The Big Book of Canadian Hauntings. John Robert Colombo
again. When I saw him at noon the next day he was wide awake, and very feverish and excitable.
“How are you, Tim, my poor fellow?” said I, taking his hand, which was very hot and moist.
“I’ve seen him again,” he replied. “I see him now. He is sitting at the foot of the bed, and pointing to the graveyard. I know what he means.”
“Tim, it’s crazy that ye are,” said I.
He shook his head mournfully.
“Monaghan,” he sighed, rather than said, “ye’ve been a kind friend to me. Give that to the little girl in Ireland — you know.” And he drew a photographic portrait of himself from under his pillow, tied round with a blue ribbon, from which depended a crooked six pence with a hole in it. “In a few days ye’ll be laying me in the ground alongside of the Captain. Do ye see him now! He is leaving the room smiling upon me, and still pointing to the graveyard. I am no longer afraid of him. He means me no harm, and it is no blame to him if he is sent to tell me to get ready.”
“Tim, you are cheating yourself. What you are telling me is all a walking dream. I can see no ghost.”
“Of course, you can’t,” said Tim. “The spirits never appear to two persons at once. But Patrick Monaghan,” he added, “let us talk no more on the subject, but send Father Riley to me, that I may unburden me soul, and die in peace.”
“It would have been cruel to me to have argued the matter with the poor afflicted creature, and him such a friend of my own, too, so I left him to go in search of the doctor first, and of Father Riley afterwards. They both came. What passed between Tim and the Holy Father, of course, I never knew; but the doctor told me distinctly. Tim was in a very bad way — stomach was wrong, the nerves wrong, the brain was wrong; in fact, he was wrong altogether, and had a fever which the doctor called by a very grand and night-sounding name, which I did not hear very plainly, and which if I did, I am unable to remember. Tim survived three days after this, sleeping and dozing, and talking in his sleep, and every now and then saying amid words which I could not well put together into any meaning, “I am coming, I am coming.” Just before he died, he grew more collected, and made me promise that he should be buried in the grave that had been dug for him by the side of the Captain. I knew that no such grave had been dug as he said, and that it was all a delusion; but what was the use of arguing with a dying man? So I promised, of course, by my honor and by my soul, to do all I could to have his last wish gratified. The doctor promised also and so did Father Riley, and I think poor Tim died happy. His last words were something about the ribbon and the crooked six pence, and the Captain, the very last syllable being, “I come.”
“We buried the poor lad in the place assigned by himself, and I was so affected altogether by the sadness of the thing that I could have persuaded myself, in fact I did persuade myself, that I saw Captain Percival in undress or fatigue uniform, just as he had appeared to poor Tim walking past the sentry-fox before the door of the Government House, and stopping every now and then to point at the grave; and the more I closed my eyes to avoid seeing him, the more permanently and clearly he stood before me.”
“And are you in any doubt on the subject now?” I inquired.
“And indeed I am,” replied the sergeant, shaking the ashes from his cigar with the tip of his little finger. “Tim must have seen the ghost, and must have believed in him, and if I only saw it, after Tim’s death, it is but another proof of what almost everybody knows, that two people never saw the same ghost at the same time. And ghost or no ghost, it is quite clear that Tim died of him, and might have been alive at this moment, but for the ghost’s extraordinary behavior. But it’s one of the questions that all the talk in the world can’t settle.”
“Do you think Tim would have seen the ghost of Captain Percival, or anybody else, if he had been sound in mind and limb, if he had been a strong hearty man with a good appetite, and an undisordered stomach?”
“Can’t say,” replied the sergeant, taking a sip of his liquor. “The doctor thought not; but doctors don’t know everything; and if there were no ghosts, why I should like to ask should the spirit of Samuel appear to Saul, and answer his questions?”
“Well, sergeant,” said I, “if you are going to the Bible for arguments, I shall shut up. Finish your glass, my man, and let us say good night.”
He finished his glass, he said good night, and walked away with the air of a man who thought he had the best of the argument.
In the Western Part of Cumberland — Romantic Traditions of Old Time Tragedies — Along the Parrsboro Shore — A Very Racy Story — By S.D. Scott — (Written for the Christmas Herald)
Halifax Morning Herald, December 24, 1887
The person who led the Editor of the Herald’s Christmas supplement to suppose that Parrsboro and the regions adjoining are richly supplied with interesting ghosts, should have been called upon to write a paper on that subject — rather than the writer. The western section of the good old county is, indeed, not without its romantic traditions. In several settlements there remained a few years ago a saving remnant of believers, survivors of those richer times, when local tragedies, acted upon the unskepticized minds of men, as seed falling on good ground, brought forth a fruitful harvest of good old-fashioned ghosts. During those fine times, not more than two generations ago in this region, little information came by way of the post office, and few were the travelers who brought accounts of the business of distant climes. Messages from other countries came so seldom that the people naturally turned for society to residents of that Undiscovered Country, from whose bourne they had been led to believe occasional travelers returned. The other world was nearer than the greater part of this, and the affairs of the nation, the strife of political factions, the war of creeds, the new discoveries of science, or the latest inventions in fashions never diverted their attention from supernatural visitors. The early families read few books in those original days. They rather sought light in evening consultation before the big fireplace, and in that solitary meditation from which minds naturally receptive and unbiased by the methodical training of modern school life, come out well stored with theories of natural and spiritual life. Few are the localities where the well authenticated facts of fifty years ago are now received with that faith which alone makes a ghost story prosperous. These things pertaining to the supernatural are in a sense spiritually discerned, and if historian and audience are not for the time in a believing mood the most stirring narratives become in the language of the late Mr. Lennie’s “things without life, as milk.”
The Cumberland ghosts are of two classes, one of which we may call Real Estate Ghosts, and the other Portable Ghosts. The first class are so designated because they are attached to the realty. They remain near the scene of the tragedy to which they owe their existence, and show themselves to suitable travelers without respect to the connection or want of connection the spectator may have had with the original event. The Portable Ghosts are the personal property of the murderers or other parties connected with the crime. They usually act in lieu of conscience and keep dark deeds from escaping the mind. Several haunted men have lived and died in Parrsboro. Their ghosts have departed with them. The permanent apparitions, as the age degenerates, are the less disposed to be visible, finding the people fewer and fewer to whom a self-respecting ghost would care to appear.
A chapter on Parrsboro ghosts would therefore read much like the famous treatise on snakes in Ireland. At last accounts, however, the Holy Way Brook ghost in the Fork Woods, near Athol, had not yet taken his final leave. The woods themselves, which before the railway was built, stretched without a break a mile each way from the rock whereon the fearful visitor was wont to sit in the quiet evening hour, are now destroyed. The spirit that dwells on the old Etter road has not yet entirely been withdrawn. The change of the name of Maccan mountain to Mapleton has not deprived the two or three disembodied inhabitants of their earthly home. Civilization has not so much as approached the Boar’s Back ghost, and though the Haunted Mill at Parrsboro is now no more there, the spot where it stood