hauntings
Some years ago my wife Patsy and I had Thanksgiving dinner at the Maplehurst Inn, one of the oldest and grandest buildings in Antrim, New Hampshire. It’s always been a traveler’s rest of one kind or another: the original structure, still the core of the Inn, was a tavern put up before the Revolution to serve the coaches pausing on their way down to Boston. It spread outward and upward thereafter, but even the newest additions – a third floor and a spacious porch – date back to the 1880s.
The current owners came to New Hampshire from Massachusetts in the early 1990s. Judy and Roy are the mother and step-father of our friend Michelle, who runs the stable where I fall off horses, and they were determined to make a go of the old place, which had fallen into disrepair. Its bones were solid, but it needed a lot of work, and not just structural. The restaurant, once locally famous, was on the skids when the couple moved in, and Judy, an excellent cook in her own right, decided right away to restore it to its former splendor. Patsy and I had dined there several times, on Michelle’s tip, and the food was wonderful. So we’d reserved a table for Thanksgiving dinner.
It was a dark and stormy night when we arrived to find that the chef was gone. Whether he or she quit or was fired, and why, I never asked. But the chef left Judy with a kitchen full of ingredients for a Thanksgiving feast to serve about twenty booked diners whose reservations she’d had to cancel. Making the best of a bad situation, she turned the evening into her own extended family’s Thanksgiving dinner, doing the cooking herself. She and Roy were kind enough to include us, without charge.
Elizabeth is nine, and she’ll always be nine. There’s a portrait of her, by no coincidence, in Room Nine, where she died. No one’s quite sure what she died of, but from the look of her clothes, she passed over, as the psychics say, in the late 19th century, when the Inn was at the height of its glory. Back then, New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock region was a favorite summer destination for well-heeled people escaping the sweltering heat of Boston and New York City. Some of them had “camps” – actually large cabins – on the shores of the area’s lakes and ponds, but most vacationers stayed in comfortable, well-appointed hostelries like the Maplehurst, usually for the entire season. The guests developed loyalties to their chosen resorts and returned year after year, coming up by train to contemplate the wonders of Nature, and occasionally venturing into the hills and woodlands, canoeing on the lakes and strolling up the easier trails of Mount Monadnock itself. But mostly it was the clean air and moderate temperature which attracted the summer people: North Country resort advertisements in the city newspapers promised “Sleeping Under Blankets Every Night!” Warm days and cool nights brought repeat visitors to places like the Maplehurst. And Elizabeth loved the place so much that she never left.
According to Judy and Roy, she isn’t a frightening ghost: more a sprite than a spirit, a sort of harmless poltergeist. She doesn’t confine her haunting to Room Nine (although the temperature in the room is always a few degrees colder than the rest of the inn, regardless of the season), but skips along the halls and up and down the stairs, popping into other rooms from time to time. Quite a few guests, knowing nothing about Elizabeth, have complained about the noisy little girl playing in the corridor, and a recent visitor, looking rather ashen, came down to breakfast one morning wanting to know why some kid kept running in and out of his room all night, even though he thought he’d locked the door.
Judy knew about Elizabeth when she and Roy took over the inn, for the little ghost is an Antrim legend. She didn’t become a believer until the morning when she came down to start breakfast, and found that all the silverware, laid out carefully on the tables of the dining room the night before, had been thrown on the floor. At first she and Roy played down the haunting of the Maplehurst, but then they realized that Elizabeth was good for business. A two-hundred-and-forty-year-old hotel complete with a resident ghost! What’s not to like? Self-proclaimed psychics and other aficionados of the paranormal (see below) began booking rooms hoping for a visitation from Elizabeth, and by Judy’s account, the mischievous sprite seldom disappointed them.
Judy and Roy are tough-minded, hard-working people, and in the tavern that Thanksgiving night they talked about the haunting problem as if they were complaining mildly about dry rot in the roof beams, mold in the bathrooms, or a persistent plumbing leak. But toward the end of the evening Judy produced a series of three photographs taken by a recent ghost-hunter who was convinced she’d had an encounter with Elizabeth.
All three shots showed the staircase leading from the second to the third floors of the Inn. They were well-lit and sharply-focused, taken from the same point of view. The first and third showed an empty staircase. The second of the series showed the staircase almost filled by a silvery, semitranslucent shape, shaped like a bell with a flared bottom rim. I’m an amateur photographer myself, and I was mystified. I know that with the new digital cameras all manner of weirdness can be jiggered into photos, but Judy swore the three pictures were taken with a regular SLR camera with a flash attachment, using ordinary color print film. I couldn’t explain away the image of the silvery thing descending the staircase (and why did I think it was coming down instead of going up, unless whatever it was had wanted to be photographed?) by claiming the film had been fogged. The image simply didn’t look like what I knew as fogging, and besides, the frames directly before and after it were perfect.
I was still puzzling over the strange photograph – Elizabeth in ectoplasmic form dancing down the stairs? – when Roy invited me outside for a smoke. There was no smoking in the inn, but he knew I was a cigarette addict, and he liked a cigar from time to time. The storm had blown itself out by then, but it was still chilly, and an icy mizzle continued to fall, turning the lights of the village’s main street into fuzzy golden globes. We were both a little drunk, and I was still shaking my head over the thing on the stairs. Roy lit his cigar, took a puff, and said, “Yup, well, I’ve never seen Elizabeth, so I won’t say one way or another. But I got into something kind of strange myself, a few years back.”
Roy’s a retired Corrections Officer, and toward the end of his career he was in charge of an old prison in Salem, Massachusetts. The place, built at the turn of the 20th century, was originally a boys’ reformatory. Local history had it that twenty boys had once escaped – or simply disappeared. Whatever the truth, the place was quickly turned into a county lockup for adults. Surveillance cameras and other modern security devices had been installed, but the building was otherwise unchanged. It was four stories high, but despite the overcrowded conditions (an average of 350 prisoners at any given time, crammed into 125 cells), the fourth floor was unused. It had once been a “detention tier” for incorrigible boys, and bad things had happened there, possibly having to do with the twenty boys who had gone missing. Inmates and guards alike hated the floor: it was always cold, and there was an atmosphere of vague menace which rattled even tough COs and hardened convicts. So it had been converted into a storage area. Nobody entered it unless he had to, and never for very long.
There was a gym in the basement of the jail, as old as the rest of the building, and almost as spooky as the detention tier. But the inmates had to use it because the jail offered no other exercise facilities. The basketball court had a new floor, new hoops and better lighting, but it was still an unsettling place, and people avoided it after dark.
One hot summer night Roy was working the 11-to-7 graveyard shift. He was shorthanded, with only one guard on duty. Roy was in the command center monitoring the surveillance cameras while the guard did fire-watch and suicide patrols. The inmates had been locked down for the night, and Roy was very busy, because although there were twenty-odd cameras, he only had one monitor, so he had to keep shifting between the views.
A little after midnight he got a walkie talkie call from the guard: “Cap, there’s something weird going on down here.” Roy switched to the camera which covered the corridor in the basement. The guard was standing outside the locked gym door.
“What’s up?” Roy asked.
“I heard a basketball bouncing in there.” Since the guard showed no eagerness to open the door himself and go in, Roy shifted to the gym’s surveillance camera. It showed a basketball rolling lazily over the floor of the court. He hustled down to join the guard, and the two of them unlocked the door. The ball had come to rest, but it shouldn’t have been there to begin with, and there was nobody on the court.
“Jesus Christ!” the guard yelped. “Look there!” Behind a grate which covered the gym’s air-conditioning duct Roy saw a young man or a boy crouched down, clutching the wire mesh with his fingers and staring into the gym. Roy approached the figure, and it disappeared. The guard looked as if he were about to shit his pants.
The overcrowded conditions in the jail, Roy told me, had already pushed inmates and guards alike to the boiling point that night, and he certainly wasn’t going to admit he’d seen a ghost. He just picked up the basketball, stuffed it back into the bin at courtside, and told the guard someone must have been careless about locking up the gym. He didn’t mention the apparition behind the grate, saying only that everyone was on edge, and maybe prone to see things that weren’t there, especially since the only illumination in the gym had come from the emergency exit panels, because neither man wanted to turn on the ceiling floods.
To calm the guard down, Roy told him that he’d just gotten spooked by a tapping noise in the ancient pipes and a trick of the dim reddish light inside the gym. But Roy was spooked himself: he had the rolling basketball on the surveillance camera’s tape, and he assured me that he’d damn well seen the kid in the AC duct. “I’d have erased the tape if I’d known how, but it just showed a basketball rolling around, so what the hell?” He finished his shift and filed an “All Quiet” report.
Roy remained haunted, literally, by what he saw that night. He began reading up on the old jail’s history, and found out that the superintendent of the reformatory at the time the twenty boys vanished had resigned after the incident was explained away as a jail-break. Strangely, although the ex-superintendent was awarded his full pension, the ageing man applied for another job at the prison, and took a part-time position as a night guard on fire-and-suicide patrol. He was accounted a little odd, but he was reliable. He held the job for about a year, but one night the Salem police were summoned by neighbors to his house. They found him sitting on a stool in his kitchen, holding a bloody butcher knife, with his wife dead at his feet, her throat cut from ear to ear. He told the cops calmly, “She wouldn’t do what I told her.”
*****
Update, summer, 2016: J. W. Cox, a genial bear of a man with a magnificent russet beard, runs a landscaping company, and this year he reconfigured one of the two small gardens in our back yard. Due to poor soil, the garden hadn’t been thriving, so he built a raised bed of fresh loam held in by an octagon made of two tiers of four-by-four-inch lumber. To keep the deer out, he erected a stout fence around the plot.
For various good reasons, not the least of which was his own admirable perfectionism about materials, the work went slowly, and during his visits, he and I had several chances to talk about things unrelated to his job. To my delight, I learned that he and his wife Carrie are ghost-hunter or to use the more respectful term, paranormal investigators.
It turned out that he knew about the Maplehurst Inn’s Elizabeth, though he didn‘t know her name. He was also familiar with other hauntings in the Monadnock region, and he’d investigated some of them, using a device of his own invention. I’m still not sure exactly how it works, but it seems to consist of a radio receiver tuned to a frequency where, under normal conditions, there’s nothing but static. He and his wife Carrie set their rig up in haunted houses, and he insists that when Carrie asks the unquiet spirits questions, the radio often picks up voices answering her.
At one of their sites, another old hotel, he and Carrie claim to have solved a murder mystery. Years ago the wife of the man who owned the place died after falling down a flight of stairs. The cops declared her death an accident. But Carrie Cox, who is better than J. W. at interpreting spirit voices, said that the wife’s ghost told her she was pushed to her death by her husband. By now there’s no chance of reopening the investigation – talk about a cold case – but the story’s plausible, since locals who knew the couple always maintained they didn’t get along, and the husband had recently taken out a large insurance policy in his wife’s name.
- W. and Carrie don’t charge anything for their paranormal investigations; the thrill of communicating with spirits is its own reward. They wanted to set up their equipment in the staircase of the Maplehurst, to see if the resident ghost would speak to them. But the hotel had changed hands, and the new owner is a woman who squeezes a dollar so hard George Washington winces. When the Coxes contacted her, she demanded a hefty fee. J. W. told me he was shocked. “She’s trying to make a profit off the spirits!” I refrained from commenting that profiting off communication with with the dead is what keeps mediums, to say nothing of preachers, in business. Instead, I asked him if he and his wife had ever thought of using a tape recorder instead of a radio.
“I already explained that,” he said a little testily. “The spirits communicate using unused radio frequencies. Tape recorders don’t have frequencies, right?”
“Right,” I said, thinking that he and Carrie ought to write down their messages from the Other Side and publish them under the title “Broadcast News.” But I didn’t share that meanspirited idea with J. W. He’s a nice guy, and if he believes in ghosts, who am I to question him? In matters of belief, I’m an agnostic: I don’t think it’s possible to know for a certainty whether ghosts – or God – exist. It might well be that I’m not psychically sensitive enough to pick up messages from either the Departed or the Almighty; perhaps my mental radio is on the wrong frequency.
In any case, J.W. and Carrie, like all religious believers, must derive great peace of mind from their conviction that there is life after death, and part of me envies them. They will go on earnestly seeking to converse with those who have passed on, while I bumble along deaf and blind to all paranormal manifestations. But I won’t rule out a sudden spiritual epiphany that might fling wide the doors of my perception. Perhaps I should try LSD again. Meanwhile, I have Carrie Cox’s card. Her organization is called “Awaken New Hampshire Spirits,” subtitled “We find things that go bump in the night.” If you have a ghost problem, contact her at www.awakennhspirits.com. Happy hunting!