Quite apart from spirits associated with people and places, is the maritime phenomenon of the phantom ship. While ghostly vessels are often found a omens of disaster in European folktales in New Brunswick they usually portend nothing worse than a coming storm.
In Stuart Trueman's collection, Ghosts, Pirates and Treasure Trove: Phantoms that Haunt New Brunswick, he quotes more than a dozen eye-witness sightings in modern times, from St. Martins to Shippagan.
By far the most famous spectral vessel is the phantom ship of the Baie des Chaleurs. For over a hundred years, everyone from a locomotive fireman to an entire Sunday school class with clergy have sighted the flaming vessel floating offshore. "Smoke was billowing up through the rigging. Figures were rushing to and fro on her decks. I called the engineer and he said 'Hell, that's just the Burning Ship,' “reported Richard Jefferson of Grand Anse, in 1892
