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St. John's :
Features
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The hike is one of the best ways to experience the city. Architecturally and geographically, St. John’s at night acquires an altogether different cast than its daytime incarnation, its quaint maritime charms eclipsed by a creepy, melancholic beauty. The befuddling web of streets unfurling higgledy-piggledy above the harbour, patterned after old fisherman’s trails, conceal a snare of sub-arteries—narrow L-shaped alleys and dark, winding pathways, their rationale lost to history. All of which seem to invite a haunting.
Later that evening, the Witching Hour at hand, Jarvis tries to explain the fertility of the city’s darker imaginings over a pint at the Duke of Duckworth. This public house, it must be said, is itself home to an oft-reported spirit, sighted waving a hand from the window above its entrance. (And here would be a fitting place to remind of the locals’ notorious fondness for drink and the role that might also play in the city’s telling of itself.)
“So many of the stories which come out of here, either from the oral tradition or the literary tradition, are really tied to a sense of place,” says Jarvis.
“Newfoundlanders are rooted in a geographic culture and a sense of place that you don’t see as much in other parts of Canada. I think community, in other parts, was something you built with a group of people who had similar interests—economic, ethnic—not so much a community that is specifically tied to geography. That’s a common theme that weaves in and out of the ghost stories here.”
He gives the example of the “death token,” one of the most common types of Newfoundland folktales. A token, often appearing in the form of a distant voice, translucent figure or animal form, signals “the aware ness,” Jarvis says, “through supernatural means, that someone close has either died or is about to die.”
Earlier, at Livingstone Street, he iterated the story of a woman who saw the apparition of a male relative hovering at the foot of her bed around the time he mysteriously vanished.
“It was a hard place to live, so people made their own entertainment,” he continues. “For a long time, places were pretty isolated and so there wasn’t a lot of communication. So someone would die far away, at sea or fishing in another community. You see these types of stories, tokens, are about communication over distance. These stories emphasize a family relationship. For example, my uncle died at sea and I knew when it happened. That has more to do with culture, than the idea there are more ghosts in Newfoundland.”
It’s precisely the type of story a savvy young restaurateur, who insists he doesn’t normally believe such stuff, will relate to me a few days later. In his version, occurring in a small outport on the Southern Shore, a man was awoken from sleep by a screaming banshee outside his window. In the morning, the family discovered their daughter, who wasn’t known to be ill, had passed away in the night.
My friend, who again insists he normally doesn’t go in for such stuff, says this story he believes. “I knew the family and I knew she died,” he says. “The way it was told and that it turned out to be true, it makes sense.”
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At our hike’s conclusion, a burly, soft-spoken fellow in a nylon hockey jacket waits patiently for the satisfied crowd to disperse. He then approaches Jarvis to share a kind of confession. It seems the man has been haunted by a certain ghastly sensation throughout the walk. He attributes it to a photograph he took of the sloping lawn in front of the Anglican Cathedral where the walk began.
The man says that for the hour or more that followed, as Jarvis escorted us through his haunted St. John’s, he felt something beckoning him back to the spot that he had snapped with his camera. Jarvis listens patiently. The man adds that this was not his first supernatural encounter.
This happens frequently to Jarvis at the end of his tours. Despite the humour evident in his script, many mistake his scholarly interest for that of a “true believer.” Someone will invariably want to share their own deeply felt experience with the unexplained. Jarvis is always good-natured about it, assuming his unexpected role of supernatural counsellor.
While acknowledging the implausibility of such stories, Jarvis the folklorist nevertheless refuses to call them “fictions,” preferring to describe them instead as truthful expressions of the public imagination.
The World’s Most Haunted Street?
At a mere three blocks, Victoria Street is reputed to be Newfoundland’s—which is to say, Canada’s—most haunted boulevard. Beginning at one of the city’s landmark buildings, the Longshoremen’s Protective Union (LSPU) Hall, where a friendly phantom roams what is now home to a theatre space and art gallery and itself worth a visit, this stretch of Second Empire homes is chockablock, it seems, with paranormal incidents.
The Haunted Hike (
hauntedhike.com)
For a city with numerous historical tours, this guided walkabout remains one of the most intriguing and entertaining ways to see the city. Now in its 10th year, and properly advertised as an “Ambulatory Theatrical Exploration of the Macabre,” the hike operates from early June to mid-September, departing Sunday through Thursday nights from the Anglican Cathedral that looms above Duckworth Street.
There are two types of tours: some nights it’s a meander called Ghosts and Ghoulies (the classic Haunted Hike), others it’s Sinners and Spirits, which focuses more of the city’s sordid, dark underbelly. The website has information on other storytelling events staged by Dale Jarvis around town, some of them at the historic Newman Wine Vaults. To bring a little of spooky Newfoundland home with you, Jarvis has published three books, including his most recent release this month, titled The Golden Leg and Other Ghostly Campfire Tales (
flankerpress.com).
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