The world is full of ghost stories and unexplainable events. The Maritimes and in particular Nova Scotia are no strangers to mystery, it abounds along their shores and in their villages. They claim hundreds of strange mysterious events and ghostly stories. To cite a few “The Ghost of Antigonish” “Annapolis Ghosts” and “The Lady of the Lake are well known among the many. Thousands of books have been written on the subject of paranormal occurrences,visions,voices and other strange noises, screams and creaks. Yet, no one to my knowledge has actually proven such ghostly shadows really exist.
Certainly I can’t explain the story I’m about to tell you, I can only say I was there when it happened.
In the late 1960’s I worked at a small British car garage in Dartmouth NS. The boss had a son, Eugene, he was 18 and studying to be a teacher at college. His dad picked up an old Austin Cambridge for us to fix up for Eugene to drive to and from school. He was doing his practical training at a school in St Margaret’s Bay, about a 45 minute drive from Dartmouth.
It was customary for the mechanics to finish up on Friday nights sharing a pint of rum before heading home for supper. We had a coke machine in the garage and we each purchased a bottle of coke, drank half then topped up with rum. One Friday night Eugene arrived at the garage and sat chewing the fat with us. he wasn’t into the rum but nevertheless told us a very strange story. While driving to work that morning he almost went off the road and into a lake. Apparently there was a narrow bridge at the foot of a hill that crossed the lake on his route to school. The reason for the almost accident, he explained was he saw three fishermen standing in a line on the bridge. He had to brake hard or he would have run over them. After he stopped the car and recovered from his shock he looked for the fishermen but there was no one there. He had seen them clearly and described how they were dressed in oilskin coats and yellow sou-wester hats. We laughed his story off adding comments about being half asleep, or dreaming about the pretty teacher he was working with. No one took his story seriously. The following Friday morning we were all working when a police car arrived and wanted to talk with Eugene’s dad. At 8.30am that Friday morning his sons car had left the road and crashed into a lake, Eugene was killed on the very spot he had told us about the week before.
Coincidence or did those three mysterious fishermen step into the path of his car again. Of course, we can rationalize, there are a dozen reason why this fatal accident could have happened, icy road conditions, inattention, speed, mechanical failure or was it just another unfortunate and unexplained accident. That is what the police report read. Yet Eugene had told us about those three mysterious fishermen on the road a week before his death. The accident happened at that exact same spot seven days later. My story is factual but a reasonable explanation for the fishermen remains out of reach of us mortals. So what do you think, fact or a silly fabricated ghost story???????. You be the judge.
God Bless and keep reading.
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