Vineyard Supernatural

by Holly Nadler

  But the question arises, are cemeteries haunted? Well, yes and no, and some more than others. Ghost hunters Lorraine and Ed Warren, in their book Graveyard (St. Martin’s Press, 1993), maintain that burial grounds become contaminated—and more susceptible to hauntings—when rude people bring in Ouija boards, black magic rites, and other demon-raising tools to rile up the otherwise neutral atmosphere.

  This would explain the ultra-haunting of America’s most haunted graveyard, St Louis Cemetery No. 1, in New Orleans. Of course, right away a cemetery is going to feel more haunted when no “inmate” is actually buried therein, but instead installed in an above-ground marble crypt, some of them as elaborate as mini-castles. You wander through these necropolises expecting at least one of the doors to bang open as the occupant lurches out, trailing decomposing strips of shroud. (The reason for these vaults is that the water table is so high, you could inter a body but it would float off in the next storm.) But the most likely reason for the countless spooky sights and sounds is that visitors are encouraged to bring their voodoo gear and to get busy with it, especially at the crypt of nineteenth-century voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, whose tomb is constantly layered with candles, powders, gris-gris bags, facsimiles of skulls—all that good stuff.

  Here on the Vineyard we have no destination of this sort for voodoo practitioners, though we’ve always had our share of witches. Whether or not our beautiful old cemeteries—Abel’s Hill, Tower Hill, and Causeway and Crossways in Tisbury—have ever been adulterated by black magic arts, the potential for spirit activity there is marginal, and here’s why.

  If we believe the anecdotal material of near-death experiences and the case studies of hypnotized patients telling of the spirit’s state between reincarnations, such as those provided by Michael Newton, Ph.D, in Journey of Souls (Llewellyn, 2004), then we take it on faith that at the point of death we’re pulled out of our bodies, able to gaze down at our own inert flesh and blood, then whisked through the stratosphere into areas of light and love and peace.

  Now, imagine yourself in this great vat of wonderfulness. Would you ever care to go back to the place where your useless, cast-off body was buried? I don’t think so!

  You might return for your funeral, to send good wishes to your grieving loved ones, maybe even materializing in their dreams or as a loving entity at their bedside to provide them with hope and closure. But would you then take a detour to the cemetery? Nah.

  If you were a tad overmaterialistic in your most recent life, part or even all of your psyche might take up residence in an earthly abode—perhaps in just one room of that house—your room! This accounts, I believe, for the lion’s share of ghostly activity on this island that we’ve all adored—and continue to adore—perhaps a little more than was or is good for us.

  But let’s say the spiritually healthy soul finds the Afterlife infinitely more sweet than the human experience, which Zorba the Greek described as “the whole catastrophe.” Would this soul come back at all, except to perform some helpful angel duties? Again, probably not. And would a helpful angel find humans to succor in a cemetery? The answer is, highly unlikely. When someone is prostrate with grief over a tombstone, the perceived wisdom is that the poor dear should be allowed to fully unload that particular quota of grief. Maybe the angel will hover overhead later while that person hangs laundry suspended on a line between two mulberry trees under a bright blue sky. That’s when a jolt of life-goes-on-and-it’s-darn-beautiful will be beneficial.

  So what type of spirit life is left to frequent an old cemetery? The neurotics, perhaps, looking to see whether any family member ever slapped up a stone. (In island cemeteries, some slates appeared decades after the body disappeared. Chalk that up to New England frugality and the high cost of monuments.) Then there are the above-mentioned materialists who are checking to see whose tombstones are bigger and more lovingly inscribed. Both sets of discarnate entities never received the lesson that our bodies are nor us, that the moment we’re sucked from our remains, our egos—our paltry, sometimes poisonous personalities—go pop! and vanish (except in the often burdened memories of our loved ones). If these sorts of ghosts ever waft into a cemetery, chances are they’ll cut out the instant they realize there’s little to mine there; they’ll head back to their former houses where they can really, authentically annoy someone.

  Also sometimes found creeping about these burial spaces are the baddies: poltergeists (i.e., beings that never were human) and ghosts of psychopaths who haven’t yet been parsed by the blade of karma. Even without dark rites to summon them, they’re bound to congregate where few positive buffers exist to keep them at bay. Hence your typical negative vortex.

  During the day, ancient cemeteries are just what I described them to be at the beginning of this chapter: meditation retreats on life and death. At night, though, look out! As it’s written on the Web sites of haunted cemeteries: Visitors are advised that they go there at their own risk. This is why I have mixed feelings about concluding my walking tours of haunted Vineyard Haven with a nighttime crawl through the elderly burial ground in the heart of town.

  Cards on the table: I would never visit that cemetery alone at night. But with a group of twenty or thirty people? What a rush! Old tumbledown slates awash in moonlight? Absolute silence except for the distant hooting of an owl? Chalk-white hands that could reach out from under the ground, only they won’t since you’ve got a crowd with you? I’m in! As I’ve said before, sometimes you’ve got to recognize that ghost hunting is just plain, goofy fun, and you go for it.

  I’ve also got to admit that Long Island psychic Inez Kirchenko, whom I’d invited on my first Tisbury walk, showed her disapproval by remaining outside the gate of the white picket fence surrounding the cemetery. She told me later, in a manner that was nonjudgmental, only reserving the right to her own opinion: “I pick up so thick a blanket of mourning in a graveyard that I can’t bear to expose myself to it.”

  I noticed that she also counted heads going in and coming out of the burial grounds, a hint that she also harbored deep misgivings about the harm that could be encountered there.

  I do ask that my tour guests respect the grounds by observing perfect silence once we enter the gate. I have an abiding sense that chatter and any type of levity could create an atmosphere provocative to the bad boys of the occult world.

  One tour night in early August, when we were about twenty steps into the cemetery, a little boy of about seven started to ask a question. I leaned down to his ear and whispered, “Can you hold that thought until we get back onto the sidewalk?” I continued leading the group to the heart of Crossways Cemetery, to the oldest slate, that of Abagail Daggett West, who died in 1770. As usual, I placed the lantern on the ground before Abagail’s stone, and in respectful silence, all of us—as my groups had been doing all summer—brought attention to bear on this Colonial lady’s final resting place, as my groups had been doing all summer.

  When we returned to the sidewalk and I’d gathered the crowd for a farewell address at Captains’ Houses Central (the corner of Church and William streets), I asked if the little boy who’d broached a question would care to speak up now. There were perhaps a dozen little kids on hand, and frankly, they all looked pretty much alike in the dark. “Which of you—? Anyone?”

  Suddenly everyone in the group grew uncomfortable, especially me! People started to mutter to themselves words to the effect of, “Did a little boy ghost crop up in the graveyard?”

  Finally a small child—a small, live child—shrugged off his shyness, cleared his throat, and piped up with his question, and a sigh of relief swept through the group, tour leader included.

  On the premise that a little knowledge is not, as is commonly thought, a dangerous thing, but a way to impress your friends—provided the friends know less than you do—here’s how you can show off your expertise in an antique New England graveyard.

  The fearsome, but often fancifully rendered winged skulls were popular gravestone ornaments fr
om the late 1600s through the 1700s. Of course you’re not going to sound so scholarly if you give a slate that broad a timeline. Better to examine the amount of lichen on the base and the degree of erosion, and pinpoint a period (rub your chin while you’re at it, and drawl, “Hmmm, I’m going to speculate post-Revolution by, oh, twenty years.” (First step, of course, is to select a stone where the deceased’s death date has eroded away, or everyone will know what a phony you are.)

  The more cheerful carvings of winged cherubs became the icon du jour from the second half of the 1700s well into the 1800s. That’s where you can call upon the subject’s death date to preen even more. Because skulls and cherubs were both favored in the mid-eighteenth century, you can muse along the lines of, “It’s refreshing to see a family opting for the more soothing graphic at this early date.”

  At the turn of the twentieth century, the sunburst—a rising and/or setting sun—came into favor, followed throughout much of the 1900s by the motif of urns (signifying mortal remains) and willows (representing mourning). No one did death better or more formally than the Victorians, with their black clothes, including widow’s weeds, dark veils, even jewelry such as bars of onyx studded with diamonds, so while you and your friends stand before one of those urn-and-willow monuments, you might comment upon these funeral-happy ancestors of ours.

  You’re still advised to enter a graveyard in the nighttime at your own risk.

  Someone who refused to take this advice is my colleague, paranormal investigator Bob Alger, whom I’ve mentioned before in these pages. Bob recently set up some equipment in the Burial Ground in the heart of Plymouth, Massachusetts; one of the oldest, if not the oldest non-Native American cemetery in America. As he moved through the dark, Bob felt a vibration run up through his leg as if someone below had taken a fist and smashed upward at his boot.

  A few minutes later, one of Bob’s cohorts cried out and grabbed his leg. “You too, huh?” Bob observed grimly.

  In an e-mail to me, Bob once said, “On the whole, I believe cemeteries aren’t particularly haunted.”

  Yeah, right. And nobody minds being punched in the foot from beneath the sod of a three-hundred-year-old grave site.

  16 The Jagged Edges Of the Square Rigger

  This was the story I didn’t dare to write when I was compiling my first book on supernatural events, Haunted Island. I’ll give it another go, and we’ll see what develops. The worst that can happen is that I’ll be forced a second time to abandon the project.

  It was the late summer of 1993 and word had traveled along the local grapevine that I was looking for true tales of Vineyard hauntings. A young Edgartown matron, Jane Tomas-sian, who sat on the board of the historical society, suggested I look into the strange doings at the Square Rigger. This restaurant at the crossroads leading into town has served drink and victuals for more than a hundred and fifty years. It’s not difficult to picture the original tavern on a cold winter night, with a roaring fire in a wall-to-wall fieldstone fireplace; wagons, stagecoaches, and tethered horses lined up outside; wayfarers lounging around long trestle tables; pewter mugs steaming with hot rum and hard cider while, outside, wind-lashed oak branches tapped at thick-paned windows.

  “The historical data is that the original family lived in the upstairs apartment.” Jane said. Two brothers—thirteen-year-old twins—shared one of the bedrooms. One night, an electrical storm was brewing over Nantucket Sound. One of the twins stood at the open window, watching the storm move in. He was struck by lightning, and crumpled to the floor, dead. Legend has it that, ever since that gruesome night, the upstairs of the Square Rigger has been severely haunted.”

  That was all I needed to hear. I started making calls, the first to then-owner Will Holtham. He said that, sure enough, the apartment had seen its share of unearthly disturbances. He gave me the number of one of several members of that summer’s serving staff who lived in the upstairs rooms. I tracked down the young man, who agreed that, definitely, a lot of weird stuff had been going on all summer: “Some of the other guys have woken up in the middle of the night because their beds were shaking. I myself, a couple of weeks ago, jerked awake with a feeling that all the air in my lungs had been sucked out of me. I had to sit up and take big, gasping gulps before I could breathe again.”

  I knew I was onto a good story and was eager to start writing up my notes. That evening in our seaside cottage, immediately following dinner, my son scrambled upstairs to finish his homework, my husband headed for his den, and I retired to my own tiny downstairs study to start my chapter on the Square Rigger.

  I’ve always been skittish around machines, but so far I’d had no trouble with my four-year-old Macintosh computer (a techno pal had once described that type of Mac as the Chevy of computers: ugly, basic, but dependable). I was dimly aware of a distant rumble of thunder over the water as I started a new file with the simple heading, “Square Rigger.” I began to type, setting the scene by describing the old tavern as the only light at the dark crossroads on the way into Edgartown.

  All of a sudden my computer screen snapped to black and a strange, crackling, staticky white light gleamed horizontally across the center. I’d never seen anything like this before, and my reaction was utter panic. This is what a computer must look like when its hard-drive crashes, I thought. I pressed the control and power keys simultaneously to shut down the system. The white line sizzled and then vanished. The screen now faced me like a window pane looking out on a moonless night.

  With a rush of relief, I recalled that, of course, we weren’t supposed to use our computers when an electrical storm was brewing. (Back in the rustic days of 1993, that was the prevailing wisdom, anyway.) I reached down and unplugged the machine, and only a moment later the first zig of lightning flared around the house. Thunder rocked the foundation, and I darted off to make sure our two cats, Beebe and Gizmo, were safely indoors.

  At dawn the next morning, feeling some trepidation that I might have shut down my Mac too late, I padded downstairs and powered up the computer. It blinked on perfectly, the system good to go.

  For the next two weeks I labored on several writing assignments for a local paper, the aborted Square Rigger chapter all but forgotten. Finally, one sunny September afternoon I sat down to get cracking again on the electrocuted teenager and his—or someone’s—continuing presence in his room. My fingers flew over the keyboard, a new, blank chapter opened up, and—the black screen with the crinkling, crackling white line was back! Once again I switched off the computer, but I didn’t bother pulling the cord this time. I realized the sabotage of my poor old Mac had to do with the story itself, not the weather. And that’s when I cashiered any further attempt to write about the Square Rigger.

  But it’s still a heck of a story, and I’m now working on a new laptop computer, so here we go again.

  The Square Rigger evolved into the restaurant we know today in 1963. It was 1993 when my previous research unearthed stories of close encounters of the unpleasant kind. Some fifteen years later, the question remains: Is the upstairs apartment still plagued with unexplained—and unsettling—phenomena? The answer appears to be yes.

  A few summers back I spoke with a waitress who was lodging in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She’d heard the accounts, of course, and that tends to heighten one’s sensitivities, prod one’s imagination, and turn the heaviest sleeper into a nerve-wracked insomniac. All of the above symptoms appeared to beset her.

  One night she got to bed late—a little after two in the morning. She dozed off but awoke a short time later with an odd mechanical noise filling the room. It sounded like the back end of an industrial air conditioner such as you hear at a big hotel.

  The young woman pushed herself into a sitting position, which brought her line of sight level with a double-hung window a few feet from the foot of her single bed.

  “The drapes were open,” she recounted, “I usually close them when I know I’ll be sleeping late in the morning, but I guess I’d been too bush
ed when I finally got to bed.”

  Suddenly a man’s face rose up from below the window sill as if slowly vaulted from a trampoline, then hovered outside the window. Framed by one of the lower panes, the face stared in at her.

  “I can’t say exactly what he looked like because I screamed, then threw my pillow over my head.” (Little kids and ostriches hide their faces this way, thinking, if they can’t see the scary thing, the scary thing can’t see them. In rational moments we deride this maneuver, but it’s precisely what even we grownups do when we suffer a freak-out of this order.)

  The quick impression she caught of the face was of a grey complexion, raggedy dark hair sticking out in every direction, intense black eyes, but no mouth or nose.

  As often happens when we’re frightened to death, she pitched into a deep, escapist sleep—a little like fainting. When the young woman woke up in the morning, she decided she’d had a bad dream, but then her certainty was undermined by the sight of the open drapes; she rarely left them that way, and that did align with her memories of the night before.

  There’ve been some other Square Rigger hauntings (of the upstairs; the restaurant is free of any supernatural reputation). The symptoms are fairly classic: sounds of whispering coming from empty rooms, cold spots, and sleepers disturbed by a shaking bed.

  But now, in the early twenty-first century, this particular portal to the unknown may be gradually closing down, and one sign of that is that I have come to the end of this chapter with words and computer apparently intact.