If you’ve ever knocked on wood, tossed salt over your shoulder, or changed which foot you led with on the stairs, you are participating in centuries-old Maritimes traditions which have crossed languages, oceans, cultures and generations. Maritimers have always been fascinated with luck — how to maximize good and minimize the bad.
Louise Manny, New Brunswick’s greatest folklorist, found this fascinating. Wherever she went, she carried a little black notebook, in which she jotted down many curious superstitions. “Sometimes, I think the folk tales of the past even more interesting than the facts,” she once wrote.
Some of the (many) superstitions she recorded in her notebook included: If your ear burns, people are talking about you — the right ear, a man, the left ear, a woman. When playing cards, it was good luck to cut cards with your left hand, away from you. Never tell a fortune teller “thank you.” If you break one dish, you will break three.
Manny observed that many had fatalistic views of luck: “Misfortunes never come singly — look for two more pieces of bad luck if you have one. … Some days, everything goes wrong. These are just unlucky. It is well but to embark on a few enterprises on such a day.”
A surprising number of superstitions were preoccupied with one question above all others: ‘Who will I marry?’
In 1867, author Juliana Horatia Ewing had just moved to Fredericton when, the morning after Halloween, she awoke to find someone had stolen all the cabbages from her garden. Upon further investigation, she learned that blindfolded Frederictonians had been sneaking through gardens in the night, believing the size and shape of their chosen cabbage would resemble the head of their future husband or wife. Her incredulous letter to her little sister in England describing the incident was laden with exclamation marks: “Dottie!! … they go around STEALING CABBAGES to tell their fortunes by!!!”
Louise Manny recorded that in Miramichi, they had a way to glean clues without stealing vegetables: “In peeling an apple, keep the peel in one piece, swing it about your head three times, contrary to the direction of the sun and drop it behind you. The letter it forms will form the initial of the beau you will marry.”
On Grand Manan, diarist Ida Small documented what she called “everyday superstitions that governed life.” These included: Don’t rock a chair in a deserted house — it brings bad luck. Drop a dishcloth and expect a visitor: if it falls in a heap, a man is coming; if it spreads out, a woman. And whatever you do, don’t bring a corduroy coat onto a fishing boat.
“Fishermen, especially, are a superstitious lot,” Small wrote. They refused to work on weirs on Fridays and always turned their boats to the right when pushing off from shore.
But the corduroy coat ban, Small discovered, had a very specific origin. A young fisherman once wore his new corduroy coat out on the water and caught nothing all day. They stopped on the shore, and he forgot his coat. Suddenly, the haul was enormous. The evidence spoke for itself, as far as Grand Manan was concerned: corduroy coats were clearly bad luck.
There is a surprising amount of common ground in Maritimes superstitions across different cultures. The Acadians from the 1600s and the Scottish immigrants from the 1800s had some strikingly similar superstitions:
A black cat crossing your path was bad luck.
A squirrel crossing your path was good luck.
A rabbit crossing your path was really bad luck.
A wedding crossing your path was really good luck.
A funeral crossing your path was bad luck.
A funeral crossing a wedding’s path was absolutely terrible luck!
Both cultures also believed that the scariest menace of all was … a redheaded woman.
A redheaded woman crossing your path was considered to be such catastrophically bad luck that you might as well just go back home and start your whole day over again.
Louise Manny explained that this luck-reset-loophole was believed to be universal; any of these bad luck omens “may be avoided if you return home and set off again.”
There was, however, a tantalizing luck-opportunity in having a redheaded woman cross your path. If, within a precisely 24-hour window of the redheaded woman crossing your path, you also saw a white horse, you would be blessed with the best luck of all!
“Evidently, the white horse is so potent in bringing luck that he can override the terrors of even a red-headed woman,” Mary L. Fraser quipped in her 1931 book ‘Folklore of Nova Scotia.’
Not all beliefs about luck crossed cultures, though.
In 1699, French poet Dièreville was staying among Mi’kmaq when he learned they believed that eating fish eyeballs would curse a person with bad fishing forever. Dièreville was appalled — he considered eyeballs the tastiest part of the fish. (But Dièreville was also, by his own admission, a terrible fisherman, so…)
The Mi’kmaq, for their part, were thoroughly disgusted by a European superstition Dièreville described. As his ship crossed the Grand Banks near Newfoundland, the sailors informed him that everyone making their first voyage to the New World had to undergo a Baptism Ceremony or the ship would sink. Dièreville was told to remove his pants, whereupon the sailors grabbed him by his hands and feet and dunked him, bum first, into a tub of water five times before throwing him in entirely. Apparently this was standard procedure in 1600s crossings.
Even Louise Manny, who took most folklore in stride, was baffled by one Miramichi belief: that if you tease the aurora borealis — specifically, if you call the Northern Lights fat — the aurora “will extend its influence down to earth to cause illness in the teaser.”
Some of these superstitions have faded. Others are still around. Many a wedding outfit has been altered to honour the old saying: “something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue” — a surefire way, the story goes, to bring the newlyweds good fortune. Traditions still endure, passed down by word of mouth for centuries, as alive as a knock on wood.
