Haunted Houses

by Nancy Roberts

  “You’re lucky tonight,” said George Quigley at the desk. We usually have reservations a long time ahead, especially during the month of August, but these people,” he tapped a name on his register, “I’m sorry to say they’ve had a death in the family and had to cancel. We can give you their room. It’s the guest room, the one where Abby Borden’s body was found.”

  “Bad weather out there tonight, isn’t it,” he commented, shaking his head. “How about some cold cider for you, or milk and our homemade cookies? We have pears, too, of course.”

  “Milk and cookies sounds great,” said Marcie, placing her suitcase beside the stairs. “Wasn’t the way he said pears strange,” she said to her husband after their host had left for the kitchen.

  “I didn’t think about it one way or the other.”

  The milk and cookies appeared almost instantly and the Rollinses sat down on a black horsehair sofa.

  “The furnishings of this house are just remarkable!” exclaimed Marcie, reaching for a cookie.

  “Oh, do you like them? We researched to find authentic pieces from the 1850s,” said Martha McGinn, one of the owners. “Some of the furnishings were either originally in the Borden house or are very similar in style.”

  “Oooh, look at this cookie. What a strange shape,” exclaimed Marcie.

  “Don’t be rude, honey. It must be for Washington’s birthday,” said her husband.

  “In August?” exclaimed Marcie.

  “Hatchet-shaped cookies are one of our specialties. And, of course, August is special, too. Since today is the fourth, we have had our anniversary reenactment of the hatchet murders of Andrew and Abby Borden. I’m sure you’ve read about the famous crime.”

  “A crime here,” Marcie said breathlessly.

  “Now, we understand if that makes you nervous, Mrs. Rollins,” said Kathi Goncalo who worked at the desk, “and we have a list of other bed-and-breakfast places.” Phil could hear the moan of the wind and rain beating against the windows, and he had visions of driving through it to discover that accommodations were nonexistent. Of course they could drive back to the highway to one of the chain motels. “We really are not nervous,” he said with a smile.

  “Well, sometimes people are. Especially with the history of the house, you know.”

  “I’m not,” said Marcie. “I think it’s absolutely fascinating. I love mysteries.”

  “I thought that might be why you and Mr. Rollins came here.”

  “Actually, we’re refugees from the storm,” said Marcie.

  “So it wasn’t because you wanted to spend the night at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast after all.”

  “Lizzie Borden? That name sounds familiar,” said Phil.

  “Oh, yes,” said Marcie. “I remember it all. Poor Lizzie was suspected of murdering her father and stepmother. Now I know why the name Fall River had such a familiar ring when I saw the sign on the interstate. And that’s the reason for the hatchet-shaped cookies!”

  “I don’t see why it should upset us now,” said Phil. “It all happened over a hundred years ago, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, one hundred and five years ago this month. I’m glad you and your husband aren’t scared, Mrs. Rollins. I think what bothers people the most is not that there was a double murder here but that it occurred in such a gruesome way.”

  “As if people consider some murders not as bad as others?” said Marcie thoughtfully. “That’s an interesting idea, isn’t it, Phil?”

  “Not to me, Marcie. I feel horror over any murder . . . it breaks one of the laws of God. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand your interest in crimes.”

  “It’s just that I’m fascinated by any type of mystery. You know that.”

  “Especially one that has never really been solved,” said a guest who was sitting in a nearby easy chair listening. “Hope you don’t mind my interrupting, but everyone has a different theory, Mr. . . . Rollins; is that right? My name is Bernard Breckenridge.”

  “How do you do,” said Phil. Breckenridge continued, “And they say that after it happened, some couples actually divorced over disagreements about who did it. Imagine that!”

  “How ridiculous,” said Marcie.

  “Let me show you some of the interesting things in the house, Mrs. Rollins,” said George, offering them cider, cookies, and fruit. “Why don’t you take this pear up to the bedroom with you, Mr. Rollins. You may decide you need a snack later.” Phil Rollins hesitated. “Do take it. We always keep plenty of pears on hand. It was Lizzie’s favorite fruit and she said she was eating pears out in the yard under a tree at the time the Bordens were murdered.”

  “But I thought she was supposed to have . . .” began Marcie. “Killed them?” said longtime employee, Kathi Goncalo. “No one really knows and probably never will. Lizzie was certainly a prime suspect, but she had a good lawyer and was acquitted.”

  “And what do you think, Mr. Breckenridge?” asked Marcie curiously.

  “I’m not sure. Sometimes I think she did it alone, and sometimes I wonder if she didn’t have an accomplice. A man whom she began to fear later. Everyone has a different opinion.”

  “We’ll have a tour of the house in the morning,” said George, “and point out where all the members of the family and the maid were supposed to have been when the crime took place. Why don’t you stay and see what you and your husband think, Mrs. Rollins?”

  “Wouldn’t that be terrific, Phil?”

  “We don’t have time, Marcie. Maybe we can come back again.”

  “If it’s not too late for you, Mrs. Rollins, let me take you through the house now and show you our modest library of books and crime scene photos.”

  “Do you mind, Phil?”

  “Go ahead. I know you want to, Marcie. I’ll go up to the room and read USA Today.”

  “Fine, honey. See you soon.”

  “Are you sure this won’t bother you before retiring, Mrs. Rollins?”

  “Not a bit! Let’s go.”

  Phil took their luggage up to the bedroom. It was really like walking into the world of his grandparents, he thought as he gazed at the old-fashioned furniture. Everything was just perfect. The bed and its pillows edged with crocheted lace, the bureau cloth, a white linen towel with a fringe. All very quaint. He was glad now that they had stopped here. He put the newspaper on the bureau and placed a small alarm clock from his overnight bag on the bedside table. A meticulous man and an experienced traveler, he never trusted the clock in the room or a wake-up call anywhere he stayed. Then he took out his pajamas and fresh clothing for the following day.

  Suddenly he noticed that the room was cold. It had not seemed chilly when he came in. Well, no matter, he would just lay his new L.L. Bean robe across the chair to put on while he sat and read.

  He began to unbutton his shirt and as he did so turned toward the old-fashioned oak bed. His fingers stopped at the second button. His hands began to tremble. The appearance of the bed was very different from only a few minutes ago when he had entered the room. Instead of the coverlet being perfectly smooth it was now quite rumpled. But that was not the important change. Its folds were rearranged so that they corresponded to the curves of a body, and it was not a slim body. On the pillow he saw an indentation that could only have been made by a human head!

  Marcie returned to find her husband sitting fully dressed in the downstairs sitting room. His face was very pale.

  “Why are you down here?” she asked in surprise. “I thought you’d be in bed by now, honey.”

  “Marcie, come upstairs. I want to show you something when you go in.”

  She stared at him in bewilderment as he put the key in the door of their room. “If something is wrong, why don’t you tell the owners? I’m sure they will take care of it.”

  “Because I thought you should see this first. Look at that bed!” Dramatically, he flung the door wide and stood aside while she preceded him into the room.

  “I’m looking. What’s the matter?” she s
aid a bit impatiently.

  “The bed. The bed is what’s the . . .” He stopped in mid-sentence. The pillow was plumped up and the coverlet was as smooth as it had been when he first entered the room . . . the room where Abby Borden was resting when she was brutally murdered more than one hundred years ago.

  The next morning Phil sat in embarrassed silence while Marcie related his experience over a hearty breakfast of oatmeal, orange juice, eggs, sausage, and johnnycakes.

  “Ooh, how wonderful. Why doesn’t something like that ever happen to me?” moaned one guest.

  “I’ve heard some people have woken up in the night to see a woman in Victorian clothes dusting the furniture, and some have even had her straighten the blankets over them as they lay there.”

  Martha McGinn noticed that Phil Rollins’s face was quite white and he did not seem interested in his food. “Incidents are sometimes reported here by the staff but seldom guests,” she said comfortingly. “People who work in the house say they hear the sound of footsteps or doors opening and closing mysteriously, but I think any spirits we have around here now are friendly ones. Visitors like to discuss their theories about the crime and they ask lots of questions.”

  “I have my own idea of what happened,” said Marcie. “I scanned some of the books and bought a transcript of the inquest documents. You should read it, Phil. I think I know who murdered both of them and it wasn’t Lizzie at all!”

  The Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast Museum is thought to be a house “active” with spirits. Some guests have reported hearing voices and the sound of a woman weeping. Others tell stories of unexplained footsteps and doors mysteriously opening and closing. In addition to reservations for overnight accommodations—where you can rent a single suite, a whole floor or even the entire house—the Borden House is open 10 am to 3 pm, seven days a week, year-round (except Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day). Tours depart every hour on the hour. The house is located at 230 Second Street, Fall River, Massachusetts 02721. (It was 92 Second Street during the Bordens’ tenure, but the house number was changed in 1896, notably to disassociate it from its macabre history). (508-675-7333; lizzie-borden.com/).

  JOHN HAYS HAMMOND JR.—PECULIAR IN DEATH JUST AS IN LIFE?

  HAMMOND CASTLE MUSEUM, GLOUCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS

  Some say the notorious inventor, eccentric, and prankster John Hays Hammond Jr. continues his bizarre, playfully morbid antics long after his death.

  Picture it: A standalone, rectangular structure with a latched door, silver and windowless and crafted from a mesh of conductive materials.

  If you claimed to be a medium in the early twentieth century and you happened to visit Abbadia Mare, the medieval-style castle of eccentric millionaire John Hays Hammond Jr., you would be asked to sit inside this contraption, known as a “Faraday cage,” a centerpiece of the grand hall.

  Once inside, protected from the influence of electric currents, you would then be asked to contact the dead. The goal of the cage was to limit interference from the human world and to determine if you truly were mystically gifted. At least, that was how it was supposed to work, per the cage’s builder, Hammond, himself.

  It would be superfluous to call John Hays Hammond Jr. eccentric—indeed he was and had no qualms about sharing his many unique talents, collections, interests, and obsessions. This includes, of course, his pièce de résistance: His home on the craggy coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where, among many other things, he practiced mysticism and spiritualism.

  And, some say, he succeeded in both practices, enabling him to continue to make his presence known long after his death.

  Although for most people, the name doesn’t quite evoke the same iconic image as Thomas Edison, Hammond Jr. was just as abundant with ideas over his seventy-seven years.

  Born in San Francisco in 1888 to wealthy mining engineer John Hays Hammond Sr., he spent a significant amount of his young life globetrotting, including in England and South America, where his father performed engineering work at Cecil Rhodes’ diamond mines.

  As the story goes, once the family returned to America, the young Hammond was inspired at the impressionable age of twelve by a visit to Edison’s workshop. Edison, in turn, was amazed by his potential and endless enthusiasm, and the two remained regular correspondents for years. The godfather of American invention also introduced his young protégé to the legendary Alexander Graham Bell.

  Over his lifetime, Hammond Jr. developed over eight hundred inventions that resulted in more than four hundred patents. He is best known for his early experiments with frequency modulation (FM) broadcasting and his development of electronic remote-control technology—thus earning him the nickname “the father of radio control.” He also invented a radio-controlled torpedo and developed techniques to prevent remote-control jamming by ally enemies.

  In fact, to this day, he remains second only to Edison when it comes to awarded patents—albeit a distant runner-up; the “Wizard of Menlo Park” holds a record-setting 1,093, according to the Edison Innovation Foundation.

  But all those years tinkering and innovating, Hammond Jr. never forgot his time in Europe; it was there that he became enraptured with the architecture, history, and lore of the abundant medieval, gothic, and Victorian castles. In an unpublished letter, he wrote, “It is in the stones and wood that the personal record of man comes down to us. We call it atmosphere, this indescribable something that still haunts old monuments...it is a marvelous thing, this expression of human ideals in walls and windows.”

  The 1920s and the cacophony of the Great War brought him to the prosperous, north-of-Boston maritime city of Gloucester, where he set out to build his own “indescribable something.”

  He prophesized (should we say, rather incorrectly) that “after I am gone, all my scientific creations will be old-fashioned and forgotten. I want to build something in hard stone and engrave on it for posterity a name of which I am justly proud.” Thus, work on his namesake Hammond Castle began in 1926. Upon its completion in 1929, he dubbed it Abbadia Mare, which means “Abbey by the Sea.”

  Today, the property is a privately owned museum listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And it is, if nothing else, an architectural marvel: Inspired by numerous styles, the structure boasts a drawbridge, flying buttresses, turrets, pillars, arches, grottoes, cupolas, towers, vast halls and passages, and elaborate staircases. (Hammond Jr. made a point to integrate all of his inspirations, it seems.) The globetrotting millionaire also bought up whatever architectural salvage he could from around Europe, including the interior of a blacksmith shop, storefront façades, ornate archways, stained glass windows, and intricately carved wall panels. All of these stunning elements, of course, were integrated into his grandiose home.

  Ever the collector, Hammond Jr. also complemented this architectural opulence with his immense collection of artifacts spanning the Roman Empire and the Medieval and Renaissance eras. As historians recount, he was once told that, if he brought architectural relics back into a home, he could have the power to raise the spirits of their original owners.

  Thus, his home includes a panoply of odd artifacts: a skull from a crew-member of Christopher Columbus; ancient tombstones and Roman sarcophagi that have been embedded into the walls like macabre art pieces; ancient chests, organs, and harpsicords; and six-hundred-year-old medieval beds.

  Certainly the most notable rooms in the house are the one-hundred-foot-long Great Hall—which features an organ with 8,400 pipes—and an interior courtyard inspired by the one built by prolific art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. The courtyard’s centerpiece is a thirty-thousand-gallon, nine-foot-deep pool, with water dyed bright green to disguise its depths (and we’ll get to that shortly).

  Upon moving into the magnificent estate with his wife, Irene, Hammond Jr. continued with his tinkering and inventing, which became ever more focused on the supernatural. He held seances for guests and regularly employed his “Faraday cage” to test would-be mediums. The device was u
ltimately bulky and dangerous—it permanently burned holes in the floor due to the significant amount of heat it generated as it worked to block any outside energy sources.

  He owned numerous books on the occult, as well, kept a number of cats—long revered, from the ancient Chinese to the Egyptians, for their metaphysical attributes—and often proclaimed his wishes to be reincarnated as one.

  But those examples merely hint at his many idiosyncratic attributes and morbid antics.

  Unlike many of us, he didn’t at all shy away from the notion of death. Notably, he loved the evening hours. Graham Bell, in fact, suggested he work at night and sleep during the day. He took the advice and, as a result, many staff, overnight guests, and even his wife would go long periods of time without seeing him. Along with this night owl mentality, some remember him wandering his courtyard in a long monk’s robe with the cowl drawn.

  His character oddities were not limited to nighttime antics: He occasionally lunched on the roof of an Aztec-like tomb and was known to ask visitors if they’d like to see where he would be buried—in an above-ground mausoleum on the property. It is said that in that sepulcher, whose steps run from the tomb door to the sea, he is interred with Siamese cats preserved in formaldehyde. So another rumor goes, the inside doors of his tomb are outfitted with locks—to keep intruders out—and he supposedly also stipulated in his will that poison ivy be planted around his grave. Thus, in death, just as in life, he wished to come and go as he pleased, and to be unperturbed in doing so.

  At ease with nudity as with death, Hammond Jr. was known to frequently swim naked in his courtyard pool. He also commissioned an anatomically-correct statue of himself—his wife, mortified, hired a sculptor to conceal the statue’s genitals with a fig leaf. If you happened to be one of the many visitors to his stunning palatial home gracing the precipice of the Atlantic, you would be in for many surprises.

  Terrorizing visitors, in fact, was one of Hammond’s favorite pastimes. For instance, in one guest room, he had a doorway layered over with wallpaper, so that, when closed, it was indistinguishable from the adjoining walls. In the middle of the night, aided by one of his many remote controls, the sly inventor liked to close the door in the event that guests left it open to allow in radiant heat—so that, upon awakening, those unsuspecting visitors would be frantic and trapped.