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St. John's :
Features
As one of North America’s oldest cities, St. John’s is no stranger to the strange. A haunted walking tour gives Christopher Frey plenty of goosebumps… and a cracked window into Newfoundland’s predilection for the paranormal
Signal Hill, the famed promontory overlooking the Narrows which shelter St. John’s Harbour, where Marconi received the first transatlantic radio transmission, is the first site most travellers visit upon arriving in the city. This is the establishing shot: the city sprawling epically and enigmatically like a collage of wooden fishing stages and sheds shipwrecked over the hills beyond the port.
An alternative version of the city, however, is evident from Signal Hill’s lesser-known, shorter and lumpier sibling a hundred metres further along the harbour. Gibbet Hill is named for the practice of leaving executed criminals to hang from a gibbet, tarred and encased in an iron cage, which was performed frequently on this peak during the 18th Century—as a humiliation and deterrent, surely, although many gawkers no doubt derived some grisly pleasure from the sight. Positioned above the old town, the appearance of the hanged man would achieve a stark, gruesome contrast against one of Newfoundland’s preternaturally naval grey skies.
That much is true.
Beneath Gibbet Hill, however, lies Dead Man’s Pond. The executed corpses, it is said, would be packaged into barrels following their termination and rolled into the dark waters of the rippling pool. Legend suggests it is bottomless, thereby making the punished soul’s descent to hell much swifter.
As local folklorist Dale Jarvis tells me, this tittle-tattle achieved such prominence that a television crew was dispatched from Toronto to investigate. They found, of course, a bottom… which any puzzled townie could have told them they’d reach.
Legends of bottomless lakes are universal and persist in Eastern Europe, among indigenous Americans and in Egypt where it was reported by Herodotus that the Nile’s source was a bottomless lake.
As Jarvis advises in the introduction to his book, Haunted Shores, the first in a series of collections about Newfoundland’s ghost tales, they provide “tantalizing doorways to another realm.” He writes: “It’s not so much that we think they actually are bottomless, but that part of us wishes they might be.” They are symbols of some pre-modern, deeply rooted human sensibility.
St. John’s is rife with such symbols, and their resonances are nurtured by the stories so avidly told and retold by locals. Which makes them seem more willing to entertain, sometimes playfully and sometimes seriously, the improbable and implausible.
Like the story of Samuel Pettyham and the house he rented on Queen’s Road in 1745. It is, according to Jarvis, one of the city’s oldest recorded hauntings. Pettyham was beset nightly by a spectral presence trying to unlatch its way into his home. One evening, Pettyham arrived at his doorstep after a night of carousing to encounter a headless man. Fleeing into the night, Pettyham later learned that this phantom belonged to a murdered ship’s captain; he had come out badly in a love triangle that figured upon the woman who once resided in his home. His killer went unpunished.
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