On the last night of October, in a converted merchant's building on the St. John's waterfront, the ghosts of Newfoundland's coast will be given a hearing. Dark Tales & Spirits, an evening of stories, recitations and songs, takes over the tasting room at Wooden Walls Distilling on Saturday, October 31, 2026, running from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. It is a Halloween event built not on costumes and dance floors but on the older, stranger material of the island's oral tradition: phantom ships, drowned sailors who come home, lights that lure boats onto rocks, and buried treasure with a guardian posted over it.
The evening is led by Karin Murray-Bergquist, a historian and folklorist pursuing a PhD in folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her fieldwork has included travel across Newfoundland to gather local accounts of regional folklore, oral history and unexplained phenomena, and her best-known project is an interactive map of ghost-ship legends from around Newfoundland, assembled from the survey cards held in Memorial's folklore archive. The idea, she told CBC News, came from seeing a similar interactive map of the Icelandic sagas. The result gathers stories that range from simple explanations for odd lights offshore to elaborate tales of phantom murder, plotted to the communities that tell them.
Some of those stories are the kind that lodge in a listener's head. In Petty Harbour, near St. John's, three men digging for treasure spotted the light of a pirate ship on the horizon — and then a dory putting off from it, rowing toward them. Two of the men ran. When they came back, the third was dead and the hole had been filled in. The two survivors later vanished from their homes and were never seen again. In Placentia Bay, Murray-Bergquist has noted, the tale is a full-on schooner seen with its sails ablaze. Elsewhere there is a boat crewed by naked oarsmen, all of them on fire, and an island in the Strait of Belle Isle where a pirate dory is said to return every year on June 25 — a place where, in the late eighteenth century, two men went looking for what was buried and both were killed, one by what the story calls a phantom slap.
At Wooden Walls, those accounts are organized into four chapters. Phantom Lights covers spectral ships, mysterious lights at sea and the false-light legends that warned sailors off certain shores. Ghostly Lovers turns to the returning spirits of lost sailors and the stories of love that go on haunting the living. Spirit Guardians takes up the treasure guardians tied to pirate legends — the ghosts posted over places where something is supposed to be hidden. Revenging Revenants closes with unsettled debts, unquiet graves and secrets that refuse to stay buried. The evening includes recitations and songs as well as prose, with special musical performances by James Dinn.
The setting is unusually apt. Wooden Walls takes its name from the oak-hulled steamers that carried Newfoundlanders to the seal hunt in the North Atlantic — vessels built of Scottish greenheart oak, from the world's prime whisky country, and nicknamed "wooden walls" for their sturdiness. The distillery's logo folds that history into a single image: the silhouette of the South Side hills, and a bottle that doubles as a ship's hull with sails inside it. Its home is the Templeton's Building at 140 Harbour Drive, a former merchant's store and pier, where the company describes a grain-to-glass operation and a 70-seat tasting room. Wooden Walls bills itself as St. John's first craft distillery, and its own account of itself leans hard on the idea that distilling and storytelling belong to the same culture.
Tickets include a welcome cocktail made with Wooden Walls spirits and passed hors d'oeuvres, with more cocktails available for purchase. The evening begins at 6:30 with the drink and the food, then moves into the storytelling, with a scheduled intermission for another round of hors d'oeuvres and a refill before the tales resume. Afterward, guests are invited to stay and linger. Seating is limited, and the event is 19-plus.
It is, in other words, a Halloween that leans on place rather than spectacle. The material Murray-Bergquist works with is not imported Gothic; it belongs to the harbours and outports within sight of the room where she'll be telling it. A ghost ship off Petty Harbour, a burning schooner in Placentia Bay, a dory that comes back on a fixed date each summer — these are stories Newfoundlanders have told for generations, recorded on index cards by earlier folklorists and now carried back into a waterfront building that once handled cargo. The distillery's own slogan for the night puts it plainly: the spirits won't just be in your glass.
Dark Tales & Spirits runs Saturday, October 31, 2026, 6:30–9:30 p.m. at Wooden Walls Distillery, 140 Harbour Drive, St. John's. Tickets are available through Eventbrite.