One day in the year 1758, an English pirated Brig entered the harbor
to replenish its water supply and make repairs. The harbor was the head
of the Gaspereau Creek. The ship was old and leaky and the pirate captain
forced the Micmacs at gunpoint to keep the pumps continually going until
repairs could be made.
The captain and crew were a bad lot and
during their stay committed many acts of violence ending in the killing
of two Micmac girls who were bringing water from a spring. That
night the Micmacs, under the leadership of DeGrass, boarded the brig
under heavy musket fire.
Urged on by DeGrass, with his hate of
the English, on account of their treatment of the Nova Scotia Acadians,
the Micmacs swarmed the vessel and killed all on board.
The brig still lies a few miles from
here in the same place where she sank that night over 200 years ago.
Her sister ship, which arrived at the same time, is in the Nor-West.
If asked , "do you believe in Ghosts
?", the answer may be no, but many strange things do happen in life;
things we cannot account for and which sometimes make a very sudden
change in our beliefs.
Are the ghosts of the pirate crew still
roaming the beach down here?
Many old timers who saw them could never
be shaken in their belief that the ghosts came before a great storm.
One night in the year 1892 a crowd of
men was playing cards in Hudson’s lobster factory at the North Beach.
Men whose word no person would doubt of questioning saw the ghosts on
one occasion and were willing to swear to it.
About twelve o’clock that night the wind
freshened from the north-east, and Jim Curwin in company with a Babineau
went down to the beach to see that the boats were well fastened.
While there, they saw a boat containing
two men rowing silently around the point. The
men landed on the shore, silently beached their boat, and just as silently
walked up the shore in the direction of the lobster factory.
There was such a feeling of uncanny about
it that Babineau crawled into his boat cuddy for the night and left
Jim Curwin who started for the factory alone. When he came to the building
he saw a tall man with folded hands leaning against the front door.
Although cloudy and not clear moonlight,
still the clouds were drifting swiftly overhead and the moonlight breaking
through their rifts made it bright enough to see the strange, death-like
face of the stranger ravaged by hate. The tall man looked Jim straight
in the face but made no reply when Jim spoke to him.