by Holly Nadler
Several years later the developers quietly sold the chapel to a Christian association, and no one was the wiser about its original dollars-and-cents origins. (You won’t find this tidbit in any of the old or more recent newspapers, nor in any of our island history books. I came across the info at the Gazette archives in a typed letter from Ellen Weiss, author of Ciry in the Woods [Oxford University Press, 1987], buried in a pile of clippings about the Union Chapel.)
Which brings us to the haunted nature of this Victorian valentine of a chapel.
As I’ve always maintained, the untold stories—the stupidly withheld secrets—which are harder to pry loose from the past than coffin lids from perma-sealed caskets, are what cause the negative vortices to flourish in psychic fields.
We know how obsessive-compulsive people are hard to take in the human dimension. Just imagine the same mental disorder in a group of discarnate souls desperate to make a single point: “If someone would just get this story straight, we could pack up and get some Afterlife psychotherapy!” I believe some depraved cleric/enforcer of the long-ago Methodist camp meeting crew is still incensed at the venal genesis of the Union Chapel. Perhaps it’s the spirit of the Reverend Hatfield, who organized vigilantes to root out booze from Cottage City hotels. Maybe it’s Campground trustee Andrew Dixon White—academic, theologian, and president of Cornell University—who wrote fiery letters to the editor, accusing the town of “blasphemy and eroticism,” and became apoplectic when he spied Methodist teens skating to the organ strains of Nearer My God to Thee. The religious conflict and paranoia in Cottage City spawned enough fanatics to stock a new round of Salem witch trials. One of those fanatics, in spectral form, appears to hover over the Union Chapel to this day.
How do I know the chapel houses a mad-as-hell minister ghost? Instead of answering directly, I’m going to propose a field trip: Grab your camera and walk around to the east exterior wall of the building. (I always think of it as the dark side.) Snap some pictures of the tall pair of windows on this segment of the octagon. If it’s the off-season and the porch lights are extinguished, take pictures of the high double doors facing in the direction of Ocean Park.
If your camera is digital, you can, of course, examine your images immediately. If you use film, you’ll need to wait for the photos to be developed. In either case, take a look at the results. You might not even need your glasses.
You see what I mean?
12 Danger! Ouija On Board
As fascinated as so many of us are by the realm of the supernatural, we can’t help but be aware of all the charlatans who’ve given it a bad rep. One of the more infamous was nineteenth-century Boston photographer William Mumford, who superimposed a hazy portrait of the late Abraham Lincoln standing behind and resting a hand on the shoulder of Mumford’s living subject, the widowed Mary Todd Lincoln. Books on spirit photography still reproduce this picture without any reference to the portrait photographer’s trial and conviction in New York for defrauding his clients by dolling up his photo backgrounds with translucent dead people.
Of course, when you’re in a rational, pragmatic frame of mind, practically every prop and feature in a ghost hunter’s arsenal seems, at first glance, to be extraordinarily silly. Ouija boards are a case in point. To be frightened of this simple bit of equipment—or more accurately, to be respectful of the warning label attached to it—seems farfetched. Still, after a number of years at work in the field, so to speak, you recognize the validity of most of the tools and come to understand the reasons behind the caution labels.
I once thought Ouija boards were as harmless as the other board games with which they’re displayed in stores—the Monopoly, Parcheesi, and Clue sets. And every teen growing up in America in the last six or seven decades has acquired a Ouija board somewhere along the line and had a grand old time seeking answers to such weighty matters as “Who will I marry?” and “Am I going to be a millionaire when I grow up?” Not to mention the kids who, senses heightened and hormones raging, attempt to spike their new obsession with the paranormal by pointing a Ouija planchette at it.
My mom’s friend Patti Bowen was typical. Back in the 1960s when Patti was a teen, she attended a sleepover at a friend’s summer house. The parents were away, thinking the pajama party girls would be safe with nary a bottle of booze or a pack of boys anywhere in the vicinity. It never occurred to them to worry about the Ouija board one of the girls brought with her.
It was a cold night in April, so most of the furniture was still swaddled in old sheets, and the windows and doors facing the lake were boarded up, as they had been all winter. The girls lit the ornate candelabra and set up the Ouija board on the onyx black dining-room table. As two of the girls placed slender white ringers on the planchette, one of the onlookers exclaimed, “Let’s call up Jack the Ripper!”
“Good idea!” sang the others.
Clairvoyants worth their salt will shudder at the ignorant audacity of it. They know that even requesting the presence of a benign spirit can invite quite the opposite into the room with you. But as psychologists always point out, teens have no sense of their own mortality and will try anything once.
Patti and her friends applied themselves to the task. In the flickering shadows of the chilly room, all eyes were on the planchette with its complement of fingers. It began to move until it spelled out, “I’m here.”
Excitedly the girls debated what to ask first: “Should we ask him his real identity?” “Is he reincarnated?” “Did he kill other women no one ever knew about?”
But before they could agree on a question, a crashing sounded from the kitchen.
The girls were stunned into stillness. Only their eyes moved as, huddled at one end of the table, they ran a head count. All five were present and accounted for.
Another crashing noise erupted, echoing in the dark and rambling cottage.
The girls shrieked. Like a flock of terrified geese, they scooted up the staircase in a flurry of pressed-together bodies. They spent the night locked in the bathroom as noises continued to reverberate from the kitchen. Dishes were tossed and broken again and again, as if the summer kitchen held as much crockery as a restaurant in a grand hotel. Pots and pans banged together. It sounded like a hoarde of demons playing a back beat that was music only to their own pointy ears.
Three of the girls eventually managed to fall asleep, curled into fetal balls on the cold linoleum floor. Patti and one other girl stayed awake all night, sitting back to back and squeezing hands as the sounds of annihilation continued. Not until first light did the hellish din taper off.
Later, in full morning light, the girls tiptoed downstairs to assess the damage. How in the world would they explain to their parents what havoc had been unleashed in this summer kitchen?
When they reached the kitchen doorway they were stopped in their tracks by the sight of clean counters and a spotless floor. Opening the kitchen cabinets, they saw perfectly stacked piles of plates, crocks, and mugs. The carnage from the night before had either been imaginary or impeccably tidied up.
The girls threw jackets over their pajamas and carried the Ouija board down to the edge of the lake, where they dug a four-foot hole in the semifrozen ground and buried the evil toy. It’s probably safe to speculate that not a single one of these girls ever participated in a Ouija binge again. However, we have to wonder whether that summer home continued to channel the presence of the last fiend in history we’d ever want running amok in a vacation spot—or anywhere else for that matter.
My buddy Bob Alger, of the Pilgrim Paranormal Research group, who has helped me with investigations here on the island, developed a relationship with a Ouija board in his Army days.
“Two other guys and I got hold of a Ouija set, and for several weeks we’d fiddle around with it late at night. For a long time we got nothing, but we persisted, and suddenly someone came through—a Scandinavian fellow named Haln who’d been a merchant in Savannah, Georgia.”
Haln told them he’d died when someone had bro
ken into his shop and set fire to it. “He let us know he liked to drink and smoke. We’d place a lit cigarette at the edge of the board and sometimes we’d see the orange end send off sparks as some unseen entity drew on the filter. When we went out, we’d leave a glass of beer beside the board, making a mark where the brew topped off. When we’d get back, we always saw that at least an ounce had been guzzled.
“After that, we got the impression our guest had changed personalities, that either Haln was getting feistier, or he’d been replaced, so we asked one night ‘Who is here with us?’ The disk spelled out L-I-V-E. One of us had already heard about this handle being used in the spirit world, that spelled backward it was E-V-I-L.”
The room got cold and the candle flickered.
“We threw that board out with our empty beer bottles.”
Some years back, my then husband, Marty, and I had a working relationship with a Ouija board. Marty’s a comedy writer—a cute, curly-haired, funny man whom you would never associate with parapsychological abilities—but whenever the two of us sat down with the board, that planchette would dart around like a silver slug in a pinball machine. “Are you doing it?” “No, are you?” we always asked each other, both equally surprised at the energetic results we produced.
Members of the family sometimes wanted us to get in touch with a departed loved one. Once we turned our inquiries to my Great-Grandma Olga. I’d only met her once, when I was four, and she died the following year, but I’ve always regarded as my leading guardian angel.
“Grandma Olga, have you been reincarnated in any of your descendants?” I asked.
“Patrick” she said, naming the son of my cousin Christopher, who lives in Ireland. Perhaps unconsciously I’d heard this name before and conjured it up from my hidden memories, but consciously I had no idea who “Patrick” was until I later spoke with my mother about it.
After my favorite aunt died, Marty and I received a request from my mother to try to contact her deceased sister via Ouija, just to find out what was what in the Afterlife.
Aunt Meta seemed to come onboard—pun intended—just as requested. All was well with her. She was spending quality time with her late husband, Max, who had died back in the early 70s, and with my father—her brother-in-law—who’d predeceased her by two years. She sounded so happy in the Elysian Fields that I decided to go for the gold and ask a question that would satisfy the theologian in me:
“Meta, on the Other Side, do you feel closer to God?”
The planchette, which had been scooting all over the board, came to an abrupt halt. It was dead in the water. For a full minute we stared at the unmoving wedge of tan plastic. At last I said with a sigh, “I guess there are certain things we’re not supposed to be told directly. We have to wait for our own firsthand experience.”
We returned to small talk with Meta—Max was fine; my dad was fine; Meta’s bubbe, who had died in the late 1920s, was fine and dandy—and then we retired the board.
The next morning I discovered that an anomaly had developed with our kitchen door. This was a brand-new house on Trade Winds Road just outside the center of Oak Bluffs, and everything had been working splendidly. Now the kitchen door suddenly refused to close. I examined it closely and determined that the protruding latch that’s supposed to retract when it encounters the strike plate was not gliding inward as it should. I examined the mechanics of the front door for comparison, and realized that somehow the kitchen doorknob apparatus had been reversed. The curved side of the protruding latch was facing the wrong way.
I’m not particularly handy, but Marty is even less so. I got out the tool kit, removed all the screws and gizmos of the kitchen doorknob, and reassembled it the right way. It worked just fine from that moment until we sold the house three years later.
The following morning, a new poltergeist-y situation was upon us. I was working on my laptop in the master bedroom, as I did every morning. Each time I reached the end of a paragraph and hit the return key to begin a new one, the just completed paragraph vanished into cyberspace! No amount of clicking “Undo Typing” would make it reappear. I tried saving each and every sentence, but nothing worked. It was as if some evil genie was determined to eviscerate my writing paragraph by paragraph.
This computer version of disappearing ink became old in a hurry. I gave up after half an hour. Later that day, when I caught up with Marty, I told him about my frustrating session. It turned out that during his own morning writing session, working at his own laptop in his den, he too watched his paragraphs get sucked into some microchip void.
After that single wracking morning, neither of us ever encountered that particular glitch again.
On the third morning after our Ouija-enabled conversation with Meta, I received yet another hint that some sort of negative energy was still hovering in our vicinity. It was around ten a.m. Son Charlie was in school and Marty had rambled into town to collect the mail. I decided to vacuum upstairs. When I opened the door to Marty’s den, I noticed a poster-sized sheet of tissue-thin paper lying on the carpet in the middle of the room. As I drew closer, I saw it was a multicolor etching of an Indonesian demon: multiple arms and legs, bulgy eyeballs, and a protruding tongue in a leering face.
The drawing was technically dazzling, the content alarming. Not the sort of art Marty would collect—he was more into seascapes and Marilyn Monroe photographs—but I figured some pal had given it to him. I picked it up and placed it on his desk, topping it with a big, thick dictionary so it couldn’t fly onto the floor again. Then I left to fetch the vacuum.
When I returned to the room, I saw that the demon poster had been shifted. Now it rested on the wooden seat of Marty’s desk chair, with the heavy dictionary still on top.
Later, when both the Nadler boys were home, I showed them the etching. Neither of them had ever seen it before.
That was when I remembered the last stint with the Ouija board, and the spirit that had balked when we’d asked about God. I tucked the board into a dark green flannel pillowcase. Then I rolled up the devilish poster and stuffed it in a cardboard box in the basement along with the shrouded board. (Somehow I felt superstitious about actually chucking it; so flagrant a rejection might call down still more wrathful spirits.)
The poster promptly disappeared. That is to say, it never showed up again in future moves when I packed and unpacked all our boxes.
The Ouija board showed no inclination to disappear, however. In fact, it made me nervous enough that I was always aware of where I had stashed it. I knew it was in the cellar below my bookstore one spring day in 2007 when two teen girls visited the store in search of a Ouija board to buy. I warned them of the hazards and regaled them with the trials and tribulations with my own board.
They were still keen on acquiring one, as teens have been from time immemorial. I related the story of the girls in the summer house calling up Jack the Ripper. Their eyes widened, but they grew more eager than ever. I knew they would procure a board somewhere, come hell or high water, so to save them good money I gave them mine.
“If it gives you any trouble, just stash it in a cardboard box,” I advised them.
I feel a twinge of guilt whenever I think of palming off that benighted board on those girls. But far be it from me to stop kids from monkeying with these sometimes diabolical tools. For myself, I’ll never again place my fingers on one of those harmless looking Ouija planchettes. And if you try it yourself, intelligent reader, caveat emptor: never conjure up Jack the Ripper or Genghis Khan or even Casper the Friendly Ghost.
13 A Ph.D. In Ghost Hunting
Mostly what we look for in anyone telling a ghost story is a respectable resume. The most creditable witness is a scientist, an engineer, or a math teacher: someone, in other words, who won’t invent kooky stories. This way, when he or she relates the most bizarre tale you’ve ever heard, you quickly dismiss the thought that you’re listening to the ravings of someone who has lost touch with reality. To the contrary, you assume the report is
one hundred percent true. Has to be.
Such was the credibility of Dr. S. Ralph Harlow (1885-1972) who resided in Northampton, Massachusetts, and on the Vineyard at Lagoon Heights in Oak Bluffs. His anti-kook credentials were flawless: He earned an A.B. from Harvard, an M.A. from Columbia, and a doctorate degree from the Hartford Theological Seminary. An ordained Congregationalist minister, he was also, for more than thirty years, Professor of Religious and Biblical Literature at Smith College.
This was not your typical channeler complete with turban and crystal ball. Yet the distinguished doc frequently received messages from the back of beyond, and he wrote all about them in a book entitled Life After Death, published in 1961 by Doubleday.
In chapter three, Dr. Harlow describes a dramatic encounter with the ghost of his deceased sister, Anna, with whom he’d shared a lifelong interest in the supernatural. During their childhood, Ralph and Anna made a pact that whoever predeceased the other would send over the cosmic transom “clear-cut evidence” of life beyond the grave.
“Clear-cut evidence” was their mantra; there must be no doubt or mistake. It would be a grand science experiment with quantifiable data.
Sadly, Anna died in her early thirties, in 1925. Her bereaved brother was initially too distraught to even think about their sibling pledge. After the burial service in a Bristol cemetery, the professor returned to his office at Smith College to keep an appointment with a student.
They discussed William James’s classic work on metaphysics, Varieties of Religious Experience. (Harlow writes with heart-stopping casualness, “[It was] a subject I had studied with James myself when I had been a student.”)
In the way that we all fiddle with objects when we’re turning over a thought, Dr. Harlow picked up a heavy glass inkwell that he used as a paperweight. He mused to his student, “Professor James once said to his class, ‘How native a sense of God must be to certain minds.’” He set the inkwell down as his mind drifted back to the eulogies spoken at his sister’s funeral. “Perhaps we can approach the varieties of religious experience if I tell you the religious experiences of my sister, Anna.”
