The Golden Leg (10 page)

M
any years ago, before houses had
electricity and before ghosts became harder to see, a young married couple went
out one evening to visit Aunt Beatrice and Uncle Eli.

When they got there, there were eight people present. The eight included the
married couple, Aunt Beatrice, Uncle Eli, along with a few friends and
relations. All of them loved to play cards, so they decided they would sit down
and have an eight-handed game. Little did they know that their game was to be
interrupted in a rather odd way.

It was getting dark, so Uncle Eli lit the lamp in the kitchen and carried it
into the living room. Everyone gathered around, sat down, and got ready to play.
As soon as they started their game, however, the lamp went out. It was just as
if someone had blown it out.

The lamp was an old-fashioned Aladdin lamp. An Aladdin lamp is a type of
lantern with a wick that burns kerosene, and where the flame is protected by a
glass globe. The glass globe acts to shield the flame, making it very difficult
to simply blow out. So, for the lamp to go out was slightly unusual.

While it was unusual, Uncle Eli did not think much of it. He
struck a match, and lit the lamp a second time. As soon as everyone picked up
his cards, the same thing happened again. The flame in the lantern flared up
brightly for a second, illuminating the room, and then went out again.

Everyone sat there in the darkness and stared at the lantern. But Uncle Eli was
having none of the lamp’s antics. He spoke up loudly, and challenged the force
responsible for blowing out the light.

“If you belong to God, go back to God,” directed Uncle Eli. “If you belong to
the Devil, go back to the Devil!”

After he said these words, Uncle Eli then lit the lamp a third time. That time
it did not go out. They were able to finish their game in peace, with no more
ghostly interruptions.

According to a local legend, the house had once been owned by a family named
Parker. The Parkers had been very strict people, and had not approved of
anything that even resembled gambling. People said that their ghosts haunted the
house, to make certain that no one gambled or played cards in their home.
Apparently, those ghosts were no match for Uncle Eli!

O
ne night, many years ago, after their
work was done, the village men gathered at the old store to swap stories. As the
night wore on, talk turned to tales of the supernatural, of strange sights men
had seen, and ghosts met on late-night walks.

One man, well-known in the community as a storyteller, thrilled the crowd with
the story of a great beast known as the “Black Bear,” which appeared every five
years. It could be seen rushing along the street at almost lightning speed, and
rattling its chains, which could be heard a hundred yards off. So true was his
telling that you could almost hear the clattering of that iron chain yourself.
Men who had heard the story before nodded sagely, and boys who had not listened
in open-mouthed amazement.

“Bah!” exclaimed a disbelieving voice from the corner of the store. The voice,
deep and gravelly, belonged to a man known to all as Crusty Harry. Crusty Harry
had been given his name because of his gruff manner, for his mood was always as
black as the hair on his head.

“Bah!” he said again, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

No one paid the skeptic much attention. Instead, the crowd urged the
storyteller to spin another yarn.

The man began again. This time he told the story of a lady in white, who would
appear halfway up the stairs of a certain house, a woman who had fallen down the
staircase and broken her pretty white neck. So solid was the ghost that the
homeowners would have to turn sideways, their backs to the wall, to pass by her
going up the stairs.

“Bah!” said the voice in the corner once more. “I don’t believe in
ghosts.”

This final interruption was too much for the man telling the tale.

“” If you ‘Bah!’ one more time,” said the storyteller, shaking his finger at
the man, “I’ll put you out to pasture with the rest of the sheep!”

Everyone laughed, and with a great scowl on his face, Crusty Harry rose to his
feet and made for the door.

“Mind the ghosts now, Harry!” shouted a man’s voice after him, and as Crusty
Harry left the store and walked out into the moonlight, he could hear another
muffled chorus of laughter from the men.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” grumbled Crusty Harry, and he started walking
home along High Street.

As he walked, he suddenly felt an intense cold that chilled him to the very
bone. Listening, he heard a great rushing noise behind him, like the sound of
wind filling a sea of canvas. Crusty Harry slowly turned to look back up
the street, and when he did, he beheld a most miraculous
sight.

There, against all things right and logical in the world, was a fully-rigged
ship sailing up the middle of High Street. Its portholes were all aglow, the
masts and rigging possessed of an eerie luminescence of their own, the black
topsails silhouetted against a glowering moon. Standing on the deck was a figure
that could only be its captain, dressed in a long, blood-red coat with
shimmering brass buttons down the front.

“Ahoy, Harry!” shouted the captain. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said Crusty Harry, and he turned his back on the
ship and kept walking. With this, the great ship’s anchor was let go. It fell
downward, passing through the surface of the road as if it was water, dragging
out the phantom anchor chain behind it. Almost immediately, a score of spectral
sailors, each one more gruesome than the one before, leaped into action,
lowering a longboat from the side of the ship. The captain took his place in the
stern, and a crew of phantom rowers propelled the boat in hot pursuit of
Harry.

“Do you believe in ghosts now?” shouted the captain, his ghastly rowers keeping
pace alongside Harry as he quickened his step along the road.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” panted Crusty Harry, hurrying along and trying
his best to ignore the boatload of decomposing sailors alongside him.

With this the captain swore a most blasphemous oath,
and leaped
from the boat, leaving his sailors behind. In an instant he flew in front of
Crusty Harry, blocking his way forward on the path. The captain leaned in close.
With only inches separating them, the ghost’s long, dank hair smelled like
mouldy straw.

“Now Harry,” said the spectre with a terrifying snarl, “you say you don’t
believe in ghosts, but do you believe in me?”

The captain glared at Harry, its eyes burning like coals in dark sockets,
daring him to respond.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said Crusty Harry, “and I don’t believe in you.”
He raised his arm into the air, and hit the ghostly captain a great blow on the
head with his walking stick. The ghost’s skull rattled like an old iron pot,
fell off its shoulders, and was caught in a pair of bony hands. With a great
shriek, the captain vanished, as well as the longboat, the ship, and all his
ghostly crew. Crusty Harry ran the rest of the way home, as fast as his long
legs could carry him.

A few days later, after their work was done, the men gathered at the old store
to swap stories. Eventually, someone spoke up and shared a ghostly tale. When
the yarn was finished, a voice, deep and gravelly, rose from the corner of the
store.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” the voice said.

But say what he might, nothing could disguise the fact that the hair on Crusty
Harry’s head had turned from black to the purest snowy white.

THE GOLDEN LEG

“The Golden Leg” is a world folk tale found in many variants in many places
around the globe. According to Stith Thompson’s
Motif Index of Folk
Literature
(Bloomington: Indiana University Pr
ess, 1
955-58), the story is a blend of
motif E235.4.2, “Return from dead to punish theft of leg from grave,” and
motif E235.4.1, “Return from dead to punish theft of golden arm from grave.”
I have heard storytellers tell wildly different versions of this tale,
including versions from Trinidad and from Newfoundland. A version from
France can be found in
A Book of Ghosts and Goblins
by Ruth
Manning-Saunders (London: Methuen & Co, 1968).

I have told this story hundreds of times, including one storytelling
performance at Virginia Park Elementary School in St. John’s, Newfoundland,
at Halloween, 2006. After I had finished, and after all the
kids had filed back to class, I found that a very quiet and very tiny
grade three girl had lingered behind.

“Mr Jarvis, the house in that second story you told?” she asked.

“The one about the golden leg?” I clarified.

“Yes,” she said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “I think that was my
father’s house.”

I like to think that, just maybe, it was.

THE PHANTOM LOCOMOTIVE

Clarke’s Beach, Conception Bay, Newfoundland

Based on the article “A Phantom Train” printed in the
Daily News
,
St. John’s, Newfoundland, April 3, 1907. Thanks to W. Ritchie Benedict for
bringing this story to my attention. In the 1907 article, the name of the
clergyman is not given, and I have taken it upon myself to name him after
Samuel Smith. Mr. Smith was not a clergyman, but he died and was buried in
the Clarke’s Beach cemetery in 1904. Through the window across from where I
sat writing this, I could see the trees that shade Mr. Smith’s grave, and
the tombstones of his neighbours in death. Clarke’s Beach cemetery,
incidentally, is said to be haunted by the ghost of a man wearing a top hat,
but though I have looked, I have not seen this rather debonair ghost. The
locomotive itself is an example of folk literature motif E535.4, “Phantom
railway train.”

THE FLOATING HEAD Dundee, Scotland

Elliott O’Donnell included his version of this reportedly true tale,
written in beautifully Gothic Edwardian prose, in his book
Scottish Ghost
Stories
(London: Kegan Paul, 1911). Floating heads and screaming
skulls are common motifs in ghost stories, but this particular specimen,
with its “faint, phosphorescent glow of decay,” is one of my favourites.
Dundee has attracted some wonderfully creepy stories, such as the tale of a
demonic black crab described by Lily Seafield in
Scottish Ghosts
(New
Lanark: Lomond Books, 1999), and the story of Logie House, haunted by the
ghost of an Indian princess captured by one of the family while working for
the East India Company, described by Martin Coventry in
Haunted Places of
Scotland
(Musselburgh: Goblinshead, 1999). The floating head story
includes motif E421.3, “Luminous ghosts,” and motif E422.1.11.2, “Revenant
as face or head.”

GRANDFATHER KING

Various locations, Newfoundland

A version of this story can be found in Michael Taft’s article
“Sasquatch-Like Creatures in Newfoundland: A Study in the Problems of
Belief, Perception, and Reportage,” pages 83–96 in
Manlike Monsters On
Trial
(University of British Columbia Press, 1980).
Taft gives the location of the story as “Battle Point” but notes that he
changed the original name of the community. The description of the monster
used here is based on two different accounts of Sasquatch-like creatures
reported in Newfoundland: one from the late nineteenth century, and the
other from the 1930s. Aside from the Sasquatch-like elements of the tale,
the guardian is similar to motif E291, “Ghosts protect hidden treasure,”
and motif E291.2.2, “Ghost animal guards treasure.”

THE CLUTCHING HAND

Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

“The Clutching Hand,” or
An Lamh Sanntach
in Gaelic, is a
traditional ghost story from the Outer Hebrides. It was originally collected
and published by R. MacDonald Robertson circa 1961, and then reprinted in
Travellers’ Tales: Western Isles
(Clydebank: Lang Syne
Publishers, 1991). It is unique in the stories present in this book in that
it is the only one where a haunting is the result of a direct curse, a
remarkable example of the old woman’s magic knowledge. The idea of only the
clutching hand returning as a ghost is motif E422.1.11.3, “Ghost as hand or
hands.”

THE PREDICTION IN DRAGON ALLEY Singapore

“The Prediction in Dragon Alley” was inspired by an “absolutely true” ghost
story, submitted by a 24-year-old gym instructor to Russell Lee, Singapore’s
bestselling author of ghostly tales. His account can be found in
True
Singapore Ghost Stories Book 2
 (Singapore: Angsana Books, 1992). If
you wish to explore the sometimes complicated world of Singaporean Chinese
and Malay ghostlore further, an excellent introduction is Jonathan Lim’s
beautifully produced and illustrated
Our Supernatural Skyline: Between
Gods and Ghosts
(Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International, 2005).
The Chinatown in my story could be in any city, though the name “Dragon
Alley” was inspired by a real alleyway in Chinatown, Victoria, British
Columbia. For other fortune-telling ghosts, compare with motif E545.17, “The
dead foretell the future.”

THE COFFIN, THE GIRL, AND THE BROOM Ireland and Newfoundland

While there are seemingly ghostly elements in this story, the tale is
probably more accurately catalogued as a fairy story, although the men
bearing the coffin and the forces responsible for the abduction of the girl
are never specifically identified as fairies in the narrative. One version
of
the story can be found in
Irish Folktales
, edited
by Henry Glassie (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). The ending of the tale
presented here is slightly different than the version collected by Glassie,
and is perhaps more representative of the tale’s origin in fairy belief. The
discovery of the birch broom instead of a body in the coffin is a motif
borrowed from a traditional fairy story from Placentia Bay, Newfoundland,
which I heard told in 2006 by ballad singer, storyteller, and folklorist
Anita Best. The three knocks at the door, followed by some strange event,
usually the death of a family member, is also a firm part of Newfoundland
folklore, as is the pinning of money into a child’s clothing to prevent
abduction by the good people.

THE LADY AT NUMBER 16 Valletta, Malta

A classic ghost story, incorporating motif E281, “Ghosts haunt house.”
While this story could be told about countless port towns, this particular
tale is based on a story from the walled city of Valletta, on the island of
Malta. The story is said to be true, and the street in question is St.
Ursola Street, in the heart of the old city. An early version of the Maltese
tale was written up in
Blackwood’s Magazine
in the 1800s, and a more
recent version can be found in Joseph Attard’s book
Ghosts of
Malta
(Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group, 1997).
Another good source for Maltese stories of the supernatural is Vanessa
Macdonald’s
The Unexplained: Ghost Stories From Malta and Beyond
(Valletta: Progress Press, 2001). When I was in Malta in 2006, I had the
privilege of meeting Vanessa and her family, and sharing ghostly tales from
both sides of the Atlantic. I would certainly recommend her book to anyone
with an interest in true hauntings.

THE BLACK STAG

St. Bride’s, Cape Shore, Newfoundland

“The Black Stag” is arguably one of Newfoundland’s most well-known, and
oft-repeated, ghost stories. I think you would be hard pressed to find an
older person from the Cape Shore who was not familiar with the story in one
form or another. I have heard several people tell this tale, most recently
storyteller Gary Green, and it is still very much a story that is part of
the oral tradition in Newfoundland. The earliest written version I have seen
is that by James McGrath, “The Black Stag—A Ghost Story” which appeared in
The Newfoundland Quarterly
(1910, vol. 10, no. 3). Ghostly stags
could be classified under motif E423.2.6, “Revenant as deer.”

THE DRUMMER OF TURK’S GUT

Marysvale, Conception Bay, Newfoundland

I tracked down this story, one of Conception Bay’s most intriguing local
legends, with the assistance of Bride Power of the Turk’s Gut Heritage
Committee, which has been working hard to preserve the oral history and
folklore of the community. The long, flat rock that marked the Drummer’s
grave was said to be located about 75 feet from where the Heritage House run
by the committee now stands. Interestingly, the nearby town of Brigus also
claims a phantom drummer. The Brigus variant of the tale claimed that an
English drummer had once made a promise to an old settler that the musician
would drum the old man to his grave, and that he would also drum at the
funerals of all his direct descendants, a story published by Don Morris as
“Drums at the Graveside; Is Brigus Phantom Real?” in the magazine
Here In
Newfoundland
(April 1956: vol. 1, no. 1). Ghost drummers fall under
folk literature motif E402.1.13, “Invisible ghost plays musical
instrument.”

SMILEY

Trinity, Trinity Bay, Newfoundland

This is one of my favourite little offbeat Newfoundland stories. It is hard
to say exactly what it was that the man
saw on the path. The
smiling stranger could have been a ghost, or a fairy creature, or some
figment of the man’s imagination. The story itself is one that has been
handed down through the oral tradition, and the exact date when the strange
meeting was said to have happened is not known. It is a story I heard many
years ago, and I have not heard another quite like it since. If anyone has
any information on the tale, I would love to know more.

THE DOG IN THE BASEMENT St. John’s, Newfoundland

A few years ago, I wrote a monthly ghost story column for the
Downhome
Magazine
, published out of St. John’s. Each month I wrote a ghost
story from a different section of the province. At one point, one of the
editors told me how a man who did some work around their office had told her
a story about the skeleton of a dog found in a basement in the downtown area
of St. John’s. I have no way of knowing if this is an authentic account of a
real haunting, or one of those urban legends that gets passed from one
friend to another, to another, and so on. True story or not, it is one of my
favourite creepy little tales from downtown St. John’s. Phantom hounds fall
under motif E423.1.1, “Revenant as a dog.”

THE LUMINOUS CHAMBER Taunton, England

The concept of the luminous chamber is based upon “a faithful report” of a
strange room in an abandoned hall in the English village of Taunton. It was
originally reported by a Mr. T. Westwood in 1840, and a version of the story
was later written up by John H. Ingram in 1886 in his book
The Haunted
Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain
. The shining room could
be described as motif E421.3, “Luminous ghosts.”

JAMES CURRAN’S GHOST

Holyrood, Conception Bay, Newfoundland

The story of James Curran’s ghost is a variant of folk literature motif
E419.8, “Ghost returns to enforce its burial wishes or to protest disregard
of them.” Like all good ghost stories, there are several different tellings
of the tale of James Curran’s ghost, and some debate over which version is
the “true” one. I have based my own retelling on “Curran’s Ghost” by Mike
Kieley, which was printed in
Come Ashore to Holyrood: A Folk History of
Holyrood
, compiled by Mary G. Veitch and edited by Marie L. Hunt
(St. John’s: Creative Publishers, 1989). Additional details were forwarded
on to me via email by Joe Moore of Mount Pearl, whose second great-grand
father, John McGrath, donated the land for the Southside
cemetery. Joe’s wife, Peg, contributed several stories to my earlier books
Wonderful Strange
and
Haunted Shores
.

THE SPINNING HORROR OF ROOM 14 Newcastle-on-Tyne, England

I discovered this eyewitness account of the spinning horror in
Haunted
Britain
by Elliott O’Donnell (London: Rider and Company, c. 1948).
In some respects, the description of the encounter with the spinning horror
is similar to what is known as a hypnagogic hallucination, or what would be
described in Newfoundland and Labrador as “The Old Hag.” Apart from the
strange laughter and the flick on the ear, many of the symptoms experienced
by the unfortunate civil engineer, such as the vision seen when waking from
a sleep, the strange humming noises, and the feeling of powerlessness (see
also folk motif F471.1, “Nightmare presses person in dream”), are typical in
other accounts of the Old Hag and sleep paralysis from around the globe. A
good example of an auditory hallucination associated with this type of
haunting can be found in my previous book
Wonderful Strange: Ghosts,
Fairies and Fabulous Beasties
(St. John’s: Flanker Press, 2005). A
more detailed study of the Old Hag is David J.
Hufford’s
The Terror That Comes in the Night
(Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1982).