Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many pirates are thought to have visited the waters that surround the island of Newfoundland. All would have gone ashore to take on fresh water and no doubt to explore the many nooks and crannies, bights and arms for which the island is famous. Some believe that many of those pirates had other reasons as well -for what better place to hide their ill-gotten wealth than some God-forsaken cove, on what must have appeared to them, a forlorn and desolate land?

Before the dawn of radio and television, stories of pirates and where they buried their less gold, proved to be great fodder for the favourite pastime in many a Newfoundland household, the telling of ghost stories. According to folklore, when a pirate buried his treasure, a member of his crew was beheaded and buried with it. The headless man was charged with protecting the bounty from any would-be fortune hunters.

Since stories of headless men abounded all around the triangular shaped island, it would appear that either there was an abundance of pirate treasure or headless men were well travelled! Back in the late forties, when I was an impressionable lad of nine or ten, my contemporaries and I would listen attentively as men gathered around woodstoves on a cold winter’s night to tell of what apparitions had been seen recently. It didn’t take much to get started, and soon the air was electrified by stories of someone being followed by a light that would strangely disappear if one decided to investigate, or of ghostly ships that would enter the harbour, only to disappear when it reached the dock.

Often the talk turned to the pirate treasure buried at Dog Harbour on Merasheen Island, just a few miles across the bay, but there never seemed to be more than talk. There were several versions of where on the island, the treasure was buried but most appeared more interested in talking about the headless man who guarded it, than actually venturing an encounter with him. One man was even said to have dreamt of the location but was told that he would have to kill a companion before he could get to the treasure.

In recent years, men using modern equipment are said to have discovered a spot on the island were something unusual is buried, but to the best of my knowledge, no digging has actually been done.