Even Scotland Yard couldn’t crack the case. But the London Society of Psychical Research — whose members included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — declared the Amity a genuine haunting.
The story of the Amity began in Rexton, which at the time was called Kingston. This had been its name since its founding in 1825 until it was renamed in 1901 for the simple and practical reason that there were an awful lot of other towns in Canada named Kingston.
In the autumn of 1867, the Amity — which means friendship — was loaded with lumber and departed for Liverpool, England.
Although this was twenty years after the golden age of New Brunswick’s shipbuilding boom, Rexton was still producing ships and timber.
The Amity, however, only made it about one mile out of town before unceremoniously running aground on a sandbar. Despite the town being a shipbuilding centre at the time, Rexton’s sandbar was a persistent headache for sea captains.
Sometimes the offending sandbar could cost lives. In 1906, a vicious gale blew a Norwegian ship called the Adona onto the sandbar, where it became stuck. Eleven crew tried to reach shore. None survived.
Fortunately, the Amity’s grounding wasn’t a disaster. While the ship was firmly stuck, at least nobody was hurt.
With winter approaching and the Amity immovable, her Nova Scotian owners gave up and sold her to local shipbuilders J & T Jardine. They were one of the town’s biggest companies, having built over 70 ships between 1835 and 1884.
The Jardines paid off the crew and captain and set to work refloating the vessel before winter.
Before departing, the Amity’s captain informed the Jardine company that one crew member was missing. According to journalist Alfred S. Beers, “there were rumours of foul play.”
A young man named Alexander Fraser was hired to unload the ship before the refloat. Fraser would later become editor of the Richibucto Weekly Review, and write a poem about what happened next.
Fraser had nearly finished unloading the ship when cold weather froze the Amity solid in ice. He was assigned to stay aboard overnight as a watchman.
During the long, cold nights, he began hearing something.
“There’s something, somebody, aboard,” he wrote. “I heard footsteps.”
He told his employers, who suspected it was just rats and a young man’s imagination running wild.
Even so, his bosses were not unsympathetic. Perhaps recognizing that spending a winter alone on a ship trapped in ice wasn’t good for anyone’s mental health, they allowed Alexander Fraser to keep watch on the ship from a nearby lighthouse on the mainland.
Fraser was still uneasy and found himself another job.
A local man named Jim Wilson was hired to guard the ship frozen in ice that winter. Dismissing the reports of mysterious footsteps, he went and stayed on the Amity overnight.
According to a later Moncton Daily Times article, “one night in mid-winter [Jim Wilson] appeared in a Richibucto tavern shivering with fright and called for a glass of rum. With the occupants of the bar gathered around, he told the following story:
“He was seated in the cabin reading by the light of a lamp that hung from the ceiling. The strange sounds that he had grown accustomed to were louder than usual, and he went on deck to investigate. The first thing that met his gaze was a tall man standing motionless against a gallery door. The sky was clear, and the moonlight revealed a death-like appearance on the stranger’s face that Wilson jumped over the ship’s side.”
Wilson returned to the Amity with several bar patrons. They searched every corner of the vessel and found no one. As a precaution, the ship was boarded up.
Jim Wilson quit.
In March, a team of carpenters arrived to fix up the ship ahead of the Spring effort to refloat it. They too heard “heavy footsteps on the deck at night … [and] the distinct sound of an intruder descending the ladder into the hold.”
In 1937, reporter Ian Sclanders went to Richibucto to investigate. He found that the ship’s captain, Albert Long, had long since passed away, but interviewed his son, Thomas Long.
“I heard my father tell the story time and time again,” he said. “He was positive that they heard footsteps, said there could be no mistaking it.”
Captain Long has accompanied the carpenters on the ship. That night, they heard the sound of footsteps.
Captain Long had been with the carpenters when the noises were heard. They searched the ship, but found nothing. They wondered, however, if the lumber in the hold had shifted.
That night, they once again heard what sounded like footsteps.
The next day, they searched the hold thoroughly but found nothing. Curiously, though, some of the lumber seemed to have moved.
“Come darkness and the footsteps again,” reported Thomas Long. “Steeling themselves for what they might discover, the men entered the hold with lanterns. The sounds ceased. They could find nothing. For several nights, the footsteps were heard, but searches revealed no signs of anything. Nor had the lumber been moved anymore.”
Despite the many thorough searches of the ship, nothing was found, leading to suspicions that the intruder was a ghost.
Despite the mystery, the work continued. In May, the Amity was finally freed from the ice and readied to sail to Liverpool.
But the ship now had a reputation, and no local crew would touch her. The Jardines hired sailors from Boston instead.
It was a rough Atlantic crossing, with the Amity being tossed around in a storm. But she made it to Liverpool.
Then the cargo hold was opened.
As the timber was being unloaded from the hold, a gruesome discovery was made – “in the extreme bow behind some upright deal ends, the decomposed body of a man was found.”
A coroner’s inquest declared that the body belonged to a stowaway who had been crushed by the shifting load of lumber during the storm. The unfortunate stowaway was buried that same day, and his body was never identified.
However, in Sclanders’ piece for Maclean's Magazine, he alleges, “There were signs of foul play.”
One of the Boston sailors, named Baines, was convinced that the stowaway’s death had not been an accident. Baines reached out to the British press to publicize the story in the hopes of justice for the mystery man.
However, at the time, the Victorian public was obsessed with spiritualism and ghosts in particular. The fascinated public drew parallels between Amity’s story and the more famous tale of the so-called ghost ship, the Mary Celeste.
There weren’t really any connections between the two ships. In Mary Celiste’s case, the crew suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. In the Amity’s case, the crew arrived fine at their destination, except there was one extra person aboard — dead.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, who was obsessed with proving ghosts were real, became involved. His organization, the London Society of Psychical Research, which was determined to find scientific evidence that ghosts were real, also investigated.
As the story took on a life of its own as a famous ghost story of a murder victim haunting a ship, Scotland Yard exhumed the body.
While it's not clear what they discovered, they next took the remarkable step of sending two investigators to Rexton. Bizarrely, they were accompanied by an investigator for the London Society of Psychical Research.
In the end, Scotland Yard failed to discover anything more about the mysterious stowaway.
In the absence of police offering a resolution, and despite there having been a distinctly human body found, the London Society of Psychical Research declared the case of the Amity a genuine cause of spectral haunting.
Ian Sclanders wasn’t particularly interested in the ghost story angle, but he did have more questions about the dead man:
“Could the footsteps have been the sound of something buffeting the ship under the ice? Was it just a coincidence that a body was found at Liverpool on the same vessel on which the sounds had been heard — the body, perhaps, of a stowaway who had been crushed under the lumber?
Could the deserter have been hiding in the hold through the winter? If so, how did he live? Where did he get food and water? How could he have eluded the searchers?
There are those who hold that the footsteps were caused by … something supernatural.
But in 70 years, nobody has found a definite answer to any of the questions. It is unlikely that anybody will now. And the name of the Amity will always be linked with an unexpected mystery of the sea.”
Want More Ghosts? Here is "The Backyard History Halloween Adjacent Story Collection":
Old Ned, The Lake Utopia Monster (Appears in Book One)
The Ghostly Fire Ship of the Baie des Chaleurs (Appears in Book Two)
The Spectre of Rexton (Appears in Book One)
The Ghost of Binstead Manor (Appears in Rebellious Women In The Maritimes)
