Bluenose Ghosts Read Online Free

looked like was a skeleton. I didn’t touch it, although I would have even then, but Joe gave a scream and ran, and I was scared. I wasn’t long overtaking him, and from that time Joe had a hard time to keep up with me. It followed and kept twenty feet behind us. There were bars on the Holmes fence. We jumped them, and the Thing cut across the field to head us off, but we got there first. We stood in the doorway and watched it for half an hour. There was a stone wall with a rotten pole on top of it, and it stood on this pole. In the morning I went out and felt that pole and, do you know, it was so rotten it just crumbled up in my hands. Why that pole was so rotten it couldn’t have held a bird.
    â€œAs I said, I’ll never forget that racket as long as I live, and as for Joe, he would never talk of it except to his mother and to me. A year later he was taken sick and a while later he died, and he always claimed this was a forerunner for him. We were both sure it couldn’t have been anybody playing tricks because the moon was full and we could see everything as plain as in the day.
    â€œThen a strange thing happened. Joe died of a tubercular throat, and he died hard, but he never rambled in his mind. It was always clear right to the end. But one day not long before his death Joe said to his mother, ‘My throat won’t hurt me any more. He (the apparition) was here and rubbed it.’ The pain had been almost more than he could bear, but from that moment it stopped and he never felt it in his throat again. I sat up with him every night, and do you know what he looked like when he died? He looked just like that man, for he was pretty well wasted away.”
    Was this then the explanation, and had Joe seen his own apparition as he was to appear in death? Was that the meaning of it all?
    When Mr. Thorne was through we sat quietly and, after a while, I said jokingly that he would be telling me soon what colour the man’s eyes were. To my surprise he took this seriously and pondered the matter. Finally he said, “No I can’t quite do that,” but his hesitation showed how vivid the experience was even to that day which would be forty or more years after the event.
    When the story was over Mrs. Thorne gave us a hot drink and some cookies and we started back to Victoria Beach. The country road was very dark that night and there was no moon to comfort us—nor to show us this unwelcome figure either. As we came to the Riorden house Miss Thomas said, “Now that is where they sat,” pointing to the bank on the south side of the road, “and that is where they saw it,” pointing north.
    â€œYes, Martha,” I said, pressing the accelerator a little harder.
    â€œAnd this,” as we approached the Cronin house, “is where it stood in the road and they saw it clearly.”
    â€œYes, Martha,” driving faster still.
    â€œAnd that is where it must have stood on the wall,” she said as we reached the Holmes property. I relaxed a little then glad enough to be away from that district, for I wanted no more of the supernatural that night.
    A year later I attended a service in the Karsdale church and the Thornes stood almost opposite me as we sang that lovely hymn, “Unto the Hills.” When we came to the line, “No moon shall harm thee in the silent night,” I looked at Mr. Thorne who has been a nervous man since this incident and thought, “But the moon did harm him.” Or at least it revealed what the ghost was like, and the effect has never worn off. Would his nervousness be due only to the fright of a moonlit night in his youth, or does he fear that when his time comes the apparition will appear as his forerunner too? It is a question I have never liked to ask him.
    Let us turn now to another kind of forerunner, and for this we will leave the Annapolis Basin and go to Clarke’s Harbour on the southwestern shore, a settlement peopled