The Angus L. Macdonald Bridge is the green suspension bridge that links downtown Halifax to Dartmouth across the harbour. Locals call it the old bridge. It opened on April 2, 1955. The ghost file on this span is thin. What it has instead is a curse story about the two bridges that failed before it, and a ceremony at the opening meant to lift that curse.
A bridge has been wanted at this water since the 1880s. Historian Blair Beed has described the first crossings as railway bridges over the narrows, built when Halifax needed a fixed link. The first went down in a storm on September 7, 1891. The second collapsed on July 23, 1893, hours after a train had crossed, and slid into the harbour in the night. No one was killed in either fall. The A. Murray MacKay Bridge, the newer of the two modern spans, sits on the site of those two. The Macdonald is the other crossing, farther south.
The bridge that opened in 1955 was designed by Philip Louis Pratley, the same engineer behind the Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver. It is about 1.3 kilometres long, with a main span of 441 metres and clearance under the centre of about 47 metres. It is named for Angus L. Macdonald, premier of Nova Scotia, who pushed for the bridge and died in office in 1954, a year before it opened. Construction started in 1952. Halifax Harbour Bridges says it carries about 48,000 crossings on an average workday. The centre lane reverses at noon. A Big Lift redecking ran from 2015 to 2017.
The curse is the story that attaches to all of this. In the version told to visitors for decades, a Mi’kmaq chief cursed any bridge that crossed the harbour after an English officer took his daughter. Three times a bridge would rise, and three times it would fall: the first in storm, the second in silence, the third in blood. The 1891 hurricane and the 1893 night collapse were fitted to the first two. When the Macdonald opened, the fear was that the third would be the bloody one. At the opening, a Mi’kmaq elder, named in some accounts as John or James Paul, took part in a ceremony to lift the curse. One version has him dancing across the bridge while others sang. Another has a small wooden replica of the bridge burned. The New York Times recorded the story in 1967 as the legend Nova Scotians told visitors.
There is no matching newspaper file of a chief’s daughter and an officer. The curse is oral history, repeated by local historians as lore, not as a documented event. The two collapses are real. The reasons given for them in the engineering record are storm, bad ground, and shipworms in the piles, not a curse. The third fall in blood has not happened. The bridge has had suicides, including the 2004 death of environmental activist Tooker Gomberg, and barriers were later added on part of the pedestrian walkway after debris fell on the naval dockyard below. Those are documented deaths on a high bridge. They are not the curse coming true.
A 126-year-old brass bell, cast in 1899 at the Meneely foundry in Troy, New York, was found in storage after years hanging under the Macdonald, about 10 metres above the water. Bridge staff think it was a warning bell for ships. How it got from 1899 to the 1955 bridge is unknown. It may have survived the 1917 Halifax Explosion. It is a real object with a gap in its history, not a ghost.
What is documented is a 1955 suspension bridge, two failed wooden spans in 1891 and 1893, and a 1955 ceremony. The curse is the story fitted to those failures. There is no named apparition on the deck the way there is on some of the other bridges in this series.
The Halifax approach at sunset, the naval dockyard on the left. The deck and the green tower, looking toward Dartmouth. The span at dusk with the Nova Scotia flag on the tower.
Relevant links
- Halifax Harbour Bridges: history of the Macdonald — opening date, length, daily crossings
- Angus L. Macdonald Bridge, Wikipedia — Pratley, the 2004 death, the barriers
- CTV: the two forgotten harbour bridges — the 1891 and 1893 collapses and the curse
- Haligonia: the 1899 bell — the bell found under the span