Out of the Bay, out of the woods: Kings monsters featured in Maritime book

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

There’s nothing better than a good story and, with Halloween upon us, the best would have monsters and ghosts in them.

Halifax’s Steve Vernon’s collection of Maritime monster tales is written and illustrated for children, but these stories have been told by young and old for generations. “People will tell me they are most scared of the kraken – it’s a giant squid that’s now as accepted as a dog, but years ago would have been mythical” for Maritime seafarers. “I always found the story of Gougou of Chaleur Bay, in New Brunswick, kind of spooky: just that this great big creature would reach out and pluck you off the deck of a ship without warning.”

Close to home, Kings County has a few of its own monster tales to tell. Vernon picked the Cape Split kelpie and Berwick’s Parker Road phantom as the best for his book. “I research, through archives and the old folks; I find a few paragraphs here and there – mostly, there’s not a lot of detail but these are stories people have been telling for years – some have been going on for so long, and there aren’t new sightings, but the stories keep coming up.”

While the Parker Road phantom looks on the surface to have been a prank - two brothers, one on the other’s shoulders, and dressed in an old army coat for a prowl around the yard in 1969; Vernon says there is more to it. “ The phantom had been sighted before that, way back into the 1800s – maybe these boys inadvertently stepped over the boundaries between a prank and something else. “I’m just a story teller, but I wouldn’t go sit in a boat or along a shoreline looking for something; but, there has to be something more. I’ve seen a forerunner: when my father died, my grandfather came to me in a dream the night before and just sat and talked with me. I don’t dream, so that stood right out. I just feel he came to talk to me, and it was really more comforting than anything.

Imagination and reality – between those, there’s a grey area. That’s where I like to pitch my tent.”

Cape Split’s kelpie is a large, dark, horse-like creature that gallops in off the Bay of Fundy mudflats at low tide, lures victims onto its back and then rides back into the waters with them, food for man-eating sea horses and dogfish. “I’ve long been fascinated with kelpies, first in my book, ‘Haunted Harbours,’ and this one in Cape Split is adapted from kelpies seen all over the place.”

Vernon’s Maritime stories are illustrated by Jeff Solway, in bright – or dark – designs. “I was blown away by Jeff’s work. I wanted artwork that just stood out, and he did it from my descriptions. They look exactly like I imagine.”

Vernon grew up listening to his father and grandfather tell tales of Northern Ontario’s old railroads, fishing and hunting expeditions. “It was the ghost stories that stuck. While grandfather was telling one of those, I’d always listen.”

Vernon told his own stories to his daughter as she was growing up, advancing the detail and level of scariness as she aged. His book can be used as a base for other young readers with a taste for spooks. The book launched in September, published by Nimbus and priced at $12.95.