Haunted Homes in St. John's
Looking for new homes in St. John's? If you're buying, you'd probably prefer a home without ghostly figures in windows, hanging bodies, pictures falling mysteriously from walls, and the sound of babies crying when there are none around. Real estate can be tricky enough with getting into, well, unreal estate. So you can be pretty sure that no descriptions like those will show up in any MLS listings.
However, if haunted houses do catch your fancy and you'd like to explore, there is probably no one more familiar with the dark side of St. John's homes than the distinguished Reverend Thomas Wyckham Jarvis, Esquire, eminent Lecturer on the Paranormal, well versed in Grimm Tales of the Vengeful Deceased, Murthers of Gruesome Dispatch, Curious Manifestations of the Holy Ghost and Historical Miscellanea, and host of the award-winning St. John's Haunted Hike. Jarvis has led untold numbers of people through the darkened streets and alleyways of old St. John's, telling tales of apparitions and mysterious happenings. As the Haunted Hike Website relates, there are legends of hauntings at locations such as the Masonic Temple and Victoria Station on Cathedral Street, LSPU hall on Victoria Street, Sutherland Place Apartments on Kings Bridge Road, the Anglican Cathedral Graveyard on Church Hill, and Signal Hill.
Actually, given that St. John's is often still called the City of Legends, it's not surprising that tales of this sort exist. From the first days of settlers trying to carve out a place to survive on this rock even when it was illegal to spend a winter here, all through the many years of military battles and the changing hands, rising time and again from the three great fires that ravaged the city, and standing firm against five centuries of the brutal North Atlantic weather and those towering cliffs and jagged rocks that pulled over 10,000 ships and even more souls beneath the crashing waves, St. John's has known more than its fair share of dark and stormy nights and death and calamity. And watching over it all, that mysterious, foreboding fog has hovered, forever present, threatening to envelope us in its impenetrable grey shroud. It's the stuff that writers work hard to dream up, but to those of us who live here, it's just the view from the living room window.
So what are some of the homes said to be haunted in old St. John's? The Haunted Hike refes to several "true hauntings." Among them, there's the apartment on Brazil Street, which had the following written about it by a former resident:
The previous tenants were friends of mine who were driven out because the wife couldn't stand the manifestations, which they blamed on a rather sinister painting which had been left behind by some earlier tenant. They found the atmosphere sinister and frightening, and objects constantly fell from shelves and walls for no apparent reason. (Note that the building stands on solid rock, and that there is no moving traffic nearby.)...
The first and most persistent manifestation was that this painting used to fall off its nail on the wall and wake me up by crashing onto the electric radiator below. The nail was firmly placed and pointing upwards, so the painting couldn't have slid off. Most strikingly, the painting always fell down at exactly 3 a.m. every time...
I also experienced other manifestations such as a hand, apparently a woman's, lightly touching mine as I lay in bed. There was also the sound of a hand bell being rung. The sound was definitely within the kitchen area of the studio apartment, and could not have come from outside or the next apartment. In the same place, a pen once jumped at least eight inches into the air, and I once saw a kind of formless area of darkness, roughly in the shape of a bat, swoop across the room and vanish into a wall.
Then there's the story from the resident of a home on Victoria Street:
A spectre, female, going down the stairway from the third to the first floor of the house. It is visible when outside on the deck and facing the house. It pauses on the landing between the third and second floor as it is about to go down the stairway, turns toward the harbour and then turns again as it goes down the stairs. It is like a fog cloud in appearance. It has never been seen when I am inside the house. When it is seen there are no different lights lit outside, no planes in the air, no fog in the air, nothing out-of-the-normal. No audible sounds are associated with it.
More details of these and other hauntings can be found on the St. John's Haunted Hike Website.
How about you? Have you ever seen a ghost? Witnessed something so strange that it just had to have been from another dimension? Share your stories; we'd love to hear. And to all of you, have a happy and safe Halloween as you venture out on the spooky streets of old St. John's!