Ghost Tours on the Lagan
Lagan Legacy and the Lagan Boat Company, going for ghosts.
For the second year, during Titanic Made in Belfast Festival, Lagan Legacy and the Lagan Boat Company host a two special evening tours on the Lagan, introducing passengers to the ghosts of the Lagan. Some of the accounts are "real"; spirits of the past. Some are folklore or superstition. Others, when being narrated, require a great deal of tongue in cheek! But those stories based on a number of tragic events confirm that "there's something in the air" around the historic River Lagan.
The tour lasts two hours - a lot of tales! Here are just a few of them, with an introduction by Charlie Warmington.
Tonight isn’t spooks or spectres; ghouls, phantoms or banshees. Most of those are the inventions of legend or fiction. This evening’s ghosts arise from the River Lagan’s unmatched legacy of maritime and industrial heritage. We’ll be navigating the remaining vast artefacts, and if the spirits of history aren’t lurking there, in the wharfs, quays and dry docks, they’ll be prowling our thoughts and minds as we ponder the past.
More ghosts were conceived by the Titanic tragedy than by any other maritime disaster in history. Nearly 1,500 people perished and many of their ghosts are said to live on. But during several hundred years of shipbuilding here on the Lagan, more than twice or even three times that number of people died building three thousand other ships. They’re long departed to another world but tonight we’ll meet them in their stories of hardship, toil and heroic innovation - all written on the wind. It’s said that the River Lagan’s ubiquitous seagulls are the souls of the shipyard workers, returned to patrol the past. In the darkness, while the gulls are silent, there’s a hushed clamour, not of phantoms, but of the visions they’re guarding. DONEGALL QUAY.This part of the Lagan – Donegal Quay – has experienced unimaginable sadness and tragedy. The ghosts here are from a terrible reality.This is a handwritten note in a diary dated June 1847. “Too soon I arrived at the quay and left my last footprint on my native land. The boat pushed off and in a few minutes I was on board the brig that was to waft me across the wide Atlantic.”Between 1846 and 1851, more than one million people – the famine emigrants – sailed from Ireland to America. Never before had the world witnessed such an exodus. And many sailed from here. The vessels, moored bow to stern, were poignantly called the "Coffin Ships" because about one in every three of their passengers died of disease and were buried at sea. Many died right here on the quays too, of illness and hunger, without ever embarking. Some ships, like the Jeannie Johnston, had a good reputation. Apparently she never lost a single passenger due to unhealthy conditions. Others lived up to the name “coffin ships”.So what kind of vessels were they? The much trusted Lloyd’s Register can tell us. It not only identified vessels, it also classified them. For a ship to be listed in the Register, it had to be surveyed and judged to be first-, second- or third-class according to age, condition and general seaworthiness. First class were OK in their day.Second-class status covered ships that were not fit to carry dry cargoes subject to sea-damage. Many emigrants travelled from here on second-class ships! It apparently didn’t matter that human beings were subject to sea damage.Third-class status absolutely prohibited long voyages; merely coastal work. Most emigrants sailed from here to America on third class ships.Boarding was a frightful affair for people leaving home and family for ever. One traveller’s description went “Men, women and children were scrambling up the sides of the ship. One could see hundreds of people confused and screaming. Luggage and boxes were flung aboard, followed by the passengers. When they or their luggage missed the ship and fell into the water there was usually a man in a rowing boat ready to rescue and get his reward.” And the ships’ crews were often incompetent. A passenger in the shipping industry gave his opinion on seamen who crewed the emigrant ships to a government committee. “Ours is one of the worst trades in the world for seamen, we get very bad sailors indeed ; in fact, we get a class of men who go more to pilfer from the passengers than for the purpose of going to sea." The emigrants who stepped from these quays onto the coffin boats were totally at the mercy of the Masters of the ship. A number of these were unscrupulous in their treatment of their passengers. Often voyages were delayed, to force travellers to use lodgings in the ports. Many emigrants used up their savings in these over priced accommodations and wound up travelling to US penniless, as indentured servants, working up to 5 years to pay off their indebtedness to the Ship’s Master. If the parents of children died in debt, their children inherited the debt.It’s a historical fact that convict ships had more and better-experienced crews. Food on the emigrant vessels was often oatmeal and biscuits, the latter often unfit to be eaten. These were as hard as rocks and full of maggots and weevils and every kind of insect. In order to eat the biscuits, they put them into a canvas bag and pounded them with a hammer. Then they mixed the crumbs with whatever water could be spared from the daily ration and ate them that way. Rations, specified under the Passenger Acts, could not keep anyone in good health for the length of the crossing and few emigrants could afford to take their own food. Moreover, dishonest captains sometimes served short measures of both food and water. Some passengers were able to do their own cooking on the deck on little fires set on stones, but there was not enough space so people often had to wait a long time before they were able to cook their rations. As a consequence, food was often either half-cooked or not cooked at all and when the weather was bad they were not allowed on deck. There was usually not enough water and it was also often contaminated. A passenger wrote in his diary “The passengers' fireplaces, upon either side of the foredeck furnished endless scenes, sometimes of noisy merriment, at other times of quarrels. The fire was contained in a large wooden case lined with bricks and shaped something like an old-fashioned settee - the coals being confined by two or three iron bars in front. From morning till evening they were surrounded by groups of men, women and children; some making stir-about in all kinds of cooking vessels, and others baking cakes upon extemporary griddles. These cakes were generally about two inches thick and when baked were encased in a burnt crust coated with smoke, being actually raw in the centre. Such was the unvaried food of the greater number of these poor creatures.”This to feed them for between 35 and 90 days crossing the Atlantic Berths on board were simply spaces on wooden bunks, usually six foot square and built into the ship’s timbers on either side of the hold, with a gangway down the middle. Each adult was usually allotted one quarter of a bunk, or 18 inches of bed space. On ships bound for British North America children had to be fitted into 9 inches.Sometimes passengers had less space than required under the Passenger Acts but even the required six feet square was inadequate. There was no bedding and men and women were usually herded together in the hold where it was dark, cramped and dirty. The holds were never or very rarely cleaned. Passengers had no means of changing their clothes or bedding, ideal conditions for the spread of body lice and the typhus fever they carried. Dysentery and cholera were rampant. An emigrant wrote in his diary in 1847 “Before the emigrant has been a week at sea he is an altered man. How can it be otherwise? Hundreds of poor people, men, women and children, of all ages, from the drivelling idiot of 90 to the babe just born, huddled together, without light, without air, wallowing in filth, and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart. The fevered patients lying amidst the noise in sleeping places so narrow as almost to deny them a change of position. By their agonized ravings disturbing those administered by the hand of casual charity, dying without spiritual consolation and buried in the deep without the rites of the church." A man and a woman tried to help a sick child. “As the boy who was unable to go on deck still continued to be ill, and was reported to be feverish, the mistress and I reviewed the medicine chest. We found it to contain a jar of castor oil, salts, laudanum, and other herbs. There was also a book of directions, which were by no means explicit, and they so perplexed the mistress, even with the aid of her spectacles, that as she was nothing the wiser of the study she resolved to trust to her own experience in the concoction of a dose.” A ship called the Sophia left Liverpool for Belfast and then America carrying well over her limit of thirty passengers and so violating the Passengers' Acts. When she docked at this quay she was found to have nearly 50 passengers in steerage. Yet the master was fined a mere £20 in Belfast and the passenger broker £10 in Liverpool. Collectively, the cost of a single ticket. It was not reported how many were on board when the Sophia left Belfast. The grief stricken passengers sometimes jumped overboard in the Lough, and tried to swim ashore – generally drowning.
The lucky passengers arrival at the other side of the Atlantic raises the question – were they lucky? For the sick, it sometimes took up to five days to see a doctor. Often a ten or fifteen day general quarantine was imposed on the vessel. The healthy emigrants thus succumbed to typhus as they were forced to remain in their lice-infested holds. With so many dead on board bodies were simply dumped overboard.
Others, half-alive, were placed in small boats, deposited on the beach, and left to crawl to the hospital on their hands and knees if they could manage. Thousands of them, ill with typhus and dysentery, eventually wound up in hastily constructed wooden fever sheds. These makeshift hospitals, badly understaffed and unsanitary, simply became places to die, with corpses piled unceremoniously into nearby mass graves. Those who couldn't get into the hospital died along the roadsides. Exhausted with disease and hunger they’d sit down on the roadside to rest – and never again arise.
Writer Thomas Moran’s words capture this one way ticket to hell.
What if the world turned wrong one day, and the deep sea gave up its dead? What would we of the land's end spy?A hundred thousand pale corpses, bobbing like fishermen's floats in the green swell?Would the endless waters become a sort of peat bog on which, stepping so carefully, we might walk from here all the way to America? Would the corpses' eyes be open, watching and resentful? Or would they be closed as tight as a baby's at the moment of birth?Whatever the final answer to Thomas Moran’s poignant question, it began here – on Donegal Quay. ABERCORN BASIN and QUEEN’S ISLANDNearly fifty thousand shipyard workers toiled along the slipways and vast gantries that once towered above us here. In the cavernous workshops with iron machines the size of houses, drilling, turning, grinding and cutting – thick sharp edged sheets of rough metal – molten iron like a red hot rainstorm searing their sweating foreheads. Lit up like ghosts as hot light flashed through the deafening thunder of hammer on hull, on hell.
Two men over there were directing a crane driver lifting twelve tons of thick flat iron plate towards the hull of a ship. A gust of wind caught the huge plate and slammed it against the ship’s hull. But the men were between it and the vessel. They were unrecognizable as human beings. “They were a coagulated red smudge on the side of the ship,” said another shipyard man who’d seen it happen. “We hosed them off the hull – a red trickle on the slipway. ”
The ghost of that vision still haunts him today.
“It was my first day in the Yard,” Johnny told us. “They brought us apprentices down to the Island – that’s Queen’s Island – to see a huge ship being constructed. She was encased in wooden scaffolding, with eight or nine horizontal gangways, one above the other, up to the top deck.” Johnny was part of a new school, with a foreman who’d be teaching the apprentices their craft. They were listening to their mentor when shouts echoed from the side of the ship, accompanied by a series of rapid dull thumps. “It was a worker,” Johnny explained, “banging off each wooden gangway, one after the other and each walkway rattled, and then the poor devil crunched into the concrete.” That poor devil remains today as Johnny’s personal phantom; except its real. “One of the other apprentices turned and ran and never came back!” added Johnny.
Shipyard worker Stevie always rolled up his sleeves. He was working with a huge drill in the machine shop. The drill’s three inch shaft was furiously spinning a heavy ‘bit’ as thick as your wrist. He turned to shout a greeting at a colleague, and the cuffs of his shirt caught on the drill, tightening in an instant, wrapping his hand, his wrist, his elbow and his upper arm around the shaft. The men who remember John’s screaming turn pale as they recollect. You can see the ghost in their eyes, sucking the colour from their faces. The same ghost perhaps that slapped their shrieking workmate onto the floor when the drill got beyond his shoulder.
Some of old man River’s ghosts are more friendly. There’s one we know of that enjoys having a boiled egg for tea. It visits an old Belfast lady called Myrtle whose father was a boiler maker here over seventy years ago.
Living near the Holywood Arches, Myrtle’s father didn’t talk much about his work.“He took me down to the yard once when I was very small,” she remembers, which was a Harland and Wolff tradition; on the weekend before a launch families were invited to view the sparkling new vessel; they often attended the launch as well.“I remember him coming home on his bike from the yard,” Myrtle recounts, “I used to stand at the back entry of our house waiting for the first sign of his carbide lamp, and for the smell of carbide.” Which of course smells like eggs, and now prompts her to think of him. Happy memories. Her father cycled off to work in the mornings before Myrtle and her two brothers were awake; an early start that didn’t dissuade the lads from following in their dad’s tyre tracks. Myrtle’s older brother became a turner, shaping metal parts on a lathe; another became a welder, and her Uncle and his son both worked in the yard. And on her mother’s side of the family almost everyone went to sea, or worked in H&W. A family tree planted beside the Lagan, and nourished by, what was for them, its living water. TITANIC SLIPWAY. This is where we guarantee you at least one ghost, and a big one at that. Almost a hundred years ago – towering above us – the stern of Titanic herself. Imagine a fifteen storey building – that was her height. This is her slipway, still here today, with some of its original fixtures and fittings. This is where what was then the biggest man made moving object in the world slid into the Lagan. Creaking and bending and screeching on stone, her friction boiling and burning thirty tons of lubricating tallow, tearing at enormous chains and ropes, and cutting with a roar into the churning water. Nearly thirty thousand tons of massive metal monster, when complete, 56,000 tons – a thousand feet long, a hundred feet wide, propellers of twenty feet in diameter – with enough lifeboats for 1200 people. On her maiden voyage she carried 850 crew and one and a half thousand passengers. There were just over 700 survivors. From the huge and tragic tally of those who perished – many become the ghosts of history. But the vast vessel herself seemed haunted by death; even while she was here on the slipway.Samuel Joseph Scott was a 15-year-old catch boy with a riveting squad. On the 20th April 1910 he left his boarding house in Templemore Street for another day’s work on the world’s biggest and most innovative passenger ship. Even during her construction the vessel was hailed as historic; he knew her well and heard she was breaking all the existing maritime records. He was proud of his place in Harland and Wolff; she was his ship too! The noise of yesterday’s toil was still ringing in his ears; the Titanic had over three million rivets, most of them thrown from the flames to a catch boy who captured them deftly in a bucket and carried them to the men with the clanging hammers. The process was relentlessly ear splittingly dangerous; deafness was virtually guaranteed. Young Samuel joined the flow of men to Queen’s Island. Later that day he fell 23 feet from the Titanic’s timber platforms and was killed instantly. The first death due to this great ship – and there’d be many more before she was even launched. Was she giving Belfast some kind of supernatural advance warning?PRINCESS AMEN-RA (Tongue in cheek required!)
Of all Titanic’s tales of the supernatural the one most often recounted, most documented, the most disturbing, the most difficult to explain concerns an ancient Egyptian Princess.The Princess of Amen-Ra lived some 1,500 years BC. When she died, she was laid in an ornate wooden coffin and buried deep in a vault at Luxor, on the banks of the Nile. This area was to become a popular archaeological location in the 1800s. In the late 1890s, four rich young Englishmen visiting the excavations at Luxor were invited to buy an exquisitely fashioned mummy case containing the remains of Princess of Amen-Ra.Unable to agree which of them would take up the offer, they drew lots. The winner paid several thousand pounds to the archaeological trader and had the coffin delivered to his hotel. Excited by his purchase, he sat and looked at it for several hours, carefully touching its ornate decorations, noting the details. A few hours later, he was seen nervously walking towards the desert, as if worried about something, perturbed and troubled. He never returned. He was never seen again. Search parties could find no trace of him. Whilst searching, one of the remaining three men was shot accidentally by an Egyptian servant. His arm was so severely wounded it had to be amputated. Bearing their lost friends Egyptian coffin the three men returned to London. The third man of the foursome found on his return home that the bank holding his entire savings had failed. It had gone bankrupt on the day the coffin had been purchased. The fourth man suffered a severe illness, lost his job and was reduced to selling boxes of matches in the street.In London the lost friends family sold the coffin to a rich businessman .Within days, three of his family members were injured in a road accident and his home was badly damaged by fire. Sometime later the businessman donated the coffin to the British Museum. As it was being unloaded from a truck in the museum courtyard, the vehicle suddenly and inexplicably went into reverse and trapped a passer-by who was severely injured.Then as the casket was being lifted up the stairs by two workmen, one fell and broke his leg. The other, apparently in perfect health, died unaccountably two days later. The Princess in her coffin was installed in the Egyptian Room. The Museum's night watchmen frequently heard frantic hammering and sobbing from inside the coffin. Other exhibits in the room were hurled about at night as if they had a maniacal life of their own. One watchman died on duty. Rumours started – the coffin had brought bad luck. Night staff resigned and cleaners refused to go near the Princess. A visitor derisively flicked a handkerchief at the face painted on the coffin. A week later his son died of measles. Finally, the authorities had the mummy carried down to the basement; it could do no harm down there. Within a week, one of the basement staff was seriously ill, and the man who supervised the moving of the coffin was found dead on his desk.By now, the papers had heard of it. A photographer took a picture of the mummy case and when he developed it, the painting on the coffin took on the likeness of a horrifying inhuman face. The photographer went home from his business premises, locked his bedroom door and shot himself. Soon afterwards, the museum sold the mummy to a well-heeled private collector. After continual misfortune and more unexplained deaths, its new owner banished it to the attic. A well known authority on the occult, Madame Helena Blavatsky, was asked to intervene on the collector’s behalf. Upon entering his house she was seized with a shivering fit and on confronting the coffin she felt what she called "an evil influence of incredible intensity" "Can you exorcise this evil spirit?" asked the owner."There is no such thing as exorcism with a spirit like this,” she explained. “Such Evil remains forever . Nothing can be done about it. I implore you to get rid of this iniquitous thing as soon as possible".News had travelled and no one in Britain would take the mummy.Eventually, a hard-headed professional archaeologist, who dismissed the terrible happenings as quirks of circumstance, paid cut down price for the mummy and arranged to transport it to his home. Being very careful with his expensive new artefact he stayed with it during transportation all the way from London to New York - in Titanic. While many have tried to discount that story, and only been partially successful, other seemingly spooky Titanic tales have been less easy to confound.A seaman on the Carpathia, the ship that rescued Titanic’s survivors from the dark and freezing Atlantic, told how a dog, probably a passenger’s pet, had jumped from the sinking ship and, somehow, miraculously, escorted a lifeboat to the Carpathia. The sailor heard a dog barking in the darkness.Barking to the Carpathia, alerting everyone on board that there were survivors hidden in the black gloom.There are countless such ghostly, unexplained, mysterious, miraculous tales connected with Titanic. Some too improbable to recount, some backed up by research, but they all started here, when Belfast’s most famous impossibly large icon slid – miraculously and improbably – into the Lagan.
SS NOMADIC.
One of Nomadic’s first class passengers became known as “the unsinkable Molly Brown”. You can visit her Denver home – it’s now a museum. In reality, she was Margaret "Maggie" Tobin Brown and was born in Hannibal, Missouri. She never personally went by the name Molly. Her history is rich in color, persistence and determination. There are many fascinating stories of Maggie Brown that occurred both before and after her adventure on the Titanic.She had amassed a fortune investing in Colorado silver mines, and in 1894 moved into an ornate Victorian mansion with her husband, J.J. Glorious in taste and design, this famous house has been fully restored to its original grandeur. Because Molly was never fully accepted in Denver high society, rumours have long persisted that her spirit haunts her cherished home. For many years after her death, the house was a boarding residence, and some of those inhabitants died while living there. Many feel the spirit of those who passed away have joined Molly's afterlife presence in the home. But back to the pre-ghost days. Molly and J.J. moved to Denver from Ledville, Colorado. They purchased a stately Victorian mansion, and she eagerly anticipated her new life as a big-city socialite. But she was a blow in from Missouri, and wasn’t allowed to mix in high circles. So she took to travelling.In the spring of 1912, Molly was in Egypt when she received word that one of her grandsons was ill. The only passage home that was available was Titanic. She made it to Cherbourg, onto Nomadic, and was taken to the Titanic. On board she became the life and soul of the doomed party.When the vessel sank Molly was instrumental in calming the women aboard her lifeboat, and she organised them as a team to row away from the sinking ship. This avoided their being sucked down to certain death.After the disaster, Molly returned to Denver as a hero and was welcomed to high society. Today dozens of eyewitnesses have seen ghosts in her museum, once her home; Apparitions of Molly - and JJ smoking his pipe. Today’s visitors sometimes say they smell smouldering tobacco. Molly's bedroom, in particular, has taken on legendary status as a haunted room. Some visitors will not even set foot in it.Without Titanic, launched right here, Molly would now be dead and gone. Her trip on the ship that slid into the water beneath us changed her life. A life, it seems, that may go on forever. Nurtured by the River Lagan, on which Titanic was born.
SAILORTOWN.Sailortown, the home of many seafarers and dockers down the years. The dockers were the men who loaded and unloaded the ships. An impossibly uncomfortable and difficult life. On average they each moved 35 – 40 tons of cargo per day. Hundreds of stories emanate from their little streets with names like Dock Street, Skipper Street, Pilot and Trafalgar Street and Nelson Street. The houses were small, often with foundations below the water table. Cockroaches were a menace. Families hated going down stairs at night – the groundfloor rooms heaved with a carpet of “clocks”, as the cockroaches were called. Walking along one part of a footpath close to the docks where these little houses stood in uninterrupted rows, some people have felt themselves being unexplainably pushed, or nudged, onto the road. This was where a young child was shot dead during the disturbances of the 1920s.In Steam Mill Lane in Febuary 1928 two horse drawn carts were passing each other in the narrow street. One of them mounted the footpath, part of its load fell off and crushed a lady to death. She was buried two days later. T’ween times she was sighted, back on Steam Mill Lane, four times. These were confirmed sightings. Some of the dockers who lived in Sailortown worked as night watchmen. They kept a lonely vigil at strategic points, all though the darkness, to keep unwanted visitors from the berthed cargo ships. One night in the 1930s a watchman was on duty near a foreign ship. A uniformed figure came down the gang plank, and over to the watchman. The man was evidently the vessels Skipper with his stripes on his sleeve; he also limped badly, and was smoking a pipe. In broken English he conversed with the watchman, who was glad of his company. He said this ship had only just arrived evening, before dark. He said he was the Captain. The next night the uniformed mariner returned. Through a haze of pipe tobacco smoke hanging in the air, he explained to the watchman that his limp was a war wound when he’d been in his country’s Navy. He returned the next night too, and said his ship would be staying for a few more days; they were awaiting a new member of the crew. But the following night he didn’t appear. The watchman went to the ship to see if he was on board.“Can you tell your Captain I’m here,” he shouted to a crewman on the deck, “I was talking to him for the past few evenings, and I’d like to bid him farewell before you depart.”The crewman seemed shocked. He came down the gang plank, onto the quay and said to the watchman: “You were talking to the Captain?”“Yes,” answered the Watchman, “for the past two or three nights.”“We don’t have a Captain,” the crewman said nervously.“But I’ve been talking to him,” argued the watchman, “and he was smoking a pipe, and told me about his war wounds.”“He was limping?” Asked the crewman, evidently upset. “Aye. And he told me he was the Captain of this ship.” Answered the watchman, getting a little impatient.“Our Captain was always in pain, with his leg, “said the crewman in a hushed voice. “He could bear it no more, and the night we arrived in Belfast he hanged himself. We’re waiting for our new Skipper to join us before we depart.”