EXTRAS
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE STORIES
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE STORIES
GHOST & FAIRY STORIES
Created by Gail Hussey Weir
February 2023
Created by Gail Hussey Weir
February 2023
NOTE: The following is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my 2006 book, The Miners of Wabana. Some of these stories were told to me by former Bell Island miners, while some were found in the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore & Language Archive (MUNFLA).
Where there are unnatural deaths, there are often reports of ghost sightings. Several miners say that buddies of theirs told of seeing ghosts of miners who had been killed in the mines: “They thought they saw the ghost alongside them drilling.”
George Picco told of an experience his brother, Leander, had in the early 1950s involving the ghost of a dead miner, a driver who had been killed in the headway in No. 3 Mine. Some time after the driver’s death, Leander got a job working the graveyard shift there. After midnight he would be there by himself until morning. After all the men had gone up, it was a lonely place, but he did not seem to mind. Then one morning, at half‑past two, George’s telephone rang:
This was Leander, my brother. I said, “Where are you to, Leander?” He said, “B’y, I’m down in the mines, No. 3 Mines.” He said, “I’m down here by meself now. I don’t know whether it was my imagination, or whether it was true or what, but I was going up the headway and I saw the man [the dead driver] in the chair, and I got that lonely I had to give you a call.”
Leander found out afterwards that his predecessor in that job had had the same experience:
One night his predecessor was coming from somewhere, from getting a mug‑up, and going up the headway, he seen the driver sitting in the chair. He said that before long, just like that, there was nothing there. He applied for another job and got away from there.
When Leander got the job, the man he replaced did not tell him of his experience. He only found out after he saw the ghost himself. He left the job then as well.
Ghosts of miners were not restricted to the underground slopes where they had worked. A woman, whose home was close to the collar of No. 2 Mine, recalled an occasion when she, her husband and son were playing a game of cards with three other women. No. 2 had been closed down for some time so, when one of the women noticed someone near the slope, everyone became curious and went to the window to look:
They couldn’t believe what they saw: men were coming up out of the slope, two by two, and going past the check house. They counted from ninety to a hundred men. After the last one had come up, the men went to check. The slope was still barred, and no trace of these men could be seen, not even their footprints in the snow. (Source: MUNFLA, Ms., 72-95/pp. 48-49.)
If the circumstances are right, even when a ghost is not actually seen, an individual may come to expect a sighting, as in the following case. A man who had worked on the haulage, or steam hoist, for many years, hauling out the loaded ore cars to be dumped, passed away:
One night sometime later, the watchman on duty heard the machinery start, even though he knew no one was supposed to be working there at that hour. It soon stopped, so he believed it was his imagination. But shortly after, he heard it start again and stop as before. He felt now that it was not his imagination, so he decided to investigate. As fast as he could, he ran up the flight of steps to the building, fully expecting to see his late friend with his hand working the lever, but there was no one there and everything was quiet. It was puzzling, but belief in ghosts was not unusual, so the watchman was, to say the least, skeptical.
The watchman waited for his relief to come on duty and together they examined the haulage to see if there really was a ghost or if something else had caused the machinery to start up. They discovered that a leaky valve was allowing steam to escape so that enough pressure was building up to start the machine, but not to keep it going. Men who were of a more nervous disposition might have fled the scene to disseminate the story of “the ghost of the haulage.” (Source: MUNFLA, Ms., 73-171/pp. 13-14.)
In a similar case, a man believed that he had been dogged by a ghost, but was embarrassed a few days later to find that his “ghost” had been something else:
One time, in No. 6, the horses used to be brought up only at Christmas. The rest of the year they weren’t brought up, but on weekends the stable boss used to have to go down and feed the horses. So he was coming up this weekend after the feeding and didn’t see a light, but he did hear foot steps behind him. Now he got nervous and used to stop. And when he’d stop, the foot steps would stop. And he went on again and eventually came to the building. And when he looked back he couldn’t see anything. He was convinced a ghost had followed him up. But on Monday morning, he learned that one of the horses had gotten out of the stable and chased him up, and they had to look for it. So that must have been his ghost.
(Source: MUNFLA, Tape, 72-97/C1284.)
It is easy to understand belief in ghosts underground, considering the surroundings and general atmosphere in which the miners worked. Following is an illustration of how easy it was to get lost in the mines and some of the things a man alone had to worry about.
George Picco got lost in the mines shortly after he started working underground, around 1930. One day he was told he would have to go “in west” to work. This was about two miles in from where he had been working all along. He had no trouble getting in there because he simply went with a couple of other men who knew the way. As it happened, he had an “early shift” that day. In other words, he finished loading early, so he was able to go on home before the normal quitting time. He went to the dry house, or lunch room, to wait for some of the men to finish so that he could go out with them, but grew tired of waiting and decided to try and find his own way out:
I took the carbide lamp out of my cap, put it on my finger and went on, happy as a lark because I had an early shift. I started off and I kept going, going, going. Finally I didn’t hear a sound of anything. Didn’t hear the sound of ore cars or nothing at all. And I stopped. The rats were everywhere, darting around. I started to look around the place, and I said, “My God, where am I?” I said, “I’m astray. Now,” I said, “which direction can I go to get back on the right track again?” I said, “I’ll try this way.” And I went on. I didn’t know where I was going, and I went into an old room that was worked out and brought up against a solid face of iron ore. I couldn’t get out. I turned around and went in another direction. All I was afraid was my lamp would go out, ‘cause I didn’t have too much carbide. I’d be in the dark, because there were no electric lights, no nothing.
I went in another direction and went into another old room, went on in, in, in, in, in, and I brought up against a solid face of iron ore again and couldn’t get out. “Gentle God,” I said, “where am I to?” I came out. I said, “In God’s name, I’ll go in this direction.” I kept on going, going, going. I said, “I’m finished. They’ll never find me.” Now in the dark when you see a light in the distance, it will be very, very small. I kept on going, and going, and by and by I thought I saw a little light. “My God,” I said, “I wonder is that a light? What is it?” And I kept on going for it. And the farther I went ahead, this little light started to get bigger. I said, “Thanks be to God. I think that’s a light.” And I kept on going for it. And I went right back from where I started. That’s what I did.
This story and the next show that some parts of the mines were spooky and creepy. The main areas were well lit but, in a lot of places, the only light was the one you had with you. If you had anything on your mind, travelling alone through these unlit areas did not help matters, as Clayton Basha found out.
When he was still living at home, Clayton’s grandmother lived with the family. She had been with them ever since he was a small child. As young children, he and his siblings used to play tricks on her, such as making the alarm clock ring so that she would think it was the telephone and get out of bed to answer it. Then they would crawl under her bedclothes, lie still until she got back into bed and then tap her on the back to make her scream with fright. When he was older and working in the mines, his grandmother had been bedridden for quite a while. One Saturday night, he was sitting at home with his mother when they heard a thump upstairs. They found his grandmother on the floor in the bathroom with her hand clasped around the chrome supporting leg of the wash basin. She was still alive, but they could not get her hand from around this leg. His mother called this the “death hold.” Clayton had to unscrew the leg and slip it out of her hand that way. At the time, he was working on the continuous operations, and he had to go to work the next morning, even though it was a Sunday. And, of course, he was worried about his grandmother. He was no sooner down in the mines when he got the call saying she had died and he had to go back up again:
Where I was working at that time, you could go from No. 3 Mine up to No. 4 Mine. This is where we were working at. Now to get from No. 3 to No. 4, you had to go through a place called “Dog’s Hole Hill.” This was a place where you had to duck down, you wouldn’t have to crawl. This was in the mines, to get from one mine to the other. No. 4 by then had no deckhead. The ore from No. 4 used to come down to No. 3 and go on up to the surface that way. So, to get back to the surface, I had to come back to No. 3 Mine and come down over this Dog’s Hole Hill. And coming down the Dog’s Hole Hill, all this was coming in my mind. It was only foolish; it was only stuff running through your mind. I figured she was going to come and get me for all this old foolish stuff that we’d be doing to her when we were children. I couldn’t wait until I saw the first light. The next lighted area you’d see was the warehouse. And when I saw the first light, I was right relieved.
These stories show that when a man was alone underground, he was really alone. Eric Luffman put it this way:
Everything was silence. You never know what silence is until you get underground and it’s quiet, dead silence, grave silence, fearful.
There were even some miners who got to the point where they had to quit mining because working in that silence bothered them so much. Eric told of the reason his stepfather decided that mining was not the work for him:
He was down in the nighttime, quiet, deadly quiet, working away. No one there, perhaps by himself, and he heard the sand, the sea, rolling above him. No. 6 Slope only had two hundred feet above, between the roof of the mine and the ocean floor. And he was working away, and he heard the beach rocks rolling.
With this kind of loneliness and stories being told of ghosts of dead miners, it can be expected that there would be some practical jokers who would take advantage of this situation to set the scene for their pranks. One such prank caused another nervous man to give up mining:
This story is true and concerns a miner who was easily agitated. On this particular occasion, a fellow workman stripped himself of his clothes and hid in an area where a workman had previously been killed, knowing that his intended victim would pass nearby on his return from the mines. When he heard the victim approaching, he began to moan and make peculiar noises, giving the victim the impression that he was seeing the ghost of the departed one in anguish. The unfortunate man got such a fright that he became mentally disturbed and gave up his job, never to work underground another day.
(Source: MUNFLA, Ms., 73-171/p. 19.)
Ghosts were not the only supernatural beings observed by Wabana mine workers. Many of these men believed in the existence of fairies. A man who worked at No. 4 compressor claimed that one night when he was on duty, the fairies visited him. He described them as little men about three feet tall, all wearing red stocking caps on their heads. When he began cursing, they went away. And, at a certain time each year in an area near the mines, people were said to have observed a fairy celebration with dancing and merry making.
(Source: MUNFLA, Ms., 71-75/pp. 21-23.)
One miner gave the following vivid account of something that happened while he was working on the surface around 1918:
Meself and me buddy, Jim, were working on the buckets one day, you know. We had to wait for the ore to come up and dump it. It’s getting on in the morning, and Jim says to me at about eleven o’clock, “Will you cover for me for ten minutes. I gotta go down in the woods for a while.” I said, “Okay, Jim.” So he goes on down in the woods. Time goes by, half an hour, hour, still no Jim. I says to meself, “That son of a bitch is down there sleeping.” So I rounded up a couple of me buddies and we went down for him, but we couldn’t find him. So we came back and told the foreman on the job, and he goes and tells the big boss. I can’t remember his name now. Anyway, this is something big now, you know, ‘cause Jim was never one to run away from work. The boss comes and forms a search party of about fifty men and we still couldn’t find him. Then he sent someone to get the police. It wasn’t the RCMP then. It was the local fellers. My son, we searched high and low. Had people come from town and everything but, you know, we couldn’t find Jim.
This kept up for two or three days. Then one day when I was back to work, up walked Jim outta the woods, beaming like an electric bulb. I says, “Where have you been?” He says, “Where have I been? I been down in the woods. That’s where I been. Sorry to be so long but, Jesus, no need to be mad. I was only gone an hour. I just met the nicest little people. You go on to lunch now and I’ll take over.” “Take over,” says I. “You son of a, where have you been this past three days? We was all worried to death over you.” “What are you talking about?” says Jim. “‘Tis only twelve o’clock. Listen. There goes the whistle.” And so it was twelve o’clock, but three days later.
Jim was telling me later that he met a whole pile of little people, and they had food and beer and danced and played the accordion. Real friendly, he said. Well, it was some going on when everyone found out he was back, ‘cause we all thought he was dead, you see. After falling off the back of the Island or something. Yes sir, he was the only one that was ever treated that good by the fairies. But people always thought him a little queer after that. And you know, he swore that was the truth right up until he died. And you know something else, I believe him. (Source: MUNFLA, Ms., 81-055/pp. 3-6.)
George Picco told of an experience his brother, Leander, had in the early 1950s involving the ghost of a dead miner, a driver who had been killed in the headway in No. 3 Mine. Some time after the driver’s death, Leander got a job working the graveyard shift there. After midnight he would be there by himself until morning. After all the men had gone up, it was a lonely place, but he did not seem to mind. Then one morning, at half‑past two, George’s telephone rang:
This was Leander, my brother. I said, “Where are you to, Leander?” He said, “B’y, I’m down in the mines, No. 3 Mines.” He said, “I’m down here by meself now. I don’t know whether it was my imagination, or whether it was true or what, but I was going up the headway and I saw the man [the dead driver] in the chair, and I got that lonely I had to give you a call.”
Leander found out afterwards that his predecessor in that job had had the same experience:
One night his predecessor was coming from somewhere, from getting a mug‑up, and going up the headway, he seen the driver sitting in the chair. He said that before long, just like that, there was nothing there. He applied for another job and got away from there.
When Leander got the job, the man he replaced did not tell him of his experience. He only found out after he saw the ghost himself. He left the job then as well.
Ghosts of miners were not restricted to the underground slopes where they had worked. A woman, whose home was close to the collar of No. 2 Mine, recalled an occasion when she, her husband and son were playing a game of cards with three other women. No. 2 had been closed down for some time so, when one of the women noticed someone near the slope, everyone became curious and went to the window to look:
They couldn’t believe what they saw: men were coming up out of the slope, two by two, and going past the check house. They counted from ninety to a hundred men. After the last one had come up, the men went to check. The slope was still barred, and no trace of these men could be seen, not even their footprints in the snow. (Source: MUNFLA, Ms., 72-95/pp. 48-49.)
If the circumstances are right, even when a ghost is not actually seen, an individual may come to expect a sighting, as in the following case. A man who had worked on the haulage, or steam hoist, for many years, hauling out the loaded ore cars to be dumped, passed away:
One night sometime later, the watchman on duty heard the machinery start, even though he knew no one was supposed to be working there at that hour. It soon stopped, so he believed it was his imagination. But shortly after, he heard it start again and stop as before. He felt now that it was not his imagination, so he decided to investigate. As fast as he could, he ran up the flight of steps to the building, fully expecting to see his late friend with his hand working the lever, but there was no one there and everything was quiet. It was puzzling, but belief in ghosts was not unusual, so the watchman was, to say the least, skeptical.
The watchman waited for his relief to come on duty and together they examined the haulage to see if there really was a ghost or if something else had caused the machinery to start up. They discovered that a leaky valve was allowing steam to escape so that enough pressure was building up to start the machine, but not to keep it going. Men who were of a more nervous disposition might have fled the scene to disseminate the story of “the ghost of the haulage.” (Source: MUNFLA, Ms., 73-171/pp. 13-14.)
In a similar case, a man believed that he had been dogged by a ghost, but was embarrassed a few days later to find that his “ghost” had been something else:
One time, in No. 6, the horses used to be brought up only at Christmas. The rest of the year they weren’t brought up, but on weekends the stable boss used to have to go down and feed the horses. So he was coming up this weekend after the feeding and didn’t see a light, but he did hear foot steps behind him. Now he got nervous and used to stop. And when he’d stop, the foot steps would stop. And he went on again and eventually came to the building. And when he looked back he couldn’t see anything. He was convinced a ghost had followed him up. But on Monday morning, he learned that one of the horses had gotten out of the stable and chased him up, and they had to look for it. So that must have been his ghost.
(Source: MUNFLA, Tape, 72-97/C1284.)
It is easy to understand belief in ghosts underground, considering the surroundings and general atmosphere in which the miners worked. Following is an illustration of how easy it was to get lost in the mines and some of the things a man alone had to worry about.
George Picco got lost in the mines shortly after he started working underground, around 1930. One day he was told he would have to go “in west” to work. This was about two miles in from where he had been working all along. He had no trouble getting in there because he simply went with a couple of other men who knew the way. As it happened, he had an “early shift” that day. In other words, he finished loading early, so he was able to go on home before the normal quitting time. He went to the dry house, or lunch room, to wait for some of the men to finish so that he could go out with them, but grew tired of waiting and decided to try and find his own way out:
I took the carbide lamp out of my cap, put it on my finger and went on, happy as a lark because I had an early shift. I started off and I kept going, going, going. Finally I didn’t hear a sound of anything. Didn’t hear the sound of ore cars or nothing at all. And I stopped. The rats were everywhere, darting around. I started to look around the place, and I said, “My God, where am I?” I said, “I’m astray. Now,” I said, “which direction can I go to get back on the right track again?” I said, “I’ll try this way.” And I went on. I didn’t know where I was going, and I went into an old room that was worked out and brought up against a solid face of iron ore. I couldn’t get out. I turned around and went in another direction. All I was afraid was my lamp would go out, ‘cause I didn’t have too much carbide. I’d be in the dark, because there were no electric lights, no nothing.
I went in another direction and went into another old room, went on in, in, in, in, in, and I brought up against a solid face of iron ore again and couldn’t get out. “Gentle God,” I said, “where am I to?” I came out. I said, “In God’s name, I’ll go in this direction.” I kept on going, going, going. I said, “I’m finished. They’ll never find me.” Now in the dark when you see a light in the distance, it will be very, very small. I kept on going, and going, and by and by I thought I saw a little light. “My God,” I said, “I wonder is that a light? What is it?” And I kept on going for it. And the farther I went ahead, this little light started to get bigger. I said, “Thanks be to God. I think that’s a light.” And I kept on going for it. And I went right back from where I started. That’s what I did.
This story and the next show that some parts of the mines were spooky and creepy. The main areas were well lit but, in a lot of places, the only light was the one you had with you. If you had anything on your mind, travelling alone through these unlit areas did not help matters, as Clayton Basha found out.
When he was still living at home, Clayton’s grandmother lived with the family. She had been with them ever since he was a small child. As young children, he and his siblings used to play tricks on her, such as making the alarm clock ring so that she would think it was the telephone and get out of bed to answer it. Then they would crawl under her bedclothes, lie still until she got back into bed and then tap her on the back to make her scream with fright. When he was older and working in the mines, his grandmother had been bedridden for quite a while. One Saturday night, he was sitting at home with his mother when they heard a thump upstairs. They found his grandmother on the floor in the bathroom with her hand clasped around the chrome supporting leg of the wash basin. She was still alive, but they could not get her hand from around this leg. His mother called this the “death hold.” Clayton had to unscrew the leg and slip it out of her hand that way. At the time, he was working on the continuous operations, and he had to go to work the next morning, even though it was a Sunday. And, of course, he was worried about his grandmother. He was no sooner down in the mines when he got the call saying she had died and he had to go back up again:
Where I was working at that time, you could go from No. 3 Mine up to No. 4 Mine. This is where we were working at. Now to get from No. 3 to No. 4, you had to go through a place called “Dog’s Hole Hill.” This was a place where you had to duck down, you wouldn’t have to crawl. This was in the mines, to get from one mine to the other. No. 4 by then had no deckhead. The ore from No. 4 used to come down to No. 3 and go on up to the surface that way. So, to get back to the surface, I had to come back to No. 3 Mine and come down over this Dog’s Hole Hill. And coming down the Dog’s Hole Hill, all this was coming in my mind. It was only foolish; it was only stuff running through your mind. I figured she was going to come and get me for all this old foolish stuff that we’d be doing to her when we were children. I couldn’t wait until I saw the first light. The next lighted area you’d see was the warehouse. And when I saw the first light, I was right relieved.
These stories show that when a man was alone underground, he was really alone. Eric Luffman put it this way:
Everything was silence. You never know what silence is until you get underground and it’s quiet, dead silence, grave silence, fearful.
There were even some miners who got to the point where they had to quit mining because working in that silence bothered them so much. Eric told of the reason his stepfather decided that mining was not the work for him:
He was down in the nighttime, quiet, deadly quiet, working away. No one there, perhaps by himself, and he heard the sand, the sea, rolling above him. No. 6 Slope only had two hundred feet above, between the roof of the mine and the ocean floor. And he was working away, and he heard the beach rocks rolling.
With this kind of loneliness and stories being told of ghosts of dead miners, it can be expected that there would be some practical jokers who would take advantage of this situation to set the scene for their pranks. One such prank caused another nervous man to give up mining:
This story is true and concerns a miner who was easily agitated. On this particular occasion, a fellow workman stripped himself of his clothes and hid in an area where a workman had previously been killed, knowing that his intended victim would pass nearby on his return from the mines. When he heard the victim approaching, he began to moan and make peculiar noises, giving the victim the impression that he was seeing the ghost of the departed one in anguish. The unfortunate man got such a fright that he became mentally disturbed and gave up his job, never to work underground another day.
(Source: MUNFLA, Ms., 73-171/p. 19.)
Ghosts were not the only supernatural beings observed by Wabana mine workers. Many of these men believed in the existence of fairies. A man who worked at No. 4 compressor claimed that one night when he was on duty, the fairies visited him. He described them as little men about three feet tall, all wearing red stocking caps on their heads. When he began cursing, they went away. And, at a certain time each year in an area near the mines, people were said to have observed a fairy celebration with dancing and merry making.
(Source: MUNFLA, Ms., 71-75/pp. 21-23.)
One miner gave the following vivid account of something that happened while he was working on the surface around 1918:
Meself and me buddy, Jim, were working on the buckets one day, you know. We had to wait for the ore to come up and dump it. It’s getting on in the morning, and Jim says to me at about eleven o’clock, “Will you cover for me for ten minutes. I gotta go down in the woods for a while.” I said, “Okay, Jim.” So he goes on down in the woods. Time goes by, half an hour, hour, still no Jim. I says to meself, “That son of a bitch is down there sleeping.” So I rounded up a couple of me buddies and we went down for him, but we couldn’t find him. So we came back and told the foreman on the job, and he goes and tells the big boss. I can’t remember his name now. Anyway, this is something big now, you know, ‘cause Jim was never one to run away from work. The boss comes and forms a search party of about fifty men and we still couldn’t find him. Then he sent someone to get the police. It wasn’t the RCMP then. It was the local fellers. My son, we searched high and low. Had people come from town and everything but, you know, we couldn’t find Jim.
This kept up for two or three days. Then one day when I was back to work, up walked Jim outta the woods, beaming like an electric bulb. I says, “Where have you been?” He says, “Where have I been? I been down in the woods. That’s where I been. Sorry to be so long but, Jesus, no need to be mad. I was only gone an hour. I just met the nicest little people. You go on to lunch now and I’ll take over.” “Take over,” says I. “You son of a, where have you been this past three days? We was all worried to death over you.” “What are you talking about?” says Jim. “‘Tis only twelve o’clock. Listen. There goes the whistle.” And so it was twelve o’clock, but three days later.
Jim was telling me later that he met a whole pile of little people, and they had food and beer and danced and played the accordion. Real friendly, he said. Well, it was some going on when everyone found out he was back, ‘cause we all thought he was dead, you see. After falling off the back of the Island or something. Yes sir, he was the only one that was ever treated that good by the fairies. But people always thought him a little queer after that. And you know, he swore that was the truth right up until he died. And you know something else, I believe him. (Source: MUNFLA, Ms., 81-055/pp. 3-6.)