Ghosts of the SouthCoast

by Tim Weisberg

  Fearing’s spirit is one of the many associated with Fort Phoenix. The most prominent activity reported is the sound of cannon fire, possibly coming from one of the eleven cannons that were placed strategically around the fort.

  There are eleven cannons around Fort Phoenix, including one that John Paul Jones captured from a British ship in the Bahamas.

  Although the fort saw action in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812—it was also commissioned for the Civil War, but never engaged in battle—not all the ghosts reported there are of a military nature. Since the fort area was bequeathed to the town in 1926, it has been a recreational area. One spirit who has been sighted numerous times is that of a jogger who will approach people at the fort and ask the time. The person looks down at their watch or takes out their cellphone in order to check, and when they look up, the jogger has vanished.

  The Haunted Library

  The Millicent Library was funded by the great benefactor for much of Fairhaven’s beautiful structures, Henry Huttleston Rogers. Rogers was a self-made millionaire in the latter half of the nineteenth century and counted among his friends the likes of Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Helen Keller, whose college education he financed personally.

  Fairhaven’s Millicent Library may be haunted by its namesake, among others.

  There is another connection between Henry Huttleston Rogers and the paranormal that is perhaps more than just coincidence. Rogers made his fortune in the oil business, most notably as part of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust. However, Rogers first got involved in the business at the age of twenty-one and with an investment of six hundred dollars, partnering with a friend to form his own company called the Wamsutta Oil Refinery. While the name is likely a tip of the hat to his SouthCoast roots, perhaps by invoking the name of Massasoit’s eldest son, he was awakening the Indian spirits back in his beloved Fairhaven.

  In another nod to the odd, Rogers’s ruthlessness on Wall Street in his later years led his critics to scoff that the initials in H.H. Rogers actually stood for Hell Hound.

  In Fairhaven, however, the man was beloved for the generosity he showed the town.

  The library was constructed in the 1890s as a tribute to Millicent Gifford Rogers, who passed away in 1890 at the tender age of seventeen. Because of her love of books and learning, Rogers decided to erect a great library in her honor, which opened to the public on January 30, 1893.

  As part of a memoriam for Millicent, the library features a stained-glass window bearing her likeness in angelic form under an image of William Shakespeare and encircled by the names of prominent American poets. The window art depicts Millicent as muse for these great writers, but she’s also the muse for the many ghost stories that surround the library that bears her name.

  Some of the stories that have circulated over the years include the ghostly specter of Millicent Rogers walking through the library, glowing with a brilliant blue hue. People also have claimed to hear her laughter reverberating through the building.

  Many of the stories originate with the myth that Rogers buried his daughter in the foundation of the library. Fueling that myth is that the dedication ceremony for the library’s cornerstone took place at 6:00 a.m. on a Monday with only the family and a clergyman present. When the library officially opened and the stained-glass window was unveiled, again it was only the family present. The public services took place in the Congregational Church.

  In conducting an investigation and writing a subsequent article for the Standard-Times in October of 2006, library director Carolyn Longworth and archivist Debbie Charpentier denied the claim of Millicent being buried in the foundation, and Peter Reid, superintendent of Riverside Cemetery, confirmed her remains are in the Rogers family mausoleum at that site.

  The stained-glass window at the library features William Shakespeare and Millicent Rogers in angelic forms.

  Even if Millicent Rogers isn’t beneath the beautiful building, other spirits may be present. Some have claimed to have seen a woman dressed all in black running her fingers across the books on the shelves, and others suggest that a man with a tweed jacket, purple bow tie and small, round glasses is often seen mopping the basement floors. The legend is that he’s the ghost of a janitor who died after slipping on a wet floor and that his footsteps can also be heard on the spiral staircase that extends from the basement to the library’s tower. Many have claimed to encounter his spirit, including psychics and a Native American gentleman visiting from Seattle.

  It is this spirit that many believe is responsible for much of the activity experienced at the library, including fire alarms going off for no apparent reason in the middle of the night and other electrical anomalies. In the course of my own investigation, alongside Spooky Southcoast cohost and producer Matt Costa, we experienced an unexplainable incident in which a light flickered on and off a few times in the basement, directly over Matt’s head with no one else present on the floor and with the light switch within his sight. Not exactly proof of the paranormal, but when we did flick the switch, we saw that it was actually connected to two lights, and only the one directly over him had been affected. The basement and pretty much the entire building are comprised of granite, which could be storing and feeding the paranormal activity.

  Another legend associated with the Millicent Library is that the spirit of Hetty Green haunts the Millicent Library because one of her hats rests among the library’s artifacts. Green was the first woman to rule the American financial world, earning the nickname of the Witch of Wall Street. She was also notoriously frugal, and even though her wealth in modern dollars would make her the wealthiest woman in U.S. history, she is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the World’s Greatest Miser. While the hat did at one time rest in the library’s archives, it hasn’t been there in quite some time.

  Visitors to the Rogers Room often report that the portraits change expressions.

  The Rogers Room houses various artifacts and documents related to the history of the Rogers family, dominated by the huge portraits of H.H. Rogers, his mother and grandmother. Hanging on the far wall of the room, it’s said that if you talk directly to the portraits, their expressions change as a result of the conversation. Indeed, the portraits are extremely lifelike, with eyes that seem to follow as one moves across the room. From different angles, the stoic frowns of the women can appear to have the creeping corners of a grin. Cold spots are often reported in this room as well, but it is actually the only room in the library with air conditioning, in order to preserve the artifacts inside.

  Despite all these potential ghosts inside, many feel the Millicent Library is haunted without ever having to step foot inside. Built in the Italian-renaissance style by renowned architect Charles Brigham, the library’s exterior is decorated with the gargoyles and grotesques that were popular at the time, placed on buildings to ward off evil spirits. There are also griffins, carvings and other such embellishments throughout the inside as well.

  This grotesque was removed during renovations and now sits in the library director’s office.

  One of those original exterior grotesques—said to be the Greek mythological figure Pan but bearing a striking resemblance to Satan—had to be taken down and replaced with a replica. The original now resides in Longworth’s office, and the library used it as a mascot on a T-shirt they had printed. Soon after, according to Longworth herself, employees of the library began having bad things happen in their lives—accidents, financial misfortunes and even the death of the janitor occurred within months of the grotesque moving to its new home. Employees then permanently placed a small Bible atop its head and, at the suggestion of a psychic, burned frankincense in the four corners of the building.

  The Castle on the Hill

  Many of Fairhaven’s finest structures were gifts of H.H. Rogers. Aside from the Millicent Library, he also gave the town a grammar school, the Unitarian Church, the town hall and other improvements. But the one landmark that looms largest is Fairhaven High S
chool, often referred to as the Castle on the Hill.

  Built in 1906, it still remains one of the most beautiful and ornate public schools ever built. An addition in the early part of the twenty-first century was constructed for space and to get the building up to code, yet great effort was made to ensure the new part of the building remained true to the atmosphere and design of the original. The result is a seamless blend of a cutting-edge education within historic halls.

  It is in those halls that many of the ghost stories associated with Fairhaven High take place.

  The most frequent reports involve phantom cold spots that pop up inexplicably around the school, even on the warmest of days. Sometimes, these cold spots act as a precursor to more overt activity, as if the spirit is summoning strength to be able to move an object or make a loud banging sound. One student told me that among the student body, the feeling of a cold spot is usually considered an “uh-oh” moment for fear of what is to follow.

  Another student, who as a member of a certain after-school club has had significant opportunities to be in the building after hours when very few students or staff is present, told me of a book that mysteriously dropped from the third floor down a long winding staircase to just in front of where she was standing on the first floor. If she had been standing just a few feet in the wrong direction, what is mostly viewed as benign poltergeist activity could have proved fatal.

  Fairhaven High School, Henry Huttleston Rogers’s Castle on the Hill.

  Poltergeist, by the way, is a German phrase meaning “noisy ghost.” The concept has been around for hundreds of years, and in some incarnations, it’s believed that the poltergeist is a spirit unto itself and has no connection to the soul of a human being. In the last fifty or so years, however, research has instead suggested that poltergeist activity could actually be subliminal manifestations of a prepubescent child. More typically associated with females, the activity is actually unintentional psychokinetic activity—manipulating objects with the mind—that comes as a result of hormonal changes and eventually wears off with time.

  The gothic detail of Fairhaven High School, home of the Blue Devils.

  Cross-Cultural Ghosts

  One of the items that draws claims of paranormal activity in the Millicent Library is the samurai sword in the Rogers Room, but it’s more likely the stories have grown over the fact that it seems very out of place for Fairhaven—unless you understand the history of how it got there. Even if the ghost story is mostly hogwash, the tale is interesting enough to tell here.

  In 1841, a fourteen-year-old peasant boy named Manjiro Nakahama and four friends were shipwrecked off the southern coast of Japan while on a fishing trip. They were rescued by Captain William H. Whitfield of Fairhaven and his crew. They brought them to safety on the Hawaiian island of Oahu (where Benjamin Dillingham’s descendents would soon settle) while Whitfield brought Manjiro back to Fairhaven, where he became known as John Manjiro, the first Japanese person to live in America. With the Whitfield family, Manjiro received an education and became a top-notch sailor, eventually setting out to sea once again.

  Manjiro eventually arrived in San Francisco just at the dawn of the gold rush and became a wealthy man. He went back and found his friends who were left in Hawaii and they all returned to Japan. Although the policy of the isolationist Japanese people was to execute anyone who left the country, Manjiro and his friends were spared and he provided the Japanese government with tales of the wondrous life in America. He played a key role in Japan, eventually opening up to relations with the West, and he often returned to the United States as a hatamoto—a representative samurai—in his later years.

  On July 4, 1918, his son, Dr. Toichiro Nakahama, and Japanese ambassador Kikujiro Ishii presented the town of Fairhaven with the samurai sword that now rests in the Millicent Library, part of an ongoing friendship between the town and the Land of the Rising Sun. It is a relationship that still remains in modern times as well. In October of 1987, Japanese crown prince Akihito and his wife, Princess Michiko, visited Fairhaven, and the town has a sister city in Tosashimizu, Japan.

  When Japanese tourists visit the SouthCoast, one of their destination points is the grave of Captain Whitfield in Riverside Cemetery, often to leave gifts and give thanks to him for his kindness to Manjiro. Do the Japanese, though, know something about his grave that we do not? The Japanese, after all, are a culture in which ghosts play a very large role. They openly believe in the spirits of the deceased and revere and honor them with special ceremonies. Perhaps they are there to communicate with the captain, just as their fellow countryman did more than 150 years ago.

  Don’t Touch that Dial

  The following story has become more than just a great ghost story; it’s also spread to the status of urban legend. Whether it originated on the SouthCoast is unknown, but similar tales have popped up elsewhere.

  Nichols House is a nursing home in Fairhaven on Main Street, near the Riverside Cemetery where Millicent Rogers lies and just down the road from Fairhaven High School. As the story goes, an elderly woman was a resident of Nichols House and her favorite time of the day was the late afternoon, when she could sit in the front parlor of the house and listen to her beloved classical music station. Yet a certain orderly who had no love for this woman would often come in and change the station to blaring rock music, perhaps to intentionally annoy her. One day, she reached her boiling point and had enough of his constant rock and roll torture, and she ran out the front door of the nursing home and into the street, where she was immediately struck and killed by a passing car.

  The legend goes that as you drive past the nursing home, if you tune your car’s radio station to 102.9 FM—the signal of the rock station the orderly changed the radio to each time—the signal will fade out and be replaced by classical music, as the old woman gets her way from the great beyond.

  From the moment I first heard this story, I knew what had sparked it; 102.9 FM, the dial setting for rock station WPXC is one step up on the FM dial from 102.5, which for about fifty-five years was home to classic rock station WCRB until that station moved down the dial in 2009. WPXC originates on Cape Cod, while WCRB broadcast out of Boston, and Fairhaven seemed like the perfect spot for the signals to become crossed somehow to allow one station to bleed into the other.

  When I went out to try it, that’s exactly what happened, and still does to this day—although 102.5 is now country station WKLB, and Nichols House has been renamed the Royal at Fairhaven. The names and station formats may have changed, but the legend lives on.

  That Dam Woman

  Acushnet comes from the Wampanoag acushnea, which has been translated by some to mean “at the head of the river” or “resting place along the river.” One interesting translation, which comes from Maurice DesJardins, suggests that Acushnet in the Wampanoag means “a place where we get to the other side.”

  Now, if that doesn’t sound like a paranormal hot spot, I don’t know what does.

  If Acushnet is a place to get to the Other Side, it’s also a place that the Other Side likes to get to. Take, for example, the spectral woman who is often seen taking in the view around the Hamlin Road Dam. She is said to be seen in the early morning hours, just as the sun rises, and described as a peaceful and benign spirit.

  The same can’t be said for another ghostly woman seen farther up the Acushnet River. This spirit often frightens away those who see her, with her animalistic behavior along the shores of the river and a name that is crudely carved into her back, yet no one has been able to get close enough to read what it says.

  The Samuel West House

  At a time when many men of God in Massachusetts were all about hellfire and brimstone, the Reverend Dr. Samuel West was of a different breed. Viewed as a liberal who was more akin to the later Unitarian movement, West would have made an imposing figure on the pulpit had he stuck to the Puritan preaching style. He was a large man—over six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds, but often appeared
disheveled and dirty. He was a man of little means, making a meager salary with the First Congregational Society in Dartmouth (in present-day New Bedford) after being ordained in 1761.

  The property that would come to bear his name passed hands quite a bit beginning in 1742, with the oldest part of the current building being built sometime prior to 1775. West came to own it in 1785, as he recovered judgment from a Thomas Crandon and took control of the property as part of that judgment—but whether he actually resided there is unknown. West had actually taken his congregation to court over his pay, and his ownership of the Acushnet property may have been related to that. It is believed that at one time, there was a church and a graveyard on the property, so he may have actually just been granted the property on which he was already serving in the church.

  The staircase at the Samuel West House leads to the haunted third floor. Courtesy of Christopher Balzano.

  In the 1920s, the house was used as a funeral home but fell into disrepair when it became a private residence again years later.

  Katie and Johnny now live in the home with their three children. The upstairs is occupied by another couple, while the third floor—the attic space—is reserved for the ghosts. But that doesn’t stop them from coming down and interacting with the living residents.

  Since Katie moved in, she’s tried to make improvements about the house, and each time it seems as though more spirits awake. It’s not uncommon in the paranormal to see activity spike as repairs are being done to a location; ghosts become accustomed to their surroundings or have an attachment to the way it was when they were alive, and changes to it often invoke their ire.