by Holly Nadler
From 1924 to 1973, Penikese was a bird sanctuary. The sanctuary’s first warden, Mr. Turner, lived on the island with his wife and children until 1941, when a freak accident occurred. One of the Turner children killed a sibling with a hunting rifle. Shortly thereafter the grieving Turners moved away.
Penikese was unoccupied by human beings for thirty-two years. Then a new regime began, that of the Penikese Island School for delinquent boys.
Fresh air, plenty of outdoor labor, and the acquiring of good yeoman’s skills—this was the protocol that, years before, Dr. Parker had instituted to provide a healthy daily regimen for his leprosy patients. The same good results were anticipated for the unruly boys of the Penikese Island School. However, of the original one hundred and six boys, tracked from 1973 to 1980, only sixteen turned their lives around. The others re-entered the world to wreak havoc, committing three hundred and nine violent crimes and more than three thousand nonviolent offenses in their subsequent careers. Once those results became known, funds dried up, although the Outward Bound-type school has struggled on to this day.
It was into this rustic morass of potentially dangerous youngsters that Vineyarder Alex Friedman stepped in the late 1990s to take up his new job as counselor.
“I worked on Penikese for six summers and five winters,” he told me recently. “You work six straight days at a time, then take days off. You have to. It’s a penal colony with ghosts.”
Still, the idealistic and handsome young man (he’s a local talk show host on Plum Television) expressed nothing but admiration for the Penikese school: “The boys and the staff built the saltbox house with their bare hands. There’s no electricity, so it’s all heated with kerosene lamps. There are three woodstoves, one of them for cooking. Everyone works in the vegetable garden, chops wood, does repairs. If a window is broken, we’re all motivated to fix it; otherwise we all freeze.”
When new kids arrive on the island—they’re called New Jacks—they’re invariably skeptical and blusteiy about any talk of the supernatural. “Ain’t no ghost, dawg!” is a typical response, Alex said, but the veteran kids tell them somberly, “You gotta respect the ghosts.”
The Penikese boys, with nothing to do but work, study, and roam the eighty acres of the island, quickly learn every last detail of the history. Today’s delinquents feel a common bond with the lepers, who suffered stigma and banishment even greater than theirs.
“They know the lepers’ names and each one’s personal history,” said Alex. “There’s an initiation ceremony for New Jacks. They’re taken to the cemetery at night and they’ve got to do a rubbing of one of the grave markers. The staff allows it. It isn’t a cruel hazing; it teaches the kids acceptance.”
One night Alex, who loves to fish, packed up rods, buckets, and other assorted gear, and took a fourteen-year-old inmate from New Bedford over to the north shore. “It was about ten o’clock at night when we walked back past the graveyard. This kid, Jimmy, behind me, started to yelp, in that indignant way little kids do: ‘Cut it out! Cut it out!’”
Alex turned to see Jimmy slapping at his head, neck, and shoulders. “Something’s touching me!” the boy shouted, clearly terrified.
“Come on. Let’s keep walking,” said Alex.
Jimmy continued his outbursts all the way back along the beach.
Sitting in my bookstore drinking herbal tea, Alex unconsciously lowered his voice as he told me the story of one of his fellow counselors, Kenny, a tough, karate-chopping ex-Army Ranger. “It was a summer night, and Kenny woke up to find a woman straddling him! Now, there were no females on the island, so it wasn’t as if someone could have snuck over from a Girl Scout camp or something. He said it wasn’t sexual. Her clothes were on. But she was reaching out and touching him as if she were hungry for affection. He said he kept thinking he was dreaming, so he tried and tried to shake himself awake until finally he had to accept that he was awake. Then, ironically, the strain of doing that caused him to fall back asleep. In the morning, when he told us about it, we all said the same thing, ‘It was Lucy Peterson.’ We’d seen pictures of her—she was young and pretty—and, of course, we were well acquainted with her gravestone up at the cemetery.”
Alex’s favorite of the Penikese ghost legends that have been passed down for the last thirty or forty years is one known as “The Man in the Yellow Pants.” Here’s how he tells the story:
Every year at Christmas, the school closes down for the winter. The kids leave, the counselors leave, and a local custodial staff^-usually a single family—comes over to watch the house.
About twenty years ago, a mom from the Vineyard and her two kids, a little boy and a little girl, were the winter caretakers. One lazy afternoon all three of them fell asleep on couches in the big room. All of a sudden the daughter started screaming, ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ The mother and the son woke up to see a man standing over the little girl, reaching out to stroke her. His modons were gentle; it looked as if he were trying to soothe her and get her back to sleep. He had a long black pigtail, Asian features, and he wore yellow pants. Of course, anyone who’s been on Penikese can identify him—Goon Lee Dip from the leper colony. Well, kindly as his ghost seemed to be, the family was terrified, and they left the island immediately.
Now here’s the freakiest part. A couple of years ago, here at my house on the Vineyard, I was telling this story to a bunch of my buddies. One of them stayed really quiet the whole time I was speaking. Finally after a long pause, when I’d started to wonder what was eating him, he said in a low voice, I was that little boy. I saw the man in the yellow pants. He was standing over my sister.
That witness, Eben Armor, had been unaware that the event from his childhood had become Penikese legend. Both he and Alex were astonished, too, at how the details of the story had remained unembellished over the years. Eben affirmed that, with a few minor changes, Alex’s version—acquired third-hand or, more realistically, seventieth-hand—described exactly what had happened.
19 Random Ghosts III
No one knows the Vineyard’s nighttime misty shores like our island fishing folk. These exploring men and women are particularly intrepid during the annual fishing derby that runs from mid-September to mid-October. If they cross paths with ghosts during their late-night bivouacs, they’re disinclined to notice. A big green genie with shiitake mushrooms for ears could leap into sight in front of them and they wouldn’t see it, not if the bluensh are running. Besides, these fishermen and women must appear as ghosts to each other, so many of them standing knee-deep in water, alone in hidden coves, gazing adamantly out to sea.
But my friend and ardent fisherman Ken Vanderlaske believes he may have encountered a ghost one cold October night during the derby of 1992.
“I had recently discovered Paul’s Point [on the rugged northern coast of Makoniky in West Tisbury]. Not too many fishermen knew about it, because you have to drive miles down a godawful dirt road. And besides, those of us who hit on a good place, well, we keep it close to the vest.
“It was pretty late into the wee hours, and I’d been wandering along the pebbly shore, casting a line here and there, not coming up with much. I rounded a bluff and came upon a really secluded cove, but I was a little bummed to see someone else was already fishing it.
“He stood in waders about ten yards out. I could tell by his movements that he was a fly fisherman like me, so I started to think maybe he wouldn’t mind if I took up a position—at a respectful distance, of course. Before I tried to hail him and get a little comradeship going, I turned to see where he’d plunked down his gear so I could stake out another spot for mine.
“Well, he had no gear. That startled me for a moment, until I considered how all of us sometimes get to meandering down the beach without paying too much attention to how far we’ve come from base. “That took about five seconds to figure out, and then I turned back to call out to the guy. He was gone. Disappeared.
“At first I thought—well, I thought a whole bunch of things: that
he’d slid under the water, that I’d turned away for longer than I thought and he’d had enough time to move away. And, yeah, I thought maybe I’d seen a ghost. But I don’t believe in ghosts, not really, so I dismissed the thought, although my overall feeling since then is, hell, yes, that fisherman was a ghost!
“I will say this. I ended up fishing the same spot, and not too much later I caught a bluefish that was the night’s winner when I took it to the weigh-station. Maybe that’s why I now think that guy was a ghost: Who else would fix up a fellow fisherman with such a nice haul?
“And, besides, I know that after I die, I’ll tell whoever stands at the Pearly Gates, ‘I’m gonna do some more fishing down on Earth before I can see straight enough to come back here.”
People often wonder whether there are ghosts in Edgartown’s grand old hotel, the Harbor View. Built in 1891 at the end of North Water Street, it offers commanding views of Nantucket Sound to the north and the Edgartown lighthouse and the bay across an open field. Well, of course there must be some supernatural activity from psychic imprints left by the tens of thousands of guests and staff over the decades. It’s a well-known fact in the ghost-hunting world that, with the exception of hospitals, hotels collect a higher proportion of deaths per capita than any other square footage of property.
That’s not surprising, when you think about it. Instead of the usual two- to four-bedroom single-family dwelling on that lot, you find a sixty- to one-hundred-bedroom behemoth. Right there, you’re asking for more frequent visits from the Grim Reaper. And then there are the folks who have a need to check out from life itself, so they check in to a hotel so as not to discombobulate anyone in their home setting. On top of that there are the drinking binges that feel more appropriate and permissible while one is on vacation. These holidays with a bottle often lead to mishaps such as tossing a still-smoking match into a wastebasket or slipping in the shower. Weekend benders might trigger heart attacks—or blackouts combined with the nasty consequence of choking on one’s own vomit.
The end result is a night watchman or a morning maid forced to confront a sad tableau. The authorities are called and, during a lull when few guests are likely to be in the corridor, a gurney topped by a black rubber bag is discreetly wheeled in and out.
Some of the most haunted sites in America are grand old hotels—the Parker House in Boston, the Coronado off the coast of San Diego, the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where the Vineyard’s own John Belushi (now buried in Chilmark) had his fatal overdose.
So … is the beautiful, Gilded Age hotel in Edgartown a repository of numerous ghosts?
Surprisingly, no. No one has ever come forward to tell me about classic hostelry disturbances such as smoke alarms going off at a stroke past midnight or thumps from a closet or a lady in white floating gauzily down the corridor, her slippers a good foot above the carpet.
Still, one thing did happen that I’ve filed under the heading of “Eye Opener.”
In the spring of 1995 I was invited to speak about island ghosts during the Rotary Club monthly luncheon in the largest of the Harbor View Hotel’s private dining rooms. During the Q & A portion of my talk, someone asked me, “Are there any ghosts here at the Harbor View.”
“Nothing serious,” I started to say, and at the same instant a whomp! sounded from the direction of the buffet table set up beside the tall windows facing the harbor.
We all turned to look. One of the flames beneath an open chafing dish had morphed into an orange ball of fire. Flames engulfed the silver sides of the dish, incinerating the food therein and extending fully four feet above in a mini-inferno. A server in a white smock rushed to throw the cover back on the dish with a clatter. Another attendant followed close behind with a fire extinguisher, but as he raised it to firing position, he—and his large audience—could see that the blaze had already consumed itself and was no more.
Ever since that time, when people ask me whether the Harbor View Hotel is haunted, I take a deep breath and reply, “Maybe.”
Canadians Doreen Kinsman and her husband bought their island home—the former rectory alongside Grace Episcopal Church in Vineyard Haven—the first day they went house hunting. “We were cranky and feeling rushed because we had to catch a plane that night, and this particular house was the only one we liked,” Doreen explained.
The light was fading as they signed the purchase and sales agreement. Seated with the real estate agent at the table in the old-fashioned kitchen, they heard the sound of creaking hinges behind them. They turned to see the exterior kitchen door open by itself. No one stood on the doorstep. Shrugging, they redirected their attention to the document. The hinges protested once more as the door closed.
The Kinsmans’ grown children, whenever they visited the old rectory by themselves, reported that the house was haunted. Unperturbed, Doreen agreed that it probably was, although, apart from the kitchen door incident, she had never seen anything occultly suggestive.
And then her friend, Margaret, died in Doreen’s kitchen. Doreen herself found the body stretched out on the floor. Some ten years later, Doreen attended a Nathan Mayhew Seminar lecture by Constance Mesmer, one of the island’s premier psychics. Ms. Mesmer made the rounds of the attendees and remarked on any stray scrap of information that happened to channel through her. When she stopped in front of Doreen, she cocked her head, amused, and said, “I’m seeing Winnie the Pooh and Piglet ambling along, and Winnie is saying, ‘We’ll always be friends!’ Does that mean anything to you?”
Doreen shook her head. “No, not really.” Constance shrugged, then went on to the next subject.
But later in the day a memory snapped into Doreen’s head. Many years before, Margaret had sent her a birthday card with Winnie the Pooh and Piglet on the cover and, inside, a message: “We’ll always be friends!”
The following year, Doreen attended another lecture by Ms. Mesmer, this time at the Katharine Cornell Theater on Spring Street in Vineyard Haven. Once more, when the medium approached Doreen, she received another dispatch from the sixth dimension: “I’m getting ‘Thank you for holding my hand.’”
This time Doreen could pinpoint her late friend’s meaning. Margaret had been nervous about flying, and whenever they’d flown together, Doreen would reach out to hold her companion’s hand as the plane landed.
Only later did she realize another, deeper meaning: Doreen had taken Margaret’s hand in both of hers when she found her friend dead on the kitchen floor.
In the spring and summer of 2003 I rented three-quarters of a house—the gathering room and kitchen area downstairs, and the two bedrooms and bath upstairs—from my friend, writer Jib Ellis. It was a Civil War-era house situated across the street from Eastville Beach in Oak Bluffs. The exterior clapboard was painted canary yellow below an adorable mansard rooftop with four dormered windows, two of them facing the sea.
Jib used the remaining two front parlors downstairs as his office. Although ostensibly he lived with his wife in her cottage on the Lagoon, from the time he prepared his first morning cup of coffee to the brink of six p.m., when he knocked off his daytime activities to roll home for dinner, he was in residence in the yellow house.
Along with Jib came his parrot, Felicity, who was given to the most godawful rain forest screeches, followed by the words “SHUT UUUUUPPPP!” which she’d picked up from a variety of humans responding in a uniform way to her own demented shrieks. This stretch of time marked a sad period in my life. Charlie, my only child, had gone off to college, and former husband Marty and I had sold the last of our family domiciles to go our separate ways.
For the thirty years preceding my tenancy, Jib had rented to a series of bachelors, none of whom had ever taken it upon themselves to clean the place. Three decades of grime and detritus coated the rooms and filled the closets. A Brazilian woman named Glaucia, whom I’d hired to help me with the initial cleanup, spent a full hour and forty-five minutes on the upstairs bathtub alone. In the middle of her porcelain war, I found her o
n her knees in the tub, shaking her head and muttering “I don’t know how people can live this way.”
This background is given to explain my near-total retreat into the upstairs rooms. I whitewashed the walls and stenciled below the antique moldings for a royal-blue-and-white toile effect. I hung butterfly-wing-thin white linen curtains across the recessed dormer windows and brought in wing chairs and my four-poster bed. I could sense—whether I imagined it or not—a Civil War widow and several other females in her household embracing and blessing me for restoring tendet loving care to this part of the cottage. Most of the day I was away at my bookstore in town, but on days off and through the long nights I hunkered in my upstairs hideaway, kept company by my cocker spaniel and my Siamese cat. And by the phantom females.
Jib had placed the house on the market, and by September the property had sold. Two sisters, Grace* and Tilda,* bought it for a summer home.
The sisters stopped by my bookstore to introduce themselves. They had the droll, dry accents of upper-echelon Yankees. Because they had plans for a gentle, much-needed renovation of the house—plans, in effect to take it from plain shabby to shabby chic—I thought for certain the Civil War widow and her female entourage would embrace the new residents as they had me.
Then one day I picked up a voicemail message from one of the sisters: “It’s Tilda at the yellow house. Call me. Immediately.”
Her flat and preemptory tone awakened my normally buried paranoia: Had I left a bag of trash in a closet, an inexplicable mess in the basement? It didn’t even occur to me that, contractually, I of course bore no responsibility for the sisters’ well-being.
When I returned Tilda’s call, I discovered her interest in me was purely for ghost-busting purposes. Tilda had converted Jib’s old downstairs office into a second master bedroom and Grace had taken over what I’d come to think of as the Civil War widow’s dormered aerie upstairs. Tilda’s bedroom, originally designed as a formal parlor, was surrounded by a shaded veranda.