by Holly Nadler
It required no more than a rudimentary knowledge of human nature to know the guys had to be thinking, What are these hotties doing here?!
The girls turned to face the bartender, a plump, mid-forties woman with a shag of dark hair. Blaine ordered a mojito, Kaitlyn a glass of white wine. When their drinks arrived, they continued to stand and face the white vinyl counter and the shelves of bottles on the wall behind the bar. Nonetheless, they felt fetvid stares boring into their backs.
Kaitlyn took a sip of her wine, then jerked her head around. “Someone just tapped my shoulder!” she said to Blaine.
Blaine took a long searching look around the room. “The closest person is ten feet away,” she said.
Kaitlyn shrugged, then set her glass on the counter. “Big mistake coming here.”
“Let’s finish up our drinks and find someplace to eat.”
The blonde nodded, relaxing her shoulders. But then she let out a low cry and spun her head around again. “Goddammit!”
“What?”
“I got tapped again!” Now it was Kaitlyn’s turn to take a long look at the faces in the bar. She thought they showed expressions of fake innocence.
Blaine felt a flare of impatience. “Look, I’m right next to you. Wouldn’t I notice if someone snuck up and touched you?”
Kaitlyn sighed and belted back the rest of her wine. Her expression was so sour that her friend said with a laugh, “Look, I’ll take a picture with my cell phone the minute you sound off again. At least I can prove there’s no one messing with you.”
For a few moments Kaitlyn stared blankly into her friend’s upheld camera as Blaine, with her free hand, took a long pull on her mojito.
All of a sudden Kaitlyn let out a piercing scream and clapped a hand to her right eyeball. Instinctively, Blaine snapped a picture at the same instant.
The bar had gone from a high-decibel chatter to silence, although now the jukebox sounded extra loud as it wailed, “Born on the Bay-ou! Born on the Bay-ou, baby!” All attention was centered on Kaitlyn as she covered her eye with both hands.
“Someone scratched my eye!”
Blaine gently lifted her friend’s hand away from her face and, tilting up her chin, peered at her with concern.
Kaitlyn’s eye was red, and it flowed with tears of injury. Then both eyes shed tears as she cried at the shock and pain.
Blaine examined the screen on her cell phone to see who was responsible for the attack. In the digital image, no one lurked anywhere near Kaitlyn. But what the camera had captured was a jagged white streak of liquid light, about three feet in length, and streaming toward Kaitlyn’s right eye.
After hearing about this experience, whenever I’ve had the opportunity—or the nerve—to ask a Ritz regular about ghost stories, he or she invariably says the living customers routinely kick up too much of a ruckus for them to notice anything more, well, nuanced going on from the spirit world. (Then, invariably, they add a secondary but enthusiastic comment: “The music’s awesome!”) All the same, I have picked up the following paranormal tidbits.
An attractive blonde in her forties told me, “One night three years ago, there was this handsome dude—blue eyes, sort of bald in that cool, shaved way—at the bar. He knew my name before I told him, though I was pretty hammered, so maybe I told him! Anyway, he talked to me—he was so serious!—about what a bummer it was to drink too much. He made such an impression on me, I’ve been sober ever since—swear to God! And the funny thing is, I never saw him before, and I haven’t run into him since! Not once! I think he was a guardian angel!”
A middle-aged male Harley rider reports having fallen off the same barstool four or five times. “It’s the one at the far end near the door. And I drink mostly ginget ale, so I wonder if there’s this mean drunk Ritz ghoul that keeps shoving me!”
Barroom ruckus or bad-boy ghosts? Aside from the eye-scratching episode, a visit to the Ritz promises to be more pleasurable than paranormal.
And the music is awesome!
6 Random Ghosts I
My favorite cab company is Martha’s Vineyard Taxi, partly because I have its phone number memorized—not an easy accomplishment once one is past a certain age—and mostly because Morgan, the twenty-eight-year-old, red-headed company owner, sometimes brings his Portuguese water dog, Manny, along for the ride.
One drizzly night last November, I called Morgan for a ride home after attending a play at the Katharine Cornell Theater in Vineyard Haven.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you something,” he said when he pulled up, looking a little sheepish. “This vehicle we’re driving maybe has a ghost. Two of my drivers last summer started to get upset about it.”
A young woman to whom he’d assigned the gently used SUV (only twenty thousand miles on it when he bought it from an off-island dealer), was the first to get spooked. On her after-midnight runs, after she’d dropped off her fare and was alone in the cab, if she glanced in the rear-view mirror she’d catch sight of the shadowy outline of a man positioned in the center of the seat behind her.
“If I’d reached between the front seats I could have touched his lap,” she told Motgan. “That’s how close he was.”
The fitst time it happened, she gave a cry and turned around to look, but saw no one there. After a while she refused to drive that particulat vehicle. Other problems arose, and eventually Morgan had to let her go. Shortly thereafter the erstwhile taxi driver left the island.
“The funny part was,” Morgan said to me, “she passed on her fears to one of the guys who worked for me. He swore up and down he’d seen this backseat rider too. He’d get this feeling of not being alone in the car, and—sure enough—he’d peek in the mirror and see this guy in the back seat.”
(In an amusing twist, one night this same driver dropped off a bunch of young tipplers at a house in Katama. Unbeknownst to him, one of the gang had passed out on the floor of the rear seat. When the fellow later revived enough to throw an arm over the seat back and let out a loud gurgle, the driver shouted in terror and swerved the cab over to the side of the road.)
Morgan and I speculated about the history of the taxi as he drove me home. Could someone have been murdered in it? I suggested. Died of a heart attack while bumping along to an undisclosed location? It reminded me of my favorite Emily Dickinson lines:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
Apparently Morgan had already wondered about the vehicle’s provenance too, but had found it was impossible to track its background in detail: “It was used for its first twenty thousand miles as a rental car. Hundreds of people drove it.”
“Did the dealer drop any hints about a, um, problem?”
“Why would he? I know I wouldn’t!”
Naturally a conversation such as this provokes you, almost against your will, to glance at the back seat. There was no one there. For the moment.
As you’ll see, this one is and isn’t a ghost story …
A house called the Silo sits all by itself on a beach on Chappaquiddick’s southwest shore. Its name is derived from the short, squat tower enclosing the sole bedroom. A picture window occupies the length of the wall of the living room which, predictably, overlooks a deck and the sparkling expanse of Katama Bay. Providing they don’t mind having to shove the two twin beds together, the Silo is a perfect place for an amorous couple to enjoy some romantic time to themselves with only sea and sky for company.
A man in his early to mid-thirties named Billy* rented the Silo for a week in July 1994. In those days I worked for a real estate company in Edgartown, and I was the agent who hooked Billy up with his Chappy rental. He told me his girlfriend would be accompanying him, which made me glad for him, considering the Silo’s private setting. Next he mentioned that his parents would join the party, which seemed to put a crimp in the week’s enjoyment quotient but, as the French people say, chacun
à son goût…
A couple of weeks after Billy’s vacation had come and gone, he called me at the real estate office and said, “1 have a couple of weird stories for you about the Silo, but you’re going to think I’m loony-tunes.”
By then I’d collected enough ghost stories (my first book, Haunted Island, was about to be published), that I recognized the symptons. He wasn’t calling me to complain about the dust bunnies under the sofa.
He added hesitantly, “There may be a ghost.”
“You’re talking to the right person,” I assured him.
He reported that on the first night of the rental the four of them had dinner at home. His parents, to whom he’d given the bedtoom, called it an early night. Billy and his girlfriend would be sleeping on the pull-out sofa in the living room.
The bedroom had two single beds banked against opposite walls across a creaky, wood-planked floot. A tired old dresser sat between the beds. (The Silo was supremely rustic; the bathroom had a sink and toilet, but the shower, rusty spigots and all, stood in a warped enclosure outdoors. Lots of Vineyard houses have outdoor showers, but that doesn’t preclude them having at least one shower indoors.)
The following morning, Billy’s mother told him that she and his fathet had dozed off quickly, but sometime later she was awakened by the sound of someone treading across the floor boards. There was no moonlight coming in through the windows that evening, and of course there are no streetlights, so the room was dark as a bank vault. She assumed her husband was approaching to keep her company.
She felt and heard the mattress press down on the edge of her bed. She scooted over to make room just as she felt the sheet and blanket lifted back. The mattress sagged as a body stretched out alongside her. But she felt no body heat, no contact whatsoever.
She waited for a cuddle, but none was forthcoming. “Ed?” she whispered into the dark, realizing at nearly the same instant that she could hear no sound beside her, certainly not her husband’s slightly labored breathing. “Hey!” she said with a trace of asperity. No response.
She reached above the bed to switch on the cheap lamp clumsily nailed to the wall above her bed. A flood of light glared in the small bedroom.
There was no one in bed with her.
Furthermore, hei husband was fast asleep on the mattress across the room. He lay on his side, facing away from her, his nighttime adenoidal breaths issuing from both his mouth and nose.
Billy paused for effect, then continued, “An even stranger thing happened a few nights later.
“It was Saturday night, and my parents had taken the car over to Edgartown on the little ferry. My girlfriend and I lounged around the Silo, grilled bluefish on the deck, watched the sunset from the living room, and then we got a little friendly on the sofa. I had my arm around her, and I happened to look up at the picture window. Just outside, I saw this chick in a long white dress staring at us! She raised her hand and waved. Then she stepped back and disappeared!
“At the time I didn’t think there was anything super-natutal about it. In fact I was steamed! Someone had come along to mess with our privacy! The only way out of the house was through the rear door, so I stomped out back and raced around to the deck to chew her out, whoever she was. She was gone. I looked both ways up and down the beach and, I’m telling you, there’s no way a human being could have booked it out of there so fast that I wouldn’t have seen her white dress waving in the wind.”
This sounded very interesting from the point of view of ghost hunting. I told Billy I’d call the homeowners, find out about the Silo’s history, and get back to him.
I hung up the phone and regaled my three office mates with the tale of Billy’s Excellent Chappy Adventure. One of my colleagues was Lynda Hathaway, the company bookkeeper. Lynda is a multigenetational islander with thick, brunette shoulder-length hair, a pretty, round face, and a lively sense of fun. At that moment, however, she had a funny expression on her face; all the highjinx had drained out of her. After the others had returned to their paperwork and phone calls, Lynda approached my desk, still looking a little green under the gills.
She said, “I was the lady in white.”
It turned out that Lynda had gone to school with Billy. She knew he was vacationing here because he’d called and asked her to recommend a rental agent. She steered him my way.
On the Saturday night in question, Lynda was attending a party at the house of her brother, artist Dana Gaines, just a short jog up the beach. Around nine o’clock she thought about Billy. He’d confided that he and his wife (whom she also knew from school days) had recently separated. He’d sounded sad, and she worried that he was sitting alone in his remote little beach house feeling sorry for himself. The remedy for this, she determined, was for her to sprint along the shore and invite sad Billy to the party.
“I had on a white cotton blouse and white cotton skirt,” she told me. “When I peered in the window to see if Billy was home, I saw him making out with this girl on the sofa! ‘Well! He hasn’t wasted any time!’ I thought. When he looked up, I waved, but I was irked and embarrassed, so I ran like a madwoman back to Dana’s. I guess Billy was wrong about me not having enough time to clear out of there.”
I must confess, I was disappointed to learn that the story had what skeptics call a rational explanation. But in the next moment, I looked Lynda squarely in the eye and said, “Okay, but was it you who got into bed with his mom?”
When a ghost story is indistinguishable from an appointment with guardian angels, one’s entire life and philosophy can be altered.
In 1979, Janice Belisle, native Edgartownian, wife, and mother of a six-year-old daughtei, was grieving for her father, who had recently died. Her daily rituals and obligations kept her going, howevei, and one of them was to teach religious classes at the Catholic parish hall on Pease Point Way, across from the Edgartown fire station.
“I had to drop something off one afternoon when I knew the church was empty,” she told me. “I stood downstairs in the dark. It was so quiet you could hear the hallway clock ticking. And then all of a sudden I heard women singing upstairs. Normally this wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary—the big loft space was where we held choir practice. But there was no sign of human presence—no coats thrown on hooks or benches, no lights on anywhere.”
The sound of singing was surreal. Janice mounted the stairs to find the vocalists. As she drew closer to the upstairs landing, she was aware of a heightened, unearthly quality to the psalm, unrecognizable but beautiful. The choir had never sounded so practiced, so … perfect. At the top of the stairs, Janice could see directly into the upper loft space. The room was empty. And yet voices spilled all around her, the acoustics of the hall amplifying the sweetness of the vocals.
When Janice recently told me about this experience, her eyes grew misty as she scrolled up the memory. “I’ve always thought my dad’s spirit sent me this band of singing angels.”
I mulled this over, then volunteered my own opinion: “I believe your dad may have facilitated it, but I’m thinking it couldn’t have happened if you weren’t scheduled in this lifetime for a state of grace. This one lasted for maybe an hour, maybe a few days, but it’s changed you, hasn’t it? It’s opened your heart and given you a deeper sense of spiritual possibility?”
She nodded with a relieved smile. “I haven’t told many people about this.”
I sighed. “I know. If we could all share these events more openly, we’d create a gorgeous new world for ourselves.”
Now it was Janice’s turn to sigh. “It was a gorgeous experience.”
“Your first,” I said with a conviction that surprised me. “It won’t be your last.”
I’ve been keeping my eye on another Campground cottage in addition to the one that yielded the Confederate soldier. In June 2006, my friend, writer Jessica Harris (of Oak Bluffs, Queens, New York, and New Orleans), introduced me to her friend, Jana Napoli, also of New Orleans, who Jessica assured me was a true medium.
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br /> Jana, a short, dark woman with the shape of a pre-Columbian Earth Mother, said she’d love to attend my Oak Bluffs ghost tour one day because she’d encountered her own roster of spirits on her yearly visits to the island.
“The creepiest one is in the Campground. You know that little street that feeds in from the Oyster Bar and Grill? Just where it intersects the circular street around the Tabernacle, there’s this grey-shingled cottage with orange and white trim. It’s got a wraparound veranda, and facing the front, there’s a … a presence. It’s an old-time hellfire and brimstone preacher. The guy’s way, way too intense.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
She shuddered. “He’s always ranting as if he’s still in the pulpit. He yells at all the people strolling by—not that they can hear him—but he tells them they’re sinners and going straight to Hell! I mean, can you believe his nerve? All these nice, happy tourists going by, snapping pictures of these pretty little cottages, and this freak is blasting them?!” She let out a grim chortle. “These days I give a wide berth to that particular corner.”
I wasn’t surprised. This was a cottage where, way back during my first visit on a late November afternoon in 1977, I’d seen a rocking chair tipping forward and back all by itself, while all the other rockers left out on Campground verandas sat perfectly still.
Jana Napoli told me her story at the start of the summer during which I later encountered the ghost of the Confederate soldier. You’ll recall that the soldier’s cottage had sat dark and deserted until that fateful August afternoon. So had this other house with the spirit of Cotton Mather on the porch. In this historic fantasyland, for two summer homes to stand idle must have constituted a record. Naturally, I decided this second Victorian dollhouse must also contain some serious ecto-life.