The Bottom of the Sea

Part 21: City of Ghosts

I didn't tell Missy where I was going. After we left the restaurant and she asked me to come with her to do some shopping before heading to her sister's. I made an excuse, hugged her and went in the opposite direction — towards the provincial archives. I had done some archival research in the past, but always with more information to go on. All I had was the information on the heritage plaque on the house; I'd taken a picture of it back in the summer. I wanted some answers, and this was the only place I figured I'd get them.

I wasn't sure what I was looking for, I just wanted some information about the owners of the house. I ended up getting lost in the stacks for hours. I didn't find much at first, but then I came across a list of owners of the property going right back to the very beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The family that owned the house the longest was the Baxter family.

The home was purchased in 1860 by Horace L. Baxter, a wealthy ship's merchant. His wife died in childbirth and upon his death the house passed to his only daughter, Elva Baxter. She married a local doctor, Charles Densmore and had two children.

Elva. Simon's ghost friend was Ella, an easy mistake. "Am I making your blueberry pies, Elva?" I muttered to myself as I flipped through the microfilm news clippings.

I scrolled through an endless stream of newspapers, noting the ads for cod liver oil and heroin cough syrup for babies. Shaking my head, I kept going until my eyes watered and my head began to pound. Finally, I found what I was looking for: an obituary from July 30, 1919. Elva Baxter Densmore died of acute kidney failure. She was predeceased by her husband, Charles, and two children, Emily (14) and Dorothy (12), who they called 'Dolly.' I looked up from the records, shocked.

She lost both children and her husband, within months.

I jotted the facts down and kept digging. The three deaths occurred between September and December of 1918. So fast— what happened? I wrote the dates down so I could find the death certificates for the family. Elva died six months after the death her youngest child. She passed away at the family home at 122 Maple Street, Locke's Harbour, and was buried in Halifax.

At the family home. She died in my house. Probably in my bedroom.

Is that why she roamed up and down the stairs, night after night? Was she the woman I saw in the kitchen by the window? Was it her pain I felt sweep through me on my first full day in the house?

I blinked away tears. My little one wasn't even born yet, and I couldn't imagine the agony of having him or her taken away from me, no matter what age they were.

"Miss? We're closing." A young man in a large but neatly trimmed beard and Clark Kent glasses spoke softly to me, and I suddenly became aware of my surroundings, like waking up from a dream. "A lot of our records are online now, you can do a lot of searching from home," he added.

"Thanks," I said, noticing the navy sky outside the windows. I'd spent too much time there and would have to drive back home in the dark, something I was dreading.

But I was filled with energy and purpose. Elva wasn't at rest; she wanted something. If I could figure out what it was and give it to her, maybe I could give her some peace. And maybe Missy and I could find the same. We were all mothers after all, women who had suffered, each in our own way. Could Elva feel that? Was she even aware of us, and what we were going through?

The more information I found only led to more questions. I took the long way back when I walked to the car so I could cut through the cemetery. Elva was buried in Halifax, which was so strange. Why wasn't she buried in Locke's Harbour with her family?

Elva was laid to rest in God's Acre, the oldest graveyard in Halifax. The sky was a dark sapphire, turning pink along the horizon as the night closed in. It was cold and windy, and I wasn't dressed properly. Crisp leaves swirled around me, and a frigid gust whipped my hair straight up from my head. Winter's closing in, I thought, with a shudder.

I creaked open the ancient wrought-iron gate and stepped inside the stone forest.

That's what Simon called it one day when Missy and I took him for a drive in the country in the last dying days of summer. We stopped at a small county fair to get ice cream and on the way back we passed a large cemetery, cold and grey against the hot, bright sky. "A stone forest," Simon said, looking out the window. "A what?" Missy and I looked at each other and laughed.

"Ella's in a stone forest, far away from her home. That's what she told me."

Missy shook her head. "He has such an imagination," she whispered. I felt a chill go up my back and looked back at Simon, who was tracing a happy face on the window.

This stone forest was full of old and decaying graves, many going back to the 1700s. I researched Halifax thoroughly as part of my decision to move to Nova Scotia; such a beautiful modern city by the sea, but with a dark past. Not many knew about its history, including a terrible maritime disaster in 1917. Over 2,000 people died during the Halifax Explosion in 1917. As if sending their loved ones away to the battlegrounds of World War I weren't enough for Haligonians to bear, the north end of the city was decimated when a munitions ship collided with a relief vessel in the harbour. All that, and then the Spanish flu ripped through communities after the war.

Halifax was a city full of ghosts, I thought, as I walked past the crumbling headstones tilted forwards and back like crooked teeth.

I found Elva's grave easily, almost walking straight to it in the middle of the cemetery as if being pointed to it by some internal tracking system.

I wiped dirt and mud from the ornate headstone. On it, there was one large word written in stone: Mother. Underneath her full name was written — Elva Josephine Baxter Densmore, 1880 – 1919. She was so young when she died.

"Are you the one who lives in my house?" I asked softly, brushing dirt and mud from the stone. I wished I had some flowers, or something to brighten up the grave, but I had nothing. I took out a tissue and continued to clean the headstone as best I could, vowing that I would return sometime with a brilliant bouquet.

I didn't know what exactly her connection was to the house, or to me, but I felt we were connected in some way.

When I reached for the tissue, I found an empty water bottle I had meant to throw in a recycling bin earlier. On a whim, I scraped into it some dried mud from her grave. I would find the grave of a relative in Locke's Harbour and spread the dirt around so she could be with them — symbolically anyway. A lonely person all my life, I felt intense sadness for this woman I'd never met who went through so much and was buried far away from all that she loved.

Feeling like I'd accomplished what I needed to do, I turned around and headed to the car, braced for a stressful drive ahead.

I'm crazy, I told myself walking back through God's Acre with a water bottle full of gravesite dirt rattling in my pocket. This house is turning me stone cold mad.