Saint John tales

A7

David Goss

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David Goss has been collecting ghost tales for the past dozen years, mostly as a result of folks sharing them with him on Walks 'n' Talks. Since it's summer, a time when ghost tales centre around the campfire, Goss will be telling bi-weekly N.B. ghost tales until Halloween.

New River Beach is probably the most haunted public beach in the province. You won't think so on a bright sunny day, when hundreds of sun and sand lovers have spread their blankets from one end to the other of the kilometre-long sandy shore.

But at night, when darkness settles over the shore, and fingers of fog drift in from the bay, well, that's an altogether different experience.

Then you might just see the ghost of John Riox, whose body wasn't immediately recovered when the Genii went down in the Saxby Gale of October 4, 1869.

It was several weeks later when his sea worn remains turned up in a cave on the Barnabas Head. Because of that incident...and the fact that what's taken as John's ghost continued to show up there for years following the Genii incident, that area is known as Dead Man's Cove to this day.

Lloyd Mealey, who lived near on the Haggerty's Cove Rd. not far from Deadman's Cove liked to share the story of John, and how he was often seen in the old Knight House at the opposite end of the beach from where the cave is located.

"Some saw the body of an old sailor with torn and tattered clothing reflected in the mirrors of that old house," Mealey recalled in an interview about 10 years ago. He added, "Others saw him only from waist down, others from the waist up, and some claimed he was carrying his head under his arm."

Mealey never saw any of the manifestations himself, but did have a ghostly encounter with a lady ghost.

"Maybe it was John's wife," he speculated. He wrote out the story for me at that time and this is how it went. "We were driving down Carrying Cove, when we looked over to where our sardine weir was and we saw a woman wading along the water's edge, nearly low tide.

"She had a long white housecoat on, and looked like she was wading along in about six to eight inches of water. Arthur said to his companion. 'do you see what I saw?' And he said, 'yes'. So Arthur said, 'if she's there tomorrow morning, we'll drive over and see who she is.'

"The next morning just about daylight she was there again, so Arthur was driving a four wheel fast over to where she was, but when they got there she disappeared.

"Even Allan McPherson, coming to the weir by boat saw her disappear, but she had no place to go so fast and all of them said it had to be a ghost." Mealey and others I met over the years of doing walks at New River shared other stories of murderer's ghost, a hobo ghost, and the ghost of a campsite worker.

To this day, mischievous deeds in the old Knight house are blamed on an unknown ghost. The various spottings, in fact, were the sufficient to attract a crew from Creepy Canada to come and film the story of New River's ghosts and to say that the area is indeed, the province's most haunted beach.

If you know of a haunted location, why not share the story with Goss at 506 672-8601 or gosswalk@nbnet.nb.ca