Intro
Hey ghoul gang! Welcome back to Small Town Spooky, the podcast delivering the chills, the thrills, and the very upsetting historical context of your favourite small town ghost stories. It’s so good to be back, fangs for sticking with the show after last week’s delay. I am hopeful it won’t happen again, though sometimes the howling madness just gets to you, you know? Also I really didn’t factor in how much travelling on the holiday weekend in October would cut into my pod production time.
I am truly flabbergasted by the fact that Small Town Spooky is already up to over 260 streams, thank you so much for listening! I also want to give a special thanks to my friend Natalie for helping me sort out the pronunciations of First Nations place words and names for this week’s episode. I did not know there were First Nations language portals and dictionaries online with audio clips and they are incredibly helpful!
If you like what you hear in this episode, please leave a review on iTunes, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and spread the word around if you enjoy it. :) You can also email smalltownspooky@gmail.com with your thoughts, stories, or any topics you might like to hear on the show.
The poll for an upcoming episode topic on STS is still going on the website; you can participate until October 29th, and I’ll announce the winner in the Halloween episode on October 31st. :) I’ll link to the poll on all of Small Town Spooky’s socials as well so you can find it there. The options are: The haunted hostel that used to be Ottawa’s jail, Brentwood College Boarding School’s ghost-infested student dormitory, or you can submit your own! Go to smalltownspooky.wixsite.com/home to vote now!
Last episode was a bit of a long one, so this week we’re continuing our creepy cross-country tour of eastern North America’s haunted places. If you’ve never spent any time in the wilds of Canada, I can tell you, it is...disorienting. As a kid, my parents used to take me and my siblings camping in Ontario’s national parks, and then when we got older we’d go out on the water in the Georgian Bay area, which is on Lake Huron. Sometimes we’d camp overnight on the little islands out there. It was so remote and just seemed completely untouched by human beings. Out in the woods, with the sound of the lake lapping at the edges of the island, the wind soughing through the trees, the critters scrabbling around on the rocks and chittering to each other, the insects singing, and the complete absence of artificial light, it’s easy to feel engulfed by the wilderness.
I can’t imagine what it was like for the first colonial settlers exploring parts of what would eventually become Canada, especially if they were coming from villages in areas of the UK with a milder climate. Don’t even get me started about how lost those first “explorers” would have been without the First Nations people to guide them around. But today’s story is, as so many ghost stories (and, let’s be real, stories of colonial settlement) are, about the horrors inflicted on people by other people.
Now let’s ghost into it.
Trigger Warning (if any)
Trigger warnings for this episode include discussion of colonial settlers, exploitation and imperialism, homicide, and mentions of immolation, the death of horses by crushing, injury due to physical labour and cannibalism.
History of New Brunswick
East of Maine, where the tip of North America juts into the Atlantic Ocean, New Brunswick is nestled like a cap, crowning the landmass. South of the Gaspé peninsula, the tiny province has a view eastward of the crescent-shaped Prince Edward Island, and connects with Nova Scotia across a narrow 25km (15mi) isthmus, where the Bay of Fundy pools to the south.
You’ll find most human occupants along the coast and to the south, sprouting up around the many rivers criss-crossing the landscape. In the northwest, the Appalachian mountain range dominates the landscape. You can hike the craggy peaks of the Appalachian Trail and peer down into the valleys; see the rolling hills carpeted in verdant, emerald green forest in the summer and the flaming orange and red hues of dying leaves in the fall bracketing the deep blue waterways. New Brunswick is heavily forested, an incredibly valuable resource in terms of not only natural wildlife and game, but also trees, to the First Nations people who settled there, as well as the European colonists who came after. Spruce, fir, cedar and white pine, as well as red and sugar maples, poplar, white and yellow birch and beech are just some of the species of trees available for harvest, used for canoes, camps, fishing weirs and crafts before the advent of the lumber industry in the early 1800s.
The name “Appalachia” likely comes from a misappropriation of an Indigenous group’s name for themselves. The Appalachee tribe, part of the Muskhogean language group, were native to Florida. Their name may be derived from the Muskhogean root word apala, which means “great sea” and a suffix chi meaning “those by”—taken together, “the people by the great sea”. The Appalachee encountered a 16th century Spanish expedition under Hernando De Soto, whose company mapped the Appalachee’s territory (extremely inaccurately, it bears mentioning). The word “Apalache” was later taken up by a French cartographer, who illustrated a map of the region depicted by de Soto’s mapmaker without actually travelling there himself.
The First Nations groups inhabiting the northeast peninsula were actually Wəlastəkwewiyik (Maliseet), Peskotomuhtaki (Passamaquoddy), and Mi’gmaq . These groups were part of the Wabanaki (meaning “People of the dawn” or “The Children of the Light”) confederacy of First Nations. Today, there are over 16000 First Nations people living in New Brunswick, living in sixteen communities across the province, such as the Wəlastəkwewiyik Matawaskiye and Nequotkuk in the west, the Mi’gmaq Oinpegitjoig in the north, Elsipogtog in the east, and the Peskotomuhkati at Skutik in the south.
The Wəlastəkwewiyik are an Algonquinian-speaking group. Their name means the “people of the beautiful river” in skicinuwatuwewakon (their language), which referred to the waterway later called St. John’s (more on the origin of the English place name later). They were referred to as the “Malécite” by the French, who had inquired of the Mi’gmaq what the Wəlastəkwewiyik were called, and given the Mi’gmaq word for the other group: mala’sit , which means “progressing slowly” in mi’kmwei, which was understood by colonial settlers to mean “slow” or “broken” talkers. They traditionally lived in territory to the west, while the Peskotomuhkati lived in the south, and much of what is today called Maine.
The Mi’gmaq were most populous in the east and settled over most of what is now New Brunswick. The Mi’gmaq word for their own people is lnu or nnu, and the name “micmac” was first ascribed to them in writing in 1676 by a French settler. According to the history set out by Daniel N. Paul in We Were Not Savages, the word may be derived from megumawaach, which was understood to mean “people of the red earth”. Prior to colonial contact, the Mi’gmaq lived in self-governed districts, in small villages with shelters made of timber and animal skins, and practiced subsistence farming, hunting game and fishing, including constructing permanent and potable fishing weirs. They liaised with other First Nations groups who were part of the Wabanaki confederacy, and migrated seasonally from the interior woodlands to the coastline.
The Mi’gmaq were accomplished artisans and craftspeople and incredibly talented seafarers who navigated the Atlantic ocean in sea canoes. They originated a glyph-based writing system that they would inscribe on rocks or pieces of birch bark with bits of charcoal, referred to as gomgwejui'gaqan or “suckerfish writing” in reference to the suckerfish, which would leave distinct traceries on the riverbottom where it passed over the mud in search of food. When the French arrived in the early 1600s, the Mi’gmaq were welcoming and helpful. Their own legends seemed to have foretold the arrival of pale-skinned men with blue eyes. Without the assistance of the Mi’gmaq, the French settlers may not have survived the winters on the coast; or at the very least, may have survived with more difficulty. The Mi’gmaq benefitted from certain technologies shared or bartered for with the colonists, but their population was vulnerable to European diseases, which some estimates say decimated up to half of their communities.
The French were some of the first Europeans to appropriate land and build settlements in Mi’gmaq traditional territory. Jacques Cartier’s 1534 expedition included a stop at Gespe’g, called Gaspé by the French, but the first colonial settlers wouldn’t establish a successful encampment in the area until some 70 years later. In the early 1600s, our old frenemy Samuel de Champlain’s expedition navigated northward up to the St Croix River (called skutik in skicinuwatuwewakon and appropriated land at Port Royal, south of the Bay of Fundy, on the northwest side of Nova Scotia (between the Kespukwitk “land ends” and Sipekne’katik “wild potato area” districts of Mi’gmaq territory).
Today, the majority of the settled areas in New Brunswick are on the smaller side, with the largest city, Moncton, topping out at about 110,000 people, with the two second-largest (Fredericton and Saint John) closer to 60k. Most other towns or settlements are between 1000 to under 10,000 people, with many of the villages concentrated on the east and southeast coasts, and through the bottom third of the province, running along the St. John’s River. St. John first came to be called Rivière St Jean because of Samuel de Champlain, who visited the mouth of the river on the feast day of Saint John (June 24) and pronounced it thus named. O, to have the unearned confidence of a straight white man.
The summarized version of what happened next with the French colonists in this area goes a little like this: France doubled down on its efforts to build a North American colony to rival the size of England’s, concentrating its efforts in the New France (Quebec) region. The French settlements in the Maritimes were pretty much on their own, where, with extensive support from the First Nations people, they established a bit of a fishing and fur trade to help eke out an existence. But because they were still technically a French colony, the settlements in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were caught in the crossfire between the New France colonists’ ongoing conflict with the British atlantic colony of New England. These conflicts would more or less come to be lumped under the title of“the Seven Years War”. In the latter half of the 18th century, France and Britain were struggling for supremacy on a global level, which also involved their land claims and colonies in North America.
Equally implicated were the First Nations groups in the Wabanaki confederacy. When the French forts began to fall to British colonial forces, the British colonists turned their eyes to First Nations’ territory. I talked in the second Small Town Spooky episode featuring Edmonton about how, whether First Nations groups were allying with, assisting colonists, or simply tolerating them, the dynamic was still complicated. An influx of white settlers on the land that First Nations had traditionally stewarded, living off of natural resources and creating sustainable patterns of hunting, fishing and farming, put a strain on the environment that made it difficult for everyone to get what they needed and survive. More people meant more destruction (whether intentional or consequential) of food sources and other resources. Add to that the very real, very violent encroachment of white settlers on land where First Nations people hunted, lived and farmed, and you get a sense of why certain First Nations groups treated with French colonists, in order to broker alliances and support in fending off British settlers’ attempt to claim land.
The British were successful in their defeat of the French in Canada in the Maritimes, though elsewhere on the continent is another story. The British imprisoned or expelled thousands of self-identified Acadians (French colonists living in the Maritimes) from their settlements, creating a diaspora that sent them to different northern and southern reaches of North America or back to France. If you remember me mentioning that Italian navigator, Giovanni da Verranzzano, in the last episode of Small Town Spooky, we have him to thank for the term “Arcadia” or “Acadia”, which is how he designated the region of Atlantic coast near Delaware. Over the next 20 years, British colonists were granted land in the Atlantic colonies that had formerly been occupied by French colonists, some invited by Crown representatives, others fleeing from the British colonies which had fallen to the American Revolution.
Around 1760, the British Crown also negotiated a Treaty with the Wabenaki confederacy. This was, in essence, a renegotiation of terms that the First Nations groups had already established with the French colonists in the 1720s, which, rather than a series of structured agreements, documented like the numbered treaties I talked about in the Unearthing Edmonton episode of Small Town Spooky, these were more like verbal agreements and were recorded post-negotiation by the Crown. I’m sure I don’t have to explain the kind of problem that could present, when you have one group relying on what was said (but not recorded) at a meeting and another group who wrote down their version of what was said and are treating it like an objective record.
This initial series of treaties is often referred to as the Peace and Friendship Treaty, with the latter treaties being included in what is sometimes referred to as the “Covenant Chain of Treaties”, made between the First Nations and the British Crown and covering parts of the Canadian Maritimes and the New England area of America. There is far more about the treaties than I can cover here, but suffice it to say that one of the salient points is that the treaties did not cede traditional First Nations territory to colonial settlers; it granted them leave to occupy it. The development of the Canadian government and the imperial policies implemented by the British Crown in their North American colonies is pretty standard from there. Outright campaigns of disenfranchisement, disinformation, and flat-out circumvention by white settlers led to an increasing winnowing of land that was safe for First Nations to exist on.
This passage from Teaching About the Mi’kmaq sums it up better than I could: “The alienation of land is perhaps the most important and detrimental consequence of European contact in Mi’gma’ki. Over centuries the dispossession of land has taken many forms: overall population growth and pressure, outright confiscation, legally-sanctioned appropriation, community displacement, and the contamination of land, as well as the destruction of ancestral sites across the region. Alongside land alienation was the growth and strengthening of the concept of private property and other Western concepts of land management, which inevitably impacted the vast majority of land areas regardless of ownership. Importantly, one must remember that land is about a great deal more than sustenance. Places anchor memories, ceremonies, the burial of the dead, and the evidence of past events and experiences. As land, habitats and species are lost, so too are the specific cultural knowledge, memory and practices that were embedded in that landscape.”
Ghosts in the Woods
The trees are close, catching the cloth of your jacket. You walk through the woods, following the trail, trying not to catch your foot on the roots exposed by years of travellers wearing down the dirt of the path. The birds call to one another overhead while a squirrel chatters on a branch below. What do they say? In the distance, you can hear the steady trickling of the stream. Underneath the buzzing of the bugs and the sigh of the breeze, you think you might hear the soft hush of the ocean lapping at the shore. The forest has its own language and its own life.
Some 83% of New Brunswick’s total surface area is forested. The Mi’kmaq have many legends about the dense forests, and one recounts how Glooscap, the mythical, superhuman being, son of the Creator, and cultural hero, received as visitors seven young warriors from neighboring First Nations groups. One young man was so enamored of the area that he expressed a wish to stay there forever and live for a long time, to which Glooscap responded by directing Giwgw, Earthquake—a personification of the natural phenomenon—to stand the young warrior up in the earth and transform him into a cedar tree. Legend has it that shortly thereafter, the wind blowing through the warrior-turned-tree’s boughs scattered cedar boughs and seeds all over the land, out of which grew all the cedar groves in the Maritimes.
Peter Lewis Paul, a Wolastoq consultant, toured the Harvard linguist Karl V. Teeter through the Wolastoq or St. John’s River area. They took oral histories, stories and legends from Wolastoq elders born before 1900, collected in the book Tales from Maliseet Country. One story, told by Charles Laporte, was about a haunting experience in the woods of Tobique River, some 110 km (70 miles) northwest of Dungarvon River and the Blackville area. In Laporte’s telling, which I’ve adapted here, a young man was recently married and had a desire to take his wife hunting in the woods. They packed their canoe and set their course, heading down the river for the place where they would overwinter.
The man set his trap out in lines by the stream for mink. The air was growing colder, with a little snow falling from the sky. His next task was to prepare his bear traps, which took some doing since the entire contraption consisted of an inner trap and an exterior ring of ten hardwood logs. It was cold and the man was rushing to get it done.
Before he left the traps, he took one last look and decided he’d done some shoddy work setting up the bear trap. He sidled inside to adjust the bait inside the trap and—SNAP! When he moved the meat, the trap snapped shut and nearly cleaved him right in two. The man avoided injury, but he was now caught in the trap himself. He couldn’t get free, and his wife was off at their camp, too far away to call for help.
The sun had gone down when the woman saw her husband approaching camp. He was carrying firewood, which he left, before returning with water. But oddly, he didn’t say a single word. He would only stare, and when she spoke to him, he wouldn’t answer. They spent the entire winter together at the camp. The woman’s husband checked the traps, skinned the game, repaired her canoe, brought firewood and water. But something about him was strange.
On their last day at camp, the man brought his wife the paddles for the canoe. He instructed her to gather whatever she wanted and load it into the vessel. She made a neat pile of everything they had collected, all the furs and skins her husband had brought her. The next morning, her husband asked if she was ready to leave, and she told him she was. He gave her a paddle and instructed her to get into the canoe. She did as he asked, and waited patiently for him to join her.
“You alone are leaving,” he told her instead, “but I am staying here. Please return to our village, and when you come back, give me a proper burial.”
A shiver went down the woman’s spine. “A burial?” She looked at her husband’s face, which had appeared so distant that first day some months ago when they’d made camp, and he’d returned from setting traps.
“I was caught in my own trap, and my body is still there,” the ghost told her.
“What do you mean?” cried his wife. “You have been with me in our camp this past winter!”
The ghost bowed his head, sorrow etched across his features, which were fading rapidly now. “This winter, it was my spirit, not me, that has been helping you. I was given leave to watch over you for a time. Please, come back and bury me.”
As the vision of the man faded away and her eyes blurred with tears, the woman pushed off from the banks of the river, heading for home in the canoe she had packed with the last gifts her husband had brought her.
The Dungarvon Whooper
In the early 1800s, Napoleon Bonaporte’s naval blockade on Britain forced the Crown to look for lumber outside of Europe. They looked westward, to the colonies they’d constructed in North America, with New Brunswick being their main target. The extensive riverways that covered the geography made it easier to move wood from the interior to the seaports on the Atlantic, and the proliferation of pine, spruce and hemlock fell quickly to loggers, who rerouted them to hastily erected sawmills. Shipyards on the major rivers and on the coast constructed boats almost as quickly as they received wood for shipment abroad. Colonial settlers with farm plots capitalized on the lumber trade in the early 1800s by working during their off-season. Mi’kmaq and other First Nations were either displaced by the incoming colonial settlers or equipped with the rudimentary tools to participate in farming or the lumber trade and earn a living as the Crown (later the Canadian government) saw fit.
Approaching the mid-1800s though, extensive forest clearing required that lumber companies move into more remote, inaccessible areas—meaning that they needed the upfront capital to pay for clearing streams of any rocky blockades to floating lumber via the inland waterways. The Crown was intervening, too, setting tighter regulation, and the trade was yielding less profit and becoming more competitive. Rich, established companies capitalized on the lumber trade, since they were equipped to buy licenses, contract lumber gangs, and erect larger, more efficient sawmills with access to proprietary ships and trains to transport their product. In the 1840s, rich, well-connected Europeans, many of them Scottish, monopolized the lumber industry in northeastern New Brunswick. After 1870, the railroad system creeping further and further over the continent enabled more expedient and voluminous shipments of logs.
The logging industry in the maritimes wouldn’t last. At the close of the 19th century, foreign tariffs, recessions and an emerging lumber trade on the Pacific coast combined with the disintegration of the wooden shipbuilding industry and decades of wasteful lumber harvesting to create a shortage of trees and demand for them that tanked New Brunswick's timber trade. But at its peak, it was a driver of the economy—and the migration of colonial settlers. Since the work was seasonal, beginning in the fall when the farmers were storing the last of the harvest and preparing their plots to overwinter, the French, Scots, Irish, British and even some Yankees from America would long haul up to northern (Upper) Canada or stream down and east to the coast to pick up work in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
The trees were felled through the autumn by the axmen. The skidding gangs came next with their horses to pull the logs from the woods, with the trails hacked out by axes ahead. It was dangerous, incredibly physical work that could kill a man through injury, exposure to the elements, or freak accident. Getting horses to long haul enormous tree trunks over rugged terrain was a skill in itself, and a bucking horse could be just as dangerous as an oversized branch falling from a felled tree; each could easily result in a broken leg, or worse, which in the middle of the wilderness could spell disaster. Lumber gang teamsters hauled through the winter, dragging their great loads through the interior to the lakes and frozen river, preparing to ship them to the coast as soon as spring thaw would allow. Hauling sleds and snow made the process somewhat easier, for as dangerous as the cold and ice could be. Imagine steering two horses lashed to a two-ton sled carrying 30 logs (that’s about 18 tons more) down a snow-covered hill, keeping up a steady speed so that the weight of the load wouldn’t crush the horses to death before you made it to the bottom.
Through the spring season, lumberjacks drove the logs downriver to sawmills for processing and to be loaded on vessels that would ferry them to ships waiting on the coast. They used a variety of implements that included poles and “calked drive boots” with studded soles that allowed them to maintain a grip while walking over logs. These boots were a logger’s pride, worn to calf-height. A logger who drowned would be buried with his boots nailed up to mark his grave. The men would use them in bar brawls to puncture their opponent’s skin, something that came to be called “logger’s smallpox”. These were rough men, sometimes hard-scrabble or thrill-seeking dare-devils, who travelled in large groups and descended on communities and their establishments (usually a local tavern of sorts), and lived in temporary camps made of rough shanties. As Donald MacKay writes, “Brigades of tough, healthy men cooped up all winter in such remote camps could make roaring nuisances of themselves when they came down on the spring log drives and fought with rival [lumber] gangs.” I’m surprised HBO hasn’t financed a six-season series about this yet.
[Image: Black and white photograph of a a big log jam in New Brunswick in 1900, with a logger standing in the foreground and some visible in the background. They are carrying poles (called "peavies") to roll the logs with. (LS-AT27/New Brunswick Museum, www.nbm-mnb.ca)]
Dungarvon River is a tributary of the larger Mirimachi, the name for which may come from a European butchering of the Montagnais First Nations words Maissimeu Assi (“Mi'kmaq Land”). The Mi'gmaq called it lustagoocheehk, “goodly little river”. Dungarvon takes its name from a river in Ireland. The name is derived from Irish Galeic Dún Garbhán, which means “The Fort of Garbhan”. According to local tradition in the New Brunswick settlement of Dungarvon, Michael Murphy, a native of Dungarvan, Ireland, was the one who originated the name, as he’d often shout “I’ll make Dungarvan shake” during a particularly spirited dance. It’s from this area that one of colonial New Brunswick’s arguably most famous ghost stories comes: the tale of the Dungarvon Whooper, sometimes pronounced “Hooper”.
The Dungarvon Whooper as told in Donald MacKay’s The Lumberjacks was taken from the recollection of Tom Pond, a resident of Fredericton who heard it in a lumber camp, where he went to work at the age of fifteen (fifteen!) after World War I. It goes about so:
“The way I heard it, it happened on the log drive in the spring. On the Dungarvon River which feeds into the Miramichi there's a place they call Whooper Springs and Whooper Landing. There's a big spring there and a big high landing, all overgrown with trees now. That's where the Dungarvon Whooper is supposed to have put in an appearance. There must have been something because some of those old fellas [...] weren't scared of anything. Bad old bastards, some of them, if the Devil himself come along they'd go and pull his tail. They didn't scare easy. After that drive, though, they got so they wouldn't even go in there!
"They were coming down on the drive and the spring before they'd had hard drivin' and had left some landings—logs piled high on the shore— so this time they had orders to put those logs into the water. But by this time the logs had all settled together and tipped over onto each other. They tented on the flats there, just above, and went to work on those landings, and it was a hard, slow drag because the "logs were so tangled and so dangerous.
"Anyhow there was this one fellow in the crew who was notorious for his blasphemy. Now to the old-timers there was swearin' and cussin'—and then, there was blasphemy. With blasphemy you cursed the Lord and you defied him. You had to be a pretty bad character to do that, but this fella was an awful wicked man in this way, a lot of people didn't want to work with him. He was cranky and ugly and hard to get along with.
"They were having breakfast in the morning and finally he threw down his plate. They had been working on that landing and it was so bad the foreman had said, 'Watch it.'
"This fella said, “I’ll break that Jesus landin' this morning or I'll eat my breakfast in Hell.”
"He grabbed his peavey and away he went. The foreman called to him but he didn't pay any attention and had just rolled off a few logs when the whole thing caved and of course four or five piles of logs were all tangled in together and when one started, it tore all the rest of them out. Twenty-two-foot logs [that] had stood there the whole year and when an old landing like that tumbled [...] a cloud of dust come up.
"When the dust began to settle they looked out and saw the logs had filled the whole Dungarvon Stream. [...] [An] animal, or creature, had come out on those logs from the landing side. A long, brown animal, with a great long tail and a round head like a man and short horns. It was the Devil. [...] He got to the other bank in terrific leaps, 20 feet or more, [and] disappeared into the woods [...]. They heard this awful, blood curdling screech — which was this fellow's death whoop, you see. The Devil was taking him away. They never did find him. The Devil had come and got him to have his breakfast in Hell."
Pond shares that the Whooper—or devil—was seen and heard many times after, and that he even encountered a logger who told of stopping his horses by the river to take a drink. He was an excellent horseman, and trained his teams well, but this particular day the horses were startled by something. They lifted their heads all at once then started snorting, jumping and threshing, and when the man looked up, he saw the Whooper perched on a log. As soon as his horses started up the racket, the Whooper leapt across the river to the bank and ran into the woods. The horses were so frantic, they broke up the man’s wagon before he could calm them. He never stopped at that part of the river again.
As with any good story, there are multiple versions, including poems, a stage play, and a song originally published in 1912 (you can listen to a version by Mike Bravener on Spotify). This version is quite a departure from the one where the Devil makes a cameo. In it, a young cook from an impoverished family travels from Ireland to Canada. In some versions, he’s a young man named Ryan, who comes to the New World to send money home to his mam. He works in a logging camp, feeding the men over long days of grueling work, and during a hard winter, there’s a shortage of food. The men in the camp are beginning to starve. So the logging boss, seeing Ryan’s young and tender body, and knowing no one on this side of the world will miss him, cuts him up and adds Ryan to his own stew, which he then serves to the men of his camp.
In other versions, Ryan is a headstrong, boorish boy who flaunts the cash he makes working in the camps. Or perhaps he’s friendly and naive, a good boy who’s neither a drinking nor a gambler but, being a little too trusting with the men of the camp, shows them the earnings he’ll be sending home. Either way, Ryan keeps his money close, in his shirt or a belt, and his covetous employer, the boss of the logging camp, sees it peeking out one too many times and conspires to kill Ryan and steal his earnings. The boss either covers up his crime, or cuts in the other men of the camp if they help him dispose of Ryan’s body. They bury him in a shallow grave, and Ryan’s spirit is laid to an uneasy rest.
Thus begins a series of strange happenings that plague the camp. The men hear strange sounds and whoops in the night from the woods around them. It can only be the spirit of the young Irish cook, wailing as he wanders the dense forest in search of those who did him wrong. In some tellings, a Catholic priest is called in the ensuing years, to exorcise the forest and bless the place where Ryan was killed. But to this day, the ghostly cries can still be heard by those unwary enough to wander into the woods of Dungarvon.
Outro/Acknowledgements
I had a lot of fun researching this episode, probably because I was more focused on the ghost stories than the genocidal aspects of early colonial settlements in Canada. Y’all, that is truly rough, and it is ongoing. I always include the sources (with links!) in my episode post so that you can read more about it, because it boggles the mind and there’s always so much more than what I can fit into an episode. There are still legal battles being fought by Mi’gmaq First Nations with the Canadian government today—you may have heard about the fishermen who destroyed Mi’gmaq fishing boats and a lobster storage facility in Nova Scotia in retaliation for the government upholding treaty rights—and most recently, an internal government memo was leaked from the New Brunswick provincial body, ordering employees to stop giving land acknowledgements. If you’re Canadian and have the means, consider donating to a #LandBack cause or contacting your local government representative telling them that this behaviour is really unacceptable when the federal government has positioned itself as committed to honouring the outcomes and calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
I listened to a lot of Mi’gmaq music when I was researching this episode and I thought I’d share some playlists with you on the episode transcript: you can listen here and here. If you haven’t heard the cover of “Blackbird” sung in mi’kmwei by Emma Stevens, it’s well worth listening to as well. And I don’t want to overlook lumberjack songs—obviously, there’s the perennial Canadian favourite “The Log Drivers’ Waltz” and the equally classic Monty Python jam, but if you’re interested in something a tad more historically accurate, check out The Wakami Wailers’ album “The Last of the White Pine Loggers”. A lot of the songs are actually narratives that describe the logging lifestyle from the early 19th century.
I also did so much reading about the lumberjacks in the early nineteenth century in Canada and it was truly wild the things they had to contend with just to get the lumber to the ocean, where it could be shipped overseas. If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend the book The Lumberjacks by Donald MacKay. It’s full of first-hand accounts of lumberjacks and goes further into the process of harvesting and hauling logs, and also includes more lumberjack stories. You have to imagine the kind of wild tales that would be shared around the campfire when there’s nothing to do but eat camp food and swap stories.
What I thought was most interesting about the Whooper stories was that there were two versions—one with a devil, and one without. In the Tom Pond version, MacKay recorded that Pond actually suggests that what the loggers saw could have been a cougar, which were apparently rare in New Brunswick, but had been sighted around the river at least four times between 1908 and 1923. They are extremely elusive animals, so it doesn’t really surprise me that they’re not often seen, and they do make wild noises. Some of the other accounts that I read suggested that maybe the noises were coming from owls in the area, and one of the things I thought of as well were foxes or coyotes.
If you have any of your own hometown scaries you want to share, or any legends about the Maritimes you know, send it in via email (smalltownspooky@gmail.com) or on the socials @smalltownspooky. We’re also coming up to Halloween and I have something really fun planned for Small Town Spooky’s first Halloween episode, so if you want to be a part of that, send me your best Halloween-related scary story to get it featured on the show!
Until next time, thanks for listening and hope to spook you soon. ;)
MUSIC CREDITS
Special thanks to the providers of the music for this episode.
It’s Not Hard to Get Lost by Bryan Mathys (title theme); Meekness, Brand New World and Smoldering by Kai Engel; Running Waters and Autumn Sunset by Jason Shaw; Clusticus the Mistaken by Doctor Turtle all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Sailor’s Lament by Jason Shaw and Jig of Slurs. Dublin Reel - Merry Blacksmith. The Mountain Road by Sláinte are under a US Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
All sound effects licensed under Creative Commons 0, courtesy of Freesounds.org.
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