McNabs Island, located in the Canadian harbour of Halifax, Nova Scotia, is rife with ghost stories, legends of hidden treasure and hanged men. Settle in for a ghost story that will give you chills. The island boasts” “three abandoned military forts, a cholera quarantine in an old potters field, ruins of old family homes... a family burial plot, a former soda pop factory that ran bootleg booze during prohibition, a shipwreck cove, a beach where English redcoats hung navy deserters during the Napoleonic Wars, a forgotten lighthouse, a former Edwardian fairground, and the remnants of a cultivated Victorian botanical garden.” (Atlas Obscura)
McNabs Island is believed to be haunted. People have reported hearing strange sounds and someone found a hole with five marker stones near Finlay. The nearby Oak Island is famous for possessing buried treasure, and only the truly foolish would risk life and limb to find it.
The Maugher Beach Lighthouse was built in 1941 near the Sherbrooke Tower site. “The other island lighthouse, McNabs Island Rear Range Lighthouse built in 1903, was replaced by skeleton towers in 1979. The waters surrounding the island became the graveyard for many ships. In 1797, HMS Tribune struck Thrumcap Shoal and sank off Herring Cove with the loss of 228 lives. Over the centuries, numerous ships were scuttled around the island. Wrecks in Ives and Wreck coves are still visible.” (Messy Nessy Chic)
Before European colonization, the local Mi’qmaq people used the island to hunt and fish. In 1794, Colonel Edward Cornwallis resided there and began a long-term military presence that would last for two hundred years. Settlers on the island found life challenging. They grew their own food or had to go to the mainland for provisions. There was no electricity except by battery and no nearby stores or services.
The European settlers brought illness with them. In 1746, France sent a fleet of 3,000 men under the command of Doc D’Anville to ally with the M’iqmaq against the British. Typhus broke out on the ship, killing 1200 men at sea. The Frenchmen were never quarantined. They set up camp and suffered through the typhus illness. The last of the fleet were left to die unburied on the rocky coastline. More settlers came from Europe, bringing infectious diseases such as typhus or smallpox with them, which infected the M’iqmaq.
In 1866, a cholera outbreak spread throughout the island. An English steamship, the SS England, was ordered to lay anchor off the island because the ship’s crew and passengers were infected with cholera. Eight hundred infected people lived on the island in tents, and food was sent to them from the mainland. The crew and the passengers were forced to remain there until the disease had run its course. There is a sad energy where the unfortunate victims of the cholera outbreak are buried, and people report a sense of being watched. (Uncomfortably Dark)
Dr. John Slayter reported that the illness was fast and brutal. The strong would survive, and the weak would perish. Two hundred people were buried in two mass graves on the island. The bodies buried at Little Thrum Cere washed out to sea, but the bodies buried at Hugonin Point remain.
McNabs Island shipwrecks and hapless victims
Shipwrecks also surround McNabs Island. Halifax Harbour is often overcast, foggy and dark. Treacherous shoals and thick fog have caused many maritime disasters. Wreck Cove is believed to have the highest number of shipwrecks in Nova Scotia. The loss of HMS Tribune in 1797 claimed two hundred lives. The ship is now in pieces, with “rusted fittings, skeletal hulls and exposed timbers”, eerie remnants of the ship’s history. People believe that the ghosts of sailors still haunt the area, doomed never to find peace. (Ghostwatch)
Peter McNab settled on the island on December 25, 1782 and his descendants lived on the island until 1935. According to Uncomfortably Dark, Peter McNab was alive and well when the gallows were still present on the island. The sound of the clanging chains that supported the dead bodies of the hapless victims of the gallows often kept him awake at night. The sound annoyed him so badly that he gathered his best mates, and they tore down the corpses and gallows with their bare hands.
McNabs Island played an important role in the defense of Halifax from the 1800s to the Cold War of the 1950s. The first fortification was Sherbrooke Tower, a Martello tower constructed in the early 1800s which was later converted to a lighthouse where Abraham Gesner tested his kerosene invention in 1851. In the 1860s, the British built Fort Ives, followed by Fort McNab in the 1880s, and Hugonin Battery in 1899. The Canadian military built Strawberry Battery, which is not accessible to visitors, during the Second World War.
McNab’s Island was significant in terms of its strategic location of the defence of Halifax. During the Napoleonic wars and other wars, the island was garrisoned, ready to guard the harbour. The military presence waned after the Second World War, but the relics of gun emplacements, pillboxes and underground stores remain, bestowing an eerie atmosphere to the island.
Peter McNab’s headless ghost
Peter McNab was a man with a good business sense, but bad luck followed him. He bought an aged fairground with hopes of restoring it and earning a fortune. He hoped to attract attendees, but was unsuccessful. He revived the old merry-go-round and added other games, but it still failed. He erected a soda factory in a barn next to his old house, and in 1908, he brewed flavorful beverages in ceramic bottles. He offered bottles to visitors of the fairgrounds, and threw parties at his dance hall. Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm for his fair waned, because he stopped in 1915. In 1919, the bottle storage cottage burned to the ground, thereby ending his ill-fated fairground and soda pop business. Hundreds of glass and ceramic bottles were lost to the flames as the building burned. Bootleggers used the old place to operate a moonshine still during the prohibition in the 1920s. Avid bottle collectors still search for vintage bottles. In Halifax, my mother found a few blue glass bottles when she was digging in her garden. She cleaned them up and has kept them to this day. (Uncomfortably Dark)
It’s believed that Peter McNab’s headless ghost still haunts the island searching for something. His old soda bottles? One more spectral ride on a merry-go-round? Only time will tell. McNab’s old family home and graveyard are the focal points for these enduring ghost stories.
More spooky phenomena have been reported on McNabs Island, including apparitions and unexplained sounds. There were accounts of a ghostly horse and carriage rattling down the old paths, and sightings of an unknown man who has never been identified. It’s hard to identify a man when he’s dead. Dead men tell no tales.
McNabs Island books
If you are curious to learn more about McNabs Island, then the following books may satisfy your curiosity, such as Bluenose Ghosts written by the celebrated folklore author Helen Creighton, or Steve Vernon’s Haunted Harbours: Ghost Stories from Old Nova Scotia. Both books are sure to give you chills. You will read with the light left on all night! Bruce Scott’s book, The Last Farm on McNabs Island, is a portrait of the island’s spooky history, with anecdotes, photographs and maps. Thomas Raddall’s book Hangman’s Beach portrays the history of McNabs Island.
Here is a short quote from the book Hangman’s Beach: “The other Frenchmen tell me it is hell turned inside out – a torture of cold instead of heat. An eternity of short days and long black nights, with snow to the hips, and an air cold enough to freeze a brass monkey’s double-shot. Why France ever owned or fought for this country I shall never know. It is not for Frenchmen, this, unless one could arrive in April and depart by November. For the rest of the year the Devil can have it - he’s an Englishman, of course.”
Today, the island remains mostly uninhabited, unless you include the dead. The Friends of McNabs Island is a volunteer, nonprofit, registered charity based in Halifax, Nova Scotia and established in 1990, dedicated to preserving McNabs Island. The island is protected as parkland, preserving its natural beauty and eerie history, promoted as a nature park and outdoor classroom. They host various events on the island, nature tours and a beach clean-up, which I once participated in. The society publishes brochures, guidebooks, posters and newsletters. They host events such as a Fall Foliage Tour, a Heritage Tour, Nature Tour, an Adventure Tour, and a Coastal Shoreline Tour. You can find their website at: https://mcnabsisland.ca/activities for more information.
Be brave, respect the island and respect the dead. There is more to McNabs Island than meets the eye.
Links to the books mentioned above
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