Harvard professor William F. Ganong arrived at the Baie de Chaleurs in the Summer of 1905, intent on finding a scientific explanation for a mysterious ghostly ship on fire that hundreds of witnesses claimed was haunting its waters.
Ganong had been born and bred to be the heir to the famous Ganong chocolate-making company. However, he had always been more interested in studying plants, camping out in the woods, and researching history than building a sweets empire.
It worked out really well for him. At just 41 years old, when he arrived in the Baie des Chaleurs to investigate the ghost ship, he was already a Harvard University professor and widely regarded as New Brunswick’s greatest naturalist and historian.
When Ganong later published the findings of his investigation into the mysterious fire-ship in the scientific journal, the Bulletin of the Natural History Society, he wrote:
“Until a short time ago, I regarded the fire-ship as a pure fiction, with no basis other than the proneness of humanity to see wonders where they are expected, or where others say they exist. But as a result of two visits to that country, during which I questioned many residents on the subject, I have had to change my opinion; and I now believe that there is really some natural phenomenon in that region which manifests itself in such a way as to be imaginable as a vessel on fire.”
William F. Ganong might be offended at being portrayed as something of a ghost hunter, though.
He had a low opinion of ghosts, calling them “weird fantasies [which are] preferred to truth, even by grown-up persons.”
Yet there he was, in the Baie des Chaleur, investigating a ghost story about an ancient sailing ship that could be seen, always on fire, burning eternally, in full sail out on the waters of the Baie des Chaleurs.
He was disturbed that he had heard reports from countless people claiming to have seen this particular burning ghost ship, including people “in whose word I have absolute confidence.”
Here is that old ghost story, told to you just how I heard it back when I was a child up on New Brunswick’s North Shore, right next to the Baie des Chaleurs…
More than five hundred years ago, back in the very earliest days of Europeans coming to North America, a fleet of three ships left Portugal, heading toward a “new found land.”
The leader of the Portuguese fleet was Gaspar Corte-Real, a daring explorer from a wealthy family, who was on a quest to discover the fabled Northwest Passage to China and India.
Gaspar Corte-Real embarked on a treacherous journey with his three ships, venturing further and further across the Atlantic Ocean into the unknown, meeting dense fog, howling winds, and frigid waters.
As days turned into weeks, fear and uncertainty gripped the crew. They became disoriented in the relentless mist, and their supplies dwindled. After what must have felt like an eternity in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, they spotted land.
This was a new and unfamiliar land, filled with fresh water, trees, and plentiful fish.
Then they encountered people.
The first meeting with the mysterious people who called this land home went quite well. The local people were quite interested in the goods the strange visitors had and wanted to trade. This was good news for Gaspar Corte-Real since he had sailed across the Atlantic to this land which he was sure was either China or India, precisely to trade for these people’s fine silks and expensive spices.
But it turned out that these people did not have the goods to trade that Gaspar had anticipated. Where were all the expensive Indian spices? Where were all the fine Chinese silks that commanded such large sums of money in European markets?
The Portuguese began to realise, much to their horror, that perhaps they were not in Asia after all.
Furious at his failure to find the Northwest Passage to India, Gaspar Corte-Real decided he was not going to sell goods TO the Indigenous people – rather he was going to sell THE Indigenous people!
He kidnapped dozens of people to be sold as slaves back in Portugal and began to prepare to set sail for home. As Gaspar Corte-Real’s ships pulled up anchor, an Indigenous military force appeared, determined to free their friends and family members and exact revenge.
As the Portuguese set their sails, the war canoes drew closer.
Two of the Portuguese ships escaped, but the canoes caught up to Gaspar Corte-Real’s flagship.
A vicious battle broke out on the decks of the ship, and amidst the chaotic fighting, the ship caught fire, quickly spiralling out of control into a raging inferno.
As the sailors jumped from the flaming ship to their deaths in the frigid waters below, they vowed to haunt these waters for 1000 years.
Ever since, still to this day, 500 years later, countless people throughout the Baie des Chaleur and the Northumberland Strait have seen that Portuguese ship belonging to Gaspar Corte-Real, still engulfed in flames, still sailing those waters…
William F. Ganong didn’t believe in ghosts.
Yet, before departing Harvard for the Baie des Chaleurs, he examined the history behind that popular Portuguese ghost story and was forced to admit the story had “something with a fact basis.”
Gaspar Corte-Real was, in fact, a real person, and the ghost story included historical truths. In the year 1500, only eight years after Christopher Columbus first arrived off the shores of North America, and only two years after Cabot first set foot in Newfoundland, he had set sail to claim some of that new-found-land for his country of Portugal.
Gaspar Corte-Real did, in fact, kidnap fifty-seven Indigenous people, who were indeed brought back to Portugal and sold as slaves.
However, a Portuguese connection to the Baie des Chaleurs is distinctly less clear.
Going by descriptions the Portuguese left behind of the clothes worn by the people they kidnapped, their victims were likely Inuit, from Labrador, and Beothuk from Newfoundland.
In fact, there really isn’t any evidence that Gaspar Corte-Real ever made it as far as New Brunswick at all, let alone its most northern tip. Most of his time was spent in Newfoundland. If his fleet crossed to the mainland, it probably landed in Cape Breton.
The three ships split up to explore, and he and his ship were never seen again. Anything beyond that has no actual historical evidence backing it up.
William F. Ganong firmly ruled out any Portuguese connection with the actual mysterious light.
In his research, he discovered that a distinctly modern author named Eliza Chase, from Philadelphia, had made up that ghost story only a few years earlier in a book she wrote called Quest of the Quaint.
Eliza Chase thought she had a recipe for a bestseller. All she had to do was combine one part of the real tale of a mysterious light on the Baie des Chaleurs with one part of the real mysterious disappearance of an early explorer, and then stir in a fictional tale of rightful Indigenous vengeance on a people who did them wrong, then bake that mix together into a scary ghost story she pretended was a true story, and what was sure to come out would be a hit book.
She was right! Her book became a bestseller in both America and Canada, and the story she invented became the most popular version of the explanation for the mysterious lights in the bay, even today.
Digging deeper, Ganong found that wasn’t the only ghost story circulating about what might have been the cause of the mysterious lights on the Baie de Chaleur. He sighed at all the spectral stories to explain the curious lights, writing:
“The[se] imaginative writers who have visited the Bay Chaleur have seized upon the story of the fire-ship as a rare treasure, and, adding to the wildest local tales sundry fanciful imagining of their own, with embellishments of banshees, pirates or picturesque historical personages which are … preferred to truth.”
The important thing for William F. Ganong was that there was a very real, mysterious light floating around the Baie des Chaleurs. He wanted to get to the bottom of it.
When he visited the towns along that bay, he quickly discovered that “the great majority of residents in the region [say] that they have seen it at one time or another.”
He set about interviewing people that summer, carefully vetting the witnesses and dismissing the less believable ones.
“Of course, I have sifted out all testimony to the best of my ability, eliminating all exaggerations and embellishments,” Ganong wrote. “Whether these be due to the habit of all humanity to make a story as big and as good as possible, or to the common tendency to gull an impressionable stranger.”
As he heard more and more stories, he found that they were frustratingly inconsistent:
“Captain Turner of Riverside, Albert County, a clear-headed sea captain, told me, in answer to my mention of the fire-ship as a freak of the imagination that he himself had seen it and hence knew it to exist.”
“I was told by a lady in whose word I have absolute confidence that her attention was attracted one night to a light off Caraquet, which looked so much like a vessel afire that she supposed it to be one of her husband’s schooners, and called him in alarm, only to find it was the fire ship.”
“Mr. James Harper, a prominent resident of Miscou, told me he had seen it in the winter on the ice … it kept rising and falling, dying down to very small scarcely visible flame, then rising slowly into a column looking thirty feet high.”
“Mr. Robert Wilson of Miscou, who sails much on Bay Chaleur tells me he has seen the fire-ship (or as he calls it the “burning ship”) several times. On a very dark night, the light appeared ahead and finally, he came near and passed within 100 yards to windward of it, so that he saw with perfect clearness. It was somewhat the shape of a half-moon resting on the water, flat side down, or like a vessel on the water with a bowsprit but no masts, all glowing like hot coal. He has seen it other times, sometimes it looked like a ship, sometimes not, and sometimes it vanished while he was watching it. Usually, it is dancing or vibrating.”
“Mr. McConnell, keeper of the light at Miscou Gully, tells me that he has seen the fire-ship, about two miles away, but it did not look to him like a ship, but more like a big bonfire.”
“Mr. Andrew Wilson has also seen it when it resembled a whaleboat, not a ship.”
“Mr. Jas Bruno and Mr. Ed Vibert, both of whom sail much on the bay, tell me they have never seen it, and do not believe in its existence.”
“So much for local testimony,” William F. Ganong sighed as he wrapped up his reports, before packing up and heading back to Harvard University. He had not only failed to solve the mystery but had also grown increasingly annoyed by it.
Back at Harvard, he complained to one of his colleagues, Dr. J. Orne Green, an extremely respected medical professor, about the unhelpful witness accounts. Much to his astonishment, Dr. Green revealed that he too had once seen a curious light on the Baie de Chaleur.
Ganong and Dr. Green resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery once and for all. They would again sift through the witness accounts, this time with a more rigorous scientific approach.
They noticed that most of his witnesses simply saw a strange light — not necessarily a boat — and only became convinced it was a ghost ship after discussing it with their friends and neighbours.
“Grouping together all the evidence it seems plain,” wrote Ganong in his subsequent report, before outlining his findings:
“first that a physical light is frequently seen over the waters of Bay Chaleur and vicinity;
second that it occurs all seasons, or at least in winter as well as summer;
third that it usually precedes a storm;
fourth that its usual form is roughly hemispherical with the flat side to the water and that at times it simply glows without much change of form, but that at other times it rises into slender moving columns, giving rise to an appearance capable of interpretation as the flaming rigging of a ship, vibrating and dancing movements increasing the illusion;
fifth its origin is probably electrical and is likely a phase of the phenomenon known to sailors as St. Elmo’s Fire.”
St Elmo’s Fire is not actually a fire at all; it’s more like lightning, or the northern lights. It is a bright, continuous electrical spark. Normally, St. Elmo’s Fire can appear at the top of high objects at times when the air is electrically charged, like when there is a thunderstorm.
The two Harvard Professors concluded St. Elmo’s Fire was most likely the cause of those mysterious lights in the Bay de Chaleur.
—
Their exciting breakthrough in solving the strange mystery was widely hailed by academics.
Drs. William F. Ganong and J. Orne Green were saluted as scientific heroes for solving the question that had bewildered so many people for so long. It was an exciting breakthrough for science at a time when belief in ghosts and spirits was at an all-time high.
However, despite the congratulations he was receiving, the extraordinarily rigorous William F. Ganong wasn’t quite satisfied.
He wondered if he had been a bit premature in announcing his findings. After all, the mark of a good scientist is to get his information peer-reviewed, and he’d failed to do so.
To double check, he began to privately send letters to scientists across Europe and North America, explaining: “I made efforts to ascertain if any such phenomenon is known anywhere elsewhere in the world…”
The following January, William F. Ganong travelled by train up to Saint John, New Brunswick, to deliver a major speech announcing his findings about the strange light on the Baie des Chaleur to the prestigious Royal Natural History Society of New Brunswick.
His announcement that the fire ship was actually St. Elmo’s Fire caused a sensation, with Ganong being lavished with praise for his breakthrough.
However, even in his moment of triumph, as his esteemed colleagues congratulated him for solving the centuries-old mystery, Ganong still held doubts…
When he received return letters from fellow scientists all over the world, he was alarmed to discover that there had been “no record of a similar phenomenon, and no development of St. Elmo’s Fire so great that it could be mistaken for a burning ship … anywhere in the world.”
This story appears in the book Backyard History: Forgotten Stories From Atlantic Canada’s Past Volume Two order a signed copy from the author here!
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 Residence Ghost (Appears in the book 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)
