By day Dale Jarvis is a mild-mannered researcher working as the preservation officer for the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador. By night however, he walks the streets as host and proprietor of The St. John's Haunted Hike, an ambulatory paranormal exploration of the secrets that lie in Newfoundland's darker corners.

Rocky Harbour spectre show
When many people think of hauntings, they think of old ghost stories involving headless pirates guarding their buried booty, or Victorian ladies in white gowns drifting through the night. For these people, hauntings happened 100 years ago, and are seen as old tales passed down by storytellers and black-cloaked tour guides. Yet while there are dozens of tales of ancient spirits in the province, hauntings continue to occur up to the present day. A good example is a recent series of paranormal events that took place in December 2001 in Rocky Harbour on the west coast of Newfoundland.

Rocky Harbour is an old community with a rich history. Local lore tells of a murder there in 1809. A trapper from St. Margaret’s Bay named John Pelley worked an area around Cow Head during the winter. The man murdered Richard Cross and Joseph Rendell when they trespassed on his trapping territory. He was later tried and executed in St. John’s.

Recent events
The haunting in question, however, is not one linked to events past or historical figures. Instead, the events took place in a fairly modern house built by its current occupants. The occurrences ranged from visual sightings and auditory experiences to electrical disturbances.

The first indication that something was wrong was an electrical disturbance witnessed by the father of the family. The gentleman was sitting on the couch watching television when the set shut off by itself. Suspicious that a nearby family member with the remote had turned it off, he looked for the culprit. The nearest person was in the next room, ignorant of the set’s contrariness.

That simple event was the first of what would become a trinity of mysterious happenings. The second event took place one day at about 10 a.m. A late-sleeping son woke to hear footsteps in the hallway.

At first, he took them for his mother. The footsteps were quite rapid and were moving back and forth along the passageway. As the son sat up in his bed, the sound of the footsteps came into the bedroom, past the foot of the bed, and then alongside of the bed to where he was sitting. The footsteps then ceased.

Not once were the feet responsible for the clamour revealed.

Strange light
The third event was the most dramatic. The same son was watching television in the bedroom one night when he caught a glimpse of a reflection in the dresser. He looked up to see a strange white light. The son described the light as an “orb” which began to rotate. The glowing orb of light spun around three times, hovering well off the floor. The placement and movement of the orb ruled out the hypothesis it was a reflection from the television screen.

Ghost orbs and glowing circles of white light are becoming the most widely reported types of hauntings in the world. Web sites with literally thousands of photographs of these orbs are popping up like mushrooms in the night of cyberspace. Skeptics and experts hotly debate the authenticity of the balls of light, blaming them on magnified dust motes, droplets of water, electrical emissions and normal geologic processes.

Sentient energy
Ghost hunters and believers argue they may be some type of mobile sentient energy that can change its appearance and location at will, like the Jacky Lanterns or Will o’ the Wisps of Newfoundland folklore.

The son theorized the occurrences might be linked to the spirit of his grandfather, a man who died further up along the coast before the son’s birth.

Whether it be due to a grandfatherly spirit or natural subterranean forces, the cause of the Rocky Harbour haunting remains unexplained.

• Story originally published by:
The Telegram, St. John's / NF | Dale Jarvis - Mar 11.02

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