Screech!, page 1
Contents
Screech! An Introduction
Why is Newfoundland So Haunted?
Where the Stories Came From
A Note about Names and Places
The Stories
The Ghostly Longboat
The Final Goodbye
The Skylarking Ballerinas
The Terrible Light
A Visit from the Old Hag
The Blueberry Ghost
The Darkness in Caplin Cove
The Echo
The Ghosts of Pushthrough
Alone on the Barrens
Tips for Spooky Storytelling
Glossary
Acknowledgements
About the author
Text copyright © 2020, Charis Cotter
Artwork copyright © 2020, Genevieve Simms
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.
Nimbus Publishing Limited
3660 Strawberry Hill Street, Halifax, NS, B3K 5A9
(902) 455-4286 nimbus.ca
Printed and bound in Canada
NB1424
Editor: Whitney Moran
Cover Design: Heather Bryan
Interior Design: Jenn Embree
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Screech! : ghost stories from old Newfoundland / Charis Cotter;
art by Genevieve Simms.
Names: Cotter, Charis, author. | Simms, Genevieve, illustrator.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200270745 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200270974 | ISBN 9781771089067
(softcover) | ISBN 9781771089074 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Ghosts—Newfoundland and Labrador—Juvenile literature. | LCSH: Haunted places—
Newfoundland and Labrador—Juvenile literature.
Classification: LCC BF1472.C3 C68 2020 | DDC j133.109718—dc23
Nimbus Publishing acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of Nova Scotia. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.
For Marie and Boyd Whalen,
my neighbours, who help me keep the ghosts away
Screech!
An Introduction
In Newfoundland there are two kinds of screech: one is a drink and the other is a scream.
“Screech” is a rum made in Newfoundland that’s used to “screech-in” newcomers. On their first visit to the island, they have to recite a Newfoundland saying, kiss a codfish, and—if they’re old enough—have a drink of Screech. After that, the visitors are made “honorary” Newfoundlanders. It’s all in good fun.
But that’s not the kind of screech you’ll find in this book.
The other kind of Newfoundland screech isn’t funny at all. It’s the sound a person makes when they see a Newfoundland ghost. A high-pitched, terrified shriek.
Unfortunately, the chances of seeing a ghost in Newfoundland are very, very good. Newfoundland is one of the most haunted places in the world. The wild and lonely landscape and rocky shores are perfectly tuned to wandering spirits and ghostly visitations. Ghost ships appear in the fog, ghost lights hover over the water, ghost screams are heard in the relentless wind. Restless and unhappy spirits haunt graveyards, fishing stages, bridges, and old houses. Dead pirates guard their buried treasure on deserted beaches and the ghosts of lost travellers roam the endless barrens.
In the old days, people gathered in a neighbour’s kitchen at night and told each other ghost stories, each one more frightening than the last. Every community had its own particular tales that were passed down from generation to generation. As a story is told and told again, it changes with the teller, but the heart of the story remains the same.
Somewhere, sometime, somebody saw a ghost. And gave a screech.
Be prepared: there is at least one blood-curdling screech in every story.
Why is Newfoundland So Haunted?
Five hundred years ago, fishermen travelled across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to the island of Newfoundland. They brought their ghosts with them. And they found many more. People from England and Ireland and France began settling in Newfoundland in the 1600s, and struggled to live in an unfriendly environment where cold, damp, hunger, and disease threatened their survival.
In the old days, Death was never very far away.
Life in Newfoundland was brutal and often short. The landscape is harsh and the weather unforgiving. People lived along the coast in little fishing communities, called “outports.” On the one side was the ocean—big and wild and dangerous—and on the other side were the barrens—vast and lonely and desolate. Covering the interior of Newfoundland, the barrens are well named, for they are miles and miles of little more than rocky hills and small lakes.
Newfoundland is a large island in the Atlantic Ocean at the very edge of North America, isolated and grim. In the old days, people had no choice: they had to go out on the ocean to make their living, and if they wanted to go anywhere, they had to go by ship. There were no cars or roads. And the currents are treacherous, and storms come up with no warning, and many ships went down. Thousands of people drowned in Newfoundland waters. In those days, when you stood on the shore and said goodbye to a family member or a friend who was stepping into a boat, you never knew if you would see them alive again.
People were more aware of Death in the old days. It was as if Death was standing right behind them all the time, looking over their shoulders. And of course, the spirits of the dead—well, they were everywhere.
Newfoundland has changed since the old days. Now there are roads and cars and cellphones and the internet. Life is not as difficult as it was in the old days. But the ghosts remain, lingering traces of the tragedies and the sorrows that beset the people of Newfoundland over the centuries.
Where the Stories Came From
All of the stories in this book were inspired by true stories people told me. I’ve spent many years travelling to different parts of Newfoundland, looking for ghost stories. I’ve worked with students in schools in Conception Bay and Trinity Bay, students who collected ghost stories from their families, stories that are sometimes more than two hundred years old.
I reimagined the stories, changing the names and often many of the circumstances, but I kept the heart of each story. And although they are primarily ghost stories, they are also stories about what it was like to live in Newfoundland when life was so hard—when shipwrecks claimed the lives of loved ones, when teenage boys went to work twelve hours a day in lumber camps, when whole families were wiped out by tuberculosis, when whole communities were uprooted and resettled far from the homes their families had lived in for generations.
These ghost stories from old Newfoundland provide a glimpse into the past: how people lived, what they believed in, what they were afraid of. The oral tradition of storytelling is fading away, but the ghosts who haunt the shores of Newfoundland are still there. They will not be forgotten.
For more information on how each story came to be, read “The Story Behind the Story” sections following each ghostly tale.
A Note about Names and Places
In Newfoundland, each community has its own particular character, traditions, and ghosts. Family names go back for generations. Although I have not changed the original location where each ghost story occurred, I have chosen names for my characters that come from outside these communities, so there can be no confusion with actual people. Inspired by real people and real events, my stories are nonetheless reimagined and fictional.
If you come across Newfoundland expressions in these stories that you are unfamiliar with, you can look them up in the Glossary.
The
Stories
There is no dark
like the Newfoundland dark.
The Ghostly Longboat
Bay de Verde
1804
Peter Keeping turned over in his bed and pulled the covers up around his head, trying to block out the sound of the relentless wind. It had been howling up and down and around the hills of Bay de Verde for three days. The house shook till he thought it would blow away, with his whole family in their beds—up, up, into the tumultuous sky—and then down, down, into the churning North Atlantic.
Peter was eleven, and he’d never lived through a storm like this. Neither had anyone else in Bay de Verde. Later, people said it was the worst storm ever to hit the little community at the northeastern tip of the Avalon Peninsula, and even today, two hundred years later, it is known as one of the worst on a coastline well acquainted with storms.
Three days and three nights of raging winds, pelting rain, and bitter snow forced the inhabitants to stay barricaded within their houses. It was Easter: traditionally a time in Newfoundland when winter storms blow in to plague the residents, who long only for spring.
Two hundred years ago there were no weather reports. Fishermen in Bay de Verde forecast the weather by watching the sky and the clouds, the moon and the stars, taking note of the direction of the wind and watching the waves as th
Peter hated the sound of the wind. Ordinary, everyday wind wasn’t too bad, but when it picked up and began to howl, he would listen, terrified, for the Old Hollies to begin their desperate wailing. The Old Hollies were said to be the spirits of all the poor victims of shipwrecks in Conception Bay, and it was said that if you heard them screeching in the wind, it was an omen that something terrible would happen.
Peter believed in omens.
There was many a night in a high wind when Peter would lie in his bed, paralyzed with fear, convinced he was hearing the Old Hollies. His father told him it was his imagination and his mother told him not to be foolish, but it didn’t help. He pictured the poor souls drowning and screaming, and it kept him awake for hours.
But he heard no screaming in the winds of this late winter storm. Just roaring—endless roaring. Peter cradled his head in his arms under the blankets and tried to sleep, as the house rocked and the timbers creaked in the wild, freezing east wind.
Despite the wind’s thrashing, at some point, Peter must have fallen asleep. When he woke up the next morning, something was different. The house had stopped rocking. It was very, very quiet.
The wind had stopped. The storm was over.
That morning, the inhabitants of Bay de Verde ventured outside their homes and began to look around the community to see what damage had been done by the storm. It was considerable: sheds had lost their roofs, fences were destroyed, and a few stages down by the harbour had been washed away completely.
Peter, longing to be outside after being cooped up with his little brothers and sisters for three days, headed over to the Backside with some of his friends. Bay de Verde sits on a scooped-out peninsula between high, rocky hills, with the sheltered harbour on one side and a more exposed beach, known as the Backside, on the other. If ever there was a shipwreck east of Bay de Verde, the wreckage would wash up on the Backside. And it was all too likely that at least one ship had met a tragic end in the Easter storm.
Peter and his pals, John Ryan and Edwin Young, climbed the hill to the path that led to the Backside. As soon as they got to the top where they could see out over the cove, they spotted a pile of rope and other debris scattered along the beach.
They scrambled down the hill and raced across the gritty sand.
Sure enough, they found thick ropes, bits of broken timber, torn canvas sails.
But that was all.
If a ship had gone down, there would be a lot more than this. Sometimes huge sails would wash ashore on the Backside, and barrels of beer and flour and tools. And bodies, of course.
But this wreckage was fresh, and there was enough of it to suggest that something very bad had happened to the ship it had once been part of.
Peter and his friends dashed back over the hill to fetch some grown-ups. A shipwreck was serious business. Ships sailed to Newfoundland from across the Atlantic—England, France, Spain, and Portugal, or up the coast from the United States—carrying all sorts of cargo. If anything could be salvaged, it would belong to whoever found it. The people in Bay de Verde were poor enough, and at the end of the winter food was scarce. Whatever they recovered from the shipwreck would be used. And if they could identify the ship and find the bodies of the dead, they could send word to the families, far away. Living by the sea, they knew how hard it could be to wait for a ship that would never come home.
Later that day, as soon as the sea was calm enough, fishermen set out in boats to look for the wreckage. Some boats went north through Baccalieu Tickle into Trinity Bay. Some went south along the coast of Conception Bay North. And some headed out to sea.
Peter and the rest of the inhabitants of Bay de Verde waited all day to see what treasures or gruesome tales would sail back in with the fishermen.
They all came back empty. Not a trace was found of the wreckage from the ship that had almost certainly gone down in the storm. It seemed that the wind and currents had carried the debris far, far away. There would be no salvage from that ship for the people in Bay de Verde. And no word sent to the families of the sailors who had met their end in the Easter storm off Bay de Verde.
Three months later, one early morning in July, Peter lay wrapped in his blankets dreaming of the Old Hollies. They were outside his window, calling to him to come and join them in the deep black water.
“Peter!” they cried in their mournful chorus. “Peter!”
Then one of them reached in the open window and grabbed his foot and gave it a shake.
He woke with a yell. His father stood at the end of his bed, holding a candle. It was still very dark outside.
“Peter!” said his father, pulling at his foot again and wiggling it. “Stop your yelling and get yourself up. It’s time.”
Peter groaned and heaved himself out of bed. Even though it was his third summer fishing with his father, he still had a hard time getting up at that hour. Rise in the dark, pull on some warm clothes, eat a quick breakfast, and then it was down to the harbour, clamber into the boat, and row out into the brightening sea. He never felt like he got enough sleep.
That morning as they left the harbour, a red sun crept up over the horizon, glowing through long ribbons of cloud. As they rowed around the point and headed towards Baccalieu Tickle, white banks of fog began creeping in from the east.
Peter’s father and his uncle Albert were rowing and Peter sat facing them in the stern of the dory. They were both strong men, and their mighty heaves on the oars had the boat skimming along the water. It would be a lot slower on the way back, with the dory full of fish.
The fog was coming in quickly now, streaming around them like the fingers of a giant’s ghostly hand, curling around the dory, wrapping around their arms and legs, pulling them into the thick white cloud that was blocking out the sun, the water, the cliffs.
“Father!” called out Peter. “Shouldn’t we go back?”
Even as the words were out of his mouth, he knew it was no good. Peter didn’t like the fog, no more than he liked the wind, but it would take more than a heavy fog to keep his father and uncle from a day’s good fishing in Baccalieu Tickle.
His father laughed. “No fog is going to stop us, is it, Albert?”
Uncle Albert grunted and shook his head. “The day a bit of mist sends me home will be the day I’m dead, you can count on that, young Peter.” And then he laughed too.
Peter sighed. Sometimes he thought the only reason his father and uncle took him along was so they would have someone to laugh at. But despite his anxiety about bad weather, Peter had learned a lot about fishing over the last two summers. How to jig for cod, how to split and clean a fish. How to keep his breakfast down no matter how rough the waves were. How to watch the currents and the wind so they weren’t swept across the Atlantic to Ireland.
But one thing he couldn’t learn was how to find the way home in a thick fog. June and July are known for their fogs along the rocky eastern coast of Newfoundland. Peter didn’t like them. Cliffs and rocks would loom up suddenly where they weren’t supposed to be. Sounds were at once muffled and confusing in a fog: sometimes birds or other boats or waves against the shore sounded farther away than they really were, and sometimes they sounded very close, but then they weren’t.
It was a mystery to Peter how his father and uncle could always find their way in a fog. He asked them how they did it, but they couldn’t really explain.
“You could tie a blindfold ’round my eyes,” said his father, “and I could still find my way back to harbour.”
“But how?” asked Peter. “How do you do it?”
“You’ll figure it out some day,” said his father. “Once you’ve spent as many hours as I have in a boat, you’ll figure it out. It’s nothing I can teach you.”
“Experience,” said Uncle Albert with a nod. “That’s all you need. About ten years of experience.” And then both men laughed.
