by Hans Holzer
After the séance, I investigated these data, and found to my amazement that the 1912 City Directory listed an “A. Maggio, poultry,” and both an Anne Brady and Anne O’Grady. The first name was listed as living only one block away from the house! Oh, yes—Mr. Karalanian found out that a young girl, accused of stealing, had killed herself by jumping from that very room!
* 45 “Ocean-Born” Mary
AMONG THE GHOSTLY legends of the United States, that of “Ocean-Born” Mary and her fascinating house at Henniker, New Hampshire, is probably one of the best known. To the average literate person who has heard about the colorful tale of Mary Wallace, or the New Englander who knows of it because he lives “Down East,” it is, of course, a legend—not to be taken too seriously.
I had a vague idea of its substance when I received a note from a lady named Corinne Russell, who together with her husband, David, had bought the Henniker house and wanted me to know that it was still haunted.
That was in October of 1963. It so happens that Halloween is the traditional date on which the ghost of six-foot Mary Wallace is supposed to “return” to her house in a coach drawn by six horses. On many a Halloween, youngsters from all around Henniker have come and sat around the grounds waiting for Mary to ride in. The local press had done its share of Halloween ghost hunting, so much so that the Russells had come to fear that date as one of the major nuisance days of their year.
“Ocean-Born” Mary’s house—Henniker, New Hampshire
After all, Halloween visitors do not pay the usual fee to be shown about the house, but they do leave behind destruction and litter at times. Needless to say, nobody has ever seen Mary ride in her coach on Halloween. Why should she when she lives there all year round?
To explain this last statement, I shall have to take you back to the year 1720, when a group of Scottish and Irish immigrants was approaching the New World aboard a ship called the Wolf, from Londonderry, Ireland. The ship’s captain, Wilson, had just become the father of a daughter, who was actually born at sea. Within sight of land, the ship was boarded by pirates under the command of a buccaneer named Don Pedro. As the pirates removed all valuables from their prize, Don Pedro went below to the captain’s cabin. Instead of gold, he found Mrs. Wilson and her newborn baby girl.
“What’s her name?” he demanded.
Unafraid, the mother replied that the child had not yet been baptized, having been recently born.
“If you will name her after my mother, Mary,” the pirate said, overcome with an emotion few pirates ever allow into their lives, “I will spare everybody aboard this ship.”
Joyously, the mother made the bargain, and “Ocean-Born” Mary received her name. Don Pedro ordered his men to hand back what they had already taken from their prisoners, to set them free, and to leave the captured ship. The vicious-looking crew grumbled and withdrew to their own ship.
Minutes later, however, Don Pedro returned alone. He handed Mrs. Wilson a bundle of silk.
“For Mary’s wedding gown,” he said simply, and left, again.
As soon as the pirate ship was out of sight, the Wolf continued her voyage for Boston. Thence Captain and Mrs. Wilson went on to their new home in Londonderry, New Hampshire, where they settled down, and where Mary grew up.
When she was eighteen she married a man named Wallace, and over the years they had four sons. However, shortly after the birth of the fourth son, her husband died and Mary found herself a widow.
Meanwhile, Don Pedro—allegedly an Englishman using the Spanish nom de pirate to disguise his noble ancestry—had kept in touch with the Wilsons. Despite the hazards of pirate life, he survived to an old age when thoughts of retirement filled his mind. Somehow he managed to acquire a land grant of 6,000 acres in what is now Henniker, New Hampshire, far away from the sea. On this land, Pedro built himself a stately house. He employed his ship’s carpenters, as can be seen in the way the beams are joined. Ship’s carpenters have a special way of building, and “Ocean-Born” Mary’s house, as it later became known, is an example of this.
The house was barely finished when the aging pirate heard of Mary Wallace’s loss of her husband, and he asked Mary and her children to come live with him. She accepted his invitation, and soon became his housekeeper.
The house was then in a rather isolated part of New England, and few callers, if any, came to interrupt the long stillness of the many cold winter nights. Mary took up painting and with her own hands created the eagle that can still be seen gracing the house.
The years went by peacefully, until one night someone attacked Don Pedro and killed him. Whether one of his men had come to challenge the pirate captain for part of the booty, or whether the reputation of a retired pirate had put ideas of treasure in the mind of some local thief, we may never know. All we know is that by the time Mary Wallace got out into the grove at the rear of the house, Don Pedro was dying with a pirate cutlass in his chest. He asked her to bury him under the hearthstone in the kitchen, which is in the rear of the house.
Mary herself inherited the house and what went with it, treasure, buried pirate, and all. She herself passed on in 1814, and ever since then the house had been changing hands.
Unfortunately, we cannot interview the earlier owners of the house, but during the 1930s, it belonged to one Louis Roy, retired and disabled and a permanent guest in what used to be his home. He sold the house to the Russells in the early sixties.
During the great hurricane of 1938, Roy claims that Mary Wallace’s ghost saved his life 19 times. Trapped outside the house by falling trees, he somehow was able to get back into the house. His very psychic mother, Mrs. Roy, informed him that she had actually seen the tall, stately figure of “Ocean-Born” Mary moving behind him, as if to help him get through. In the 1950s, Life told this story in an illustrated article on famous ghost-haunted houses in America. Mrs. Roy claimed she had seen the ghost of Mary time and time again, but since she herself passed on in 1948, I could not get any details from her.
Then there were two state troopers who saw the ghost, but again I could not interview them, as they, too, were on the other side of the veil.
A number of visitors claimed to have felt “special vibrations” when touching the hearthstone, where Don Pedro allegedly was buried. There was, for instance, Mrs. James Nisula of Londonderry, who visited the house several times. She said that she and her “group” of ghost buffs had “felt the vibrations” around the kitchen. Mrs. David Russell, the owner who contacted me, felt nothing.
I promised to look into the “Ocean-Born” Mary haunting the first chance I got. Halloween or about that time would be all right with me, and I wouldn’t wait around for any coach!
“There is a lady medium I think you should know,” Mrs. Russell said when I spoke of bringing a psychic with me. “She saw Mary the very first time she came here.”
My curiosity aroused, I communicated with the lady. She asked that I not use her married name, although she was not so shy several months after our visit to the house, when she gave a two-part interview to a Boston newspaper columnist. (Needless to say, the interview was not authorized by me, since I never allow mediums I work with to talk about their cases for publication. Thus Lorrie shall remain without a family name and anyone wishing to reach this medium will have to do so without my help.)
Lorrie wrote me she would be happy to serve the cause of truth, and I could count on her. There was nothing she wanted in return.
We did not get up to New Hampshire that Halloween. Mr. Russell had to have an operation, the house was unheated in the winter except for Mr. Roy’s room, and New England winters are cold enough to freeze any ghost.
Although there was a caretaker at the time to look after the house and Mr. Roy upstairs, the Russells did not stay at the house in the winter, but made their home in nearby Chelmsford, Massachusetts.
I wrote Mrs. Russell postponing the investigation until spring. Mrs. Russell accepted my decision with sonic disappointment, but she was willing to
wait. After all, the ghost at “Ocean-Born” Mary’s house is not a malicious type. Mary Wallace just lived there, ever since she died in 1814, and you can’t call a lady who likes to hold on to what is hers an intruder.
“We don’t want to drive her out,” Mrs. Russell repeatedly said to me. “After all, it is her house!”
Not many haunted-house owners make statements like that.
But something had happened at the house since our last conversation.
“Our caretaker dropped a space heater all the way down the stairs at the ‘Ocean-Born’ Mary house, and when it reached the bottom, the kerosene and the flames started to burn the stairs and climb the wall. There was no water in the house, so my husband went out after snow. While I stood there looking at the fire and powerless to do anything about it, the fire went right out all by itself right in front of my eyes; when my husband got back with the snow it was out. It was just as if someone had smothered it with a blanket.”
This was in December of 1963. I tried to set a new date, as soon as possible, and February 22 seemed possible. This time I would bring Bob Kennedy of WBZ, Boston and the “Contact” producer Squire Rushnell with me to record my investigation.
Lorrie was willing, asking only that her name not be mentioned.
“I don’t want anyone to know about my being different from them,” she explained. “When I was young my family used to accuse me of spying because I knew things from the pictures I saw when I touched objects.”
Psychometry, I explained, is very common among psychics, and nothing to be ashamed of.
I thought it was time to find out more about Lorrie’s experiences at the haunted house.
“I first saw the house in September of 1961,” she began. “It was on a misty, humid day, and there was a haze over the fields.”
Strange, I thought, I always get my best psychic results when the atmosphere is moist.
Lorrie, who was in her early forties, was Vermont born and raised; she was married and had one daughter, Pauline. She was a tall redhead with sparkling eyes, and, come to think of it, not unlike the accepted picture of the ghostly Mary Wallace. Coincidence?
A friend of Lorrie’s had seen the eerie house and suggested she go and see it also. That was all Lorrie knew about it, and she did not really expect anything uncanny to occur. Mr. Roy showed Lorrie and her daughter through the house and nothing startling happened. They left and started to walk down the entrance steps, crossing the garden in front of the house, and had reached the gate when Pauline clutched at her mother’s arm and said:
“Mamma, what is that?”
Lorrie turned to look back at the house. In the upstairs window, a woman stood and looked out at them. Lorrie’s husband was busy with the family car. Eventually, she called out to him, but as he turned to look, the apparition was gone.
She did not think of it again, and the weeks went by. But the house kept intruding itself into her thoughts more and more. Finally she could not restrain herself any longer, and returned to the house—even though it was 120 miles from her home in Weymouth, Massachusetts.
She confessed her extraordinary experience to the owner, and together they examined the house from top to bottom. She finally returned home.
She promised Roy she would return on All Hallow’s Eve to see if the legend of Mary Wallace had any basis of fact. Unfortunately, word of her intentions got out, and when she finally arrived at the house, she had to sneak in the back to avoid the sensation-hungry press outside. During the days between her second visit and Halloween, the urge to go to Henniker kept getting stronger, as if someone were possessing her.
By that time the Russells were negotiating to buy the house, and Lorrie came up with them. Nothing happened to her that Halloween night. Perhaps she was torn between fear and a desire to fight the influence that had brought her out to Henniker to begin with.
Mediums, to be successful, must learn to relax and not allow their own notions to rule them. All through the following winter and summer, Lorrie fought the desire to return to “Ocean-Born” Mary’s house. To no avail. She returned time and time again, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend.
Things got out of hand one summer night when she was home alone.
Exhausted from her last visit—the visits always left her an emotional wreck—she went to bed around 9:30 P.M.
“What happened that night?” I interjected. She seemed shaken even now.
“At 11 P.M., Mr. Holzer,” Lorrie replied, “I found myself driving on the expressway, wearing my pajamas and robe, with no shoes or slippers, or money, or even a handkerchief. I was ten miles from my home and heading for Henniker. Terrified, I turned around and returned home, only to find my house ablaze with light, the doors open as I had left them, and the garage lights on. I must have left in an awful hurry.”
“Have you found out why you are being pulled back to that house?”
She shook her head.
“No idea. But I’ve been back twice, even after that. I just can’t seem to stay away from that house.”
I persuaded her that perhaps there was a job to be done in that house, and the ghost wanted her to do it.
We did not go to Henniker in February, because of bad weather. We tried to set a date in May 1964. The people from WBZ decided Henniker was too far away from Boston and dropped out of the planning.
Summer came around, and I went to Europe instead of Henniker. However, the prospect of a visit in the fall was very much in my mind.
It seemed as if someone were keeping me away from the house very much in the same way someone was pulling Lorrie toward it!
Come October, and we were really on our way, at last.
Owen Lake, a public relations man who dabbles in psychic matters, introduced himself as “a friend” of mine and told Lorrie he’d come along, too. I had never met the gentleman, but in the end he could not make it anyway. So just four of us—my wife Catherine and I, Lorrie, and her nice, even-tempered husband, who had volunteered to drive us up to New Hampshire—started out from Boston. It was close to Halloween, all right, only two days before. If Mary Wallace were out haunting the countryside in her coach, we might very well run into her. The coach is out of old Irish folktales; it appears in numerous ghost stories of the Ould Sod. I’m sure that in the telling and retelling of the tale of Mary and her pirate, the coach got added.
The countryside is beautiful in a New England fall. As we rolled toward the New Hampshire state line, I asked Lorrie some more questions.
“When you first saw the ghost of “Ocean-Born” Mary at the window of the house, Lorrie,” I said, “what did she look like?”
“A lovely lady in her thirties, with auburn-colored hair, smiling rather intensely and thoughtfully. She stayed there for maybe three minutes, and then suddenly, she just wasn’t there.”
“What about her dress?”
“It was a white dress.”
Lorrie never saw an apparition of Mary again, but whenever she touched anything in the Henniker house, she received an impression of what the house was like when Mary had it, and she had felt her near the big fireplace several times.
Did she ever get an impression of what it was Mary wanted?
“She was a quick-tempered woman; I sensed that very strongly,” Lorrie replied. “I have been to the house maybe twenty times altogether, and still don’t know why. She just keeps pulling me there.”
Lorrie had always felt the ghost’s presence on these visits.
“One day I was walking among the bushes in the back of the house. I was wearing shorts, but I never got a scratch on my legs, because I kept feeling heavy skirts covering my legs. I could feel the brambles pulling at this invisible skirt I had on. I felt enveloped by something, or someone.”
Mrs. Roy, the former owner’s mother, had told of seeing the apparition many times, Lorrie stated.
“As a matter of fact, I have sensed her ghost in the house, too, but it is not a friendly wraith like Mary is.”
Had s
he ever encountered this other ghost?
“Yes, my arm was grabbed one time by a malevolent entity,” Lorrie said emphatically. “It was two years ago, and I was standing in what is now the living room, and my arm was taken by the elbow and pulled.
“I snatched my arm back, because I felt she was not friendly.”
“What were you doing at the time that she might have objected to?”
“I really don’t know.”
Did she know of anyone else who had had an uncanny experience at the house?
“A strange thing happened to Mrs. Roy,” Lorrie said. “A woman came to the house and said to her, ‘What do you mean, the rest of the house?’ The woman replied, ‘Well, I was here yesterday, and a tall woman let me in and showed me half of the house.’ But, of course, there was nobody at the house that day.”
What about the two state troopers? Could she elaborate on their experience?
“They met her walking down the road that leads to the house. She was wearing a colonial-type costume, and they found that odd. Later they realized they had seen a ghost, especially as no one of her description lived in the house at the time.”
Rudi D., Lorrie’s husband, was a hospital technician. He was with her on two or three occasions when she visited the house. Did he ever feel anything special?
“The only thing unusual I ever felt at the house was that I wanted to get out of there fast,” he said.
“The very first time we went up,” Lorrie added, “something kept pulling me toward it, but my husband insisted we go back. There was an argument about our continuing the trip, when suddenly the door of the car flew open of its own volition. Somehow we decided to continue on to the house.”
The house the pirate Don Pedro built: “Ocean-Born” Mary’s
An hour later, we drove up a thickly overgrown hill and along a winding road at the end of which the “Ocean-Born” Mary house stood in solitary stateliness, a rectangular building of gray stone and brown trim, very well preserved.