Things That Go Bump In The Basement, Livingstone Street, St. John’s

Things That Go Bump In The Basement
Livingstone Street, St. John’s

By Dale Jarvis

Winter nights seem made for the sharing of spooky tales.  Wind swirling ‘round the gables of old houses and the tappings of skeletal branches against attic windows would certainly set the stage for many a ghost story.

In his book, Streets of St. John’s, author Jack White quotes newspaper columnist, J.M Byrnes. Byrnes reminisced of a particular poplar tree from his youth on Livingstone Street in the 1880s, “its stark branches now in the sleep of winter and ghostly with bandages of falling snow, sprawling over the gables of the adjoining houses and stirring restlessly with the ever increasing wind which tapped and swirled against the attic windows.”

Livingstone Street is more that just atmospheric, however. Indeed, it seems to have attracted a fair share of local legends.

It was not that long ago that there was a woman living on Livingstone Street with her young son. The boy, like many young children, was possessed of an imaginary friend.  In this particular case, it was an imaginary dog.  The boy would often go down into the basement to play with his invisible friend, and the mother thought nothing of it.

The basement was only roughly finished, and not the most comfortable of spaces. So the woman hired a contractor to come in, tear up the old broken concrete floor and pour a new one, in order to finish the basement and make it more liveable.  When the workman pulled up the floor, there, underneath the old concrete, he found the skeleton of a dog.

Or so the local legend goes, anyway. Like many ghost stories, it is one that I have come across through second-hand sources, so it difficult to judge its accuracy.  What is interesting, however, is that it is a story which does not seem out of place on Livingstone Street.  Haunted basements, in fact, seem to be a recurring theme in the neighbourhood.

Around 1972, a family with several children was living in a house on that street. By and by, several family members started to experience strange things.  One of the eldest boys saw a strange face looking in at him through a window.  The mother started to hear heavy footsteps coming up the stairs in the middle of the night.  But it was the two youngest children that witnessed the most terrifying event, down in the basement of the property.

“Caroline” was only a young girl at the time, about six years old. Over 30 years later, she still has a vivid memory of what she saw in that basement.

“Me and my brother were down in the basement playing,” remembers Caroline. “He wanted me to sit on top of an old oil barrel that was in our basement. I was afraid to sit on the barrel because I was afraid I would fall off.  I reluctantly agreed to go up there only after he went first.”

Caroline’s brother started to climb up the barrel when the girl looked across the room.

“There in the middle of the basement was the most terrifying sight of my entire life,” she says, thinking back on the events of that day. “There was this giant head and face staring at me.  It had black hair; the face was very ugly. The lips were the scariest part, and were snarled up and sneering at me.”

“It was horrifying,” she remembers.

The image was in the middle of the basement, with an evil smirk on its face, about three feet high. Both Caroline and her brother saw the apparition.

“I ran out of the basement screaming, my brother ran after me,” Caroline describes. “I ran upstairs and told my older brother, he went downstairs to check out what I had seen”

When the family went downstairs, the head had disappeared. The basement light, which had been on when the children had fled, was now turned off.

“I guess the darkness hates the light,” says Caroline

Originally printed in Haunted Waters, published by Flanker Press. 
Map: Insurance plan of the city of St. John's, Newfoundland