Read Online Haunted Harbours by Steve Vernon - Free Book Online

island of the five that had been settled. John Ruff lived there with his wife Susannah. Together they raised six children – Isaiah, Noah, Andrew, Arthur, Anthony, and Benjamin. Sadly, John was not the best of men. A drinker and an abusive father, he frequently beat his wife and was known in those parts as a bit of a bully. In the late summer of 1842, John and four of his sons were working on Moose Island. Susannah was enjoying a much-needed vacation from John’s bullying ways at the settlement of Five Islands. The two oldest sons, Noah and Isaiah, had grown and fled the unhappy family.
    On that day in July 1842, the oldest son Andrew rowed the family dory into Five Islands with his father’s corpse laid in the stern. John Ruff’s head was broken open as if by a bad blow and a single maple leaf was found embedded in the gory wound.
    â€œIt was a maple tree did it,” Andrew swore. “Father had been drinking and he felled it badly.”
    As I’ve said it was a long-known fact that John Ruff was overly fond of the bottle, so no one was surprised to hear this story. The case was quickly dismissed as a simple accidental death, and the town of Five Islands began busily burying the memory of John Ruff and his abusive ways.
    But one person could not forget. Young Benjamin Ruff, nine years old at the time of his father’s death, was haunted by bitter memories of that day on the island. He was kept awake at night by visions of his father standing with an axe over his bed. For two long years, young Benjamin feared the coming of nightfall and the blind baleful stare of the Atlantic moon. Then, two years from the date of his father’s death, young Benjamin felt compelled to make a startling confession to the authorities.
    â€œIt was Arthur and Andrew who murdered Father, and Anthony and I saw the whole thing happen.”
    The two older boys were brought in for questioning, but it was taken to be a bad sign when Arthur Ruff fled the district. The truth came out when young Benjamin told a Supreme Court in Truro of what had happened on the night of his father’s death.
    â€œFather had been drinking,” young Benjamin said, “and he’d gone to lay down in the barn with my older brother Anthony. He was asleep when Arthur went and got the axe. Arthur stood over Father for a long time, waiting for him to wake up. When he opened his eyes, Arthur brought the axe down on his head.”
    Benjamin further stated that Arthur and Andrew had dragged their father’s corpse out of the barn to the woods, where they prepared a crime scene, felling a heavy maple tree and placing their father’s corpse next to it. While Arthur arranged the corpse, Andrew went back to the barn and used a hand adze to hew and gouge out the bloodstains on the floorboards.
    â€œWhy did they do this? Why did you say nothing until now?” the prosecuting attorney asked young Benjamin.
    â€œI didn’t want my brother to hang. It wasn’t any of his fault.”
    â€œWhose fault was it?”
    Young Benjamin’s eyes grew strange and flat and he stared over the courtroom in a cold and distant fashion.
    â€œWe saw something strange that night before the killing — a dark figure dancing about the barn,” Benjamin said. “I think it was the devil.”
    The other sons confirmed that there had been many times in the past when this devil had been seen upon the island.
    Was it one more lie? The product of a deluded boy’s vivid imagination? Or was it perhaps the truth?
    â€œThe devil likes it there on the island,” Andrew swore. “He whispers in the night. I think it was his idea that Arthur kill father.”
    â€œAnd was it the devil’s idea that you hide your father’s murder in such a fashion?” the prosecuting attorney sarcastically asked.
    â€œNo, of course not,” Andrew replied. “We didn’t want to see our brother hang. One death in a family