Ghosts of the SouthCoast

by Tim Weisberg

  The Assonet Inn

  Another story that comes from the village is that of the Assonet Inn, and how it was a preferred rest stop for weary travelers during colonial times. In order to have a warm bed for the evening and to avoid possible harassment from area Indians, travelers would be more than happy to pay to spend the night at the inn along the shores of the Assonet River.

  They’d check in—but they wouldn’t check out.

  Supposedly, some sinister people in the area—perhaps Indians, perhaps not—would rob these travelers, kill them and throw their bodies in the river. Thus, their spirits are said to linger around the river and attempt to warn others who try to stay at the inn.

  It is another interesting tale, but one where the true history gets in the way of the good story. Actually, the Assonet Inn wasn’t built until 1896, as a private residence for local Civil War hero major John Deane. It became an inn in 1940.

  The Assonet Inn may bear the ghostly legends of a former Assonet tavern, the Green Dragon.

  However, the Green Dragon Tavern did exist on the other side of the river from 1773 until the 1930s, when it was destroyed and replaced with the band shell that is still there today. Is it possible that this is a true story that was just transposed, over time, from one establishment to another?

  One thing I am certain of—if you choose to dine or lodge at the Assonet Inn—you’ll make it through your visit unscathed. And try the boneless fried chicken; it’s to die for (pun intended).

  DARTMOUTH AND WESTPORT

  In early 1652, thirty-six settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony—including John Cooke, a passenger on the Mayflower in 1620—purchased what would become known as Dartmouth from the Wampanoags. Massasoit and his eldest son, Wamsutta, sold the lands to the English for the sum of “thirty yards of cloth, eight moose skins, fifteen axes, fifteen hoes, fifteen pairs of breeches, eight blankets, two kettles, one clock, two English pounds in Wampum, eight pair of shoes, one iron pot and ten shillings.”

  Not a bad price to pay for some of the most picturesque lands in the SouthCoast region, but, again, it was laughable to the Indians that anyone could actually own land.

  About six months after the purchase, the Society of Friends (also known as the Quakers) left Plymouth to escape the strict religious views of the Puritans and worship as they saw fit. In November 1652, they settled Dartmouth, which was comprised of lands that were formerly known as Acushnea, Ponagansett and Coaksett.

  In 1671, Richard Sisson and his family moved out to the Coaksett section of the settlement, also known as Acoaxet, in the area that would eventually secede from Dartmouth in 1787 and become Westport.

  In modern times, each town is now known as a residential community, despite the bustling economic centers that have sprung along Route 6, which bisects each town as it heads west into Fall River. Both towns also feature sprawling farmland and gorgeous waterfronts as well.

  The House that Hetty Bought

  We learned of Hetty Green, the Witch of Wall Street and the World’s Greatest Miser, when discussing the Millicent Library in Fairhaven. But Green had a more direct connection with Dartmouth, because when she died in 1916, her son Edward Howland Robinson Green inherited half of her $200 million fortune and freely spent her money, much to the benefit of the town and of science.

  Green purchased Round Hill and erected a mansion that still stands today. Known as Colonel Green’s Mansion—even though “Ned” Green had no military rank—it is now used as high-end condominiums in a private, gated community. But during Ned Green’s time there, he allowed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to conduct experiments such as atom-smashing at his mansion, and he also built his own radio station, WMAF, on the property and allowed MIT the use of his radio transmitters. MIT used the equipment to track polar expeditions and transatlantic zeppelin flights, while Green spent his time amassing one of the greatest stamp and coin collections of anyone at the time.

  Ned Green also purchased the Charles W. Morgan and had it put on display at Round Hill, a nod to his family’s roots in whaling. In 1933, he allowed physicist Robert J. Van de Graaff to conduct his electrical experiments at Round Hill, building the forty-foot-tall Van de Graaff generator that is still on display at the Museum of Science in Boston.

  Green died in 1936, and, in 1948, his family donated Round Hill to MIT for continued experimentation and defense use. MIT eventually sold it off but not before constructing a giant radio telescope that would become known as the martini glass until it was demolished in 2007 to make room for new construction.

  Considering the great deal of electrical equipment and experimentation at Round Hill, it’s no surprise that visitors to its shores often reported seeing ghostly ships sailing through Buzzards Bay, apparently feeding off the energy generated from Colonel Green’s mansion. What’s more, ufologists recognize it as one of the East Coast’s UFO hot spots. Since the erection of the radio telescope, there have been frequent reports of strange lights and mysterious objects in the sky. No doubt “Colonel” Green would have taken great delight in that knowledge.

  Lurking in Lincoln Park

  In 1894, the Union Street Railway Company was operating a line from New Bedford to Providence, Rhode Island. Disappointed with lagging sales on the weekends, the company purchased some lands around an old dance hall near the Dartmouth–Westport line and invested about $150,000 to build an amusement park that would be a destination point for city residents that was right along the Union Street line.

  For nearly one hundred years, Lincoln Park was exactly what the company had hoped it would be, bringing families from miles around to enjoy its splendor. In 1946, the park added the Comet, a three-thousand-foot-long wooden roller coaster that featured top speeds of fifty-five miles per hour.

  Baby boomers flocked to Lincoln Park in the summers of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, but by the mid-’80s, the park’s attendance figures were in serious decline. Smaller, independently owned amusement parks like Lincoln Park or Rocky Point Park in nearby Warwick, Rhode Island, were often overlooked by vacationers, who instead chose to make longer trips to larger theme parks outside of New England.

  All that remains of Lincoln Park in Dartmouth is the skeleton of the Comet.

  Safety issues began to plague the nearly century-old park as well. According to the website RideAccidents.com, a twenty-seven-year-old park employee was killed when he fell from atop the Comet on August 17, 1986. A year later on September 29, 1987, the Comet again was in the news when the brakes failed and one of the cars jackknifed on the track. The roller coaster never ran again, left in that position as the park closed permanently in December of that year.

  Park owner Jay Hoffman sold off many of the rides and attractions to pay off debts, and what little remained of the park burned to the ground in subsequent fires around the now abandoned property. It soon became a haven for thrill-seeking teenagers and drug addicts, until they found out that even though the rides are gone, the ghosts remain.

  The spirit of the park employee who fell from the Comet was often seen walking the tracks, making his usual daily inspection round. As the story goes, each time he got to the top of the steepest hill, he’d disappear—perhaps a residual haunt replaying to the point of the worker’s fatal fall.

  The sign says No Trespassing, and so do the ghosts.

  Other reports include the faint sounds of carousel music and the smell of Lincoln Park’s famous clam cakes wafting through the air. These are common reports from abandoned amusement parks, and considering the high amount of energy exerted in these places—screaming, laughing, running children and strong feelings of joy, exuberance and adrenaline—it’s no surprise that an imprint of that energy could remain behind.

  While it’s important to again note that no area should be investigated without permission, this is especially true of Lincoln Park. As tempting as it may be to hop the fence and climb what remains of the Comet, the wood has completely rotted through and it’s only a matter of time until the r
est of the ride crumbles to the ground. In addition, the land has been purchased for development into condominiums and a shopping center, and the neighbors keep a vigilant watch for trespassers.

  Hell U

  Colleges and universities are breeding grounds for urban legends. For some, such as Bridgewater State College or Stonehill College that are located within the Bridgewater Triangle, those legends are the product of actual paranormal activity. In the case of University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth (UMD), however, it’s mostly just a good story.

  Ask any student (and some of the faculty) at UMD, and they’ll tell you about how the campus was designed by a man who was possessed by the devil; that he created it as an unholy temple to worship Satan; and who eventually was driven to leap off the campanile that stands in the center of the campus. Some legends even claim that he did it on June 6 sometime between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m., and, from that point on, whenever the calendar reaches the sixth of any month, his glowing spirit can be seen atop the tower between 9:00 and midnight.

  The odd details of the campus design certainly don’t help dispel this rumor, either. The infamous 666 benches are often the first thing incoming freshmen want to see. Three walking paths that cross the campus converge in front of the liberal arts and auditorium buildings in rounded alcoves with benches inside them. From a ground-level perspective, the design doesn’t make much sense, but take a look from one of the upper floors and clearly see that the three paths and rounded alcoves spell out 666, the number of the beast. There are also six steps in each of the three staircases outside of them.

  The University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, where some believe the campus was designed by a devil worshipper.

  Other claims that have less validity are that the buildings are all in the shape of the number six (Google Earth easily dispels this notion); each staircase on the campus grounds contains either six or thirteen steps, with the six-stepped staircases always grouped in threes with each stair being six inches high; there are no clocks within the buildings so students won’t realize when the clock has struck midnight; the campanile is a giant beacon broadcasting to demons around the world; the campanile is also supposed to represent a giant middle finger giving the salute to God; the buildings’ roofs were made flat in order to accommodate flying cars in the future promised by Satan; and the concrete structures are designed to keep students feeling cold, anxious and desperate.

  If you believe these stories, you’d think UMD was the second coming of Dana Barrett’s apartment building from Ghostbusters, and that the architect was Ivo Shandor. So what is the truth? The campus was designed by Paul Rudolph, a student of the Brutalist movement that features sharply angled concrete structures as part of its general design. Rudolph also designed City Hall in Boston and the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, D.C., and neither of those places is accused of being the gates of hell.

  When I was a student at UMD in the mid- to late 1990s, I was already hearing tales about how the architect had leapt from the campanile. In actuality, Rudolph died of cancer in 1997, after years of exposure to asbestos.

  The Spirits that Haunted the DeMello Family

  While this book intentionally steers clear of hauntings of private residences, there is one intriguing SouthCoast case that has come to public light in recent years.

  In the book Our Demons, Our Forefathers: Ghostly Encounters in a Sleepy New England Town, coauthors Thomas DeMello and Thomas Nickerson share their experiences growing up in Westport and as a Native American spirit with bad intentions plagued the DeMello family at two different residences within the town. The stories are so incredible that they may seem unbelievable—until you consider the reputations that both authors are putting on the line in telling their story. Nickerson is an English teacher at New Bedford High School, and DeMello is a police officer for the City of Fall River. As we all learned when we were children, if there are two kinds of people you can trust, they are teachers and police officers.

  The Icehouse

  The icehouse is located along the shores of North Watuppa Pond, which supplies Fall River with its drinking water. North Watuppa Pond drains into South Watuppa Pond, and the two are on the border of Westport and Fall River. The icehouse was built in 1864, and the stone building was used to keep chunks of ice from the frozen pond of the winter in order to provide blocks of ice for residents’ iceboxes in the summer.

  The rumor is that the icehouse burned in a fire, the result of arson while child laborers toiled inside and were unable to escape, but others say it merely crumbled after years of neglect, and the fires were part of the strange incidents that took place in subsequent years. Either way, it has developed a reputation not only for being haunted but also for being a spot in which rituals and animal mutilations are conducted for nefarious purposes. Reports of bloodstained walls and pentagrams drawn on the floor are also common.

  If this type of negative activity is going on, the energy could be easily trapped by the remaining fieldstone within the structure. Perhaps that’s why many of the ghost stories surrounding the icehouse feature angry spirits attempting to drive visitors away. There are even reports of large black dogs with red eyes—or hellhounds, as they are known in folklore—chasing people from the site.

  The Slave House

  In the late 1700s, there was a significant number of blacks living in Dartmouth. Part of the reason was because of its more tolerant Quaker attitude—in stark contrast to the Puritans—but also because of the proximity of Dartmouth and Westport to Newport, Rhode Island, the hub of the northern slave trade.

  In 1780, seven of these black residents asked to be granted the right to vote. They were already tax-paying citizens and Revolutionary War veterans, and they felt they deserved the same rights as white men. Their petition was denied by the town; but in 1783, slavery was declared illegal in Massachusetts, and even if they couldn’t vote, at least the black residents of Dartmouth were free—or so they thought.

  According to legend, one sea captain living in the vicinity of what is now Cornell Road in Westport took exception to the government telling him whether he had the right to own slaves. Slaves were not only an integral part of his crew, but he also viewed them as inferior beings. Instead of allowing his slaves to become freemen, he instead murdered them by drowning each of them in a basin kept in his cellar. Subsequent residents of the property report phantom splashing sounds in the basement and say that any water left down there evaporates at a quickened pace, as if some unseen force wants to be rid of the water as a reminder of something horrible.

  Now more than two hundred years later, the spirits of these slaves still roam the property where they died, unable to achieve freedom from the sea captain’s grasp, even in death.

  The House Next to White’s

  Approach any SouthCoast resident and ask them to name a nearby haunted location, and it’s a sure thing that a good majority of them will mention, without a moment’s hesitation, “the house next to White’s.”

  What they are referring to is a rather nondescript home that was situated just to the east of White’s of Westport, a landmark function facility along Route 6. Visible from the highway that leads from Westport into Fall River, it sat abandoned for many years as its legend continued to grow until it recently burned down.

  Located near a cemetery, its haunted legend suggested the house had actually been built over a Native American burial ground that may have already been cursed before it had been desecrated by a white man’s dwelling. It seems as though everyone in the area knows someone who used to live there and has a tale to tell about apparitions of Indians parading through the house, unseen hands gripping at them from under the bed or strange noises emitting from the house, even after the home was vacant.

  Teenagers and thrill seekers who approached the house in its later years would often report a general heaviness surrounding the property, an oppressive and unwelcoming feeling that would strengthen as you got closer to the front door. Those brave e
nough to peek in its windows reported seeing macabre sights such as coffins lined up along a far wall.

  In actuality, the home was vacant because it was purchased by a nearby funeral parlor as storage for their extra inventory. That may account for the coffins but not for the rest of the activity reported. The legend has grown to such proportions that, for many, it will always be known as the SouthCoast’s most infamous haunted house.

  FALL RIVER

  Fall River has always had a bit of an identity problem. The city began as part of Ye Freeman’s Purchase in 1659, originally a part of Freetown before breaking out on its own in 1803 under the name of Fall River, named for the Quequechan River that runs through it. Quequechan, in Wampanoag, means “falling river,” as it has eight falls within its run to Mount Hope Bay.

  However, in 1804, the town changed its name to Troy and would remain that way for the next thirty years, before reverting back to the Fall River name in 1834.

  Until the textile boom of the early 1800s that would carry the city through almost to the twenty-first century, Fall River always struggled with who it was as a community. Located practically equidistant from both New Bedford and Providence, Rhode Island, it felt tugs from both sides. It wasn’t until August 4, 1892, that the city had its defining moment, and that moment would eventually become known as the Fall River tragedy. Now, the city will be forever linked with Lizzie Borden, the young woman who allegedly took an ax and killed her father and stepmother.

  Quequechan Club

  Of course, Fall River is a place rich in history and culture and is a lot more than just a pair of grisly ax murders that still stand unsolved. A prime example of that is the Quequechan Club on North Main Street, within sight of Battleship Cove (a large collective of naval battleships and a maritime museum that remains one of Fall River’s top tourist attractions) and just a stone’s throw from the house where Lizzie—or someone else—changed the course of city history forever.