EXTRAS
THE LEGEND OF
THE WOMAN IN WHITE
Fall was always a magical time of the year in my 1950s childhood on Bell Island. That was when the new school year started. Soon Simpson's and Eaton's Christmas catalogues arrived to get us dreaming of new toys. Hallowe'en had us dressing up in old clothes and going door-to-door to beg for sweet treats. That was swiftly followed by the excitement of Bonfire Night. Skating started at the arena. Meanwhile, every home would be full of the aromas of Christmas baking, overlain with the smell of newly painted walls. There were school concerts to prepare for and, finally, the joys of Christmas itself. So much to do; so much to look forward to.
In the waning days of August, the new chill in the air would start the mind thinking of Fall and all those things to come. Another harbinger of Fall every year were the chilling words, "The Woman in White is out tonight."
In the waning days of August, the new chill in the air would start the mind thinking of Fall and all those things to come. Another harbinger of Fall every year were the chilling words, "The Woman in White is out tonight."
Many summer evenings after supper, there would be 10 or a dozen children out on our dusty little dead-end lane playing a game we called "Daddy," but commonly known elsewhere as "Tag." As Fall approached, the evenings would get shorter but, having been out late all summer long, we would be reluctant to end our play and would often ignore our mothers' calls to come in for the night. When repeated attempts to get us into the house failed, an older child would be sent out to yell, "the Woman in White is out tonight." This would put the fear of God in us and we'd all scatter to our respective homes.
I understood the Woman in White to be actually not a woman, but a man dressed in a white sheet, ghost-like, who was sometimes said to have a rifle and who went out after dark scaring the daylights out of innocent people for no apparent reason. Whenever I asked where he had been seen, it was always some other area of Bell Island a safe distance away from us. To my knowledge, he never actually shot anyone and I had never heard if he was ever caught. I don't recall hearing of the Woman in White appearing at any other time of the year other than the Fall.
When I became a student of Folklore at Memorial University in the 1980s, I found a couple of references to the Woman in White in the Folklore Archive, MUNFLA. These were submitted by contemporaries of mine. The first was done by Maureen Murphy, who lived on Quigley's Line, at the bottom of Tucker Street where I lived. She wrote in 1970:
The Woman in White was a figure used to scare children. It was most feared by young children after dark. Stories and reports about him circulated in abundance. The "Woman" was really a man, dressed in a white sheet and carrying a rifle. It was believed he used to go about at night peeping into windows and chasing people who were out alone.
The second report was from Foster Lamswood, who lived at the Front of the Island on Memorial Drive. He wrote in 1971:
The Woman in White was really a man. He wore white sheets and would appear unexpectedly to young girls and women who were walking home late at night. He frightened boys and men as well. He was commonly believed to be a sex pervert or deviant. There were stories that different individuals in the community used to dress up as the Woman in White. It was never ascertained who the Woman in White really was.
On March 1, 1993 in The Evening Telegram, Steve Neary, a Bell Island union leader and politician, presented an article entitled "The Woman in White, Part of Island History." In it he hoped "to present a true story of a strange phenomenon which occurred on Bell Island when mining was in its heyday." He went on to say:
Here is my version which is presented as I recollect the facts and without exaggeration of distortion. Back in the 1940s and 50s when Bell Island was a booming mining community, every few years a "Woman in White" would throw a scare into residents that would last for about two weeks. People would be so intimidated by the Woman in White that women would have to be escorted to and from bingo halls and children had to be accompanied to prayers on Sunday evening by parents or a guardian. After dark, everyone would look over their shoulder to see if the Woman in White was following them.
The Company lumber yard, located near the top of Compressor Hill, seemed to be a favourite hangout for the Woman in White. People had visions of this mysterious person leaping from one pile of lumber to another or peeping from behind one of the piles. Other isolated and lonely places were also singled out to be hiding places, especially near roads leading to graveyards. Rumours were rampant on the Island for about two weeks and then the panic would subside and things would return to normal --- until next time.
To my knowledge, nobody has been able to provide a satisfactory explanation for the visions of the Woman in White. There are people who say it was a ghost. Others think it was someone playing a practical joke. Imaginary or otherwise, I personally have never met anyone who actually saw the Woman in White. Nor have I met anyone who could prove it was a prank. I do know these events created quite a lot of excitement on Bell Island and people were bewildered by them.
As far as this writer is concerned, the mystery of the Woman in White remains unsolved to this day... The Woman in White will no doubt be an important part of the history and the legend of Bell Island when future historians write the story of this once prosperous mining community.
I wondered how wide-spread the legend was, but my research at the Memorial University Library did not turn up any reference to it. When the Internet became available, it too failed to find any such activity. Meanwhile, over the years, I would ask people I met from other parts of the province if they had heard of The Woman in White. Nobody had. Then in 2019, I stumbled across a 2017 online publication by the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador entitled "Down in the Sands: Boyhood Memories of Salmon Cove." On page 34 of this booklet* is a story of "The Woman in White" of which the informant, who was born about 1950, says, "You'd always hear of the Woman in White. Everybody would talk about this woman who would appear and she'd be all dressed in white, and people were frightened to death." The story goes that a group of boys in Salmon Cove were stealing crab apples one night and when it came time to head home, one of the younger ones was scared of meeting the Woman in White, so the others said they would see him home safely. Just past the church and graveyard, they were about to go up Parsons' Hill when they saw what they thought was the Woman in White "very vivid, standing at the top of the hill. And boy, did we get a start." Their first reaction was to throw rocks at her and then they all ran home. "Next day we found out it was Aunt Gladys Parsons coming home from her LOBA meeting with her white dress on." (Apparently she was not hit by any of the rocks, so the story had a happy ending.) There are two elements of this Salmon Cove story that are similar to the Bell Island stories of the Woman in White. The first is the time of year of this event, in the late summer or early fall when crab apples would be picked. The second element is the white clothing. The story differs from those told on Bell Island in that there the Woman in White was believed to be a man. Since many Salmon Cove men commuted weekly to Bell Island to work in the mines, it is highly likely that they brought the legend home to Salmon Cove.
So, what was the inspiration for "The Woman in White," (two other such characters were "The Claw" and "Rifleman")? Eric Luffman, who I interviewed in 1984, had been a middle-aged man in the 1950s on Bell Island. He suggested that they were probably based on radio serials that were popular in the 1930s and 40s before the advent of television. A quick search of radio serials will bring up information on the American company, General Mills, makers of Betty Crocker and Pillsbury baking products. That company began producing radio programs in the 1920s to advertise their products. In the late 1940s, they aired a serial about a plastic surgeon and his practice. It was called "The Woman in White," and the female nurse was the main character. Eric's theory was that some people who enjoyed playing practical jokes on their friends would, on occasion, dress up as one or another radio character and try giving their friends a fright "for a laugh." He told me:
It got started by a feller who lived in Dominion Range, who used to have a fashion of going out night time with a big old white blanket over him. He did it for badness, just to frighten people. Someone caught him one night. After that, in the Fall of the year when it would be dark with no lights nowhere, dark as pitch, every Fall there'd be somebody going around as a Woman in White, or the Claw.
Eric went on to tell of his own encounter with the Woman in White one dark night:
This one night, I was up to the West Mines and I got drunk. There's one thing when I get drunk, I never want to meet nobody. I'd go out of my way getting home rather than meet anyone. So I decided to come out the West Track and come down to the Scotia Ridge across the barrens where the tank is and on down home.
Everything went along fine. I came down and got almost down to the tank [which was behind the arena] and I saw this there, standing up in the road, about six foot two inches tall, like a Ku Klux Klan, and it frightened the devil out of me. I stopped still and I sobered up as sober as the Lord. Now, I said to myself, "if I don't go this way, if I go back and come down the other way, he'll cut me off." So I come down, one foot after the other, until I got within talking distance. I said, "Are you going to hammer me with that chain?"
"No, Eric," he said. "I'm not. I'm waiting for so and so."
I said, "You bastard. You got half the people frightened to death."
"I'm only after one man," he said.
I said, "All right."
He said, "Did you see him?"
I said, "No."
"Well," he said, "he got to come this way, or that way over there."
But I don't think he caught him. It was a feller keeping with his wife. I knew both of them. I can't
mention names. He gave me some fright though. I don't know how he got on. Anyhow, both of them are dead now. He was on the go a year or two.
So Eric's story of the Woman in White that he met behind the arena suggests that someone used the local legend as a way to scare off the man who was fooling around with his wife, but it seems that he was just one in a long line of "Women in White," most of whom were different individuals playing a joke. In some cases, it was simply a scary "boogeyman" story told to get children in from play as darkness fell.
* "Down in the Sands: Boyhood Memories of Salmon Cove." Oral History Roadshow Series #004, 2017, edited by Katherine Harvey. The Heritage Foundation had hosted a "Memory-Mug Up" where residents of Salmon Cove shared stories of growing up in that Conception Bay North community. This was followed by in-depth interviews that you can read at:
https://www.mun.ca/ich/resources/OHR_booklet_004_WEB. pdf.
I understood the Woman in White to be actually not a woman, but a man dressed in a white sheet, ghost-like, who was sometimes said to have a rifle and who went out after dark scaring the daylights out of innocent people for no apparent reason. Whenever I asked where he had been seen, it was always some other area of Bell Island a safe distance away from us. To my knowledge, he never actually shot anyone and I had never heard if he was ever caught. I don't recall hearing of the Woman in White appearing at any other time of the year other than the Fall.
When I became a student of Folklore at Memorial University in the 1980s, I found a couple of references to the Woman in White in the Folklore Archive, MUNFLA. These were submitted by contemporaries of mine. The first was done by Maureen Murphy, who lived on Quigley's Line, at the bottom of Tucker Street where I lived. She wrote in 1970:
The Woman in White was a figure used to scare children. It was most feared by young children after dark. Stories and reports about him circulated in abundance. The "Woman" was really a man, dressed in a white sheet and carrying a rifle. It was believed he used to go about at night peeping into windows and chasing people who were out alone.
The second report was from Foster Lamswood, who lived at the Front of the Island on Memorial Drive. He wrote in 1971:
The Woman in White was really a man. He wore white sheets and would appear unexpectedly to young girls and women who were walking home late at night. He frightened boys and men as well. He was commonly believed to be a sex pervert or deviant. There were stories that different individuals in the community used to dress up as the Woman in White. It was never ascertained who the Woman in White really was.
On March 1, 1993 in The Evening Telegram, Steve Neary, a Bell Island union leader and politician, presented an article entitled "The Woman in White, Part of Island History." In it he hoped "to present a true story of a strange phenomenon which occurred on Bell Island when mining was in its heyday." He went on to say:
Here is my version which is presented as I recollect the facts and without exaggeration of distortion. Back in the 1940s and 50s when Bell Island was a booming mining community, every few years a "Woman in White" would throw a scare into residents that would last for about two weeks. People would be so intimidated by the Woman in White that women would have to be escorted to and from bingo halls and children had to be accompanied to prayers on Sunday evening by parents or a guardian. After dark, everyone would look over their shoulder to see if the Woman in White was following them.
The Company lumber yard, located near the top of Compressor Hill, seemed to be a favourite hangout for the Woman in White. People had visions of this mysterious person leaping from one pile of lumber to another or peeping from behind one of the piles. Other isolated and lonely places were also singled out to be hiding places, especially near roads leading to graveyards. Rumours were rampant on the Island for about two weeks and then the panic would subside and things would return to normal --- until next time.
To my knowledge, nobody has been able to provide a satisfactory explanation for the visions of the Woman in White. There are people who say it was a ghost. Others think it was someone playing a practical joke. Imaginary or otherwise, I personally have never met anyone who actually saw the Woman in White. Nor have I met anyone who could prove it was a prank. I do know these events created quite a lot of excitement on Bell Island and people were bewildered by them.
As far as this writer is concerned, the mystery of the Woman in White remains unsolved to this day... The Woman in White will no doubt be an important part of the history and the legend of Bell Island when future historians write the story of this once prosperous mining community.
I wondered how wide-spread the legend was, but my research at the Memorial University Library did not turn up any reference to it. When the Internet became available, it too failed to find any such activity. Meanwhile, over the years, I would ask people I met from other parts of the province if they had heard of The Woman in White. Nobody had. Then in 2019, I stumbled across a 2017 online publication by the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador entitled "Down in the Sands: Boyhood Memories of Salmon Cove." On page 34 of this booklet* is a story of "The Woman in White" of which the informant, who was born about 1950, says, "You'd always hear of the Woman in White. Everybody would talk about this woman who would appear and she'd be all dressed in white, and people were frightened to death." The story goes that a group of boys in Salmon Cove were stealing crab apples one night and when it came time to head home, one of the younger ones was scared of meeting the Woman in White, so the others said they would see him home safely. Just past the church and graveyard, they were about to go up Parsons' Hill when they saw what they thought was the Woman in White "very vivid, standing at the top of the hill. And boy, did we get a start." Their first reaction was to throw rocks at her and then they all ran home. "Next day we found out it was Aunt Gladys Parsons coming home from her LOBA meeting with her white dress on." (Apparently she was not hit by any of the rocks, so the story had a happy ending.) There are two elements of this Salmon Cove story that are similar to the Bell Island stories of the Woman in White. The first is the time of year of this event, in the late summer or early fall when crab apples would be picked. The second element is the white clothing. The story differs from those told on Bell Island in that there the Woman in White was believed to be a man. Since many Salmon Cove men commuted weekly to Bell Island to work in the mines, it is highly likely that they brought the legend home to Salmon Cove.
So, what was the inspiration for "The Woman in White," (two other such characters were "The Claw" and "Rifleman")? Eric Luffman, who I interviewed in 1984, had been a middle-aged man in the 1950s on Bell Island. He suggested that they were probably based on radio serials that were popular in the 1930s and 40s before the advent of television. A quick search of radio serials will bring up information on the American company, General Mills, makers of Betty Crocker and Pillsbury baking products. That company began producing radio programs in the 1920s to advertise their products. In the late 1940s, they aired a serial about a plastic surgeon and his practice. It was called "The Woman in White," and the female nurse was the main character. Eric's theory was that some people who enjoyed playing practical jokes on their friends would, on occasion, dress up as one or another radio character and try giving their friends a fright "for a laugh." He told me:
It got started by a feller who lived in Dominion Range, who used to have a fashion of going out night time with a big old white blanket over him. He did it for badness, just to frighten people. Someone caught him one night. After that, in the Fall of the year when it would be dark with no lights nowhere, dark as pitch, every Fall there'd be somebody going around as a Woman in White, or the Claw.
Eric went on to tell of his own encounter with the Woman in White one dark night:
This one night, I was up to the West Mines and I got drunk. There's one thing when I get drunk, I never want to meet nobody. I'd go out of my way getting home rather than meet anyone. So I decided to come out the West Track and come down to the Scotia Ridge across the barrens where the tank is and on down home.
Everything went along fine. I came down and got almost down to the tank [which was behind the arena] and I saw this there, standing up in the road, about six foot two inches tall, like a Ku Klux Klan, and it frightened the devil out of me. I stopped still and I sobered up as sober as the Lord. Now, I said to myself, "if I don't go this way, if I go back and come down the other way, he'll cut me off." So I come down, one foot after the other, until I got within talking distance. I said, "Are you going to hammer me with that chain?"
"No, Eric," he said. "I'm not. I'm waiting for so and so."
I said, "You bastard. You got half the people frightened to death."
"I'm only after one man," he said.
I said, "All right."
He said, "Did you see him?"
I said, "No."
"Well," he said, "he got to come this way, or that way over there."
But I don't think he caught him. It was a feller keeping with his wife. I knew both of them. I can't
mention names. He gave me some fright though. I don't know how he got on. Anyhow, both of them are dead now. He was on the go a year or two.
So Eric's story of the Woman in White that he met behind the arena suggests that someone used the local legend as a way to scare off the man who was fooling around with his wife, but it seems that he was just one in a long line of "Women in White," most of whom were different individuals playing a joke. In some cases, it was simply a scary "boogeyman" story told to get children in from play as darkness fell.
* "Down in the Sands: Boyhood Memories of Salmon Cove." Oral History Roadshow Series #004, 2017, edited by Katherine Harvey. The Heritage Foundation had hosted a "Memory-Mug Up" where residents of Salmon Cove shared stories of growing up in that Conception Bay North community. This was followed by in-depth interviews that you can read at:
https://www.mun.ca/ich/resources/OHR_booklet_004_WEB. pdf.