Vineyard Supernatural

by Holly Nadler

  I would recommend that he devote the next chunk of his life to laughing. He would really need to work at it, but I honestly think that after an hour of guffaws, this morose man would feel a change.

  And the bonus is that nasty ghosts don’t like laughter. They don’t get it. It annoys them, and, quite speedily, they leave. Or else they too learn to laugh and are cured of their own dark tendencies.

  I was reminded of an interview I had with Candace Duark* of Chilmark for a chapter in Haunted Island. She’d told me about an experience she had, back in the 1970s, in an old hunting lodge in Vermont. She and her friends who shared the house all had a sense, whenever they bent their heads to a task, of a man standing over them with an ax held high, ready to strike. She found out that the lodge had once been owned by a lumberjack who’d killed his wife and children. A psychic told Candace and her group to cure the phantom of his guilt and dementia by making him laugh. For weeks they told jokes, held wine-tasting revelries, acted goofy, and told more jokes until they were rolling on the floor. “We made him laugh,” said Candace, “And then one day his presence vanished from the cottage.”

  So there you have it—the ultimate exorcism: Throw out the holy water, don’t bother to call a priest, just laugh out loud!

  8 Little Girl Lost

  Iheard a man’s voice over the phone asking if I was the woman who conducted ghost research on the Vineyard. It made me sound as if I went about in a white lab coat, pouring beakers of ectoplasm into petri dishes, but I answered in the affirmative.

  He sighed. A long pause ensued. I thought he might hang up.

  Finally he said, “I never believed in ghosts before. I never believed in anything other than the power of science to explain everything. But now …” Another sigh. Another pause. “My wife and I and our two children have just come back from a Vineyard vacation in a house so … so possessed, that it’s going to be a long while before we rent a place on the island again.”

  Michael,* a businessman from Coventry, Rhode Island, in his early thirties, proceeded to tell me the following story.

  Michael, his wife, Gayle,* and their eight-year-old daughter and five-year-old son rented a four-bedroom cottage for two weeks in July 2004. The 125-year-old Victorian sat on Tuckernuck Avenue, one of the countless streets in Oak Bluffs lined with nineteenth-century houses.

  The cottage they stayed in had been purchased a couple of years before by three New York firemen looking for a good investment. One of the new owners told Michael over the phone, “The place was a shambles. You could sit in the living room and see cracks of daylight coming through the walls. They call those old cottages ‘Victorian gems,’ but if they’re allowed to sit and fester, they turn into Victorian mushrooms.”

  The firemen hired a local contractor, but had also come to the island themselves on weekends to work on the project. “I’ve wondered ever since if anything weird happened to the firemen,” Michael speculated as he told me about his family’s stay in the house. “I mean, did they already know the cottage was straight out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show?”

  The Rhode Island couple found the cottage adorable at first glance. The sloping roof lines, upstairs dormers, and old-fashioned layout (including “railroad” bedrooms upstairs, where one room opens directly into the next) had been preserved, but fresh beaded-pine paneling covered the inside walls, and new beige shingles covered the exterior walls. New windows (in a traditional style), and freshly painted cedar trim provided a clean and snappy look.

  “The kids spent the first hour racing up and down the stairs,” Michael recalled. “In a downstairs closet they discovered a box of antique children’s toys—you know, a toy horse, a couple of old dolls, pick-up sticks, carved wooden cowboys and Indians. We figured the toys had come with the house, because the firemen didn’t seem to be into antiques—the furnishings are modern and basic. The kids played with that stuff like they’d never been given a Nintendo DS.”

  The first night the family strolled into town for pizza at Giordano’s, then ice cream down on the docks, followed by a ride on the Flying Horses (the oldest operating carousel in the country) to finish a busy day. “We know how to tire our kids out for an early bedtime,” quipped Michael.

  Half an hour later, the children were bedded down in two small upstairs rooms with a communicating door open between them. Michael and Gayle settled themselves into the living room downstairs and cracked open some books they’d brought to read. Within half an hour, though, they too became drowsy, and tiptoed up the stairs to their bedroom at the front of the house.

  Husband and wife drifted off to sleep, only to be awakened a short while later by the sound of children hooting and laughing maniacally and bounding up and down the wooden staircase.

  Michael shouted, “GET BACK IN BED!”

  The cacophony continued.

  The couple, sitting bolt upright, stared at one another in confusion. Their kids had never misbehaved so boisterously before. Michael got out of bed and hollered through the open door. Crash! bang! More thuds up the stairs. A series of snide giggles, sounding strangely amplified, rent the air.

  Leaning through the bedroom doorway, Michael could glimpse the top of the staircase. There was no sign of even one marauding child. All sounds from the stairwell had ceased. Totally mystified, he made his way across the narrow corridor to the half-closed door of his daughter’s room and craned his head around the door. By the soft glow of the night light that his daughter had insisted they leave on, he could see his child sound asleep, her slender arm wrapped around one of the antique dolls they had discovered earlier in the day. Michael drifted through the room just far enough to peek through the connecting doorway into his son’s room. The boy, too, lay sleeping.

  From the stairwell, the sound of galloping footsteps and whoops of laughter exploded behind him again.

  Michael turned and dashed back to the second-floor landing. Once more, all noises ceased as he stared down the narrow staircase leading to the shadows of the foyer.

  When he returned to bed, he asked his wife, “Did we bring along some kids we forgot about?”

  The cottage on Tuckernuck remained quiet for the rest of the night.

  The following day, Michael and Gayle occasionally shot one another a searching glance, but mostly they forgot about the events of the previous evening and went about having a fun vacation.

  “It was a little like the shock of hearing about a death,” Michael said, “The first step is denial. We were in denial that day.”

  Back at home after many hours at the beach, Michael barbecued chicken on the grill, and Gayle prepared a rice dish and a salad. “We thought slices of watermelon would pass as a real dessert, but after that the kids pleaded for a walk into town to get ice cream.”

  Gail had brought up a Parcheesi game, and that engrossed the family for the next hour and a half. The long July evening finally succumbed to darkness. Shadows filled the house, but the foursome felt too satisfied and relaxed to get up and switch on the lights.

  On the east side of a house, a single thump sounded, as if a drunken giant had come to call, knocked once, then passed out. The family members looked at one another in surprise. Moments later another hard, hollow thump hit the house, this one coming from a wall closer to the street. Only a moment later, another one landed on the west front corner of the house, as if whoever was doing the pounding had jumped the length of the thirty-foot porch in a single bound. Thump after thump completed a circuit of the house. Another round ensued, this one faster.

  Michael told his wife and kids to stay seated as he leapt up and flew to the west windows of the dining room in time, he thought, to catch the perpetrator jogging around the bend. A loud whack landed on the left side of the window, then another on the right as he watched, but no visible figure slipped past the glass.

  On the final circuit, the poundings whipped around the house with the speed of an automatic weapon firing across wall after wall.

  Then all was quiet. That is, un
til Michael’s daughter piped up, “What was that, Daddy?”

  After a long cogitating pause, Michael said, “I don’t know. Maybe the plumbing system kicked on.”

  He’d almost convinced himself.

  To Michael’s relief, the insane pounding on the exterior walls never repeated itself, but the sound of children romping up and down the stairs was a nightly feature. His own two kids, mercifully, always slept through the din. It never ceased to jar Michael and Gayle awake, but they’d taken to rolling their pillows over their ears and tucking back into dreamland.

  On the second-to-last day of their vacation, Michael called his business partner back in Rhode Island for their daily morning debriefing. Before they hung up, his partner observed, “Something you should know, man. Have you ever noticed my neurotic habit of staring at my cell phone after I’ve hung up? I always make sure the call’s finished, and no more seconds are being charged. Well, every time you and I say ‘over and out,’ I see that the call is ongoing. Lately I’ve held the phone to my ear, and I can hear this little girl babbling away. I know it can’t be your daughter, because you wouldn’t hand your cell to her after a business call. You’re just not that big of a goofball.”

  “What’s the girl saying?” asked Michael uneasily.

  “I can’t tell, but she’s yammering away like she’s playing with a litter of cocker spaniel puppies.”

  Michael decided not to mention this to Gayle.

  On the family’s last morning in the house, they spent the time tidying up. Gayle made sure the kids put all the antique dolls and toys back in the box and returned it to the downstairs closet. Finally, with the car packed up and ready to go, the children buckled into the back seat, Gayle riding shotgun, Michael decided they needed a memento snapshot of the house. He dug his camera out of his rucksack and squeezed off a photograph of the cottage in late-morning light.

  When the prints came back from his local camera store the following week, Michael gave a start when he came to the photo of his rental house. Perfectly centered in the front parlor window was the image of a little girl, staring out as if wondering where her companions were going—and why they weren’t taking her with them.

  9 Shipwreck

  I’m often asked whether objects can be impregnated with ghostly material. This question arose, for instance, when an antiques dealer in Edgartown learned she’d acquired a cabinet from a house that she later heard is home to a gaggle of ghosts. Could the haunting carry over to the piece of furniture? she asked me. My answer was hardly reassuring: Possibly—she or whoever purchased it would need to wait and see.

  “How would we know?”

  “Well, unless you slept overnight in the store, you’d have a hard time knowing. Usually what happens is that someone takes the item home and discovers his or her nights are no longer restful.”

  “How so?” she asked in a quavery voice.

  “Most commonly you’ll get thumps and bumps on the walls as if someone’s bouncing a ball. You might find windows standing wide open that you know you closed and locked the night before. You might hear a disembodied voice sobbing or sighing as if searching for a lost item, things like that.”

  “Oh, God!” she groaned. “Should I tell a prospective buyer?”

  “That’s an ethical question,” I said, having experienced the same dilemma back in the ‘90s when I negotiated vacation rentals and knew in advance—thanks to my ghost research—which houses had skeletons in the closet, so to speak. “Why don’t you first see how the cabinet does in the shop? When you open up in the morning, check to see if things are moved around. Any china smashed? Framed pictures removed from hooks and placed, picture-side facing down, on the floor or leaning against the base of the wall?”

  The subject reminded me of a valuable piece of flotsam taken from the wreck of a 275-foot luxury steamer, the City of Columbus, after it smashed up on Devil’s Bridge off the cliffs of Aquinnah on January 18, 1884.

  All shipwrecks are tragic, inevitable (in that the sea will always rise up and take its toll), and vicariously thrilling and frightening to every single one of us. The wreck of the City of Columbus was just a little bit more so. To read about the Vineyard’s most notorious shipping disaster is to feel your chest compress with silent weeping.

  On a clear night with a chill northwesterly wind, the vessel left Boston with forty-five crewmen and eighty-seven passengers aboard, headed for the warmer climes of Savannah and points still farther south. Captain E. E. Wright had piloted this ship and others countless times through the most treacherous part of western Vineyard Sound. His course should have taken him through that difficult passage, with Tarpaulin Cove to starboard and the Gay Head cliffs to port. Extending out from the cliffs is a one-square-mile stretch of underwater boulders known as Devil’s Bridge, and that is where the City of Columbus came to grief.

  Even scrupulous investigation failed to explain why the vessel veered so devastatingly off course, but the key factors were these: Captain Wright dozed off in the pilot house with the windows closed; the quartermaster at the wheel was experienced but unlicensed; the second mate, delegated to carry out the captain’s orders—”When Tarpaulin Cove bears north, go west-southwest”—either forgot to pass along the coordinates, or the quartermaster spaced out upon delivery.

  As the vessel took its first horrendous hit against one of the unseen boulders, Captain Wright was jolted awake. Springing from the pilot house, he ordered a reverse-thrust maneuver, which only served to wedge the ship more soundly into the rocks. Water gushed aboard. Immense waves battered the hull. The boat listed, and anyone who could—all of them men—shimmied up the ratlines and into the rigging to hang themselves out to freeze while they waited for help.

  No attempt was made to save women and children, and all of them perished. Within twenty-four hours of sailing, seventy-five passengers and twenty-eight crewmen were dead.

  At daybreak, residents of Gay Head observed the wrecked ship on Devil’s Bridge, and many brave lads set out in lifeboats to rescue the handful of survivors clinging to the masts.

  First let it be said that, in the wake of any maritime disaster on these shores, Vineyard men have never hesitated to jump into the flimsiest boat and haul off to rescue any survivors. Scores of hardy island men have received medals and other honors for their valor and fearlessness.

  But after the bodies were counted, there was always a second reason why islanders were so quick to respond to a wreck: Lots of great stuff would wash ashore! There’s an old adage in Aquinnah (formerly Gay Head) that, at first light, all eyes turn to the western shoreline, for this is where all the booty floating in from the vast Atlantic is bound to tumble in with the tide.

  City of Columbus, with its plush cabins, Gilded Age public rooms, and kitchen stocked for affluent diners, sent Gay Headers a wealth of belated Christmas treats: hundreds of tubs of butter (which the tax revenue bureaucrats tried to collect), upholstered chairs, paintings, dishes, clothes, jewelry, silverware, even quarterboards with the ship’s name embossed, one of which is housed today in the maritime museum at Mystic, Connecticut.

  George A. Hough, Jr., author of Disaster on Devil’s Bridge (Marine Historical Association, 1963), wrote about his family’s summer neighbor, Mr. Rogers, who owned a humble cabin on the north shore of the Vineyard: “Over the doorway to the seldom used parlor was an oval tablet of porcelain. It was fancily lettered in faded rose and black: Social Hall. Turned out, Mr. Rogers himself had pried it from the wreck of City of Columbus, right after it was tossed up on the beach.”

  We can only imagine how many up-island homes still house a relic or two from that catastrophic night. Did all these pieces carry a psychic imprint of that fateful event? A remnant of the despair felt by a frozen sailor as he hung in the rigging as intervals of blackness, then stark light each time the beam from the Gay Head lighthouse trapped him in its glare? An echo of the screams from the panic-stricken woman whose dress was caught in a heavy metal door below decks? Of the horrifie
d young mother found dead with her lost baby’s booties ice-soldered to her skirt?

  I would hazard a guess that almost all the islanders who can point to a piece of bric-a-brac and say, “This if from the wreck of the City of Columbus” have also experienced certain problems in their homes.

  I know of one person in particular …

  The woman was tall and thin in that lanky, rangy way that is typical of so many Yankee women, thanks to their gene pool and to years of outdoor exercise—tennis, bicycling, and swimming, in this woman’s case. She was roughly sixty-five years of age and had inherited a quaint Chilmark homestead with views of Stonewall Beach and Menemsha Pond. I met her at an art opening at the Red Barn gallery. In those days, back in the early ‘80s, the gallery was owned by a delightful pair of art dealers and antiquarians named Bruce and Brandy.

  When our conversation worked around to the subject of hauntings, she told me, “My farmhouse has always been full of creaks and ghosties that go bump in the night, but it’s gotten worse lately. And I think this condition of ‘worse’ started when I moved a particular chair from the dining room to the sunroom. I needed to air out the chair. The truth of the matter is, it had begun to stink!”

  The offending piece of furniture was a red-plush upholstered parlor chair from the City of Columbus. “My father bought it for forty dollars from a Gay Head native who had four of the darn things and wanted to furnish his house in Danish modern,” she explained. “We used to say Dad should have bought the whole set while he had the chance, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “What’s the smell like?” I asked.

  “Oh, just an old chair smell—mildew, rot. Frankly, it looks like hell, but I do realize it’s a museum piece, so I’ve resisted having it refinished or reupholstered.”

  But it wasn’t the chair’s gamey odor that bothered her most. It was its effect on the cottage itself.