Mary E. Chisholm’s Ghosts
Back in 1967, Jonas Crane wrote “Tales of the Tide,” an index list of ghost stories from the Hancock County area that had to do—you guessed it—with the water and shore.
One of the best stories, he said, was that of the Mary A Chisholm. The Gloucester Banker ship had sixteen ghosts in all, clearly an overachiever. Each of those ghosts were once a man on the Chisholm’s crew and each fell from the rigging, all the way at the top, and into the sea, lost.
“According to the old tale, on the seventeenth trip to the banks, the look-out man and the mate saw the ghosts of all of the sixteen drowned sailors dressed in black oilskins and clinging to the top rigging with all their ghostly strength. That ended the Chisholm’s career as a fisherman, for no sailor would ship on her after the story got around.
There is at least some partial truth to the ghost story of the Mary Chisholm which made its rounds to the Ellsworth American, Bangor Daily, and at least one other Maine newspaper in 1967.
On January 8, 1891, The Times Record had a small blurb on page 1 about Canadians Becoming Lenient.” In it, the unnamed journalist wrote, “Mary E. Chisholm, from this the LaHave banks with fish, put into this port in distress, having lost ninety fathoms of chain in the recent gales.”
Maybe the ghosts needed the chain to do the hauntings?
One of the earliest news stories about the Mary E. Chisholm’s ghosts appeared (appropriately) in the October 30, 1938 edition of the Portland Press Herald, page six.
Edward Carlson referenced an earlier Press Herald story by Alfred Eden earlier that year about the vessel. And it’s here that the story gets really interesting and it begins in 1906 after the ship had been sold by Captain Jim Ellsworth. She was skippered by Captain Les Durost.
Durost’s crew mutinied.
“She was a bad ship, and evil-starred, the Mary; not in herself, perhaps, but in her misfortune in being commanded off and on, by a type of captains termed ‘drivers,’ men more anxious to make quick trips than to safeguard the members of their crews.
“For she had killed 17 men, had the black-hearted Mary Chisholm (and that was before Jim Ellsworth took her out. And she had driven others to mutiny (That, as just noted was after Can’n Jim parted with her). And all her days she was haunted by the evil she had done.”
That’s a lot of baggage for one ship to carry.
According to Carlson’s story, Jim Ellsworth’s son Dan, went to sea with his father on this boat, which was the type of ship that had a long main boom and went quickly, but sometimes she’d reed down the sails when things got rough.
“And in gales when it became imperative to reef, or capsize her, the Mary killed her men—one at a time—on the foot ropes of her plunging bowspirit and on that overhanging main boom of hers,” Carlson wrote.
It gets worse.
“When one of her self-styled ‘driver’ skippers had driven the Mary before a gale to the point where it was reef her or lose her, some poor devil would be ordered into the bowsprit foot ropes to shorten her straining jibe—with the solid, green water thundering aboard….And sometimes, a man would lose his grip and his footing out there,” he wrote.
Or, they sea would sweep him off.
Or they’d be smashed off by the boom.
Captain Jim Ellsworth lost no men this way, but others had.
And those men allegedly came back. Allegedly, one day, The Mary came back into port. And that day all of her crew quit.
“The Mary’s lookout had stepped aft to gossip for a moment with the helmsman, on a black, rainy, windy night, somewhere out on Georges,” he wrote. “It was a lonely, spooky sort of a night, and the lookout could have been pardoned if his scalp suddenly prickled when the helmsman, pointing forward above the dim light of the binnacle, inquired suspiciously, ‘Say, who are them fellows, there by the windlass—them fellers in black oilskins?’
“As he uttered those last two words, literally shouting them in his terror, both the helmsman and his shipmate bolted for the cabin companionway, tumbling over each other in their mad haste to get below decks. Both had recollected simultaneously that every living man in the Mary’s crew wore yellow oilskins; that not a living man among them wore black.”
In 1906 the crew mutinied because of a brutal skipper. Another skipper and another year, the ship hit a free-floating iceberg. Her port timbers were crushed. She limped to Nova Scotia and her men survived. But the boat didn’t stay in New England. She headed to Martinque and the Bahamas.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Ellsworth American, Wednesday, Nov 08, 1967, page 16. https://www.newspapers.com/image/962451585/?terms=%22ghost%22%20%2B%20%22Bar%20Harbor%22&match=1
https://www.newspapers.com/image/992314035/?terms=%22mary%20chisholm%22%20%2B%20%22ghost%22&match=1