Chip Chick
This man’s family is originally from a tiny fishing town called Catalina, Newfoundland. About four or five miles north of the village is a smaller town called Little Catalina. Tiny ponds and bogs surround the two towns.
In 1913, his great-grandma was around 13, and a dance was held in Catalina for kids in the area.
His great-grandma went to the dance, and so did another young girl who walked several miles from Little Catalina to get there. Unfortunately, as the story was passed down over the years, he doesn’t know the girl’s name.
On the night of the party, it was darker than usual, and a fog traveled into the area from the North Atlantic.
At around 9 p.m., the dance ended, and everyone left to return home. The following morning, the girl’s parents rode through Catalina and stopped at residents’ homes to ask if they’d seen their daughter because she hadn’t come home after the dance.
They wondered if she’d stayed overnight in Catalina with a friend or family member. A boy told them that after the dance, he’d seen the girl wandering down the road toward Little Catalina.
Later, they assembled a search party and looked for the girl for two weeks. Men who lived in the area looked through the woods and bogs, and fishing boats searched the coastline. Unfortunately, they never found the girl.
“Eventually, everybody came to the grim conclusion that she must have gotten lost in the dark and fallen into a bog hole, which, like quicksand, will suck you down. Months later, one man claimed to have seen her ‘floating’ over the bogs one evening,” he said.
According to the man’s story, he tried to save the girl, but she vanished into the woods. He assumed that no one believed the man because he was an alcoholic. In the early 1920s, his great-grandma and her sister were berry-picking the bog.
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