The Dungarvon Whooper

The defining New Brunswick ghost story, from the lumber camps

The Dungarvon River runs through the deep woods of central New Brunswick, in the Miramichi country, and its ghost story was handed down among the lumbermen who worked these woods all through the 20th century. The Dungarvon Whooper, pronounced "hooper," belongs to the years between about 1850 and 1875, when Irish families were pouring into Canada after the Great Famine and young men went into the winter woods to cut timber.

In the best-known telling a young Irish cook, usually called Ryan, came to a camp on the Dungarvon with all his savings in a money belt around his waist and made no secret of it. He was handsome and strong, with ruddy cheeks and black curly hair, the first one up every morning, and he could whoop louder than any man in camp, waking the crew with an ear-splitting yell. One day, with the crew away cutting, only the cook and the boss were left in camp. When the men came back that night the cook was dead, and the money belt was empty. He had taken sick and died quickly, the boss told them. The snow lay four feet deep, too deep to carry the body out, so they buried him in the forest. That night, and many nights after, terrible whoops and screams rang through the woods, and the frightened crew fled the camp and never returned.

Other versions turn it around. In one, Ryan is the murderer, a hunter who lured the camp cook into the woods and shot him for his money, and it is the cook's ghost that shrieks at dusk. The Whooper is usually invisible, though some describe a wildcat or puma, and sceptics have suggested a screech owl or a panther.

For years, the story goes, the screams went on until Father Edward Murdoch, a priest from Renous, prayed over the grave by Whooper Spring and made the sign of the cross; in some versions the ghost was too strong even for him. The best-known form of the tale is a song by the local poet Michael Whelan, published in a newspaper in 1912 to the tune of "Where the Silvery Colorado Wends Its Way," which ends by admitting it may be false or true. The story lives on in plays by the Heritage Players of Renous, and the whistle of a train that ran along the Dungarvon echoed through the hills so like the ghost's cry that the train itself was named the Dungarvon Whooper. People in the Miramichi still say they hear it at dusk.