Haunted Harbours (8 page)

The forget-me-nots still grow around the Piper's Pond, scattered like a thousand pale blue tears. The legend says that if you run around the pond thirteen times in a counter-clockwise direction, six times for her and seven for him, or once for every full moon in a year, the piper will rise up out of Piper's Pond and begin to play the bagpipes.

Is it true? As Sam Slick was wont to say, “Facts can be stranger than fiction.”

11
THE MOOSE
ISLAND DEVIL
FIVE ISLANDS

I first heard this tale told over a pitcher of good draught beer at the Lord Nelson Beverage Room in Halifax, a lowly tavern made famous by the fact that it was only the second pub in Halifax to allow women inside its doors. More recently, the pub has served as the first stopping point for many a college student working their way down Spring Garden Road towards the livelier downtown bars. It was fine fishing grounds for a wandering storyteller; the talk was cheap and the beer even cheaper.

The man who told this tale to me gave me nothing more than the barest of bones to work with. Such is a storyteller's lot. A few days worth of digging at the Archives enriched the facts, and I've painted in what details history saw fit to leave out.

Moose Island is the largest of a fistful of islands that jut into the Bay of Fundy at the base of the broad and low Economy Mountain, near Five Islands, Nova Scotia. There's fine hiking here, and in the autumn the turning leaves will tell you stories I could never dream of.

The Mi'kmaq tell us that Glooscap created these islands while throwing stones at the beaver across the bay from the top of Cape Blomidon. The legend goes that the beaver had built a dam between Advocate and Blomidon, causing water to flow into Glooscap's Blomidon home and drown out his medicine garden. Glooscap set a trap to catch the beaver, but the wily animal escaped his device. In a fit of rage Glooscap then threw five great boulders at the beaver, who escaped, but not without a flattened tail.

More practical sources will tell you that the five islands have been christened geometrically for their shape — Diamond, Long, Egg, Pinnacle, and Moose. Moose Island is so named because it looks just like the hump of a big old bull moose rising up from out of the gray waters of the Atlantic.

Upon the granite coastal wall of Moose Island is crudely carved the face of an angry bearded man. Locals call this cliffside Ruff's Ghost after a long dead Irish settler who went by the name of John Ruff.

Back in the mid-1800s Moose Island was the only island of the five that had been settled. John Ruff lived there with his wife Susannah. Together they raised six children – Isaiah, Noah, Andrew, Arthur, Anthony, and Benjamin. Sadly, John was not the best of men. A drinker and an abusive father, he frequently beat his wife and was known in those parts as a bit of a bully. In the late summer of 1842, John and four of his sons were working on Moose Island. Susannah was enjoying a much-needed vacation from John's bullying ways at the settlement of Five Islands. The two oldest sons, Noah and Isaiah, had grown and fled the unhappy family.

On that day in July 1842, the oldest son Andrew rowed the family dory into Five Islands with his father's corpse laid in the stern. John Ruff's head was broken open as if by a bad blow and a single maple leaf was found embedded in the gory wound.

“It was a maple tree did it,” Andrew swore. “Father had been drinking and he felled it badly.”

As I've said it was a long-known fact that John Ruff was overly fond of the bottle, so no one was surprised to hear this story. The case was quickly dismissed as a simple accidental death, and the town of Five Islands began busily burying the memory of John Ruff and his abusive ways.

But one person could not forget. Young Benjamin Ruff, nine years old at the time of his father's death, was haunted by bitter memories of that day on the island. He was kept awake at night by visions of his father standing with an axe over his bed. For two long years, young Benjamin feared the coming of nightfall and the blind baleful stare of the Atlantic moon. Then, two years from the date of his father's death, young Benjamin felt compelled to make a startling confession to the authorities.

“It was Arthur and Andrew who murdered Father, and Anthony and I saw the whole thing happen.”

The two older boys were brought in for questioning, but it was taken to be a bad sign when Arthur Ruff fled the district. The truth came out when young Benjamin told a Supreme Court in Truro of what had happened on the night of his father's death.

“Father had been drinking,” young Benjamin said, “and he'd gone to lay down in the barn with my older brother Anthony. He was asleep when Arthur went and got the axe. Arthur stood over Father for a long time, waiting for him to wake up. When he opened his eyes, Arthur brought the axe down on his head.”

Benjamin further stated that Arthur and Andrew had dragged their father's corpse out of the barn to the woods, where they prepared a crime scene, felling a heavy maple tree and placing their father's corpse next to it. While Arthur arranged the corpse, Andrew went back to the barn and used a hand adze to hew and gouge out the bloodstains on the floorboards.

“Why did they do this? Why did you say nothing until now?” the prosecuting attorney asked young Benjamin.

“I didn't want my brother to hang. It wasn't any of his fault.”

“Whose fault was it?”

Young Benjamin's eyes grew strange and flat and he stared over the courtroom in a cold and distant fashion.

“We saw something strange that night before the killing — a dark figure dancing about the barn,” Benjamin said. “I think it was the devil.”

The other sons confirmed that there had been many times in the past when this devil had been seen upon the island.

Was it one more lie? The product of a deluded boy's vivid imagination? Or was it perhaps the truth?

“The devil likes it there on the island,” Andrew swore. “He whispers in the night. I think it was his idea that Arthur kill father.”

“And was it the devil's idea that you hide your father's murder in such a fashion?” the prosecuting attorney sarcastically asked.

“No, of course not,” Andrew replied. “We didn't want to see our brother hang. One death in a family is bad enough, don't you think?”

“We saw the devil once before,” Benjamin later added. “My sister saw him behind the water barrel when my father was going to kill Mother with his knife, but when Father saw the devil looking at him like a hungry man watching a stew pot steep, he couldn't do it.”

Further questioning brought to light the fact that the boys had originally planned to throw their father over a cliff and had gone so far as to practice by throwing a sheep over the cliff. Because the sheep was only crippled by the fall, they decided to find them-selves another plan.

Ruff justice, indeed.

The Ruffs' barn had tumbled down in a storm, but officials investigated the wreckage nonetheless. They discovered evidence of a chipped floor and bloodstains between the cracks of the floor-boards, but that was a common sight in the days when farmers slaughtered their livestock indoors. The coroner exhumed Ruff's badly decomposed body and ruled that although the wound to the skull could indeed have been caused by a malicious blow with an axe, it could just have easily have been caused by a poorly felled tree. This testimony was further substantiated by townsfolk who allowed that Ruff was a poorly skilled woodsman, a bit of a drunkard with a bad temper to boot. Another witness declared that he'd never believed young Benjamin was of a right mind.

After further questioning, the judge ruled in the accuseds' favour. He decided that the evidence presented by a delusional eleven year old wasn't substantial enough to convict Andrew and Arthur.

The blame was laid at the feet of the earlier magistrate's failure to summon a coroner at the initial time of death. Lack of evidence was the final verdict, and the death of John Ruff, axe blow or not, was deemed accidental.

The Ruffs soon left the island, not even bothering to sell the property. As far as the townsfolk of Five Islands knew, young Arthur never returned to the area. Yet lights have been seen to this day on Moose Island, strange dancing lights, like a lantern being held by a shaky man, or a ghost.

Is it the devil, or the ghost of John Ruff? Perhaps it is the spirits of his murdering sons, doomed to endlessly repeat their crime. I dare you to spend a night camping on this island to find out the truth.

12
THE WEEPING
CAVE OF
PARRSBORO
PARRSBORO

This story was told to me by a Saint Mary's University professor of Mi'kmaq descent. He was a bit of a wild man and taught me that a writer shouldn't feel shackled by the chains of conventionality. One of my fondest memories was of him walking into class with a stick of high explosive and placing it on his desk.

“Sometimes,” he said to the class, “a writer needs to use dynamite.”

Of course, no English students were harmed in the making of this anecdote.

The dynamite was a dud.

I hope you'll find this story isn't.

The shores of Nova Scotia are riddled with caves, the most famous being The Ovens sea caves of Riverport, Lunenburg County. Every year thousands of tourists make the climb down to view these spectacular rock formations and listen to the waves echoing their long lonely song.

If you happen to travel to Parrsboro, the folk there will be glad to tell you about the mystery of the Maiden's Cave, where the ghost of a young woman weeps and moans to this very day.

You'll find Parrsboro on the northern shore of the Minas Basin. It was named in the year 1784 in honour of Admiral John Parr, who was Governor General of Nova Scotia at the time. Before that Parrsboro was simply known as the Partridge Island settlement. It is reputed to have the world's highest tides and has been celebrated as the home of Glooscap, mighty Mi'kmaq warrior and magician. The area is also well known for the amazing amounts of amethyst and agate that can be found on beaches and cliffsides. Legend has it that while creating the tides, Glooscap scattered his grandmother's jewelry bag on the shores of Parrsboro, thus creating its abundance of natural wealth.

In John Parr's time, the waters of Nova Scotia were home to scores of ruthless pirates and privateers. One such pirate, a Sicilian by the name of Dionaldo, was making a fine living pirating the boats that passed by.

Mention pirates and people will picture sashes, cutlasses, and golden hoop earrings, men shouting “Yo ho!” and swinging from ropes with knives in their teeth, or one-legged sea captains with gaudy parrots perched on their shoulders. That's not how it really was. More often than not, a pirate would simply pull up beside your ship, possibly with two or three ships of his own, and point a cannon at your ship's hull. You would be given the option to surrender, and perhaps become a pirate yourself. If your ship was deemed seaworthy, the pirate would seize it and hoist his own flag, thus increasing his flotilla. Pirating was a business, plain and simple.

Mary Jane Hawkins sailed with her father on trading missions in his ship, the
Red Hawk
. Some swore that a woman on board a ship was simply asking for bad luck, but Mary Jane's father held no such belief. Being both captain and owner of the ship, his word held sway over all the crew's fears.

Yet perhaps the crew had been right in this instance.

The trouble began when Dionaldo's vessel came aside of the
Red Hawk
. The captain would not surrender and so he and the crew were massacred. Mary Jane, however, was saved for other purposes. Knowing what her fate would be, she tried to fling her-self overboard, but Dionaldo would have none of that. Had circumstances been different, this tale might have ended a little more abruptly. Possibly Mary Jane might have escaped or drowned her-self. Perhaps Mary Jane might have married Dionaldo and lived as a pirate-captain's wife.

At least that was how Dionaldo saw it. You see, Dionaldo was a bit of a romantic. He believed that he could woo this daughter of the sea, and that in time she would certainly fall in love with him. He couldn't fathom the notion of her holding a grudge simply because he'd killed her father and all of her friends. She was just a girl, after all, and as wayward as the restless sea. He was certain her mood would turn, and she would find her way to his bunk. You've got to love an optimist.