by Aaron Mahnke
Soon, Daniel Benton received word that his two older grandsons had died while onboard the prison ship, but no word came of the whereabouts of Elisha. He sent for word and waited impatiently, but before he could learn the truth, Daniel Benton passed away.
It was weeks later when the answer finally came: Elisha was free and being brought home, but he was sick with smallpox. This was bittersweet news for the Benton family. On one hand, Elisha was coming home. That was a good thing for everyone. But on the other, smallpox was deadly. Nearly half of everyone who contracted the disease eventually died, and those were not the kind of odds that gave people hope.
When his fellow soldiers brought Elisha into the house, he was guided straight to a room near the kitchen known as a “dying and borning room,” where those giving birth or sick with illness could be kept away from the rest of the house and cared for. It was a colonial America version of quarantine and intensive care.
But word spread of Elisha’s return. Not every soldier and sailor returned from war, which is something that even homes today still deal with. And one of those who caught wind of the young Benton’s arrival was Jemima Barrows. She had waited and stayed true to her beloved, and there was nothing she had hoped for more. Elisha had come home.
I imagine she ran rather quickly to the doorstep of the Benton home. I would imagine that she knocked—being from a lower social status, after all—but it must have been hard for her to not kick the door in and race to find her beloved. Jemima knew her place, though, and she waited for someone to come to the door.
She was told that Elisha was sick and that she needed to go back home, but Jemima turned out to be a very stubborn young woman. Even when they told her that he was dying from a highly contagious and deadly disease, she wouldn’t relent. And in the end, she won: Jemima was allowed into the house, where she set herself up as his sole caretaker and nurse.
After a time, Jemima’s parents became worried. Their daughter hadn’t come home all day. So they made their way to the Benton home and asked if they had seen her. When they discovered that she was, in fact, in the room caring for a smallpox patient, it is said, they wept. Jemima’s mother said that they would go back home and get clothing for their daughter, and then quickly left the Benton house.
They never came back.
THE GREAT DIVIDE
Elisha Benton died on January 21, 1777, after weeks of battling the smallpox that ravaged his body. Jemima stayed by his side the entire time, caring for him through it all. But her sacrifice did not come without a price. In the final days of Elisha’s life, she too began to show signs of the illness. Within weeks, she also was dead.
The couple was buried on the Benton family property, alongside the stone walls that line the road to the house. But due to burial customs of the time, they were not allowed to share the same plot. Instead, they were separated by about forty feet, one grave on either side of the road.
It sounds like the end of a tragic story, and in some ways it is. Elisha and Jemima were never able to marry, and their young lives were cut short. But in other ways they live on. According to some, it’s their separation outside that has led to the reports of their restless spirits within the home.
The Benton home was sold in 1932, and then again in 1969 to the Tolland Historical Society. It was converted into a museum shortly after, but the influx of visitors served only to draw out reports of mysterious occurrences.
One member of the staff claimed that her dog would not enter the dining room. When she picked the animal up and moved it to the sitting room, it refused to go anywhere else after that. Others have felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding and unwelcome. One woman, after cheerfully asking to visit the second floor, climbed the narrow staircase, only to return moments later, telling the staff, “I never want to go there again.”
Noises have been heard throughout the house that are difficult to explain. Knocking, footsteps, and what sounds like the snapping of branches have all been reported by visitors. Some have even heard distant voices, and sometimes the movement of furniture. Others have heard what they describe as a weeping woman, someone who is mourning a deep loss. Those familiar with the homestead’s past have assumed the woman is Jemima, crying for her lost love. A few have even seen the figure of a young woman in a white dress in various places in the house, searching for something no one else can see.
At times the home has been used by overnight guests. One couple actually lived there for a few weeks while their own house was being renovated, and on one occasion entertained a guest of their own. They claimed that on the night of their friend’s visit, the conversation in front of the fireplace was interrupted by the sound of footsteps thumping down the hallway from the eastern door of the home. The sounds moved closer and closer to the living room, and then just stopped. The couple’s guest was packed and gone within fifteen minutes.
Another couple who stayed overnight in the Benton homestead reported a very odd experience during their stay. Their hosts had retired to sleep upstairs, and they themselves had settled in down in the living room, which was serving double duty as a guest room. The wife claimed that she was awakened in the middle of the night. It was nearly completely dark in the room, but she felt as if someone—or something—was in the room with her. And then, as if materializing out of the darkness, a pair of legs appeared near the head of the bed. A man, she assumed, was standing there, close to her.
Her first assumption was that her host had come down to play a joke on her. Maybe that’s the kind of guy he was, but the middle of the night is probably the worst time to play a joke, no matter who you are. Either way, she decided to call his bluff and wait to see what he would do.
Nothing could have prepared her for what happened next, though. A hand came out of the darkness and quickly covered her mouth. She flinched but held her ground. If he was going to try to frighten her, she decided, he was in for a surprise. She pretended not to care, but after a few moments it became hard to breathe, and in the end panic took over. Pushing the hand away, she sat up and whispered harshly at the figure, “What are you up to?” Almost instantly, everything vanished: the legs, the hand, all of it. Just…gone.
The following morning she brought up her experience at breakfast and asked the hosting couple why they’d decided to pull that sort of prank. The husband and wife looked at each other with confused expressions on their faces.
They each made the same claim: no one had come downstairs during the night.
PIECES OF US
The places where we live can take on a certain life of their own. We fill them with our personality, our celebration, and sometimes even our tragedy. And although we can move on—whether by packing up and moving out or by leaving this earthly life—we often leave pieces of ourselves behind.
Like a forgotten cardboard box in the back corner of the attic, some of our echoes stay behind where others can discover them. Some call them ghosts. Others think of them as bad vibrations. I don’t think any of us would be wrong, no matter what language we use. In the end, something stays behind, and it’s not always easy to see.
Sometimes it is, though. A few years ago, an architectural photographer visited the Benton homestead with his sister in order to get some pictures for a project they were collaborating on. They wandered the property outside looking for the best view of the house. It’s gorgeous, really, if you have a thing for antique homes, and the deep red paint on the wood clapboards is very classy and elegant.
Their project involved using Polaroid cameras, the kind that immediately kicks out a small, white-framed photograph that slowly develops into clarity. When they found the perfect place to shoot the house—very near the graves of Elisha and Jemima, incidentally—the photographer took a picture.
Something was wrong with the photo, so he took another. That one, too, was off. He showed it to his sister, and they tried a third. Then a fourth. Then a fifth and a sixth. Finally they switched to a backup camera, one that had just come back from being repaired a
t a camera shop, but the photographs that came out of the new camera were the same. It wasn’t the camera, they realized eventually. It was the house.
All of the defective photos had the same flaw, as clear and easy to spot as the house itself. There, in each image, the second-story window was glowing, as if something bright and hazy was just behind the glass.
I HAVE A CONFESSION to make. Keep in mind, I write about frightening things for a living. I haven’t read a horror novel yet that’s managed to freak me out. And yet…I’m deathly afraid of open water.
There, I said it. Even though I live near the coast and I’ve been out on the water before, I hate being on boats. I’m not even sure why, to be honest. I just am.
Perhaps it’s the idea that thousands of feet of cold darkness wait right beneath my feet. Maybe it’s the mystery of it all, of what creatures—known and unknown—might be waiting for me just beyond the reach of what little sunlight passes through the surface of the waves. But I’m pretty sure that what really makes my skin crawl is the thought that, at any moment, the ship could sink.
Maybe we can blame movies like Titanic or The Poseidon Adventure for showing us how horrific a shipwreck can be. But there’s a far greater number of true stories of tragedy at sea than fictional ones. And it’s in these real-life experiences—these maritime disasters that dot the map of history like an ocean full of macabre buoys—that we come face-to-face with the real dangers that await us in open water.
The ocean takes much from us. But in rare moments, scattered across the pages of history, we’ve heard darker stories. Stories of ships that come back, of sailors returned from the dead, and of loved ones who never stop searching for land.
Sometimes our greatest fears refuse to stay beneath the waves.
DEEP HAUNTINGS
Shipwrecks aren’t a modern notion. As far back as we can go, there are records of ships lost at sea. In the Odyssey by Homer, one of the oldest and most widely read stories, we meet Odysseus shortly before he experiences a shipwreck at the hands of Poseidon, the god of the sea. Even farther back in time, we have the Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, dating to at least the eighteenth century BCE.
The truth is, for as long as humans have been building seafaring vessels and setting sail into unknown waters, there have been shipwrecks. It’s a universal motif in the literatures of the world, and that’s most likely because of the raw, basic risk that a shipwreck poses to the sailors on the ships.
But it’s not just the personal risk. Shipwrecks have been a threat to culture itself for thousands of years. The loss of a sailing vessel could mean the end to an expedition to discover new territory, or it could turn the tide in a naval battle. Imagine the results if Admiral Nelson had failed in his mission off the coast of Spain in 1805. Or how differently Russia’s history might have played out had Tsar Nicholas II’s fleet actually defeated the Japanese in the Battle of Tsushima. The advancement of cultures has hinged for thousands of years, in part, on whether or not their ships could return to port safely. But in those instances when ancient cultures have faded into the background of history, it is often through their shipwrecks that we get information about who they were.
In 2014, an ancient Phoenician shipwreck was discovered in the Mediterranean Sea near the island of Malta. It’s thought to be at least twenty-seven hundred years old, and it contains some of the oldest Phoenician artifacts ever uncovered. For archaeologists and historians who study this ancient people, the shipwreck has offered new information and ideas.
The ocean takes much from us, and on occasion it also gives back. Sometimes, though, what it gives us is something less inspiring. Sometimes it literally gives us back our dead.
One such example comes from 1775. The legend speaks of a whaling vessel discovered off the western coast of Greenland in October of that year. Now, this is a story with tricky provenance, so the details will vary depending on where you read about it. The ship’s name might have been the Octavius, or possibly the Gloriana. And from what I can tell, the earliest telling of the tale can be traced back to a newspaper article from 1828.
The story tells of how one Captain Warren discovered the whaler drifting through a narrow passage in the ice. After hailing the vessel and receiving no reply, Warren brought his own ship near and the crew boarded the mysterious vessel. Inside, they discovered a horrible sight.
Throughout the ship, the entire crew was found frozen to death where they sat. When they explored further and found the captain’s quarters, the scene was even more eerie. There in the cabin were more bodies. A frozen woman, holding a dead infant in her arms. A sailor holding a tinderbox, as if trying to manufacture some source of warmth. And there, at the desk, sat the ship’s captain.
One account tells of how his face and eyes were covered in a green, wet mold. In one hand the man held a fountain pen, and the ship’s log book was open in front of him. Captain Warren leaned over and read the final entry, dated November 11, 1762—thirteen years prior to the ship’s discovery:
We have been enclosed in the ice seventy days. The fire went out yesterday, and our master has been trying ever since to kindle it again but without success. His wife died this morning. There is no relief.
Captain Warren and his crew were so frightened by the encounter that they grabbed the ship’s log and retreated as fast as they could back to their own ship.
The Octavius, if indeed that was the ship’s name, was never seen again.
DEAD RECKONING
The mid-1800s saw the rise of the steel industry in America. It was the beginning of an empire that would rule the economy for over a century, and like all empires, there were capitals. St. Louis, Baltimore, Buffalo, Philadelphia—all of these cities played host to some of the largest steelworks in the country.
And for those that were close to the ocean, this created the opportunity for the perfect partnership: the shipyard. Steel could be manufactured and delivered locally, and then used to construct the oceangoing steamers that were the lifeblood of late nineteenth-century life. The flood of immigration through Ellis Island, for example, wouldn’t have been possible without the steamers. My own family made that journey.
One such steamer to roll out of Philadelphia in 1882 was the SS Valencia. She was 252 feet long and weighed in at nearly sixteen hundred tons. The Valencia was built before complex bulkheads and hull compartments, and she wasn’t the fastest ship on the water, but she was dependable.
She spent the first decade and a half running passengers between New York City and Caracas, Venezuela. In 1897, while in the waters near Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the Valencia was attacked by a Spanish cruiser. The next year, she was sold and moved to the West Coast, where she served in the Spanish-American War as a troopship making the voyage between the United States and the Philippines.
After the war, the Valencia was sold to a company that used the ship to sail between California and Alaska, but in 1906 she filled in for another ship that was under repair, and her new route became San Francisco to Seattle. They gave the ship a checkup in January of that year, and everything checked out good. For a twenty-four-year-old vessel, the Valencia was in perfect working order.
She set sail on the twentieth of January 1906, leaving sunny California and heading north. The ship was crewed by 9 officers and 56 crewmembers, and played host to 108 passengers. Somewhere near Cape Mendocino, off the coast of northern California, the weather turned sour. Visibility dropped and the winds kicked up.
When you’re on a ship at night, even a slow one, losing the ability to see is a very bad thing. At night the crew typically rely on the stars in the same way sailors did centuries ago. But even that option was off the table for Captain Oscar Johnson, and so he used the only tool he had left: dead reckoning.
The name alone should hint at the efficacy of the method. Using last known navigational points as a reference, Captain Johnson essentially guessed at the Valencia’s current location. But guessing can be deadly, and so instead of pointing the ship a
t the Strait of Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island and the mainland, he unknowingly aimed it at the island itself.
Blinded by the weather and set on the wrong course by faulty guesswork, the Valencia struck a reef just fifty feet from shore near Pachena Point, on the southwest side of Vancouver Island. They say the sound of the metal ripping apart on the rocks was like the screams of dozens of people. It came without warning, and the crew reacted by immediately reversing the engines and backing off the rocks.
Damage control reported the hull had been torn wide open. Water was pouring in at a rapid pace, and there was no hope of repairing the ship. The Valencia lacked the hull compartments that later ships would include to guard against sinking in just such circumstances, and the captain knew that all hope was lost. So he reversed the engines again and drove the ship back onto the rocks. He was trying not to destroy the Valencia completely but to ground her, hoping that would keep her from sinking quite so quickly.
That’s when all hell broke loose. Before Captain Johnson could organize an evacuation, six of the seven lifeboats were lowered over the side. Three of those flipped over on the way down, dumping out the people inside. Two more capsized after hitting the water, and the sixth boat simply vanished. In the end, only one boat made it safely away.
LIFELINE
Frank Lehn was one of the few survivors of the shipwreck. He later described the scene in all its horrific detail:
Screams of women and children mingled in an awful chorus with the shrieking of the wind, the dash of rain, and the roar of the breakers. As the passengers rushed on deck they were carried away in bunches by the huge waves that seemed as high as the ship’s mastheads. The ship began to break up almost at once and the women and children were lashed to the rigging above the reach of the sea. It was a pitiful sight to see frail women, wearing only night dresses, with bare feet on the freezing ratlines, trying to shield children in their arms from the icy wind and rain.