Haunted Harbours Read Online Free PDF Page A

lands.
    Nicholas was inches away from his own death. Even though the tribes had long ago made peace with the British, it was still considered most unsociable to wave loaded weaponry in a stranger’s face. Only the fact that the Mi’kmaq thought him more funny than dangerous saved his life. They took his pistol and turned him out into the darkness.
    Nicholas brooded through long days and nights, hearing the Mi’kmaq ceremonial drum beating in his very own woodlot. Three days later when the Mi’kmaq left their ceremonial grounds, Nicholas moved in with all of his sons and cut that section bare. He even deigned to pick up an axe himself. He worked from sun-up to sundown, tearing his favourite pilfered silk shirt in his effort to make that section of land absolutely inhospitable. Nicholas hauled the felled timber to Lunenburg and had it loaded on a ship, and he personally saw to the delivery in Halifax. It was his best load yet. He returned home to Lunenburg with his pockets jingling and he grinned with the sweet taste of revenge.
    His grin faded when he returned to his estate and found that his entire family had been murdered. Even his dog had been gut-ted. The furniture had been broken up and his fine clothing torn and burnt. He knelt over the ashes and howled like a gut-shot wolf. They say that the townsfolk heard his screams all the way back into Lunenburg; if they didn’t hear the scream they certainly heard the bell tolling long both day and night.
    Eventually Nicholas wandered back into the settlement of Lunenburg, a shadow of his former self. His fine clothing was torn into rags upon his back. His eyes were dulled with madness.
    The settlers rallied to his cause and gathered a hunting party of stout German and Dutch farmers and sailors armed with muskets and pistols. They managed to hunt up several Mi’kmaq, hanging four of them in front of the site of the massacre at Horseshoe Cove. Doubtless many of these Mi’kmaq were innocent, and a lot of blood was needlessly spilled, but the townsfolk felt that justice had prevailed. They shipped two of the Mi’kmaq survivors to Halifax for trial. One died in prison and one escaped.
    For a time Nicholas Spohr lived alone in the town of Lunenburg, getting drunk every night with what was left of the profits of his last wood sale. He swore that he would never return to the accursed blockhouse at Horseshoe Cove.
    Then one moonlit night he disappeared, walking into the Nova Scotian woods. Most of the townsfolk figured he’d been drunk and had simply wandered off, but a few wiser folk knew better. They searched for three days and finally found him outside of the blockhouse, prostrate upon his wife’s grave, dead from hunger, exposure, and the ravages of grief.
    They buried him there, outside of the blockhouse that had promised him so much happiness. For many a year the site was shunned by whites and Mi’kmaq alike. Yet in the restless nights of autumn, when the wind is dancing with the clouds and talking of the snow that soon will fly, the story goes that you can hear the sound of an iron bell tolling a low and mournful dirge, even though the blockhouse has long since vanished. Local folks who hear it, even today, will simply shrug their shoulders and walk on: Old Nicholas is ringing his bell and walking a lonely vigil through a woodlot that has never grown back quite right.

5

THE
GHOST-HUNTER’S
WHISTLING GHOST

LIVERPOOL

    In her 1968 collection Bluenose Magic , Helen Creighton tells of a lot of different ways that you can slay a witch or rid yourself of a ghost. Silver will do it; water will too. So will fire and salt. I’ve since heard the following old story of a rogue witch-hunter who used just such a technique to make a small living, although I have reason to believe that his motives were less than silvery pure.
    Back in the early 1800s in the Liverpool area, there lived an old man named Hank O’Hallorhan. Hank was a