Vineyard Supernatural

by Holly Nadler

  I padded downstairs in my pajamas and slippers, unlocked the rear office door, and let myself into the bookstore. At night I keep a ring of small lamps with floral, opaque glass shades lit to serve as night lights. The bookstore walls are framboise red, and the bookcases are antique or distressed to look reasonably old. In this low-lit, cozy setting, an unexpected track of music greeted me.

  It was Tchaikovsky’s Nocturne in F, the first piece on the first CD of the world’s most relaxing classical music. The one I’d been listening to for three days straight, but not on this day, not this evening. Yet here it was; the air was filled with Tchaikovsky’s fairy-light, tinkling piano melody.

  This was so like a supernatural event that had startled me nearly four decades ago—when a deceased friend changed the record on my phonograph from Scott Joplin to James Taylor—that I identified it and accepted it immediately for the otherworldly hello that it was.

  In stark contrast to the long-ago night when an apparent ghost’s hand on a phonograph had frightened me from my house, never to return except to collect my belongings, this time I stepped into the room and let Tchaikovsky’s chords surround me like a cashmere shawl. During a paranormal event such as this one, you can’t point to a particular departed soul with one hundred percent certainty, yet I was convinced this was surely another visit from Steve.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. As the Nocturne played, I drifted over to a cafe table facing the length of the store. I propped my elbows on the table, chin in my hands, and listened to the music, as rapt as if a live pianist performed for me alone.

  The music ended. I tried to remember what came next on deck. Was it Bach? Pachelbel? A long silence ensued, longer, I thought, than the normal interval between tracks. And then a new piece of music struck up with its own signature frenzy. It was the Valse Brillante. From the Chopin CD.

  I burst out laughing, dragged over the stepladder, and shut down the music for the night.

  The haunting tapered off after that. It will be interesting to see if Steve has paid his regards in full and made his way to the next part of his journey—a journey that doesn’t include me, at least not for now. But I really won’t mind if I continue to have this interesting figure as my good ghost friend.

  11 Random Ghosts II

  Accidents like this shouldn’t happen. That is, we decline to waste time worrying that this particular misfortune will befall us. We worry about such things as slipping in the tub, or having a truck plow into us, or getting electrocuted while prying a mangled bagel from the toaster.

  We have no concerns, however, about being struck by lightning indoors with all the windows closed.

  In December 1851, Mrs. Elwina Norris, a whaling captain’s widow, invited some lady friends for afternoon tea at her home at the corner of Main and Spring streets in Vineyard Haven—the corner where Mardell’s card and gift store has stood for decades.

  It was a cloudy day, but not even a drizzle had dampened the ground when Mrs. Norris’s friends gathered in the front parlor around the festive table strewn with teapot and padded cozy, dainty bone china cups, pongee-silk napkins, and a three-tiered platter of cookies and little sandwiches.

  A fire blazed and crackled in the hearth. When it showed signs of burning low, Mrs. Norris tinkled a bell and her new “girl,” a month off the boat from Ireland, appeared to feed a fresh chunk of wood to the coals. Conversation centered on gossip and town doings. If anything critical had happened anywhere else in the world—or even across Vineyard Sound—no one spoke of it or even knew about it.

  In the distance, far beyond the lace-curtained windows facing the harbor, an occasional boom of thunder made itself known. The women paused, teacups halfway to their lips, pinky fingers extended as they’d seen in the pages of Ladies’ Home Journal, and then the chatter started anew.

  Presently, strong winds rattled the shutters and shook the house. The afternoon grew preternaturally dark. Mrs. Norris assured the ladies they were welcome to shelter in the house as long as they needed to. “The girl can always fix up beds for you. And we have a lamb roast planned for this evening.”

  The tea-party guests nodded and chuckled. This sleep-over sounded more amusing than returning to their homes, with all the attendant obligations. As they entertained this notion, a fireworks display of lightning flared in the northeast-facing windows. And as always happens when lightning strikes so close, a Vulcan-sized burst of thunder slammed into the house, shaking the floors and the ladies’ chairs. Shrieks and nervous laughter followed.

  “Thank goodness lightning never strikes twice,” said Mrs. Norris. “And that, my dears, is scientific fact.”

  Famous last words.

  In the next moment, the flames in the fireplace were drawn upward in a shower of sparks, as if the chimney were inhaling. Then, instantaneous with a cannonball of thunder, a rush of static propelled itself out of the fireplace. The guests watched in horror and amazement as a spear of lighting, bright as molten yellow-white lava, shot out of the chimney, struck Mrs. Norris in the ear, then fired up through the top of her head in a geyser of sparks, the trajectory of the lightning shaped like a check mark through the woman’s head. Her tea cup and plate clattered to the floor.

  She died seated in her chair. Her neck was scorched, but her face was untouched.

  Coincidentally, at what was reckoned to be the very same moment—or close to it—diagonally across the street, in a stable that has long been the site of a shop called Bowl ’n Board, a painter named Francis Nye, Jr., was also struck by lightning and killed on the spot. This strangely homicidal pair of lightning bolts still has meteorologists scratching their heads. Lightning bolts are often branched, so it could have been a single event. Still, it was very odd that one bolt would kill two victims separated by a distance of fifty yards.

  Historians chalk up this story to the ferocity of storms in earlier days. No modern-day squalls come close to that afternoon tempest of a century and a half ago, despite hints that global warming may already be leading to stronger storm systems. Meteorological trends notwithstanding, those of us whose eyes widen at any hint of the supernatural have to ask ourselves whether that storm of 1851 had fantastical dimensions, particularly after perusing the Vineyard Gazette’s description of the horror: “The cloud from which the electrical fluid was discharged, hung directly over Holmes Hole for twenty or thirty minutes, during which time there was an almost uninterrupted flash of lightning and roar of thunder. The scene was frightful and appalling, and made the stoutest hearts to quail.”

  Could it happen again?

  The widow Norris said it could not.

  I rest my case.

  A couple of weeks into my ghost-walk tours of 2007, I bought a new lantern. Kerosene lanterns had been part of my schtick since I started the nighttime walks in 1993. They last a long time, shed a beautiful light, and put us in mind of ghost-hunters (and ghost victims) past. Also in the lanterns’ favor, they haven’t once caught my skirt on fire, an eventuality that people who know me and my Calamity Jane tendencies will swear is bound to happen.

  The new lantern was larger than the ones that had come before it—about the size of a twelve-cup coffeemaker. The first night I used it on my Vineyard Haven tour, I found the wick needed constant adjustment. Sometimes the flame flared too high; other times it diminished to the point of going out. I did not blame this on any paranormal activity. The lantern was obviously a faulty product that would need to be replaced.

  At one point in my Vineyard Haven walk I have the group pause outside the oldest house—quite plain and in need of a fresh paint job—on a rutted dirt road known as Cromwell Avenue. Due to its choice location near the harbor, this lane was once the thriving commercial strip of old Holmes Hole. Imagine a town out of Pirates of the Caribbean, with taverns, ships’ chandleries, sailors with cards in hand draped around barrels, and horses and wagons trundling past at all hours of the day and night.

  Nowadays, the only shop overlooking the unpaved Cromwell Lane is
the oh-so-tasteful and expensive Midnight Farm, a housewares and apparel shop co-owned by Carly Simon. The rest of the dusty half-block is quiet and dark. The scariest sight a stroller would be likely to encounter is the occasional skunk rooting in someone’s trash bin—though one evening that same summer we were startled to see a naked man in the window of his apartment over Ripley’s Reads, a children’s bookstore terraced high above Cromwell Avenue. He gazed out at the twenty or so people in my ghost walk group, then slowly pulled his drapes closed.

  It was at this spot (though not on the Naked Man Night) that someone asked me whether I believe in demonic possession. If I’d had a chance to answer, I would have said, hedging my bets, “I do, but in my opinion the phenomenon is rare.” My response was cut off, however, because at that exact instant a fireball erupted in my new lantern. It looked for a moment as if it might shatter the glass. I almost dropped the lantern. Instead, my instinct for thrift took over (I’d just shelled out twenty bucks for the contraption, after all) and I spun the wick control all the way down. The fireball vanished, leaving black smudges on the glass.

  Then it was impossible to relight the lantern. I tried it with other people cradling it. I held it while other people flicked their lighters. Those able men who love rescue remedies took a turn with it. The wick refused to let a single flame be coaxed from it.

  We finished the walk in darkness, a particularly stressful circumstance during our final tramp through the ancient cemetery situated in the heart of town. Leading the way, I tread carefully in the dark, but I took a header over one of those foot-high gravestones. I’d like to say a ghost pushed me, but I knew this was more of an example of the I Love Lucy factor in my life.

  For the Edgartown tour a few days later, I managed to relight the lantern. Once again, the wick required constant fiddling. And another fireball was in the offing.

  You’ll recall that the first fireball occurred as the key words demonic possession were uttered. The second was activated when I stood on the steps of the Federated Church on South Summer Street and described a minister who preached hellfire and brimstone sermons. Yes, it was on hellfire and brimstone that the lantern got jiggy again. This time, it happened earlier in the tour (about 8:15), so enough light remained for all of us to see a cloud of black smoke billowing out through the perforated metal top.

  “I’m going to bury this haunted lantern at the crossroads at midnight,” I joked nervously.

  That turned out to be unnecessary: I returned the lantern to the hardware store and received a new model that worked perfectly for the rest of the summer.

  “Come on, honey, show her that bizarro picture.”

  It was the start of my Ghosts of Edgartown walking tour one July day in 2007. I’d just gathered together my group of twenty or so people, among them an outgoing mom and her fifteen-year-old daughter. The girl had a moon-shaped face and a typically sullen adolescent disposition, which kept her forehead furrowed and her mouth puckered. This seemed like a classic mother/teenager outing: daughter had been willing to join mom on a ghost-hunting tour, but their “togetherness” was maintained by the teen keeping a twenty-foot distance.

  As we descended the wooden steps of Edgartown Books, the mother prompted again over the bobbing heads, “Sweetie, show the lady your picture! She’ll love it!”

  The girl shook her head in vigorous refusal.

  And so the hour unfolded as we visited sites of apparent hauntings, including my favorite: the six late-seventeenth-century Mayhew gravestones standing a mere twenty feet back from the sidewalk, surrounded by roses and hydrangeas—just your average Edgartown front yard. The evening softened as antique lamps twinkled on inside the quaint captains’ houses. (I’ve always thought that even without the ghost stories, a stroll through nighttime Edgartown weaves an inexorable spell of enchantment.)

  At the end of the walk, when I deposited my guests on the upper terrace of Memorial Wharf overlooking the harbor and the dark shores of Chappy, I noticed that mother and daughter had drawn together.

  In a voice that had lost its pushiness (now that she and her child enjoyed a tempotary truce), the mother said, “Can you show her your picture now?”

  The girl had her cell phone ready for display in her hand. She held up a digital photo a friend had snapped of her an hour and a half earlier as they finished dinner at a cafe called The Newes of America, operating in the Kelley Hotel right in the heart of town. The hotel has long been said to be haunted—something about a man hanging himself on the third floor and a spectral lady who materializes in the laundry room. The management of the cafe, a brick enclave in the oldest part of the building, is so aware of the hotel’s reputation for ghosts that it runs an article about them on its menu: “Would you like a ghoul’s appearance along with that quesadilla?”

  The sullen teen’s face filled the screen, and she hadn’t bothered to dignify the picture with even a wan smile. I recognized the ancient brick wall behind her that gives The Newes its charm, but what I didn’t—couldn’t—recognize was the powdery white face peering over the subject’s shoulder.

  Every so often I’ll encounter some element of the supernatural that seems more Hollywood than “real” (if the skeptics among you will allow me to use that term). When children on my walking tours ask me if my ghost stories are scary, I try to make the distinction between a skeleton wielding a scimitar in a movie and the different but equally frightening image of a figure looming in an upstairs window when you know for a fact no one is home.

  This face in the girl’s cell phone photo was of the Hollywood variety while, at the same time being absolutely, or so it appeared, real. The features bore that mummified look of layers of half-decomposed wrappings. The eyes were small, dark, and without life or soul. The face had no more animation than a mask, but, if this was a mask, it lacked any aesthetic or ornamental value.

  I stared a long time at the image, then, handing the camera back to the girl, I said, “I don’t know who or what this is, but it’s the freakiest thing I’ve ever seen step into a picture.”

  She rewarded me at last with a genuine smile.

  Nothing seems amiss—from a paranormal perspective—about the Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs. This grey-shingled bastion of Sunday worship, concerts, and lectures has stood for nearly a century and a half on a rise just to your left as you clear the long commercial block of Circuit Avenue.

  The Union Chapel is so much a part of our summer cultural scene that we often take it for granted. But if you stand back and train a fresh eye on the structure, you end up renewing your sense of awe at its grandeur and originality.

  A major architect of the nineteenth century, S. F. Pratt, who seemed to take much of his inspiration from sixteenth-century Parisian buildings, Loire Valley chateaux, and, closer to home, Newport mansions, designed the Union Chapel with almost reckless flair. At the tippy-top of the already interestingly shaped octagonal building, a six-sided crown of triangular dormers, dominated by a cone-shaped ninety-six-foot spire, gives the look of an origami construction made solid. And as if one sky-piercing spire were not enough, Pratt added an ornate bell tower, thrusting up alongside the western doors. This tower, unhappily, sheered off and smashed to pieces during the Big Blow of 1933.

  At the chapel’s ground-floor level, four vaulted double-door entrances face out in each compass direction. The original shingles of the roofline were banded with cream and burgundy stripes, the intricate motif repeated on the long-lost bell tower.

  Oak Bluffs (formerly Cottage City) is still recovering architecturally from the blowback of most of the twentieth century, when arbiters of taste decreed that Victorian design was as silly as beribboned poodles. That was the time of the dismantling of towers, bay windows, gingerbread trim, and every other species of “frippery.” If these design Nazis could have run completely amok (and they very nearly did), they would have flattened the sloping rooflines, dormers, gables, and verandas of every house built from the 1860s to the 1890s.

  During the
last four decades, devotees of Victorian design have been putting it all back. Perhaps one day the Union Chapel will be completely reconstituted, up to and including the cream and burgundy stripes and the bell tower.

  The fancy-pants church went up in 1871. A little-known fact at that time—or at this time, for that matter—was that the project was sponsored not by a pious church group but by the area’s most aggressive developer, the Oak Bluffs Land and Wharf Company.

  The investors urgently needed to prove to the denizens of the Methodist Campground that the secular developments springing up on every side of their sacred site were intended for churchgoing homeowners. It’s difficult to grasp today how the Campground Association could have seemed so intimidating, but clearly that group of tough businessmen felt their livelihood depended on raising, of all things, a church.

  Yes, the Methodists were concerned that they were outnumbered by the heathens. In response to the depraved town springing up all around them (well, there were illegal saloons, noisy amusements such as a dance hall and a skating rink, and even a house of ill repute), the camp meeting folks erected a seven-foot fence clear around their twenty acres. They even threatened to move lock, stock, and Bible to another parcel of land they had purchased in East Chop. If that failed to protect them from the stain of secularism, they planned to pack up lock, stock, Bible, and cottage, and decamp to a wilderness area in Maine.

  This would have dealt hurtful PR to the investors (“DEVELOPERS DRIVE CHURCH GROUP OFF ISLAND”). Bad idea, considering that the Methodists’ White City had always constituted the big draw for summer visitors to Cottage City.

  But now the developers could point to the Union Chapel and say, “Ta-dah! A house of worship! Christian! We’ve got it all right here!”