All the way at the end and to the left is another small room; this is where the second group is headed. They enter, gather in a circle, and spread out an array of tools for investigating the paranormal. As they all douse their flashlights, these tools cast an ethereal red glow.
Scantly furnished with just a bed, the tiny chamber in The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, was once a lodging room for aspiring ministers. “Holy men,” as one-time resident Nathaniel Hawthorne explained in his 1854 memoir of the property, “in their youth, had slept, and studied, and prayed there.” Hawthorne aptly described the garret, outfitted with just the necessities of a bed pan, a clothes rack, two mirrors and a small fireplace, as “wild and uncivilized.”
On this summer evening, the room is stiflingly hot and musty, the bodies cramped together contributing to that air of claustrophobia.
The leader of the investigation team asks for a volunteer. Reluctantly, one comes forward; his duty is to stand inside the room’s only closet—door latched closed—while the researchers attempt to coax out one of the “shy” spirits that are believed to spend their afterlife within these walls.
“Are there any ministers here?” one group member asks of their unseen guests.
Members of the group are equipped with an infrared camera; temperature gauges and electromagnetic field (EMF) readers (which are used to read fluctuations that could indicate a spectral presence); a device that records electronic voice phenomena (EVP, or sounds or voices of unknown origin); and pendulums and L-shaped dowsing rods (their pattern of swings and movement are said to be answers to questions asked aloud of spirits).
“A simple sign would work. If you can move something—it doesn’t have to be much.”
For a few moments there is nothing except the hushed breathing of the group. Eyes are naturally drawn to a small window, which reveals the welcoming silhouettes of pine trees on a moonlit night. Somewhere, an owl hoots, and traffic can be heard whooshing in the tiny roundabouts of Concord’s cramped downtown streets.
Then suddenly: A series of unmistakable knocks from the closet.
At the same time, the door leading out to the attic alley creaks open several inches, its hinges screeching the part of something from a horror movie.
“You’re not trying to get out, are you?” the leader asks the closeted volunteer.
“That’s not me kicking.”
“You’re not leaning against the door?”
“I’m not leaning against the door.”
The pendulums in the hands of the “experiencers” begin swinging in vigorous circles and arcs; the dousing rods pivot back and forth. One visitor, sitting closest to the exit door, feels an unexpected chill coming through it—the kind that causes one to defensively lift one’s shoulders as if expecting a hand to reach out of the darkness for a light caress.
“We’re really curious about you and we’d like to speak with you.”
The EVP device begins to crackle. Distorted voices seem to form words, which the group’s leader deciphers: “Careful.” “Simple.”
He continues, “These people came a long way to meet you, to visit you—to try to understand why you’re here.”
The garbled translated response: “Correct.”
“Is there more than one spirit here tonight?”
After a moment, what sounds like “pupil.”
“Would you like to learn from us? Are we your pupils?”
With no reply forthcoming to this question, a different volunteer, this time female, takes a place in the closet—which the group has also learned is referred to as the “sermon room”—fittingly, because it was where ministers-in-training practiced their recitations.
As the questioning continues, the female volunteer reports a slow audible rapping inside the closet, as well as a distinct temperature drop.
To facilitate further otherworldly communication, a “spirit box” is retrieved. Also known by the nickname “shack hack”—referring to the now defunct Radio Shack line of electronics stores—this modified AM/FM radio scans up and down the dial, a process that is said to enable spirit voices to more easily cross the divide.
“What is your name?”
Several voices “reply” as the box tremolos up and down the channels like hands running along piano keys.
“Luther.” “Mercy.” “Stop.”
“What are you trying to tell us?”
Indecipherable voices fade in and out with the squawk of feedback.
“Do you want us to leave?”
“Uh-huh.”
The whole group joins in with a volley of queries: “Open the door for us.” “How about just rattle the door?” “Can you just make a noise?”
One voice, ominous and final, comes through on the spirit box: “Leave.”
Then the room falls silent. That’s apparently all the ghosts wished to reveal this night.
The Old Manse is one of many historically significant buildings in Concord, Massachusetts.
It is also believed to be one of the most haunted buildings in a city where history is, absolutely and literally, glimpsed at every turn.
Most renowned for its role in the American Revolution—its Old North Bridge was the site of one of the opening battles of the American Revolution, which in those initial days was referred to as the “American War of Independence”—it has also been called the “American Athens” because of the fertile transcendentalist minds who congregated in the city in the 1800s.
The Old Manse was built in 1770—although it’s not known whether it was constructed from the ground up or remodeled out of an existing building, according to author Paul Brooks—and is today a buttercream-colored, Georgian clapboard building sitting on nine acres overlooking the Concord River and a replica of the Old North Bridge. On April 19, 1775, still a relative infant when it comes to the lives of buildings, it was a silent spectator to the fateful Battle of Concord.
The nonprofit Trustees of Reservations purchased the property in 1939; located just off Monument Street, through a gate down a path bordered with trees, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and as such is a popular tourist destination.
Two hundred and forty years ago, it was built for William Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandfather, pastor of the Church of Concord, according to Brooks’ book The Old Manse. Emerson was succeeded by Ezra Ripley, who boarded Ralph Waldo Emerson for a year in 1834—the year that the then thirty-two-year-old poet and essayist spent writing his first book, Nature, which essentially became the founding of transcendentalism, a philosophical movement based on the belief that people are inherently good but are easily corruptible by society and institutions.
Eight years later, in 1842, the young, Salem-born writer Nathaniel Hawthorne moved in with his new bride, Sophia. The newlyweds spent three years there, a period in which Hawthorne wrote some of his most famous short stories, including “The Celestial Railroad” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”—but before he set down the works that would make him an American icon, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. During his tenure in the Manse, Hawthorne welcomed the greatest minds of the time, including Emerson; Henry David Thoreau (who would publish his renowned Walden in 1854); pioneering teacher and philosopher Bronson Alcott; Margaret Fuller, an Emerson protégée, journalist and women’s rights advocate; and poet William Ellery Channing.
Not surprisingly for a romantic couple based on their literary proclivities, Hawthorne and his wife used a diamond ring to etch simple pronouncements onto window panes at the Manse: “The smallest twig leans clear against the sky,” “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes,” “Inscribed by my husband at sunset, April 3, 1843. On the gold light.”
Along with several of their transcendentalist compatriots, Nathaniel and Sophia are buried not far away in an area known as “author’s ridge” in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (sharing a name with the one in New York State famous for its dead, headless resident).
When Hawthorne returned to his
home city of Salem, the property was passed to Samuel Ripley (son of the aforementioned Ezra) and his wife Sarah, who lived there for twenty years after her husband’s sudden death. Three generations of their descendants—the notable Emerson-Ripley family—then lived there until the property was set aside as a landmark.
Well-regarded mural painter Edward Simmons, Sarah Ripley’s grandson, wrote of his memories of the Manse in his 1922 autobiography. In an ode that endures ninety-five years later, he summed up its legacy: “The Concord literati are gone, the town has completely changed, but the Old Manse is still there, holding many secrets.” Might those secrets include its numerous residents and visitors of the phantom variety?
Hawthorne was the first to write of their presence.
“Houses of any antiquity, in New England, are so invariably possessed with spirits, that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to,” he remarked in his 1854 Mosses of an Old Manse, a tribute to his years living on the property.
“Our ghost,” as he described, would “heave deep sighs” in the parlor, rifle through paper “as if he were turning over a sermon” in the upper entry, but was nevertheless invisible, “in spite of the bright moonshine that fell through the eastern window.” Hawthorne also described him as sweeping through the midst of a discoursing company one evening at twilight, “so closely as almost to brush against the chairs.” Yet despite that, it was still covert, identified only by the distinct rustle of a silk minister’s gown.
After visiting the attic, an area the novelist described as beset with “nooks, or rather caverns of deep obscurity, the secrets of which I never learned, being too reverent of their dust and cobwebs,” he surmised that the ghost was a pastor of the Concord parish more than a century before, a contemporary of Anglican preacher George Whitefield. (He was most likely referring to the reverend Daniel Bliss, according to the records of the First Parish in Concord, who held outdoor mass meetings and was, as Hawthorne noted, of “fervid eloquence.”) He came upon Bliss’s visage, in a wig, band and gown, holding a Bible, on a roll of canvas in the “saints’ chamber.”
But Bliss wasn’t alone; there was apparently also the boisterous ghost of a servant maid who would clank and bang around in the kitchen “at deepest midnight,” cooking, ironing, grinding coffee—although there would be no evidence of these tasks having been done the following morning, according to Hawthorne.
“Some neglected duty of her servitude...disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, and kept her at work without any wages,” he wrote.
Over the years, it has been said, Hawthorne’s ghosts have been joined by an assembly of others. Notably, many tourists, staff and passers-by have reported a woman in Victorian dress sitting in one of the Manse’s many front windows.
In other instances, shadowy figures have floated upstairs or into the downstairs parlor, just as inexplicably disappearing—such a distressing experience for some interpreters that they purportedly refuse to go inside the structure after dark to this day.
Numerous eerie raps and taps have been heard throughout the building, as well, and books have alighted from shelves and flown across rooms. In the attic where Hawthorne came upon the painted likeness of his benevolent ghost, meanwhile, one frequent visitor recalled a vintage baby carriage creakily rolling several feet across the floor.
During the recent investigation by the paranormal team on a late-summer night, there were several other reported encounters. Members of the group of about two dozen that gathered to explore the eighteenth-century property also claimed to interact with the apparition of a fourteen-year-old boy who had suffered head trauma; someone also had the sensation, while standing in the front parlor, of their arm being touched by unseen hands.
A little before midnight, the group walked single-file through a washroom and kitchen, and then down a narrow hallway lined with portraits and bookcases, and decorated with cream-colored French tromp l’oeil wallpaper. Then they climbed an equally confining staircase—with a coincidentally (or not?) spooky thirteen steps—into a room at the end of the second floor hall.
In the small corner room, a frilly, wedding-white dress drapes the bed, as if awaiting its wearer. (Maybe it belongs to the Victorian lady witnessed by so many in the window?) Fertile minds can only imagine it billowing with life.
With their pendulums swaying, dowsing rods rotating, and the illumination of the various instruments casting exaggerated shadows, the group members asked a series of questions of the dark space.
“Is there more than one spirit energy with us?”
“Do you want to communicate with us?”
The answers, according to the movement of the devices, are all “yes.” One member of the group with avowed acuteness of the unknown claims to sense them, and describes them as “pacing around, checking everyone out.”
Soon, the researchers depart the room and its phantoms, offering the pleas-antries “we appreciate it very much,” and “nice meeting you.”
The night’s final destination: Old North Bridge. Amid the croaking of frogs and the chirping of crickets, the crew makes the short walk down to the river just around midnight, traversing a dewy field beset by fruit trees and a giant boulder where Thoreau was said to sit and ruminate.
Once they reach an obelisk monument beside the grave of British soldiers, at least two in the group pick up on a lingering sense of agony.
“I feel death and fear and transition,” one remarks. Another, breathing heavily, bent over, declares, “No one’s happy here. No one’s happy right now.”
On the arched wooden footbridge—a replica erected in 1956 and restored in 2005, according to the Park Service, the fifth built on-site over the last 240 years since the original was taken down in 1788—the spirit box is again employed. Its bluster of static and feedback clashes with the river’s placid sounds.
“Can you say hello?”
The entreaty is met with crackles and squeals.
Another question: “How many British soldiers are here with us now?”
After a pause, the faint, contradictory replies of two distinct voices: “Forty-six.” “Seventy-nine.”
“Are there Minutemen here—and if so, can you give us a really clear number?”
No answer that time; instead, the simple but ominous: “They...knew...”
There is a volley of additional inquiries, but the spirit box bears nothing conclusive; apparently the brief exchange is all that could be mustered.
The group’s leader finishes with a solemn “Thank you”—which is met by a very audible and clear “You’re welcome.”
After a silent walk back up to the building, the group departs, car lights splashing arcs over hundred-year-old stone walls and against even more aged trees. The Manse once again sits dark at the end of its tree-lined lane, its windows lidless eyes, its double chimneys and attic gable the only protuberances from its boxy silhouette.
Concord, Massachusetts, is worth a visit in and of its own right. The beautiful and bucolic New England town is rich with history: It is the home of Walden Pond State Reservation (where Henry David Thoreau spent two years writing his pivotal Walden), the Minute Man National Historical Park, and Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House (the setting for Little Women). Also consider taking a meal at the Concord Colonial Inn—which is said to have some resident ghosts of its own—just down the street from The Old Manse.
The Old Manse is open for tours on select dates throughout the year. The property grounds are open year-round, dawn to dusk. For detailed information, visit www.thetrustees.org/places-to-visit/metro-west/old-manse.html.
THE HATCHET MURDERS
THE LIZZIE BORDEN HOUSE, FALL RIVER, MASSACHUSETTS
The Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast Museum where controversy still continues as to Lizzie’s guilt or innocence.
Sheets of rain wrapped the car, obscuring Phil’s view of Interstate 95, and drops fell with a staccato rap on the roof of the new Chrysler van as Phil and Marcie made their way from Wareham to Providence. Marcie
wiped mist from the inside of the window beside her. “It is really bad, Phil. Why don’t we stop and spend the night somewhere?”
“It isn’t that far to your sister’s now. We can be there in another two hours, if the rain lets up.”
“And if it doesn’t? Phil, the radio just said this storm is the edge of a hurricane. The Fall River exit should be coming up soon, let’s turn off there.”
“And stay where? I don’t know anything about Fall River.”
“For some reason the name sounds familiar,” said Marcie. We could try a B&B. That would be a pleasant part of our trip.”
“Marcie Rollins, only you would think of making a funeral trip pleasant.”
“Well, we don’t need two funerals. Ours, from having an accident in this downpour, and my brother-in-law’s, too.”
“That’s true. Does Cindy need you tonight?”
“I don’t really think so. Bob’s sisters are there at the house.” Another barrage of rain pummeled the van, and the headlights of other cars became more difficult to see between the rivulets of water on the windows. “I’m going to give her a call on the car phone and tell her about this weather, Phil. Isn’t the Fall River exit coming up?”
“Yes. I’m going to take it.”
The answer at the first B&B was not encouraging. “We don’t even have that small room left, do we Amy?” the owner asked his teenage daughter. She shook her head. “People leaving the interstate to get out of the storm, I guess.”
“Do you have any suggestions?” asked Phil.
“There’s the one at 230 Second Street,” suggested the girl. “Of course they’re nearly always full up, but you could try them.” She suddenly giggled and said, “If you don’t mind staying there.” Her father gave her a reproving look.
His directions were clear, and a few minutes later they were peering through the rain at the front of an austere two-story frame home. Narrow as it had looked when they drove up, it went back farther from the street than they had realized and was actually quite spacious.
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