When the Ghost Screams

by Leslie Rule

  Overnight guests at St. Mary’s Art Center are sometimes startled to find a ghost tucking them in. (Leslie Rule)

  Debby Constantino, an electronic voice phenomena expert, is in the attic of St. Mary’s Art Center preparing to communicate with spirits. She and her husband, Mark, have captured ghostly voices on tape in the old haunted house. (Leslie Rule)

  Some say the apparitions seen on the premises of St. Mary’s Art Center were victims of a long-ago fire. (Leslie Rule)

  St. Mary’s Art Center’s huge porch welcomes both the living and the dead. (Leslie Rule)

  Others have encountered the ghost of a hefty woman in the kitchen. She materializes with the distinct scent of violets surrounding her.

  What happened at the house to cause so much activity?

  Maybe the spirits are left over from the days the building was a hospital. Overnight visitors have been startled awake by someone trying to take their temperatures. And they have heard the squeaking wheels of a gurney as it rolls past their rooms in the dead of night.

  But something else likely causes the ghostly activity, Janice said. “There was a terrible fire there,” she explained. “Many people were killed, including a nun.”

  The nun was a hero. She helped many people out of the burning house and continued to go back in to rescue more.

  The last time she rushed back into the house she did not come out.

  St. Mary’s Art Center has a welcoming feel about it. It is unpretentious and cozy, with a hodgepodge of funky furniture that fills the main floors.

  The attic, however, is another story.

  When paranormal investigator Debby Constantino and I ventured into the attic, we felt uncomfortable. In one cramped storage area, we each had the sense that something bad had been done to a child there. We later learned that others have sensed the same thing in that spot.

  Most visitors to St. Mary’s Art Center report that the guest rooms have a wonderful aura, and that the spirits there do not frighten them. (Leslie Rule)

  Sensitive people often feel uneasy in the attic of the art center. (Leslie Rule)

  And in one of the larger attic rooms, we both felt so anxious that we could barely breathe. When we told Janice about our reaction, she said, “That’s where the mental patients were. They kept them chained in the attic.”

  At least one patient had been chained during the fire, she said. He perished there when he could not break free.

  ————

  ST. MARY’S ART CENTER IS IN VIRGINIA CITY, JUST OFF “R” STREET

  PO Box 396

  Virginia City, NV 89440

  (775) 847-7774

  Lizzie

  “Hi. This is Lizzie. No one can take your call now. Father’s taking a nap on the sofa, and Abby is visiting a friend …”The bed and breakfast’s macabre telephone announcement makes the flesh crawl.

  “Father is taking a nap on the sofa …”

  It is exactly what Andrew Borden was doing when he was bludgeoned with an axe on August 4, 1892, in his home in Fall River, Massachusetts. His wife, Abby, was killed in her room upstairs, and Lizzie was blamed for the grisly murder of her father and stepmother. Though a jury later acquitted her, she remained guilty in the public eye.

  Today, the site of America’s most infamous double murder is the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast. The house has been carefully restored to resemble the time of the killing. It has been decorated with historical accuracy. Crime scene photographs were referenced so that furniture could be placed exactly as it was the day of the homicide.

  It’s no wonder the ghosts are confused! If the ghost of Andrew Borden were to ask himself if perhaps he was dead, he’d likely look around and say, “Don’t be silly. There’s my sofa! Time for another nap!”

  Indeed, an employee witnessed a fog form in the kitchen. The stunned woman watched as the wispy white entity floated into the parlor toward the sofa.

  “She was a little unglued,” said Lee Ann Wilber, owner of the Borden home since June 2004, adding that the previous owner had seen the specter of a woman in Victorian dress in the cellar.

  Though Lee Ann has not yet seen a ghost there, she has experienced odd things. “I was in the basement when something touched me,” she confessed. It was as if invisible fingers tapped her between her shoulder blades and then moved down her back.

  Does Lizzie haunt her childhood home?

  No.

  At least that is what Lee Ann believes. “Lizzie is not here,” she said adamantly. It is the murder victims who remain frozen in time in the historical home.

  The killing was so long ago it is hard to wrap our minds around the fact that Andrew and Abby Borden were real people.

  Yet they were.

  Andrew Borden and his first wife, Sarah Morse Borden, had three daughters: Emma, Alice, and Lizzie. Little Alice died before Lizzie was born. When Lizzie was just two years old, her mother died.

  Andrew later married Abby Durfee Gray. Gossips whispered that he could not love the chubby woman; that he had married her simply to get a free housekeeper and babysitter. Lizzie and Emma never liked their stepmother.

  Many have said that when Andrew, a wealthy banker, put a piece of property in Abby’s name, his daughters’ anger toward their stepmother intensified. Andrew, they say, was so miserly that his daughters were frustrated by his refusal to supply them with the finer things, including indoor plumbing.

  As members of one of the prominent families in town, Lizzie and Emma longed to live up on the hill among the wealthy Fall River residents.

  Was it this frustration that fueled Lizzie’s habit of stealing?

  In addition to shoplifting in stores, she was the main suspect when valuable items, including diamonds, disappeared from her parents’ room.

  There is no one left alive to truly understand the intricacies of the Borden family dynamics, yet many are still speculating on them and the impact they had on the warm summer morning that stained the calendar with a splotch of blood that a century of sunny days cannot wipe clean.

  The Borden housekeeper, Bridget Sullivan, was in her attic room on the fatal morning she heard Lizzie yell, “Come downstairs! Father is dead! Somebody got in and murdered him!”

  Andrew Borden was on the sofa, covered in blood. Abby, too, was soon found dead in her upstairs room, apparently cut down as she made the bed. Andrew had received ten blows, while Abby suffered nineteen.

  Emma Borden had an alibi. She was out of town. Fingers were soon pointing at thirty-one-year-old spinster Lizzie. Her case was not helped when a pharmacist testified that Lizzie had tried to buy prussic acid, a deadly poison, one day before the killing.

  And Lizzie certainly looked guilty when her neighbor, Alice Russell, said she had seen Lizzie burning a blood-stained dress days after the homicide. The defense insisted the stains were not blood. They were paint.

  Emma and other witnesses took the stand to say the stains on the cheap dress were indeed paint, left by careless painters who had worked in their home months before the murder.

  As for rumors of contention in their family, said Emma, they were just that: rumors. The family was civil to each other, she testified. She suggested that a supposed rift between her and Lizzie that had been noted in the newspapers had been planted there by the police.

  The defense also brought up the mysterious stranger who witnesses had seen lurking near the Borden home around the time of the killing. Maybe he was the killer!

  Had the brutal murder been committed by a total stranger thirsty for blood? Had he taken the murder weapon with him when he slipped away?

  Despite an exhaustive search, investigators could not be certain they had found the murder weapon. A hatchet with a broken handle was discovered in the cellar, and though primitive forensics indicated a match, it was not a certainty.

  Searchers took apart walls within the Borden house, but to this day, the question of the murder weapon is part of the puzzle.

  During the 1893 trial, the victims’ skulls were r
evealed. Lizzie took one look at the gruesome sight and fainted. Was she really distressed, or was it a calculated move? If it was simple theatrics, it worked. The all-male jury deliberated for sixty-eight minutes and pronounced her not guilty. Somehow, they could not find the soft-spoken Sunday school teacher capable of such a grisly crime. On June 20, 1893, Lizzie was free to go.

  Abby and Andrew, however, are not free. They are frozen in time, shadow people, hidden in the whispers of those who sit up all night at the B&B, debating America’s most famous whodunit.

  Shadow people are welcome at the popular B&B. In fact, many guests seek the place out because of the ghostly encounters.

  Despite warnings that it could open the door to evil, a Ouija board is available for guests who dare to contact the other side. Regular séances also are conducted.

  “We recently had a birthday party for a fourteen-year-old,” Lee Ann told me, explaining that they held a séance as part of the entertainment. “It was in the dining room where the temperature is always comfortable.” Yet, during the séance, an inexplicable cold breeze blew from nowhere, swirling around the teens until they shivered. The entire downstairs was soon chilled.

  Another recent occurrence left Lee Ann shaking her head. She was in Abby’s old room, making the bed for a couple who had spent the night and were out exploring. She tidied the room and was preparing to leave when she saw a pair of diamond earrings sparkling at her feet. “They were side by side on the floor by the door, as if someone had put them there,” Lee Ann told me.

  Why hadn’t she noticed them when she entered the room?

  She put the valuable earrings in her pocket for safekeeping. When the guests returned that evening, Lee Ann approached the wife as she relaxed in the parlor and asked, “Are you missing something?”

  The woman perched on the sofa asked, “What do you mean?”

  Lee Ann held out the earrings. “Her mouth popped open in surprise and her hands went to her ears,” said Lee Ann. “Her husband had given them to her years ago, and she had never taken them off.”

  Later, the same woman was in the shower when she felt her necklace loosen and drop to her feet. She scooped it up as the suds swirled around it. It, too, had not been off her neck in years.

  Whose ghostly hand tried to snatch the glittering jewelry?

  Lizzie’s!

  Despite Lee Ann’s belief that Lizzie is not one of the resident ghosts, the fact that Lizzie had a reputation for stealing diamonds makes me wonder.

  Would Lizzie be more welcome if she were not an axe murderer?

  After her acquittal, Lizzie was ostracized in Fall River. She purchased a big house on the hill, and though her neighbors found it pretentious, she named it Maplecroft. She further annoyed Fall River citizens when she changed her name to Lizbeth and entertained famous actors and actresses at home.

  She broke the rules of a Victorian society, but that does not make her a killer.

  A nurse who cared for Lizzie years after the tragedy said that her patient had confessed the truth to her. She had had a boyfriend that Andrew did not approve of. It was he who had committed the brutal double homicide.

  If this is true, what happened to him? Did she continue to see him after the trial, sneaking off to a faraway city for rendezvous? Or did she break it off, sickened by what he had done but afraid to report him for fear she would be implicated in the plot?

  In America, we are “innocent till proven guilty.” Yet, Lizzie, never proven guilty, is rarely considered innocent. If she were innocent, would that draw her back to the scene of the crime? Is she roaming restlessly there, as visitors sit up all night debating her guilt?

  Innocent or guilty, her ghost may very well be drawn to her childhood home. And she may not be alone. Could one ghost be responsible for so much paranormal activity?

  Shadowy figures dart through the house, furniture moves on its own, and unseen hands tamper with the thermostat. Some have reported the sound of marbles rolling on the upper floors.

  Marbles?

  Yes, Lizzie may have lost hers, but these marbles are believed to belong to the ghosts of two neighbor children drowned by their mother. Some say the lonely little spirits seek refuge in the Borden house.

  I’ve yet to find any documentation of the case, but Lee Ann insists there is a childish energy present in her B&B. The mischievous kids play with the thermostat, she said, turning it up or down on a whim.

  The children’s ghosts, she said, may have moved from the house that they shared with their murderous mother.

  ————

  LIZZIE BORDEN BED & BREAKFAST

  92 Second Street

  Fall River, MA 02721

  (508) 675-7333

  www.lizzie-borden.com

  Night on the Town

  It was a quiet night at the Radisson Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. As the security guard performed his routine check of the sixth floor, he paused and looked around.

  Everything was as it should be. The floor reserved for conferences was still. The doors were all locked. The smiling people with their notebooks and name badges had all gone back to their rooms on other floors. He glanced at the wall, where his own shadow had paused with him.

  Suddenly, a chill swept through him. The shadow was walking away without him. He spun around to see who had crept up behind him. There was no one there.

  Who had cast the mysterious shadow?

  November 28, 1942, was a cold night. But that did not stop Bostonians from stepping out on the town. Crowds gravitated toward a popular nightclub in the city’s theater district.

  The Cocoanut Grove on Piedmont Street was the closest thing to a tropical oasis in the middle of a Massachusetts winter. Fake coconut trees “grew” between the tables where customers crowded to sip cocktails. The ceiling was painted to look like a starry sky.

  With the rattan-covered walls and island-themed drinks, a bit of liquor-fueled imagination could almost make people feel that they were in an exotic place.

  That evening it felt balmy. Maybe it was the body heat. Customers were jammed close together, good-naturedly jockeying for tables.

  To some, it was stifling. Many latecomers took one step inside and decided it was too hot and too crowded to stay. They went back into the icy air to find another place to celebrate Saturday night.

  Those who stayed looked forward to hours of entertainment. Comedians, singers, and dancers all performed at the Cocoanut Grove. Entertainers that evening included Buck Jones and Dotty Myles.

  Cowboy Buck Jones, fifty-three, was a movie star and a veteran of World War I. In town on a war bond-selling tour to aid soldiers in World War II, he was busy doing good deeds. Just hours earlier, he had visited a children’s hospital to cheer up his young fans.

  Dotty Myles was a seventeen-year-old singer. She hoped that her gig at the Cocoanut Grove was the start of an exciting career. Lovely and talented, everyone said she would become a big star.

  The club boasted three bars. The Caricature Bar and the Broadway Lounge were on the main floor, while the Melody Lounge and the kitchen were tucked into the basement.

  At a little after ten p.m., bartender John Bradley called to sixteen-year-old bar boy Stanley Tomaszewski and pointed to one of the palm trees in the Melody Lounge. The lights were out beneath the palm fronds there. The customers seated at the table beneath it had apparently unscrewed the bulbs so that they could sit in the shadows.

  Following the bartender’s orders, the teenager went to fix the light. As he stood on a chair and peered up at the lightbulb, the couple at the table laughed and asked him to leave it dim. That decision, however, was not up to him.

  Stanley could not see well enough in the dark to tighten the bulb. In the next instant, he did something that many believe dramatically and irrevocably altered the lives of too many people to count.

  He lit a match.

  It took a moment for the world to turn inside out. Stanley tightened the bulb and left the customers in a pool of cold light. Then
he walked away.

  When Stanley looked back and noticed the sparks on the fronds of the tree, they really didn’t look very dangerous. He figured he could easily extinguish the sparks.

  When the tree went up in flames, some of the people laughed as the boy tried to beat out the fire with his hands. Someone threw water on the fire, but the ceiling was soon ablaze. Before people could respond, a ball of fire rolled through the Cocoanut Grove nightclub.

  Moments earlier Dotty had been studying her algebra book as she waited for her turn to sing. When the fire raged, the girl tried to flee, but she was knocked down by a herd of screaming people.

  Meanwhile, some folks who knew they should leave the burning building figured there was time to get their hats and coats and headed for the cloakroom instead of the exit doors.

  It was a deadly detour.

  Some people ran toward the kitchen, searching for a way out. A few huddled in the walk-in freezer. Others managed to squeeze out of the tiny kitchen windows.

  Katherine Swett refused to leave her cashier’s box and stayed put to guard the money. She was later found dead.

  As luck would have it, firefighters were nearby extinguishing a car fire and arrived on the scene quickly. They went to work, trying not to think of the charred victims piled up outside the nightclub.

  When rescuers entered the building, they were startled by the sight of customers sitting calmly at their tables, their hands still curled around their drinks.

  What were they waiting for? Why hadn’t they fled the club as the others had?

  But as their eyes adjusted, the firefighters realized that the people were lifeless. Poisonous gases had killed them so swiftly they had had no time to react. They did not know what had hit them.

  Theirs were merciful deaths compared to some of the others. Witnesses described beautifully dressed women, shrieking as their evening gowns went up in flames. While many were burned to death, others were trampled by the stampede of panicked people. Some choked on the black smoke.

  The Cocoanut Grove was a death trap. Terrified victims funneled toward the doorway, but the revolving doors allowed few to escape. That exit soon became jammed with bodies. The last man out looked back to see the person behind him go up in flames.