Conversations With the Dead
Who is Haunting St. Martins Cave?
When Moncton resident Craig Wood tried to snap a quick picture of his daughter Abby, her sister Jenna and some other tourists exploring one of the caves in picturesque St. Martins last summer, he captured someone else in the shot - a pale apparition of a man who Craig says just wasn't there when he snapped the photo with his cellphone.
Craig says he doesn't believe in ghosts, but he has no idea
how the image appeared. And what the heck's that blue orb glowing over there at
left edge of the frame? He's curious to hear what others think.
"At first I thought I took a reflection of myself
somehow," he says. Indeed, the silhouette does bear some resemblance to
the man who took the photograph, but it's not conclusive by a long shot.
In the old days of photography on film, it would simply be
some kind of classic double exposure, but in a digital pic taken on a mobile
phone?
Also, there's no other photo of Craig or anyone except Abby
in any of the other pictures on the phone.
Of course, the apparition doesn't turn up in any of the more
mundane places he took photos of Abby in the days before - parks and playgrounds
and the like.
Instead, in classic ghost story fashion, it shows up in a
cave in a picturesque coastal fishing village that drips with history the way
water drips from the ceiling of the cave itself.
According to information provided by the village, St.
Martins was first settled in 1783 by a group of loyalist soldiers known as the
King's Orange Rangers. The original name of the community was Goolwagagek, a
Mi'kmaq word meaning "haunt of the hooded seal," according to the
DeMoulles map of 1686.
From the looks of things, the place may be haunted, but
that's no hooded seal in the photo.
"I hate calling it a ghost, but the farther I go with
it ..." Wood says, the thought trailing off.
"Maybe I got a shot of Elvis in his fat years," he
says with a laugh, at a loss for any other way to explain it.
Craig has been back to St. Martins five or six times since,
talking to locals and trying to learn about local ghost lore.
"In St. Martins nobody knows me by name. They know me
as 'the ghost guy,'" he says.
The key ghost story from the area is The Burning Ship of St.
Martins, essentially the same phenomenon sometimes seen on New Brunswick's
Northumberland coast, what appears to be a burning sailing ship with people
aboard who can be heard screaming for help.
It's said to appear every few years, usually on or about
July 1. Craig snapped his shot last July 3.
That's enough to get folks in the seaside community talking
about the possibility the figure is the ghost of a ship's captain, perhaps
looking for survivors after his ship has wrecked. Possibly, whatever that thing
is that is in his hand is a lantern from a bygone era.
Others think it's the ghost of the pirate Captain Kidd, said
to have explored the Fundy coast. Is the ghost looking for treasure left in the
cave years ago?
That camp says the figure in the photograph is wearing a
coat from that era and the rear leg of the figure is a peg leg.
Still others say it's just some contemporary dude wearing
shorts.
Craig says he's found in some ways the spectral image is a
form of Rorschach inkblot test. What you see might say more about your own
interests than anything about the image. He's found a local historian in St.
Martins who's convinced it's a sea captain from the glorious era when tiny St.
Martins was the third-largest shipbuilding community on the east coast. Craig's
brother says it's clear the figure's holding a bag of money. A woman he knows
says the man is carrying a small child.
The television show Ghost Hunters doesn't know what to say
about the photograph, but its producers are interested. The problem is the
production costs that would be involved in shipping a film crew from the
Seattle-based show out to the Bay of Fundy. Possibly, the producers haven't
looked at the Village of St. Martins website and realized what a videographer's
dream Canada's most picturesque village is.
At any rate, they wanted Craig to ship the phone to them for
analysis, but he's refused for fear of it being lost in shipping.
Craig doesn't even use the phone anymore for fear he will
somehow accidentally erase the image, now carrying one phone for calling people
and the other just to share his mysterious story. He won't even take the smart
card out of it in case that somehow breaks the spell - be that spell either the
hocus-pocus kind to the technical gremlin kind.
"I don't know what to do with the picture next,"
he says.
But of one thing Craig Wood is certain.
"I've had a ball with it."
UFOs and Ghosts Among 'Paranormal Activity' Investigated by Police Force
Although officers in Dundee, Perthshire and Angus did not receive any reports of zombies, witches or vampires, several people got raised the alarm with police about an "alien spacecraft".
One person also contacted Tayside Police in January 2009 claiming they were being attacked by ghosts in their Dundee house.
But officers who attended found that the person who raised the alarm was hallucinating.
The weird and wonderful that officers from Tayside Police have been called out for in the last three years has been revealed in their response to a Freedom of Information request.
Three of the five incidents of paranormal activity in Tayside reported between 2009 and 2011 have been given explanations by officers, while the other two remain unexplained.
Apart from the hallucinatory incident involving ghosts in Dundee, officers also explained to a witness reporting a UFO sighting in Crieff, Perthshire, in February 2010, that the orange lights in the sky were not from an unknown life-form, but that of Chinese lanterns.
The next month police received a report of another UFO in Fife, which officers investigated and found out was in fact a radio transmitter.
However, in an incident that would have got X Files' Mulder and Scully excited, at 11.11pm on May 13, 2009, a witness reported a UFO sighting in Glen Lyon, Perthshire.
They described a triangular shaped bright white light in the sky, which police have still classified as "unexplained".
Almost a year later at around 2am on April 27, 2010, a Dundee resident reported a sighting of lights in the sky over the city, believed by the caller to be either UFOs or day break
No police attendance was requested or required, although the incident has been recorded as "unexplained".
The freedom of information request asked for details of "reports of UFOs, ghosts, witches, vampires and zombies" in the last three years.
The response to the request explained it “may not reflect an accurate picture of the number of reports of this type” made to the force as these were the paranormal activity reports containing the keywords.
In order to carry out a thorough check of all odd goings-on reported to police, they would need to go through every single report manually for the last three years, which would exceed the £600 threshold for the processing of a request under Freedom of Information legislation.
Tayside Police also could not provide details of how much money and manpower had been spent on investigations into paranormal incidents.
Source: news.stv.tv