Haunted Harbours by Steve Vernon

of the island’s extremities. Between these sandbars lies an unchartable obstacle course of deeps and shoals. The island itself is made entirely of sand, and changes shape as the years go by. The maps must be drawn and redrawn. Two lighthouses, one at each end of the island and built by the Canadian government, have been moved and moved again due to the shifting sands.
    The island itself is a kind of shape-shifting ghost; fishermen fear it and sailors avoid it, because the waters about Sable Island seethe with ghosts. Nearly 150 ships have grounded upon the shoals, broken upon the rocks, and sank beneath the churning Atlantic waters surrounding this little stretch of sand.
    In the late eighteenth century, the waters of Sable Island claimed a two-masted brigantine by the name of Frances . Yet the waters and the rocks were not the only ones that were to blame for the shipwreck. No sir, they had help.
    In those days, men known as wreckers made a living salvaging whatever washed ashore. When the pickings were slim and the weather too calm to wreck many ships, there were always a few unscrupulous men who would lay false signal fires, remove warning buoys, and stuff shoal-bells with cotton, thus luring unwary ships to their doom.
    It was the wreckers who brought about the end of the Frances , luring her to her doom with the aid of several lanterns. Aboard her were a Doctor Copeland, the medical surgeon of the seventh Prince’s Regiment, his wife and their two children, fourteen other passengers, and a crew of nineteen men.
    Mrs. Copeland was a young woman, younger than her husband by a good six years, and was to all accounts a most beautiful woman with long flowing hair the colour of sunburned straw. She was wearing her wedding ring, a family heirloom of solid silver surmounted by a large red ruby. Those who saw the ring close up described it as an eerie thing, the colour of welling blood.
    Frances went down with all hands, and the wreckers found easy pickings, scavenging the supplies and furniture that washed ashore. Amongst the jetsam on the beach, the lead wrecker found the body of Mrs. Copeland. Her face was as pale as candle wax, her skin bloated by long hours in the salt water. Her hair was loosened and snarled by the tide’s angry fingers, and her clothes had been nearly torn from her, but the ring was still there. Its beauty caught the wrecker’s eye.
    He knelt in the surf, heedless of the waves. He caught at the ring and tried to work it from her hand. The ring wouldn’t budge; her fingers were swollen from the cold and the long immersion. Stealing a glance to his left and right, making certain no one watched, the old wrecker snapped open his case knife and severed Mrs. Copeland’s ring finger.
    The instant he cut the finger off, her eyes flew wide open like rudely-snapped window blinds. She opened her mouth to scream, and in panic he held her under the water. She struggled, splashing his face with the blood from her mutilated hand. The wrecker grimly held her under, cutting her throat with the edge of his case knife. In a few short moments, she was dead.
    The wrecker stood up, still holding his case knife and the dead woman’s finger. He worked the ring off and cast the finger into the tide. He pushed her body out a little ways into the water, saying a prayer to Father Neptune in hopes that the current would catch her and hide his dirty work.
    In fear he fled to Halifax, where he sold the ring to a watch-maker of dubious ethics. He used the money to purchase a room and a bottle, and that night he opened his throat with the very case knife he’d used to cut Mrs. Copeland’s fair white neck.
    Some say it was guilt, and some say that it happened in a fight over the spoils of his crime, while others claim the wrecker was visited that night by the ghost of Mrs. Copeland, who stood over his bedside pointing an accusatory finger stub.
    I cannot say for sure, but I do know this. On lonely summer