Investigation: Deadman's Island, Halifax, Nova Scotia

"Four prisoners carried to Target Hill this morning, a place where they bury the dead. I'm fearful a number of us will visit that place this summer if not shortly released." ~Benjamin Franklin Palmer of Stonington, Conn., wrote this in his journal on June 4, 1814. He had been captured in December 1813 off Long Island, N.Y. and held in the Melville Island prison adjacent to Deadman’s Island, Halifax, NS. 

Always on the lookout for the next mysterious place with a paranormal past, my investigative partner and I have read and heard various stories about Deadman’s Island; for one, strange lights have been seen bobbing over the hill on top of the graves there. No, not fireflies. No, not other people with flashlights, flares or cigarettes. Real, actual unexplained orbs of lights. 

Luckily, we live just a stone’s throw away from Deadman’s Island. Since the weather is so much more pleasant for doing outside things, we decided to grab the trusty Nikon and head on over to this now-quaint little place. 

Today, we stood on top of four hundred graves. 

Background: 

This very small island was originally used as a military training and practice site and was known as Target Island (or Target Hill). During the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, at least 200 soldiers and sailors died in captivity on the nearby Melville Island prison (200 meters away and now the Armdale Yacht club). It held over 8,000 prisoners in its day. 

The dead were wrapped in canvas and tossed into unmarked graves on the island. 

Also buried there were escaped slaves and quarantined immigrants (typhus and smallpox were rampant for a while). 

The total number of unmarked graves on Deadman’s Island was approximately 400. 

Allegedly, there was one marked grave; that of Canadian mariner, John Dixon. 

After 1847 no one else was buried there. 

The British sold the island in 1907 to a business man who ran an amusement park on it. He called it Melville Park and ran a ferry from the mainland to the island. While digging and planting around the amusement park, three human skulls were unearthed. The park eventually closed in 1927 due to hardship caused by the 1st World War, the Halifax explosion, and the stock market crash in the 1920’s. Another man opened it as a pleasure park in 1930. Storms and land development unearthed more skeletons. 

In the 1960’s, the island was annexed to the mainland and was no longer a true island. 

It is important to note that more recently, the Northwest Arm Heritage Association, the Ohio Society of the War of 1812 and the Royal Canadian Legion collaboratively protected the island and the graves from being damaged and disturbed for development purposes. They researched British Admiralty logs and records to discover the extent of the mass burials on the island and saved it as a heritage park, established by Halifax municipality in 2005. 

Location: 

Deadman’s Island is in the south end of Halifax on the Northwest Arm. You can access the island on Pinehaven Drive off Purcell’s Cove Road. Parking is on this residential street in front of upscale houses and there is a well-developed path/entrance with signs leading the way in. 

        

What Happened:: 

Walking along a nicely established path with wooden rails and over a small bridge, you enter a more wooded area. You are actually right in someone’s backyard/sideyard but that is the way it is designed. Lots of trees surround a wide path and the odd bluejay was squawking at us to keep out. But knowing there could be grisly ghosts to be seen and photographed, on we went. 

A few minutes later we were at the water’s edge where obviously the island had been connected to the mainland. A short walk around this small shore and we found ourselves in the modern provincial park, complete with benches, plaques and signs which detail the historical significance of the island, which was right in front of us. 

 

Today, it is tree covered, with clear paths winding their way up the small hill. Between the trees, the harbour is in full view. A bit unnerving to know that each step was on top of a potential gravesite, it still felt calm and serene, with no air of creepiness whatsoever(unfortunately). 

We did come across a few weird, unexplained depressions in the ground, the likes of which I have never seen before. Still don’t know what would cause the earth to sink down in perfectly round circles. We also came across a weird teepee shaped stick structure and also have no idea why it was there. Seemed like a Blair Witch type of thing. 

Incidentally, we were there in early evening as the sun was just beginning to drop towards the horizon and even though it was still daylight, we did not see any of the ghostly lights that have been reported to plague the hill. 

                       

   

                      

(Melville Island, which is now the yacht club, formerly the prison)

Result and Conclusion: 

We don’t know. Remember reading our other “investigation” posts, in which I clearly stated that most of our exploration of paranormal places would likely end this way? Well, it applies to this one, too. 

Given the melancholy and grisly history of what went on on the island so many years ago to so many people, I don’t doubt for a second that people have witnessed paranormal manifestations of one kind or another. Unfortunately, we did not witness anything today, but alas, this is the chance you take when you set out on these excursions. Therefore, we offer no explanation of the aforementioned mystery lights seen around the island. We also did not see the marked grave of John Dixon, as noted above, if it is even still visible. 

Perhaps we will go back, with voice recording equipment and try to capture the voices of the long-dead, who were indecently piled one on top of the other under that mound of land along the Halifax shore. 

For further paranormal reading in which we mention this island AND others, check out our newsletter on Nova Scotia’s eeriest islands: 

Nova Scotia's Eeriest islands(link)

Also, the The Globe and Mail had a great piece regarding Melville Island here: 

Globe and Mail: Melville Island(link)

Need the link to our paranormal newsletter site? 

No sign-up required. 

Nova Scotia Paranormal Events Newsletters(link)

Ghost Faces

I don’t think it’s all that difficult to actually “see” a ghost. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have claimed to. I don’t think it’s a case of whether or not you are “open” to it happening. It’s like seeing a blue jay or a shooting star. They are around and if you get to see one for yourself, then good for you.

Of course, a ghost or spirit can be around a certain location and make noise and move objects and that sort of thing without ever materializing; so they aren’t always visible, to the human eye anyway.

And when they are visible, most people (myself included) will tell you that they look just like you and me, not all wispy and ethereal like in the movies. Of course there are different entities so sometimes they can look like dark shadows without any discernable features. But that’s not what I am getting at so I digress.

To actually capture a ghost/spirit on camera is a near impossible feat. There are tons of pictures circulating the internet and in published books which claim to be ghost photography. But most turn out to be inconclusive or doctored pictures, or something else entirely that the photographer thought was a ghost but isn’t really.

I’ll be the first to admit our eyes can play tricks on us. I once mistakenly thought a road sign in the dark was a man standing on the shoulder of the road. Once I got quite close, I could clearly see said sign was in fact just that. Although that incident was not photograph-related, it demonstrates how one thing can be mistaken for something else, especially under varied lighting conditions (ie: dark, foggy, camera settings, etc)

All this being said, you could take a thousand pictures in a known-to-be-haunted location and examine them to death (pun intended) and never come up with anything unusual.

And that is exactly what I did.

And then one day, when scrutinizing the latest batch of pics, you see something weird.

And that is exactly what happened.

To re-cap, this blog is about the regularly-haunted house in the country that my mother owns. You are probably all very familiar with it. If not, please have a look around and become acquainted.

A lot of the time, when I am there, I take random pictures in the HOPE that someday something unusual and unexplained will present itself. Like I said, you could take pictures for years and come up empty handed continually. (Incidentally, I have captured a few anomalies over the years but nothing perhaps as solid as the following.)

Within recent weeks, I took some outdoor shots of the property this house stands on, with my trusty Nikon. (mainly of windows because let’s face it, what ghost wouldn’t want to look out at the countryside on a beautiful summer day?)

Upon scrutinizing them later on the computer, one picture of the dining room window caught my eye. A face was looking out the window. I went to the next picture and it got even weirder. Two faces were there and one of them was clearly my father-----who died in 1981.

The face in the first picture looks to be of a young girl, smiling, with long hair. Her features are still clearly visible in the second picture, right below my father’s face, and she looks more like my grandmother in this picture. 

 

For comparison, this is my father and grandmother.

I have shown the pictures to several people. All but one agrees the man’s face is my father, and that there is at least one other face (a girl or woman) and perhaps as many as three faces in total. 

There was only one person in the house that day: my mother, who was nowhere near the dining room. Nor do any of these faces belong to her.

I have clearly stated ghosts are extremely hard to photograph. But that doesn’t mean it CAN’T be done. Did I get lucky and capture something in my shots? Seems like it.

You can blow them up and add filters all day, but you have to remember the images will not act like they would if humans were in the pictures because the people in these pics are not exactly made of skin and bones. They have intangible qualities to their make-up and that must be taken into consideration when analyzing the photos.

I am perfectly fine with people being skeptical. And so, for comparison purposes, I took more pictures of the same window yesterday, at the same time of day, same weather outside, with the same camera, and nothing changed inside the house. I examined the pictures on the computer later and there are no anomalies at all.

To me, if the faces were fuzzy, hard to see or basically just unclear, I would not share them so readily. But they aren’t any of those things. They are right there, basically just smiling for the camera.

Side note: It should also be noted that I heard unexplained noises from the dining room earlier that afternoon. The dog was startled by them and left the dining room. Not sure what the source of that noise was (they are frequently heard and unexplained) but it could be related to what was captured in the photos.

Conclude what you will and decide for yourself.

Need the link to our paranormal newsletters?

No sign up required!

Nova Scotia Paranormal Events Newsletters