This did nothing to calm the fears of the two older children and they retreated to their sisters bedroom and, bolting and barring the door behind them, proceeded to remain in the room until their parents returned home around midnight.
This was to be the first of many such happenings in the house. It began to happen on a regular basis, the front door opening, footsteps ascending the stairs and the sounds of someone going from room to room on the second floor. After a time the family began asking questions of neighbours and any persons who might have some knowledge of the former residents of the house.
It seems a couple had purchased the land and begun building the house just prior to the start of the war. Their only child, a son, helped his father with the construction and was eager to finish the task so he could move in and take possession of one of the larger bedrooms on the second floor. But before any of the bedrooms could be completed he was called for military service and shortly thereafter sent to Europe, where the war was in its final, devastating months.
And the boy was destined to never move into his new room, for just weeks before the war ended, he was killed in action. Unable to continue with the construction of their home, his parents sold the house and moved out of the province. Neighbours believed the footsteps the new owners heard where those of the boy returning to his unfinished home and going from room to room on the second floor, in search of the bedroom he would never see.
It seems not all ghosts are sad or vicious, for in the Amherst Shore area some years ago there was a playful ghost who would hide the milk pail of a farmer until the man would give up looking for it and sit on his milking stool, whereby the pail would be once again placed in front of him. This happened every night for years, and the man never once saw or heard a single soul in the barn with him.
Then there was the mischievous ghost who would lock the outhouse door on people unlucky enough to have to visit the "facility" without someone else standing guard to let them out.
Stories abound of pirate ghosts who come searching for their buried chests of gold, and in the Dorchester area some say there are pots of gold coins, buried centuries ago by the Acadians just before the Expulsion in 1755, that are guarded by the ghosts of those misappropriated peoples. Many old houses in this area have their residents ghosts, departed souls who, for one reason or another, have failed to depart this world for the next.
I'm not sure whether these tales are all true, but it's for sure that they are real in the minds and imaginations of the people who originally told them.
Believe them, or not. It's up to you.
Happy Halloween!
