“The year that war broke out between North and South, I was sent to Paddy Hollow Camp. It had a very bad name as there had been a horrible murder committed there a few years before, and reports said Ghosts were seen there often,” wrote teenager Thomas Glasier in his diary.
Thomas came from one of the richest families in New Brunswick, the nephew of the famed lumber baron "The Main John" Glasier. But nepotism meant little in the ruthless world of the 19th-century timber trade. Thomas’ uncle sent him to start at the bottom, learning the hardest lessons in a dilapidated old shanty called Paddy Hollow.
He shared a broken-down cabin with three others: Lockie McKenzie, an elderly Scotsman whose thick brogue was "largely incomprehensible"; Black Jake, who “only ever slept sitting upright in a chair”; and The Cook, who Thomas considered a rare culinary talent.
None was troubled by ghost stories, Thomas wrote in his diary, adding: “Oh, how we laughed about the Ghost.”
One day, while surveying the edge of his uncle's claim, Thomas stumbled upon a mansion. “The house was beautifully furnished,” he marvelled, “with large barns and stables.” Living there was a lone caretaker who "rarely spoke a word."
But after Thomas shared a bit of whiskey, the caretaker’s tongue loosened. He complained that a ghost was indeed prowling the region — and it kept stealing food and clothes.
Thomas asked about the mansion, and heard the first chilling details of the murder:
“It was owned by a wealthy American [named] Coy,” explained the caretaker. Coy hadn’t been back since “the murder of a beautiful girl who was on a visit to the family and was murdered at Paddy Hollow Camp. … The murderer escaped and was never heard of again…”
Soon after, strange things began happening around Paddy Hollow.
“Just as everybody was asleep, we were awakened by the noise of something walking on the roof,” Thomas wrote.
Black Jake charged out the door to investigate. Moments later, he bolted back inside, pale-faced and breathless, declaring he’d seen a ghost: “it was six feet tall, and when it looked round its eyes were shooting fire … and it ran off into the woods like a streak of fire.”
As winter beckoned, The Cook went outside one night to collect a frozen 20 lb pork chop from a barrel he kept outside. The first snow of the season had fallen, and in it he saw a set of footprints from a barefoot human!
“There was no one living within miles of the camp,” Thomas mused. “So we put it on the Ghost.”
As winter deepened, the woods went silent except for the groaning of trees under snow. One day, while felling white pine to be shipped off as masts for tall ships, Thomas met an old hunter who shed more light on the murder.
The victim, he said, had been one of several guests at the Coy estate one summer. A farmhand “fell in love with this girl, but she did not care for him. He was a wild, reckless fellow and persisted in his attentions until they had a quarrel.”
The houseguests then went for a picnic at Paddy Hollow. The girl wandered off to pick blueberries and was never seen alive again.
A search party, led by the very caretaker who spoke to Thomas, found the terrible truth. “Covered up with old boughs and bushes, they found the poor little girl dead. Brutally murdered,” the hunter recounted.
The farmhand disappeared that very day, and the Coy family packed up and left, never to return.
A few nights later, The Cook went to throw some dirty water outside. “There stood the Ghost, all in white, with the blazing eyes,” Thomas recorded.
“Great Scott!” The Cook screamed, recoiling from the monster with glowing red eyes and slamming the door.
One bright Sunday as spring began to beckon, Lockie McKenzie went out to check his traps. He returned screaming in his thick Scottish brogue: “I’ve seen a ghost, Sor! Eyes wide open, Sor! Looks like the damned, Sor! I ran for my life, Sor!”
Once calmed, he explained that he’d spotted some promising pines atop a gorge. While scrambling up a rocky hillside to investigate, he’d found a hidden cave. Inside, he found a door, “woven with branches of trees. … Inside, something was lying on the floor — it was an old axe.”
McKenzie pushed the branch-door aside and got a shock: “There, on some sort of bed, crouching was the most awful-looking creature I’ve ever seen! … I tumbled half the way back, it’s a wonder I did not break my neck!”
The woodsmen followed him back to the cave the next day.
Investigating, Thomas found “a pair of pants that might have been black at one time.” In a pocket was a photograph of a young woman.
Nearby lay a white birch bark mask with red flannel circles sewn around the eyeholes. When the woodsmen placed a lit candle inside the mask, the white face and glowing red eyes instantly explained the terrifying apparition seen by Black Jake and The Cook. “It gave an awful appearance. That was what was used to frighten people,” Thomas explained.
In an alcove at the back of the cave, their search ended.
“There we found the ghost,” Thomas wrote, “He was dead and frozen stiff.” It was the body of an unusually tall and muscular man with long hair and a beard well past his waist.
After the caretaker confirmed the photograph was of the murdered woman, Thomas reached his final, grim conclusion: “This Ghost man was the murderer.”
The farmhand who vanished after a murder had become a self-made spectre, living in a freezing cave, surviving by stealing food, and using an illuminated birchbark mask to terrorize anyone who came near.
“Poor wretch,” Thomas Glasier wrote in his diary. “He must have suffered more than death — A living hell.”
And so, somewhere along the winding river of New Brunswick, in a forgotten, silent cave, lie the bones of a man who spent his final years as a living ghost …
The Backyard History Halloween 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 Residence Ghost (Appears in Mysterious Stories From Atlantic Canada's Past)
The Spectre of Rexton (Appears in Book One)
The Ghost of Binstead Manor (Appears in Rebellious Women In The Maritimes)
