The Grey Lady of Stony Beach
On a dark misty night when the fog is wispy and close to the ground, one can imagine why the Granville Road in Annapolis County, Nova Scotia, is known as one of the province's most haunted spots. My little community, Granville Beach, once called Stoney/Stony Beach, is the setting for one of the more famous of our area's ghost stories, the Grey Lady. Known to locals since her sightings in the 1800s, her story has been told and retold by many.
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| The Dentaballis Marsh in what was known as Stoney Beach |
One of the earlier printed accounts of the Grey Lady comes from Isabella Ann (Farish) Owen's series newspaper columns she wrote for the Halifax Herald titled, "Ghost Stories of Nova Scotia", in 1897. These columns were popular and copied by other newspapers, including the Bridgetown Weekly Monitor. The Monitor ran the column in their 22 December 1897 issue. The following is the section of the column that discusses the Grey Lady.
"All the dwellers about Annapolis are familiar with the stories of the ghost of Stony Beach in Lower Granville. Some years ago as the Rev. F. P. Greatorex accompanied by his wife and sister, were returning from Lower Granville to Granville Ferry, where they resided, they saw a short distance on the east side of the Baptist meeting house at Stony Beach, a woman presenting a very striking and peculiar appearance. She was dressed in black, but of very antiquated style, and had a black veil over her face. She appeared to be gliding rather than walking and took no notice at all of the occupants of the wagon as they drove very slowly past her. Mr. Greatorex looked round after passing and saw her still gliding along, but the third time he looked round she had disappeared.
Mr. Greatorex was speaking of this peculiar woman on the following day, when the late Mr. Samuel Hall, of Granville Ferry, told him that he [had] seen no living woman but a mysterious appearance that he himself had several times seen whilst living at Stony Beach.
Mr. Greatorex made enquires and found numbers of persons who had seen the same thing. The late Capt. William Smith, of Granville Ferry, told him that on one occasion he was driving from the ferry to Lower Granville, when snow was on the ground. At Stony Beach this woman walked along the road in front of his horse and prevented him from driving on. He therefore called to her that he would give her a lift in his sleigh. His attention was diverted to his horse in order to draw him to the side of the road, and when he looked for his expected passenger she had entirely disappeared and left even no footprints upon the snow.
The horse that Mr. Greatorex had upon this occasion took no notice of the woman, but a few years afterwards he was driving to Lower Granville with another horse, one fine afternoon in summer when the following interesting sequel to the story occurred. He was driving along in the neighbourhood of Stony Beach when his horse suddenly exhibited symptoms of the greatest fear. He abruptly stopped and turning to the south jumped over the ditch at the side of the road and going up to the fence stood trembling. Mr. Greatorex got out of the wagon as quickly as possible and examined the harness, thinking something must be wrong, but found nothing that could be the cause of such sudden fear. He tried to lead the horse back to the road but the animal positively refused to go and had to be taken over the stones close to the fence for quite a distance, before he could be led to the road again. Then Mr. Greatorex got into the carriage and proceeded on his way. The place where the horse acted in this manner was the exact spot where the woman was seen a year or two before. On this occasion Mr. Greatorex saw nothing, but the horse must undoubtedly have seen her.
Dr. Maurice Calnek told me that once on passing Stony Beach his horse trembled violently and he had difficulty in making her proceed.
This apparition is apparently transparent, for some men while mowing saw her and the fence which was on the other side of her was visible through her body.
There are two stories current to account for this appearance. One is that a woman was brought to Stony Beach by vessel and there murdered and buried by the sailors. The other that a sailor attached to the garrison at Annapolis brought his wife in a boat to Stony Beach and returned without her."
The Monitor received an interesting letter in response to Mrs Owen's article from Lindley Vail Shaw, a native of Clementsport, that was published in their 12 January 1898, issue.
Shaw's letter is probably an early mention of her as the Grey Lady, as Mrs Owen does not actually call her by that name in her article. He indicates that locals referred to her by that name. The "haunted grave yard" that Shaw spent the night in in Stony Beach hoping to meet the Grey Lady was the Stoney Beach Cemetery. The "under ground tomb" that he was in was almost certainly Samuel Hall's Vault. This vault in shown on the 1876 map of the cemetery but was later dismantled and filled in. A note of interest, Shaw was the great grandson of Ann (Phinney) Shaw, whose headstone is the oldest in the cemetery.
Frederick Pearce Greatorex was born in London, England, and came to Nova Scotia with his extended family in the mid 1870s. He was an Anglican minister and was rector of the All Saints Parish (Granville) from 1876 to 1892. According to Dr. Helen Creighton in her book, Bluenose Ghosts, Rev. Greatorex was interested in "apparitions" before he saw the Grey Lady for the first time. She says he encountered her soon after he moved to Granville Ferry, and if we take into consideration the death of Samuel Hall, Esq., (the man who told Rev. Greatorex that it was a ghost he had seen) that puts the encounter between 1876 and early 1879. Accounts say that his wife, Emma (Mountain) Greatorex, and his sister, Eleanor (Greatorex) Bogart, were with him when he saw the Grey Lady, but while his wife also saw her, his sister did not. Dr. Creighton recounts the Greatorex's sighting as follows;
"...when they got to Stony Beach they saw a lady in grey gliding along beside them wearing a short skirt, a shawl, and a bonnet. Her feet did not seem to touch the ground, and she kept her pace shortly ahead of them. They attempted to pass, as Mrs. Greatorex wished to see the face under the bonnet but, as they drew up aside her she disappeared."
Creighton says that Rev. Greatorex had sympathy for the Grey Lady's plight and wished to give her a Christian burial. He searched Stoney Beach in hopes of having another encounter with her so that he might ascertain the whereabouts of her remains, but was unsuccessful in his endeavors. He is said to have regretted that he did not speak to her when he had the chance. Rev. Greatorex died in 1922, aged 73 years, and his wife, Emma, died in 1938, aged 90 years. At the time of her death, Emma was probably one of the last people who had seen the Grey Lady.
Helen Creighton's aforementioned book, Bluenose Ghosts, which was published in 1957, brought the story of the Grey Lady to a wider audience. The book is a collection of the ghost stories Creighton collected when she travelled Nova Scotia (and other Maritime Provinces) to record folklore and songs. The Grey Lady's story is told at the beginning of the eighth chapter, aptly titled, "So Many Wandering Women." Creighton visited Victoria Beach, a small fishing community at the end of Granville Road, and was told the following version of the Grey Lady's story by an old fisherman;
"Up to Stony Beach there is a woman with no head. They claim there was once a deep-water fisherman who ran ships to foreign ports. He was married and had a family and one time he was going away on a long voyage when he got in with nice young woman very handsome and he carried her on the ship for a long while. It was an Annapolis ship. At that time nice ships were built here. When he come back he had this woman and he didn't know what to do with her. They claim that he took her ashore and killed her, and she is the woman they see there. They claim that this woman wants to tell somebody about it, but nobody has ever had pluck enough to ask her. They say if you ask her in the name of the Lord that she will tell you. The reason she had no head is they claim he beheaded her, because she would appear sometimes with a head and sometimes without, but she was always dressed in grey."
Creighton also talked with the family of the late Dr. Augustus Robinson of Annapolis Royal, who told her about his encounter with the Grey Lady. Dr. Robinson was a highly respected physician who was mayor of Annapolis Royal at one time. He had heard stories of the Grey Lady before he saw her for himself.
According to Creighton, Dr. Robinson was on his way home from a call on a foggy night when he came to an elbow in the road where there was a small bridge over a brook. Alders grew thick on the sides of the road in this section. As he came upon the bridge, his horse became agitated and would not budge, similar to Rev. Greatorex's experience. Dr. Robinson got out of his gig and went up to the horse's head to try and lead him on and there he saw the Grey Lady. She was standing in front of the horse and stopping him from going any further. When Dr. Robinson approached her, she disappeared. As the horse was still spooked, he had to lead it along by the bridle, and when he came to the bridge, he found that it had been washed out by a spring freshet. The Grey Lady had saved him from what could have been a terrible accident. Other people had told Dr. Robinson of seeing the Grey Lady at this bridge, usually as a warning. In this story we see the Grey Lady's benevolent side.
Creighton also tells of two other encounters, but I have not been able to find information on the people she mentions. One was a Mr. Mills, of which there were many, who saw her on the marsh (probably the Dentabellis Marsh or Queen Anne Marsh) one morning. However, she appeared to him as a "filmy wraith" and he was able to see the fence through her. Mr. Mills was frightened by her appearance and fled the scene. His story is probably related to this paragraph from Mrs. Owen's column;
"This apparition is apparently transparent, for some men while mowing saw her and the fence which was on the other side of her was visible through her body."
The other story was about a Roy Condon who saw her when walking at two in the morning to get to the boat he was working on. Curious as to why a woman would be out walking at that hour, he said "Good Evening" to her but got no response. He turned to look at her again, but she was gone. He remembered the stories of the Grey Lady and was so scared he ran to and stumbled in his boat. I have not been able to find who Roy Condon was, but Creighton was told this story in Port Wade.
In her column, Mrs. Owen mentions three other people by name who experienced the Grey Lady. The first, Samuel Hall Esq., was born in Stony Beach in 1800, and he lived there until his later life when he moved to Granville Ferry. He was a well respected member of an old family and a member of the local Baptist Church.
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| Samuel Hall, Esq. |
Capt. William Smith of Granville Ferry, was also said to have seen the Grey Lady. He was born in Nova Scotia, in about 1832, and was a sea captain. He married Mary Havilah Hall, Samuel Hall's niece. Capt. Smith died in 1886, and was buried in Stoney Beach Cemetery. The burial service was performed by Rev. Greatorex. The last mentioned, Dr. Thomas Maurice Calnek, was born in Granville Centre in 1850, and lived in Granville Ferry. His experience mirrored that of Rev. Greatorex's second encounter with his frightened horse. Dr. Calnek's encounter would have taken place before 1875, as in that year he moved to Costa Rica, where he died in 1908.
In Bluenose Ghosts Helen Creighton closes her story of the Grey Lady with an explanation for the fact that she does not visit our community anymore. There was a group of young people out for a hay ride and picnic, something that was common in the area in the early 1900s. Sunday Schools and Temperance Societies would often go on excursions or entertainments. On this specific occasion, the group was on their way home at dusk and a young man decided to play a trick on them and pretend to be the ghost. He jumped out from behind a stone wall and one of the group pulled out a pistol and shot at the "ghost" killing him. This is said to have caused the Grey Lady to cease her visits. I have not been able to verify this story and Creighton does not give her source. It seems unlikely that such an event would have occurred in our community and it not have been widely reported on and remembered.
Whatever the reason, the Grey Lady has not been seen in Stony Beach in recent years, as far as I am aware. I have myself walked in the area at night many times and even on a few foggy nights, but have not seen her. Perhaps in this age of technology and explanations we have lost some of our imagination. The people mentioned who encountered the Grey Lady, and shared their experiences, were all respected members of their communities. This is to say, they were not people to tell tales and they genuinely believed they encountered the supernatural. While we could probably explain the Grey Lady as being wispy fog that was close to the ground, it is much more fun to believe she is real!
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