Games
Come in. Pull up a chair.
Them days you sent a youngster up the road to say there was a game on. Now you send the code, and if a chair's still empty when you deal, one of the regulars takes it.
Advertise here
Skipper
Got a place worth the drive?
Down the road
Well, Sunday after Mass we'd walk it. Start at the gate and go down, and every house along here I'll tell you who's in it.
The Old Hag: being hag-ridden in the night
The Old Hag sits on your chest at night and pins you down.
Sleep paralysis is a documented and well-understood medical phenomenon, and Newfoundland is one of the places where the experience is most strongly shaped by folk tradition. David Hufford's experience-centered study 'The Terror That Comes in the Night' made the Newfoundland Old Hag a classic case in folklore studies, Melvin Firestone published 'The Old Hag: Sleep Paralysis in Newfoundland' in 1985, and Barbara Rieti's 'Making Witches: Newfoundland Traditions of Spells and Counterspells' (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008) places hagging within the province's witchcraft beliefs.
The story they tell
The tradition: being 'hagged' - waking unable to move with a weight, often an old woman, pressing on your chest - attributed to a witch or the Hag herself; communities passed cures and counterspells to shake her off.
Story
Where that comes from
On the go
Them days the garden party was the whole summer. Here's what's on the go now, and when.
The kitchen
Well, Sunday the pot was on before Mass and the smell of it met you at the gate. Here's what was in it, and how it's done.
The hall
Them days the hall had a dance Saturday and the kitchen had music the rest of the week. It's still playing. Come in and listen.
The yarns
He said, you know the one about the light on the water. I said, I do. That's a story, mind, and I'll tell you which parts.
Not the house
No, I said, that's not the house. It was down just below there. Go back up the road.
Back up the road
