Ghosts of Nova Scotia

The Maritimes are rife with stories of ghosts and other spectres from the world beyond. Nova Scotia has a particularly rich legacy of such stories, and Ghosts of Nova Scotia is filled with many of them. This tenth anniversary edition has been updated and expanded. The stories are generally short—you can read a few with a cup of coffee—and the subjects are varied.

 

In his introduction, Darryll Walsh—a lecturer at the Nova Scotia Community College and host of “Shadow Hunter”, a series on the Space Channel—writes, “I began my initiation into the unknown as a small child… I was put to bed early to make room for adult discussions, but I stayed awake for I knew that … the conversation would turn to the mysterious.”

 

It did and he has gathered a great assortment of the mysterious in this book. For example, in the story entitled “Amherst”, there is “one of the most documented and strangest occurrences of ghostly phenomena” involving a young woman named Esther Cox. After breaking up with her boyfriend, she began experiencing sounds under the bed, objects moving by themselves and ““Esther Cox, you are mine to kill” was written by a ghostly hand in front of a half-dozen witnesses”, among other frightening events.

 

Meanwhile, “Isle Haute” has legends of buried treasure, and “Spidell Hill” was, for many years, the location of a ball of fire. A ghostly woman walks “Evangeline Beach” and, on the anniversary of a massacre of British troops, Bloody Creek runs red in “Bridgetown”.

 

If your interest runs to sea creatures, don’t fret; they make appearances here, too. In “Cape Sable Island” there are stories of a sea creature with tusks and red eyes, while in “St. Margaret’s Bay” there have been sightings of one that was “seventy to one hundred feet long … [with] a long mane.”

 

Pirates enter the fray, as do headless ghosts, and even a little dog thought to be the Devil strolls through the book, making Ghosts of Nova Scotia a fun and interesting compendium for the curious and for the believer. —Sharon Hunt