Books What Changed Me, vol 2

"If you talked while you were digging for treasure the money would sink down, or the devil would come with his head bare, or the man buried with the treasure would come with his sword in his hand to kill you."


One of many little quotable stories told to Dr. Helen Creighton over the course of the many years she travelled the East Coast of Canada compiling folklore to make up, among other volumes, a book that has been by my side and in my head for a good long time. The story of its discovery shares a major trait with my previous entry: the public school system.

Whilst sitting through a tedious library orientation in the very first of my junior high school days, my friend Dwayne nudged me and pointed to the stacks:
"Bluenose Ghosts. I wonder what that is."


It could have been the very first book I checked out at my junior high. I made my way through all the chapters in rapid succesion: Forerunners. Ghosts Guard Buried Treasure. Devils and Angels. So Many Wandering Women. There and Not There. During an afternoon reading period, in the bright light of day, I vividly recall being terrified by a detail from a larger story in the chapter Haunted Houses and Poltergeists:


"My wife heard of these stories and they got on her nerves so much at night that she would dream of a child that was nothing but bones coming down the chimney hole asking for food."


Bluenose Ghosts is fairly well known and can be found on the bookshelves of many a Maritime Canadian. Helen Creighton recieved the Order of Canada for her almost mind-boggingly thorough cataloguing of songs and stories that were just on the edge of being lost at the beginning of the last century. The only thing I can personally say to her detriment is that she inadvertantly unearthed the now-ubiquitous and endlessly commodified Farewell to Nova Scotia.


Much of the book is transcribed directly from the master tapes of outport fisherman, etc. laying down the stories in their own words: "De ye known what is was?", says one interviewee in describing a ghost. "It was a nawthin'." Similarly another person describes the sound of a ghost as "Somethin' soft knockin' on nawthin'."
On several occasions I've performed a long, florid monologue from the book in which two men encounter a "Thing" standing on an impossibly rotten fencepost on a bright summer's night. It's such a well-told story that it's actually frightened and mildly disturbed audiences, and petrified a group of high school tough guys one night as I read it in a dorm room while chaperoning a drama group.

The sort of superstitions and elaborate folklore detailed in the book still linger in this region. Once while filming a Blair Witch- style documentary to alleviate boredom on a theatre contract in rural Nova Scotia, my fellow actress and myself discovered over the course of this lark that the ghost story we were covering was in fact very much alive in this part of the world, and we ended up with a fascinating little documentary showing its interpretation over the course of several generations. Seeing the fears and anxieties of a people expressed in these folklorish ways even today brought Nova Scotia to a new kind of life. I've an unproduced play called Dark Fields which in part explores the way free-floating distress ends up manifesting itself as stories of the devil & grey ladies, etc. etc. to this day.


That my high school friends and I for years dropped quotes from BG as much as from TV and film gives me enormous satisfaction. That it's woven its way through my life even to the degree that I've been able to return some of it to the culture in my day is satisfying moreso. In my ever tumultuous relationship with this little province, Bluenose Ghosts is one thing that's come out of Nova Scotia that I'll talk up forever.



This is the mass-market paperback version of the book that you'll find these days all across Canada. There's an out-of-print 1950's hardcover edition that has this rippin' scary fisherman on the bottom left corner of the cover.