug up the remains promptly reburied her and never recorded the site of their discovery. It was better, they believed, to let the woman sleep in peace. Old bones rest uneasily and should seldom be disturbed.

Huia Ryder, a New Brunswick historian, reports that at the same time an old man in Saint John swore that he and his family often saw a grey lady walking the shores of the western side of the harbour.

Saint John folk will still tell you of a grey lady who is seen walking the shore near Portland Point on April nights. When approached, she seems to fade away. Some say she runs while others claim that she drifts off like smoke on the breeze.

Is this the ghost of Françoise Marie La Tour? Who knows? I believe that any actress as bold and daring as Madame La Tour would not willingly give up the spotlight, and would seldom miss an opportunity to perform.

10

THE

BARKING DOG

KINGSTON

An argument is like a sleeping dog. If you wake it too suddenly, there is just no telling whom it will bite. In the early 1800s, just outside of Kingston, New Brunswick, a pair of neighbour–ing farmers named James Rogers and Peregrine White sparked up an argu–ment that ultimately ended another man’s life.

The two were a pair of lonely and angry men who worked their fields and lived only to fight with each other. Peregrine White was a tall, lanky stick of a man with a temper that snapped given any excuse. He had served with a Loyalist regiment during the Revolutionary War and had returned home to work his farm. It was no secret that Peregrine had a bit of a grudge against those who had not served in the war.

“All fat men, all soft men, sitting at home in the dark like great mucking cheeses,” Peregrine would say of any man who hadn’t fought in battle.

James Rogers, on the other hand, was a slow and sluggish kind of man. He was a heavy drinker with a surly disposition and a ten–dency towards brooding. He didn’t much care for Peregrine, and Peregrine returned the feeling with compound interest.

It was said that the two men had been keeping a feud simmering for many a year, just out of habit. Some folks blamed the grudge on a mistaken land claim that robbed one or the other of an acre or two of farmland. Other folks swore that the two of them were sim–ply a pair of irascible, abusive, and absolutely vindictive old coots.

“It’s all Peregrine’s fault,” Rogers averred. “Never trust a man who stands taller and leaner than his turnip hoe.”

“That fat old tosspot Rogers won’t get along with anyone,” Peregrine countered. “He’d as soon start an argument as draw a breath. And you can guarantee that both argument and breath will be equally foul.”

The trouble between the two of them came to a head on the afternoon of Saturday, September 22, 1810, as Peregrine White walked towards the town of Kingston on the long road that snaked its way around James Rogers’s property line.

It was a fine, clear day. The weather was suited for grinning or singing or just laying back under the shade of a tall silver birch tree, but Peregrine was carrying a load that was guaranteed to sour any man’s disposition. Peregrine was bent under the weight of a long-standing grudge that he’d fed and fattened for far too many years, and he was just aching to let it drop on some unsuspecting person’s head.

You see, for Peregrine White, all of life’s misfortunes began with someone else. As far as he was concerned there was never anyone else to blame but a neighbour or a stranger or a friend. He had a hard time dealing with anything that remotely resembled personal responsibility.

On this fine Saturday afternoon, Kipper, the small grey ter–rier who kept the Rogers’s farm safe from the depredations of the foxes, coyotes, and a few wandering black squirrels, was vigilantly patrolling his territory. In fact, any creature that was bold enough to cross over the Rogers’s property was bound to trigger the bark–ing instincts of this mangy grey terrier. Old Kipper yipped and yapped at anyone or anything passing by.

Who really knows why a dog barks? A sight or a sound or a strange scent can set a dog off at any particular moment in time. It’s a well-documented fact that dogs will even bark at spirits, and can keep half an eye peeled towards the invisible world. Then too, sometimes a dog will bark at its own tail or a shadow or a tree branch blowing in the breeze. Dogs don’t need much of an excuse to throw their two bits into any kind of a situation.

And this afternoon for whatever reason, little Kipper decided to bay and bark at Farmer Peregrine White.

“Bow-wow-wow, yourself,” Peregrine shouted. “Go find your front porch or I’ll stone you and feed your scrawny little carcass to my breeding sow.”

With that White stooped and quick as you could say “rock,” he picked up a chunk of New Brunswick granite and nailed the animal square in the side.

“That’ll fix you,” Peregrine said.

Kipper yelped like he’d been dropped tail-first onto a hot stove. His panicked yapping brought James Rogers to his front door on the double. He spied old Peregrine stooping for another bit of ammunition to pelt his dog with, and he charged out like a fat, galloping avenger of canine abuse.

“I have you now, White,” Rogers shouted, barrelling down his front path towards a calmly waiting Peregrine White. The man stood there, rock cocked in a blatant raised fist, grinning like he was enjoying himself. Finally, he’d found some fun.

“Come ahead then, Rogers,” Peregrine said. “I’ll bash what–ever brains remain in that besotted skull of yours.”

“You don’t scare me,” Rogers said, stopping his advance all the same.

“What’s it today, Rogers?” Peregrine asked. “Cider or whisky? Or have you saved up enough coppers to buy yourself some wine?”

With that last insult the two old buggers squared off like a pair of duelling gunfighters, showering each other with a deluge of well-flung curses and a spray of incidental spittle. The two men, loud at the quietest of moments, outdid themselves on this afternoon. Little Kipper kept yapping and barking all through the argument. The three of them together raised a clamour that could have easily awoken a dead man’s shadow.

Meanwhile, inside the farmhouse, not more than a few metres away from the argument in progress, young Mary Evans, who worked as a server for Rogers, heard the raucous quarrel–ling. Mary was busy at the time being amused by her fiancé, William Mascaline.

Mascaline, inspired by a boyfriend’s deep need to impress his girlfriend and a sense of honest indignation, ran out into the yard to try and separate the battling codgers. Or rather, he limped out. You see, as a result of a boyhood accident, William Mascaline walked with a pronounced and permanent limp that he was very sensitive about.

“Return to your house, Master Rogers,” Mascaline said, trying his best to remain polite to his fiancé’s boss. “And you, Mister White, had best be on your way.”

Unfortunately for Mascaline, old Peregrine was all too ready to take offence and find himself another target to vent his inesti–mable wrath upon. He turned upon Mascaline and tore him up one side and straight down the other. He insulted him in every way imaginable, even going so far as to ape Mascaline’s limp in a mean and nasty fashion.

“Stump boy,” Peregrine called him, hobbling along in an exaggerated way. “Humping and stumping, where’d you learn to walk?”

However, Mascaline kept his cool, repeating his advice time and again.

“You really need to go home, Mister White,” he said. “Why waste your day ranting at me and this farmer and this poor little terrier?”

Realizing that his efforts at humiliation were being wasted upon William Mascaline, Peregrine White turned his anger upon young Mary Evans.

“That fiancée of yours, that scullery slattern, that trollop and tray-toter. Do you really think she loves you?” On and on, building like a rolling tidal wave, Peregrine White heaped abuse on Mary.

That did it.

While William Mascaline could let insult after insult slide from his back like rainwater off a mallard’s feathers, there was no way in tarnation that he was going to put up with someone insult–ing his Mary.

“Mister Peregrine White,” Mascaline said, his voice becom–ing low and more menacing. “If you don’t leave my sight and my earshot right this minute, I will knock you down with my bare hands.”

“Bravo, bully,” Peregrine taunted, “threatening an old man. What fine manners you show your fiancée.”

Mascaline spat in the dirt.

“That terrier has more manners than you, sir,” Mascaline said, “and he’s a fair sight better looking.”

“I’ll stone you, boy,” Peregrine said, hefting his rock and drawing a breath for a fresh new tirade. “In fact, if I had a mus–ket I’d blow out your mealy young brains for showing me such impudence.”

And then he threw the rock, winging it off of Mascaline’s bad leg. That was definitely the straw that broke the camel’s back. Mascaline turned and ran back to the farmer’s house and hunted up Rogers’s old musket. It was a dirty thing, rusted and uncared for. It looked as if it might just as well blow up in Mascaline’s face as fire.

“Here’s your musket, Master White, sir,” Mascaline said. “You may fire if you have the courage for it.”

Ah, the brash foolishness of youth mixed with the bitter anger of age makes for a very bad brew indeed. Peregrine White took the musket and eyed it with an ex-soldier’s critical observation.

“You keep as bad a care of your weapons as you do of your house, Rogers,” Peregrine said. “I’m in as much danger from shooting myself with such a weapon.”

“Damn you, sir,” Rogers huffed. “Use that weapon or I will use it myself.”

Peregrine White put the musket to his shoulder.

“Mind you, boy. I’ve killed bigger men than you, back in the war,” Peregrine warned.

“The war was a long time ago, old man,” Mascaline answered. “The lies and brags you make of it mean nothing more than the wind.”

“Better you use this musket for a crutch, gimp-a-leg,” Peregrine said cruelly. “It probably isn’t even loaded.”

Rogers, who was a little loaded himself even this early in the morning, was hair-trigger quick to speak up. “And what good is a weapon, if it isn’t loaded? It’s primed and ready sir. Are you?”

There’s nothing so foolish as those who will listen to a double-dog dare.

Peregrine threw the musket back at Mascaline. “I need no gun to tell you what I think of you and that serving wench you hope to bed.”

With that Peregrine launched himself into a fresh torrent of insults. Mascaline stood there taking it all in, hanging onto the musket, his fists white-knuckled with rage.

And then, all at once, as if by accident, the musket thun–dered out a gout of black powder. Mascaline had been holding it loosely, aimed towards the ground, but just the same Peregrine fell to the dirt, his left leg holed brutally midway between his ankle and his knee.

“I’ll show you how to limp,” Mascaline was heard to say.

Mary Evans came flying off the front stoop and knelt beside the fallen Peregrine, bandaging the old coot’s leg with a swatch of fabric torn from her only courting dress.

Whether it was simply human courtesy, or the fear of losing her lover to the gallows, Mary Evans was determined that old Peregrine would not suffer. She patched him up as best as she could, but there was nothing to be done. Infection set in, and on Wednesday, October 3, 1810, old Peregrine White muttered his last bitter insult and passed away.

William Mascaline was arrested and charged with cold-blooded murder. He faced trial at the Kingston courthouse on October 30, 1810. One day before Halloween, Judge Ward Chipman Sr. sentenced William Mascaline to hang, and six days later, hang he did.

Mary never married and James Rogers never repented his temper. Kipper ran away on the day of the trial, although some believe that Rogers simply shot and killed the terrier, thus putting an end to the sole reminder of his uncontrollable rage.

Not a lot of folks know about this trial, but there are many who tell you that on Halloween nights in the woods outside of Kingston you will often hear a small dog barking in the wind. Others will tell of hearing the voices of two bitterly angry old men arguing in the empty night.

And there is many a Kingstonian who has heard and seen the ghost of Mary Evans walking the lonely woods, weeping for her long-lost lover. Her tears mix freely with the evening mist, and the night wind blows lonely and sorrowful and full of regret.

11

THERE WILL

BE BLOOD

CATONS ISLAND

In the first month of 1611, a pair of Jesuit missionaries, Pierre Biard and Enemond Masse, set sail from France and arrived at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, the first permanent French settlement in Canada. Port Royal was built on the site of modern-day Annapolis Royal. You may remember that it served as a base for Sieur D’Aulnay Charnisay, the archrival of Charles La Tour and his wife Madame La Tour.

The two missionaries, Biard and Masse, were under the orders of the king’s confessor to take charge of the Jesuit mission in Acadia. It was a rough job, but France had confidence in the men they had chosen.

In the summer of 1611, the two men, accompanied by a crew of hardy St. Malo traders, set sail up the St. John River to a tiny little island called Emenic, just off of Long Reach. Nowadays they call this place Catons Island but back in the seventeenth century it was nothing more than a rung on a long ladder leading inland to future trading grounds. The traders hoped to establish a perma–nent trading base on the island, while the missionaries planned to meet with local holy men and get to know the Maliseet.

The journey down the St. John River was a rough one, but Biard and his men were seasoned travellers. Still, this was a strange and dark country to them. All along the riverside the trees bowed down their heads, and the wind whistled through the branches, and the black flies and mosquitoes buzzed incessantly. They saw bear and moose and other creatures they did not recognize. Fish jumping in the river’s waves startled them, and at every turn they felt the for–est breathing about them as if in anticipation of a coming feast.

The travellers were still a league and a half away from Catons Island when the sun called it a day and nighttime rolled on in. The stars were just beginning to peek out of the darkness when all at once a part of the northern sky turned a bright blood red. As if the sky were burning down, this light spread in vivid streaks and flashes, until the shining glow completely encompassed the nearby Maliseet settlement.

Biard remarked “the red glow was so brilliant that the whole river was tinged and made luminous by it. The apparition lasted about five minutes and as soon as it disappeared another came from the same direction, with the same form and appearance.”

Of course, it is very probable that this phenomenon was noth–ing more than an early sighting of the aurora borealis, or the northern lights. However, the Maliseet came to the missionaries and pointed up at the bright shimmering radiance, crying out, “Gara, gara, maredo.” According to Biard their warning translated as: “We shall have war. There will be blood.”

We might file that dubious translation in the same sector as the guides who thought Kanata was the name of the country they were travelling in, rather than a First Nations term for a village or cluster of houses.

According to all descriptions the light radiated across the entire sky. The Maliseet swore that it was a spirit warning them of oncoming danger, and perhaps they were right.

Biard’s band of travellers was decidedly unnerved by the occur–rence. They met with the settlers at Catons Island, and an argu–ment and battle nearly ensued.

The settlers, panicked by the sight of the eerie light mistook Biard’s men for a group of bandits.

In Biard’s words, “What a night this was; for it passed in con–tinual alarms, gun shots and rash acts on the part of some of the men.”

They were worried that the Maliseet’s prediction, inspired by the omen in the night sky above, would have its bloody fulfillment on the earth below. The night was spent in sleepless terror and in the morning, in an effort to re-establish some sense of order and a little hope, Biard performed what was very likely the first ceremony of the holy mass in the province of New Brunswick. His men bowed their heads and prayed, and for a time peace was found.

Yet as he looked down into the chalice filled with the holy sac–ramental red wine all that Pierre Biard could see was that burning sky of blood that had looked down grimly from the heavens above the missionaries. He kept his head bowed and prayed just as hard as he could.

Two years later, Biard was captured during the destruction of the Nova Scotia settlements of Saint Sauveur and Port Royal by an invading British military expedition from Virginia. Noted sea raider Samuel Argall led the expedition. The fort at Port Royal was looted and burned to the ground. Eyewitnesses swore that the sky burned red that night and for many nights to follow.

Biard was captured and taken to Jamestown, where he barely avoided being hanged, before being transported back to France and framed for the instigation of this raid. He finally managed to clear his name of all dishonour and afterwards made a life for himself working as a missionary in the south of France. He became renowned as a professor of theology and was made mili–tary chaplain in the armies of the king. He died of natural causes at Avignon, France, in 1622 at the age of forty-six.

I wonder if the blood and the war that the Maliseet natives prophesied was some sort of a forerunner of the destruction of Port Royal? Or is it possible that the natives were only having a laugh at the missionary’s expense, playing up a natural phenom–enon and doing their best to terrify the foolish white men?

In any case, Port Royal was looted and burned in November 1613. De Poutrincourt, the sieur at the time, was discouraged enough to return to France and transfer all of his North American holdings to his son. De Poutrincourt died around 1623 and bequeathed his possessions to one Charles La Tour.

Funny how these things all come around, isn’t it?

12

GHOST HOLLOW

CARTERS COVE

There are an awful lot of ghosts around in old New Brunswick and this spectral population is reflected in the etymology of the region. On any map you’ll see such places as Ghost Hollow, Ghost Island, Ghost Hill, Ghost Lake, and Ghost Rock. I’ve done my level best to track down the stories behind each of these names, but have so far only found the tales of Ghost Rock, Ghost Hollow, and Ghost Hill. I will continue to keep hunting for the ghost stories that must surely lie behind Ghost Island and Ghost Lake.

I heard this next tale from a New Brunswick schoolteacher by the name of Darren White. He told me the bare bones of the story and I have fleshed it out as best as I can.

Ghost Hollow is an awfully hard place to find on a map.

If you leave the city of Saint John, heading west towards Fredericton and take the Grand Bay exit, you will come to the Westfield Ferry. The ferry is located next to Westfield Beach, and makes the five-minute ride connecting Grand Bay–Westfield and Hardings Point.

After reaching Hardings Point, stay on Route 845 and keep going straight, heading towards Kingston. It shouldn’t be that hard to find, on account of Route 845 is the only major road lead–ing from that end of the ferry. Ghost Hollow is about six minutes from Hardings Point at regular driving speed. You don’t actually see the hollow so much as drive into it. It is a stretch of road that drops down and stretches out in the basin of a deep old valley.

At least that’s how the directions were told to me.

It seems there were two brothers by the name of Laskey who lived on a small farm somewhere in the belly of Ghost Hollow. Some say they were twins and some say they just happened to look alike, as brothers sometimes do.

A small brook used to run through the hollow and one of the brothers, the younger one, got into the habit of sitting on a huge boulder by the brook, alongside the roadway, for his after-supper pipe.

They say that one night the younger Laskey brother fell asleep on the rock and took a chill, and before a week had clocked by he breathed his last breath and died.

Now having a brother pass on like that can affect a man. The other brother took his place on the rock. He would sit there and smoke his brother’s pipe, not saying a word. He’d just sit there and stare up at the sky.

Who knows what he was up to? Maybe he was trying to make mischief, or maybe he wasn’t trying anything at all. Maybe he was just sitting there and thinking about his brother and wondering to himself just what lay beyond those stars.

Word got out that the ghost of the young Laskey boy was haunt–ing the hollow. Folks who knew the story were always surprised to see him sitting there on that rock. When one of the cars ran off the road because the driver was so frightened, folks got to think–ing that maybe it was time to do something about the ghost of Ghost Hollow.

“We should send a priest,” they said, but no priest would go.

Finally, a brave young fisherman by the name of Andrew McTavish said he wouldn’t mind swinging down to the hollow to have himself a look.

“Might go down there and see what I can scare up,” he said.

So Andrew McTavish walked on over to Ghost Hollow, some–time after the sun had gone down.

“You’re not going down there in the darkness?” one of his bud–dies asked.

“Well, you don’t see too many ghosts in the daylight, do you?” Andrew retorted.

He walked down the long, slow hill that led into the hollow. The moon climbed up, a big, fat pumpkin of a moon that lit up the whole valley like it was daytime.

“A fine far night,” Andrew said, staring off into the heavens.

A hoot owl called out whoo, whoo?

“Just me,” Andrew said. “Nobody special at all.”

When he got close enough to the rock he could see the glint of the pipe bowl, flaring and gleaming as its owner puffed away.

“I’ll lay you odds that’s my ghost or my man,” Andrew whis–pered to himself.

And then, as he drew closer, he shouted out bold and plain. “Here now. I’ll have a word or two with you.”

The figure on the rock didn’t move one whit. He just sat there puffing on his pipe as if he were as deaf as a frozen winter stone.

“Are your ears stogged in?” Andrew asked. “I’ll have a word with you or know why you won’t speak.”

And still the figure sat there, puffing away. Andrew could see him now and he sure did look an awful lot like the Laskey boy, but then again, so did his brother.

Andrew bent down as he walked and scooped himself up a pocket full of rocks to throw.

“Here now,” he called out. “If you’re a man, speak up or I’ll make you speak.”

And he started pitching and flinging those rocks with deadly accuracy, shying them off the boulder the figure was sitting on. One or two of them hit the mark and the ghost finally spoke up.

“Hey!” he shouted.

Andrew stepped closer and picked up a good-sized chunk of stone.

“Now look here, mister man,” Andrew said. “This next rock will raise more than an ouch from you. Of course, being a ghost, I don’t reckon you’ve got all that much to fear, now do you?”

At that, the figure jumped up and skidded down the rock, dropping the pipe and spilling the ashes, and nearly breaking his leg. He didn’t stop for anything, just kept on running.

Andrew grinned at the sight.

“Well who’d have dreamt that a ghost could ever run so fast?” he said into the darkness.

And nobody but the old hoot owl answered him.

Who, indeed?

13

GHOST ROCK

LORNEVILLE

Lorneville was originally named Pisarinco by the clansmen who settled there. Pisarinco was a Maliseet term, prone to misinterpretation and, as were many native names, to unfortunate mis–pronunciation. In the late 1800s, the name was changed to Lorneville, in honour of Sir John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, the ninth Duke of Argyll and the Marquis of Lorne.

Now personally I think that Sir John had himself more than enough names to begin with, without bothering to name an entire settlement after himself, but the name was changed regardless.

Just off Lorneville Road, a little south–west of Saint John, is a spot folks used to call Ghost Rock. The rock stood just at the end of the road, directly between the fine white clapboard church and the brood–ing Lorneville Harbour. Now the rock isn’t there anymore, hav–ing been lost to an unfortunate demolition blast during develop–ment of the land, but folks still love to tell the story of the lonely maiden of Ghost Rock.

It was back in the late 1820s that James Trevarton, tall, lean captain of the brig Minerva, fell in love with one Florence Atherton and asked her for her hand in marriage. Unfortunately, Captain Trevarton was not alone in his infatuation. His first mate Davis Dugall had been watching the two together for some time, and he vowed to himself that he would have this beautiful black-haired woman.

Dugall harboured his hatred for the couple like a stone in his heart. He was certain that with the captain out of the way, Florence Atherton would yield to his suit. He waited for the cap–tain one night as the gentleman came whistling home after an evening of courting his sweetheart on her family’s front porch. It was his last night before he sailed away in the Minerva for another voyage at sea.

Dugall hid behind a lilac bush, holding a chunk of beach rock in his hand, and waited until his captain walked past.

The black-hearted rogue sprang out of the shadows and struck the captain stone dead with the rock. Trevarton fell to the dirt, and Dugall dragged his body down to the Ghost Rock and crammed it into a cranny beneath the heavy stone. He blocked up the crevice with some beach rock, daubed it in solid and snug with mud, and covered his work with a bit of driftwood and seaweed. What a careful craftsman he was. If he hadn’t found a future in sailing he might have made himself a fine life as a Maritime undertaker.

Then the cold-hearted devil made his way down to the Minerva.

“The captain’s been called away on business,” he swore to any who asked. “We’re to be away on the tide and he’ll meet us further down the coast.”

It took some convincing, but old Dugall was a pretty slick liar. In the end, the tide won out and the Minerva sailed away as it was scheduled to. Meanwhile, Florence Atherton remained at home, certain that her love was away to sea, never dreaming that he lay so very close to her doorstep.

A year later, Dugall fell overboard off the coast of Nantucket. Some swear that he jumped off the ship as a result of his bad conscience. In any case, when his belongings were searched a letter was found in his cabin confessing to the murder of Captain James Trevarton, along with a map showing the place his body was buried.

When the townsfolk of Lorneville dug up his body, Florence Atherton’s heart broke in two.

“At last I can rest,” she said, and by all accounts she fell dead upon the hard and unforgiving side of Ghost Rock.

Now there are more than a few holes in this particular tale. One wonders just how long a ship would sail without its captain and just why a murderer would bother drawing a map revealing the location of his victim’s body.

Wonder or not, it is true that folks in the area still claim that on cold, moonless, lonely nights a beautiful woman in a long grey bridal gown is seen walking these shores as the waves shatter into salty tears against the coast about her spectral feet. Even now that the rock has been reduced to gravel there aren’t many campers brave enough to spend a night on these shores.

14

THE PICKLE

BARREL WIFE

CAMPOBELLO ISLAND

Sometimes a name just won’t stay stuck. A place will spit a christened name out as easily as a fish slipping an unwanted lure.

Campobello Island dangles out of the mouth of the Bay of Fundy just north–west of Grand Manan Island like a lost fishing hook. The Passamaquoddy First Nations people, a peaceful fishing tribe whose name literally means “pollock-spearer,” originally called the island Ebaqhuit, which means “lying beside the land.”

Captain Cyprian Southack — famed privateer, cartographer, and treasure hunter— decided to rename Ebaqhuit in 1773, calling it the Great Island of Passamaquoddy. Folks who live there will tell you that while their island was pretty enough it was hardly worth calling great, but I guess old Southack must have been fairly impressed.

In 1770, the island was granted to William Owen, an officer of the Royal Navy who had lost an arm as the result of a wound suffered during the Seven Years’ War. The grant was a compen–sation for his work as an aide to Lord William Campbell. At the time, Lord William Campbell was the appointed governor of Nova Scotia. William Owen returned the favour by naming the island Campobello, which was a play on Campbell’s name and the Spanish/Italian word bello, meaning beautiful.

As a young man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent summers on Campobello and often sailed to Dark Harbour on Grand Manan Island, where he would happily dig on the beach, hunting for one of Captain Kidd’s many buried treasures. Roosevelt contracted the polio that eventually crippled him on Campobello, but went on to build himself a summer home here.

Folks on the more populated southwest end of Campobello Island will be happy to offer you a story of the Bingo Man, the spirit of an elderly gentleman who died of a heart attack one Monday night on his way to bingo and has since been spotted on most Monday nights, still hunting for the bingo hall.

That’s a quaint enough tale for some, I suppose, but pretty tame fare for any book of ghost stories I put together. Instead I’d like to offer you a little stronger meat. I’d prefer to tell you the tale of the nastier, less-populated northern end of Campobello Island. The northeast part of the island is mostly covered with sharp unas–sailable cliffs, spotted with snarling fir trees, poison sumac, and a few wild daisies like pearls amongst the cold, grey rocks.

There’s a natural cove at the northeast corner of the island that caves inward like an open mouth. They call it Mill Cove and there’s a small town nearby that is famed for its bear hunting and fishing. If you ask nicely, folks around Mill Cove will be more than pleased to tell you the grim little yarn of the carpenter John Dunbar and his pickle barrel wife.

Now look here close and give me a listen because I guarantee this one is a dilly of a tale.

John Dunbar of Mill Cove, New Brunswick, was a master carpenter who made a fair living raising houses, crafting furni–ture, working as a shipwright and making coffins. Between that he worked hard in a local sawmill. In short, he did whatever was needed to put money in his pocket.

I said he was a Maritimer, didn’t I?

Unfortunately, he put just as much money in the local tav–ern keeper’s pocket. John’s wife, Margaret, was rightly con–cerned by his habitual drunkenness and lack of foresight. She was constantly on the lookout for a little of his money to salt away.

Sometime around the year 1798, John Dunbar was commis–sioned to construct the very first gallows in Charlotte County, in the town of St. Andrews. The town is about thirty kilometres due north of the island. In those day that was a fair distance to go, but Dunbar needed the work. He was proud that they’d hired him, though some folks maintained that he got the job simply by being the cheapest carpenter in those parts.

“Mister man,” one villager said. “You never seen a fellow so jeezly cheap. He would squeeze a coin so tightly that old King George iii himself had to pause a moment and blush.”

And that’s where the whole problem started. John Dunbar was a poor carpenter, in both senses. He couldn’t charge all that much for his work because it wasn’t worth much in the first place. To make matters worse, he was determined to keep what little money he had from the grubbing hands of his wife. She would only spend it on bills and that, to John Dunbar, was a complete waste of good drinking money. He took the few gold coins that he earned from building the gallows in St. Andrews, and buried them in a hidey-hole behind the house where he figured they’d be safe. He wouldn’t tell his wife where he’d hidden the gold — the fact was he didn’t even tell his wife he had any gold to hide.

“The money went to the bills,” he swore. “It was blown to the four winds on this and that and half of nearly everything else.”

Well sir, Mrs. Dunbar’s mother never raised herself any fools. Margaret Dunbar knew darned well that old John had tucked that gold away somewhere to spend on his thirst. So she fixed him with one eye and nailed him with the other and kept a long, quiet watch on her husband’s comings and goings. You see, she knew well enough that old John liked to keep his assets liquid, so he could pour them out of his pocket and into the local barkeep’s open hands.

Margaret waited for her moment, like a still hunter waiting in a stand of trees for a shot at its prey. One night John Dunbar came home roaring drunk and not knowing any better. Margaret seized her chance.

“Where’s my money?” he called out. “I’m off to the tavern.”

“Your money is where you said you put it,” Margaret said. “Blown away to the four winds on this and that and half of nearly everything else.”

So old John teetered out to his hiding spot to sneak out a wee bit more of his hard-earned gold to buy himself a wee bit more rum. That was all the chance that Margaret Dunbar needed. She followed him out to the back of the house and watched as he rooted up the money. She didn’t even need to stay quiet or sneak around one bit. He was that drunk already that he didn’t even notice she was there.

Then, once he’d gone roaring on back towards the town pub, Margaret Dunbar dug up his gold and hid it away herself in a small iron box that she buried just up from the beach under a stone that she marked. Always a practical woman, she’d keep the money hidden there for household emergencies.

For a day and a week John Dunbar carried on, blissfully unaware that his stash of gold coins had been discretely pilfered. By and by, as the tide slipped in and out, he drank up another thirst, and the gold coin he’d been leaning on melted away in the barkeep’s hands. John Dunbar went out to his hiding place and found out the truth. The money was gone.

“Where did you hide it?” he howled, knowing right away where the money had got to.

“Hide what?” Margaret Dunbar asked. “Whatever are you talk–ing about?”

Now Margaret Dunbar was counting on the fact that John would be too proud to admit that he’d been outfoxed by a woman. Because he hadn’t told her of the gold, if he forced the issue, he would be accepting that she’d outsmarted him.

A reasonable man would have let the argument lay right there where he’d dropped it, but John Dunbar had built up a pretty serious thirst for rum. And never should it be said that master carpenter John Dunbar lived anywhere handy to the realm of reason.

They argued from noon until nightfall, and when the full moon was spying blindly down from the heavens above, John Dunlap picked up his broad axe and struck his wife squarely between her eyes.

Only he didn’t stop there. Fear and anger took hold of his very being and the old devil cut his wife up into pieces and sunk the remaining chunks in the pickle barrel, in the root cellar directly underneath his house.

“Salt my money away, will you?” he said, as he dropped what was left of her into the barrel. “I’ll show you salt, I will.”

Old John kept his secret snugged deep within his guilty old soul for a full week and a half before mentioning his wife to anyone.

“She’s left town,” he would say. “She got tired of my drinking ways, I guess.”

And then he’d smile.

“Oh, she’s in a terrible pickle now, I’ll wager.”

And then he’d snigger, low and nasty, and would say no more. This went on for a couple of weeks, and then one night the rum got the best of him. Hunkered down over drink and cards the truth finally leaked out from his own lips like a trickle of brine leaking out of a pickle barrel.

Now John Dunlap was the one in a pickle. Quicker than you can say gherkin, they took him to the St. Andrews courthouse, and tried and convicted the carpenter, sentencing him to be hanged on the very gallows that he’d built.

A day before his execution he escaped. He fled to the town of Bayside, eleven kilometres from St. Andrews. Why did he stay so close by? Remember, eleven kilometres seemed considerably farther back in the days of horses and wagons. He found employ–ment there as a woodcutter, but was recognized right off and returned in chains to St. Andrews.

Only they didn’t hold him for very long. He escaped a sec–ond time and fled to Boston. Legend has it that a resident of St.

Andrews by the name of William Bentley was passing a house in Boston when he was struck on the head by a falling shingle. He looked up only to recognize John Dunbar, working with a crew patching the roof. Dunbar was taken back to St. Andrews and hanged. The third time was the charm, I reckon.

Treasure hunters still search the Mill Cove area hoping to find the missing Dunlap gold that was hidden by Margaret. Unless someone isn’t telling, that gold remains undiscovered. To this day, certain older citizens of Mill Cove swear they’ve heard the screams of Margaret Dunbar, low and hollow as if calling from a long way off, like perhaps from the bottom of a pickle barrel.

15

THE

LAKE UTOPIA

SEA MONSTER

LAKE UTOPIA

Lake Utopia is located in eastern Charlotte County, about one kilome–tre northeast of the town of St. George. It is a popular tourist spot, known for its fishing and sporting opportunities.

The lake is approximately seven kilo–metres long and three kilometres broad at its widest point. It is connected to the Magaguadavic River, thanks to the second deepest natural canal in the known world.

Magaguadavic (pronounced mack-uh-day-vick) is a Maliseet word mean–ing “river of eels.” The name may owe as much to the twisting shape of the river as it does to the abundance of eels in its waters. Over one hundred named tributaries and more than fifty-five lakes depend on the flow of the Magaguadavic River. That leaves room for an awful lot of tales— some of those tales are attached to a certain sea serpent called Old Ned.

The name Utopia is a joking reference to a land grant bestowed upon one Captain Peter Clinch in 1784. By chance or design, the grant included a fair amount of land located directly beneath the lake. Displaying an uncommonly philosophical sense of humour, Captain Clinch named the lake after Thomas More’s book Utopia, a play on the Greek term ou-topos, meaning “no place.” Local legend has it that the lake is inhabited by a gigantic sea monster, known as Old Ned, who breaks through the late winter ice of the frozen lake and snaps up unsuspecting victims.

The serpent is reputed to be at least twelve metres long, with a head the same size as a good-sized plough horse’s head and a mouth full of sabre-like teeth. It was first reported by a band of wintering lumberjacks who watched in terror as the creature twisted and rose from out of the cold winter waters.

Of course the local Mi’kmaq and Maliseet knew of this crea–ture long before any settlers arrived. It took the white men decades to wise up to the existence of something that large, living that close to civilization, perhaps because the beast never bothered paying taxes.

Upon hearing of the beast’s existence, the local hearties set out to catch the creature using gigantic makeshift fishing lures con–structed out of floating logs wrapped with dangling chains that held heavy iron hooks baited with chunks of salt fish and pickled pork. They dragged the unsavoury mess behind their boats, hop–ing to lure the lake monster up towards the surface.

The foolhardy fishermen met with absolutely no success. A fur–ther attempt to snare the creature in a tangle of massive fishing nets, thirty metres long and six metres wide, met with similar results.

Whatever was out there wasn’t going to be caught that easily.

Since then, there have been numerous sightings of the Lake Utopia Sea Monster, generally during the late winter and early spring when the ice is too rotten for skating or ice fishing. It is believed the creature swims up from the sea through the large natural canal. Some folks reckon that the beast lies dormant out there in the lake over the winter and it is only the heat of the oncoming spring that awakens it.

Learned authorities have theorized that there might be several possible explanations for these reported sea monster sightings.

Some experts blame the whole thing on great huddles of eels that clump together perhaps for warmth or as some sort of weird mat–ing ritual. These great clumps of lake eels, called eel-balls, are a common phenomenon, and Lake Utopia is certainly eel country. The eel-balls have been sighted in other regions in clumps almost two metres in diameter, moving through the water in a roiling twisting motion created by the flipping eel tails that dangle on the outside of the ball. Some scientists figure that such a sighting could be easily mistaken for a sea serpent.

Other experts believe that the sea monster may be nothing more than a giant sturgeon, a long-snouted, armour-plated fish that can grow up to four-and-a-half metres in length and weigh in at over ninety kilograms. Such fish were common in the St. John River long ago, before overfishing dropped their numbers down into near-extinction. Part of the problem was the sturgeon’s docile nature. They could be roped and herded and tethered to posts. These giant fish had absolutely no killer instinct or survival mechanism within their great scaly forms. This makes the stur–geon an unlikely impersonator of a sea serpent.

Another theory points to the possibility that the sea monster is just a submerged primeval tree root thrust up from the depths by the heaving of the late winter ice. Such an occurrence is common in the Lake Utopia region. Logs and shipwrecks and old canoes are frequently and unexpectedly thrown up from the bottom of the lake. Still, some of the locals figure the churning of Old Ned the Lake Monster down on the bottom causes the upheaval.

Other experts explain the phenomenon away with talk of giant sea turtles or families of otter swimming in line. I’m not wise enough to argue against such specialists, but I can tell you this: there is a great deal of difference between the monster folks have encountered and described, and a fish, eel, turtle, or otter.

The legends live on to this very day. Locals will happily tell you of grandmother Edna Mckillop of St. George, who in 1951 saw the waters of Lake Utopia begin to boil and splash as a huge head poked up through the surface, followed by a body that looked like a great moving black rock. She swore its jaws were streaked with a reddish substance that could have been a tangle of bottom weeds —or maybe even blood.

Even as late as 1982, there were sightings of the creature. That was the year a worker in a Lake Utopia paper mill, Sherman Hatt, spotted a creature that he said resembled “a submarine coming out of the water with spray on both sides. It was about ten feet long and put me in mind of the back of a whale.”

Sherman reported that the creature surfaced, displaying a head as large as a good-sized washtub before sinking down into the murky lake waters. Perhaps the discrepancy between this description of the monster’s head and the one that compared it to a horse can be explained by a case of winter eye strain, or pos–sibly the great beast has spawned himself a baby or two. In which case one has to wonder where on earth the mate of the creature has got to?

If you ask me, fishermen in the Lake Utopia area would be well-advised to carry along a jumbo-sized fishing rod, a very large fishing net, a year’s supply of flour, and one heck of a frying pan. An oar ought to serve you just fine for a spatula, if you’re not of the fussy sort.

Hmmm. I imagine that sea monster ought to taste some sweet, after sizzling in the pan with a barrel of herbed butter, a bushel or two of potatoes, and maybe a bucket of sliced lemons on the side.

I only hope somebody remembers to bring marshmallows.

16

THE BLOODY

STUMP OF

BONNY RIVER

BONNY RIVER

Down in the southwest corner of New Brunswick, about ten kilometres north of St. George, lies a tiny village by the name of Bonny River. Not a lot happens here, but the landscape is absolutely spectacular. The entire region is one gigantic glacial wash, a carved out hol–low where retreating ice sheets dropped trillions of tons of granite as they boo–gied in slow motion across the face of the province somewhere around about the tail end of the last ice age.

In the early 1800s, a young girl by the name of Mary Well lived on one side of the Magaguadavic River. On the other side of the river was a small settlement of hunting shacks. Two of these shacks were owned by a couple of good friends named Ben and Isaac. Now Ben and Isaac were long-time buddies who grew up hunt–ing and fishing on the side of the Magaguadavic River. Time and again the two of them had saved each other from terrible mis–fortune. When they were thirteen, Ben dragged Isaac out of the river. Of course, Ben had been the fellow who pushed Isaac into the river in the first place, but what else are friends for?

In their later years Isaac sprained his right ankle snowshoeing and Ben lugged him over his shoulders across ten long, heavy kilometres of snow-covered wilderness. Afterwards Ben went back and fetched out the deer that the two of them had shot.

It was a friendship carved in New Brunswick granite and only the love of a river woman could wash it away. As fate would have it, Ben and Isaac both fell in love with the same river woman, Mary Well of the Magaguadavic.

The problem was that Mary loved both of them. Every morning she would watch as the two men struck out in their canoes across the Magaguadavic, trying to be the first to land on Mary’s shore. They had struck an agreement that whoever reached the far shore faster would have the chance to talk to Mary first that day while the other did the honourable thing and stood clear.

Of course, talking to Mary first also gave the victor of that day’s canoe race the opportunity to escort Mary Well for the rest of the day, so the race soon became quite competitive. Folks would gather on the shoreline to watch Ben and Isaac paddle like the devil was swimming close behind. Occasionally they’d pause to swing an oar at each other or even chuck a rock. Everyone figured that a fight was inevitable.

“You have to choose one,” Mary’s mother told her. “There’s only room for a single ring on any girl’s ring finger.”

“Hunt one rabbit, you’ve got supper,” Mary’s father added. “Hunt two rabbits, you’ve got sore feet.”

But Mary wouldn’t listen to either her mother or her father. The truth was, she enjoyed the attention Ben and Isaac paid her. They brought her the best rewards from their hunts and kept her in food and fur. The sad fact of the matter was both Mary’s mother and father also enjoyed the food Ben and Isaac provided and their grumbling bellies stopped them from nagging Mary any further.

But Ben and Isaac were growing impatient.

“You have to choose one of us,” they demanded.

“I love you both,” Mary said.

Did she mean it or was she only being fickle? It’s hard to know for sure. The heart is made of a hard-packed ground. There’s no hunter with an eye sharp enough to track a trail across such coun–try and know for sure that he’s heading in the right direction.

The two friends finally had enough. On a hot August day, after a glass of cold buttermilk, they swore that they’d put an end to their quarrelling and competition once and for all.

“We’ll fight for Mary’s hand,” Ben said. “The two of us will square off and the winner takes all.”

So they called upon the town blacksmith who forged an iron chain and drove it into both sides of a sturdy red maple stump. Each of the two suitors was shackled to one end of the chain with his left hand tied behind his back.

“We were bonded in life,” said Isaac. “We’ll be bonded in death.”

“We’ll fight to the end,” said Ben. “And the winner will take the hand of Mary Well of the Magaguadavic.”

The townsfolk gathered to watch the battle. Today someone might have tried to stop them, or possibly dialled for the police, but these were simpler and harder times. If two men decided to fight, no one would do or say anything about it. Life went on — and no one wanted to miss a show like this.

High upon her front porch, Mary Well stood between her mother and father. She was both flattered and excited at the prospect of the duel fought on her behalf. The two men, armed with their hunting knives, stood face to face over the red maple stump they were chained to. They fought, wielding their hunt–ing knives with practised ruthlessness. Ben was cut in the left shoulder and blood ran down his arm like a long red scarf, but he caught Isaac with a slash in the leg that painted Isaac’s trou–sers scarlet red.

“Yield and give,” Ben said, menacing Isaac with his knife. “That cut was close to the blood-pipe, I warrant. You’ll run your–self dry before the end of an hour.”

“Your own wound is closer to the heart than mine. You’ll be lying in the dirt, cold and pale, while I’m still standing,” Isaac predicted. “Put down your knife and let’s call it quits.”

The truth was neither of the men wanted to hurt the other more than they already had. They had known each other for many years, and as much as they loved Mary they also cared for each other. But both men were stubborn New Brunswickers who didn’t give up easily when pushed to it.

Mary knew that too. At first she’d been excited to see the two friends fighting for her attention, but now the whole situation had changed. She didn’t want them to hurt each other. She didn’t want to be the one to blame if either man was killed.

“Stop!” Mary shouted.

Now here is where individual versions of the tale begin to dif–fer. Some folks say that Mary keeled over in her parent’s arms, stone dead from a stroke. Other folks claim that Mary ran out to stop the fight and was caught by an accidental knife swing from either Ben or Isaac.

At least I hope it was accidental. A fight to the death brings out strange emotions— although some might think it impossible that a man who starts out fighting for someone could end up hurting them, stranger things have happened. The human heart can be as dark and murky as the waters of the surging Magaguadavic.

I don’t know if either of those versions is true. The way I was told the tale, both men’s knives did the deed, catching the girl square in her heart as she tried to step between them, piercing her more surely than any of cupid’s well-sharpened arrows.

“I’m sorry,” were her last words.

Before the sun had sunk beneath the red painted evening sky, Ben and Isaac had either killed each other or died from their wounds. No matter how you tell the tale, three hearts stopped beating over one fatal love. That’s bad arithmetic by anybody’s bookkeeping.

Folks around Bonny River claim that the red maple stump is still there in the woods beside the fast-flowing waters of the Magaguadavic River, stained with the three lovers’ blood and the taint of the rusted iron chain that shackled them in life and death. On moonlit nights, the ghost of Mary Well is said to wan–der the shores of the river, keening for the two loves she care–lessly threw away, all because she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make up her mind.

So how did Mary Well die? Which version is true?

I guess you’ll have to make up your own mind about that, now won’t you?

17

GHOST HILL

LYNNFIELD

About twenty kilometres north of Calais, Maine, lies the pretty little town of Lynn-field, New Brunswick. Deep in the heart of this town is a shadowy hillside, shrouded with poplar and mountain ash. The folks around Lynnfield call it Ghost Hill and it’s a common stunt for the school kids to dare one another to run up to the top. Nobody can resist a double-dog dare.

You get an eerie feeling walking on this hill. As if something or someone is watching you. The air around Ghost Hill is always chilly and hushed. Not even a breeze dares stir this dark little hummock.

“It’s the perfect place for a graveyard,” some people will tell you, and if you ask nicely enough, they’ll be more than happy to tell you why. It seems that back in the mid-1800s this property was owned by one William McGeorge, the foreman of a logging crew. He didn’t spend all that much time in town. He was far happier out in the woods, felling timber, making what money he could.

Money was an awfully big word for Mister William McGeorge. It was a big part of his life. He just couldn’t get enough of it. Bluntly put, the man was tighter than a frozen clam. He wouldn’t give you last year’s calendar if you promised to burn it for him.

As you can guess, William wasn’t all that well liked around town, but truth to tell nobody would say boo to him. He was a big man and a big employer, so it wouldn’t pay to make trouble with William McGeorge. There was no reason to. He paid his men regularly, if not well, and he rarely caused problems.

At least that was the case until the census man from Frederic-ton came into town.

Nobody really paid much attention to the census taker. They gave him whatever information he asked for because that was the law, but the truth of it was they didn’t really see much sense in what he was doing. They knew they were all there, and they only needed to count heads when it came time to carve the Thanksgiving turkey —even then, numbers only mattered because whoever came first got the drumstick and whoever came last wound up with a hunk of bread and some turkey grease.

“We knows we counts,” they would say. “Our fingers, our toes, and our paycheques. What else is there to worry about?”

No sir and no ma’am, nobody paid much attention to that skinny little census taker from Fredericton except old hard-hearted William McGeorge. You see, that census taker was riding one of the finest-looking white mares that he had ever seen and William McGeorge just had to have that horse.

“A horse that fine would fetch a bucket load of dollars at the market,” William said. “Somehow I’ve got to put that pony in my stable.”

So later that week, after riding up William McGeorge’s hill, that skinny little census taker never came riding back down again. Being a logger, William McGeorge was a sizable man. Truth was, you never seen the like of it when old William started swinging an axe. He could topple a tree faster than old Moody’s goose, and drop it right wherever he wanted it. I mean, no one ever said that William McGeorge was anywhere handy to slow.

So when that skinny little census taker came riding up to big William McGeorge’s hill I guess William was waiting for him, maybe with an axe. In any case, the census taker was never seen again in those parts, and that white mare spent the rest of the year in McGeorge’s barn.

“I won it in a bet,” he told anyone who dared to ask him how he’d come by such a fine animal.

If they pushed the point he’d just tell them to mind their own darn business.

“He took off for Fredericton,” McGeorge would say. “That’s one less nose to count, I reckon.”

There weren’t that many folks around who bothered asking William about anything at all. The truth was they were all a little scared of William McGeorge. They always had been and after that census taker up and disappeared they were even a bit more fright–ened. William began to act strangely, as if something were bother–ing him. There was something in the big man’s eyes, something in the way he looked around a building before walking in a door, as if he were afraid someone might be in there waiting for him.

“He backs into camp these days,” his loggers noted, “and he carries an axe wherever he goes. It’s like he thinks somebody is following him around, getting set to sneak up on him.”

The funny thing was William never seemed to get around to selling that mare. Maybe he was just too lazy or maybe he had grown used to the horse, but neither of those explanations seems anywhere close to likely.

Then there were the sounds heard coming from up on the hill.

Some nights, folks would hear chopping, like William was try–ing to hack a big old tree down. Then there were other nights when they heard hoofbeats galloping across the property.

“It’s that white mare,” some said. “McGeorge rides it around and around the fence of his hill, like he was trying to outrun something a whole lot faster than speed ever dreamed.”

“He’s trying to outrun the devil,” others said.

Then came the night when they heard screaming coming down from the hill. Nothing human could have made such a sound, and it was awhile before the stalwarts of the town worked up enough nerve to march up the hill to see what the bother was.

“We got there and it was something you wouldn’t believe,” said the town constable. “Big William McGeorge was huddled in his barn crying like a little baby over a bloodied up axe. He’d cut that fine white mare into more pieces than I want to think about. Rendered her down to stew meat size. Where’s the sense in that I ask you?”

Three nights later there was one more scream, cut off short and sharp.

The constable grudgingly led a few more townsfolk up that old hill of McGeorge’s.

They found William McGeorge right where they’d left him, hunkered down in his barn and clinging onto the axe, his finger–nails dug deep into the grain of the wood. He was stone cold dead and no one could tell just how he’d died.

“I guess he finally got counted,” was all that the constable would say.

Shortly after that, folks began referring to that hill as Ghost Hill —it’s been called that ever since and I guess it always will.

Sometimes folks hear that chopping sound, like an axe work–ing into something hard and soft and wet, all at the same time. Sometimes folks hear a mare galloping around and around in the night.

They blame it on the wind. They blame it on nerves. They blame it on everything but the truth. The truth is nobody ever goes up that hill, except maybe a child or two on a dare from their friends and even they don’t stay up there all that long.

And who could blame them?

18

THE

UNIVERSITY GHOST

FREDERICTON

Fredericton is one of the prettiest cities in New Brunswick. The streets are bus–tling, business is booming, and there’s always something interesting going on.

There were people living where Fredericton now stands long before it officially became a city. The Mi’kmaq and Maliseet used the area for farm–ing centuries before the first white man rowed into the Bay of Fundy. However, that all changed in the winter of 1692, when Joseph de Villebon, the governor of French Acadia, raised a fort on the southwest tip of the intersection of the St. John and Nashwaak rivers.

He began constructing the fort on March 18, 1692. It was the eve of Saint Joseph’s Day, when the patron saint of carpenters is honoured. The fort’s design was simple—it was a square-shaped palisade made of six hundred pieces of timber with a diamond-shaped tower at each corner. The towers allowed the defending forces to fire upon attack–ers from three sides, no matter which direction they came from.

The fort was named Fort Saint-Joseph, or Fort Villebon, or Fort Nashwaak, depending on whom you spoke to. Joseph de Villebon was a fine soldier and a good governor to all reports, given to a bit of joie de vivre excess. During one celebration he had fifty kilograms of gunpowder burned to add a little bang to the bonfire, and spent the evening toasting the good health of both his mistress and his wife from a keg of fine wine, although he never toasted one when the other was within earshot.

Following Villebon’s death, the fort was abandoned to the ren–ovations of fate and time. Since then erosion and flooding have swallowed the fort’s original site, which now lies beneath the bed of the St. John River.

The Fredericton area was first permanently settled and named Pointe-Sainte-Anne, or Ste. Anne’s Point, in 1732 by Acadians fleeing Nova Scotia following the expulsion. They settled on the south side of the St. John River, a couple of kilometres upriver from the site of Fort Nashwaak. The British captured Ste. Anne’s Point in 1755 and burned the settlement to the ground. Over the years the site was warred over unsuccessfully by the Acadians, the Aboriginal populace and the British.

In 1784 New Brunswick became a separate colony from Nova Scotia and it was decided that Ste. Anne’s Point was the logical choice for a provincial capital. Its central location was easily accessible to the people of New Brunswick. Besides, it was far enough from the border to keep it safe from an American inva–sion. One had to consider these possibilities back then. The town was renamed Frederick’s Town, in honour of Prince Frederick Augustus, Duke of York, the second son of King George iii. They shortened the name to Fredericton and the rest is history. A his–tory that is undoubtedly full of ghosts. At least one of these ghosts can be found in the halls of St. Thomas University.

The older folks of this area can tell you of a large grey resi–dence building on Waterloo Row that was haunted by a piano-playing ghost. She didn’t play that badly, so the story goes, but her sense of timing left much to be desired. She was fond of banging the old residence piano at two in the morning, regardless of mid-terms or exams or the dangers of a Sunday morning following a Saturday night shindig.

Martin Morris, who at the time was serving as the don of the residence, reported seeing this spirit. Martin had been sleeping and was awoken by the sounds of piano music coming from the lower hall. He stomped angrily downstairs, assuming he was going to find a couple of frat boys, three sheets to the wind, showing off on the keyboards for their own amusement.

“Whoever is making all this noise is definitely going on report,”

Martin said as he turned the corner and stepped into the room. Only there wasn’t a frat boy in sight. Instead, he saw a woman in a long, flowing grey nightgown that looked as if it might have been made out of clouds and smoke.

She didn’t seem to notice his arrival. Martin stood there, petri–fied with terror. Sweat began to soak his armpits and a swarm of goosebumps crawled up and down his back. He felt the strands of his hair rise up, one by one.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The woman didn’t say a word. She just kept on playing a sad and lonely tune that the young man couldn’t recognize. He felt as if he should know the name of the melody, yet for the life of him he couldn’t place it.

“This is a men’s residence,” Martin said. “You’re not supposed to be in here at this time of night.”

It was a long reach and Martin knew it. He was grabbing for whatever made sense because he didn’t want to consider the possibility that she might be more than an ordinary woman. Sometimes that’s a little easier than actually admitting you might be in the presence of the impossible.

The woman kept playing on.

“Do you know any other tunes?” Martin asked. “Something a little livelier, say maybe a jig?”

He felt as if he would laugh or scream, and he wasn’t sure which reaction he’d give in to.

Just then another resident, Ansel Kutter, a young Moncton lad who had aspirations of the priesthood, stepped into the room. He saw the don, and he saw the spectral woman playing the piano, and he didn’t hesitate for an instant.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he shouted, making the sign of the cross in mid-air. “I command you to tell me who you are, and to state your purpose.”

And just as easy as a summer breeze, the spectre turned around and smiled at the two trembling men. “My name is Loretta Duncan,” she said, and with that she vanished like a candle blowing out.

The next evening Martin and Ansel felt ready for anything. They stood in the darkness of the room, watching the piano closely.

“Will she turn up?” Martin wondered.

“Shhh,” Ansel warned. He seemed the stronger of the two, but the fact was that Ansel was as frightened as Martin.

Only the woman didn’t show.

“Perhaps she isn’t coming,” Martin said.

And with that, the piano began to glow softly, like the flicker of a dying campfire.

Ansel opened his mouth, but closed it without saying anything, too frightened to speak.

And then all at once the piano began to play by itself, like one of those old player pianos. The music was so hauntingly sad that both men felt tears come to their eyes. Ansel and Martin drew closer, trying to get a better look. They could see a shape now, vaguely human, more of a light than anything else, sitting upon the piano bench and playing.

Martin felt a strange compulsion, like a whistle that only a dog could hear, but had to obey. Martin stepped forward, feeling completely out of control. He sat at the piano and began to play.

Ansel stared at his friend sitting there playing with the soft glow of the woman’s shape flickering around him.

“It was as if she were wearing him like a borrowed suit of clothes,” Ansel said afterwards.

Within moments, tears were streaming from Martin’s eyes. He was terrified, but for the life of him he couldn’t stop playing.

Ansel began to say the Lord’s Prayer over and over, hoping to ward off the evil spirit but nothing seemed to help. Furniture moved of its own accord. A desk slid across the floor. A closet door opened and slammed shut repeatedly although Ansel could see no one in sight.

Martin continued to play, coaxing notes from the old keyboard, the tears raining down his face. After a time he stopped playing.

He sat there at the keyboard, sobbing mutely.

“What’s wrong?” Ansel asked. “What happened?”

Martin turned towards Ansel. His eyes were stark and hollow with sorrow and a little terror.

“He never writes,” Martin said. “She waits and she waits, but he never writes.”

And that’s all he would say. Days later he could barely remem–ber the experience, or perhaps he merely didn’t want to. The piano was moved into the basement and eventually to a second-hand store. The spirit continued to haunt the residence, some–times pushing furniture about and sometimes slamming doors.

Neighbourhood dogs would bark uncontrollably as they passed the building.

Folks believed that the spirit haunted this residence for a rea–son, but the reasons given often varied. Some believed the spirit was a mother waiting for word of her missing son. Others swore it was a heartbroken lover just waiting for a letter from the one who had broken her heart. It is said that the sound of a piano can still be heard on certain nights and that the spirit who walks these lonely college halls will never be at rest.

19

THE HOWLING

GHOST OF

HOWLAND RIDGE

HOWLAND RIDGE

Back in the day folks told an awful lot of ghost stories, mostly to keep their minds off the reality and terror of the world they lived in. There were just so many things to be frightened of. Tuberculosis was a big one. Back then, if somebody developed a case of tuberculosis it was time to dim the lamps, hang a black wreath on the door, and call for a preacher. They just didn’t have the medicines or the doctors or the hospitals that we have today.

Back then, a case of tuberculosis meant you tucked your toes into bed and sucked on a bottle of laudanum, a painkilling concoction made from a mixture of opium and alcohol, likely to numb your senses as well as your aches. You waited for time to pass, and tried to while it away as well as you could.

In the little town of Howland Ridge, about thirty kilometres east of Woodstock, there lived a family by the name of Whitlock. Their oldest boy, Sam, caught himself a chill logging by the Keswick Stream, and it led to pneumonia and the onset of tuberculosis.

“Poor lad,” folks said. “He’s nothing but a lunger.”

Now a lunger was what people called tuberculosis sufferers, and it was kind of a short way of saying that someone was not long for this world.

Poor Sam took to his bed and only ventured out to the front porch of his family home. He’d sit huddled on his grey willow rocking chair, wrapped in a grey railroad blanket, looking down the hill at the town he’d grown up in, wondering to himself if he’d see one more year. He did his best to keep his spirits up, grinning when he could and chuckling whenever he had the wind. Yes sir and yes ma’am, folks always did say Sam Whitlock had himself one heck of a sense of humour.

Now folks didn’t come around to the Whitlock home that year, on account of they were afraid that the tuberculosis might be catching. Naturally, Sam wasn’t allowed to go out amongst the public for fear that he might accidentally cough or breathe or spit blood on someone else. So when a group of local loggers spot–ted what looked to be young Sam Whitlock out strolling through the middle of a logjam in the heart of the Keswick Stream, they were so surprised you could have hung a handful of hats on their bugged out eyes.

“He was standing there, right in the thick of things,” one old logger said. “Big and bold as Johnny-you-please. We’d been beating on this logjam with peavies and long poles, trying to free it up to run only we weren’t having much luck, you under–stand. The felled trees were jammed up tight. We’d about given up on the whole notion when somebody noticed young Sam Whitlock standing out there on a felled pine in the middle of the stream.”

Those who’d seen him described him as being unusually tall and stick-like and strangely insubstantial.

“He looked a little like his bones and meat were poured together with smoke and seafoam,” another witness said. “Like he was there and not there, like a dream you’re remembering over a glass of strong rum.”

However Sam Whitlock never left his home that day. In fact, he was lying on his deathbed, gasping painfully through his last few breaths.

At the end of it, he grinned and tried his best for one more joke. “Well boys, I guess I’ll go out with a howl,” and then he drew in his breath to make one last whoop, only they say he choked up and couldn’t let the breath back out. His face turned blue like a winter moon, and his cheeks billowed out like wind strained sails, and then all at once the strength ran out of Sam Whitlock and he up and died.

That was right about when the logjam that was blocking up the Keswick Stream let go. The felled timbers that were clogged in the water tumbled free and ran down towards the mill. The watching lumbermen whooped for joy. Folks said they could hear the echo clear into the town.

People in the Howland Ridge area will also tell a tale of how hunters have seen the ghost of Sam Whitlock howling like a New Brunswick panther through the woods, not as loud as the Dungarvon Whooper, but loud enough to send a herd of goose–bumps galloping up a grown man’s backbone. Woodsmen have seen a grey figure moving through the woods, and when they try to approach, he disappears.

“All grey and hazy,” they’ll tell you. “Like he was made out of smoke and seafoam.”

They tell this story in Howland Ridge sometime after the rum has been poured — and they always tell it soft, in a whisper, just in case the ghost of Sam Whitlock happens to be listening nearby.

20

THE DARK

CHUCKLE

LOWER WOODSTOCK

Some folks claim that laughter is one of the finest tonics known to man, but in the town of Lower Woodstock, New Brunswick, a chuckle might very well be an omen of impending doom.

The town of Woodstock lies at the mouth of the Meduxnekeag River where it flows into the St. John River. Medux-nekeag is taken from the Maliseet word for “rough and rocky at its mouth,” and any–one who has ever tried to say Meduxne-keag River five times fast, will certainly agree with that translation. Just try and see how rough and rocky it is in your mouth.

The town was originally settled by Loyalists following the American War of Independence. It is the oldest incorpo–20 rated town in New Brunswick, achieving this status way back in 1856. The town was officially divided into three separate sections —the Upper Corner, the Creek Village, and Lower Woodstock.

For many years, the Maliseet who lived on the old Lower Woodstock reservation lived in fear of the sound of laughter. Not just any laughter, mind you. It was a certain eerie chuckle heard on nights when the moon was clear and bright. The Maliseet swore they could hear the chuckle, low and raspy like a creaking coffin hinge, and anyone who heard it knew that before the night was out a member of the tribe would die.

And die they would, whether of sickness, or drowning on the Meduxnekeag River, or in some hunting accident. The chuckle might bring on a fishing accident, or a murder, or just the slow and creaking slip of old age. Nothing and nobody was safe. Any time a Maliseet heard that croaking, creaking chuckle, they would shiver and prepare to mourn.

It was “a very weird sound, almost guttural, like a duck being choked,” reported Dr. Peter Paul of Lower Woodstock. “After a death, someone would always remark that they had heard the chuckle three or four days before.”

This carried on throughout the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Only a startling, gruesome discovery brought an end to the eerie New Brunswick forerunner.

In 1930, a local demolition crew tearing down an old abandoned house came across a small collection of animal bones on the prop–erty. As they continued to root and dig they found a human skull, and realized that the bones were in fact human in origin.

A little careful investigation unearthed the identity of these long buried bones. A pathologist in Saint John went over them carefully and came to the conclusion that they were the remains of Noel Lolar, an old-time Maliseet moose-hunting guide who had lived at the house back in the early 1840s. Lolar had lived there with a woman whose name no one could recall.

Apparently Lolar had passed away of natural causes, but because he had been living with this woman without ever having married her, the local priest denied him a burial site in conse–crated ground. As far as the pathologist could guess, the woman had buried Lolar in a drainage ditch on his land, and had then left the county to go and live with relatives.

She probably hadn’t meant any harm in her actions. It prob–ably seemed like the best way to deal with someone who’d gone and died. Bones needed burying, and if the man in the collar told her she couldn’t bury them inside the fenced-off orchard of gravestones, then it was an easy enough decision to bury him in a ditch. She was a small woman, by all reports and the ditch was probably soft for digging.

The local Maliseet holy men decided that these bones were the actual source of the ominous chuckle, and thought that they could only truly be put to rest if they were buried in consecrated ground. The new priest had no objections, and in 1930 the long dead bones of Noel Lolar were finally laid to rest in a Lower Woodstock burial ground.

Locals swear that since that belated burial the chuckle of death has not been heard in the Woodstock night. All the same, the Maliseet around Lower Woodstock are pretty careful just how they crack their jokes on certain moonless nights.

Don’t laugh now. There’s no telling just who might be listening.

21

THE

SHIKTEHAWK VIKINGS

BRISTOL

“Cattle die, kinsmen die, all men are mortal,” the old Vikings said. “Only the legends live on.”

However, even names can die as we’ve already seen in a couple of our other stories. The village of Bristol, New Brunswick, was once known as Shiktehawk —a Maliseet word that means “where he killed him.” The word refers to a legendary battle between the Maliseet and their old foe the Mohawk. The battle was decided by a one-on-one showdown between the chiefs.

According to the legend the Maliseet chief won, and Shiktehawk was where he killed the Mohawk chief.

Shiktehawk lends itself to a lot of unfortunate incorrect pro–nunciations, so way back in the late nineteenth century the name of the village was changed to Bristol, after the city in Britain. The name was selected by the postmaster general, who originally hailed from Bristol. One wonders if he was homesick.

This story takes place where the Shiktehawk River branches into the St. John River. A band of treasure hunters were out for an evening of excavation, hot on the trail of one of Captain Kidd’s numerous caches.

“It’s here,” one of them shouted. “I know it is.”

Just then the edge of somebody’s spade clanked hard against something that sounded a lot like a wooden chest.

“We’ve found a coffin,” one of them swore. “We’ve been dig–ging in a graveyard.”

“You daft fool,” the leader said. “It isn’t a coffin. It’s a chest and it sounds to me as if it’s laden with gold.”

He thumped again, and before anyone could think to ask just what gold sounded like when it was cased up neatly in a box of rotting timber, an apparition loomed up out of the darkness.

Sailing down the Shiktehawk, just as big and bold as Johnny-be-pleased was what the fortune hunters later described as a great glowing Viking longship. The sides of the stout craft were armoured with heavy round shields. The deck was lively with the clamour of heavily armed Vikings. The ship’s prow sliced through the water like a keen hunting knife.

“You could see their beards and hair blazing about them like golden fire,” one man swore, “and they were singing something that sounded a little like a dirge or a war song. I could smell the coppery tang of fresh-spilled blood in the air and the dragon fig–urehead roared out at us like a lion.”

There was nothing else to do, but turn and run blindly into the night, leaving picks and shovels and the treasure map behind them. In the morning when the would-be treasure hunters had mustered up the courage to return and continue their search, there wasn’t one of them that could find his way back to the site.

Historians have proven that the Vikings did indeed make their way to New Brunswick from their base in Newfoundland. They called it Vinland way back then, perhaps for the bright blueber–ries or blackberries growing throughout the woods. The strongest proof is the presence of wild walnut trees, or butternut trees as they were called back then. Butternut trees, which are native to New Brunswick, were found growing at l’Anse aux Meadows, a known Viking settlement, but do not grow anywhere else in Newfoundland.

Did old Vikings sail down the Shiktehawk River and leave behind a treasure chest? Or perhaps their ghosts were sailing the river in search of plunder? It might be that the poor frightened treasure hunters looked like easy pickings to those bold Viking spirits.

Why don’t you set out some night along the Shiktehawk River with a pick and a spade and find out for yourself some time soon?

22

ECHOES IN A

COVERED BRIDGE

JOHNVILLE

Forget about Madison County —the world’s most beautiful covered bridges reside in New Brunswick. Mind you, these bridges are a vanishing breed.

They are old and losing ground in the battle against steel and plastic and profit margins; still, as of 2006, a total of sixty-five authentic covered bridges of a total of nearly three hundred back in the 1960s remained in New Brunswick.

One of the province’s most famous bridges has been swept from the land–scape, but folks around Johnville still remember the Keenan Covered Bridge that crossed the Monquart River in Carleton County. The bridge was known for its beauty and its haunting story, and tourists would travel from miles around to visit, take a few snap–shots, and hold hands as they walked through its creaking splen–dour. However, the local folks tended to steer clear of the Keenan Covered Bridge, detouring for miles if they had to. They knew that it was truly haunted and they had no wish to court the dark–ness that lurked within.

The story begins back in the 1800s when an old woman appar–ently vanished somewhere along the twenty-six metre length of the covered bridge while out for her evening walk.

“She walked on in,” locals will tell you. “But she never came out on the other side. Not in one piece, anyway.”

The history books haven’t left us with her name, but folks around Johnville sometimes call her Molly —and sometimes they call her Headless Hannah. A headless female cadaver was reputedly found upon the roadway just beyond the bridge back in 1890.

The original bridge was built back in the 1800s, then torn down and rebuilt in 1927. It was during this reconstruction that the dried and desiccated remains of a human head were dug up by bridge workers. They assumed that the head belonged to the body found nearby forty years before, and reburied it a little fur–ther from the bridge.

“She’ll rest in peace here,” the foreman was heard to pronounce.

Shortly after the reconstruction and the burial of the head folks began reporting that the bridge was haunted. A woman in a long black dress and shawl would often materialize upon carriages as they passed through the darkness of the bridge. Not much of a cause for panic, I suppose, except that this old woman was headless.

One farmer crossing the dark bridge in his wagon noticed that someone was holding onto his hand. The grip felt cold as if the hand holding his had been dipped in icy river water. He squinted and stared into the darkness as a shape slowly formed directly beside him. It was the headless ghost of the Keenan Covered Bridge. A low moan, like wind whistling through a broken win–dow, emanated from the stump of her neck. The farmer, nor–mally a hard-headed New Brunswick fellow, fainted dead away. He awoke on the other side of the bridge, his horse in a complete state of panic. It took a full week before he found the nerve to tell his sister the story. Until his confession, he had just sat on her front porch and stared down the road towards the Keenan Covered Bridge.

Since then the headless woman has been spotted on the road–way and in the shadows of the bridge and sometimes standing under it. She has appeared in automobiles and trailers causing panic and excitement. So far as the records show she has never done anyone harm.

Some folks believe that she’s simply searching for her miss–ing head. Other people believe she is hunting for whoever mur–dered her. She may haunt that area still, but on May 3, 2001, an unexplained fire burned the Keenan Covered Bridge down to the ground. Some people blame it on kids and others will tell you that someone had a grudge against the local fire chief. So far as I know, nothing has been proven.

The local people have wondered if this will mark an end to Headless Hannah’s reign of terror. I’m not sure if it will or not. A photograph that was taken of the remains of the bridge follow–ing the fire clearly shows the face of a woman charred into the end grain of a piece of timber. Experts were called in and the photograph reached the media, but no one could come up with a plausible explanation. A few days after the photograph was taken rain obliterated the image on the wood, but the photograph still remains.

There’s a new bridge now, all shiny and modern. Only time will tell if old Headless Hannah will return to the place where the Keenan Covered Bridge once stood.

23

MALABEAM OF

THE MALISEET

GRAND FALLS

Thomas Carleton, the first governor of New Brunswick, established a mili–tary post in 1791 on the St. John River, just shy of the Maine border. With true New Brunswick modesty he named the outpost Fort Carleton. The settlement that grew around the fort was known as Colebrook until 1890 when the town was incorporated and its name was officially changed to Grand Falls, or Grand-Sault as it is also known. Grand Falls is one of two Canadian municipalities to possess an officially bilingual name, which only stands to reason, as the town is the most bilingual in all of Canada. Over eighty percent of the population speaks both French and English.

Grand Falls was named after the spectacular waterfalls in the town, where the rolling St. John River falls about twenty-three metres. They are the highest falls in the province, and some say that they are rivalled only by Niagara Falls for their awesome splendour.

As the late New Brunswick historian W. O. Raymond wrote in his book, The St. John River (1910): “Every traveller should visit the Grand Falls. No description or illustration will suffice to give a just idea of their majesty and beauty.”

And so I won’t waste any more time or effort trying to describe these falls to you. Instead let me tell you the story of Malabeam, the maiden of the Maliseet, a tale that most residents of Grand Falls will be happy to relate to you.

Let me take you back to the old days—life was hard, and people had to take their leisure where they could find it. So it was that way back in the fourteenth century, Malabeam, a young Maliseet maid, and her father, Sacotis, rested themselves upon the green and mossy banks of a quiet stretch of the St. John River. Of course in those days the Maliseet called the river the Wullustock, which means “the good and beautiful river,” but whether good or beautiful, the Wullustock could fool you if you weren’t careful.

Malabeam and Sacotis relaxed after a long hard day spent pad–dling their canoe and fishing for the salmon that teemed through the river. Nowadays the river has been built up with the addi–tion of hydroelectric dams and growing industrialization and the salmon runs are a little less plentiful. Back in the early days of New Brunswick it was said that a man could cross the Wullustock during salmon season simply by walking upon the backs of the seething fish. That may have been a bit of an exaggeration, but suffice it to say the salmon were thick.

“It is good to feel the sun on my face and hear the river talking to the rocks,” Sacotis said.

“And what is the river saying to the rocks, Father?” Malabeam asked, with a sly and playful grin.

Sacotis smiled back at his daughter. Another father might have been angry with a daughter with such a ready wit, but Sacotis could never bring himself to find anger in his heart for Malabeam. She was the sun and the moon of his life. He steered by her advice in all of his decision making.

“The Wullustock is telling the rocks that Sacotis will stand by his daughter Malabeam forever and ever as long as the river rolls through the land.”

Ah me, if only someone had told Sacotis that you need to be very careful talking about forever and ever when you are standing in the heart of a story, for at this point in the tale, a band of three hundred Maine Mohawk warriors intent on raiding the Maliseet village of Meductic rose up from the nearby woods and promptly surrounded Malabeam and Sacotis.

So quickly did the Mohawk warriors spring upon Malabeam and Sacotis that the two of them did not have any kind of chance to escape. Sacotis rose to his feet with his hunting knife in hand, but he might as well have been waving a feather. Before the old man could take two steps, a Mohawk spear was driven through his heart. The spear drove him to the ground. Malabeam knelt beside him and in as short a time as it took you to read this sen–tence her father’s blood soaked into the New Brunswick dirt, and he died in her arms.

With a shriek like a hunting hawk, Malabeam snatched up her father’s knife, determined to have her vengeance, but the Mohawk chief had hold of her before she could use the blade on them or herself.

“You will lead us to your village,” the Mohawk chief told her.

“If you bring us there quick and quiet we will spare your life. This is your only chance to live.”

Malabeam looked up at the warrior with hatred in her eyes.

He was a man, as any other, but in those days the lines between men were carved pretty deep. He was of another tribe and he had killed her father. That was all that Malabeam of the Maliseet needed to know.

“What will you do at my village?” Malabeam asked.

The Mohawk chief laughed. What did she think they would do?

“We will kill your men,” he answered truthfully, “and capture your women. But if you help us you may live with me as my wife.”

Malabeam stood there a minute, pretending to think the Mohawk chief’s offer over.

“We will need to travel by canoe,” Malabeam said. “My village is downriver and too far to walk to.”

“We have canoes,” the Mohawk chief said. “We took them from some fishermen upstream. Let us go.”

Malabeam did not know what to do. Her people were farm–ers and hunters, not warriors. They grew maize and squash and beans. They fished, and they wandered where the game would take them. Taken unawares, they would be easy pickings for the fierce Mohawk warriors.

“Follow me,” Malabeam said, stepping towards her father’s canoe. She did her best not to look back at his body lying there in the dead pine needles and moss. “I will lead you in my father’s canoe.”

“Ha!” the Mohawk chief said. “Do you take me for a fool? You will lead us, but not by yourself in your own canoe.”

So saying, he bound her to the bow of her own canoe, and kept hold of her hair from behind.

“Guide us to your village,” he said. “And we will do you no harm.”

And so Malabeam led the Mohawk down the Wullustock shouting directions to them as they travelled. She showed them where to back water, when to paddle hard, and when to ride out the current. She pointed to the shallows, and made herself as use–ful to their cause as she could.

“We have found a good friend in this Maliseet maiden,” the Mohawk chief said to his warriors. He was proud of his plan, and pleased at the thought of taking her as his wife. He cut her loose, hoping to impress her with his fearless generosity.

“Here,” he said. “You can paddle beside me.”

He had made his mind up. As far as the Mohawk chief was concerned, the girl could be trusted.

More fool him.

Malabeam did nothing to harm this trust. She knew that they would do with her as they wished. No amount of reassur–ance on their part could convince her otherwise. And she also knew that she could not let the spirit of her father, Sacotis, lie unavenged, nor could she watch as the Mohawk had their way with her people. So she led them to the rushing waters of the Chikanakapeg, meaning the destroying place, now known as Grand Falls.

When the Mohawk heard the roar of the waterfalls they were frightened, but Malabeam only laughed at them as harshly as a young woman knew how to laugh at a pack of proud warriors.

“Are the mighty Mohawk afraid of a little running water?” she asked. “All that you hear is the river talking to the rocks where another stream comes together with it. Two small rivers make a big noise.”

“It sounds stronger than that,” the Mohawk chief said.

He didn’t want to appear frightened in front of his people or his bride to be, but in truth, the sound of the approaching water scared him more than a little.

“It is nothing more than a bit of whitewater,” Malabeam said, paddling all the harder. “Are the Mohawk men or little frogs? Paddle on, and claim your victory, and you will sleep with me tonight.”

She laughed at them and taunted them further until their anger rose up and they paddled harder to show her how unafraid they were. Not even the Mohawk could resist a double-dog dare. But when they rounded the bend in the river the current took them and tumbled them toward the brink of the Grand Falls.

“Come to your doom, you Mohawk braves,” Malabeam sang out as she tore free from her captors and plunged into the raging river. “And I, Malabeam of the Maliseet will lead the way.”

It is a good question as to whether or not Malabeam was diving for her freedom or simply diving in defiance of the Mohawk. In any case, every single Mohawk went over the falls to their death. Their broken and battered bodies washed ashore for days afterward. The Maliseet combed the shoreline looking for any sign of Malabeam after finding the remains of her father back in the woods.

Sadly, her body was never found. If you talk to some folks they will tell you that her spirit still haunts Grand Falls, and you can hear her calling through the crashing water, above the rush and the foam.

Other folks will tell you of an old woman who used to live in the woods that some believed was Malabeam’s ghost. She has been seen time and again wandering through the forest, perhaps searching for her father’s body, hoping to bury him properly.

I don’t know which is true. All I know is that there is more to life than just life itself, and sometimes one must give up one’s life for the sake of others. No other person in New Brunswick history epitomizes that sentiment so much as the maiden hero, Malabeam of the Maliseet.

24

THE CANNIBAL

SHE-QUEEN OF

NEW BRUNSWICK

DALHOUSIE

Chaleur Bay, or Baie des Chaleurs, meaning “the bay of heat,” was first named back in July 1534, long before old Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635) was anything more than a wishful thought in his grandfather’s heart. That didn’t stop Champlain from taking credit for nam–ing the bay or mapping the New World, particularly New Brunswick. Neither was really new at all, as any of the peo–ple of the Mi’kmaq, the Maliseet, or the Passamaquoddy could have told him if he’d bothered to ask.

Throughout most of the year chilly Chaleur Bay fails to live up to its name. It can get mighty cold that far up the New Brunswick coastline.

The bay is a little notch in the northeast corner of the province, just shy of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, and it serves to separate the Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec from New Brunswick’s north shore. There are quite a few spirits and ghosts that prowl these waters, but let me tell you about the scariest inhabitant of Chaleur Bay— Gougou the cannibal she-queen of New Brunswick.

Now I know what you’re thinking. What kind of a name is Gougou? It sounds like the kind of sound a baby might make when it is feeling happy or hungry. Well, a lot of words are short and sim–ple and yet not so sweet. Words like kill and eat and rot and taste.

So how’s your appetite now?

Gougou was named for the noise she would make from out of the depths of Chaleur Bay. Folks living nearby would hear a low and loud bubbling sound that built up to a roar. Scoffers have claimed that the sound was nothing more than the rush of the tide and the wind through coastal rock, but the Mi’kmaq will tell you that there is a lot more in this life besides what you can see and touch.

The whole thing started when Samuel de Champlain first heard an old Indian legend of Gougou, and returned to France to publish it as one of the very first descriptions of a Canadian mon–ster. The Mi’kmaq tales of a giant sea monster intrigued him so much he left a young Frenchman by the name of Vignan behind in a Mi’kmaq village to gather information. Now Champlain had a reputation for these sorts of discoveries. It was he who reput–edly discovered Champ, the monster of Lake Champlain, on the border between New York and Vermont. That is another tale for another time, but keep that bit of information firmly in mind. The fact is, Champlain liked to tell monster stories.

Vignan told Champlain of how he saw the beast Gougou standing in the waters of Chaleur Bay with a skin of fish scale and slime. Gougou was reported to be so tall that the masts of a ship could not reach her waistline. She would pluck her victims from the shore and deposit them in a large pemmican bag that she wore draped about her hips.

Other folks will tell you that the bag was an organic part of her, like a marsupial pouch. In either case, she left her victims to soften in the bag, much as the crocodile is reputed to some–times drag beasts too large to chew down under the water, wedg–ing them there until decay has rendered the meat soft enough for its poor chewing to handle. In fact, crocodiles have been known to hold pieces of meat in their mouths to rot until the meat is soft enough to swallow. Think about that the next time you’re having trouble chewing down a tough slab of beefsteak and maybe it’ll make it a little easier.

Or maybe not.

“Gougou is old,” the Mi’kmaq will tell you. “Her teeth have gone bad and she hates to chew.”

Depending on whom you talk to, Gougou is either an oversized monstrous mermaid or a giant woman with rainbow-patterned fish scales. Some say that she hides herself behind the glare of the northern lights as they play out across the bay. Others swear that Gougou resides in a lair on a rocky little island hidden deep in the belly of the Baie des Chaleurs.

Descriptions of Gougou and her location vary wildly. I reckon it’s hard to see particularly straight when you’re busy screaming in abject terror. Getting eaten by a giant-sized fish-scaled mermaid will do that to a man, if he isn’t calm at heart. It’s possible that all of the reliable witnesses are now mouldering in the capacious bottom of Gougou’s pemmican bag.

Whatever the reason, you should keep your eyes wide open when you are sailing across the Baie des Chaleurs, no matter what the time of day. That distant thunder you hear might be the rumbling of Gougou’s ever-empty belly. Sunscreen and sweat might be all the spices she needs to slide you down whole into the belly of her pemmican bag.

25

THE

PHANTOM SHIP

OF CHALEUR BAY

BATHURST

The tale of the phantom ship began in the year 1500 when a ruthless Portuguese seafarer by the name of Gaspar Corte-Real sailed into Chaleur Bay on his ves–sel, Caravel, and landed on the nearby Gaspé coastline. Gaspar made friends with the local Mi’kmaq and treated them to a great feast of food and whisky. After plying them with alcohol and smooth-talking treachery, Gaspar imprisoned them in the hold of his vessel and locked them in chains.

Gaspar planned to sell these natives in Europe as slaves. It was easy money, he thought, and who would be upset over the mistreatment of a few untaught savages?

A summer later, Gaspar returned to Chaleur Bay and landed on Heron Island. The Mi’kmaq here seemed just as gullible as those on the Gaspé coast. However, word had gotten around about Gaspar. It seemed these Mi’kmaq were not as foolish as he thought they were.

The joke was on Gaspar when the Mi’kmaq stole into his camp, butchered his men, and dragged him away to a rough trial and an even rougher justice. They carried Gaspar out to the mud flats and bound him to a rock where he could lay and watch as the tide gradually crawled up to claim his life.

“Think on what you did,” they told him.

Now a watched kettle will never boil and a tide can creep awfully slowly if you are staring at it hard enough. Gaspar burned a hole in the water with the intensity of his gaze before it crept up inch by inch to engulf him. It is said that he died screaming as the water slowly rose above his head and drowned him.

The following summer, Gaspar’s brother Miguel Corte-Real sailed into Chaleur Bay searching for his missing brother. Now the history books and legends do not tell us if Miguel was as unscru–pulous as his brother, but the local Mi’kmaq took no chances. They boarded Miguel’s vessel and when he and his men barri–caded themselves in the hold of the ship, the Mi’kmaq set fire to it. Miguel and his men died screaming as loudly as Gaspar had.

It is said that before the Mi’kmaq set the vessel alight, Miguel and his sailors joined hands in the darkness and swore a terrible oath that they would fight together and die together, and haunt the waters of Chaleur Bay for a thousand years to come.

Since then there have been many sightings of the burning ship. The phantom ship has been seen up and down the bay, its spars and sails burning and figures dancing in the flames and screaming and leaping from the masts.

The burning ship has found a home of sorts in the town of Bathurst where the people have claimed the legend as their own. In fact when you are driving into the town keep a close eye for the road sign with the painting of the burning ship. It is truly a spectacular sight.

They also say that you can still hear the cries of Gaspar in the waves that break against the rocks of Chaleur Bay. You will very likely see that flaming ship sailing across the waters for many a year yet to come.

LAST WORDS

I looked up from my last story, surprised to see just how much time had passed. The flames of the campfire had burnt down into a glowing bed of coals, and the embers were losing their spark and subsiding into the memory of the New Brunswick forest floor.

“That’s some fine storytelling,” the old man said. “It whiled away the hours nicely.”

I’ll say. The morning sun was flow–ing over the rim of the distant horizon. I could hear the birds beginning to wake up, and the sky was stretching itself awake before spreading a bright blue blanket over the woods and fields.

“Talk will do that, won’t it? Telling stories is how we pass the time between night and morning. We tell stories to each other, and then while we sleep, we dream and tell stories to ourselves.” I just sat there blinking. My mouth was dry. How long had I been talking?

“There is a tale to be found in every scrap of history,” the old man went on. “It is the storyteller’s vision that decides exactly where and when he will begin, and where and when he will end.”

I was barely listening. I had a school to get to and I wondered how many cups of coffee it would take to rouse me into action.

“And I guess this is as good a place as any to end our tale,” the old man concluded.

“You’re leaving?” I asked.

“I’m going home,” he answered. “You ought to throw some water on that fire. The New Brunswick woods are just too pretty to burn down.”

I fetched some water from a nearby stream and obediently doused the ashes. The water hissed as it hit the coals, and a ghost of smoke rose up and obscured my vision.

Through the cloud of the sudden smoke I saw the old man stand up and stretch himself out. As he stood and straightened he seemed to grow almost totem-pole tall. He leaned back and let out a hoot and a howl that echoed and re-echoed across the woods and the hills and nearly deafened me.

I closed my eyes and when I opened them he was gone, leav–ing me wondering if I had spent the whole night talking to myself, but his moccasin prints were still there by the fire.

Just once I thought I heard a quiet chuckle, but when I lis–tened closely all I could hear was the echo of his wild whoop caught in the whisper of the wind. In the far distance I was cer–tain I could hear the waves of the Atlantic, beating like hushed tom-toms on the New Brunswick shore, telling me a story I could not understand.