by Holly Nadler
Apparently for several nights running she’d awakened to a dismaying sight: “This has been happening every night at one o’clock in the morning. I open my eyes with a startle reflex. My bed is positioned so that I can see through both sets of windows to the porch on both sides. There are figures out there staring in at me!”
“What kind of figures?”
“Well, it’s dark all along the front lawn, so they’re kind of shadowy, but I can make out the shapes of a couple of stovepipe hats like Abraham Lincoln used to wear, and I can see some women in bonnets. Everyone seems to be wearing black. Or maybe navy blue or brown or dark grey.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Some nights just two or three, other times a multitude!”
“Is there a porch light you can flick on?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that!” she cried as if I’d suggested she run naked into the street. “That would surely make them angry!”
I reassured her that these spirits meant her no harm and told her to keep me updated, but I heard nothing further from either sister for more than a year. The next time I ran into Tilda, she told me the late-night visitations had ceased. She actually seemed disappointed.
It’s funny how accustomed we become to our ghosts, and how much we miss them when they leave.
20 An Atheist’s Afterlife
My father believed in nothing. This Age of Enlightenment brand of “healthy” skepticism can be an obstacle to happiness in later years when the ailments of the elderly put a person in mind of what lies ahead. In the unbeliever’s opinion, what lies ahead is nothing: blackness, emptiness, moldering in the grave.
Ever since I was a child, my dad and I debated each other about God and the Afterlife. (If he had written the preceding sentence, he would have left out the capital letters.) When I was young he would steamroll over me with his grownup rhetorical abilities and his contempt for what he considered the idiocy of belief in anything unseen. As I got older, though, and read many books, and my mysticism deepened, our talks became more mutually respectful.
“You’re going to be pleasantly surprised,” I sometimes told him regarding his fears of death and nothingness: “You’ll find you’re still here, there, or somewhere, and you’ll be feeling mo’ better!”
“I very much doubt that,” he would say with the bleakest of sighs.
Dad’s death was part of a ghost story in and of itself.
It was a hot and humid July week in 2000, and my parents, after a visit to us on the Vineyard, were house-sitting my Uncle Bob’s 1960s-era split-level ranch house in Andover, Massachusetts. A year earlier, Bob’s wife, Rita, had taken ill and almost immediately collapsed and died at the top of the staircase.
Mom and Dad found an eerie depression settling over them during their stay. My mom visited a superb medical intuitive in Newburyport, Joan Flynn, to whom she reported her sudden, inexplicable unhappiness.
With her hands on Mom’s temples, Joan said, “There’s a sad, angry spirit in the house where you’re staying. She doesn’t know what you’re doing there. She’s severely territorial. Are you sleeping in her former bedroom? I suggest you move to another room.”
That evening my parents moved out of the master bedroom and made up a bed in one of the guest rooms. Sometime after one in the morning, my mother was awakened by an enormous thunk. She found my father unconscious at the bottom of the stairs. Had he fallen? Had he been pushed?
(Half a year later, Uncle Bob also took a tumble down these stairs, dislocated his hip, and spent months in physical therapy rehab. When he was finally released, he put the house with the cursed staircase on the market and moved lock, stock, and crutches to Florida.)
Dad lay in a coma for five days at Lawrence General Hospital north of Boston. My brother flew in from California and joined my mother, sister, and me at the vigil. On the morning of the fifth day, one of the nurses told us Dad’s vital signs were flattening. He had only minutes to live.
I had a sudden impulse to call the Buddhist center on the island, where I’d been meditating and receiving the teachings. The lovely Lama Yeshe, a Buddhist ani, or nun, who’d been supervising the center, answered. I told her my father was dying and asked if there was a particular Tibetan prayer or chant that might be beneficial to him and to us.
Yeshe said, “Om pani padme hum is always suitable, but Sharma Rinpoche [the head of this particular Buddhist lineage] is visiting. Would you like to speak to him?”
Rinpoche came immediately to the phone. He asked me for my father’s first name and then promised to retreat to the sanctuaty and perform a pow-wah for my dad. (The pow-wah is a funerary chant to help a soul’s transition to the Bardo—the Tibetan term for the posthumous spiritual realm.)
When I joined my family members beside my father’s recumbent form, I marveled that, at this very moment, this dying atheist was receiving special attention from one of the major figures in the Buddhist world. At the same time that I entertained this notion, Dad’s vitals began to recover, and he lived for another nine hours.
We decided to conduct a small memorial service for Dad at the Unitarian Church on Martha’s Vineyard. Later that night, shortly after ten p.m., we stood in partial moonlight at the East Chop lighthouse and scattered my father’s ashes over the rosa rugosa–lined cliffs. I quoted from Lord Byron:
So we’ll go no more a-roving so late into the night
Though the heart be still as loving, and the moon be still as bright…
The haunting started two nights later.
I had just dozed off to sleep, alone in my bed, when a man’s voice—not whispered but at full normal speaking volume—crackled an inch from my left ear: “Time to get up!”
And get up I did! I jolted awake and pitched myself to a sitting position. It was the work of a moment to switch on the bed-table light. There was no one in the room with me. I checked the clock: It was a little after ten p.m.
On the second night, just past ten, my senses were sharpened and this time I was only half asleep when the man’s voice barked again in my ear: “Time to get up!”
This time I flailed away from the sound, rolling onto my right side. As I lay there fully awake, the words still seeming to resonate in the room, I realized it was Dad’s voice.
On the third night, again past ten, the instruction was repeated. By the fourth night my adrenaline level was elevated to the point where sleep was clearly out of the question. Pillows braced my back, and both my bed-table lamps glowed in the high-ceilinged room. I was alone in the house. Past ten o’clock, my glance strayed to the clock on the wall. Would my father tell me to wake up even when I wasn’t sleeping?
At the moment I entertained this thought, I heard a footstep at the bottom of the stairs. Then another, then another. Someone was slowly, wearily climbing to the landing just outside my open bedroom doorway. When the footsteps seemed to place the visitor midway up the staircase, I called out dolefully, “I’m so sorry, Dad. I just can’t handle this.”
The sound ceased. I never encountered a trace of my father’s spirit again, and later came to regret and feel guilt over my reflexive squeamishness. Why wouldn’t I wish to hear or, perhaps eventually—if I’d let the sequence play out—see Dad’s ghost? What could be the harm in that? In fact, wouldn’t it be rather wonderful? In time dismay at that lost opportunity caused me to lose my jitters about the supernatural, which in turn opened me up to the phantom flurries of the past couple of years. But as much as I’ve tried to communicate with Dad, saying silently, “Come back! Come back! I’m not the sissy I used to be!” he hasn’t graced me with another visit.
But others have crossed paths with him.
My old friend Laurie White, who, along with her husband, Peter, used to own the Old Stone Bakeries in Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, saw Dad on the evening of the memorial service. She looked up from her stove to behold a solid-looking, flesh-and-blood rendition of my father staring with palpable longing at the shrimp she was stirring in a copper pan. Bef
ore she could cry out, the hungry ghost disappeared.
When Mom returned to her condo in Palm Desert after a month spent grieving with her sister in Marin County, a neighbor knocked at her door. This man was a voice-over actor who also, as a result of a long-ago near-death experience, had a deep clairvoyant streak.
“I’m so sorry about Larry,” he murmured.
“But how did you know? I just got home ten minutes ago, and I haven’t spoken to any of our neighbors yet!”
The man nodded. “I just saw him at the mailboxes.”
“But how—?”
“I saw what I call a transparency. He was leaping and dancing. He communicated great joy and pleasure at being here. He was so bubbly, he made me laugh. And he was laughing too!”
This, by the way, was right in keeping with my dad’s personality. For all his curmudgeonly ways about life after death, he had the world’s most infectious laughter.
Finally, my sister, Cindy, encountered Dad during a visit to the Vineyard in the summer of 2007. Let it enter the record that Cindy has never had a paranormal thought, insight, or tap on the shoulder in her life; she is truly Dad’s clone in the skeptical department. Yet one evening as she dressed for dinner, she saw a gauzy figure of our father appear inside the closed curtains of the bedroom window. She took a step forward and felt a smile of incredulous welcome forming on her lips.
He dissolved into thin air.
The following morning, with the apparition still uppermost in her mind, Cindy walked to the East Chop Light, where all of us gravitate to commune with Dad’s spirit. She stood at the railing, gazing off to sea, speaking softly about the trying events of the past half-year, and how she wished she could feel his presence and have a stronger sense of him watching over her.
Behind her, bells began to chime. “It was beautiful, melodic. It reminded me of those old bell towers in Italy,” she told me later when she returned to town. “I looked at my watch. It was seven minutes after ten. It seemed like an odd time for the bells to be ringing.”
I said, “I’ll tell you what’s even odder: There are no bells at the East Chop Lighthouse.”
“But I heard them!” she maintained.
“I’m sure you did,” I replied with a grin.
I only wish I had heard them too.
21 The Haunted Parsonage
The term haunted parsonage almost calls up the “Duh!” response for its redundancy, thanks to all those English mystery novels where every parsonage has an eccentric clergyman, a quaint history, and a ghost.
The parsonage on South Water Street in Edgartown, built in the 1840s, has all of the above. Back in the late 1600s, Governor Thomas Mayhew claimed this strip of waterfront property for his family. This land-grab was entirely legitimate, since in 1642 the man had purchased the whole island from a pair of English noblemen for the grand sum of forty pounds. (He also, on the same bill of sale, acquired Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands, but liquidated these holdings when he realized one island was sufficient for his needs.)
The Mayhews were political animals, but they also bred religious zeal in their gene pool. Thomas Mayhew, Sr., and especially Thomas Mayhew, Jr., made it their mission to convert the Indians. This responsibility to church and faith extended down through the lineage to Sarah, the last of the Mayhews to own the Water Street property. When she died in 1956, she bequeathed her house to the Federated Church on South Summer Street (also haunted—see chapter 17) as the lodging for its minister.
The current pastor, the Reverend Gerry Fritz, says he’s constantly approached by Mayhew descendants from many separate branches of the Colonial-era family tree, who contend, “You’re living in my house!” The Reverend Fritz says he’s lucky he knows the straight line of descent that preceded Sarah’s bequest, or he might be concerned about having to run a hostel for nomadic Mayhews.
I had heard stories over the years about the spirit life at the parsonage. A single phone call answered my question.
“Is the parsonage haunted?” I asked the voicemail for the Reverend Fritz.
He called back the next day. “Indeed it is.”
Two mornings later I sat in the clergyman’s cozy, book-laden office in the parish hall beside the church. What followed was one of the most fascinating interviews I’ve ever conducted.
Gerry, his wife, Kathleen, and their daughter, Katelyn, moved into the parsonage on October 11, 1999. After putting Katelyn to bed, the couple gravitated to what they called the Blue Room downstairs, a small, inviting study facing the harbor. The night was chilly, so the windows were closed. Gerry sat on one end of the sofa, and Kathleen stretched out with her head on his lap. On the far side of the room sat a television bracketed by two old rocking chairs.
Not long after they’d settled into the cushions, one of the chairs began to move back and forth. This was more than just a quiver; it was a good, solid rocking movement, as if a hundred-plus-pound person were sitting there. The rocker moved back and forth for ten or fifteen seconds, then stood as still as the other chair.
Kathleen rose from her horizontal position. Husband and wife stared at one another, then Kathleen said, “Must be Sarah.” She turned to face the chair and voiced the absolutely correct protocol of living inhabitant to dead proprietor: “Hello. We’ll be living here for awhile. We love this house and we promise to take good care of it.”
From time to time over the following years, “Sarah” continued rocking in her favorite chair beside the television.
Another form of haunting was olfactory: Gerry would often walk into a room and encounter an overwhelming fragrance of flowers. “There would be no bouquet in the room, no windows open onto the garden. It was always a scent arising from nowhere, but an absolutely wonderful surprise.”
One afternoon, Kathleen came downstairs and saw the figure of a woman standing in one of the doorways. The woman wore a tailored, dark, Depression-era skirt and jacket. “Hello, Sarah,” she said, and the apparition vanished.
Once, during the Christmas season, Gerry delivered a sermon with a title borrowed from the hymn “In the Bleak Mid-Winter.” Afterward, he strolled home in weather that seemed to take its cue from the song. Arriving back at the parsonage, he glanced at an upstairs window where a light glowed; a talisman against the grey skies. A woman stood framed in the window. Gerry assumed it was Kathleen, and he gave her a merry wave.
Several seconds later he bumped open the back door and crossed the threshold of the kitchen to find his wife standing at the stove with her back to him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in surprise.
She turned her head and cocked him a look. “Ah … I live here.”
“But I just saw you upstairs at the bathroom window!”
“I haven’t been upstairs in over an hour.”
Gerry trudged to the second floor and inspected all the rooms. No one else occupied the house. Unless they counted Sarah, which, in fact, they did.
“Sarah likes me!” Gerry said. “That’s the feeling I get. She liked men, apparently, but not necessarily in a flirtatious way. She simply enjoyed male company. A few days after her appearance at the window, it was Christmas Day, and the three of us were opening our presents. At the bottom of my Christmas stocking I found an old, tattered antique handkerchief. There was a little bit of embroidery on it, and the initials S.M. “Where’d you get this?’ I asked Kathleen. She replied, ‘I’ve never seen it before.’”
A final, comical ghost occurrence: The Fritzes’ fat, stubby-legged terrier/dachsund mix, Pepper, always slept with Gerry and Kathleen, but was physically incapable of climbing up on their extra-high bed without help. On nights when husband or wife left the bed, Pepper often would insist on being removed from the mattress and placed on the floor. But then, when the wandering spouse returned, Pepper would be back on the bed, with the recumbent spouse still sound asleep.
The Fritzes’ acceptance of the ghost at the parsonage led to an interesting follow-up involving a local myth; the kind we all de
ride as fodder for kids’ tales at pajama parties.
Virtually every country locale has its version of the Abandoned Bride yarn, which invariably involves the following plot points: Bride is jilted by groom, bride gets killed or kills herself at some spooky spot in the countryside, bride clad in white wedding gown returns on moonless nights to the scene of her death, where the hapless sojourner is bound to encounter her.
Shortly after the Fritzes moved to Edgartown and became acquainted with the ghost of Sarah Mayhew, they took a road trip back to their former town of Machias, way down east on the coast of Maine.
“If you get off the main highway, there’s a more direct alternate route that winds through heavy woods around a remote lake,” Gerry told me. “It’s called Catherine’s Hill, and the story goes that Catherine was traveling this road on her way to her wedding, dressed in her white gown, alone in a horse-drawn buggy. Some accident befell her, the buggy overturned, and she was killed. Of course, legend has it that people driving around this lake late at night have seen this ghost bride.”
It was around eleven at night when Gerry and Kathleen, with Katelyn asleep on the back seat, reached Catherine’s Hill. Gerry joked to his wife, “You know, now that we’re on good terms with Sarah at the parsonage, maybe it’ll open up a portal for us to see poor Catherine.”
At that moment, the headlights of the car picked up something glowing ahead of them at the side of the road. As they drew closer, they discerned a young woman in a trailing, lacy white gown. Her back was to them, and she walked determinedly as if there were no automobile chugging behind her.
The Fritzes stared in shock as they approached. An actual, living person stranded—for whatever reason—on this pitch black road, would turn to flag down a passing vehicle, but this woman ignored them (or was oblivious to them), and never broke stride.
