The Lunenburg Werewolf (2 page)

Approximately forty kilometres southwest of downtown Halifax lies the little town of Peggy's Cove. The village was founded in the year 1811 when the province of Nova Scotia issued a grant to six families to settle and build up the area. Very little has changed in this tiny fishing village since then—it now has a population of less than one hundred souls, all told.

Over the years, Peggy's Cove has become famous as a kind of living Holy Grail for Nova Scotia tourism. Every year thousands of curious visitors flock from across the globe to walk upon the cove's lonely rocks and search for the Lady in Blue—the ghost of a woman in a blue dress who is said to haunt these shores—and every year the local authorities warn the public of the dangers of clambering over those slippery, wind-blasted boulders. And yet every year—even in the wildest of weather—foolhardy visitors insist upon braving the wave-splashed rocks, risking at best an unexpected dunking and at worst death by drowning.

No one is really sure just how Peggy's Cove originally got its name. Some claim that the name is nothing more than the diminutive of the name Margaret, since Peggy's Cove is situated at the mouth of St. Margaret's Bay. Others will tell you that the tiny village was originally known as Pegg's Cove—as it appears upon maps dating as far back as the late eighteenth century. Storytellers and folklorists will also tell of how, in the early nineteenth century, the town got its name after a sturdy little schooner was shattered upon the glacial granite of Halibut Rock, just a short distance from the current site of the much-photographed Peggy's Cove Lighthouse. Coincidentally, this is also the story of how the Lady in Blue came to haunt the shorelines of this now-infamous tourist attraction.

Peggy's Story

It was a stormy October night. The wintry wind howled like a mad banshee. The rain sliced down in sheer, horizontal sheets. The local folk called such a storm a Southeaster and on nights like this they laid extra firewood by their hearths, latched their windows, and barred their barn doors securely. Dories were hauled ashore and larger vessels were made fast with the tying on of extra hawser line. However, there was no such protection available for a brave schooner caught in the grip of the open sea.

The schooner's captain leaned heavily against the wheel, pitting his faltering strength against the irresistible power of the current. It was no use.

“We're going to lose her,” the first mate told the captain.

“Wrong tense,” the captain said. “The fact is we have already lost her.”

The first mate shook his head sadly. “Perhaps the men were right, after all,” he said. “We should never have allowed a woman on board. It is Jonah luck for certain sure.”

“Wrong again,” the captain corrected. “The way I count, it looks like we've got two women, not just one.”

It was true. The men had threatened mutiny when their captain had first announced that he was allowing a woman to sail with them. To make matters worse, the woman had brought along her young daughter.

In time the men had grown used to these unwanted intrusions. The ill omens promised by their gender were overcome by the woman's kindness and comforting beauty. The men looked forward to watching her walk upon the deck in her favourite dress—a comfortable cotton dyed a particular shade of deep cornflower blue. The sailors even grew used to the sight of her young daughter, the cook would bake her sugar cookies, and the oldest of the men would always find the time each day to play her a tune on his wheezing old concertina.

Yet at a time like this, when the water was roaring and the waves were raging and the wind blew hard enough to blow the pucker from out of a whistle, old feelings would slowly surface.

“Two women on board is twice the bad luck by my mathematics,” the first mate pointed out.

“There's no mathematics necessary in a situation like this,” the captain said. “Calculate it however you want to and it is nothing more than a matter of time before we all go down and drown.”

“So what do we do?” the first mate asked.

“What else can we do?” the captain replied. “Hang on until we can't hang on any longer.”

The captain tried his best to bank his foundering vessel and turn her against the relentless current, but it was no use. His grim prophecy of losing the ship proved sadly true as the waves inexorably drove the brave schooner into Halibut Rock. The oak planks of the hull smashed up against the implacable granite with a jolting impact that drove the sailors to their knees. The waves splashed and swallowed the deck. Some of the crew tried to save themselves by clambering atop the schooner's masts.

Meanwhile, one brave sailor saw fit to rescue the ship's female passenger. Whether her presence had brought the vessel to its sorry state or whether it had been simply a mixture of bad timing and bad weather did not matter to this simple sailor. This was a woman in need and he was going to do his level best to see her to safety. “Get up on my shoulders,” he told her. “I'll wade to shore.”

It was a foolish hope but better than nothing. The woman grabbed her daughter and clung to the brave sailor, who struck out into the current. He kicked away from the sinking schooner and tried his hardest to swim when he realized it was too deep to wade to shore. But the cruel Atlantic current pulled him under, and with his last gasp of strength he pushed the woman a little closer to the shoreline. In turn, she pushed her daughter towards the waiting rocks.

The next morning, when the people of the village came down to survey the aftermath of the shipwreck, they were amazed to find the only survivor—a fifteen-year-old girl who had washed up upon the shoreline.

The trauma of the girl's ordeal had left her suffering with total amnesia. She could not even remember her given name. A local family by the name of Weaver adopted the child and gave her the name Margaret—or Peggy, for short.

The Lady in Blue

It is said that years later, as Peggy walked the shoreline, she saw what looked to be a woman in a blue dress—the shade of which was a blend of summer cornflowers, deep sky, and lonely regret. The woman did not seem to walk across the boulders, but rather glided, like a schooner in full sail. Peggy felt a cold breeze shiver across her bones and a salty tear splash at the corners of her vision. As she drew closer, she was amazed to see how strangely familiar the woman looked to her. It was almost as if she were staring into a mirror that had fallen into a quiet tide pool.

“I am sorry,” the woman said in a voice as soft as a summer breeze blowing in from the harbour. “I am sorry for leaving you.”

Since then the Lady in Blue has been reportedly witnessed by many tourists and residents alike in Peggy's Cove. Some people will tell you that the Lady in Blue is actually the ghost of a woman who married a local man and then grew tired of the life of a wife of a fisherman. She supposedly abandoned her husband and children and sailed away on a Scotland-bound steamer only to sink just a few kilometres from her destination. Since then her spirit is thought to have wandered the rocky shores trying to make amends for her grievous treatment of her family.

Others will agree that the Lady in Blue was a fisherman's wife, but they will add the wrinkle that she wanders the shoreline grieving for her husband, who drowned at sea while trying to support her and her four children on a fisherman's wages. After the incident, she apparently gave her children up for adoption and then in a fit of sorrow starved herself to death, wandering the shoreline and wasting slowly away.

For myself, I believe that the Lady in Blue is the ghost of Peggy's mother—the woman who gave her life so that her child might have a chance of survival. How very much like a mother to never forgive herself for drowning before her daughter was fully grown.

Whatever the story, there are an awful lot of people who have seen this sad blue spirit wandering the lonesome grey rocks of Peggy's Cove. Keep an eye peeled the next time you visit the tiny village named after our heroine—and don't get too close to those grey rocks or those cold, hungry waves.

About twenty kilometres southeast of the town of Yarmouth, in amongst the random scatter of islands that cluster about the larger and better-known Tusket Island—including Green Island, Bald Island, Sheep Island, and Goat Island—lies a bit of rock and timber that is known to the locals as Murder Island. According to Yarmouth historian R. B. Blauveldt, at the time of Yarmouth's first settlement back in 1761, the skeletal remains of an estimated one thousand bodies were discovered bleaching upon the rocky shore of Murder Island.

Some people will tell you that these skeletons were actually the remains of the original diggers of the Oak Island Money Pit, which which we will get to later on in this collection. These people believe that the dreaded Captain Kidd transported all the witnesses of the burial of his treasure to this tiny little island off of Yarmouth, where he murdered them in a fit of cold-blooded savagery.

Several sources also suggest another origin of the name “Murder Island.” These sources talk of a great battle that was fought by a pair of warring First Nations tribes upon the island. They report that, according to an eighteenth-century French missionary who spent his life travelling from village to village, the Mi'kmaq and another tribe waged a great battle over a hidden treasure on the island. The resulting massacre was supposedly so brutal that the Mi'kmaq decided the island was bad luck and promptly paddled away from it, leaving it to the bones.

Do not be misled by any books that list this as a possible source for the original name, however, because when I looked into this version of the story, I learned that the sources in question were confusing Murder Island with an island in the St. Lawrence River known as the Île au Massacre (Massacre Island). There, according to local folklore, the Mohawk massacred a band of two hundred Mi'kmaq after trapping them in a small cavern.

So what
really
happened on Murder Island?

A Derelict Ship

On the fine Tuesday morning of October 7, 1735, the sturdy two-masted brigantine
Baltimore
set sail from Dublin, Ireland, bound for its home port of Annapolis, Maryland, with approximately five dozen souls on board—including eighteen crewmen and two ship's officers.

The
Baltimore
was sighted once as it rounded Cape Sable Island over a month later. Then, early in December, the ship drifted into Chebogue Harbour, about six kilometres north of Yarmouth. When it arrived, the
Baltimore
was empty of crew and passengers save for a solitary survivor, who called herself Susannah. The deck was stained with blood and hacked in spots as if a great battle had been fought upon it. The ship had quite obviously been ransacked and there were no signs of cargo or valuables.

Susannah identified herself as the wife of the ship's owner, Andrew Buckler. “We were off course,” she told the local authorities. “And we dropped anchor at Murder Island to refill our water and to forage for game.”

No one thought to ask just why the ship's captain had bothered landing at Murder Island when the larger and more populated Greater Tusket Island was so close at hand. Perhaps they believed that the captain had been confused in his weariness. Perhaps it was just that no one could imagine the possibility that Susannah wasn't exactly telling the whole truth of the matter.

“We were attacked by savage Indians,” Susannah went on to explain. “They surprised us at nightfall. They killed the crew and stripped the vessel of everything that could be removed. I managed to survive by locking myself in the captain's cabin. I fought them off with a pair of flintlock pistols that I found hidden in a sea chest in the cabin.”

Her rescuers were naturally touched by this story of lone heroism, but there were still a lot of nagging questions that badly needed answering: How had this massacre taken place so close to civilization without being noticed? What were the natives, who had absolutely no history of piracy or massacring shipwreck victims, actually doing out there, so far from their home and hunting ground? What had happened to all the bodies? And why hadn't the attackers, whoever they were, simply broken down the cabin door and overpowered Susannah after her two flintlock pistols were emptied? Unfortunately, Susannah couldn't offer any answers that even came close to satisfying these questions.

“The Indians stripped the vessel of what valuables they could find and departed,” she explained. “Afterwards I fainted from fatigue and hunger. I knew nothing until you good people rescued me. I'm afraid that I do not know what became of the bodies of the captain, my husband, and the crew.”

She went on to explain that along with seizing the ship's cargo, which she estimated to be valued at about twelve hundred pounds sterling, the mysterious attackers had robbed her of a personal fortune worth sixteen hundred pounds sterling in silver and gold.

“Besides that,” she went on. “They stripped the ship of its sails, rigging, furniture, armament, and six fully working swivel guns.”

Naturally, the townsfolk did not wish to push a possibly unnecessary interrogation upon the woman. After all, she had barely survived a massacre and had been through a terrifying ordeal. Why punish her further by asking futile questions? She had been through so very much already—hadn't she?

The Hoodoo Ship

At the time of Susannah's arrival, Governor Lawrence Armstrong was the official in command of Annapolis Royal. In May 1736, Armstrong heard word of the fate of the crew of the
Baltimore
and dispatched Ensign Charles Vane with an armed party to apprehend the mysterious woman who had been found aboard the ship. “We will get to the bottom of this,” the governor swore.

Once Vane and the armed party had safely arrested Susannah, they sailed the
Baltimore
back to Annapolis Royal, where they moored her in the harbour. Susannah Buckler appeared before a council and was questioned at length. She repeated her previous story, almost verbatim.

All winter long, the
Baltimore
lay anchored in the harbour. People almost forgot that she was there. As time passed, the ship was stripped of anything worth stealing. She grew a bad reputation, and the local folk began to think of the vessel as some sort of jinx. They gave the
Baltimore
the nickname “The Hoodoo Ship.” Some even called it “The Death Ship.”

After a time, no one would board, purchase, or sail the ship. Finally, Armstrong ordered the
Baltimore
destroyed. The ill-fated brigantine was towed out to sea, torches were lit and thrown, and the
Baltimore
burned to the water's edge and sank.

Unfortunately, the mystery still remained.

Getting to the Bottom of It

Finally, word was received from Ireland regarding the nature of the passengers on the ship, and the story of what really happened was pieced together. It seemed that the woman who called herself “Susannah Buckler” had actually been a convict, one of sixty convicted criminals who were being transported to Annapolis, Maryland, aboard the
Baltimore
.

During the passage across the Atlantic, “Susannah” had managed to make friends with the ship's owner, Andrew Buckler. Through Buckler she had become acquainted with the captain of the vessel. Before the ship had reached Nova Scotia, “Susannah” had managed to free her fellow convicts, who'd massacred every member of the crew. Afterwards, they'd flung the crewmen's bodies into the water to wash ashore at Murder Island. However, their bloodlust had remained unquenched.

An argument amongst the criminals had somehow escalated into a full-blown battle, and the convicts had killed one another off until only “Susannah” and nine other ex-prisoners remained alive. Then “Susannah” had finished the rest of her comrades off with a pot of salt pork stew—carefully seasoned with rat poison—after which she'd heaved the final nine bodies over the side and into the Atlantic Ocean's cold, merciless grasp.

A perfect crime, or so she'd thought.

Susannah's Fate

Following her imprisonment, the woman known only as “Susannah Buckler” made friends with one of her guards and eventually escaped from Annapolis Royal. She fled — some believe with the help of the guard and others believe with the help of a fisherman—across the border to Boston, where all trace of her disappeared. Perhaps she died.