Vineyard Supernatural

by Holly Nadler

  As time moved on, the homestead grew to include a bigger house, a barn, a tool shed, and other outbuildings. Later, additional farmsteads were built for the grown children and their families. Because the Native Americans had been interred without markers, no one paid any attention to whether the structures were placed over human remains.

  But the spirit world remembers.

  A bit of each departed soul seems to remain with the small plot of ground where its memory was once observed by the living. Even when all reference to the departed being has been obliterated, this remnant—this echo, this keeper of a lost soul—remains and broods for, oh, a few millennia.

  In the case of an entire burial ground such as once stood on this cliff-side land, a community of sad shades broods together, creating an atmosphere that draws other melancholy shades, in turn repulsing bright spirits and helpful angels. Such a deepening vortex of depressed energy attracts outright evil energy, the personality-disordered segment of the spirit world.

  Over the next two hundred years, descendants of the original couple displayed a wide range of mental disorders: alcoholism, depression, aggression. Some of the luckier ones escaped this disturbing legacy by moving to the mainland or to other parts of the island. But certain of the ones who stayed to farm the property found themselves afflicted with bleak moods. Depression is contagious, after all. Think of an hour spent with a harsh, complaining person; even ten minutes in the company of a habitual pill can shatter our own good mood and trigger a flight response. So how much worse is it if we live with a legion of morose ghosts constantly whining and berating each other and us—even if it’s all happening on an unconscious level?

  We can only hope that as the dismal descendants of the cliff house settlers died off, many or even all of them merged into a realm of Love for the soul’s cleansing. But the stain of their ill-will, sharp tempers, and sorrow hung over the property, swooping in and out to create a searing electromagnetic held—the kind that’s strong enough to register on a ghost hunter’s EMF meter.

  In the 1860s a thirty-year-old whaling captain from New Bedford bought the land, tore down the slum of old farm shacks, and built for his beautiful nineteen-year-old bride a white clapboard Greek Revival cottage with aubergine shutters and picturesque gables. The captain went to sea for the following four years, and the young wife, although she missed him dearly, thrived in this setting. She may have sensed the surrounding sadness of the cliff side, but she had a strong character and set up an unconscious shield of light.

  In the warm months she enriched the soil to cultivate flowers and vegetables. Her favorite animals were her three dogs and one affectionate goat named Evangeline, all of whom followed her on rambles along the cliffs and beaches. In the winter she walked to the village to teach reading and arithmetic to the children. Back at home she whistled, chattered to her pets, prepared hearty stews and aromatic pies, and stenciled everywhere she could find a bare piece of wall in the cottage.

  In the years this radiant and loving woman presided over the house, the encircling sad phantoms withdrew to the edges of the property. A host of invisible guardians moved in to protect the young captain’s wife, thus building up the good geists of the land. Had the woman’s benevolent presence extended over the years and the coming generations, this cliff site might have been changed for the good. Instead, one sparkling day in September, the woman slipped on a section of the cliff eroded by a recent storm (or was she pushed?). She, Evangeline, and two of her dogs tumbled to the rocks below, and all were killed.

  When her husband returned, his bereavement deepened during the time he spent in the honeymoon house. After he shipped out again, the property lay fallow for many years.

  The negative vortex reopened.

  In 1910 the tumble-down “haunted house” on the cliffs was sold to a Boston Brahmin family who remodeled it in the new Arts & Crafts bungalow style. The father was cold and patriarchal, the mother dissatisfied and sour, the children growing into bitter people thanks to their parents’ lack of tenderness. Their few weeks spent at the cliff house should have been summer idylls, but between their own family hostilities and the spirit world’s message of menace, no one found pleasure there. At this point, flesh-and-blood beings and etheric energies were attracting heavier-duty percussions from a place of pure evil. The cliff house was openly haunted now, with dishes crashing in the night, unlit lamps combusting, and occasional gale-force winds churning through sealed rooms.

  Once a cleaning girl from the village felt herself get pushed down the stairs. She survived the accident with no more than a twisted ankle, but some months later when a weekend guest, a Harvard professor with Puritan antecedents (and a puritanical personality of his own) fell down the stairs and died of a concussion, the maid wondered if he too had been pushed. Must’a been, she thought. Too bad he hadn’t lived to speak of it. Or had he died to speak of it? After the tragedy, occupants of the house sometimes woke in the middle of the night to see the figure of a man in pajamas standing over them holding a candle and treating them to a fierce scowl.

  And so it went, right up to the present and the new six-thousand-square-foot trophy house, whose owners divorced upon its completion, and whose only child, a freshman home from Brown University, committed suicide by jumping off the cliff not far from the spot where the captain’s bride had fallen.

  Hello, fresh new demons!

  So, you see how the living and the dead are partners in making their own spot of the world into heaven or hell?

  And some locations are haunted more by the living than the dead.

  A few years back I rented a guest cottage with sloping ceilings and a pleasant view of the Oak Bluffs Harbor. With naval-grey painted subflooring, no windows to starboard and port, and downstairs bedrooms partitioned off with sheets of particle board, this rental had never been tenanted by anyone who considered it home. As a result, no one had ever stayed for more than a few months at a time. I figured I’d change all that. I’m a dab hand at decorating, so I moved in my own much-loved furniture and collection of antiques, my boon companions (a cat and a dog), and I lived happily ever after.

  Well, not exactly.

  I resided there for a full three years—a record for that cottage—but happiness eluded me. The family next door, a married couple with five kids, screeched at each other day and night. My neighbors on the other side—summer Vineyarders with grown kids and grandkids—were so unfriendly that at one point I knocked on their kitchen door and handed the husband a bouquet of flowers and a note suggesting we exchange a civil hello now and then. I’d written, “If we can’t even like our neighbors as ourselves, where is our world going?” No response.

  Even worse, the two cottages lined up directly behind me were deserted and steadily decaying into the ground, just like your classic haunted houses. Not once in three years did I see a light burning in those two dwellings.

  Sometimes I would sit alone upstairs, gazing out at the lavender glow of sunset on the harbor, and I could positively feel the aches and pains of prior tenants. The landlady had told me they’d all been drug users and other varieties of losers. It hardly helped matters that, when his children weren’t handy, the yelling dad next door picked fights with whoever lived in the guest cottage.

  Were there ghosts in my house? Sometimes late at night, reading in my bedroom below, I heard footsteps treading the overhead floorboards. It made sense that the morose beings in the vicinity had attracted a random spirit. Or could the spirit have started it all, spoiling the outlook of anyone who happened to rent this cottage? My sense of the place was that the suffering humans who lived there affected each other more than an occasional roving ghost would have done. (I must confess that sometimes I wondered if the angry man and woman next door were possessed by minor demons.)

  Bottom line: Most paranormally haunted houses aren’t nearly as haunted as the cliffside cottage described earlier. In fact, the spirits might very well have a benign influence on the living. This goes to show that, w
hile the living and the dead do indeed collaborate by contributing to the psychical pH of any given environment, human beings at their worst are more toxic than most denizens of the spirit world.

  So, what’s been assembled in the following chapters? More ghosts on this island (and in this region) than ever, some fun stuff, a hint of the path that connects the supernatural with the Divine, ghosts and people teaming up (willingly or unwillingly) in the world we share—all of it, ideally, propelling you, honored reader, on your own nascent ghost-hunting career.

  3 The Lavender Room

  December 2007. Most of the Victorian manor houses of Ocean Park had been boarded up for the season. As I studied them, their dark spires seemed to trail off into the starry skies, onyx to the east and burgundy to the west where the lights from town lightened the gloom. In the center of the park, a ring of globed lamps shone around the cold, white gazebo like the lonely moons of Jupiter. I snapped a picture centered on the gazebo, and a galaxy of tiny lights showed up on my digital playback. Ghostly orbs, or merely an out-of-control read-out of reflections from the lamps?

  You be the judge …

  I was there that evening because I had been contacted by the owner of a particular house on Ocean Park Avenue. Arlen Westbrook, who resides in the Southwest, visits the Vineyard off-season. She has owned the property since 1962, but her new husband, who is older, finds traveling increasingly difficult, so her Vineyard time is limited.

  Like many seasonal residents, Arlen has always rented her cottage to vacationers for a week here, two weeks there. Many of her tenants return year after year, even the ones who decided they enjoy a gentler holiday when they avoid the cottage’s lavender bedroom.

  I snapped nine pictures of the house on Ocean Park during my visit. Each angle disclosed a wealth of orbs of varying sizes. Some of the photographs looked as if Tinkerbell had flicked her wand to coat the house with pixie dust. I had never seen anything quite like it.

  As a test, I retraced my steps and took pictures of all the neighboring cottages; not a speck of fairy shimmers turned up on any of them, although an occasional milky white orb appeared. This was Ocean Park, after all, where spirits of the past have long been know to waft in and out.

  Arlen’s tenants had mentioned odd doings at the cottage, and she asked them to jot down their memories of events. (Interestingly, when you consider all the people who hesitate to report a ghost for fear of sounding foolish, along with the scientific types who reflexively assert, “There must be a rational explanation!” you can safely formulate this ratio: For every person who reports a ghost at a particular property, two others have also experienced a paranormal incident there, but will never tell).

  One of Arlen’s tenants, a young man who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote about an experience from a few years back:

  My girlfriend was not too happy with me, so I had taken up residence in the lavender room. I woke up with the weird feeling that someone else was in the room. I looked toward the window and saw what looked like a small figure—a girl, probably on the younger side. She just sat there looking down at the floor. I believe she had light-colored hair, probably blond. I think she was wearing a light blue or purple shirt. I thought it was my girlfriend, and decided to ignore her, as she was mad at me, so I went back to sleep. In the morning I asked her why she’d come into my room and sat there. She told me I was crazy, and that she had never entered the room that night. I’m sure I saw something, and if it wasn’t her then … I don’t know.

  The second witness to the ghost in the lavender room was a woman who recalled several peculiar occurrences:

  My friend and I had been renting the house on Ocean Park since 1984. My friend slept in the big bedroom to the right of the stairs. I slept in the bedroom over to the left.

  One night in the summer of 1992 I awoke and saw a woman in a wheelchair sitting at the foot of the bed. She looked like a real person, not a form made of mist. The wheelchair was old-fashioned with a caned back, and it looked as if the shadow of a man stood behind it, though I couldn’t see any detail. I remember telling myself to look at the clock on the night-stand to see what time it was. It was 1:11 a.m. The woman looked to be in her seventies, had chin-length bobbed yellow-white hair, and wore a long-sleeved black dress. I felt she was very angry at me for being there in the room. She wanted me out. I felt threatened.

  She kept staring at me. She slowly lifted her skirt above her knees to show me her lower legs. They were chalk white, with golf-ball-sized lumps all over them, like some sort of calcification under the skin.

  Through it all she just kept staring at me. I was too shocked to move and run to wake up my friend because the lady was blocking my getaway. I would have to go past or “through” her to get to the door. I was too scared to call out or say anything. So I turned around in bed, got on my knees, buried my face in my pillow, and prayed for the woman to disappear. I didn’t look back to see if she had.

  I awoke in the morning in the same position, on my knees with my face in the pillow.

  After that I never slept in the lavender room again. And I never really liked being upstairs alone. In the following years we would talk to the ghost and tell her we were back, and we often closed the door to her room at night to leave her in peace.

  The next summer on Ocean Park, we brought a Ouija board to see if we could contact the ghost. We asked who she was, and if we could contact her. All that was spelled out was “tktk tk tk.”

  Several years later, we again rented the house on Ocean Park. Soon after we arrived, a group of women showed up, believing they had reserved the cottage that week. We didn’t have our lease with us, and one woman in the group became upset because she was convinced the house was hers. The atmosphere became very confrontational, with the same woman suggesting we let them stay there too, since there were lots of beds in the house. [Author’s note: Our two protagonists should have put the entire group in the lavender room!]

  We reached Arlen by phone and got the matter straightened out: my friend and I did indeed have the cottage for the week. We helped the other vacationers rent a vacant condo in the Tucker House, also on Ocean Park. We offered to lend them some extra blankets from our house. I went upstairs to the lavender room and took some blankets from the cabinet over the bed. As I started down the stairs, I felt two hands shove my back. I lost my balance and fell forward down the stairs. My friend was at the bottom and saw me fall. One foot took the brunt of it. The whole occurrence was so weird, I took a picture of my foot. It was black and blue, especially my big toe.

  I felt that, at the time this happened, a lot of “bad vibes” had been stirred up in the house by the mix-up with the women. And maybe the ghost wasn’t happy that I violated our agreement to stay out of her room.

  In the summer of 2004, my sister came to stay with me at the house. She had been told about the ghost and, driven by curiosity, made a choice to sleep in the lavender room. I was sleeping in the big room across the hall when I heard a loud BAM! from the other room. I dashed into the room to find that, as she slept, my sister’s arm had smashed hard against the wall. It frightened both of us, but the next day my sister suggested that perhaps she’d had an accident from tossing and turning in her sleep.

  Many people ask my friend and me why we keep returning to the cottage. It’s been our traditional vacation spot for many years. We love the house and have enjoyed grand times there, with many rich memories. And we haven’t minded being respectful of whoever else might be staying there with us!

  This intrepid tenant showed tremendous grace and good sportsmanship by ceding the bedroom over to the fuming ghost who—to give her her due—undoubtedly had no idea what this interloper was doing in her bed.

  So how did the lavender room at an undisclosed location on Ocean Park become so packed with proprietary interest from the Other Side?

  The lovely old cottage has housed its share of joys and sorrows. The house was constructed in the late 1860s after the Oak Bluffs Land and Wharf company
sold the small lots on the grand park to affluent homeowners. A series of socially prominent families owned the cottage—the Reads, the Bur-roughses, the Sanbornes, the Bodfishes—though none of them held the deed for more than a few years. And none of the women in these families matches the description of the mad-as-hell apparition in the wheelchair, although, as I’ve pointed out before, any one of their spirits may also float through the house from time to time, driven by whatever small wedge of their psyches retains some nostalgia for the place.

  Then we come to Harrah and Irene Bennett, who bought the cottage in 1925. Harrah was a popular Providence radio personality known as Uncle Red. The Bennetts spent many summers in the cottage and eventually moved in year-round. (The mountain of coal Arlen and her husband found in the basement when they bought the property attested to this.)

  Bizarrely enough, in March of 1957 both Harrah and Irene fell seriously ill—from different ailments—at the same time. According to a Vineyard Gazette newspaper clipping, a son-in-law arrived from far away to deal with the joint crisis. In the handful of articles about the Bennetts, the usual requirement for a son-in-law, i.e., a daughter, is never mentioned, not even in the Bennetts’ respective obituaries, which describe them as being “without heirs.” As so often happens when we begin to delve for historical data, it’s the absence of information that suggests a secret woe.

  The no-longer-broadcasting Uncle Red died in 1958. Irene, after a long, debilitating illness in a Vineyard Haven nursing home, passed on in 1962, the year Arlen and Perry Westbrook acquired the cottage. If the ghost of Irene Bennett made an initial pass at her lavender bedroom instead of venturing forth to the Great Beyond, she might have begun a long period of discouragement to find it frequently occupied.