Haunted Houses

by Nancy Roberts

  Meanwhile, in the library, the round domed ceiling caught and amplified sound, allowing him to eavesdrop and later share what he heard to embarrass his company; he also loved to tell visitors that his pool was only a few feet deep—although it did, in actuality, extend nine feet down—before brashly, and to their astonishment, diving in.

  That courtyard’s most unusual feature, though, was its weather system—it had lights and pipes that allowed Hammond to summon sunlight, moonlight, fog, even a heavy downpour if he so desired. If he felt that guests were lingering too long, they might suddenly find themselves drenched.

  Some say his antics didn’t stop when he—or at least his earthly form—did.

  After his death in 1965 at age seventy-seven, visitors and staff alike reported strange echoes and the squeak of soft-soled shoes on stone floors (perhaps Hammond Jr. sneaking up on them, or plotting his next prank). Irene, for her part, was said to suffer depression throughout her life; she became reclusive, painting the walls of her bedroom with lush scenes, then fencing them in with a wide railing to represent her mental torment. She passed away in 1959 while in her late seventies, but has been seen peering out of the castle windows, notably the one overlooking the courtyard pool.

  As they did during Hammond’s lifetime, stray cats continue to wander without hesitation into the castle and take up residence. In one well-circulated story, not long after the proprietor’s death, a large black cat was seen sauntering in, navigating the castle’s passages as if it were already intimately familiar with them. It then bounded up and nestled into one of Hammond’s favorite chairs.

  There are numerous other unaccounted-for phenomena: Uninvited guests are said to wander the property, suddenly vanishing when approached; disembodied voices speak foreign tongues; books are found strewn about in the uninhabited library; and paranormal researchers feel cold spots and uneasy presences throughout the castle. Others have described the muffled mewing of cats or something like small animals brushing against their legs—only to see no four-legged creatures about.

  Who can say what is real and what is imagined? Only Hammond Jr. himself knows if he is enjoying his eccentric afterlife.

  Gloucester is a gorgeous seaside city on the tip of Cape Ann; getting to it takes a willing diversion, but visitors won’t be disappointed. It is full of museums, curio shops, seafood restaurants, and beaches revealing treasures at low tide. The Hammond Castle Museum is located at 80 Hesperus Ave., stately standing along Gloucester’s rock-ribbed shore. It is open from late May/early June through late September, seven days a week, from 10 am to 4 pm. Guests can guide themselves through the castle or take tours that depart every 90 minutes. Candlelight tours are also offered on Thursday nights—in homage to the night-loving proprietor himself—and the castle is available for private rentals, corporate functions, weddings, and other events. For details, visit www.hammondcastle.org or call (978) 283-2080.

  THE GHOST LOVER

  THE ALEXANDER–PHILLIPS HOUSE, SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS

  This house was the scene of an exceptional courtship.

  It is doubtful whether Historic New England hosts many ghost-story programs. Even if it did, it seems unlikely that another story could be as unusual as this one. This story was first presented at a then Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities meeting by the son of Mrs. Julia Bowles (Alexander) Phillips twenty-five years after her death.

  Fortunately, one of those present at that meeting was Richard C. Garvey, editor of the Springfield Daily News. His interest in history and his writing skills combined as he masterfully retold the following romantic and eerie story. Garvey’s source was an account that Mrs. Phillips wrote in 1886 that was never made public until it was presented to the Society. He edited and paraphrased it for his newspaper. With his permission, the story below is reproduced as it appeared in the Daily News.

  When my father bought Linden Hall, I was very young, only seven years old, but my first recollection of the house is quite distinct. I was first brought here by Father one afternoon when he came to talk over some business arrangement with the former owner, an elderly Southern lady who occupied it as a summer residence. She was accompanied by her family of two sons and a beautiful daughter, a retinue of slaves, and a fine yellow coach drawn by thoroughbred horses.

  Soon we were established, and I and my young sister roamed at our own sweet will through the lofty rooms and the lovely gardens. The flower garden was the delight of my sister and myself. My sister was a strange child, fanciful and dreamy. Very soon I noticed that the house seemed to have a special charm for her. Our dining room was then in the eastern wing, the library in the western wing.

  It is in this library wing that my story centers. We were still quite young when we learned that this library and the little bedroom opening out from it had been lived in for years by a young man, one of the sons of the Southern lady. During all this time, no one had looked upon his face. He was a very handsome fellow, they said, clever and fascinating in his manner, but like many attractive men with plenty of money, he had become dissipated and led a very fast life. Then, satiated with what he supposed to be the only pleasures of this world, he decided to isolate himself from his fellows and spend his remaining years in study and self-communion.

  My sister, Leila, was a peculiar, reticent child, and this story naturally made a great impression upon her. In the summer, when the old library was opened, she spent a great deal of time there, sitting at the window that looked out upon the garden and reading the queer old books, especially those related to the supernatural. The years of our childhood rolled slowly by.

  One warm Sunday afternoon early in June, when Leila was sixteen, she stood in the garden facing the library. She looked toward it, feeling drawn to do so by some strong impulse. There in the window sat a young man, and he seemed to her as beautiful as a god. His large, dark eyes rested upon her with a gaze of burning intensity.

  She walked through the garden, around the pathway, and up the library porch steps, but on looking into the room, she was amazed to see the chair in the window empty! She came immediately back to the rest of the family and asked what young man had been in the library. We laughed and replied that she must have been dreaming. She turned away from us with a troubled look in her eyes.

  She came to me one evening several days later and said, “I have seen him again.” She told me that she had stepped out upon the eastern porch for a moment and was astonished to see, standing in the driveway, a spirited black horse saddled and bridled with rich, silver-mounted trappings. She turned her head and encountered again the face of the man she had seen at the library window.

  Before she had time to speak or even think, he leaned toward her, grasped her hand on which he pressed a burning kiss, and, mounting his horse with a flying leap, galloped away in the dusk.

  As Leila related this to me, she was trembling with intense excitement. She begged me to say nothing of the matter to our parents, and I consented, though greatly troubled.

  It was about this time that Leila became a somnambulist. One night I was awakened from a heavy sleep by a slight noise. I lighted my bedside candle, hurried into my wrapper and slippers, and reached the foot of the stairs just as a white figure opened the library door and glided out onto the porch. I was not of a timid disposition, but the ghostlike apparition before me was almost too much for my nerves.

  I recovered myself sufficiently to think that the figure looked like Leila. I hurried to her room. Both windows were open wide. The moonlight streamed in over the great fir tree, lighting up the whole chamber, and one hasty glance showed me that her bed was empty. I groped my way downstairs again and hurried out the library door.

  Midway on the garden walk, I met Leila. She was walking slowly with wide-open eyes, utterly unconscious of my presence.

  It struck me as very curious that she was completely dressed, in a soft white cashmere, her favorite dress, and her manner of walking was very peculiar. She seemed to be leaning toward s
omeone. Her face was upturned with an expression of rapt attention, and now and then she smiled and moved her lips as if speaking, but I could distinguish neither words nor sound.

  Without saying anything to Leila, I determined to speak to Mother, but I could not bring myself to mention the two strange meetings of which Leila had told me. To my surprise, Mother appeared to think little of the sleepwalking; she said that she herself had been subject to the affliction as a young girl. After that I became so accustomed to Leila’s nocturnal walks in the garden that I am sure I slept through some of them.

  The sultry days of August came. I had never known such oppressive heat. For weeks we had no rain. At last, one evening we started to bed feeling a slight breeze stirring, and we said hopefully, “Before morning, we shall have rain.” I must have slept soundly for several hours before I was awakened by a frightful flash of lightning, followed immediately by a deafening crash. Before I could gather my senses, down came the longed-for rain, in drenching torrents.

  My first thought was of the open windows throughout the house, and I flew from room to room closing them. On my reaching Leila’s room, a sudden flash illuminated the entire chamber and showed me that the room was empty.

  “Leila is out in the storm!” I cried out, and two or three of us took a lantern and went into the garden. Halfway down the walk we found her—her life shattered by a lightning bolt!

  We bore her into the house and up to her bed. It was then that we realized she was wearing Mother’s wedding dress, from an old cedar chest in the garret. Leila had arrayed herself in the quaint, old-fashioned gown, and upon her head she had placed mother’s bridal veil of antique lace.

  The cruel lightning had failed to mar her exquisite beauty. Not until we had laid her away in the grave was everything explained. A few days after the funeral, I was in her room. On opening a little escritoire, I found a folded letter addressed to me in Leila’s handwriting. The letter told me of the first time the handsome stranger in the garden spoke to her, and, when he did, it was a declaration of love!

  This is what he told her:

  “Leila, the power of love has drawn me from a far-off country to your side. Without question or fear, will you put your trust in me?” After quoting his words to her, she revealed her own plans, saying, “I am going to that far-off country from which he came to me, and it may be many years before I shall see you all again.”

  It was her goodbye. This astonishing confession of Leila’s was never known before outside the family.

  Years went by and the city grew. Finally, through the constant raising of the street, the house seemed so low that Father thought it advisable to move it to the side lawn where it now stands. When the library wing was removed, the workmen discovered in the low cellar beneath the bedroom the skeleton of a man. It was given decent burial near the graves of our own dead, and Father yielded to what he thought was a peculiar fancy of mine: He buried the man’s bones beside Leila’s.

  Located at 289 State Street, between Elliot and State Streets in Springfield, Massachusetts, the Alexander-Phillips House remains one of Springfield’s most famous residences. It was built in 1816 according to the design of Asher Benjamin, then America’s leading architect.

  HOW TO KILL A SPY

  SEVEN STARS TAVERN, WOODSTOWN, NEW JERSEY

  Seven Stars Tavern is said to be the champion haunted house of New Jersey.

  There are houses that have an overwhelming sense of mystery, houses that reach out and capture your imagination by evoking thoughts of the spirits of people who have lived within their walls. For me, there was just such a house.

  Years ago, when I was a child living in Woodstown, New Jersey, I would pass it on sunny days and rainy days alike. Sometimes I would see it looming darkly beside the road, wrapped in dense fog common to this low-lying area. But whatever the weather, I invariably felt the house’s spell. Named Seven Stars Tavern, it was built in 1762 at the intersection of Kings Highway and the Woodstown–Auburn Road.

  Many stories of the supernatural are connected with Seven Stars, but space here allows for only the most famous one. It is the story of the ghost of a Tory spy. The event upon which it is based is said to be a historical fact. According to the owner, Robert Brooks, a man loyal to the British during the Revolutionary War was supplying information to King George’s soldiers. The soldiers would then conduct foraging raids, stealing cows and food from area farmers.

  Neighbors eventually found out about the Tory’s actions and decided to take care of the scoundrel. A group of men dragged him up to the attic of Seven Stars, tied one end of a rope around his neck and the other around a wooden beam, and tossed him out the window.

  In the 1930s there was a man living in the Salem area named John Klein. He was one of four harvesters employed to cut the grain for the Robbins family, who owned Seven Stars Tavern. Nathaniel (“Natty”) Robbins always had difficulty getting help locally because the house had a reputation for being haunted. Finally, Natty was fortunate enough to hire John Klein, who had no fear of ghosts, and three other itinerant workers, named Simon, Sam, and Jim.

  It was the custom for farmhands to sleep in the large attic of the house, which was furnished only with some chairs, a bowl and pitcher on top of an old pine washstand, and straw mattresses on the floor. After their first day’s work, the four men were too tired to notice the musty smell of old wood and moldy straw. All went to bed early that night, and their sleep was deep.

  On the second day Simon went about his work with a glum silence that irritated his friends Jim and Sam. All four men worked hard and retired early that night, again from exhaustion, but before extinguishing the lamp, Simon asked if anyone had heard anything strange the night before. His friends at once connected this with his long face that day and assured him that he must have been dreaming. This is what he wanted to believe, but Simon was still uneasy, for he could not rid himself of the certainty that he had not been dreaming. His memory of the event was far too vivid.

  Simon knew that if he said more, he would be ridiculed; as it was, his friends made jokes about his drinking too much of Natty’s cider. The next day Simon’s spirits were still melancholy. He avoided his friends entirely, and just before dark he made some pretext to slip away and climb up to the attic alone. When the others came up laughing and talking, they found Simon up in the rafters that supported the roof—marking crosses on the timbers with a piece of chalk. They joked about his “getting religion” so suddenly, but Simon said nothing, and as soon as he had swung himself down, he blew out his candle and turned in.

  Something awakened Sam during the night, and to his astonishment he saw Simon seated on a chair, staring straight ahead and rigid as a post. At his feet were two lighted candles. The agony of fear on Simon’s face was real.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Sam, springing to his feet.

  “Shhh!” whispered Simon, holding up a hand to quiet him. His face was white and his eyes wide as he gazed in the direction of the stairway. Sam roused the two other men as quietly as possible, but perhaps he made more noise than he thought, for Simon repeatedly hissed “shhh” at them and motioned agitatedly for them to be quiet. The men could not help being frightened, although they had no idea what had happened. There was a terrifying sense of some imminent peril.

  In profound silence they sat and waited. Finally, John Klein whispered, “What is it, Simon?”

  “Shhh! Ghosts!” Simon whispered back. “I heard ’em again. They may come back up here. They’re downstairs.”

  Klein was not afraid of ghosts, but Simon had shaken his confidence. It was not what Simon had said or even the conviction with which he had said it that upset Klein as much as the fact that, now and then, Simon would whisper a few stuttering words and then give a startled jump.

  The story, as Klein was able to put it together, was that Simon had actually heard ghosts the night when the men said he had only been dreaming. At first, Simon said, the ghosts were far away. Then they came nearer. Finally, there h
ad been a terrible scuffle on the stairway, with much shouting and swearing. A group of brawling spirits had come thronging up the ladder into the attic and headed for the window near Simon’s mattress. “They pushed and shoved right up to my window and went out through it as if they were smoke! Twice now I’ve seen them and heard them.”

  “How do you know they’re ghosts?” asked John Klein.

  “If they were human, they would all be dead. That window is sixty feet above the ground, but they’re not dead. I heard them clatter back in again. Shhh! They’re downstairs now.”

  All was darkness except for the shadows of the men moving as the candles flickered. Simon made them lock the door at the foot of the stairway. Klein and Sam did so. Next Simon ordered that all the attic windows be closed and wedged, too, and they did that also. In silence they sat and waited, hearing only the beating of their own hearts. Simon would not let them set their chairs over any crack in the floor because, as he told them, “When the ghosts find the door barred, they’ll come up through the cracks in the floor.”

  Not a sound. They were all apprehensive, yet there was nothing but a prolonged stillness. After some time had passed, Jim broke the silence and told the others they were all “blank fools” and that he was going back to bed. The rest followed sheepishly.

  How long they had been asleep is uncertain, but they were brought to their feet by the most hellish screams of terror. Simon was nowhere to be seen. By the light of a candle that someone lit, they found him, almost hidden, down in the angle where the floor met the sloping roof, his face to the corner and his hands clasping his head. He was screaming and sobbing, praying and writhing, all the while kicking as if to get away from somebody or something.