Bluenose Ghosts

Presents ghost stories based on folklore which look at the character of people and villages in Nova Scotia.

Stories gathered from Nova Scotia.

Ghosts guarding buried treasure, phantom ships, haunted houses and supernatural warnings of death are just some of the strange and mysterious phenomena from Bluenose Ghosts. These unexplained mysteries are all based on personal experiences of ordinary people, told to Helen Creighton, one of Canada's most respected and renowned folklorists.

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A collection of traditional Nova Scotian folktales, superstitions and home remedies compiled by the Canadian folklorist and author of Bluenose Ghosts. Beginning in 1928, Dr. Helen Creighton traveled across her native Nova Scotia seeking out and recording its rich heritage in the form of ghost stories, folktales, and folksongs. She first shared her findings in 1957 with the collection Bluenose Ghosts, and followed its success eleven years later with Bluenose Magic, both of which are considered classics of Maritime literature. This fascinating volume welcomes readers into a supernatural world of witchcraft, enchantment, and buried treasure. It shares stories of the region’s indigenous Mi’kmaq people as well as variations of tales brought over from Europe. Here too are folk remedies, dream interpretation, divination, superstitions, and more that has been passed on from generation to generation of Nova Scotia’s families

The popular conception of Nova Scotians as a pure, simple, idyllic people is false, argues Ian McKay. In The Quest of the Folk he shows how the province's tourism industry and cultural producers manipulated and refashioned the cultural identity of the region and its people to project traditional folk values. McKay offers an in-depth analysis of the infusion of a folk ideology into the art and literature of the region and the use of the idea of the "Simple Life" in tourism promotion. He examines how Nova Scotia's cultural history was rewritten to erase evidence of an urban, capitalist society, class and ethnic differences, and women's emancipation. In doing so he sheds new light on the roles of Helen Creighton, the Maritime region's most famous folklorist, and Mary Black, an influential handicrafts revivalist, in creating this false identity.

Ian McKay shows how the tourism industry & cultural producers have manipulated the cultural identity of Nova Scotia to project traditional folk values. He offers analysis of the infusion of folk ideology into the art & literature of the region, & the use of the idea of the 'simple life' in tourism promotion.

Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.