The Celtic Crusader: The Story of AWR MacKenzie and the Gaelic College

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

The ghosts of two Scottish clergymen are said to haunt the halls of the
Gaelic College in Cape Breton. The first is the spectre of the Reverend
Norman MacLeod, a Calvinist hardliner who in 1819 arrived in St. Ann’s
Bay in a boat simply named “the Ark.” For three decades MacLeod
built his congregation and his church. Then, in 1854, after a series of
crop shortages, MacLeod declared that God had cursed the land. He and
his followers boarded another ship and set sail for the Antipodes to
establish a colony in New Zealand.

The second ghost is said to be that of the Reverend Angus MacKenzie. He
was stationed in the St. Ann’s parish by the Presbyterian church in
the mid-1930s. Born in Scotland, MacKenzie was delighted to find himself
in a Canadian community where the language, culture, and music of his
homeland were duplicated. He noticed, however, that the old ways were in
decline. What resulted was both triumph and tragedy.

MacKenzie decided to build a Gaelic College to preserve Scottish
culture in Cape Breton. He consciously chose MacLeod’s old church site
to anchor his project’s claim to the soil. Although the two ministers
were originally very different in temperament, the harder MacKenzie
worked to build his college the more he came to resemble the autocratic
MacLeod. While he lived, it was said that it was dour MacLeod’s ghost
scaring the pibroch out of the student body. After he died, isolated and
generally despised, it was claimed the ghost was MacKenzie’s.

A little book full of run-on sentences, The Celtic Crusader makes for
interesting reading as both local history and character study. The
author has already built a solid reputation for himself as a popular
historian with such works as Jingo and The Corvette Navy.

The Reverend MacKenzie would likely have approved; the Reverend
MacLeod, to be sure, would not.