Vineyard Supernatural

by Holly Nadler

  Arlen and Perry, their two adopted kids, and his three children from a previous marriage enjoyed the Ocean Park cottage for many happy summers. Perry died in 1998, and in 2002 Arlen married Marshall Clinard, a retired sociology professor.

  One final piece of family history is included because it may contribute to the spirit content of the Ocean Park cottage: Arlen’s daughter, Joyce, of Native American heritage, died at the age of twenty-eight. Her own cherished, private domain during her family’s summer vacations was the lavender room.

  On a frigid night in mid-December of 2007, I visited the seasonally dark and brooding cottage on Ocean Park with my buddies Bob Alger, Bob Kent, and Patrick MacAllister from the Pilgrim Paranormal Research Group. Arlen had mailed me a key and her blessings. The men heaped their equipment on the kitchen table and switched on a battery-operated lantern. In a few more minutes they had their electromagnetic field meter in hand, carrying it from room to room to arrive at a baseline reading of 0.1. A thermometer recorded forty-seven degrees, but it dipped into the high twenties as the evening wore on. Electronic voice recorders were activated in strategic locations.

  All three men strapped red lights to their foreheads, the better to reduce visual interference, both to the naked eye and the camera. Their cold streams of breath turned from silver to ruby red.

  Bob A. announced our arrival in each room with a friendly “Hello” and an assurance that we were here on a brief visit. We all made mention of thumps and bumps as these sounds occurred; sometimes only one of us heard a noise, other times we noted it together. At one point Bob K. remarked, peering up to the pointed ceiling of the front bedroom, “I heard a male voice, maybe coming through the vent?”

  But it was in the lavender room that things started to get lively.

  We’d drifted in and out of the tiny, high-ceilinged bedroom several times until finally we focused on a framed portrait of a dark-haired Victorian debutante. All of a sudden the space we stood in grew colder, going from refrigerator chilly to the swirling mists of meat-locker cold. The electromagnetic field meter, which had remained at the baseline 0.1 now spiked to 0.3. Then as we continued to gaze at the portrait, something kicked the inside of the closet door, hard and loud.

  Suddenly I remembered I was up past my bedtime and announced that I was heading home.

  Bob, Bob, and Patrick stayed for a couple more hours to continue their investigation. A week later, Bob A. e-mailed me:

  In the middle bedroom upstairs we heard a girl’s voice—unintelligible, though we picked up a definite “Hi”—we caught it on the audio of one of the video cameras. Shortly after that, the EM meter in the violet room alarmed. Bob also got a picture in the front bedroom of a mist forming. Also there were a couple of times when we were out of the house, warming up in the truck, when the EM meter alarmed. We heard a lot of footsteps, and a lot of banging noises that could have been a loose shutter; it’s hard to say. There seemed to be more bangs and noises when we were out of the house; [the ghosts| were shy when we were inside with them. All in all, an interesting night.”

  Amen to that.

  Some weeks later, when Bob and his crew were cleaning up the audio of the disembodied girl’s voice, they were able to tease out this message: “You’re probably looking for me.”

  4 Confederates On Pedestals

  If you read the Vineyard Gazette (or any of the smaller, long-gone island newspapers of the nineteenth century) on microfiche, covering the years of 1860 to 1865, you would scarcely know the Civil War was going on. Camp meeting picnics, moonlit wagon rides to South Beach, and the new rage for croquet commanded greater attention from the local reading public. Vineyarders have always had an absolute libido for denial, and it’s easy enough to nurture this pathology on any island without a bridge to the mainland, where all the serious stuff is happening.

  Even in the decades preceding the Civil War, the pressing issue of slavery was, embarrassingly enough in hindsight, a source of ambivalence on the Vineyard. Slavery was illegal here, but that was because it had long before been banned in Boston. A purely poisonous piece of federal legislation had come along in 1793, the Fugitive Slave Act, compelling citizens in antislavery states to remand escaped slaves to their owners. Then the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, bless its heart, before the election of 1860, passed the Personal Liberty Act, obstructing that vile law and allowing runaways the right to plead their case before a jury.

  Some Vineyarders helped these fugitives by hiding them among the more accepting mixed-ancestry residents of Gay Head, or by escorting them on the next leg of their journey, to New Bedford. From there, the escaped slaves would go on to Boston and then to safety in Canada.

  And this, too, was good: Vineyarders voted for Abraham Lincoln in larger proportions than did townsfolk anywhere else in the nation. But events heated up faster than wise minds could take stock: South Carolina seceded from the Union, six more states followed, forming the Confederacy; Fort Sumter was fired on and federal troops were sent to intervene; eight more states seceded, and the cannons were rolled out.

  If Mr. Lincoln could have spent a few days with island locals, his long legs stretched across a Campground porch rail, he might have been prevailed upon to try diplomacy before killing off hundreds of thousands of his citizens. (Mark Kurlansky, in his 2006 book Nonviolence, demonstrates convincingly how the battle could have been averted, and emancipation achieved, without unleashing the dogs of war.)

  At the war’s start, Gazette editor Edgar Marchant invited publishers and politicians around the nation to let go of their antagonisms and come fishing on the Vineyard: “If they are terribly pugnacious and excited, let them go out and harpoon sharks, and bang them on the head with a good-sized club.”

  Island dwellers are accidental Utopians in that they have rarely, if ever, been crusaders, which means they haven’t added to the world’s woes. Let us take care of our own plot of giound; you’re welcome to join us, but don’t ask us to join you—that, in a nutshell, is the unspoken policy of island living.

  During the Civil Wat years, one could see this live-and-let-live approach play itself out every time a new call for volunteers and, later, draftees, came down from the state capital. Virtually no Vineyarder signed up. Most able-bodied men could find an exemption that fit their circumstances (sole surviving son, sole support of a wife and children, etc.). Failing a good, juicy exemption, or the very solid excuse of absence at sea, anyone could buy his ticket out with a three-hundred-dollar bounty paid to a professional recruiter in Boston who hired substitute recruits (often recently arrived Irish immigrants). Many of these recruits for hire would sign up, desert, and sign up again under a new name to collect another bounty.

  At town meetings on the Vineyard, voters authorized bonds to pay the bounties for the men who would not be marching off to war. Let us not forget that, in spite of what our third-grade social studies classes taught us, no one in the North was asked to fight to end slavery. Lincoln strongly believed that soldiers would lay down theit arms and desert in droves if that were the rallying cry. Rather, they were fighting to preserve the Union. At this juncture, the states had been “united” for a mere eighty-five years.

  After the war, the new editor of the Gazette, James Cooms, Jr., took advantage of his new bully pulpit to write: “The future historian will point to the leaders of the rebellion as being the indirect cause of the abolition of slavery on this continent—showing how good is made to spring out of evil.” (What Cooms did here was give Confederates the ctedit for ending slavery in spite of themselves. This is twisted thinking but it is also, somehow, very Vineyard.)

  And so life continued on apace, with the usual byproduct of war: recession and grievances nursed for generations on both sides of the conflict. On the Vineyard, animosities were muted, though not entirely lacking. As usual there were more pressing local concerns—a bad economy, not enough jobs, too few amusements, rampant alcohol use—so what else is new? But in this Yankee stronghold very little Monday morning
quarterbacking was going on about the late war. That is, until 1891, when Charles Strahan, Oak Bluffs newspaper publisher and veteran of the 21st Virginia Regiment, decided to erect a monument to an unidentified Civil War solider. Originally located at the base of Circuit Avenue, it was moved in the early twentieth century to its present site facing the Sound on a triangle of lawn above Ocean Park.

  Let me put into the record here that this bronze statue has always been known colloquially as the Confederate Soldier. It’s been painted blue. It’s been painted grey. Numerous times. It’s even been green, due to oxidation of the metal.

  It’s still referred to as the Confederate Soldier, although island historians will correct you until they’re blue (or grey or green) in the face.

  No one knew quite what Mr. Strahan had in mind when he paid a small fortune for the statue. Was he trying to sneak a Rebel into a Yank town? Mr. Strahan insisted the monument was designed to end all lingering hostilities, and to celebrate peace, glorious peace.

  Yet somehow the feeling remains that we’ve got Confederates in the attic (to borrow from the title of Islander Tony Horowitz’s hilarious book). We’ve certainly got Confederates on the sea. Mr. Robert Douglas, founder of the Black Dog tavern, tee-shirt, and souvenirs empire, maintains two exquisite nineteenth-century reproduction schooners in the Vineyard Haven harbor, the Shenandoah and the Alabama. The original schooners bearing these names belonged to Southern privateers and were responsible for decimating New England’s whaling fleet during the Civil War. These Rebel swashbucklers routinely captured civilian ships, dumped the mariners ashore, then set fire to the vessels. A good half-dozen Vineyard whalers were destroyed in this manner.

  Surprisingly, we’ve also got ghostly remnants of grey-clad soldiers on our porches.

  I was keeping my parapsychologist’s eye on a particular cottage in the Campground after a man in his early fifties paid a visit to me in my bookstore in the summer of 2003. He and his wife had recently purchased a house alongside the charming white parish hall, a Campground landmark that resembles a church in a tiny Vermont village. The weekend before the man’s visit to my store, the couple had come up to their new home to take stock.

  He sensed immediately that something was not right with their house. A great many things were not right. Objects toppled from shelves. Small items such as a spatula or a sink-side sponge would disappear, then reappear precisely where they were supposed to be. At one point, the new homeowner watched, aghast, as a beaded-glass salt shaker slid across the breakfast table without the help of any visible human hand. Then the pepper shaker followed suit, clinking alongside its companion.

  “The funny part of all of this,” he said, “was that I couldn’t discuss it with my wife. She’s a scientist, with all the skepticism that comes with that profession. If I said anything about ghosts to her, she’d bite my head off!”

  When it came time to pack up and leave at the end of the weekend, an unmistakable tension had developed between the pair. They were silent on the ferry passage, and the silence continued during the car ride north out of Wood’s Hole and up Route 28 toward Boston. Not until they had glided up and over the soaring heights of the Bourne Bridge, and left Cape Cod behind, did his wife turn to him and say, “Shall we talk about the ghost?”

  I asked the beleaguered new homeowner to keep me updated, but several years elapsed without my hearing another word from him. As part of my research, I added the cottage—grey shingles, cream and Pompeian-red jigsaw trim, yellow shutters—to my list of potentially haunted houses, which meant it received a long, searching glance whenever I walked past it.

  Three years later, I could tell that something was still amiss with this cottage. A telltale indication of paranormal activity is a house sitting dark and unused. I’m not talking about a derelict, abandoned house—that, of course, is a blatant sign. So is a house on Martha’s Vineyard in a highly desirable location, in fine fettle, standing unlit and vacant, with the owners disinclined to rent it for big bucks or lend it to friends or family. It needn’t be anything overt—no spooks leaping from broom closets or creepy moans issuing from the basement. Instead, there might be something in the very atmosphere of the house that makes the occupants anxious or depressed, but they never for a moment place the blame on the spirit world. Instead they simply find reasons to go elsewhere for the summer, and feel no motivation to share their strangely un-wonderful house with loved ones.

  And so it was, or seemed to be, with this cottage.

  Then, one late afternoon in August, I was ambling up from the harbor with Huxley on his leash. From one of the tiny connecting lanes, lined chock-a-block with gingerbread mini-palaces, we entered the main circle called Trinity Park and, in the distance, I glimpsed a man seated on the porch of the cottage by the pretty, white parish hall.

  At last, someone using the house!

  The man was perched on a rocking chair at the far end of the veranda. He was leaning forward, hands on his knees, feet planted firmly on the boards, legs together. I saw to my amazement he was dressed in a Civil War uniform, specifically a Confederate uniform: white, long-sleeved shirt with a slender grey band at the high collar, a grey billed cap on his head.

  Must be going to a costume party, I thought.

  By the time I was within twenty feet of the porch, I noticed that he was sitting improbably still and that his skin tone was dull, a deep, unnatural beige.

  You dope! I chided myself. He’s a mannequin! My next words to myself were: But just in case he’s not a mannequin, stop staring! It’s rude!

  Let me add that the man never once looked at me, so if I stared, chances were I wasn’t provoking him with my lack of couttesy. Instead, he was gazing straight ahead, as if he were watching the antics of children or dogs at play in the patk.

  Trying to keep my own gaze straight ahead, I walked past him, Huxley at my heels. Then my curiosity got the better of me because, well, I sensed that something important was taking place. I turned for one last look.

  At this point, the figure should have been seated only about three feet behind me. Only he wasn’t. He was gone.

  So was the rocking chair.

  I stopped. So did Huxley. He crooked his ears in different directions—his way of indicating he had no idea what I was trying to tell him. (Unlike some canines, Huxley seems to be unfazed by—or oblivious to—ghosts.) He stared at me with his beady, buggy, Boston terrier eyes.

  “Huxley, I think we’ve just seen a ghost.”

  If anyone had caught me talking out loud to my dog, I might have looked pretty beady and buggy myself.

  5 Puttin’ on The Ritz, at Your Own Risk

  In May 2006, a couple of Boston University girls down for the Memorial Day weekend had a brush with the supernatural in a honky-tonk cafe. I can almost hear the late Rod Serling’s solemn voice as he narrates the girls’ experience: “A dark night on a haunted island, a jukebox playing a forgotten tune, and two young women who are about to meet a barfly from … the Twilight Zone.”

  The Ritz Cafe, near the bottom eastern corner of Circuit Avenue, may not be Oak Bluffs’ oldest saloon, but it’s arguably the funkiest, loudest, grittiest, and most colorful dive on the entire island. Only the biggest night-owls and the most continuously inebriated locals frequent the Ritz Cafe. “Everybody knows your name,” applies to Ritz regulars as much as it does to the more upscale clientele of the Cheers bar on television, but at the Ritz everyone also knows you drink Cutty Sark shots with beer chasers.

  For all its hard-drinking atmosphere, the old watering hole is not so scary that you’re likely to get pummeled if you root for the wrong baseball team. On the contrary, the Ritz is nothing short of cozy. Excellent bands often play there—island favorites such as Johnny Hoy and the Blue-fish and the Sultans of Swing. A second room holds an elderly pool table. Locals waiting for take-out pizza at Giordano’s feel comfortable hanging out in this quieter room, pool cue in hand, able to absorb some of the fellowship from a distance.

  The
building began as a fish market in 1872, some years later changing over to a fruit and confectioner business, followed by an ice cream parlor. During the 1920s and 30s a package store held pride of place, but the Ritz has been the Ritz since 1944, and we’re all better off for it.

  On one notable occasion, April Fool’s Day 1997, the Ritz’s management hosted a special marriage ceremony. Any amorous couple could step forward to be wed for the night, no questions asked about alternate spousal commitments. Local blues singer Gordon Healy hitched up the temporary brides and grooms, who, along with their guests, danced until closing time. One of the Just Married couples won the raffle for a getaway weekend at the none-too-plush Surfside Motel, down the way and across the street.

  When the Ritz was undergoing renovations in the early 1980s and had to shut down for a month, islanders observed that a bevy of parked cars kept turning up every evening in the normally deserted parking lot of the East Chop Beach Club. The deal was, if you couldn’t drink in good company, you could always BYOB and pile into a car with some buddies. An island wag called it “the Ritz Sur Mer.” The ocean view was free of charge.

  Yes, nearly every Vineyarder under ninety has stepped into the Ritz Cafe at least once.

  Their first visit was also fated to be their last for the two Boston University students, Blaine* (19), and Kaitlyn* (20). The girls possessed the rite-of-passage fake IDs to allow just this sort of bar sortie.

  On the night in question, the two pretty girls—Blaine with shoulder-length auburn hair and Kaitlyn with pale blonde hair pulled back and clasped with a tortoise-shell barrette—wore low-scooped tank tops, designer denim shorts and, respectively, hot pink and turquoise Crocs. It was about seven o’clock in the evening, and the girls pointedly avoided the gaze of the male regulars who were already on their way to getting sloppily drunk. Even without eye contact, the girls could feel urgent, bemused stares streaming in their direction.