Mrs. Coyle and the Corpse
Nancy Coyle could raise the dead and everyone in St. John’s knew it.
Nancy Coyle, generated by Bing AI
Nearly 200 years ago, Mrs. Nancy Coyle lived atop Carter’s Hill in St. John’s, NL.
The city was a very different place, than it is today. It was time when the port was full of tall-masted ships and the waterfront was crowded with sailors from countries all along Atlantic. All night long songs sung in unfamiliar languages carried from the harbour to the houses of the city.
It was exciting and, for most citizens, a good time was certainly easy enough to find.
Not so, for Nancy Coyle.
To begin with, Nancy was a widow.
Worse than that, she was a poor, elderly widow.
She had a household to manage and she had to do it all by herself. She was certainly willing to work but, for a woman of her age, a paying job was hard to find.
Still, Nancy did what she could.
She opened her home to wayward trades people. A light burning in her upstairs window let them know she had a room to let. People took her up on her offer. The money helped but it was never enough to make ends meet.
She needed a good job and Nancy, being wise, realized the easiest job to get was a job no one else wanted.
The Job No One Wanted
Though St. John’s was a cosmopolitan port, with visitors from all over the world, it lacked some of the amenities of other cities. On of the missing services was a city morgue.
Most citizens didn’t care whether the city had a morgue or not. At the time, it was customary for families to take care of their own dead. They laid them out, waked and buried them without the need of mortuary services.
For ships in port, it was a different story. When one of the sailors died — as was bound to happen from time to time — there was no one in St. John’s to care for the body.
Nancy saw an opportunity.
She agreed, in exchange for a stipend from the government, to take the city’s deceased sailors, strangers and anyone else in need of mortuary care into her home, where she would prepare them for burial.
It was an honest job but, when her neighbours found out that she was spending her days in the company of corpses, they didn’t like it.
It wasn’t long before Nancy’s circle of friends dwindled.
Then things got worse.
Nancy and the Dutch Sailor
Dutch sailor, generated by Bing AI
One night a Dutch sailor was out on the town, drinking and having a good time. On the way back to his ship he slipped on the wharf, hit his head and tumbled into the harbour.
The young sailor’s body drifted there between the ships, his unblinking eyes staring at the stars.
No one knows how long he floated there but, when his shipmates spotted him, they knew it was too late to help.
They hooked his body with a grapnel and dragged it ashore.
A short while later the corpse was delivered to Nancy’s door.
All alone, she went about her work. She washed his cold, pale body and wrapped him in a sheet.
Just as she finished — just as she had him ready to be nailed into a coffin — the corpse coughed.
The young man sat up and surveyed his surroundings.
You can imagine Nancy, shock. Her corpse was no corpse at all!
The men who had retrieved the body had been too hasty. The young sailor hadn’t been killed by his fall into the harbour, he had been rendered unconscious. In the comfort of Nancy’s parlour he’d awakened.
Realizing immediately what had happened, Nancy got her ‘dead sailor’ a drink. When he’d recovered sufficiently, she guided him back to his boat on the waterfront.
The sailors couldn’t believe what they were seeing — their dead shipmate was, once again alive.
Shunning Nancy
It wasn’t long before stories of Nancy’s and the sailor were being told all through the city. Few wanted to discuss how she saved a man’s life, instead they whispered that she must have some kind of supernatural power, that she was some kind of witch who could resurrect the dead.
People turned on Nancy.
They already found her work with corpses distateful but the thought that she could raise the dead was downright scary. They wanted nothing to do with her — in life or in death.
It is said that a few years later, when Nancy died, no one wanted to care for her body. They were still afraid to work with the corpse of the woman who controlled life and death.
To this day, no one knows what happened to her body.
It doesn’t seem like a very fitting legacy for a woman who chose to bring dignity to the dead.
Nancy’s Eternal Vigil
Nancy Coyle’s ghost, generated by Bing AI
She’s been dead for nearly 200 years but people still talk of Nancy Coyle to this day… and they still do it with a shudder.
Some people claim Nancy still keeps her vigil over the dead in St. John’s. It is said, from time to time, her spirit still appears in the city. She is said to be seen in cemeteries wearing a red cloak; sometimes she wanders alone, other times she escorts a phantom hearse.
The Truth of Nancy Coyle
When it comes to Nancy Coyle, it’s tough to say exactly where the ‘strange truth’ ends and the ‘tall tale’ begins. It seems likely there was a historical Nancy Coyle who provided mortuary care in her home in St. John’s, circa 1840. Paul O’Neill writes of her in his book The Oldest City: The Story of St. John’s and Heritage NL has a webpage dedicated to her.
O’Neill relates the tale of her revival of the Dutch sailor and suggests that this was not an isolated incident, that Nancy witnessed more than one ‘corpse’ come ‘back from the dead.’
I tried to find Nancy in old Colonial records and, to some degree, I succeeded. The governement did, indeed, pay money to a Nancy Coyle but, the only records of payment I found were ‘monies payed by the Colonial government for the support of the aged.’
This is not to say she wasn’t paid for providing mortuary care, I just didn’t find a record documenting it. My search, however, was far from exhaustive.
I’m pretty sure the truth of Nancy Coyle stops somewhere before her supposed hauntings begin.
The book Haunted Canada 5: Terrifying True Tales (by Joel A. Sutherland) relates the tale of Nancy, including her haunting of downtown St. John’s, in a story called “Queen of the Dead.” Sutherland writes that Nancy also witnessed the revival of a man named John Murphy, who’d spent many years in an asylum. I’m not sure where Sutherland sourced this tale, or whether he created it himself.
If you know the origin of the John Murphy story, I’d love to hear it.
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The Oldest City, Paul O’Neill, 2003
Nancy Coyle (1840s), Heritage NL
Queen of the Dead, Haunted Canada 5, Joel Sutherland
An Encounter with Nancy, Queen of the Dead, Anecdotage.
Haunted, historic and open to the public — five of the most convenient places to encounter a ghost in Newfoundland.