by Aaron Mahnke
As a final attempt to free his home from whatever force was inhabiting it, Phelps gathered witnesses for a second séance. His hope was that he might learn something about the spirit, something that would help him get rid of it or at least appease it. Phelps had lost hope, and now his rational mind was leaning into unknown territory out of desperation.
The séance revealed very little new information, but according to reports from Phelps and other witnesses, the spirit did identify itself. It claimed to be a deceased male clerk who once had worked with Mrs. Phelps on a financial matter. The name was investigated and certain details matched up with public records, but it was still unclear what the spirit wanted and how they might finally be rid of it.
The notes continued to appear as well. Once, a paper drifted onto the table during a tea party hosted by Mrs. Phelps. Phelps himself received dozens, many of which referenced common names for the Devil from that era. Bynames including Beelzebub, Sam Slick, and Sir Sambo all found their way onto these notes.
Finally, in September of that year, a note appeared on the desk while Phelps was there working. Deciphering the message as best he could, he realized that it was a question, presumably from the spirit who haunted the house.
“When are you planning to leave?” it asked.
It was a clear and powerful message. Phelps and his family weren’t welcome there anymore. Perhaps it was a threat. Perhaps the attacks would increase, or more dramatic events might follow. If a small fire could be lit beneath Henry’s bed, it didn’t seem like a stretch to imagine the entire house being at risk of burning down.
Phelps took a moment to process the question, then reached for the paper. Taking his pencil, he wrote his answer below the messy handwriting: “October 1.”
There was no reply that day, but Phelps stuck to the agreement. On October 1, 1850, the family returned to Pennsylvania, and he followed shortly after. Weeks later, though, they all returned. I’m not really sure why, to be honest. Maybe they wanted to give it another try. It was their home, after all.
But the activity continued. There was more knocking, more writing on the wall, and more objects that moved through the air as if they were dangling from invisible strings.
One final note appeared in the house in May 1851, and after that, the family moved out for good.
ALIVE AND WELL TODAY
Most of us know someone with a story to tell about unexplainable things: objects that seem to move without our involvement, sounds we can’t explain, the feeling of being watched when there’s no one else in the room or even the house. It’s easy to understand why some people have a desire to search for the truth.
But what if the act of reaching out for answers has real-world consequences? Certainly the events in the Phelps mansion confirm something of that kind. Maybe those events were the result of a family with a very open mind, doing their best to interpret admittedly unusual experiences.
Or perhaps there really is something beyond the veil, and it reaches through from time to time in order to affect the lives of the living. It’s a difficult question to answer. Even impossible, perhaps. Which is why we keep asking it.
Remnants of spiritualism have stuck around, embedded in our popular culture. Classic horror novels such as The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson’s Hell House both drew heavily on that world, featuring séances, automatic writing, and otherworldly activity.
Even today, with movies such as The Exorcist and What Lies Beneath, the notion of reaching out to communicate with the world beyond our own is alive and well. And maybe there’s a good reason for that.
Another family bought the mansion after the Phelps family moved back to Pennsylvania, and over the years the home changed hands often. By the 1940s it had been converted into a facility for the care of the elderly. And when a Mr. and Mrs. Caserta—both of whom were registered nurses—moved there in 1947, there were already more stories filling the hallways: of doors that wouldn’t stay shut, knocking, whispers, and random noises that seemed to have no explanation.
But it was their infant son, Gary, who encountered the most trouble. One night, the couple was pulled from sleep by one of the patient buzzers. Mr. Caserta quickly stepped out of their room and descended to the second floor to see what was wrong. As he did, he caught the scent of smoke.
He quickly ran from room to room, checking in with each patient, but all of them were asleep. Finally, at a loss for answers, he dashed back up to the third floor and into Gary’s room. Inside, he found smoke billowing from the direction of the crib. Rushing over, he saw that the blanket at Gary’s feet was burning, small flames slowly spreading to the sheets.
One other night of sleep was interrupted by the same buzzer system, and this time both of Gary’s parents exited their room just in time to find the boy crawling toward the top of the staircase. How the boy got out of his crib and into the hallway was a mystery.
In each instance, the alert system saved Gary’s life. Needless to say, the Casertas were very thankful for the person or people responsible for telling them that Gary needed help. It was ironic, really; the buzzer system was designed to allow them to help the patients, but twice, it seemed, the patients had helped them. So they asked each of them, one by one. None of the patients claimed responsibility, though.
Now, clearly the Casertas didn’t know the Phelpses. And while the locals had always whispered of the old hauntings, they most likely didn’t know the full extent of the stories. They certainly didn’t know about the contents of those otherworldly notes that would appear to the Phelpses from time to time.
Given the chance to read them, though, they would have been surprised by what that final note said a century before, in May 1851: “The evil one has gone, and a better one has come.”
MOST PEOPLE ARE afraid of the dark. And while this is something that we expect from our children, adults hold on to that fear just as tightly. We simply don’t talk about it anymore. But it’s there, lurking in the back of our minds.
Science calls it nyctophobia: the fear of the dark. Since the dawn of humanity, our ancestors have stared into the blackness of caves, tunnels, and basements with a feeling of rot and panic in our bellies. H. P. Lovecraft, the patriarch of the horror genre, published an essay in 1927 titled “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” and it opens with this profoundly simple statement: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
People fear the unknown, the “what if,” and the things they cannot see. We’re afraid that our frailness and weakness might become laid bare in the presence of whatever it is that lurks in the shadows. We’re afraid of opening up places that should remain closed.
And sometimes that’s for good reason.
ACCIDENTS HAPPEN
The Berkshire Mountains, which extend north to south across the western sides of Massachusetts and Connecticut, are not the Rockies by any stretch of the imagination, but in 1851 those hills were in someone’s way.
The Troy and Greenfield Railroad Company wanted to lay some track that would cut through the mountains in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, and so they began work on a tunnel. On the western end sat the town of Florida, with North Adams holding up the eastern end. Between those towns was about five miles of solid rock.
This building project was no small undertaking, no matter how unimpressive the mountains might be. It ultimately took the work crew twenty-four years to wrap things up and had a total cost of $21.2 million. That’s $406.5 million in today’s dollars, by the way. See, it was a big deal.
Monetary costs aside, however, construction of the tunnel came with an even heavier price tag: at least two hundred men lost their lives cutting that hole through the bones of the earth.
One of the first major tragedies occurred on March 20, 1865. A team of explosive “experts” (I use that term loosely, because nitroglycerin was incredibly new to just about everyone in America at the time) entered th
e tunnel to plant a charge. The three men—Brinkman, Nash, and Kelley (Kelley’s first name was Ringo, which I think is just awesome)—did their work and then ran back down the tunnel to their safety bunker. Only Kelley made it to safety, however. It turns out that he set off the explosion a bit too early, burying the other two men alive. Naturally, Kelley felt horrible about it, but no one expected him to go missing, which he did just a short while later. Poor Ringo.
The accidents didn’t end there, though.
THE SHAFT
Building a railway tunnel through a mountain is complex, and one of the features most tunnels have is a vent shaft. Constant coal-powered train traffic could result in a lot of smoke and fumes, so engineers thought it would be a good idea to have a ventilation shaft that would extend to the surface above and allow fumes and groundwater to be pumped out. This shaft would be roughly thirty feet in diameter and would eventually stretch more than a thousand feet down and connect with the train tunnel below. By October 1867, however, it was only five hundred feet deep. Essentially, it was a really, really deep hole in the ground.
To dig this hole, they constructed a small building at the top, which was used to house a hoist that would get the debris out, as well as a pump system to remove groundwater. Then they lowered a dozen or more Cornish miners into the hole and set them to work.
You see where this is going, right? Please tell me you see where this is going.
On October 17, a leaky lantern filled the hoist house with naphtha, an explosive natural gas, and the place blew sky-high. As a result, things started to fall down the shaft.
What things? Well, for starters, three hundred freshly sharpened drill bits. Then the hoist mechanism itself. Finally the burning wreckage of the building. All of it fell five stories down the tunnel and onto the thirteen men working at the bottom. And because the water pump was destroyed in the explosion, the shaft also began to flood.
The workers on the surface tried to reach the men at the bottom but failed. One man was lowered into the shaft in a basket, but he was pulled back up when the fumes became unbearable. He managed to gasp the words “No hope” to the workers around him before slipping into unconsciousness.
In the end they gave up, called it a loss, and covered the shaft. But in the weeks that followed, the workers frequently reported hearing the anguished voices of men crying out in pain. They said they saw the lost Cornish miners carrying picks and shovels, only to watch them vanish moments later. Even the people in the village nearby told tales of odd shapes and muffled cries near the covered pit. Highly educated people, upon visiting the construction site, recorded similar experiences.
Glenn Drohan, a correspondent for the local newspaper, wrote, “The ghostly apparitions would appear briefly, then vanish, leaving no footprints in the snow, giving no answers to the miners’ calls.” Voices, lights, visions, and odd shapes in the darkness—all the sorts of experiences we fear might happen to us when we step into a dark bedroom or basement.
A full year after the accident, they reopened the shaft and drained out the several hundred feet of water that had accumulated. They wanted to get back to work. But when they did, they discovered something horrific: bodies…and a raft. Apparently some of the men had survived the falling drill bits and other debris long enough to manage to build a raft. No one knows how long they stayed alive, but it’s clear that they died because they had been abandoned in a flooding hole in the ground. After that, the workers began to call the shaft by another name: the Bloody Pit.
Catchy, eh?
A STORIED PAST
About four years after the gas explosion, two men visited the tunnel. One was James McKinstrey, the drilling operations superintendent, and the other was Dr. Clifford Owens. While in the tunnel, the two men—both educated and respected among their peers—had an encounter that was beyond unusual. Owens wrote:
On the night of June 25, 1872, James McKinstrey and I entered the great excavation at precisely 11:30 p.m. We had traveled about two full miles into the shaft when we finally halted to rest. Except for the dim smoky light cast by our lamps, the place was as cold and dark as a tomb.
James and I stood there talking for a minute or two and were just about to turn back when suddenly I heard a strange mournful sound. It was just as if someone or something was suffering great pain. The next thing I saw was a dim light coming along the tunnel from a westerly direction. At first, I believed it was probably a workman with a lantern. Yet, as the light grew closer, it took on a strange blue color and appeared to change shape almost into the form of a human being without a head. The light seemed to be floating along about a foot or two above the tunnel floor. In the next instant, it felt as if the temperature had suddenly dropped and a cold, icy chill ran up and down my spine. The headless form came so close that I could have reached out and touched it but I was too terrified to move.
For what seemed like an eternity, McKinstrey and I just stood there gaping at the headless thing like two wooden Indians. The blue light remained motionless for a few seconds as if it were actually looking us over, then floated off toward the east end of the shaft and vanished into thin air.
I am above all a realist, nor am I prone to repeating gossip and wild tales that defy a reasonable explanation. However, in all truth, I can not deny what James McKinstrey and I witnessed with our own eyes.
The Hoosac Tunnel played host to countless other spooky stories in the years that followed. In 1874, a local hunter named Frank Webster vanished. When a search party found him stumbling up the banks of the Deerfield River three days later, he was without his rifle and appeared to have been beaten bloody. He claimed he’d been ordered into the tunnel by voices and lights, and once he was inside, he saw ghostly figures that floated and wandered about in the dark. His experience ended when something unseen reached out, took his rifle from him, and clubbed him with it. He had no memory of walking out of the tunnel.
In 1936, a railroad employee named Joe Impoco claimed that he was warned of danger in the tunnel by a mysterious voice. Not once, but twice. I’m thinking it was Ringo, trying to make up for being an idiot.
In 1973, for some unknown and godawful reason, a man decided to walk through the full length of the tunnel. This brilliant man, Bernard Hastaba, was never seen again. One man who walked through and did make it out, though, claims that while he was in the tunnel he saw the figure of a man dressed in the old clothing of a nineteenth-century miner.
He left in a hurry, from what I’ve read.
VOICES IN THE DARK
Stories about the tunnel persist to this day. It’s common for teams of paranormal investigators to walk the length of the tunnel, although it’s still active, with a dozen or so freight trains passing through each day.
There are rumors of a secret room, or many rooms, deep inside the tunnel. There’s an old monitoring station built into the rock about halfway in, though few have been brave enough to venture all the way there and see it. Those who have report more of the same: unexplained sounds and lights.
Oh, and remember Ringo Kelley, the sloppy demolition expert who got his two co-workers killed in 1865? Well, he showed up again in March 1866, a full year after the explosion. His body was found two miles inside the tunnel, in the exact same spot where Brinkman and Nash had died.
He had been strangled to death.
THE SAN JUAN Islands are a cluster of small, wooded islands off the coast of Washington State, just across the water from Vancouver Island. The westernmost of those small plots of land is San Juan Island itself. With a population of less than seven thousand, it has the welcoming feeling of a small, quiet town.
Seriously, this place is quiet. The most exciting thing most people can think of about their home there is that one of the residents is Lisa Moretti, a retired female WWF wrestler. But on the northern tip of the island, just beyond Roche Harbor and the resort there, is a road that leads into the woods. What is hidden in those trees, away from the prying eyes of tourists and residents alike, is someth
ing so unusual—so out of the ordinary and bizarre—that it practically begs for a visit.
Traveling down the long dirt road that runs into the heart of the forest like a withered artery will bring you to an iron archway mounted on stone pillars. The words “Afterglow Vista” are woven into the metalwork. Beyond that, deeper into the woods, is a series of stone stairs that lead up a small hill. It is the thing on top of that hill that immediately catches the eye of every visitor, without question.
It’s an open-air rotunda, a ring of tall stone pillars standing on a flat circular limestone base. They’re connected at the top by thick Maltese archways, but nothing covers the rotunda; its interior is completely exposed and visible.
What’s inside it? A large, round stone table, surrounded by six stone chairs. Odd, but not creepy—until you realize the purpose this monument serves.
It’s a tomb. Resting inside each of the chairs are the cremated remains of a human being.
A HISTORY IN LIME
In the late nineteenth century, San Juan Island became known for lime deposits. Then, as now, lime was an essential ingredient in important products such as steel, fertilizer, and cement, and the lime industry of San Juan Island provided much of the community’s jobs and revenue.
In 1886, a man named John S. McMillin purchased a controlling interest in the major lime deposits, and he eventually developed the industry there into the largest supplier of lime on the West Coast. In the process, he built the twenty-room Hotel de Haro at Roche Harbor, and the company town that surrounded it. In addition to the lime factory itself, he built the barrel works, warehouse, docks, ships, offices, church, general store, and barns. He even built houses for the workers, with single men living in large bunkhouses and families being given small cottages that had been built into neat rows. All the structures belonged to McMillin, but his army of employees—more than eight hundred of them at the peak of the business—gave them life. The town was self-sufficient, with its own water, power, and telephone systems, and he paid his workers in company scrip—company currency that was good only at the local company store. Of course, workers could still draw their salary in U.S. currency whenever they wished, but the scrip was used in the store all the way up to 1956.