Vineyard Supernatural

by Holly Nadler

  At the instant he uttered the name, a shot resounded, like a pistol going off right in the small room with them.

  Both student and teacher stared in amazement at the source of the explosion: The glass inkwell had been cleaved thunderously, instantly, cleanly, and completely in half.

  Then the disembodied voice of Harlow’s sister said loudly and distinctly, “Is that clear-cut enough evidence?”

  The student jumped up and fled in terror. She never requested another interview.

  A short while later, Dr. Harlow’s parents began receiving mysteriously charged messages. They would find them on Mrs. Harlow’s bed table when they awoke in the morning. The notes were written in their daughter’s hand, scrawled in blue ink on sheets of grey vellum. Oddly, the written lines ran at right angles to the printed guidelines on the paper. The writing did indeed look like Anna’s longhand and showed examples of their late daughter’s habit of stressing various words by underlining them.

  The first note from Anna read, “I cannot find the words to express the joy and satisfaction of the work. We are busy every minute of the day, and sometimes into the night, too, but happy—oh so happy!—You must come and see for yourselves if you would be convinced. Do come all!”

  Now there is an invitation! The fearless Dr. Harlow might have taken his sister up on the suggestion if the transition could have been comfortably managed. (Interestingly, while Mrs. Harlow found the notes persuasive, Mr. Harlow, an old school Christian, declared them the work of the Devil. Disciples of fundamentalist religions regard anything to do with the spirit world as diabolical—no exceptions.)

  On at least two occasions, Dr. Harlow intercepted messages from the Other Side while vacationing on the Vineyard. During a March weekend visit to their house on the Lagoon, Dr. and Mrs. Harlow learned that their neighbor and friend Helen had been diagnosed with cancer. Dr. Harlow later told a forum at Stevens Chapel (the Unitarian Church in Vineyard Haven), “[My neighbor] and I had many talks, including some on psychical experiences which seemed to comfort her.”

  In June when the Harlows returned to the island, Helen was alive and her immediate death “not expected.” One day in July, the Harlows’ ten-year-old daughter, Betty, went swimming a mile south on the beach. Suddenly she was overcome by a strong sense of Helen’s presence. She dashed from the water and scuttled home. Bursting through the door, she asked her parents if their neighbor had died. Unbeknownst to the Harlows, Helen had indeed died at the same time that Betty was immersed in the water.

  A few years later, the Harlows arrived for a May weekend. They celebrated their return to the island by taking a walk in the woods. “We especially loved the spring after a hard New England winter, for it is then that the fields and the woods are radiant with new life,” Dr. Harlow later wrote in a religious publication called Guideposts. “The little path on which Marion and I walked that morning was spongy to our steps, and we held hands with the sheer delight of life…. This day we were especially happy and peaceful; we chatted sporadically, with great gaps of satisfying silence between our sentences.”

  They heard the murmur of voices behind them, and thought, quite naturally, that they were about to be overtaken by a group of people walking more briskly than they were. Strangely, the voices were suddenly resonating, not only from behind, but from above.

  “About ten feet above us, and slightly to our left, was a floating group of glorious creatures that glowed with spiritual beauty,” Harlow recalled. “There were six of them, young, beautiful women dressed in flowing white garments and engaged in earnest conversation. If they were aware of our existence, they gave no indication of it. Their faces were perfectly clear to us, and one woman, slightly older than the rest, was especially beautiful. Her dark hair was pulled back in what today we would call a ponytail. She was intently talking to a younger spirit who looked up into her face.

  “Neither Marion nor I could understand their words, although their voices were clearly heard.”

  The band of beings floated past them, their chatter fading until the figures disappeared. As soon as the couple could speak, they sat on a fallen tree, still holding hands, as they debriefed each other. They shared identical impressions, right down to the pony-tailed speaker and the rapt attention of her protege.

  It’s interesting to note that the Harlows’ already exalted mood, their sense of heightened pleasure at the beauty all around them, and their profound joy in each other’s company, seemed to bring into their orbit this company of celestial beings.

  This was a sight rarely conferred on anyone born since the time of the medieval mystics. The stirring vision must have boosted S. Ralph Harlow to a higher level of sanctity, although it’s clear from his writings that he was three-quarters of the way there to begin with.

  14 Tisbury’s Ghostly Perimeter

  When an entire town is afflicted by the darker shadings of the spirit world, certain steps must be taken to shift the balance back toward the positive end of the spectrum.

  The sweetness and shadows of downtown Tisbury (a.k.a Vineyard Haven) remind me of an experience Marty and I and some Vineyard friends had in the Uffizi Museum of Art in Florence, Italy. We referred to the requisite guidebook as we ambled from one brilliant painting to the next. In nearly every instance, the setting of each painting the book described as revealing—with subtlety, elegance, or even reluctance—“a veil of melancholy.” Soon “a veil of melancholy” became our private joke for the duration of the trip.

  But just such a dark veil is what the town of Tisbury has endured since the Great Fire of August 11, 1883.

  The fire itself was a straightforward tragedy of the sort that was all too common in nineteenth-century towns. On that fateful evening, a fire started in the ugly four-story harness factory (located where the old stone bank sits today at the northern end of Vineyard Haven’s commercial block). The old wooden structure, filled to the rafters with flammable materials, turned into a royal blaze in no time. An escalating northeasterly wind heaved the flames south and west. Before the night was over, the whole of Main Street and all the buildings within half a block of the factory had succumbed to the fire. Mercifully, no one was killed, though many were injured.

  Much was made of the fact that no town fire brigade existed and that each shopkeeper and householder was left to his or her own devices, hauling buckets of water from individual wells and tossing them one by one on the fire. However, we might pause to reflect that a fire brigade in and of itself hardly guarantees full protection. In 1883, the Mansion House hotel, located at the far southern end of Main Street, burned to the gtound without benefit of firefightets. The inn was rebuilt, but then in the winter of 2001, the Mansion House burned again down to its nub, even though the modern, fully loaded Tisbury Fire Department was located directly across the street!

  Following the inferno of 1883, the township was so devastated that Boston and New York newspapers predicted Holmes Hole would never recover. They underestimated the pioneering spirit of islanders. The shops and dwellings of Main Street were rebuilt in the endearing style of a western frontier town. (It’s inspiring to look at old pictures of this late-nineteenth-century remake because, while the shop names have changed, the buildings themselves are largely, recognizably, the same.)

  So why did the veil of melancholy develop? Is it a psychical hangover from the horror of the fire? Certainly that’s a factor. But, putting the pieces together, it’s apparent to your average ghost-hunter that a negative vortex has opened up on the site of the old harness factory that was the incubator of the 1883 fire.

  When I first began visiting the island in 1976, I thought, what a gentle history endows this place: no feuds, few murders, and only the smallest amount of chicanery. And that may be true: The Vineyard is indeed, and has always been, a kinder, gentler place than most of the rest of the country. But over the decades a reputation for extra sweetness and light has been generated, undeservedly, by reporters, editors, and historians, all of them unwilling to expose an
y kind of villainy.

  Wouldn’t you think that, in the aftermath of the Great Fire, at least one newspaper editorial or historical account would have posed the question of how the fire started?

  I combed the Gazette archives, my own shelves, and library shelves for every last book, both archaic (locked under library key) and modern to see if anyone had anything to say about the cause of the fire. I found nothing. This was starting to feel like a thirteen-decade-old cover-up.

  Such an untold story, particularly if it means a historical figure has never been brought to justice, can create a howling frustration in the spirit world (think of the Furies chasing ancient miscreants, or Banquo’s ghost crashing Macbeth’s banquet). In Vineyard Haven you can sense it on a cold November night when leaves clatter along past boarded-up captains’ houses—or at Christmas as an oboe player brings temporary cheer to a street corner—or in the dead of winter during a long lull when no ferry steams into the gorgeous, empty port.

  It wasn’t until the spring 2004 issue of Vineyard Style magazine rolled off the presses that historian Chris Baer set the record straight about events leading up to that fiery evening in August of 1883.

  This is the tale of a nineteenth-century Vineyard businessman named Rudolphus Crocker. Recently I asked a zillionth-generation islander and historian, “Do you know anything about Rudolphus Crocker and how he acquired orphans to work in his harness factory?”

  The historian took a labored breath before he said. “Ah, my great-uncle Rudolphus.”

  Instantly I knew I wouldn’t receive the real scoop on his venerated great uncle. Still, I persisted: “But was it true about his mistreatment of the orphans?”

  He assumed the voice of a lecturing professor, “In Victorian times it was considered an act of philanthropy to provide lodgings and jobs for orphans.”

  Here’s the unadorned, long-unreleased story.

  In every age there are ugly buildings. Mostly we consider these eyesores a manifestation of the twentieth century, but the nineteenth century, cradle of the Industrial Age, has given us the worst offenders. In Vineyard Haven, one of those rose to a visually defiling four stories of grey walls and rows of prison-sized windows on the northeast side of Main Street: the harness factory and the dormitories for its workers.

  Rudolphus Crocker was born and partially raised in Vineyard Haven, but at the age of eleven he was indentured to an abusive uncle who himself had owned a harness factory on the mainland. For five years he slaved away for ninety hours a week in his uncle’s hell-hole. When Rudolphus returned to the island, he created his own hell-hole: a harness factory, first situated at the corner where Rainy Day stands today, then moved northward across the street, where the town’s worst eyesore was erected.

  Rudolphus Crocker’s plant provided up to one hundred jobs and was the biggest employer on a jobs-scarce island. This alone must explain the pass he received from the local press. He was a prominent businessman; enough said.

  His work crews were a rowdy bunch, mostly teen boys culled from the class of drifters, immigrants, and newcomers. When Crocker needed to beef up his work force he visited New Bedford orphanages, where he picked up eight boys at a time. The workdays were long and relentless. When workers misbehaved, Rudolphus whipped them. (Think of children exploited as slave labor in Third World countries today; this was the fate of America’s impecunious kids in the Industrial Age.)

  Often the boys would attempt to get free. On one occasion two of the lads grabbed a dory from the beach and rowed out to one of the dozens of tall-masted ships anchored in the harbor. Officials remanded them to the harness factory, where Rudolphus treated them to twenty lashes apiece.

  News of Crocker’s cruelty leaked out, and at one point the entrepreneur found himself under state investigation for overworking and horsewhipping his workers. No charges were ever filed.

  The fire “of suspicious origins” (historian Chris Baer’s words) started shortly thereafter.

  Who knows what happens to sadistic bastards after they die? Although most of the more open-minded metaphysicians among us no longer believe in a literal Hell, we have a sense that those who’ve unleashed a tremendous amount of harm on others are, in the Afterlife, made to examine their misdeeds and endure a term of penance, perhaps by returning to human life and taking on the role of victim. In the process, these redeemed souls may help to shed light on the crimes for which they themselves were once responsible.

  Fine. The karmic wheel is a wonderful thing, but back on Earth when a cruel man’s memory goes down in old newspaper accounts and history books as a “prominent businessman” and the “Island’s biggest source of jobs,” well, that’s where the veiled melancholy settles in until the truth is told.

  Through the years people have confided to me about ghosts apprehended in or around the old stone bank that stands on the site of the former harness factory. Robert Wheeler, president of the bank in the 1980s and 1990s, confirmed recently that the people who worked under him regularly reported paranormal occurrences.

  “I never saw or heard anything myself, but I always thought the figure behind the haunting had to be old Stephen Carey Luce, first bank president in the early 1900s. He was highly germaphobic, so much so that he tied the guest chair in his office to the radiator to keep his visitors from getting close to him. He sounded disturbed enough to come back as an annoying ghost.”

  An excellent theory, but my money is still on old Rudolphus.

  A woman who worked in the bank in the early ‘80s told me that in one of the corridors she often felt an invisible foot striking her ankle and tripping her. Most of the time she caught herself, but twice she took a spill that bruised her knees.

  People have reported that, when walking past the old stone bank in the wee hours (on the Vineyard, the wee hours are any time after eight p.m.), they have heard watery voices coming from the vicinity of the building.

  Long Island medium Inez Kirchenko, who accompanied me as my guest on my first-ever ghost walk in Vineyard Haven, intuited the following (before I told her or the group any part of the story): “I’m hearing the clattering of young men’s footsteps. I see two boys running away from us up that dark street [where Main Street turns residential]. They’re wearing heavy boots, frayed black pants held up by suspenders, long-sleeved white shirts, grey caps. Their hearts are racing. They’re excited but fearful about getting away.”

  Diagonally across the street from the old stone bank, the owner of the French restaurant Le Grenier said that, back in the mid-1970s, he and his crew shared an odd experience as they reclined at a corner table, savoring cognac after closing time. Suddenly a staticky noise swarmed at the street-side windows. A swirling white cloud formed in the center of the room like a slow-motion tornado. The owner-chef and his staff watched in amazement as the whirlwind swept across the long room, then percolated through a far window and disappeared.

  A woman who as a child summered in a seaside home a few doors up from the bank, told me this story: “I was sixteen or seventeen, and backing my car out of the drive. Just before I reached the street, I heard the two back doors crunch open. I whipped my ahead around, but no one was there, and the doors were perfectly shut, as they should have been. Then after I reversed into the street, I heard the clunk of the back doors slamming shut! Again, no one was there, and the doors were undisturbed. It was creepy!”

  There are ghost stories to be found all up and down Main Street. If you examine a map that shows the perimeter of the Great Fire, you’ll find yourself studying the periphery of the chiaroscuro atmosphere of the town. It’s a lovely village, and through the ages inhabitants have shoved back the darkness with flowers, charming shops, and human kindness. All we can do is bring on more oboe players, plant still more flowers, make an effort to smile more, and to open our hearts—continuously.

  In a way, this town is a microcosm of all the human gathering places on the planet.

  A postscript: In the summer of 2008, before this book went to press, another di
saster struck Vineyard Haven when a popular eatery, the Moxie, burned to the ground on July 4. The adjoining building, which housed the legendary Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, was also scorched to the point of ruin. This is just the sort of calamity the town is prey to. At this juncture, the negative vortex appears to be widening.

  Prayers are welcome.

  15 Memento Mori: Island Cemeteries

  There is nothing more precious than a historic New England cemetery.

  Whereas modern cemeteries are fully as banal as the suburban sprawl and strip malls that surround them, old burial grounds invite us to linger and reflect—the engraved messages on many of the aged tombstones exhort us to do just that. The visitor who heeds that advice comes away with a renewed sense of how fleeting life is and of how what lies beyond the grave is guaranteed to be better if we make every effort to be fully conscious in the here and now. In that regard, a stroll through an ancient cemetery is an act of meditation.

  I used to wonder why tombstones of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were so grim. First you must come to grips with the death’s heads abutted by angel’s wings. (The wings are perceived by scholars as a sign of the soul’s uplifting, but still…) In the Tower Hill graveyard, near the sea in Edgartown, Thomas Trapp, who died in 1719, rests beneath a slate that reads, “All You That Corns My Grave To See / Such As I Am So Must You Be.” On Abel’s Hill, in Chilmark, you’ll see the 1747 marker for Elizabeth Bosworth, engraved with angels and devils in a pitched battle and the words “Mors Certa, Incerta Die[s], Memento Mori, Fugit Hora” (Death is certain, your days are uncertain, remember you will die, the hours flee.) And whenever the carvers were stumped for something new to inscribe that was suitably bleak, they could always fall back on the lines viewed in all old New England burial grounds, such as you’ll find on Tower Hill at the grave of Henry Butler (“d. 1737 in his 37th year”): “When On This Stone You Cast an Eye, Remember You Are Born to Die.” And there’s always the perennially tasteful and pithy, “Memento Mori.”