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St. John's :
Features
And speaking of love triangles, there is the ghost of Catherine Snow—executed before a mob thousands strong in 1834 at the old courthouse, where she now lingers, only a short time after giving birth to a child. She had been sentenced as an accomplice in the murder of her husband, along with her reputed lover and her husband’s accountant. Snow always maintained her innocence.
Love, lust, greed, jealousy, vengeance and loss—these are the elemental theatric emotions of such tales, and through their prominence make life in St. John’s seem the larger for it.
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If St. John’s is a city of apparitions, Dale Jarvis is its most enterprising medium.
On a suitably drizzling evening in mid July, low embankments of fog scudding over the rooftops, I accompany Jarvis and two score curiosity hounds on one of his Haunted Hikes. This impresario of the undead, dressed in the guise of Rev. Thomas Wyckham Jarvis, Esq., looks like a particularly macabre town crier, clad in black cloak and tricorn hat. He speaks an argot of 19th-Century English as he leads a giggling gaggle of tourists and locals on a paranormal peregrination. It’s part performance art and part historical tour with the requisite amount of black humour made to measure.
He begins at the Anglican Cathedral, raising a sceptre toward the unkempt parcel of weeds that unfurls down toward Duckworth Street. “This peaceful grassy yard to my left is, in fact, a graveyard.”
As the oldest consecrated cemetery in the city, and once home to a gallows, Jarvis announces, “it’s estimated [to contain] some 5,500 mouldering corpses. Enough to fill this boneyard in some places three to five deep.”
He continues with the ghastly history. “Spring runoff and melting snow have caused human bones to escape the stone retaining walls which hold the dead in place, the bones trickling down to lie exposed on Duckworth Street, below.”
Beckoning his charges onward through the gloomy night, Jarvis halts the procession at about a dozen sites, barking out details of grisly goings on therein like an eloquent carny: Willicott’s Lane, where phantom fires are still seen on the site of the slum that was razed to the ground in the Great Fire of 1892; and Simpson’s Tavern, outside of which the ghost of a young girl murdered by a notorious pedophile is reputed to roam.
Some of the hauntings are old, but many are of recent vintage, such as an agreeable ghost nicknamed “Phil” who shared an apartment on Duckworth in the 1990s with three young women, physically comforting one of them through a period of deep depression. (It’s guessed Phil may have been the ghost of the man who introduced margarine to St. John’s in the 1930s.)
Jarvis never fails to point out the former site of a gallows or whipping post or famous duel, or that we might be standing over an abandoned cemetery.
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