Tales and Items of Interest

will call Pigott (that was like the name). He was a man of low tastes and immoral habits, but a capital farmer. It was he who added all the back wing of the house and made the necessary divisions, etc., for farming the land. He had two sisters in his service, the daughters of a laborer who lived in a regular hovel about three miles nearer town. After a time each sister gave birth to a boy.

Very little can be learned of the domestic arrangements, since Pigott bore so bad a name that the house was avoided by respectable people; but it is certain that one sister and one baby disappeared altogether, though when and how is a complete mystery.

When the other baby was between one and two years old Pigot [sic] sold Binstead to an English gentleman named F ellowes, from who we hired it, with the intention of eventually buying it. The other sister returned to her fathers house, and leaving the baby with Mrs. Newbury, her mother, went to the States and has never returned. Before leaving she would reveal nothing, except that the boy was her sister’s, her own being dead. It was this very Harry Newbury that we had unwittingly engaged as farm servant. He came to bid me farewell a few months after I left Binstead saying he would never return there. In 1877 I inquired about him, and found that he had never been seen since in Prince Edward Island.

The SPR’s Proceedings included two addenda, which The Daily Examiner did not print. In a letter dated September 24, 1887, Mrs. Pennée added:

‘Another fact has come to my notice. A young lady, then a child of from 5 to 10, remembers being afraid of sleeping alone when on a visit at Binstead on account of the screams she heard outside, and also the ‘woman with a baby, ’whom she saw passing through her room. Her experience goes back some 10 to I 5 years before mine.’

The SPR also cited the contents of a second letter, dated St. Anne de Beaupré, January 23, 1889, which stated:

(1) Mrs. Pennée interviewed Father Boudreault, the priest sent for by the C. family to exorcise the house. Father B., however, was on his death-bed; and although he remembers the fact that he had

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been sent for to Binstead for this purpose, he could not recollect what had been told him as to apparitions, etc.

(2 ) Mrs. M., who first saw the figure, has gone to England, and cannot now be traced. Mrs. Pennée adds: ‘The lady in question told several people that she saw a women with a baby in her arms when she slept at Binstead; and, like myself, she noticed a frilled cap on the woman. The woman whose ghost we imagine this to be was an Irish women, and perhaps you have noticed their love of wide frills in their head-gear. ”

(3) Mrs. Pennée revisited Binstead in 1888, and says, ‘The tree whence the screams started is cut down; the room where all saw the ghost is totally uninhabited; and Mrs. C. would not let us stay in it, and entreated us to talk no further on the subject. From the man we got out a little, but she followed us up very closely. He says that since the priest blessed the house a women has been seen (or said to have been seen, he corrected himself) round the front entrance, and once at an upper window.’

There, apparently, Mrs. Pennée’s investigations ended.

Introduction by Nelda Murray

SOURCE The Daily Examiner, Nov. 28, 1889. The Island Magazine, No.23, pages 9 — 15.

NOTE The English Society for Psychical Research (SPR)