Where the Ghosts Are: A Guide to Nova Scotia's Spookiest Places
Where the Ghosts Are: A Guide to Nova Scotia's Spookiest Places
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781771087001 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nimbus |
| Publication date: | 11/19/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Ghosts of White Point Beach Resort
43° 57' 57" N, 64° 44' 09" W
One of the true pleasures of my storytelling profession is when I am asked to go and tell stories in other parts of the province and/or the country. I have told my ghost stories several times down at the wonderful White Point Beach Resort and Lodge and I always have had a wonderful time there.
Originally founded in 1928 as a private hunting and fishing lodge, White Point eventually grew to become one of Nova Scotia's most well known vacation spots, employing almost two hundred Nova Scotia workers. Then, on November 12, 2011, tragedy struck: the main lodge caught fire and burned down.
Thanks to a lot of hard work, White Point Lodge was rebuilt and reopened exactly one year later, better than ever. Now, a lot of you folks might know that White Point Lodge is actually supposed to be haunted by not just one, but several ghosts.
Let me tell you a bit about them.
The most well known White Point ghost would be the spirit of Ivy. Ivy was the wife of Harvey Elliot, one of the earlier owners of the lodge. Ivy managed the resort's food and beverage department. She was, by all reports, a very tough lady to work for. She was a stickler for detail and would not put up with the slightest infraction of culinary etiquette. For example, if a piece of silverware was placed in the wrong location upon the dining tables Ivy would be known to pick up the offending bit of cutlery and fling it at whichever employee had the misfortune to misplace it.
To this day employees all have their own particular Ivy story, even though the woman passed away over fifty years ago.
"I was working late one evening about ten years back, setting the dining room for a large convention banquet that was scheduled to take place the very next day," Sid, a bartender at the Lodge's bar told me back in 2010, during my first Halloween visit to the lodge. "I was tired and I guess I had somehow misplaced a dessert spoon," Sid said. "By the time I realized my mistake I was absolutely exhausted. I did not want to go back and reset each of the tables for the sake of that one stupid spoon.
"At that point," Sid went on, "the dining-room lights went out. I fumbled in the dark for five whole minutes before finally finding the proper switch. When the lights came back on, I was surprised to see a dessert spoon flying at me, clanging off of my forehead and leaving a mark. I was even more surprised when I realized the entire dining room had been reset, with the dessert spoons all carefully re-laid in the proper position."
He grinned at this point and tipped me a wry wink.
"I don't really know if there is such a thing as ghosts," Sid said, "but I believe deep down in my heart of hearts that Ivy was looking out for me that night. She reset the tables and then she flung that spoon just to remind me not to make that same mistake twice. And do you know what?" Sid went on, "I haven't made that same mistake ever again. I just look at a dessert spoon and my head starts to ache all over again."
The interesting part of this story is that I heard similar tales from several of the wait staff as well as the people at the front desk. Ivy is still well known to the employees of the White Point Resort Lodge — but she isn't the only ghost that haunts this establishment.
There is also a ghost of a caretaker named Danny who resided in what was then known as Cabin 20, but is now Unit 137. Danny was a close friend of Ivy's and after she passed away he was often seen walking through the trails, talking to himself as if he were talking to his good friend Ivy.
The ghost of that old caretaker is still seen in front of his cabin. Sometimes he sits in a rocking chair while other times he is seen raking leaves in the autumn. Whenever anyone tries to get closer to the ghost he simply fades away or else steps behind a nearby tree and disappears.
Besides the ghost of Danny there is also a third ghost that haunts White Point Lodge. This would be the ghost of a nine-year-old boy whose family lived in the area in the early 1920s — back before the lodge was even built. The boy reportedly drowned while rafting off of White Point and his body was never recovered.
One look at the waves that relentlessly pound the White Point shoreline and you can imagine just how much difficulty a nine-year-old boy would have trying to steer a raft. Apparently, he had originally just set out to go a little ways into the water, but a rogue current caught the raft and led to his untimely demise.
The boy's ghost is the shyest spirit to haunt the lodge. His apparition is rarely seen, but he is always described as wearing old-fashioned overalls and a rumpled white shirt. He is most often spotted upon the rocks or else out on his raft, drifting eternally.
These three ghosts, in my opinion, definitely rank White Point Lodge a spot on my top ten-list of most haunted locations in Nova Scotia.
CHAPTER 2The Yarmouth County Jail
43° 52' 25" N, 66° 07' 03" W
Constructed in the year 1865, the brick-and-granite structure of the Yarmouth County Jail looms prominently over the smaller residential houses of Main Street, situated directly across from the Yarmouth Firefighters Museum.
The building contained living quarters for the jailer as well as his family. There were a total of nineteen jail cells as well as one large barred room that was used as a makeshift debtor's prison, for folks who could not pay their bills on time. The cells were laid out in tiers, with the bottom level being reserved for the male prisoners. The female and male prisoners who had yet to go to trial were kept on the upper floor.
The walls and ceiling were made out of concrete that was whitewashed yearly, as if to mask the despair, hatred, and guilt that lingered. Each cell was furnished with a sturdy iron bed frame that was fixed to the wall, topped with a straw mattress, two blankets, and no sheets or pillows.
There was a prison yard surrounded by a high fence, and the prisoners spent their time breaking rocks down into gravel for the streets of the town. Yup, sounds like it was a really great place to live, so long as you didn't have to stay there for more than a half an hour or so.
Over the years there have been many signs of hauntings within the cold, hard walls of the Yarmouth County Jail. Aside from the wildly varying temperature, water faucets turning on and off by themselves, and the sounds of moaning, shrieks, and hammering at nighttime, the eerie figure of a woman has been spotted wandering the corridors. She carries a lantern and appears to be looking for someone. Some witnesses of this phantom have also reported hearing the unmistakable footsteps of someone clicking along the wooden floorboards in a pair of fancy high-heeled shoes.
Darker still is the report of witnesses who swear they have heard the sound of a man screaming in the darkness, accompanied by the apparent reek of burning flesh. Experts believe this might be the ghost of Omar P. Roberts, who was convicted in a trial at the Yarmouth Courthouse in 1922 after burning his housekeeper, Flora Grey, to death in a fit of jealous rage. Roberts was madly obsessed with her and when she spurned his romantic advances due to his much greater age, hatred kindled deep within his heart. In his mindless anger he burned his house to the ground with Flora inside and got himself badly burned in the process.
Flora survived just long enough to identify Roberts as her murderer.
Omar P. Roberts was the last man to be hanged in Yarmouth. They hanged him at dawn on November 24, 1922. The execution was kept secret, for fear of a public uproar. The only witnesses reported were two local clergymen, the town doctor, the jailer, and a fellow prisoner who had been asked to assist in the duty. Roberts was also buried in secrecy. Most folks agree he was buried in an unmarked grave in the Yarmouth Cemetery; other folks have whispered that Omar P. Roberts was actually buried in behind the prison, in a quiet corner of the exercise yard.
It is his ghost people believe most frequently haunts the deserted halls of the Yarmouth County Jail. Interestingly, although the jailhouse served the Yarmouth region for almost 140 years, closing down in 2004, a local developer has purchased the old Yarmouth Jail from the township and intends to completely renovate the facility to construct a social and artistic hub. She hopes the darker history of the jailhouse will draw hordes of tourists.
"When we were kids we used to actually cross to the other side of the street rather than walk in front of the jail," the developer confessed. "With a little luck and a whole lot of work we might eventually manage to draw the kind of tourist traffic San Francisco enjoys with Alcatraz Island."
At the time of writing, the jailhouse is still in dire need of renovation. There is lead paint upon the walls. The building has no lighting, no working electrical system, and the plumbing is shot. The roof is nothing more than a thin funereal veil. It will take an awful lot of work to bring this old building back from the dead, but the developer hopes to eventually open up a full-scale restaurant on the top floor, a community performing art space on the second floor, and a small business centre in the basement.
I will be very interested to see what the ghosts make out of all of these brand new developments.
CHAPTER 3I Seen What I Says That I Seen
43° 29' 39" N, 65° 43' 05" W
Around 11:45 P.M. on October 4, 1967, a car full of Nova Scotian citizens witnessed a low-flying, brightly lit object careening into the cold starlit waters of Shag Harbour. An eighteen-year-old fisherman named Laurie Wickens was driving the car. Travelling along with Laurie was a long-time buddy of his, as well as their girlfriends. The four of them were returning home from a dance at Cape Sable Island, about thirteen miles to the east. It was a moonless night. The skies were calm and clear.
Almost ominous, some folks would say.
"We looked off to our right from the car and saw a line of lights flashing in the sky over the harbour," Laurie Wickens reported. "One would be on, and then another one and then a third and fourth in a kind of running sequence and then they'd all be on at once and then it'd start all over."
They thought the lights came from an airplane but it didn't look like any airplane they had ever seen before. The lights steadily picked up speed, heading westward towards Shag Harbour.
"If it was a plane it was in trouble," Laurie Wickens went on. "It tipped this way and that way and then went down over a hill and we lost sight of it. By the time we crossed over the hill to where we could see it again, it had gone down into the water."
By the time they reached the waterfront several members of the town arrived to witness this eerie mystery soaring high above the waters of Shag Harbour. A pale-yellow, moon-shaped light hovered eight feet above the water and eight hundred feet from the shore, following the ebbing October tide and trailing a long wake of pale-yellow foam behind it.
"The foam stuff looked like a big floating giant snail trail," one witness said.
Laurie Wickens and his friends jumped back into their car and drove a half a mile further down the highway to a Lower Woods Harbour gas station. They fed a dime into a payphone and called the local RCMP detachment. Laurie Wickens reached RCMP Corporal Victor Werbicki at the Barrington detachment and reported what they'd seen.
"How much rum do you have in you, Laurie?" Corporal Werbicki asked. "One bottle or two?"
"Listen here, mister man, I'm as a sober as a Baptist judge on a Sunday morning," Laurie Wickens tartly replied. "And I seen what I says that I seen."
"My other desk phone is ringing," Werbicki said. "Just stay put and I'll send someone out there to see."
Werbicki hung up the phone. It rang again. Three more people phoned in reports of the eerie lights in the sky, and how they believed some sort of an aircraft had crashed into the cold depths of Shag Harbour.
This wasn't a joke.
Corporal Werbicki radioed two other constables on patrol, Ron O'Brian and Ron Pond, and the three Mounties drove down to the harbour.
Corporal Werbicki first reached local fisherman Lawrence Smith as he was heading for bed after a long day spent working on his boat.
"There's a plane down in the harbour," Werbicki told Smith. "I want you to go on out and have a look and see for us. I'm phoning Bradford Shand to bring his boat out as well."
"Makes sense to me," Smith replied. "Two boats can search better than one."
The two skippers and their crews took their boats out into the water searching for a crash site and possible survivors. The men were scared stiff of what they might find but they were determined to do their best to help out; yet all they discovered was that strange foamy slick, nearly eighty feet wide and a half a mile long swathing across the water of the Shag Harbour Sound.
"I wasn't too fussy about sailing into that foamy stuff," Lawrence Smith said. "But I didn't have much all that much say in the matter. You just couldn't avoid it, you understand."
The foam had the consistency of shaving cream, only with a glittering gold sheen across the surface. They even tried to scoop the weird floating foam up but the stuff just ran between their fingers.
"All we found was a patch of yellowish-brown foam on the water," Laurie Smith stated. "The colour looked a lot like burnt pancakes to me, you know when they are good and brown."
"That foam smelled foul," Shand added. "Just like burnt sulphur. It was nothing like any pancakes I ever breakfasted on."
The RCMP contacted the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, which in turn contacted the Coast Guard. By this time several other fishermen had showed up in their own fishing boats. A Coast Guard cutter joined them in their search an hour or so later and then reported to the RCMP: "No aircraft — private, commercial, or military — had been reported missing anywhere along the eastern seaboard of Canada or the northern United States."
Teams of Navy and Coast Guard divers descended down into the depths of the harbour, however they didn't find a thing. A day and a half later, the Canadian Defence Department issued the following memo:
"A preliminary investigation has been carried out by the Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax and it has been determined that this UFO sighting wasn't caused by a flare, float, aircraft or any known object."
Other Reported Sightings
Mind you, the UFO sightings weren't strictly limited to the Shag Harbour area. Air Canada Captain Pierre Charbounneau, flying from the Halifax Stanfield International Airport on Air Canada Flight 305, pointed out to co-pilot Bob Ralph that there was something strange going on to the left of the aircraft at about 7:15 P.M. on the evening of October 4, 1967. The captain noted in his flight report that the two men observed a string of bright lights and a brilliantly lit rectangular object.
Both pilot and co-pilot reported seeing some sort of silent explosion, as if something had hit the aircraft. The two men agreed that it looked as if the whole thing faded into a blue hazy cloud.
At almost the very same time, author and Nova Scotia UFO expert Don Ledger reports in The UFO Files (Nimbus Publishing, 2007), that local Darrel Dorey, his sister Annette, and his mother were sitting on their front porch in Mahone Bay, when they noticed a large bright object manoeuvring above the southwestern horizon.
They weren't the only ones who saw something. UFO sightings were reported that day and the following from as far up the coast as Halifax Harbour. Now, while some of those sightings were undoubtedly just an easily explained outbreak of mass hysteria mixed with a dose of UFO fever, others were not as easily dismissed.
One Possible Theory
I recently read an editorial in the opinion pages of an October 2017 Halifax Chronicle Herald newspaper that suggested several unnamed fishermen owned a case of emergency flares, a few months too far beyond their "best before" date.
Fearing a possible mishap due to the flare's instability, the fishermen decided to set them off out at sea where they could do no damage. Following their impromptu fireworks display, the fishermen sailed back to Shag Harbour. When they spotted the RCMP and the crowd of people gathered at the shoreline they decided to opt for discretion — for fear that their harmless disposal of the bright rescue flares might get them into serious trouble.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Where the Ghosts Are"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Steve Vernon.
Excerpted by permission of Nimbus Publishing Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Section I South Shore
1 The Ghosts of White Point Beach Resort 4
2 The Yarmouth County Jail 7
3 I Seen What I Says That I Seen 10
4 The Haunted Churchill Mansion 15
5 The Frost Park Phantom 20
6 The Heartsick Ghost of Seal Island 23
7 The Yarmouth Runic Stone 27
8 Where the Blue Lady Walks 30
Section 2 Western Shore
9 The Parker Road Phantom 35
10 The Stem-ta-Stern Hanged Man 40
11 The Two Battles of Bloody Creek 43
l2 The Bloody Creek Crater 46
13 The Ghosts of Haliburton House 50
Section 3 Northern Shore & Cape Breton
14 The Drummer Boy of Ghost Lake 55
15 The Lonely Ghosts Of Broughton 59
16 The Ghost Train of Barrachois 62
17 The Golden Arm 67
18 A Miracle At Tim Hortons 73
19 The Critter of Cranberry Lake 77
20 The Phantom Ship of Northumberland Strait 81
21 The Dagger Woods Howler 85
Section 4 Eastern Shore
22 The Crousetown Canary 91
23 The Grey Lady of Stoney Beach 95
24 The Grey Lady of Seaforth 99
25 The Hammering Soldier of Petpeswick 101
26 The Ghost of Haddon Hall 105
27 Mahone Bay and the Ghost of the Young Teazer 109
28 The Moser River Mauler 113
Section 5 Central & Halifax
29 Where the Ghost Walks 118
30 The Ghost of Alexander Keith 123
31 The Privateer's Warehouse 125
32 A Triple-Barrelled Curse 130
33 A Fortress Built on the Bones of a Double Dozen Ghost Stories 133
34 Ghosts of the Halifax Explosion 140
35 The Whispering Dead of the Chebucto Road School 143
36 The Haunted Window of St. Paul's 145
37 The Ghosts of the Five Fishermen Restaurant 147
38 The Henry House Heebie-Jeebie 150
39 The Halifax Explosion Memorial Bell Tower 153
40 The Ghost of the Halifax Armoury 157
41 The Bayers Lake Mystery Walls 160
42 The Spring Garden Road Memorial Public Library 164
43 The George Street Celtic Cross 168
44 Double Alex at The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic 171
45 The Old Halifax Courthouse 175
46 Dead on Delivery 179
47 More Ghost Stories Than You Can Shake a Pitchfork At! 183
48 The Last Bow of the Ghost Light 190
49 Oscar Wilde Has His Final Say 197
50 The Pirate's Ghost of Point Pleasant Park 198