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HAUNTED TRAILS
& GHOSTLY TALES
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3
By Louis C. Jones
CLUBS OF THE GEORGIAN RAKES
COOPERSTOWN
SPOOKS OF THE VALLEY
LOUIS C. JONES
Illustrated 6y ERWIN AUSTIN
HILL AND WANG NEW YORK
Copyright 1959 by Louis C. Jones
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-8152
First Printing May 1959
Second Printing July 1959
Third Printing September 1959
Fourth Printing February 1960
Fifth Printing August 1963
Sixth Printing September 1965
Seventh Printing (First Paperback Edition)
September 1967
Eighth Printing March 1968
Manufactured in the United States of America
From gh.osties and ghoulies
And long-legged foeasties
And things ttiat go bump In tne night,
Good Lord Preserve us I
page
Preface from an Old Hang Yard vii
CHAPTER ONE Introducing the Dead i
Two Why They Return 19
THREE Haunted Houses 57
FOUR Violence and Sudden Death 85
FIVE Haunted History 117
Six The Ghostly Hitchhiker 161
Notes and Sources 185
Index 199
It is a great privilege to live in a town which the dead have
not deserted. Walk the streets of Cooperstown with me on a
moonlight night and I'll show you a village where the en-
chantment of death is a warm and friendly quality. We leave
my house in the old hang yard, cross the Susquehanna River
at its source, and there at River Street and Main under a
vii
v ;ji PREFACE FROM AN OLD HANG YARD
mammoth pine tree stands Pomeroy Place where old Ann
Cooper Pomeroy came back long after her death to tend the
house her rich descendants seldom used. Once, a clergyman
seeking the Episcopal rectory listened to her directions with-
out the slightest suspicion that she had been in Christ Church
yard for many a long decade, but he identified her picture
next day without any trouble.
Next door to Pomeroy Place is Greencrest where a dead
wife came back to raise Cain every time her successor took
down that huge portrait in the stairwell. Across the street on
Sheldon Keek's property there is just a slight depression in
the earth that tells where Richard Cooper's house stood. For
years after his departure the Cooper family abstained from
using his great leather chair, because Uncle Richard was sit-
ting in it. It was from the Keek's house, Byberry Cottage, that
Susan Fenimore Cooper, the novelist's daughter, set forth in
her wheel chair a few moments after she died, crossed River
Street, wheeled into Christ Church and down the aisle during
Good Friday service, right through the altar, and disap-
peared. Susan had always had "power" and one could have
expected little less from her.
In that same block there is an Indian buried behind the
stone wall. Once every few years he pushes the wall out onto
the sidewalk; I noticed the other night it's beginning to bulge
again*
One reason we in Cooperstown may be luckier than most
villages is that forty years ago Judge James Fenimore Cooper,
grandson of the novelist, wrote down the stories he had heard
and his townsmen keep on repeating them with variations
and embroideries. And don't think these are the only haunts
PREFACE FROM AN OLJD HANG YARD ix
we have. Over at Dr. Goodwin's house and up Otsego Lake
at Hyde Hall the restless dead have long been said to break
the peace and quiet of the night and the serenity of their lat-
ter-day tenants. At least this is what the people say happened;
this is our legendry, our folklore, and all around us here in
the heart of upstate New York there are similar legends.
And that's what this book is about: the stories of ghosts
kept alive by the telling and retelling of our people. This
is not a scientist's report on psychic phenomena, it is not a
handbook for scaring children at summer camps, it is not his-
tory; it is folklore as it was found in New York State about a
dozen years ago.
One of the assets of New York State is that from its very
beginning people came here from all over Europe Dutch-
men, Germans, Frenchmen, Scots, Irish, Englishmen, Ne-
groes, Portuguese Jews, and Swedes were all here by the
eighteenth century, and I think this polyglottery has helped
to give us a rich and varied folk tradition. These stories re-
flect the length and breadth of this cultural patchwork quilt.
Most of the tales are of York State ghosts told by York State
people, but not all, for I have chosen to include tales brought
here from Europe by the latecomers, told now to very Amer-
ican grandchildren as part of their family "knapsack of mem-
ories." I am reasonably sure that many of the stories now
deeply rooted in New York countryside first came to us in
this same manner.
It was my privilege to teach from 1934 to 1946 at the New
York State College for Teachers in Albany. I say "privilege"
advisedly because there were some exceedingly interesting
minds on the faculty and a bright, hard-working student body
X PREFACE FROM AN OLD HANG YARD
deriving from every cultural background you could imagine.
One of my colleagues and close friend was Professor Harold
W. Thompson, who gave a course in American Folklore, the
first, I believe, offered to undergraduates. Students not only
studied songs, stories, and beliefs of our people, they went
into their own family circles and their home towns and col-
lected their own traditions. Thompson's sending students out
to discover their own personal heritage has always seemed to
me inspired teaching.
I came to know something of the impact of this experience
after he left Albany for Cornell in 1940. 1 had been interested
in folklore from the time I heard Carl Sandburg sing and
talk at Hamilton College in 1929, and I had had time to do a
certain amount of collecting, writing, and studying, always
with Harold Thompson's encouragement and support. So it
was that I inherited the teaching of "Eng. 40: American Folk-
lore" and taught it in fall, spring, and summer for the next
six years. More than a thousand students and I taught each
other the legendry and singing tradition of our state. This is
the place to make unmistakably clear my indebtedness to
them, for they spread a dragnet across New York, bringing in
child lore, proverbs, songs, tall tales, short tales, legends, and
especially tales of the supernatural. Thompson can sing and
play the piano, he knows music thoroughly, and he stressed
the musical tradition. I'm tone deaf and lung power is my
only musical asset, but I had always been intrigued by ghosts
and witches, the Devil and all his followers. Being smart stu-
dents, they most particularly sought what interested teacher;
Thompson's archive is rich in songs, mine in the supernatural.
The two-hundred-odd stories in this volume are only a fifth
PREFACE FROM AN OLD HANG YARD xi
of the total number of ghost tales these young people gar-
nered from kith and kin. The Archive of New York Folklore,
which contains all of their findings, now is available to schol-
ars and students in our library at the New York State Histori-
cal Association at Cooperstown, filling two steel filing cabi-
nets to capacity. It always seems sizable until I look at the far
greater archive in Harold Thompson's office at Cornell.
As I have said, this book stems from the work of my stu-
dents, and I know that neither I nor any other one person
could have made a collection of this scope. But there are dis-
advantages in having someone else do your field work. There
wasn't time to teach thoroughly the techniques of collecting,
and the more experienced folklorist looking at the reports
often wishes for more of the feel of the situation, the kind of
person who told the tale, the overtones and significances
which were not reported. Yet old people will talk to the
younger members of their own families in ways they never
would talk to a stranger, especially a professorial stranger. So,
taken all in all, weaknesses and strengths, I think we came up
with a clear picture of what our countrymen say about the
restless dead, a subject that has been of human concern since
the first flame flickered in a cave, since men learned to love
and face death.
This book in itself is something of a revenant It was writ-
ten under the generous terms of a John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Fellowship in 1946-47 and laid away with the
much longer manuscript of which it is a part. It has been bur-
ied under the accumulations of a dozen busy years devoted to
many other aspects of the folk culture of New York. Now it
appears again and I hardly recognize it.
Xii PREFACE FROM AN OLD HANG YARD
Let me also make perfectly clear my treatment of the ma-
terial that my students brought to me. I have added nothing
(even when the temptation was great) and have tried to keep
faith with their findings while offering the reader a book of
reasonably consistent tone and style. I wish that I could give
you each of these stories in the words of the teller, after de-
scribing him and his intimate world. Instead, I offer a sense
of the relationship of one story to another, one attitude and
belief to the next. I have changed certain personal names
(never place names) to avoid possible embarrassment, but the
original material and all the information in our archive
about collector and informant is at the disposal of the inter-
ested scholar. The names of the collectors and informants
appear in the back of the book.
Finally, to save some of my readers trouble of mind, let me
make it clear that I have tried, in revising this manuscript,
not to put on the hat I wear as Director of the New York
State Historical Association. For example, in the story of the
woman who haunts the octagon house in Walton, one would
get the impression that the cemetery is almost across the road.
I know that is not so, but here I am concerned only with
what the people say happened, and if they have confused
geography or dates* I have left it their way. In short, as a folk-
lorist I have tried to stick as closely as possible to my sources;
as a historian I have gone fishing.
L. C. J.
Cooperstown, New York
December 31, 1958
CHAPTER ONE
People talk of the returning dead in differing tones and
varying moods. There is the man who has seen a ghost him-
self and knows what he has seen and would go to court and
swear to the truth of his experience. There is that man's son,
who has had no such encounter but this thing happened to
his father, a man who did not lie, so the truth is as he tells it.
Then there is the doubter who reports the legend of the
neighborhood. He would have you think he is above such
2 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
superstition, but often, if you press him hard or catch him
unaware, you discover that really he is not so sure; a lot of
strange things go on in the world and this legend is not the
strangest; probably it is not so, but . Then there is the true
doubter who tells his story with a sneer and a chuckle and
frequently tells it badly. Finally, we have the sophisticated
teller who is tuned only to the age of science, but for the mo-
ment, while he tells his yarn and until he has achieved his
effect, would have you think him otherwise. Because he is a
literate man, familiar with literary patterns, he often tells
the best story of all.
I am sometimes asked what those who think they have seen
ghosts have really seen. I cannot answer that with any great
assurance; I can only recite an experience which helped my
understanding tremendously. It happened at a time when I
was not unusually interested in this type of folklore, and it is
the only experience of its kind I have ever had. I was not
then, as I am not now, convinced that those who die come
back to earth in a sensible form, nor was my actual experi-
ence unusual at all it has happened millions of times to
others. I recount it merely because I can make this report
from first hand and without any question in my own mind
as to the validity of the details.
In his later years my father was a devoted gardener; March
to November he spent from dawn to dusk among his flowers.
His knowledge of botany and floriculture was wide and based
on scientific study, which he had been carrying on as an avo-
cation for fifty years. During the last ten years of his life I
would drop in on him once or twice a week, and there was a
good chance that I would find him on his knees among his
INTRODUCING THE DEAD 3
flowers or in the barn working over his records or preparing
plants or seeds for the ground.
He died in Albany in January, 1941, and in March I per-
suaded John Witthoft, then one of my students and today
Chief Curator of Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State
Museum, to take over the care of the garden for my step-
mother. On one of those March days when the air has the
softness of spring in it but the ground is still covered with
snow, John and I went out to the barn to look the situation
over, to see what plans had been left, what experiments were
under way, what fertilizer and seeds we would need.
This was a typical city barn, divided in two rooms, one a
single horse stall and the other what had been a carriage
room. It was a place where I had played all through my boy-
hood; it was always a place closely associated with my father.
We entered the small door in front of the horse stall, and I
went through into the dark, big carriage room to roll back
the sliding door, so we could see what was there.
As the door rolled back the room was lighted by the bril-
liant morning sun reflected from the snow. When I turned to
look at the room, my father was sitting on a crate cutting
peony roots. He wore his old work clothes, a faded shirt, and
dirty pants; his ancient straw hat was stuck on the back of
his head. Beads of sweat covered his brow and his shirt was
dark under the arms. He kept right on working. He looked
up at me, his beard white and gleaming, but his pale blue
eyes were more cold and expressionless than I had ever seen
them. There was neither pleasure nor anger in his face it
was merely that he was looking straight at me. And then pres-
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGH1
ently he wasn't there. John had seen nothing but an up-
turned crate.
Being a product of the twentieth century I had an expla-
nation. In a room redolent with memories of my recently
dead father, I projected from my mind his image. Emotion,
fatigue, recollection, all contributed toward the vision. This
was a psychological experience and not a very unusual one
at that. With my training and attitudes, that is all that it
could have been, but suppose I were not a product of this
age but of an earlier and more believing one? Suppose I had
been raised in a climate of opinion which assumed as a matter
INTRODUCING THE DEAD 5
of course that for any one of a million reasons or for no rea-
son at all the dead come back. Suppose members of my fam-
ily, the leaders of my church and community had told me of
these visits from the dead as true experiences; suppose the
neighborhood in which I lived contained houses from which
everyone shied away because they were haunted. . . . What
then would I have seen? Then it would have been no pro-
jection from my unconscious mind, but my father's ghost,
pure and simple. Not only that, but it would have been per-
fectly understandable, under those circumstances, for the
meeting to have been far more fruitful. He might then have
spoken to me, given me messages, warnings, advice which,
under the circumstances, would have had tremendous mean-
ing for me.
When one considers in how many lands and for how many
centuries this would have been the accepted interpretation of
what I saw, one at least pauses long enough to salute the
tradition of the past and try to understand it. There is always,
I tell myself, the possibility that the explanation of the cen-
turies is right and the psychologists of my own time wrong.
They have been wrong on other occasions.
For our purposes we shall, from this point forward, assume
that the ages are right and examine the reports of the people
concerning the returning dead as though we had never a
doubt in our minds that what is said to have happened did
happen. This is the folklorist's path.
.When the dead return they adopt a wide variety of guises
and forms, some in the vivid likeness of their mortal bodies,
others as wraiths or lights, still others in shapes so weird and
6 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
uncanny that they seem to have stepped out of drunken
nightmares.
First of all, there are the living corpses, bodies which have
been certified for burial and laid out in their coffins. They
rise in their solemn place and act for a few moments never
for long and only once as though the mortal spark were still
alive. But, and this is important, these people are really dead
and have no business acting in this fashion. Very often, I no-
tice, those who speak of this phenomenon are from Irish back-
ground, and the stories are told as happening in both this
country and Ireland.
At the wake of an Albany man named Ferris he sat up in
his coffin, frothing at the mouth. Only a priest could lay his
spirit to rest, but the family had great difficulty persuading
one to come, for it is known that the priest who lays such a
spirit soon dies himself. Finally, they tell me, a young priest
came. He drew a circle on the floor and invited the dead man
to step inside it. As soon as Ferris was inside it, the priest
knocked him down, and then they put Ferris back in the cof-
fin and went on with their wake. But before the year was out
the young priest was dead.
Sometimes a similar incident is told as a joke. They tell of
old Sean, who drank himself into his coffin; in the midst of
his wake, when the good Irish whisky was passing from hand
to hand, he could finally stand it no longer and rose in his
coffin to shout, "What's the matter with me? Ain't I good
enough to have a drink wid youse at me own wake?" But usu-
ally the animated corpse is taken very seriously.
There is an Irish telling of this theme in the family of Mar-
garet Keiley of Cohoes, people originally from Ballinrobe
INTRODUCING THE DEAD 7
and Roscommon in Ireland. It concerns the family Mona-
ghan, who lived a century or more ago in Roscommon, a man
and his wife with their twelve sons. The sons were of as many
different temperaments as they were of different ages. The
eldest was calm and wise, while some of his brothers were al-
ways fighting mad about something and forever making the
house a howling bedlam of violence and bitterness. They
lived on a farm, far from any town, and they were so poor
that for several months of each year the father packed off to
Dublin to get some ready cash. Those were trying times in
the little farmhouse, for the din of battle continued from
cockcrow to the lighting of lamps, and sometimes on into the
night. The boys were expected to keep the farm running
while their father was away; but their mother, who was a
sweet and gentle soul, left the decisions to her sons, and they
could never agree on the way the work should be done- It was
the strong hand of their old man that they needed to keep
peace in the place; as time went on, this became increasingly
their need. One day a quarrel that had been flaming into
trouble off and on for three months burst out between two of
the bigger boys. It began at breakfast and continued inter-
mittently well into the morning, first in the house, then by
the barns, and finally out on the bog. It came to an end when
they both lay dying.
The deep and terrible anger of their father when he re-
turned from Dublin a few days later was directed toward
his wife, a woman so weak that she couldn't protect her chil-
dren from their own boyish violence, a woman who didn't
deserve a dozen sons, a woman whose very presence in the
house was a menace to her family. He cursed her for a weak-
8 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
ling and a fool; he drove her from the door, calling upon God
and the saints to see to it that never again would she find a
place of rest, that she keep wandering over the face of Ireland
though her feet be cold and though she never found a place
to lay her head.
She traveled through many towns and many villages. For
a spell she was down Limerick way, working now here, now
there; then she went to Cork, where after a time she found
work with a fine family. She had worked in that house some
years, doing all the dull and thankless tasks that fall to the
maid-of-all-work. Then there came an evening when the mas-
ter and mistress announced that they were going out, going,
in fact, to the wake being held for the brilliant and greatly
beloved young priest of a parish on the far side of the city.
Instead of docilely trudging back to the kitchen, the broken
and defeated woman hesitated, then calling on all her cour-
age, asked if she might be permitted to accompany them. It
was made clear that they were not accustomed to taking the
servants with them on such occasions, but there was a des-
perate pleading in her voice that prevented their persisting
in their refusal. As they clattered across the city, she sat hud-
dled in the far corner of the carriage, a bent shadow in black
who spoke no word from the time they started until they left
her standing outside the parish-house door. About an hour
after the couple entered, Mrs. Monaghan walked in, ap-
proached the coffin, and then, after a long look at the sweet,
calm face of the dead priest, knelt beside the coffin to tell the
beads of her rosary.
The minutes ticked by, lengthening into hours, and still
the homeless wanderer continued to pray. It was at the very
INTRODUCING THE DEAD Q
stroke of midnight that those in the room saw the strangest
sight of their lives. First they heard a stirring noise in the cof-
fin, then they saw the corpse sit straight up. Slowly he raised
his hand and placed it on the kneeling woman's head. The
voice that had said many a mass in their hearing spoke
slowly, steadily: "Mother dear, do not weep. I who was your
eldest son have prayed for you since you left us in our youth,
and I knew that we would meet again. Your sins have been
forgiven you, and from this very moment on you will have a
place to lay your head and will never again be cold. God be
with you." The old woman sobbed out in anguish as the priest
was seen to lie back once more in the coffin. She stood up and,
leaning over, kissed her son farewell. Then she turned, stum-
bling to the floor. When they reached her, she was with her
son.
The living corpse is not a very frequent phenomenon in
American folklore. On the other hand the commonest form
assumed by a ghost is an appearance so lifelike that, unless he
is known to be dead, he passes for a living person until he
vanishes or does something else out of the ordinary. Of
course, if you know a person is dead and meet him on the
street, or if he drops in on you one night, then there can be
no question about what manner of man he is.
Not infrequently one who is dying appears elsewhere than
his place of death at the time of his death and that can be
very confusing. The spirit just released from the body is ap-
parently especially active, although his presence is seldom
purposeful; he has no reason for appearing, beyond the sim-
ple pleasure of trying out his new-found power. Defoe, in
10 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
1706, wrote a classic report of such a visitation in The True
Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal, but visits to
friends and relatives just after death are not at all uncommon.
One day a woman on the Utica-Little Falls bus was telling
of a family in East Schuyler who had an annual autumn visit
from a city fellow who liked to help with the milking. One
October he didn't come and no explanation accounted for
his absence, but nobody thought much about it. Then one
morning late in the fall, Henry, the old fanner who owned
the place, was out milking when he felt a tap on the shoulder.
He turned around to see his city friend standing by him.
"Can I help you milk her, Henry?" was all he said. Henry got
up and let him finish milking, thinking no more about it ex-
cept that his friend had decided to come after all Henry
wasn't one of those fellows who thinks you have to waste a
lot of breath talking. The newcomer milked until the pail
was full, whereupon he handed it to Henry and walked to
the house. At breakfast Heniy took a good deal of ribbing
from his family after he asked where their visitor was and
told them about the milking. He didn't say a thing not even
the next week when word came that their friend had died
down in New York the morning he was there milking, up in
East Schuyler.
There are plenty of other stories like that: There's one
about a man who was seen fixing his roof just before they
brought word that he had been killed in a mine some miles
away; another about a woman who was seen praying in a
New York City church at almost the same time her body was
taken out of the East River; and on countless farms and in
11
INTRODUCING THE DEAD
city homes the dying or but momentarily dead appear to
those who love them at some distance from their bodies.
In the type of oral ghost tale which is nearest to literary
form, such as the stories of the ghostly hitchhiker and others
of the contemporary tales (see Chapter Six), the crux and im-
pact of the tale most frequently depends upon this ability of
the dead to deceive the living into thinking that the ghost is
alive. Often it is not until he vanishes that the truth is dis-
covered.
The next degree away from reality if we start with the
solid bulk of the animated corpse, then take the lifelike
ghost is the spirit which is perfectly recognizable but is un-
questionably a ghost because of its translucent and somewhat
filmlike form. It is recognizable in every detail, but the ob-
server is under no illusion about what he is facing. From this
point on, ghosts become progressively less distinguishable
until they seem mere rushings of air in the night.
These apparitions fall into three main divisions: First
there are those characterized by whiteness; then there are
those who appear as lights; finally there are the miscellaneous
grotesqueries.
Artists are great ones to favor the ghost as a white figure,
usually dressed in something that looks like a trailing night-
dress. Actually the people report this form only occasionally.
"The woman in white" is a familiar expression, but she is not
very clearly defined. We hear such descriptions as a "white
ghostlike shape," a "hazy figure," a "whispy white mist,'* and
a "figure surrounded by a nimbus," but they are not much
more common than animated corpses.
12 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Many ghosts are credited with appearing as lights of vari-
ous sorts. We had balls of fire which skittered about a farm-
house I once owned, and several of our country friends took
a serious view of the matter. These balls of fire do act as
though they are looking for something, of course, but after a
while they stopped bothering us, so either they weren't ghosts
or they found what they wanted. Personally, so long as the
house didn't catch on fire, I didn't much care one way or the
other.
A ghost that appears as an ordinary light, looking like a
lantern or flashlight from a distance, which goes over the
same route night after night usually has a message he wants to
convey; either he wants reburial in a cemetery (this seems to
be a favorite need of murdered peddlers) or he wants to point
out where money is hidden. A few of the wandering dead
take the form of flames or colored lights; but frequently
these are not souls but supernatural warnings of a tragedy or
disaster which is to appear in a locality or affect a particular
family.
The routine ghosts who have no more imagination than
to come back as lights and shadows seem pale and uninterest-
ing beside the grotesque characters who choose some unor-
thodox form for their returns. Long before Washington Irv-
ing there were headless ghosts in York State and a sizable
number are still remembered. Sometimes there is no head at
all; sometimes it is carried by a horseman on his lap. On the
road from Groveside to Boyntonville, farmers report that if
you start off to market just before dawn, there is a chance
that as you go through a patch of woods you may be held up
by a whole procession of headless men walking across the
INTRODUCING THE DEAD 1 g
road. Near Dumpling Hill an old German used to keep handy
a loaded rifle in the stock of which he had placed passages of
Scripture written on rolls of paper; this was a guaranty against
all witches and ghosts but especially against a headless Indian
he had seen in front of his house, dancing around an old
stump. In Lewis County they told of a headless man who came
to a certain barn and milked the cows but it was hard to keep
hired men on that farm, anyhow. Not until the barn burned
did he go away. On Watch Hill, near Yorktown Heights, if
you stand by a certain rock at midnight when there is a full
moon, you can see a headless Revolutionary soldier step out
of a crevice in the rock. Not infrequently, as we shall see,
headless ghosts are the guardians of buried treasure.
Not only do bodies without heads appear, but miscellane-
ous parts of anatomy appear too. One of the workers in our
Watervliet arsenal, for example, remembers an incident of his
youth in Germany that would rivet itself into the memory of
any man who had experienced it. When he was a boy, he used
to wander from farm to farm to help with the harvest. So it
was with a group of other workers that he lay one night in a
haymow that they had filled that day. The sun was down and
the weary men had climbed into the loft to get their sleep,
but the time for sleep had not yet come, and they lay in the
warm, sweet hay, talking and joking. The principal butt of
their laughter was a lank, big-handed Bavarian named Ernst.
The laughter was rough and the teasing sharp until the poor
boy grew irritable and anyone with half an eye could see his
temper getting out of hand. Perhaps another minute and
there would have been a free-for-all there in the hay, but the
excitement which came was of a different sort.
14 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
The one nearest the ladder thought someone was coming
up with a lantern, and in a moment the whole gang had
turned in expectation to see who was joining them. The rag-
ging of Ernst stopped; expectation turned to terror as the
group saw a brightly glowing head swim up through the hole
in the loft, move swiftly among the men until it hovered
above the shaking Ernst. The heavy-lidded eyes looked at
him, through him; the voice was clouded and far away:
"Pray, Ernst, pray for your sister's soul, for this day she was
drowned." The head moved on, rose in the air, and floated si-
lently out the open window just under the roof. There wasn't
much work done on that farm the next day, especially after
the neighbor came to call Ernst home for the funeral of his
sister, who had indeed died as the strange messenger of the
night before had announced.
In Pittstown there is a house, I am told, where on the anni-
versary of a murder a pair of bloody hands appears on the
front door. And from the North Woods comes the story of a
man whose fishing one day netted him nothing but long
strands of a woman's hair. And after his wife had dried the
hair out by the fire, it continued to make a sound like the
dripping of water and in the middle of the night a voice
came from the hair to tell the woman of a murder and how
the body must be taken from the lake and buried. Every night
the dripping continued the voice never came again until
word had been passed on to the authorities for the raising of
the body. But most spectacular of all is the ghost that appears
limb by limb, then head and torso, each part rolling down the
stairs of the house he haunts in Poughkeepsie. Finally the
parts roll together and there stands your spook. Most people
INTRODUCING THE DEAD 1 5
don't hang around very long, looking at him. It is worth not-
ing that only very rarely, in the folklore of our people, do the
dead appear as skeletons Hallowe'en notwithstanding.
When you see a ghost in the form of an animal, it may be
either the spirit of an animal returned to earth, or it may be
a ghostly human in this guise. The latter is by no means com-
mon, and very frequently when found here it comes from Ital-
ians who are accustomed to this belief in the old country. One
American of Italian origin tells of a woodsman he knew who
saw a ghost bulldog once, with the face and mustache of a
friend of his who had recently been killed nearby. Generally
speaking, of course, what seems to be the ghost of an animal
is just that. Horses and dogs are the most likely to return to
our world, but cows do too, and once in seven blue moons a
shade of a cat will come mincing in. That seems odd to me
that cats, with all their reputation for mystery and secrecy,
are not more often seen after their ninth life is dosed. Horses
sometimes carry ghostly riders, more often appear by them-
selves. One rose from her grave to help her master do a last
spring plowing ("the skin was a mite loose, but it was old
Dolly, all right"), while a famous trotter buried on the
grounds can be heard at Matteawan State Hospital.
If a ghost is the sensible return of a soul from among the
dead to the land of the. living, we are put to it for a proper
name for the reappearance of inanimate objects which return
from the past. Often this is part of a re-enacted scene in which
those objects had a part. A ghostly horse will draw a ghostly
hearse to the cemetery; a train will travel down the track; a
ghost will turn a grindstone that has long since been dis-
l6 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
carded. In Troy there was a little Quaker lady who liked to
return to the room that had been hers when she was alive,
and when she came all the furniture which had been there in
her day came back too.
One phenomenon that has always interested me is the re-
ported presence in Cohoes of the Death Coach, so well known
in Irish folklore. It is a good example of the constant absorp-
tion into our American folk culture of the lore of those who
came to us from across the sea. As in Ireland, the coach fol-
lowed certain streets and the souls who died along its route
during the day were picked up at midnight, and it was con-
sidered a great honor to live upon its circuit. The coach was
sometimes called the "horseless carriage," for no horses were
visible between its shafts. In the same city there was another
ghostly carriage full of gay, dead young people, enjoying
themselves but not the least bit interested in stopping for
fresh recruits.
While many accounts of the returning dead are hazy, there
are enough with sharp details to make it possible to assert
that twice as many men return after death as women. One
reason for this is that men are much more likely to meet their
deaths violently than women, and a goodly segment of the
wandering dead were murdered, killed in accidents, or com-
mitted suicide; about every third ghost met death violently.
Their age is somewhat more difficult to determine. My
guess would be that the age of ghosts (they seem not to age
after death) follows the normal mortality curve of a hundred
years ago, with a reasonable allowance to account for the ex-
ceptional number of murders, suicides, and fatal accidents.
INTRODUCING THE DEAD 1 7
Since there was then an unusually high death rate among chil-
dren, we observe that about one ghost in ten is under his
majority, but even with this group, many were done in by
violence. This is in contrast to the stories of European ghosts,
where relatively few are young.
One of the striking facts about the dead is that apparently
almost anybody can come back if he has sufficient reason or
wants to. There are thousands of the returning dead who
were just ordinary, run-of-the-mill citizens like yourself. If
you had sat across the bridge table from them while they were
still alive, it never would have occurred to you to say to your-
self, "This is the type that haunts houses." Many of them are
plain farmers or simple housewives. But businessmen, serv-
ants, industrial workers, clergymen, soldiers, and sailors are
just as likely to return as horse thieves, gamblers, prostitutes,
and "fellers who die bad." Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and
heathens, Negroes, Indians, and white men, saints and sinners
all have the same rights after death; if they want to come
back, they come. These, of course, are the recognizable ghosts;
there is the great multitude whom none can recognize and of
whom nothing specific is known.
In all fairness ghosts have gotten an undeservedly bad
name. Everybody goes about acting afraid of them and this
reflects on their reputations; all this foolishness in the Sunday
supplements and on Hallowe'en and a long-standing tradition
has led the people to think that meeting the dead is a harrow-
ing experience and fraught with great dangers. This is non-
sense and statistically unsound. I could produce tabulations
and charts to prove it isn't so. What this country needs is a
l8 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Society for the Prevention of the Defamation of the Return-
ing Dead.
The truth is that the great majority of the dead are totally
indifferent to your values, but they do have something on
their minds that needs to be taken care of, or they have some
sort of compulsion which makes it necessary for them to come
back to old scenes. It is true, a few come back maliciously, but
much less frequently in this country than abroad. Never does
a malevolent ghost harm one who is innocent of wrong; when
one of them is violent, it is because he has good reason and I
have heard of their knocking down, whipping, beating, brand-
ing, scratching those they feel they are justified in punishing.
But a ghost almost never runs berserk, hurting innocent by-
standers; the few who are out for trouble direct it at those
who have betrayed them. If your conscience is clear, you have
nothing to worry about; even if it isn't, it may be some con-
solation to know that occasions of violence are very rare in-
deed. On the other hand, a great many ghosts are a nuisance,
making noises, moving furniture, letting the cat in, scaring
the dogs or horses, opening doors that are locked and shutting
blinds that are open, but these antics are more often than not
devices for getting attention. These are not the malevolent
dead, though some people are frightened by them. As we shall
see presently, many ghosts come back to do favors of various
kinds and with other generous and kindly purposes in mind
far, far more than come back in anger.
CHAPTER Two
It would be an endless task to present the wide variety of
reasons why the dead return, but perhaps a little sampling
will give some idea. After examining hundreds of accounts of
ghosts, it seems to me that these reasons fall roughly into five
categories: they come back to re-enact their own deaths; to
complete unfinished business; to re-engage in what were their
normal pursuits when they were alive; to protest or punish;
or, finally, to warn, console, inform, guard, or reward the
living.
19
2O THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Why anyone would want to re-enact his last moments on
earth, especially if those moments were fraught with intense
inner conflict, I do not understand yet. One old man who
died sitting in a little closet off his bedroom, putting on his
pants (one of the most absurd of all human postures cer-
tainly), has been seen by his granddaughters in the same
closet, going through the same business more than once. In
Johnstown, after World War I, a shell-shocked father came
roaring out of his house one day with a razor in his hand and
slashed the throat of his wife, who was standing by their fence
with her baby in her arms, talking to a neighbor woman. As
he ran on toward the back yard his wife started to follow
him, yelling, "I'll kill you!" The moment she moved, her
head dangled and she fell down dead. As soon as he saw that
she was dead he cut his own throat. Blood flowed all around
them. A few nights later two women saw the figures re-enact-
ing the whole scene, and the agonizing screams chopped
through the quiet of the night. The house they lived in was
hardly fit for habitation because of the racket they made, and
this continued despite the fact that three times priests blessed
the house and yard. They kept on disturbing the peace until
the house burned down.
Suicides most frequently get the urge to try again. In Glen-
mont, below Albany, they tell me there is a house which once
belonged to the Van Rensselaers. Long ago and for some rea-
son now forgotten, the lady of the house lost her reason and
began to distrust and then hate her entire family. One day
the ragged thread of her sanity snapped and she went to the
attic where she burned all the valuable papeis she could find
and then went out on the widow's walk. There she paced up
WHY THEY RETURN j> x
and down for a few moments before she leaped off. It is in that
last moment or two of indecision and in that final leap that
she is seen in our time: the unsettled pacing to and fro, the
sudden jump, the hurtling body.
To a mortal mind it makes far more sense for the dead to
return to complete some matter of business which was left
unfinished at death than to go through the death act over and
over again. Later we shall discover a considerable number of
stories with this as the motivating factor, but a few examples
now will set the pattern. When the dead die with some-
thing on their minds, some intention unfulfilled, some ques-
tion unanswered, they often do something about it.
Down in Schoharie there was an old man who had a
sprightly daughter who was being courted by a chap named
Sam whom her father didn't think worth the powder to blow
him to Hell. There wasn't much he could do about it; he
was down sick in bed and the girl had a mind of her own.
One day Sam was hanging around the house and the two men
had some words. It ended up with the old man yelling out
that he'd get even with the young pipsqueak somehow, some
day. A few days later he died and Sam was free to see his girl
as often as he wanted. One night after they had been making
the plans for their wedding, he started whistling down the
path for home. It was close to midnight when he saw the girl's
father standing in the middle of the path with a whip in his
hand, only instead of the decrepit oldster he had been when
he died, he was young and strong and full of fight. He lay
into Sam with his whip and Sam ran; the faster he ran, the
heavier came the blows of the whip. All the way home the
22 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
whip kept lashing away and Sam couldn't escape it. After he
got in the house he packed up a bundle of his duds and lit
out of there; the girl never saw him again. So that was a piece
of business that was finished.
Farther east, near Mariaville, there was a Scot who had an
argument with his next-door neighbor over their boundary
line; the neighbor claimed that Sandy had moved the stone
that served as a marker some distance in his own favor. After
Sandy died there was even more trouble because the case went
to court. And those who passed that way claimed that you
could see the old Scot sitting out there on the stone, all night
long, his red tam-o'-shanter cocked on his head as though he
just dared anyone to lay a finger on that stone. So far as I
know, nobody ever did.
Husbands and wives have their unfinished business too.
They tell of a Massachusetts man who was a cussed character
and made his wife's life a misery for years. She was a gentle,
placid soul who let the old brute have his way and just went
on being sweet about it. Time went by and neither of them
changed any, right up to the day of his death. But one night
after he had been gone a few weeks she woke up with a start
to find him standing beside the bed. She was scared; she didn't
say a word, just lay there in the darkness. The next night she
woke up about the same time and there he was again. He
didn't move or make any gesture in her direction; all he did
was to stand there looking down at her. If she was scared the
first night, she was terrified this second time. Both nights,
after a while, he faded away. The third night when she went
to bed she decided that if he came again she would lay aside
her fear and speak to him. After all, it was only her husband,
WHY THEY RETURN 33
and if she could put up with him for years on end while he
was alive, she figured that there wasn't any sense in her being
frightened of him after he was dead. That night he was there
again. She held her breath for a minute and then she spoke.
"What do you want, John?"
"I want your forgiveness, Mary, for the bad way I treated
you during our life together."
"Good heavens, John, is that all you want! You were for-
given long ago." And with that John disappeared and never
came back, so far as she knew.
The shoe was on the other foot in a family up in Lowville
where the wife died, never having cured her husband, Matt,
of card playing. She had spent all her married life trying to
persuade him by fair means and foul to give up going out
with the boys to play poker. She did better after death. Old
Matt's house, then being womanless, was a fine place for the
crowd to gather, so for some months after he became a wid-
ower, Matt played host to his cronies. Then he began to
notice that one by one they were dropping out. It wasn't until
his friend Paddy was the only one left that he found out why.
His wife had discovered that by appearing to each of her hus-
band's friends on a night when he was going home alone
through the swamp, she could discourage his poker playing
for some time to come. They tell me she is still hanging
around Lowville, and any man in that town who starts mak-
ing a practice of leaving his wife home so that he can get in a
little stud with the boys is liable to meet up with her on the
way home especially if he has to pass that swamp out Matt's
way. Some women are just spoilsports by nature.
A very different reason brings a woman back to Walton,
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
and has been bringing her back for a long time. About a hun-
dred years ago a woman wanted an octagon house and her
husband had the plans drawn and was all ready to build it
when she died. They owned a piece of land alongside a very
twisting road not far from the cemetery, and after she was
buried, her husband went ahead and built the house anyway.
It is one of the few octagons in that section. It has a spiral
staircase from cellar to cupola and other interesting details
that would have pleased the lady mightily if she had ever had
a chance to see it. And she tries, mind you, to get there from
the cemetery to have a pood look at it but she never Quite
WHY THEY RETURN 05
makes it. Everyone knows that the reason there are accidents
there at night is that drivers see her halfway across the road
and swerve to miss her, often piling into another car. But you
can't blame her for trying.
Another to whom a particular building meant a great deal
was the pastor of a Catholic parish who had planned for many
years to repair and remodel his church. The congregation
had been collecting money for that purpose and at length
there was enough saved to begin the work. At that point their
beloved and devoted priest died and other hands had to carry
through the plans. The new priest did the best he could to
fulfill the dream of his predecessor, but the details had not all
been set down and when he went over the matter with the
contractor, he had to guess at many of the original intentions.
The workmen erected their scaffolding and started work. The
first night as they were about to leave the building an elderly
priest met the foreman at the door and gave precise instruc-
tions for the work that was to be done the next day. They fol-
lowed his orders, and the next night, indeed every night, as
the foreman was about to leave, he found the old priest at the
door. It was not until some days later that the foreman had
occasion to seek out the young pastor to ask some questions
about the day's work which the older man had not made quite
clear. What old priest was the foreman talking about? There
must be some mistake, for no one besides the pastor had any
voice in the changes that were to be made. At length it be-
came apparent that the dead priest was seeing to it that his
plans were carried out to the last detail, and his successor very
wisely gave instructions that whatever orders he gave were to
2 6 THINGS TOAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
be fulfilled to the letter. The ghost continued to come each
night for his brief interview until the church was finished.
There is an interesting group of stories dealing with
ghostly priests who fulfill after death promises made while
still alive. The basic tale is of European origin and has made
itself completely at home on American soil; there is little
distinction to be made among the versions which came from
Ireland, Italy, and Alsace-Lorraine and those which are told
of Albany, Glens Falls, and Brooklyn. Probably the story
could be found among Catholics the world around, for often,
I notice, it comes directly or indirectly from a member of the
clergy. This is the story of the priest who died before certain
masses which he had promised to say could be said, and how
ultimately the mass was sung and the promise kept.
It sometimes happens that a dead priest contrives to bring
to the attention of a living confrere the fact that in passing
to the other side he has left obligations unfulfilled. There
was a priest who took over a parish in Wellsville, for example,
after an elderly and greatly beloved pastor had died. Soon he
observed a curious phenomenon: every night as he lay in bed
a strong light shone on the books of a certain section of the
bookshelves. This became so annoying that he called in an
electrician and did everything else he could think of to dis-
cover the source of this strange and unaccountable nuisance.
Finally, almost in desperation, he took out all the books in
that section of the shelves and went through each one, page
by page. The last book in the section was the breviary the old
priest had been reading when he died. In its pages the priest
found a ten-dollar bill and a note requesting ten masses for
the dead. Apparently they had been given to the old man,
WHY THEY RETURN 27
who had died before the masses could be said. After the re-
quest had been fulfilled, the light never shone again on the
bookshelves.
Another and similar incident about a dead priest concerns
the combination on the safe rattling each night as the suc-
cessor read his office, and not until the order book was dis-
covered within the safe and the masses said did the rattling
cease. In Toledo, Canada, the dead priest appeared to one of
his parishioners, whereupon she fled the church where she
had gone to pray. When she told the current pastor, he advised
her to go back a second time, for the dead man might have
some important message for her. She followed his advice and
when the old priest appeared he told her of a mass for which
he had been paid but which he had failed to say. Until that
mass was said, he would be unable to rest. And so the living
priest said the mass and the dead priest found it unnecessary
to return.
Often, however, it is the dead priest himself who sings the
mass, and this is the more common European version if the
examples at my disposal are a sufficient cross section to judge
by. While this has been told as happening in St. Mary's
Church in Glens Falls and in the Cathedral of the Immaculate
Conception in Albany (where the girl who saw the dead priest
say the mass left the building with her hair suddenly turned
snow-white, to die a few days later), I prefer the version which
concerns Visitation Parish in Brooklyn.
About thirty years ago a man fell asleep in the back of that
church and was locked in for the night by mistake. Promptly
at midnight he awoke. Lights had been turned up on the
altar, and a priest had come out dressed in his vestments, evi-
2 g THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
dently prepared to say mass. He stepped to the foot of the
altar and, facing the empty pews, called out, "Is anybody here?
Is anybody here?" When no answer came, the lights went out
and the priest disappeared.
The poor man in the rear pew was so frightened that he
had been unable to speak out and for the rest of the night he
huddled in the back of the church. No sooner were the doors
open in the morning than he went to the priest to tell him
what he had seen. It was agreed that they would go together
the following night to see if the lonely cleric would return.
At the stroke of midnight the candles on the darkened altar
lighted up and the priest dressed in his vestments came for-
ward once again. Once again he looked out over the dark
church and asked, "Is anybody here? Is anybody here?"
"We are here/' answered the living priest.
The figure in priestly vestments began saying the mass and
went through the entire ritual; then he walked off the altar,
never to return. The priest explained to his awe-struck pa-
rishioner, that they had seen some priest out of the church's
past who had promised to say a mass and neglected to fulfill
his promise. But not even in death could he rectify his fault
unless there were someone present in the church as he read
the mass.
Among the Irish in Glens Falls they tell of a man who, pass-
ing St. Mary's Church late one night, saw that the lights were
all on and heard the choir singing for all it was worth. The
front door was locked, and that made him curious, so he
climbed the outside wall and peered through the window
where he recognized the priest and members of the choir and
congregation, all of them former neighbors and old friends
WHY THEY RETURN 2 Q
of his, each of whom lay cold and dead in the burial ground.
A woman remembers that in her girlhood in Fonnicola,
Italy, they told of a pious woman who woke in the middle of
the night to hear the churchbells ringing, so she got up di-
rectly, dressed, and went to the church. But she knew none
of the congregation nor the priest. Then the woman who sat
next to her explained that the priest was saying masses which
he had failed to say while he was still alive and that the con-
gregation was making up for masses they had missed while
they were alive and that the pious woman was the only liv-
ing soul who had ever attended one of their services.
Nor are the Catholics the only ones who tell of ghostly
congregations, for the Jews have stories to the effect that
sometimes at midnight, when the synagogue is locked and
dark, the dead hold religious services only they say it back-
ward, and should anyone from among the living be present
and see that ghoulish travesty, he would leave the building
forever deaf, dumb, and blind. Thus, when the parents of a
small child in Smorgon, Poland, discovered that he had been
locked in, the parents ran in terror to their rabbi. But he was
a learned man and knew how to propitiate the dead. He
formed a procession of the leading men of the congregation
and, each carrying a torch, they filed to the synagogue. There
the rabbi stepped to the door and knocked three times. Then
he repeated certain prayers backward and abjured the spirits
of the dead to leave the place of worship. His learning was
the saving of the child, for when they opened the doors he
came forth happy and well. He told them that he had watched
the dead hold their services and when they danced in the
aisles, he had danced with one of them. But no one had done
gO THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
him any harm, and he seemed none the worse for his experi-
ence except, perhaps, that he was a little sleepy.
Sometimes the dead return to pick up the threads of their
lives momentarily and then fade back into limbo. It is often
the simple, everyday acts they seek to recapture. The ma-
chinist returns to his lathe, the patent medicine king works
on in his old laboratory, the miller grinds his corn once more,
the widow searches the horizon for her husband's long-lost
ship, and sailors walk the shore at Sodus Bay, scanning Lake
Ontario for comrades who were lost in a bad nor'wester. The
dead boss of an East Chatham cheese factory used to be seen
in the furnace room around midnight, leaning against a post,
smoking his pipe as he had been wont to do.
The drunkard may come back for a drink, like old Jim
who used to hang around the Dater Tavern on the Albany-
Saratoga Road. Jim had been a very pleasant fellow, drunk
or sober. He worked as hired hand at various farms in the
neighborhood and spent all his money in the tavern used
to say that if he ever got a mouthful of water, it would finish
him. When he was dying he looked around and, with a kind
of grin on his good-natured face, begged that they bury him
on the little hill in back of the tavern, so it would be real
handy if he needed a drink. About ten years later the tavern
was sold and made into a farmhouse. The new family would
wake up in the night and hear Jim down in the living room
(which had been the bar) getting his nightcap before rolling
back to his little residence. The end of this story provides the
irony and pathos: one day one of the daughters of the family
was out walking on the hill and kicked something she thought
WHY THEY RETURN 3 1
was a white stone. But it wasn't; it was Jim's skull. It rolled
down the hill and fell into the creek at the bottom. They
reburied the skull and the rest of the bones in a deeper grave,
but the water had passed his teeth and the damage had been
done. Old Jim never came again to order drinks in the old
barroom, thus ending the adventure of one of the happiest
ghosts of whom I know.
The Austin family, who had many another attribute, were
a musical lot. Old Joseph when he was alive was one of the
best players of the French accordion in New Hampshire. One
time Grandpa got a notion that his father (Joseph) would
likely come to see him that night, so he set the chair out in
his bedroom and waited. After a spell not only his father but
his uncle Jonathan put in an appearance. The three of them
had a fine time talking about the old days, and when Joseph
saw his accordion he was so delighted that he picked it up
and began to play. He was better than when he was alive
so good, in fact, that Grandma Austin came to the door to
find out what was going on. She knew Grandpa couldn't play
as well as that, but when he shouted through the locked door
that it was his old man playing the contraption and when
she heard her father-in-law's voice, she fled in terror. As
Grandpa's father and uncle rose to go, he shook hands with
them both, and they promised to return if the family kept
the news from Joseph's second wife, who wasn't very popular.
(Of course, Grandma couldn't keep quiet, so they never came
again.) But the next morning Grandpa discovered that Jo-
seph, the old rascal, had taken the accordion with him. I like
to think of him playing it wherever he is, with all his ancient
zest.
32 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
The pleasures of the Austin family point up the fact that
the returning dead frequently enjoy themselves immensely.
And sometimes they re-enact a happy experience of special
importance to themselves. A Polish woman in Schenectady
recalls the day when the lord of the estate where she was born
sent her on an errand to another manor. When she arrived
it was after dark, so the lady of the house suggested that she
spend the night. With some hesitation she added that there
was only one free bedroom in the house, but she hoped that
a girl could get a restful night's sleep there. The girl had a
good sleep all right, but in the morning her hostess seemed
unduly solicitous as to the kind of night she had put in and
was relieved when she was assured that everything had been
very peaceful.
A month or so later the girl came back on another errand
for her master and was told to take the same room as before.
This time the night wasn't so uneventful. As she was dozing
off, she heard the doorknob being softly turned. She got up
and went to the door, opened it, and peered out into the hall.
There was no one there, so she locked her door again and
went back to bed. After a spell the door was tried again, this
time more violently than before. She lit a candle, unlocked
the door, and again peered out into the corridor, only to find
it still empty. As she closed the door she thought she heard
horses' hooves and the rolling wheels of a carriage outside her
window, along the cobblestone drive. She ran to the window
and peered out into the moonlight; she could see the full
length of the driveway but, although she could distinctly
hear the vehicle, there was nothing to be seen.
Remembering the solicitude which the great lady had
WHY THEY RETURN 33
shown for her the last time she stayed in the house, the girl
gathered up her courage and went to the woman's room,
where she explained what she had heard in full detail. There
was no surprise in the older woman's face, nor any of the
disbelief which the girl had half expected. No, this was what
the woman had anticipated the first time. The fact of the
matter was that the girl had been sleeping in the room once
occupied by a daughter of the family. A suitor who was
frowned upon by her parents had come to her one night,
opened the bedroom door, and then driven off with her down
the driveway in his fine carriage. The daughter was never
seen -again, but sometimes when the moon was just right, the
couple would re-enact their elopement: the turning of the
doorknob, the rolling clatter of the horses and carriage.
Sometimes there was a tinkling of a woman's laughter, but
not this night.
There was an Irish couple whose story is told in Albany
and the like of which I have never heard. One would hardly
say they re-engaged in their living pursuits, although, ulti-
mately that is what happened. They were a bride and groom,
but before the crumbs of the wedding cake could be swept
away, the bride had gone where there is neither marriage nor
giving in marriage. The nights were sleepless for the youthful
widower; he could think only of the cup of happiness they
had barely raised to their lips before it was dashed to the
ground and broken. As he lay bemoaning his lot, about a
week after his bride's death, he realized that theie was a glow-
ing light outside his first-floor window. He got out of bed to
see a girl with her back toward him, standing in the moon-
light and combing her hair with a golden comb. Everything
34 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
about her reminded him of his wife, but he could not be sure
until she turned around. He waited, breathless, beginning to
think it might be a banshee, for they too are ever combing
their long tresses in the moonlight with golden combs. At
last she turned; it was his wife and no mistake. The swift in-
take of his breath must have frightened her, for no sooner
was he sure that it was she than she was gone.
AH the next day he thought about this; he wondered, as
have so many before him who have seen the restless dead, was
this a dream? Did she come to him while he slept, yet so
clearly that there was no boundary between sleeping and
waking? "If she were a dream/' he thought, "she will not
come again just as she did last night; but if she does come
again, I will grab at the comb. If the comb is in my hands
when the cold light of morning comes down over these green
hills, then what has come to me is no dream at all but my own
Mary, back from yonder." That night he didn't so much as
try to go to sleep; rather he stood hour after hour by the win-
dow noiselessly waiting. When midnight came, there was the
nimbus of light again and the girl just outside his window
with the gold comb in her hand, combing her hair over and
over. He didn't speak, nor utter any sound, but in a flash he
plucked the comb from her hand. The light vanished and his
bride \vith it. The next night she didn't come, nor the next.
He was sad, looking at the golden comb, remembering, curs-
ing his own haste. Then one night she was there.
Tired to his very soul, he had gone to bed early with the
gold comb tight in his hand, the teeth of it pressed into his
palm. He woke up suddenly; the light outside the window was
WHY THEY RETURN 35
just dimly perceptible. No sooner was he up and out of bed
than she spoke to him.
"Michael, I'm needing my comb back," and he heard the
sad murmur of a meadow brook in her voice; no man who
loved her could refuse her asking.
Carefully now, lest his living flesh touch her ghostly fingers
the Irish are careful about these matters he placed the
comb on a yardstick that was by him, then extended it over
the sill within her easy reach. When she had it again, a smile
came to her eyes and they stood together and talked, the sad-
glad talk of lovers who have parted, reunited, and must again
go separate ways. But she had a scheme, the whys and where-
fores she could make clear to no living man; the simple fact
was that there was a single chance, a long and desperate
chance that she could come back to the land of the living and
to him, not for a few speeding seconds, but to live out the
natural pattern of her life. He was to do exactly as she told
him, and he was to keep well his secret.
On Friday week there was a great parade in town to open
the annual fair. The merchants, the pipers, the farmers who
were going to show their fine horses, and a little band of
traveling showmen all paraded down the street while the
pipers played their wild music. For none of these did the
young widower have any eyes; he kept watching for the end
of the line, the last horse. Then it came, a beautiful stallion,
white as linen bleaching in the sun, and riding it, her head
high and her eyes as proud as a queen's, was his bride. Just as
she had told him to, he waited, crouching low by the road-
way; then, as she came abreast of him, he dashed out from his
post and circled her waist with his arms to swing her lightly
36 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
to earth. Her arms were about his neck and her lips tight-
pressed to his, for in this strange manner he had rescued her
from the shadows of the other world and she could stay with
him for a long life and a happy one.
With those who return to protest deeds of omission and
commission by the living, the commonest complaint of the
dead is that they have been buried in some out-of-the-way
place to which they object. This is a prime reason w r hy so
many victims of murder come back to us, but all such we
shall consider in the next chapter.
Sometimes a man will vow at his death that he will come
back either as a proof of his innocence or in case his wishes
are neglected. For years there was a ghost that walked the
halls of St. Agnes* School for girls in Albany, built where
there had once been a gallows tree. It was said to be one who
had stood in that spot with the rope around his neck and
sworn that he would reappear until his innocence was estab-
lished. I taught in that building one year after the St. Agnes'
School had been moved to new quarters; a great many very
odd things happened but, I'm sorry to say, no ghost appeared.
A new office building is now on the site, and while steel and
concrete do not preclude ghosts, they seldom move from one
settled habitat to another.
Out in Westmoreland a farmer named DeVinney worked
hard to leave his children a heritage of rich and fruitful earth,
but he died long before his children were old enough to take
over the management of the land. Mrs. DeVinney hesitated
for some time before she sold the farm because she could hear
in her mind's ear his deathbed vow that if the land were sold
WHY THEY RETURN
out of the family he would come back to haunt anyone who
bought it. A young couple purchased it anyway, and in a few
months the wife gave birth to a child. As she lay in bed read-
ing one day a short time after her labor, she looked up to dis-
cover Mr. DeVinney sitting at the foot of the bed. He was
very good-natured about it.
"I told my wife I'd come back and haunt whoever bought
this house," he said, and then he grinned at her.
The woman screamed, but before her husband rushed into
the room, Mr. DeVinney had gone. Nor was that the last of
him. About a month later, what with a new baby, they
thought there ought to be a big family party and so all the
kinfolk for miles around came over for Sunday chicken din-
ner. Afterward, when the dishes were done, they gathered on
the front porch to have a picture taken. It was a fine picture;
even the baby was just as clear as could be. And there was
Mr. DeVinney peering out the parlor window; he still looked
good-natured about it.
Protesting ghosts are very often parents who go on trying
to direct their children's lives even after death has parted
them. The kind of parent who would not let his child work
out his own salvation usually has the kind of child that never
will learn anything anyway. There was a miserly couple out
East Schodack way who had pinched and saved until they
were eighty and all the fun had long since gone out of their
lives. He "died of meanness and shortly after his wife died
from eating moldy crackers." But their daughter found that
all the poor-mouth talk she had been hearing for sixty years
was foolishness; to her great amazement she came into a neat
sum or money. No one in his right mind would have said that
jg THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
she painted the town red or spent the money like a drunken
sailor, but according to her parents' standards she went hog-
wild. And they made their objections very evident: they
rapped on the walls at night; they bumped around the place
so that nobody could get any sleep. Every once in a while her
father would appear, floating up and down the stairs, white
whiskers and all. Matters got so bad that she rented the house
and moved away. This apparently confused her parents, for
they kept right on haunting the house, while she went else-
where to spend their money on simple pleasures they would
have considered sheer madness. But they didn't follow her;
they just made it very difficult for her to get any rent out of
the house: tenants didn't stay overlong.
Another ghost had quite a different effect upon his grown
son, with far more serious results. There was a very wealthy
man down near Rye in Westchester County who had violated
all Ten Commandments, with the possible exception of mur-
der, which no one had ever proved. As his last hour ap-
proached, he began to worry about his son and heir, who was
a chip off the old block. If the father had learned anything, it
was that one had to pay bitterly for the kind of life that he had
led, and he wanted the younger man to avoid paying the price
if possible. They had a long talk in which the father's fears
were thoroughly explored. At the last moments he turned to
his son and said, "I shall be watching you every minute of
every day. If you step over the bounds into mortal sin, I shall
return and make you suffer for it."
At first the son behaved very well, for his father's threat was
constantly in his mind, but toward the end of the first year his
financial affairs went from bad to worse. He was in danger of
WHY THEY RETURN 39
losing everything he owned house, investments, his father's
entire estate. There was, so far as he could see, only one way
of escape: embezzlement. There was an opportunity and one
day he took it.
That night he awakened to hear a strange sound; while it
drew closer he tried to identify it. It was the sound of chains
just outside his bedroom door. Chains are very rarely rattled
by our native ghosts, but once in a while the old-country ways
crop up. In terror he yelled for his butler, but when the serv-
ant came the noise ceased. The next night he ordered all the
doors and windows closed and locked. He decided to stay up
all night, waiting. Shortly after midnight he was just begin-
ning to doze when the clanking rattle of the chains came
again, nearer and nearer. He screamed for the servants, but
by the time they arrived he had fainted.
The following night the police were asked to send a detail
to watch the premises, though in his heart he was certain that
no mundane law force could capture the rattler of the chains.
He took one of the largest dogs from his kennel up to his
room with him. Once more he ordered all the doors and
windows locked and he checked the window in his room him-
self. He sat down by the fireplace, the only cheerful sight in
a house pervaded with fear. Suddenly he looked at the dog:
the beast was standing up, staring at the window. The man
felt a little breeze, and then out of the corner of his eye he
saw the curtain flutter. For a long time he did not dare turn
around; then, in a burst of courage he did. Just inside the
window stood his father. When the servants found him he
was unconscious on the floor. The dog was dead.
They took the fellow to the hospital where the doctors told
40 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
him there was nothing wrong with him at all. He was in an
advanced state of hysteria and insisted that his father would
come for him again. On the fourth night, the first after he
got to the hospital, the nurse had no sooner left his room
than the whole floor was electrified by a bloodcurdling scream
coming from his room. Two or three nurses and an intern
rushed in to quiet him before he had the hospital in an up-
roar. But it was quite unnecessary; he lay dead on the floor
beneath the window which was unaccountably open.
I have also heard of a mother whose post-mortem interest
in her daughter's private life led to quite a different ending.
There was a marriage and it had ceased to be a good mar-
riage. Though the couple lived under the same roof, they
went their separate ways. Then the wife's mother was taken
ill and came to live with them. The wife gave up her job to
take care of her mother, with whom she shared the guest
room. After a few weeks the older woman died and was
buried, but her daughter continued to use the guest room.
One night, just as she was drifting off to sleep, she felt her bed
move as if it had been poked. She thought it was her little
dachshund, and without opening her eyes, she said, "Down,
Fritz!" When the bed moved a second time, she sat up to
scold the dog. But it wasn't Fritz at all; instead, beside the
bed was a bright light, in the center of which stood her
mother.
"Get up, Alice," said her mother, and Alice obeyed. Alice
had always obeyed when her mother spoke.
Her mother held out her hand and Alice took it. As she did
so, a chill ran up her arm, completely numbing it. Her
mother led her quietly out of the guest room and down the
WHY THEY RETURN 4 1
hall as far as her husband's bedroom door. There she gave her
daughter a look both penetrating and meaningful, after which
the mother was slowly consumed by the bright light, and then
that too faded.
Alice considered this a command from a better world. So
she opened the door and went in; after that, they used the
guest room for guests.
A constant source of discontent among ghosts is a burial not
to their liking. Those lying in hidden graves or unblessed
ground are universally restless. There is a story from Poland
told here in New York of a woman who suffered, not for her-
self, but for her child. Between two Polish villages ran a road
beside which was a cemetery. There came a time when any-
one driving or walking along the road was likely to be joined
by a strange woman who appeared from nowhere. If her com-
panion was quiet, she went with him as far as the edge of the
next town; if he spoke to her, she vanished immediately. This
became such a common occurrence that nobody thought
about it, one way or another. But there was one man who was
not so stoical as the others. He wanted to know why this
woman couldn't rest in her grave like a respectable person,
minding her own business.
One day as the woman joined him he put his thumb and
index fingers inside his belt, and this, for reasons which I
cannot explain, kept her from disappearing when he spoke
to her. She begged him to release her, but he asked, *'Why do
you not lie in your grave and take your rest? What is it that
keeps you forever wandering between these towns?" Then
she told him of her unbaptized baby, buried in a far corner
of the cemetery, who would not let her rest. If the living
42 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
wished to do her a real kindness, then for the love of God, go
find the little grave with its cross made of tiny white stones
and have the priest bless it so that she could sleep as a dead
woman should. In sorrow and pity the man released her and
went straightway to the priest. Together they found the little
grave overgrown with weeds. They cleared away the brush
and the priest blessed the grave, and then they went their
separate ways. The next time the man came to the village, the
woman appeared for the last time to any living soul, to thank
him for bringing her peace and quiet.
It is a well-known fact that a person who loses a leg in an
accident is liable to feel cold or dampness in that leg if it is
buried too near the surface of the ground. A more acute prob-
lem comes after death.
A neighbor of Michael Welch, when he lived back in Ire-
land, lost his leg in an accident. Between the shock and his
grief over the loss, it wasn't six months before he was a dead
man. A few mornings after the funeral Mr. Welch and his
mother were sitting over their morning cup of tea when the
door opened and the widow came rushing in with a wild tale
about her husband appearing to her the night before. The
Welches put it down to the hard time she'd been having and
the bad way she was in. But the next morning, and the next,
she came back with the same story. There was something
wrong, or her man would never in the wide world keep pester-
ing so. So they told her to speak up sharp and plain to him if
he came again, saying, "In the name of God, what do you
want?" The next night he came again, and what would he be
wanting but his leg? So they went out and dug it up and
buried it with his body. That was all the poor fellow was
WHY THEY RETURN 40
Tti/
after; from that time on, he rested easy and was no more
trouble to anyone.
In a similar story, many people in a Polish village saw the
revenant at different times shuffling through the streets in a
brown coat with red binding and with slippers on his feet.
The priest was finally consulted, and he suggested that if the
man's position were changed he might rest easier. So they dug
up the coffin, to discover that the body was lying on its left
side. They changed him over to his right side, nailed up the
coffin, and reburied it; and the man was never known to walk
again.
This matter of digging up the body to make it more com-
fortable, or at least to change its position, reaches a kind of
ultimate point in a Russian story about a woman who hung
herself. Out of sheer malice she then got into the habit of
going around the neighborhood at night letting all the geese
loose. Some got lost; others were killed. This went on until
her former neighbors decided that steps had to be taken. As
soon as the priest gave permission to dig up the body, the
whole village trooped to the cemetery. They soon had the
coffin open. The woman's chin had been forced down on her
breast by the combined effect of a broken neck and a small
coffin. With the kindest intentions in the world, they chopped
off her head with an axe someone had brought along, set her
head between her knees, nailed up the coffin, and replanted
it. After that the geese stayed in their pens and nobody saw
the woman wandering about any more.
The dead have as great a variety of worries as the living and
are as irrational about them. Of course, sometimes their con-
cern derives from folk beliefs which have been forgotten.
44 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Once, for example, there was an Irish farmer who had spent a
full year mourning the death of his wife; but feeling at last
the call of the living stronger than that of the dead, he asked
a neighbor's daughter to fill the vacant place in his home. The
lass agreed and the banns were read at mass for the first time.
That very Sunday night he returned home from the fireside
of his betrothed and climbed into bed with the feeling that
soon again life would be warm and full, a great change indeed
from the deep emptiness that filled his house.
He fell asleep, only to awaken suddenly, feeling himself
shaken roughly by the shoulder. He sat up in bed. There be-
side him stood his dead wife looking down at him with tears
in her eyes. He spoke her name, begging her to tell him why
she wept and why she had returned. Her complaints came
pouring over him like a cascade of tears. He had treated her
shamefully, leaving her to walk the earth of nights barefooted;
the night air was cold and the ground was cold, and her heart
was colder yet, what with her husband's hard neglect. Never
once had he thought to sprinkle her shoes and stockings with
holy water, nor had he given them to some poor needy woman
among the living in her name and in her memory. Now into
her very house, into their marriage bed, he was to be bringing
a new wife to take her place, and like as not she would be the
one who would be prancing about in the fine shoes and stock-
ings that had been left behind.
Solemnly the husband promised that he would do as his
wife wished, and with his promise she faded from the room.
At the first crowing of the cock, he dressed, took his wife's
shoes and stockings under his arm, and set out upon the high-
way, walking thoughtfully until he spied a bent, old hag
WHY THEY RETURN 45
whose palm stretched forth for alms. They talked a while, and
when he lightheartedly went back to his farm, he had the beg-
garwoman's promise that the shoes and stockings she had re-
ceived in the dead woman's name would be worn to church
for three successive Sundays and each time would be sprinkled
with holy water. And she must have kept their bargain, for
never again did the dead wife return. The young man entered
into his new marriage with a clear conscience and the tacit
blessing of the dead.
An occasional ghost seems intent upon the protection of
certain ones among the living. One girl remembered a dead
aunt who walked home from work with her each night, and in
both Rensselaer and Haverstraw a protective ghost would ap-
pear in the form of a black dog to shepherd honest working
girls at night. A rather touching story of a mother who carried
her share of the burden of raising children after her death also
comes from Rensselaer. The mother of five small children
died and in a short time her husband remarried. Now, occa-
sionally a dead wife will make life unbearable for her succes-
sor, but this woman apparently appreciated the fact that the
children's new stepmother was doing everything in her
power to give them a good home and affectionate care. When,
in due time, the second wife bore two children, there was a
great deal of work for one woman to do and very little to do
it on. She did her best for the whole family, but there were so
many little children, so many faces to wash, so many clothes
to keep clean, so many dishes to be done three times a day
that she never could catch up on all the nagging details of
domestic life. It was at about this time that the first wife began
46 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
to return. They would hear her about midnight down in the
kitchen. In the morning the dead woman's children would be
washed spick-and-span, and on arising even their hair would
be combed, their clothes would be freshly prepared and laid
out for them, making life a little easier for the woman who
was taking her place.
Death has many messengers to warn the living of its ap-
proach: birds fly against the window, dogs howl, there are
rappings on walls, and strange dreams disturb one's rest. But
sometimes the dead themselves return to announce that one
of the living is soon to join them. This comes most often, not
to the one who will die, but to one close to him. A dead
mother will appear to her daughter to say, "I have come for
Papa." And a day or two later he goes with her. Sometimes it
is less specific than that: the very appearance of a ghost in the
form of "a white lady" or "a beautiful lady," who is present
for a little while and then disappears, is enough to convince
those who see her that she comes as a warning of death for
someone.
Usually the people do not know who the mysterious woman
is (it is seldom a man) who comes to warn them, but in Pan-
cake Hollow they knew perfectly well: it was Jemima Wilkin-
son. Pancake Hollow is in the Pang Yang settlement between
Highland and New Paltz, on the ridge above the Hudson
River. Someone once said, "I've often been to Pang Yang, but
I never knew exactly which place was it when I was there,"
and this is a comment I understand. For I was taken there
once by my late friend, Warren G. Sherwood, poet, historian,
gravedigger, and native of Pancake Hollow.
It was an autumn day, cold and windy, and the leaves were
WHY THEY RETURN 47
mostly gone from the trees as we trudged through the woods,
Warren, my eldest son, Peter, who was ten at the time, and I.
Down roads long in disuse, through overgrown paths, we
trudged, Warren talking incessantly about the old days as he
knew them when he was Pete's age. At length we paused in the
woods before a long-forgotten stone wall.
"Well," he said, "this is it."
I looked about me at the second growth, the underbrush,
the blowing leaves and wondered what he meant. Then the
stone shells which had once been small houses and barns be-
gan to come into focus. There were a dozen, maybe more of
them, a little settlement with trees growing inside the roofless
squares. Once this woods had been a village, founded in 1800
by Connecticut families intending to go far west into Yates
County, where Jemima Wilkinson, the Public Universal
Friend, had begun a New Jerusalem near Perm Yan on the
shores of Lake Keuka. Jemima Wilkinson was one of the off-
beat religious leaders who found refuge in New York State in
the nineteenth century. She had once been desperately ill, and
her old soul died and a new consecrated spirit inherited her
body, destined to proclaim, "News of Salvation to all that
would Repent and believe in the Gospel." Out in the west
country among the Finger Lakes, her followers built her a
noble house that still stands and the rich fields made the
colony prosper.
But not all her followers reached that promised land. One
group from Connecticut got no farther than Ulster County,
where they bought lands and called their cluster of stone
houses Penn Yan Settlement, known eventually as Pang Yang.
Jemima was not unmindful of these people nor of their
48 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
descendants. A few hours before one of them was to die, she
would appear on the road, serene, comforting, dressed in gray,
as she is in the two portraits of her which still exist. She came
to claim her own, and they knew her in that place as the Gray
Lady, never speaking her real name, perhaps lest strangers
misunderstand.
Sometimes the dead return to make the first announce-
ment of their passing to those who love them. A girl appears
by her father's bedside, almost at the moment that she died a
hundred miles away. A mother is sleeping soundly when the
bed is shaken until she sits up and turns on the light. There is
her son who works on the railroad as a brakeman, dressed in
his blue-checkered hat and his blue overalls, just as he was
when he went out on his run a few hours before. Very quietly
he tells her that he has slipped and fallen under the train and
been killed. Her first impression is that she has had a bad
dream, but she is certain that this is not so. Early in the morn-
ing they bring home his body and tell her how he had slipped
on the icy ladder as he climbed from one car to the next.
Strange lights are not uncommon warnings of death, but it
is sometimes believed that the light is itself a ghost. A case in
point is the tradition of the Goodell family in which a ghost
light acts much as a banshee might in Ireland, coming when-
ever one of the family, absent or present, is about to die.
Whether or not the Goodells still live north of Little Falls I
do not know, but a generation ago a family named Murphy
were their next-door neighbors, and it is from them that I
have the tale. One evening Isabel Murphy was waiting for her
brother Harry to return from town, and when he drove in the
yard she went to meet him. He was very excited and pointed
WHY THEY RETURN 49
out into the field next to the house where there was a curious
light, looking more like a lighted birthday cake than anything
else, and it was moving. As they watched, it disappeared into
Goodell's woods.
Harry had first seen it when some distance down the road
and had thought it was the single headlight of a car. He had
pulled his horse over to the side and stopped, lest the beast
become frightened and bolt. When the car failed to material-
ize, he drove closer to discover that there was a light in the
field, and that it was not being carried by anyone but was
moving about under its own power.
About nine the next morning Mr. and Mrs. Goodell ar-
rived, and that in itself was unusual, for it is a rare day when
a farmer and his wife go calling in the middle of the morning.
They had heard about the light and wanted all the details.
When Harry told them all he knew they shook their heads as
though he had confirmed all their fears. Then they settled
down to explain why they were so concerned and what they
thought the light meant.
The Goodells, it seemed, had been in that neck of the
woods since before the Revolution and when the Indians at-
tacked Cherry Valley in 1778, twenty miles to the south, to
burn and massacre, one white man had been able to escape to
the north and warn them that there was danger abroad. Thus
they were prepared when the Indians came and there was no
such catastrophe as took place to the south. But ever since,
whenever one of the descendants of the original Goodell fam-
ily was about to die, this same messenger, now in a ghostly,
lighted form came to give them warning.
This explained the concern of the Murphy's neighbors, and
- THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
undoubtedly It also explains why they were not greatly sur-
prised when a sister of the family, who was recovering nicely
from an appendicitis operation in a nearby hospital, died that
afternoon.
There are other stories of lights, but I know an even stran-
ger one about shadows. In good truth, there is no ghost in it,
but ghost or not, this is where it belongs. There were once
three friends from Nyack who went hunting on Hook Moun-
tain. There was a fine, full, harvest moon and they went out
when it was high to make their kill game laws notwithstand-
ing. As they stood in the bright moonlight in an open patch
on the mountainside, they were suddenly struck by a re-
markable fact. Of the three, standing side by side, only two
o them cast shadows. When John realized that there was no
shadow for him, he was terrified, broke up the party, and
went back to camp. The next day he was still unnerved, so
they gave up the plans for hunting and went home.
A few days later they met for an evening at John's house to
play a little pinochle. While they were playing they thought
they heard something in the cellar, and their host went down
to see what the disturbance was. As he stood up he dropped a
card, and when his friends glanced at it, they saw it was the
ace of spades. They looked at each other and both of them
were unable to hide their fright. But soon they heard their
friend's footsteps on the stair, and then they saw his shadow,
cast from the light in the cellar. They supposed he was on the
top step, but just at that moment they heard a heavy thud at
the foot of the stairs, and when they rushed to see what the
matter was, they found John on the cellar floor, quite dead.
WHY THEY RETURN
He had never even put a foot on the first step before death
met him.
It is not always of death that the dead warn; sometimes it is
the danger of death, from which they come to protect the
living. There was the night watchman in a tannery in Calli-
coon of whom they tell that one bitter cold night he just de-
cided it wasn't worth while to make his rounds and that he
would stay in his comfortable chair by the stove. It was then
that a silent, white figure appeared before him. After that, the
fire didn't seem so cozy, and he thought he might as well go
make those rounds. Just as he closed the door behind him, the
52 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
whole building collapsed from the weight of too many hides
that had been piled high in the upper rooms that afternoon.
That's one case, and the headless brakeman is another.
There was once a bummer brakeman named Tolley, who,
like all bummers, never worked long on any one line. When-
ever he decided to change runs, he'd get a ride in the crummy
(caboose) to the place he wanted to go. This one time he was
in the crummy, waiting for a friend of his, who was the regu-
lar brakeman on that run, to come back down from his inspec-
tion of the cars. It was a cold, rainy, spring night, and Tolley
was just thinking that it was a terrible night for his friend to
be climbing along the top of the cars when the train hit a
washout at a curve on the tracks and the first dozen cars were
derailed. Tolley went out to look for the brakeman and
found him with his head cut off, lying between two cars. They
picked up what was left of the body and put it in a baggage
car, but they couldn't find the head anywhere. Tolley went
back up the line to warn any train that might be following
them, and as soon as the track was repaired they went on
again.
Tolley settled down after that. He became a fireman, then
an engineer, but he always tried to avoid the run where the
accident had happened. A while after he became an engineer,
he was assigned to that same run, over his protest. But that
was what they gave him and he had to take it and like it. By
then, trains were traveling a lot faster than they had been
when he was a bummer brakeman, but whenever he came to
the spot where his friend had lost his head, he slowed the
freight down in spite of himself, especially on rainy nights.
WHY THEY RETURN 53
That's the way matters stood for several years. Then one
wet March night as he approached the fatal curve, he sud-
denly saw a red light on the track. He cracked the air and
brought the train to a grinding stop. He told the fireman to
go ahead and investigate, but the fireman came back to report
that there was no light to be seen. Not satisfied, Tolley went
up the track himself to investigate. As he left the cab he saw
the red lantern bobbing above the track. His own white lan-
tern was swinging by his side as he walked. He kept his eyes
on the red light, and as he drew near the spot he saw what ap-
peared to be an old-styled, red-globed lantern, faintly illumi-
nating the lower part of a body clad in the regulation blue
overalls of a brakeman. Running forward, Tolley called out
excitedly, "What's the matter? What's the matter?" Since he
got no reply, he raised his lantern to see why the other fellow
didn't answer him. The reason was easily discovered: the
body ended at the neck. Then there was nothing out there on
the track but the horrified engineer and the howling March
wind and the rain that was beating down in torrents. Tolley
walked on up the track a little farther, because he was sure
that there had been a reason for what he had seen. And there
it was, just around a sharp bend: a boulder that the spring
rains had loosened so that it had rolled onto the track. It was
too large for the crew to remove, and they had to wait for the
wrecking crew to get there. Of course, the fellows on the
wrecking crew howled with laughter when they heard the
story of the headless brakeman, but, considering the state of
his nerves, Tolley exhibited exceptional patience in pointing
out to them that the headlights of the locomotive would never
54 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
have shown him the boulder in time to prevent another
wreck. That was Tolley's last run; the next morning he
handed in his resignation.
Not infrequently, ghosts return to convey specific informa-
tion, and we shall meet a number of such stories in the pages
ahead, but one example will suffice here. It is from Poland and
was told by the same grandmother who heard the ghostly
couple eloping when she was a girl.
It concerned the death of the noblewoman who had been
managing the family estate in the absence of her son, who was
abroad. After the old lady was buried, the servants discovered
that no one could enter her bedroom because the minute they
opened the door flames shot up, forming a wall within the
room. These seemed to do no harm, and as soon as the door
was closed, they ceased to burn. It was, they decided, a busi-
ness with magic in it. There was a servant girl in the house-
hold who had been devoted to the old lady and was afraid of
neither man nor devil. While the other servants gathered
against the far wall opposite the door, the girl opened it and
plunged through the flames. There in the center of the room
sat the dead woman, quietly spinning. She had been waiting
for the lass; she had messages she wanted delivered to her son
as soon as he returned. He was to pay all the debts and wages
which she had left unpaid at the time of her death. She left
word where he would find the records and accounts which she
had hidden away shortly before her brief illness. A day or so
later the son came home, and after he had done as his mother
requested, the flames no longer sprang up in her room and
life went on its natural course.
WHY THEY RETURN 55
These then are the principal reasons for the dead to re-
turn; most ghosts are harmless enough, it must be admitted,
and some of them very well intentioned indeed. Years ago, I
made a statistical count of the moods displayed by American
ghosts. Thirteen percent of them were in a very unpleasant
frame of mind, 29 percent couldn't have been nicer, and 58
percent were completely indifferent to human values of good
or bad. Now that these results are written down they look
rather silly, but no sillier than lots of other people's statistics.
CHAPTER THREE
If you grew up in a reasonably small town or one of those
static sections of a city, you ought to be able to recall the
haunted house that was in your neighborhood. Perhaps it
was a place where the families quickly moved in and moved
out because strange things happened which could not be ex-
plained on rational grounds. Perhaps it was a dilapidated,
57
jjS THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
empty old place, where at night the window blinds banged
against the walls. Certainly the windowpanes were raggedly
broken, there was an overgrowth of weeds and lilac bushes
that isolated it from the other houses, and only the very brave
or very foolhardy went near it at night. I remember well a
house of this sort from my boyhood and how I tried to imag-
ine what goings on had brought it to its strangely frightening
state. It has taken me many years to find the answer, but I
think that now I could hazard a reasonable guess.
First of all, when the dead decide that they have reasons
for going back repeatedly to a particular house (and, of
course, that is what w r e mean by a haunted house), they are
prone to be noisy about it and the variety of their noises is
remarkable. You wouldn't believe all the things that people
hear!
The dead are a heavy-footed lot, for all their incorporeity.
They are upstairs or in the attic, or they are downstairs in the
cellar, or they are on the stairs, going up or down. Not just
once, mind you that could be your imagination but over
and over again they come; not just for one family of occu-
pants, but for successive families until the house has a bad
reputation and nobody will rent it. It always sounds silly to
the outsider who has never heard footsteps in the middle of
the night, but those who have seldom get used to the sound
even when they know it is only one of the dead.
Chains, which English ghosts seem to fancy, are rarely
heard in our country, but the dead make plenty of other
noises: they moan and screech, speak in muffled voices, rap on
tables, roll apples in the cellar (though when you go down to
see, the apples are in their baskets), knock on doors, thump
HAUNTED HOUSES 59
and hammer, play the piano, wind clocks, and now and then
let off a terrific blast, like a rifle shot. Of course, these aren't
the only noises the dead make, but these are the ones that
occupants of really haunted houses may expect.
For some reason, the dead seem to be especially interested
in doors and windows. Doors in their houses are opened by
no earthly hands; they slam shut when there is no wind blow-
ing; they resist all mortal effort to keep them locked or
latched. The dead are a persistent lot and will go to great
lengths to keep things the way they want them. Henry Austin
tells of a house his grandfather lived in on Piercefield Hill
where the door from the kitchen to the woodshed would
never stay shut. A man had been murdered there, years be-
fore, and that fellow wanted the door open, but the Austin
family wanted it closed. It became a struggle to see who would
win. Finally Mr. Austin shut the door and drove a good-sized
spike into it, nailing it to the casing. They figured that would
fix the dead man and they sat down in the kitchen to see what
he would make of a spike. About half an hour later that spike
flew out of the door and was driven right into the opposite
wall. Then the door opened its wonted six inches. That same
house had a window shade which the dead man wanted up
but the family wanted down. At four thirty every afternoon it
went up, whether they liked it or not. Mrs. Austin tried wir-
ing it down once, but it just ripped to pieces and went up.
Finally the Austins had to give up the place, and after subse-
quent tenants had even more trouble, the owner burned the
place down.
Windows can give a lot of trouble. Sometimes it is the shut-
Go THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
ter like the one in the Hardenberg Mansion which will
never stay shut no matter what they do to it because the old
colored woman must keep an eye on the young ones of the
family who played in the yard when she was alive.
Sometimes the whole window falls out. On the state road
near Alder Creek there was, up to twenty years ago, a house
with a front window that they had to keep boarded up be-
cause every time they put a new window in, it fell out as soon
as dark came. Once there had been a roaring good party there
and in the excitement one of the boys had been thrown out
that window and killed. He continued to resent it.
Furniture conies in for attention. There used to be a house
up in Waterford, in back of St. Mary's Church, that was
empty for about twenty-five years, except for an occasional
family that tried to make a go of living in the place. The trou-
ble was that as soon as they got in and arranged the furniture
they would wake up next morning to find it entirely rear-
ranged to suit the dead. This would go on until the family
would decide that they were going to live where they could
have their possessions where they wanted them.
Another annoying habit of ghosts, and a common one too,
is to pull the covers off the living while they sleep. When you
combine this with other manifestations, it can make life un-
bearable. Put yourself in the place of the families that rented
a house near Crescent. No sooner would they doze off at night
than their covers would be flipped right off the bed. If they
were retrieved, it happened again. Next, the front door,
which had been carefully locked, would swing open without
any cause. It wasn't until they found a skeleton by the old
spring near the house that these annoyances stopped. Of
HAUNTED HOUSES 6l
course, finding it isn't enough you have to give it a decent
burial. Then the dead can rest.
At that, they didn't have nearly as hard a time of it as an
Italian family who moved to Port Byron a generation ago.
The only home in town they could afford to live in was a lit-
tle place which the landlord admitted was haunted before
they rented it. Early each evening they would hear noises in
the cellar; then about midnight the shadow of a man would
glide across the wall of the upstairs bedroom. In the morning
the family would awaken to find their blankets outside the
window. During the two or three years they remained in
that house, they would sometimes have to stay up because he
was making so much noise in the cellar. At midnight when
his shadow came, they would plead with him to quiet down,
but it never did any good. Finally, in desperation, they
burned down the house and moved to a little shack on the
muckland.
Strange lights appear in haunted houses to puzzle and ter-
rify those who try to live there and, if the place has been aban-
doned, those who pass by. These appear in various ways and
under differing circumstances. In Port Leyden there is a
house where the old man who died there still walks about the
place at night with a lantern in his hand. The widow of a
railroad man who had been killed in a wreck had to move out
of their house in Clayville because strange lights flickered
through the rooms all night long. After a girl was killed in
the attic room of an Albany house, the people saw lights in
her window, though the house was quite empty. Outside of
Schenectady there is a house where lights have appeared ever
62 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
since the owner died before he could finish telling neighbors
where he had buried his money. The lights always appear in
the bedroom where he died, and af terward they find the front
door ajar, no matter how securely it has been locked.
Waterford, which stands at the terminus of the Barge Canal
and has been the scene of many a strange sight, natural and
supernatural, tells a pathetic story of domestic strife which
provided the town with a light-haunted house long years after
it had fallen into decay. About 1900 there lived in a poor lit-
tle place by the waterfront a young carpenter and his wife
and two children. His poor health he had tuberculosis, as it
turned out made it hard for him to keep a job and encour-
aged his parents, an abnormally mercenary and avaricious
pair, to demand that he sign over to them the title of his
home. They made life miserable for him and undoubtedly
their nagging hastened his death. But shortly before his death
he warned his parents that if they did anything which harmed
his wife and children, or if they made things difficult for them,
he would haunt them as long as they lived.
No sooner was their son dead than his parents began to pull
legal tricks and before the poor widow knew what had hap-
pened, her in-laws had possession of the house and had dis-
possessed her and their grandchildren. Because it needed con-
siderable repair, the new owners couldn't rent it. They locked
the doors and closed the shutters to wait for a tenant. But no
tenant ever came because soon the neighbors began to see
lights playing through the chinks of the shutters, and those
who passed at night could see the lights waver and weave
within. It wasn't long before people tended to walk on the
other side o the street and word went out that the son was
HAUNTED HOUSES 63
back to make good his threat. Little wonder that it fell into
decay until it tumbled to the ground. But even during those
later years, after it had become utterly untenantable, the light
was still to be seen on occasion through the breaks in the walls
and the warped casements. When at last the roof fell in and
the walls collapsed, there were no more lights. But never a
cent did the greedy ones get from their chicanery, and so, I
suppose, their son had his vengeance.
When a place is subject to a wide variety of ghostly pranks,
we say it suffers from poltergeists, the mischievous spirits of
the dead. Now it is the plan and purpose of this book to deal
in folklore, not attested psychic phenomena, but I am going
to deviate from that plan for a few pages to report on two
experiences with poltergeists, one occurring twenty-five years
ago, the other in the winter of 1958.
In 1934 Harper's Magazine published an article called
"Four Months in a Haunted House." It was signed with the
pseudonym of "Harlan Jacobs," but the author was a profes-
sor of mine at Columbia, a very kind but practical, hard-
headed scholar who vouched for the truth of eveiy word of
his article. Knowing him, his word was beyond question.
Furthermore, he is not a believer in the supernatural in gen-
eral, nor in ghosts in particular.
One summer in the igso's Mr. and Mrs. "Jacobs" rented an
isolated cottage on Cape Cod so they could do a job of writing
they had mapped out. In view of what happened, it is inter-
esting to note that although the house was nine years old it
had never been occupied. The first night Mrs. "Jacobs" heard
tapping on the brick walk outside her window, as though
64 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
made by a man with a cane. The next night they both heard
it. When they went outside with a flashlight, it stopped, nor
was man or beast to be seen and there was no place anything
could hide.
More than fifty times during the ensuing weeks they heard
the same sound, always at night, usually about ten o'clock but
not every night. When Mr. "Jacobs" hid outside, it did not
come; when he waited just inside the door, the sound ceased
the moment he opened it. And there were other inexplicable
sounds. As he got into bed and turned off the light, he would
hear a box of matches fall, a newspaper blow across the floor,
a rolling pin bang on the floor and roll to the wall. But each
rime when he turned on the light, nothing was there.
They were pestered by a "universal click" which seemed to
come at all hours of the day and night, sounding like the
clicker a lecturer uses when calling for a new slide. To make
sure it was not insects, they went over the house almost board
for board. No insects. Then there were footfalls, upstairs and
down, whichever place the "Jacobses" were not currently oc-
cupying.
One night Mr. "Jacobs" went into a garage attached to the
house, which he used as a place to store his reference books.
He was attacked by a vast swarm of moths, but when he re-
ported this to his wife and she returned with him to see for
herself, there was not a sign of one single moth. This room
had a concrete floor, metal roof, and, except for the door to
the house, had been shut tight all summer. Parenthetically,
one might point out that in Cornwall, England, in Russia,
and among certain American Indian tribes it is believed that
souls frequently return as moths or butterflies.
HAUNTED HOUSES
Then there was the "grand piano smash," a terrific noise
from the garage. Inspection showed nothing amiss.
A lawyer friend, his wife, and daughter came to visit. The
lawyer was told about all this and was scornful; the wife and
daughter were told nothing. But they all heard these sounds,
although during their visit the "Jacobses" did not.
There was no explanation for ail this, not even a local
legend. All we have is a meticulous report from a man we can
believe.
At least the "Jacobses" were permitted to suffer their in-
dignities in private, but the Herrmann family of Seaford,
66 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Long Island, had to share theirs with the world. In the latter
part of February, 1958, the Herrmanns' difficulties were in
every paper and on every radio and television station in the
country day after day, for theirs was the "House of Flying
Objects."
Mr, James M. Herrmann, an Air France employee, his wife,
his thirteen-year-old daughter, and twelve-year-old son live
in a modern housing development thirty-five miles from New
York City. One afternoon in February, 1958, several bottles
containing various types of liquid in various rooms of the
house began to pop off their screw caps and jump about,
among these a bottle of holy water, others of shampoo, medi-
cine, liquid starch in the kitchen, and bleaching fluid in the
cellar. Three days later, at approximately the same time in
the afternoon, half a dozen other bottles in different rooms
of the house blew off their tops and fell to the floor. This hap-
pened time and again in the days to follow.
On Sunday of the next week Mr. Herrmann was talking to
his son, who was brushing his teeth, when a bottle of medi-
cine moved a foot and a half in a southerly direction along a
sink top and smashed into the sink. Then it happened to a
second bottle going in a westerly direction.
They called in the police and while the patrolman ques-
tioned the family, more bottles popped. Detective Joseph
Tozzi was assigned to the case and you couldn't have chosen
a man less sympathetic to explanations which suggested the
supernatural. Bottles kept popping and spilling. On the fif-
teenth of February the bottle of holy water spilled for the
fourth time; when Mr. Herrmann picked it up it was warm to
HAUNTED HOUSES 67
his touch, though this was the only time any of the bottles
were warm.
Letters poured in on the family from all over the country,
for by this time the press services, radio, and television were
having a heyday. The sincere, the troubled, the crackpots, and
the publicity seekers deluged the Herrmanns with advice.
One day a porcelain figure took off from a table, flew
twelve feet, and fell against the wall this while Detective
Tozzi was in the house. They checked every possible scien-
tific explanation that was suggested. An ink bottle, a sugar
bowl, another porcelain statue sailed through the air all in
one evening; shortly thereafter the Herrmanns went to the
house of a relative for a few days. Nothing happened. They
returned and two days later the sugar bowl misbehaved again;
this time it broke. Two days later an eighteen-inch statue of
the Virgin sailed twelve feet from a dresser top to hit a mirror
on the opposite wall, denting the frame but breaking neither
the glass nor statue. When the radio fell off its table and slid
fifteen feet across the floor and a bookcase fell over on its face,
the peak of the disturbance was reached. It is interesting, I
think, that as time went on more and more people suggested
Poltergeisterei as the cause. There were a great range of other
explanations, all of them disproved by hard-headed and very
alert Detective Tozzi.
I have not recounted the stories of the "Jacobses" and the
Herrmanns because I wish to claim that either house was
haunted or that poltergeists were responsible. Rather, the
stories serve to show the kind of experience people in our
time occasionally do go through. If happenings of this sort
take place in a climate of opinion where ghost lore is gen-
68 THINGS THAT CO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
erally accepted, then there is no other explanation possible
except, of course, witchcraft. Personally I have no explana-
tion for either of these cases, but I think even the most realis-
tically minded can accept them at face value.
In the folklore about poltergeists there is usually an ex-
planation for their presence, unlike the examples you have
just read. For example, there was a house in Schenectady
which was once a dive. Unfortunately some of the girls were
un-co-operative and ended up buried in quickly dug graves
in the cellar. One night there was a brawl and before dawn
came they had to bury the pianist beside the girls. After this
gang cleared out, a respectable, hard-working laborer and
his family took the place and they had a rough time of it. The
mother would make the beds and when she turned to look
back in the room as she was leaving, they would be completely
mussed up again. She would clean up her kitchen and when
she re-entered the room, there would be utter disorder, far
worse than what she had just straightened out. The family
would sit down to a meal and a cold breeze would send the
shivers through each of them, yet no windows or doors were
open. And each night the family would hear a piano playing
in the house, although neither they nor any neighbors owned
such an instrument. The family moved out after a little while,
and when new owners took over the property, the bones were
found in the cellar. Once they were taken out and buried, the
difficulties ceased, and today the place is happily occupied.
The breeze which this family experienced is a fairly com-
mon phenomenon. People sometimes describe it as a "strange
feeling," or an "unseen presence." People climbing the stairs
feel one of these presences as it passes, or a child crawling up,
HAUNTED HOUSES 69
one step at a time, is suddenly given a shove by an unseen
hand and sent sprawling to the bottom. Sometimes it is a
more specific matter: a hand is felt to drop on the shoulder of
one who sits alone by the fire, or someone lying in bed feels a
presence sit down beside him. There is no sound, there is
nothing to see, but something is there and you know it is
there.
The bloodstain that cannot be scrubbed out is something
else again. Any man with eyes can see it and anyone who
wishes to use a good supply of elbow grease can verify the
fact. There is a house in the Helderberg Mountains where a
man fell down his cellar stairs, cracking his head open and
breaking his neck in one careless movement. Some people
said the man was to be seen sometimes coming back with a
tool kit to fix the step that caused his death although a
woman who grew up in the place says she never saw him. But
the spot of blood on the step would not come out; no mattei
how much she scrubbed or painted, it always came to the sur-
face. The same thing is true of the house in Constableville
where Bill Hinton cut his thoat, and Lord knows how many
other places in our parts.
All in all, living in a haunted house can be a nerve-racking
experience, what with the noise, the lights, the monkey busi-
ness with doors and windows, the pulling off of blankets, the
moving of furniture, the spooky feelings, and the blood spots
that will not be cleansed. Usually there is nothing much any-
one can do about it. There are a few rituals that have been
tried through the years and that have proved effective. Gen-
eral repairs and the putting in of new doorsills will sometimes
fO THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
do the trick. Some people will tell you that all you really need
to do is move the house to a new foundation.
An elderly grandfather sent me word that he really knows
how to break the spell of a haunted house; he learned long
ago in Germany. First of all you need a certain gift for seeing
the returning dead, a gift, fortunately, which he possesses.
Then you must stay in the place which is haunted all night
by yourself. When you hear or see the ghost, you cross your-
self and say, "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost, who are you and what are you doing here?" Then the
ghost will tell you if there is money buried there and where it
is. Sometimes he will escort you to the very spot. If he has
been murdered and buried there, he will show you the place
and then you have to dig up the bones and give them proper
burial. Buried money, according to this gentleman, need not
be dug up immediately; so long as he has told someone where
it is, the ghost who guards it can rest in peace. If you speak to
a good ghost, it won't bother you at all, but if you have the
misfortune to meet an evil one, a "feeling comes over you that
is not pleasant." A bad ghost, according to this authority,
will seldom show himself, and if he does, he is usually head-
less.
There are other methods for eliminating ghosts from a
house. The use of holy water, for example, is very common.
But the one sure method, which I have seldom heard to fail,
is to burn the house down. I know of only one instance in
which fire failed to eliminate a ghost. That was up near Sodus
where a woman's baby cried and cried one night when there
was a bad thunder and lightning storm. Finally the crying
drove the mother a little mad, and she stabbed the child to
HAUNTED HOUSES 7 1
death. After that, whenever there was a thunder and lightning
storm you could hear that baby cry, but during one such night
the house was struck, and when the fire had finished with it,
there was nothing left standing but the fireplace before which
the distracted mother had rocked her child the night she had
killed it. But even after that, you could still hear the baby's
cry on stormy nights, and it was not until the chimney and
fireplace were dismantled that you could pass by during a
storm and not have the hair rise up along your neck when the
shrill, plaintive wail of that baby's ghost pierced the air.
Along with all these other manifestations, the dead occa-
sionally put in an appearance in the houses they haunt. Some-
times this tendency to make themselves visually evident seems
no more than the carrying on a lifelong habit; again there is
an impish desire for attention; and, naturally, there are those
who come back with a set purpose in mind, usually a desire
to get some information across the barrier to the living, who,
it must be admitted, can be fairly obtuse.
One could name hundreds of examples of those who ap-
pear to haunt houses as a matter of habit. Almost any town
you might care to name will have at least one such ghost, like
the woman in Sag Harbor who still can be seen pacing the
widow's walk above her home, waiting for her husband's ship
to return from the seas. On Shelter Island there is a house
where a whole family has gotten the habit of coming back, a
family that has owned their land since Charles II's time. The
two old ladies who have lived in the house in recent years are
very conscious of their ancestors' presence, and on the whole
pleased by it. Outsiders are startled sometimes. One day the
* 2 THINGS THAT CO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
maid asked the older sister why she went down to the base-
ment every night to get drinking water when the maid was
only too glad to do it for her.
"That isn't I, child, that's my Great-Aunt Sarah."
And there was the time when a niece came to visit with
a young doctor she thought it likely she would marry, a very
scientific young man who didn't believe in any superstitious
nonsense. One morning he was shaving thoughtfully, me-
thodicallyalmost, one would say, scientifically. Peering in-
tently into the mirror he was suddenly jolted by the sight of
another face beside his own. Being a bachelor and used to
privacy with his razor, this was a shock. He whirled about,
but he had been mistaken; there was no old lady watching
him after all. A little more lather, a few more careful strokes,
and there was the face again; another fruitless whirling about.
It was very annoying; indeed, it was almost disturbing. When
he went downstairs he complained about the incident to his
hostess. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he
regretted having said anything so absurd. But her answer was,
in its own way, reassuring or would have been to any but a
scientific mind.
"Oh, yes/' she said, "they come around. We don't have
men here very often any more. They're probably pleased."
Late in the night on holidays and family birthdays, the lo-
cal people say, the two old ladies stand by the head of the
stairs and listen to their long-dead relatives holding their
parties on the first floor. The silver clatters, the glasses tinkle,
and the laughter comes up through the stairwell. No one in
that house fears death, for to die means merely that one joins
the family at their party in the dining room.
HAUNTED HOUSES 75
The dead are a persistent lot, and once they get the idea
they want the living to learn some fact or do something for
them, they keep at it until they are satisfied; if it is necessary
to appear repeatedly until they finally get the service they re-
quire, why they appear. There is a story of a woman in a lit-
tle town over in Vermont which is typical. From an empty
house weird noises and the shrill cries of a woman were heard
repeatedly. Finally half a dozen fellows from the village de-
cided that the only thing to do was to spend the night there
and see what they could see. Well, they hung around for hours
and just about the time they made up their minds to go on
home and get some sleep, they were aware that a woman was
in the room, cuddling a baby in her arms. They asked her who
she was and what she wanted. She had only one reply to all
their questions, and that she repeated, parrotlike:
"He killed me and killed the baby and buried us undei
the porch."
"He killed me and killed the baby and buried us under
the porch."
Then she was gone. Next morning they found what she
meant, and after they took the bones to the cemetery, there
wasn't any more trouble.
Over and over again the dead return to insure themselves
a decent burial in consecrated ground; they object vehe-
mently to being left around in out-of-the-way places. Another
thing that worries them is money that they have cached away
before they left and that they didn't get around to telling
anyone about. If it's in a house they'll stay around it until it
is found.
Take that furnished house in South Troy the landlord
74 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
could never keep rented because every tenant who took it
said it was too scary to live in. There was a man, a tall, thin
man with whiskers, who came clumping down from the attic
at midnight and went to the parlor where he tapped on the
oil paintings with his cane, turned about, and went slowly up-
stairs again to to disappear until the next night. You couldn't
stop him. You could see him, but you couldn't feel him; sev-
eral people had tried. That's what they all said happened;
most of them told Sam Barry about it. Sam ran the saloon
at Jefferson and First Streets, a few doors away.
Finally, after this had happened five or six times, the land-
lord hired Sam and five other fellows, at a hundred dollars
apiece, to go there and spend the night so as to clear up the
matter. The boys sat around and then played some poker.
Right on the dot of midnight they heard him coming down
the stairs. He did just what the tenants had said he did:
walked into the parlor, went to each picture in turn, tapped
it with his cane, turned on his heel, and went upstairs again.
The boys said afterward that the hair on their heads just stood
right up on end. They tried to get their hands on him, but
they had no more success than the others. As soon as he had
gone back, they locked up and went over to the landlord's
house to tell him what they had seen.
They talked the matter over every which way. Finally one
of the men asked where the landlord had bought the paint-
ings, for they seemed to be what interested the old man. They
had come with the house, along with all the furnishings,
which had been bought from the estate of an old fellow of
considerable means who had built the house and lived there
for years. Maybe they'd better go take a good look at those
HAUNTED HOUSES 75
pictures. Just before dawn they all went back again, the land-
lord with them. And behind those oil paintings, inside the
frames, and under the wallpaper behind the pictures they
found securities and bills worth fifteen thousand dollars. That
day they had a priest come in and bless the house, and from
then on the old man was content. The living had finally
caught on to what he had been trying so clearly to tell them.
There are also ghosts who go to the trouble of re-creating
the lost and forgotten past. Not only does one of the dead re-
turn to the land of the living but an entire scene, a total mo-
ment or way of life is revitalized. And it is this the living see.
Out in Steuben County, for example, a chap took his girl
home one evening and started walking to his house. After he
had passed several farmhouses he approached a desolate,
empty, run-down place generally believed to be haunted. He
was grinning to himself about this as he came whistling along.
Then he heard music and laughter. The closer he came to the
house the louder were the sounds. Then in the moonlight he
saw that the old place looked different from the way he had re-
membered it: the grass was mowed; the shutters seemed to be
straight on their hinges rather than hanging askew; it seemed,
in the moonlight, as though the place had a coat of paint on
it. When he noticed the light in the windows he decided to
go up and take a look to see what was going on there, anyway.
Inside, a party was in progress; people were playing cards and
dancing. As he watched through the window he was terrified
by the high, piercing, agonized scream of a woman, and no
sooner had the sound cut the air than the lights went out and
he was staring through the broken window of the old de-
76 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
serted house he knew. Not wanting to sound like a fool, he
said nothing of his experience for several days to anyone, but
a few nights later when he went to visit his girl again he told
her what he had seen. She seemed not at all surprised, for the
night he told her about was the anniversary of a party which
had taken place in that house many years ago, a party which
had ended in a woman's murder. Each year, at the hour and
instant of the tragedy, they all came back to the house and the
violence was re-enacted.
There is a story told, round about Albany and Troy (and
many other places across the country), which is a kind of folk
classic, ranking with stories of the ghostly hitchhiker which
we shall meet later on* Of several versions, I like it best the
way Sunna Cooper heard it and told it to me.
Fifty years or more ago a man and his wife were traveling
by carriage from somewhere in New England to Troy. They
had passed Eagle Bridge and Johnsonville before they real-
ized that it was getting much too dark for them ever to reach
Troy that night. Just before they reached Spiegletown they
saw a light burning in a little house about three hundred
yards off the main road and, not knowing how near they were
to the village, decided to see if they could get lodgings there
for the night. The man pulled the horse onto the little side
road and climbed the hill to the house. He knocked at the
door. An elderly man and his wife, both of them obviously
ready for bed, came to the door. They were a gentle, kindly
couple, and while they never took paying guests, they would
be delighted to have the travelers spend the night with them.
So the horse was put in the barn while inside the house the
HAUNTED HOUSES 77
hostess brewed up a pot of tea and brought out some home-
made bread and fresh butter. The four of them chatted a
while before the travelers were taken to their room. It was
then that the man tried to pay for their lodgings, because, he
said, they wished to be on their way early in the morning and
their hosts might not be awake. But the offer was vigorously
refused; they were not in the habit of taking in paying guests
and to pursue the matter would only embarrass them. Leav-
ing it at that, all four went upstairs to bed.
The travelers slept soundly, awakening shortly after sunup.
They dressed quietly and with care, and lest they awaken the
people who had been so kind to them the night before, they
stole downstairs. On a table by the door they placed a fifty-
cent piece, which, fifty years ago, was a fair price for their
lodgings. They got the horse out of the barn, harnessed it,
and drove on to Spiegletown where they had some breakfast.
It was at breakfast that they received their first shock. They
were talking to the man who ran the little restaurant where
they ate and mentioned the very warmhearted reception they
had been given the night before. Just where was this house,
he wanted to know. They told him in great detail and watched
the strange look which came over his face as they did so.
"But, my good friends, I know the house you mean. A fam-
ily named Brownley lived there for years."
"That's right. That's the name they gave us."
"But but that can't be. Both Mr. and Mrs. Brownley
died in the flames three years ago when that house burned to
the ground."
Then there was a great argument, while each side doubted
the other's sanity. Finally there seemed to be only one way to
^8 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
settle it. The three of them piled into the carriage and drove
back the two or three miles to the place where the couple had
turned off the road. The horse climbed the little hill, up the
three hundred yards to the same spot where they had gone
the night before. But there was, in good truth, no house.
There was only the gutted cellar, overgrown with weeds and
filled with the burned debris. They stood looking at it for a
few minutes when all of a sudden the woman screamed and
fainted. There in the rubble was a charred and partially
burned hall table with a fifty-cent piece on it.
Some people have the knack of getting along with the dead,
others go all to pieces. The most successful ones, it seems to
me, are blessed with the gifts of courage and serenity. They
take the restless dead in the same stride that they take the
living. In the stories families bring with them from Italy it is
courage which is stressed, sometimes to the great advantage of
the living.
Take for example the Damino family, who lived for genera-
tions in Castiglione, Italy, before they came to this country.
The family was made up of a thriving brood of youngsters, a
hard-working, gentle-hearted father, and a mother who was as
wise as she was kind and laughter-loving. They moved one
time into a big sprawling house which the neighbors assured
them was haunted, and they soon believed it. They would
come downstairs in the morning and find all the dishes laid
out on the floor. At other times it would be the furniture
huddled into a corner. Mamma would laugh and say it must
have been an earthquake. Then one night they were awak-
ened by the crying of their five-month-old baby, whom they
HAUNTED HOUSES 79
found lying in the middle of the floor, and no one knew how
he could have gotten there. This was too much for Mr. Da-
mino: "Let's move. Too many strange things happen in this
house." But his wife merely laughed and felt the baby all over
to be sure it was unharmed. "No," she said, "we have been
lucky in this house. You have prospered and the children keep
well. These ghosts will not harm us, if we are not afraid of
them, and I am not afraid. We shall stay." And they did stay,
with the result that soon the dead left them to their own de-
vices.
Teresa Rossomondo was a woman cut from the same cloth
as Mrs. Damino. She was practical and fearless, and blessed
with a clear conscience. Twice the dead came to her, but she
faced them as imperturbably as she did the living. The first
time it was old Sabato Malona who, until he was murdered,
had owned the house where the Rossomondos lived in Italy.
Everyone said that he was drifting about the house, waiting
for his time to be fulfilled, but Teresa knew that the old man
had no quarrel with her or hers, so she was not afraid. One
night, after a long, laborious day in the fields and in the
house, she went to bed early. In her early sleep she thought
she heard scuffling and dragging footsteps in the attic, but
when someone tugged at her feet she sat up with no sleep in
her. There was the old man, spry and mean-faced as ever. The
voice was high and cracked that asked, "Teresina, what are
you doing in my bed?" Before she could answer him suitably
the chimes of midnight rang from the church tower and the
old man was gone, and he never came again. (Our American
ghosts usually ignore this curfew but not Italian ones,) An-
other time when she had gone to pick fruit in the orchard of
8o THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
the dead Stanislaura, who had been kind to her when she was
a child, he came and touched her on the shoulder. They spoke
of the weather and friends, of the harvest and the times. As
they stood there she stooped over to place her basket on the
ground in order to rest her tired arms, meaning to ask him
what brought him back to the old place. When she stood up
he was gone, but afterward her only regret was that he never
came back; he had been a good friend and it was nice to see
him again.
Good fortune came to another Italian woman because she
had what Chaucer called "gentil herte." She was married to
a man who had grown tired of her. He didn't want to harm
her, and he wasn't yearning after anyone else, but he was
just tired of die wife that he had. One day he suggested that
they move to a little house in the woods, so she gathered up
some food and clothes and in a short time was ready to join
him. They tried living away from those they knew for a spell,
but he was still bored. He decided to leave her. It was very
simple: he told her he was going away for a time. Since she
was well brought up and an obedient wife she didn't question
his going but set herself to getting along in the house alone.
Soon she heard people crying upstairs in an unused part of
the house. She went to the bedroom on the second floor where
she found a coffin, a corpse, and a group of mourners, weeping
and moaning. Her first act was to kneel and pray for the dead
man's soul, and then, out of the sympathy in her heart, she
wept. Thinking the others would be hungry, she arose from
her knees and went downstairs to prepare food for them all.
She piled the food on a great tray and trudged up with it to
find, when she got back in the room, that corpse and mourners
HAUNTED HOUSES 8l
alike had disappeared. The coffin was there, however, filled
high with gold. She understood then what had happened. The
dead man had needed just one living person to mourn his
passing, and when she had prayed and wept she had fulfilled
that need. All the people had been wraiths, but the gold was
hard and real between her fingers. A day later her husband
came that way to see how she was making out. She waved to
him to come out of the woods, and when he saw what had
come to her he saw her, as it were, in a fresh light. They tell
me that it was some time before he tired of her again.
One of my favorite historic houses in this country is Forty
Acres in Hadley, Massachusetts. The Porter-Phelps-Hunting-
ton family that has lived there for two hundred years has got-
ten along with their restless ancestress, Elizabeth Porter
Phelps, by the simple device of accepting her and her comings
and goings and teaching their children to do the same. First
a word about the house: it is long and rambling and filled
with all the things that other families threw away, generations
ago. Never very rich, never very poor, the family had good
taste but dwelt in comfort rather than elegance. The house
conveys a quality of serenity which one suspects may have
been its abiding spirit.
My good friend Dr. James Huntington retired some years
ago from practicing medicine to devote himself to preserving
and interpreting this house he loves. Elizabeth Phelps is his
great-great-grandmother and he loves her too. He has known
her all his life, for when he was a boy, on summer nights he
would see the little old lady dressed in outdated clothes lean-
ing over his bed. His brothers also saw her on many occa-
sions. The older members of the family took these appear-
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
ances as a matter of course. "Don't mind that," they would
say. "That's only Elizabeth. We've all seen her."
The tradition is that Mrs. Phelps was devoted to her son
Charles and wanted him to bring his family to the old house
to live. It was for this that she had the third-floor attic added.
Charles never came and the attic was never finished, but in
the dark of the night she goes up to see how it's coming along
and to tuck in any young ones who may be sleeping there.
There are no longer children in the house, but Elizabeth
is still there. Sometimes an unsuspecting guest turns around
to see what might be the source of the rustling sound behind
HAUNTED HOUSES 83
him. Elizabeth wants to know who's there, that's all. Or a
small shadow may fall across the floor and a cool breeze pass
through the room at the same time. The good doctor always
knows what that means. Or coming down the stairs one senses
her presence, waiting for the living to pass. Gentle, inquisi-
tive, friendly, she is easy to get along with, but the members
of the family have been making it easy for her ever since
the end of the Civil War when she first returned, a half cen-
tury after her death.
I recommend that you go to Hadley, see Forty Acres, see
Dr. Huntington, and, if you're lucky, see Elizabeth. Even if
you miss her, you will have seen one of our most charming
haunted houses.
CHAPTER FOUR
Those who die violently are the most likely to be foot-loose
after death those drowned at sea, killed in railroad, auto-
mobile, and industrial accidents, killed in battle, and most
especially those who are murdered or commit suicide. There
is a fatalistic logic which assumes that to each of us there is
an allotted span and that one whose thread is cut short before
85
86 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
his predestined time may spend it wandering the earth. Be-
lief that those who have been murdered and those who die of
their own hand come back is probably as old as our civiliza-
tion. In earlier times the ghost of one murdered, like Ham-
let's father, stayed on the scene until his death had been
avenged. Into the grave of the suicide was pounded an oaken
stake to keep the spirit in its place.
Murder victims are especially prone to haunt their old
stamping grounds and pack peddlers were always likely can-
didates, so that our part of the country has many an isolated
farmhouse or woods road with its peddler ghost. The peddler
was a man alone, with little contact with people who knew
him intimately. His customers were often many miles apart,
his itinerary was usually known only to himself, he was de-
fenseless against any numbers, and his pack of desirable arti-
cles and the money he had to carry on his person supplied
motives. His custom of asking for a place to sleep wherever
he found himself must frequently have led him to sleep in
the homes of the least desirable of our citizenry. After he had
been stabbed quietly in his sleep (often his bloodstains re-
fused to come off the floor), he was dragged down to the cel-
lar and buried in the dirt floor; or instead he was thrown
down an abandoned well, or laid to an uneasy rest behind
the barn where the woodpile could be stacked over his body.
Then the trouble began, for these peddlers were rugged souls
who might be murdered in their sleep, but that didn't mean
there was the end of it. They came back as strange lights,
as the makers of weird sounds, as the industrious haunters
of houses, as wraiths, and in their natural persons. Sometimes
they returned regularly, sometimes at annual intervals, some-
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH 87
times now and then, but they kept coming until their bones
were found. Sometimes beside the bones were a few pieces
of rusted tinware which their murderers had thought it un-
wise to keep above ground.
Of course, peddlers aren't the only murder victims to come
back. Two or three others will do for now.
One which interests me, because I am a great admirer of
the house in which the murder took place, is the ghost who
walks along the terrace of the beautiful old colonial mansion
known as Cherry Hill, far out on South Pearl Street in Al-
bany.
I had heard as a boy that Cherry Hill was haunted but had
forgotten about it until I had a report from one of my friends
that neighborhood people had been seeing the murdered man
or the murderer again; some said it was one of the Van Rens-
selaers. When you really want the facts of Albany's past you
ask the booksellers. Frank Scopes just snorted when I asked
for a verification of my friend's report. Of course, he didn't
want to be dogmatic about it, but his recollection was that
the murder took place on May 7, 1827, that the man who
was killed was young Abraham Van Rensselaer's manager, a
fellow named John Whipple, and that the murderer was Mrs.
Whipple's lover, a good-for-nothing named Jesse Strang. And
somewhere, said Mr. Scopes, he'd seen a pamphlet about the
case; if he ever ran across it, he'd let me know. The next time
I walked down Maiden Lane he crooked his finger at me,
and there was the pamphlet, located under Lord knows how
high a mountain of books.
As murders go, it wasn't a very interesting one and un-
doubtedly much of its contemporary interest derived from
88 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
both of the principals being employees of the Van Rens-
selacr family. John Whipple was, as Frank Scopes said (I have
yet to catch him in a factual error), the manager of young
Van Rensselaer's estate at Cherry Hill. This was a position
of considerable responsibility because Abraham Van Rens-
selaer was barely of age, his father having died but a year or
so before the murder. There had come to work around the
place but recently this chap named Jesse Strang, who soon
developed a friendship for Mrs. Whipple. They spent a tru-
ant weekend together and a few days later he bought a re-
volver. On the night of May 7 he learned that his mistress's
husband was in a back room on the second floor of the main
house, going over accounts with his employer. Strang climbed
up on a roof outside the window and shot through the glass,
killing Whipple instantly. He was quickly taken, and the
trial, a three-day wonder, sent him to the gallows and Mrs.
Whipple to the penitentiary. When they hanged him, spec-
tators drove from as far away as Cooperstown to see the spec-
tacle.
But now comes the problem: who is the ghost? Assuming,
and I think it is a safe assumption, that it is one of the princi-
pals, which one? Is it Strang, pacing up and down, as he may
have done before he collected the courage to shoot his mis-
tress's husband? Is he waiting for some rendezvous with her?
It could be, of course, but it is unlikely, for almost never does
the murderer posthumously return to the scene of the crime;
almost invariably it is the victim who comes back. (There
is one exception: when the murder is re-enacted and both
murderer and murdered reappear.) So, the chances are that it
is Whipple, waiting for something, maybe for Strang, maybe
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH 89
for his wife maybe he is still on the job keeping a weather
eye on Cherry Hill, a stately island out of the past surrounded
by the rushing tide of the industrial present.
The Hudson River has three tributaries named for some
murderer. There is the Moordenerskill (Dutch for Murderer's
Creek) in Rensselaer County, the Moodna Kill (apparently
another form of the same) just south of Newburgh, and Mur-
derer's Creek in Greene County. The ghost of the woman
whose death gave the Greene County stream its name has
been known to return. On one occasion the Woman in
White climbed right up on a wagon and took a ride with
the poor terror-stricken driver. Her name, according to an-
other source, was Mary Johnson, and she had been murdered
by a George Eliot in 1841. They buried her under the bridge
and for years she appeared there and on occasion even kept
good Episcopalians from crossing the bridge on their way to
church in the Upper Village.
In the same stream there is an island named for Sally Ham-
ilton who met violent death farther downstream, but when
the tide came in her body was floated up to the island and
discovered there. Sam Frisbee saw her more than once and
told Clarice Weeks about it.
"When I came back home there was some trouble, so I
went to this boardinghouse to live. The house was halfway
down the hill into the Brick Row. ... A man named Dave
Bush slept with me in the southeast room upstairs that cor-
ner room."
"How long ago was this?" Clarice wanted to know.
"Thirty-five years ago, mebbe more. Well, we had heard
go THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
about people seeing things in this house before, but as I say,
I've never been afraid o'f anything much less ghosts.
"This one night it was rather cool and I woke up about
midnight and found I had no covers.
" 'Dave, give me some covers/
" 'No, I won't/ he answered. 1 won't because I can't, I
ain't got any/
"So I got up and lit one of those big old kerosene lamps.
I looked all around and there, in front of the door, rolled
up and pushed right against the closed door, was our blan-
kets. I brought the covers back to bed but I lay there won-
derin' who could have done it and gotten out of the room.
Then, for a few nights nothing happened.
"One night we came back from downstreet I guess it was
the first time they had movies in Jerry Brooks' Opery House.
About midnight Dave poked me. 'S-S-Sam! S-S-SamI There
it is! LookP
" 'You're dreaming, Dave. Wake up/
" Tm not dreaming. I'm awake. Look against the door/
"Sure enough, there she was, a beautiful female figure.
Looked at first as if she might have a wedding dress on. I
couldn't see her face clear, because she was sort of pale and
faint right there in front of our closed door. But it wasn't
a wedding dress, I was sure of that later on.
"I wasn't afraid, so I got out of bed and walked across the
room to investigate. All the while I kept my eye on her.
Then I grabbed for her with both hands. There was nothin'
there!
"I thought that someone might be playing a joke on us.
Then I thought maybe it was the reflection of lights in Hud-
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH Q 1
son on the windows or something like that. But when I got
back in bed she was still gone. Let me tell you, it was a funny
feeling. I wasn't scared; I've never been scared, but it did give
me a funny feeling."
Clarice suggested it might have been the bride who dis-
appeared from that house when her bridegroom was killed a
few hours after their wedding. But Sam was sure it wasn't the
bride.
"There used to be a beautiful girl from downstreet named
Sally Hamilton that's who it was. She used to visit at that
house where I was. I knew her, such a beautiful girl! She
used to wear a lot of jewelry pins, rings, necklaces, and all
that. She used to walk up the lower road to Herr's Camp and
over a short cut to the Spoorenburg Road that we called Korst
Veloren Road that's Low Dutch, you know. Some fellow
murdered her and her body floated up Murderer's Creek to
a little island, but there wasn't any jewelry on her body when
they found her. Some folks said a deserter from the army did
it. No one knows. No one knows. But that's what I saw, any-
way." m
The dead choose strange ways to make themselves mani-
fest, and this is true in Italy as elsewhere. To understand
this next tale it is necessary to know about a belief held in
the section of northern Italy around Barre that if one is mur-
dered without cause, his spirit leaves his body to enter the
nearest urn of water. The first person to drink from the urn
swallows the spirit. This sometimes causes him to turn into
a snake or to do strange and unaccountable deeds. The young
girl Angelica did not turn into a snake after the murder of
g2 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Pietro took place a short distance from her home, but she
did undergo a definite change. She had been a normal, wil-
lowy girl who enjoyed the life of the village and took little
thought of tomorrow. Pietro was murdered in the evening,
and she heard his screams but did not realize at the time what
was happening. In the morning she was the first member of
her household to be up and around, and so first drank from
the urn of cool water they kept by the door. Apparently
Pietro's spirit was in the water, for her stomach began to
bloat and she began to say queer things. She could foretell
the future: who would marry, who would be unfortunate,
who stole, and where the stolen goods were hidden. When
they asked her what had brought about this change in her,
she could only shake her head, as though she herself did not
know the reason, though everyone else was satisfied that it
was Pietro who spoke to them through her. Always just before
she was able to speak of the future she would make a peculiar
sound and her stomach would swell up. Angelica lived to be
twenty-two, and three days before her death one of her patron
saints came to her in a vision and told her to prepare her-
self. The day she was to die she dressed in her best clothes
and lay down upon her bed to await the death that came be-
fore the sun set.
Mrs. Rose Malerba, the woman who told the story of An-
gelica, was in those days a girl herself in Barre, engaged to
marry a successful young lawyer. Angelica told her on one
occasion that within a few months she would discover that
her fiance was being unfaithful to her and that their engage-
ment would be broken. She would then go to America where
she would meet a man from a neighboring village and after
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH 93
a short courtship marry him. At the time the whole prophecy
sounded fantastic, but as she tells of it now in Albany it seems
stranger yet, for that is exactly the way her life worked out.
If Angelica's spirit is typically Old World, the second shoot-
ing of "Red" Halloran is in the American thriller tradition.
Some years ago in Chicago there was a tough gang leader
named Red Halloran who bought himself, at the height of
his power, a magnificent, custom-built, bulletproof, sixteen-
cylinder dream car. It had everything, with a few extras
added. Then came a day when he had to make a quick get-
away. He roared out of Chicago all by himself and ran spang
into a police ambush; bulletproof car or no, they filled him
full of lead.
Just how the car got to New York or how it acquired a
reputation for being haunted, I do not know, but when the
dealers tried to hire someone to drive it to California to its
new owner, its reputation was well enough established so
that no one wanted to take the job. Finally they found a news-
paper reporter who had just been fired and who agreed to
take it west for a hundred dollars and expenses. The boys at
the garage told him he'd never get it past Chicago, but he'd
heard stories like that before.
The early part of his trip was entirely uneventful. He had
decided to sleep in the car and thus to pocket the money he
had been allowed for lodgings. Somewhere in Illinois he be-
gan to get sleepy again, so he drove the car onto a side road
and curled up to take a few winks. When he awoke the car
was being driven very rapidly by a man he had never seen
before, a burly redheaded character who would answer
94 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
neither his questions nor his protestations, a character who
kept on whistling "Yankee Doodle" and driving the car as
though the Devil himself were following.
After a few uncomfortable miles the reporter noticed police
patrol cars up ahead; the driver noticed them too and went
past them like a bat out of Hell, completely ignoring their
signals to stop. With that, the police began to shoot, and the
driver made a desperate effort to pull around a patrol car
they had parked across the middle of the road. In that fleet-
ing second the reporter made two moves: he grabbed the
wheel with one hand and turned off the ignition with the
other. It was then he realized that the driver had disappeared
and he was sitting there in the front seat by himself.
When he tried to tell the police what had happened, he
fully expected them to call him a liar, but several of them
had seen the redheaded driver. And others recalled the curi-
ous fact that on that very spot and under identical circum-
stances Red Halloran had been killed. And when they heard
the reporter's description of his driver, they knew all too well
why he was not in the car when they got to it. So they let
the reporter go on his way while they went back to waiting
for a stolen car they had been looking for in the first place.
There is a story they tell in the Adirondacks which recalls
the ancient belief that a ghost of one who has been murdered
stays on earth until he has been avenged, a belief which seems
to be generally rejected in our time.
Two men had a hunting camp, not far from St. Regis Falls
in the North Woods. Every season they would go up there for
a few days' hunting, just the two of them. Everybody assumed
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH 95
they were good friends until one day a few years ago when
one of the men we'll call him Conklin, because that wasn't
his name came down out of the woods alone. Conklin said
his friend Barry had got lost, and so a search party went back
up in the woods with him, but just then the snow set in and
they didn't find any trace of the missing man.
The State Police thought there was something fishy about
the whole business. Conklin got flustered when they asked
him too many questions, and anybody could see that he
wasn't telling the whole story. But they didn't have any evi-
dence, and moreover they didn't have any corpse to prove
murder, so the case was dismissed.
In the spring Barry was found lying at the base of a tree
with his skull broken. Still the police couldn't prove any-
thing, and when the coroner's jury turned in a verdict it was
"from accidental death, cause or causes unknown," or what-
ever it is they say in cases like that. Beside his body they had
found his rifle, all rusty now, but his hunting knife was miss-
ing from the case on his leg where he carried it. Nobody
thought much of that at the time.
The next fall Conklin went back to his camp with a new
companion. The first night they were there, the newcomer
turned in early. It had been a long trip and he had fallen
into a very deep sleep when he was jolted awake by Conklin,
who was screaming, "Don't do it! Don't do it!" He pulled
himself out of the bunk and found his flashlight. There was
Conklin dead in his chair, with a hunting knife stuck in his
heart. A curious detail was the discovery of the fingerprint
expert when they took the knife to police headquarters.
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
There was only one set of prints on the handle of the knife
and those were quite clear: they belonged to Barry.
Another story of ghostly revenge doesn't involve a murder
at least not at first but it does involve a couple of other
interesting bad habits. This version comes from an Italian
family, but my wife says that as a girl in New York City she
heard a version of it from a German playmate.
It began when a rather surly and overbearing husband
brought home a pound of calf s liver. It was midday, and
since the noon meal was waiting to be eaten, he told his wife
to cook the meat for supper. She had brought the food out
under the arbor, and they sat there together in an unusually
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH 97
pleasant mood, for he was not what one would call an amiable
man. She told him how the body of the rich, old gentlewoman
of the village who had died the day before had been brought
to the church next door. The man was not particularly inter-
ested in her prattle, but his mouth was full of good ravioli
which he kept washing down with equally good Chianti,
and he did not want to stop eating long enough to tell her
to be quiet. Besides, it probably did little harm to permit a
woman to talk now and then, so long as she did not pretend
that what she said mattered. Finally he said, "Enough," and
his wife, not knowing whether he referred to his meal or
her conversation, became silent. After dozing in his chair
for a spell he went back to his shop, and a lazy afternoon
drifted into eventide.
As the time for his return approached, his woman began
the preparation and the slow, well-seasoned cooking which
liver properly requires. After a while she lifted the lid and
peeked at the meat. It looked done, but to be sure she cut a
little piece from the edge and popped it into her mouth. It
was good; the flour had formed a delicious crispness around
the edge, and the flavor was rich and right. She tried another
piece, and another, and another. She was ravenous and she
had no power to stop herself until the pan was empty. Then
she remembered her husband and panic shook her. He was
not a man to whom one could explain that the meat he had
brought home at noon had tasted so good that there was
none for his dinner. Too often she had felt the beatings he
dealt her when the world went contrary to his plans. It was
then she thought of the rich widow lying alone before the
altar.
98 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
It was a fine meal, and the man rose from his table well
satisfied with the world. It had been a good day; customers
had kept him busy at his shop, the noon meal had been pleas-
ant, and now he'd had a dinner fit for the gods, green salad
with rich olive-oil dressing touched by just the right amount
of garlic and vinegar, fresh bread, and the tenderest, tastiest
liver that ever a man set to his lips. He looked his woman
over, seeing her with new eyes. She had a variety of uses
all of them, he chuckled to himself, satisfactory. "It is time,"
he said, "for us to go to bed."
Perhaps he had drifted off to sleep before it happened,
though his wife had not yet closed her eyes. It was a voice,
close to their ears, yet from a distance: "My liver! I want
my liver! Give me my liver!" It was the voice of a woman, an
old and cultured woman. The cry came again and again, pierc-
ing and terrible. "My liver, give me back my liver!" At last
the wife could stand the strain no longer, and in a tumbling
flood of confession she spilled out the story.
As she told it, he could almost see her slit the belly of the
widow's corpse, thrust in her long-fingered hand until she
found the organ she was seeking, deftly cut it out, rearrange
the clothes, and speed out of the church, back to her stove
and frying pan. It explained her own lack of appetite which
he had considered so fortunate at mealtime. As he weighed
the matter in his mind, the point which disturbed him was
that it was he who had eaten the liver and that undoubtedly
it would be upon him that the dead woman would wreak her
vengeance. He had some idea of the kind of havoc a really
aroused ghost could bring about.
Both women had ceased speaking now, though the living 1
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH gq
one at his side lay moaning softly into her pillow. There
was only one thing a man could do, he decided, under the
circumstances. He got out of bed and went into the kitchen,
coming back with the carving knife. Fortunately his wife
fainted before he drew the fine sharp blade along her sleek
belly. A few minutes later he stole into the church to give
the old woman a new liver to replace the one he had eaten.
One wonders whether he did not look upon the meat just
a bit longingly, for the corpse was getting a much better
organ than she had lost At any rate, the old girl was satis-
fied and never disturbed his sleep in the nights that followed.
A special group of ghosts consists of persons murdered
specifically to guard treasure buried with them. Not all
haunted treasure is protected by a murder victim, but some
is. In my part of America, haunted treasure was usually
buried by pirates, by Indians, by settlers during the French
and Indian Wars, by Tories during the Revolution, or by
latter-day misers who had no faith in banks and a strong
sense that the earth was the place for man's valuables. Mur-
der was committed so that a ghostly guardian might serve
the owner of the treasure, for if a young person were placed in
the hole with the treasure, he would be there to guard it for
what would have been his normal span of life presumably
a longer span than the life expectancy of the owner. One other
characteristic of haunted treasure in our area is this: it is al-
most never found by those who search for it.
All through the nineteenth century there were stories cur-
rent along the Hudson Valley that Captain Kidd had buried
100 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
his treasure there, and many a time the moon looked down
on men digging hopefully for it.
Close to a hundred years ago, in the town of Hughsonville
between Beacon and Poughkeepsie, a woman named Talmage
had a dream. She was an old woman then, tall, with full lips,
an aquiline nose, and cold blue eyes. She had been born on
Hallowe'en just before midnight, and she had been born with
a caul. When she told fortunes with tea leaves her eyes were
like blue crystals which held all the secrets of the past and the
future. This woman dreamed the same dream on three suc-
cessive nights when she was ninety years old.
In this dream she saw a tall man, whom she recognized as
Captain Kidd, burying gold at the base of a giant oak in a
grove of trees not four miles from where she was sleeping.
She could see the gold pieces plainly enough to describe them
exactly the following morning. The next night, and the next,
the dream ?fes repeated, each time identical with that of the
preceding night, each time most specifically clear. The repeti-
tion and the clarity, and perhaps some urging from the lady
herself, caused the men in her family to plan a little action.
Matt Talmage and his brother Jim set out for the grove one
night shortly after the third dream. In the back of the buck-
board they carried a bull's-eye lantern, two shovels, a pick,
and a potato sack. Just before they started, Matt slid a rifle
in with the other things. There were a number of reasons for
going at night: there was farm work in the daytime; they had
no wish either to be followed or to be laughed at; but most
especially, the old lady had told them to go at night, and she
had a way of speaking that forestalled contradiction and dis-
obedience. She had told them to go at night and to say nc
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH 1 1
word to each other once they got there, for silence is the re-
quired rule when it comes to digging haunted treasure. Ab-
solute silence.
The moon was shining when they started out, but the
woods were very dark and when they came to the grove it
was pitch-black. They lit the bull T s-eye lantern and quickly
found the giant tree of which the old lady had spoken. It was
easily found, for it dominated the entire grove. They were
silent now, pointing to the spot they had been told to find, the
place "between the folds of the tree that formed two huge
roots." They were scared: the owls made the only sounds and
the silent bats swooped low over their heads; not even a star
could be seen through the heavy roof of foliage.
Jim had begun the digging, and after twenty minutes' work
he was tired, but the pile of dirt beside the tree was beginning
to grow. He looked up to Matt to ask him to take over, but
his eyes went beyond his brother and by the reflected light of
the bull's-eye lantern Matt saw Jim's mouth gape open and a
look of terror come over his face. Matt felt his own blood go
icy and his neck and spine tingle with panic. Then he turned
around and looked.
There, standing with his elbow level with the seat of their
high wagon, was a man, ten feet or more in height. That it
was the same man the old lady had described to them was be-
yond all doubt. Slowly a great arm rose and with an imperious
gesture motioned them to leave the grove. For a few seconds
they were frozen to the spot where they stood, but as the giant
started to walk toward them they found their feet. Matt
screamed and they both started running. They circled the
figure, clambered onto the wagon, and tore out of the grove
102 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
toward home. They whipped the horse, but it was hardly
necessary, for he seemed to share their panic.
The next morning, after very little sleep, Matt and Jim
went back to the grove. Even in the morning light the grove
was dark and the shadows of their fears from the previous
night were in the air. There by the giant oak lay their tools,
just where they had left them the night before. But the
ground between the great spreading roots was as though it
had not been touched for centuries. Each particle of moss was
in its place; even the ant hills were undisturbed. Yet there
was no question but that it was the place where Jim had piled
high a heap of dirt the night before. There was no way of
proving it now, and the two brothers looked at each other
speechlessly. They gathered up their tools and went home.
That night they told what had happened in the local tavern
and took a good deal of ribbing for it. But after the tavern
was shut for the night, a little group collected some tools and
hitched up a wagon and went to the grove to find out for
themselves. They found out. It happened to them just as it
had happened to Jim and Matt. The mountain of a man had
spoken no words but they could no more have stayed there
than they could have lifted themselves on wings.
When Matt and Jim told the old lady what had happened
to them, she was not surprised. "The man who gets the treas-
ure must outwit him, that's all/*
Well, as I hear it, every decade or so, somebody tries it.
Thirty years ago three boys from Brockway set out at ten
o'clock one night to get those gold pieces. They left the Gold
Coast Cafe in an old Model T. The car was found next day in
the road near the grove, but the boys haven't been seen or
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH lOg
heard from since. But the tree is still there in the grove, tow-
ering over it like an old pirate captain bullying his crew from
the bridge.
While this is a fairly typical example of the problems fac-
ing the hunters of haunted treasure, there are some variations
of which one should be forewarned. Sometimes the spirit
which guards the treasure is headless, sometimes it is in the
shape of a dog. Sometimes counter charms are used to keep
the treasure from disappearing when it is located. One man
out in LeRoy used a long rod with the letters GOD stamped
on it. The sharp points of the two ends were tipped with sil-
ver. Once the box was found, it was to be pierced by the rod
and that would hold it in place so that it wouldn't disappear.
The only trouble with that invention was that the owner
never got near enough to pierce the box, much less to keep it
from disappearing. The experience of Matt and Jim of hav-
ing the ground seemingly untouched when they went back to
investigate the next morning is a commonplace among treas-
ure hunters. Not infrequently they inadvertently break the
taboo against speaking, and no sooner have the words fallen
from their lips than the treasure sinks out of sight and the
dirt falls into the hole; the sod rolls back into place, and there
is nothing to do but go on home and forget about it.
From the Helderberg Mountains west of Albany comes a
complicated ritual to insure the finding of treasure, although
I know of no one who claims that he has found any this way.
Nor have I used it myself, so you may take it for what it is
worth. First of all you must locate a spot that seems mysteri-
ous and a likely spot for the treasure to be hidden. You go
104 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
there at midnight without light of any sort, and remember not
to say a word all the while you are there. First you dig a hole;
then you take some of the dirt from the hole and cover over a
sheep buck. You place a turkey gobbler on top of the dirt
over the sheep buck, and then you cover that with dirt from
the same hole. Then you place a rooster on top of the pile and
cover him over with more of the dirt. By this time you have
a good-sized pile, and that is all you can do for that first night.
If you can continue to maintain silence during the second
night you are certain of your treasure. First you uncover the
rooster, who will jump up and fight you. You must kill the
rooster and then uncover the gobbler. He will fight you too,
but you must kill him, maintaining perfect silence all the
time. Then you take care of the sheep buck in the same way,
and if you can do him in silently, then you can start digging,
and if there is treasure there, you will find it.
This has the earmarks of being a fragment of a European
tale which has been lost in the New York hills. It calls to
mind a story told by an Italian family living in Schenectady.
Early one morning a poor fisherman was on his way to his
boat when a young boy called to him from beside the road.
"Come here," said the boy.
"I can't," said the fisherman. "I have to catch fish so my
family can eat."
"Would you like to be rich?"
The fisherman went over to the boy to see what all this
was about. The boy told him that some robbers had asked
him to guard some treasure for them and then had killed him.
Now the fisherman could have gold and jewels beyond price,
if he would do just as the boy directed.
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH 105
"Go into the cave there beyond that tree. I'll be right be-
hind you. First you will meet a snake. Don't be afraid; just
step over the snake and keep walking. Then you'll come to
two snarling dogs. Don't be afraid; I'll be right behind you.
Finally you will see a man with a shotgun sitting on the treas-
ure. He'll say, 'Don't move or I'll shoot/ When he says that,
fall right on the treasure and touch it. It will be yours, if you
do just as I say."
"All right," said the fisherman, "let's go."
The two entered the cave and came upon the snake. The
boy said, "Go on. I'm right behind you. Don't look back for
me, but I'll be here all the time."
The two dogs looked frightening, but the voice of the boy
reassured him and he stepped over the dogs. He went on till
he came to the man with the shotgun.
"Don't move or I'll shoot," warned the man.
The poor fisherman was paralyzed with fright. He turned
around and cried, "I can't do this. I can't leave my family."
That did itl Everything disappeared. He found himself out
in a field all by himself. Soon the boy appeared, angry and
disappointed. He told the fisherman that if his instructions
had been carried out the man would have been rich and the
boy's soul could have gone to rest. Now someone else would
have to be found. He cursed the man, saying that he always
would be poor and always wear rags.
A few days later the man bought a new pair of overalls and
the first time he wore them he tore a big hole in the knee. He
was ragged and poverty-stricken as long as he lived.
The little boy in that story recalls the attractive ghost
called Mazzo Maoriello told of by people in Amsterdam, New
10 6 THINGS THAT CO BUMP IX THE NIGHT
York, from Rome, Italy. He was a little boy all dressed in
white and wearing a saucy red cap. Mazzo had finished his
task of guarding somebody's gold for the full period of what
would have been his normal lifetime, and yet he stayed in
this world. He liked to join the other children in play, and
grownups would find him happily romping with their young
and invite him into their homes for dinner. Everyone knew
that he was from the other world, but no one was afraid of
him and everybody hoped that sometime he would reveal
where the treasure which he had been forced to guard lay
buried. If he still remembered, he never told. But when
folks came to move from one home to another he was likely to
be on hand to help, for there was something about the ritual
of moving that appealed to him; perhaps he was stirred by
some memory from die long ago when he was a real child and
shared the excitement that comes to every family when it
changes houses.
I don't want to leave the impression that only children,
giants, and monsters guard haunted treasure, or that it is
always done in a malevolent spirit. Sometimes the owner
seems merely to be watching out to see that the right sort
eventually comes into possession of his gold.
There was a haunted house in Trenton, New Jersey, that
no tenant would stay in very long because of the ruckus a
ghost made all the time. After a while a woman who had lived
a mighty careless sort of life went to the landlord and told
him that she wasn't afraid of any ghost that walked. He said,
"All right, if you're sure you won t be afraid/'
She'd been there a few nights when she had occasion to go
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH
down in the cellar. At the foot of the stairs this great dark
thing rose up in front of her. "What the hell do you want?"
she asked. All she remembered after that was falling; when
they found her next day every hair of her head had been
burned right off. She got out of there as fast as she could get.
The next tenant was a good church woman who sewed
every Tuesday for the missionary society and who went to
prayer meetings on Wednesday nights. The landlord ex-
plained the situation to her before she moved in. "Don't you
worry," she said. "I'll stay/'
A few nights after she arrived she wanted something down
in the cellar too, so she lit a candle and went down the stairs.
This same "thing" rose up in front of her. "Good friend,
what in the name of God is it that you want? Is there any-
thing troubling you that it is in my power to help?" This
"thing," this ghost, motioned to her to follow him, and they
went over to a corner of the cellar. Then he pointed for her to
put down her candle. As she did this she noticed a loose block
of cement in the floor that she had never observed before. She
lifted it out and there she found a neat box set in the floor,
filled with gold pieces. She was flabbergasted. "Is this for me?"
*he asked the ghost, but when she turned to look for him he
was gone, and as they tell it in Trenton, he hasn't returned
since.
I have never seen statistics analyzing the relative popularity
of different methods of committing suicide but there must be
such available. I raise the point because such a vast majority
of the ghosts whose last mortal act was self-destruction seem to
have preferred hanging to the other possibilities. The very
10 8 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
ropes they hang themselves with become haunted like the
one in a Pine Plains barn that appeared every time anyone
entered there. They had cut a man down from the rafters in
1845, but the rope kept reappearing. They would cut it down
again and again, but there it was the next time they walked
into the barn. And there is that bell rope in Katsbaan: one
wintry midnight some years ago the good folk of the com-
munity heard the bell ring and a few hardy souls got dressed
and trudged over to the church to see what mischief-maker
or what catastrophe could be the cause. A stranger's body was
swinging back and forth, with the bell rope about his neck.
Who he was or why he chose the Katsbaan bell rope as his
method of departure was never known, but some say that if
you are awake in the middle of the night on the anniversary
of the event you can just hear the clapper as it taps the bell.
Suicides are great ones for haunting houses, as has already
been suggested, and they go through all the antics that other
ghosts do. I have no reason to believe that the returning sui-
cide is any different from the rest, but sometimes one of them
will work out a specialty which separates him from the general
run. There is a house in Saugerties in which a man hanged
himself in the attic fifty years or more ago. Thereafter it was
impossible to keep a candle or a kerosene lamp burning in the
attic, and whenever anyone entered it the door would bang
sfmt behind him. Eventually some owner had the place wired
for electricity, but even then it was impossible to make a light
go on in that part of the house. They tell me that if you were
to go up there tonight with a flashlight, it would flicker out.
I have also heard of a woman whose husband was a salesman
on the road and one day he came home to find she had done
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH
herself in. The next tenants had a terrible time: she would
go upstairs and open the bedroom doors and go back down
again; she would go to the attic and make noises as though
she were moving boxes and cases about, but when they were
examined they seemed not to have been moved; she would
turn the key in a lock while someone was watching the door,
but when the door was opened she was not there. And on two
occasions she did something I know of no other ghost doing.
She would go over to the telephone and dial it; people in the
room could see and hear it happen. No one seems to have had
the presence of mind to lift the receiver and find out whom
she was calling, and so a good story is lost. Makes you wonder,
though, when the telephone bell rings in the middle of the
night and you crawl out of bed to answer it, and there is no
voice at the other end. At least it makes me wonder.
Two of my favorite ghosts drowned themselves, and each
in its own way is unique. We might call them the cases of the
persistent fisherman and the girl in the Pink House.
Thirty or thirty-five years ago a family named Johnson
moved into the valley of the Kuyahoora, which branches off
from the Mohawk at Herkimer. They bought a little old stone
farmhouse on one of the Norway-Middleville roads. The
house had been neglected and empty for several years previ-
ous to their coming. The neighbors predicted that they
wouldn't stay long; nobody ever did because the place was
badly haunted, but the Johnsons were not to be driven out
of their new home by silly gossip and superstitious foolishness.
But it wasn't as easy as that. Under the stairway leading up
from the front hall, there was a tiny closet the door of which
1 10 THINGS THAT CO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
was secured by a wooden turn-knob. Each morning Mary
Johnson found that little door wide open, and each morning
she dosed it again, only to find it open again the following
morning. That sort of experience starts out by being annoy-
ing, then it becomes an irritation, and after that it becomes a
nightmare. They put a chain on the door, but that didn't
work, because just before dawn the chain rattled so loudly
that everyone in the house was awakened out of a sound
sleep. Between chain rattling and an opened door, the John-
sons chose to take the chain off and throw it away.
At just about this point in the story Mary Johnson's
brother John came for a visit. He was a great fisherman, and
since there was a fine trout stream nearby, he decided to get
up before the rest of the family one morning and see what he
could catch for breakfast. He took his rod and went to the
ruins of an old mill on the banks of a millpond through
which the trout stream passed. In the first light of dawn he
saw an old man fishing on the banks of the pond. He was an
odd-looking duck, wearing an old-fashioned ulster, and he
sat with his rod secured in the forked branch of a fallen tree.
"How's the luck?" asked John.
No answer.
"I say, how's the fishing?" this time in a louder voice, but
still no answer. Finally, deciding the old man just wanted to
be left alone, he walked on downstream, but after a few feet
he looked back to discover that the old man had vanished.
It didn't make sense; the land thereabouts was flat and there
were only a few big trees. The man hadn't had time to walk
off. Either he was in the pond or he was in the ruined mill.
John peered down into the clear, shallow water and there
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH
111
was nothing there but some fish which would make a fine
treat for breakfast. Then he examined the cavernous interior
of the mill and there was nothing there but rotted beams and
weeds.
He went back to the place where he had seen the old man,
and he was surprised to observe that the soft ground for many
yards around showed no footprints but his own. There was
no hole in the ground where he had seen the crotched stick.
He began to think he was going mad.
Later that day he told his experience to an ancient inhabit-
ant of the community who brightened right up when he
heard the description of the vanishing fisherman. There was
1 1 2 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
no question about it, that was old Mr. Brockhurst who lived
in the Johnson's house for years. Used to go fishing every
morning of the year when it was possible to get at the fish.
He had been very particular about his fishing tackle, of which
he had a fine assortment. Used to keep it in a little closet
under the stair and heaven help the person who tampered
with it! Drowned in that same millpond.
The Pink House in Wellsville, ten miles from the Penn-
sylvania border, is the focal point of a cumulative legend of
haunting by a suicide. This is particularly interesting in view
of the fact that there is a printed version of the story (in verse)
which bears only superficial likeness to the story which is
developing among the people of the area.
Most old settlers agree that the story in the poem "Paul-
ine," by Hanford Lennox Gordon, is substantially the correct
one. This is a tale told by a dying soldier at Appomattox and
concerns a cruel, rich father, a sweet and simple daughter, a
poor but honest lover. This father was the builder of the
Pink House, the man who first gave it the color it has to this
day, a lumber merchant in Wellsville, hard as nails in every-
thing except what touched his daughter. It was in the village
school that she, Pauline, met the son of a poor widow who
lived on the outskirts of town. The youngsters grew up to-
gether, and by the time they reached high school they were
in love, although her father knew nothing of this romance.
Only once did the boy ever come to the Pink House; that
was the day he was to leave the village to study law in the city.
They had the misfortune to be caught in each other's arms
by the master of the house on that occasion, whereupon Paul-
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH 1 1 J
ine's father called the boy a good many nasty names, among
them "beggar," which bitterly hurt his natural pride. Despite
these insults the lovers carried on a clandestine correspond-
ence until her father sent each of them a forged letter pur-
porting to come from the other which effectually stopped the
letter writing and left each of them hurt and angry. A year or
so later, word came to the boy that Pauline was marrying a
rich, middle-aged newcomer to the town whom her father had
encouraged for financial reasons. The lovers met once more,
this time on the streets of Wellsville the day before her wed-
ding. When Pauline and her father passed the boy in their
carriage, his attitude was very nonchalant and one who had
seen them would have assumed that whatever had passed be-
tween the couple was dead.
That night the boy decided that in the morning he would
go to the Pink House to ask her forgiveness, but in the morn-
ing he was awakened by a friend who came to tell him that
Pauline had drowned herself in a fountain at the Pink
House.
Then it was that the Pink House began to show signs of
being haunted. People would enter the library and have the
feeling that a woman had just left it by another door and
there would be Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portu-
guese, opened and turned face down on the sofa. At night
they would hear the piano playing pieces which Pauline had
enjoyed playing, and at other times the scent of the perfume
which she used would be particularly strong in a room, as
though she had just left it.
This, then, is the way the story is told in print. We now
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
turn to the oral tradition as it is growing in the area round
about Wellsville.
One tradition says that a man married one of two sisters
and came to his wife's home to live; what he did not know
until she drowned herself in the millpond on the grounds
was that his sister-in-law was also in love with him. In this
story there is no ghost. Other versions develop this theme and
add to it the tradition of haunting which we have already
encountered in the "Pauline" version.
Thirty miles from Wellsville they will tell you that the
family had two daughters, the older o whom was engaged
to be married and her trousseau was all made, waiting for the
important day. Out of a clear sky came the shocking news that
her fianc had eloped with her younger sister. The bride-that-
was-tohave-been was so heartbroken that she drowned herself
in the swimming pool. After a year or so the sister and her
husband came back to live in the Pink House. First, stories
began to circulate that the dead sister was seen in the moon-
light near the pool. She was seen on the walk to the house;
she was seen passing through the door. Then one night the
couple was suddenly awakened by something cold and
clammy on their faces. The next night they kept their eyes
open, and they saw the dead sister enter their room and come
beside their bed. Then she threw back her head and with a
quick movement she tossed her wet hair across their faces and
drew it toward her before she vanished into the shadows
forever.
From Professor Thompson's archive at Cornell comes the
best telling of this story I have found. I would like to quote it
as it was written by Mrs. Edward W. Wilson. Her beginning
VIOLENCE AND SUDDEN DEATH 1 j g
is very like the one above and we pick it up after the elope-
ment.
"No letter of explanation from the hasty couple on their
unscheduled honeymoon could temper the grief of the father,
nor the dismay of the jilted girl, who, rather than see her
former lover bring home his new bride, drowned herself in
the marble fountain in front of the Pink House, This double
shock saddened the father, who, nevertheless, forgave his
older daughter and welcomed her back home. A year later, he
had a granddaughter who for two years brought happiness to
the Pink House. Then a strange thing happened; the little
girl began avoiding her parents and wanting to be alone. She
wanted only to toddle about the gardens all by herself, often
rising from her bed at night to wander aimlessly in the moon-
light. One night, her aunt appeared and beckoned to the little
girl to follow her down the carpeted staircase, across the en-
trance hall, out into the fateful fountain, where the body of
the poor little innocent was found the next morning. The
relentless spirit of the aunt continued to haunt the Pink
House every night, bringing sleeplessness and worry to all its
occupants. The grief-stricken grandfather now turned against
his older daughter and her husband, sent them away from
Wellsville, and soon followed his granddaughter to the
grave. . . .
"At length the owners of the mansion returned home, now
with another two-year-old daughter, whom they were deter-
mined to watch over night and day. And it is well they did,
for on the night of their home-coming the wraith appeared
before her second niece, beckoning her to follow. The frantic
father, on vigil in the child's room, lit a candle, whereupon
1 1 6 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
the spectre departed. Each night after that a light was kept
burning in the child's room, and only once (when the candle
flickered) did the ghost reappear. With candle-light replaced
by gas, and then by electricity, an ever-burning light was
maintained in the girl's room, where even to-day passers-by
may see it, though the niece is nearing eighty, and her parents
have left the Pink House forever."
CHAPTER FIVE
A man who set his mind to it could probably write a ghostly
history of the United States. It might take a while to garner
all the stories the people tell, but certainly we would find
representative men and women from every crucial period of
our past who have returned. The memories of their comings
have been cherished by the people who have told and retold
their stories.
Naturally, we begin with the Indians, and as with so much
of our lore about the aborigines, the ghost tales frequently
117
1 1 8 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
tell more about the sentimental enthusiasms of our nine-
teenth-century forebears than about the Indians themselves.
A case in point is the Indian chief of Conesus Lake. Every
year when the vacationers go out to the lake they delight to
hear the old-timers say their say, and if some visitors are
doubtful, others are open-minded enough to line the shores of
the lake on August evenings, hoping that they may see what
others swear that they have seen. What there is to see comes
when the August moon is full, and something about the night
convinces them that they have seen an Indian chieftain, wear-
ing phosphorescent war paint that glows in the moonlight*
What they enjoy most of all is the legend of the young Indian
wife who could no longer stand the beatings her chieftain
husband gave her and who in desperation ran away with her
warrior lover from another tribe. They made good their
escape, but her husband continued the search for many years.
Eventually he devoted a day's token search to them once a
year, and this much he vowed he would do forever. And he
does.
A happier couple haunt Indian Lake. Once again it was a
chieftain (we don't deal in anything less when we grow sen-
timental about the savages), one Sabeal, who went out into
the woods about his mountain home and never returned. As
the long wintry hours dragged on, his wife, worried and grief-
stricken, set out over the ice-covered lake to find him. His
body they never located, but hers, frozen stiff, was found a
few days later. They buried her on a little island where, as
dusk settles down you can still hear, if your ears are sharp,
the voice of her husband calling out to her.
One could find many another such story in our parts. After
HAUNTED HISTORY
we stopped butchering the American Indian, we began to
sentimentalize him, and the evidence of the Hiawathaization
of the Five Nations is to be found in local legends about
Lovers' Leaps and Spook Rocks, invariably telling about a
pair of yearning lovers and at least one cruel chieftain. These
stories have an aura of bookishness, falling somewhere out-
side the fold of genuine folklore. They are neither the tales
the Indians tell of themselves nor tales that have taproots in
the white man's past. They are, I suspect, often the product
of early local historians and sentimental ladies who were well
read and anxious, indeed too anxious, to prove that we in
America had had a romantic past. That does not mean that all
of the ghostly Indians fall in this rather colorless category; a
number of them give evidence of being both more believable
as ghosts and more valid as folklore.
Take for example the ghosts of Whoopin' Boys Hollow near
Sag Harbor. The eastern end of Long Island is a great croco-
dile's mouth gnawing at the Atlantic; on the upper jaw is
Greenport; where the tongue would rest is Sag Harbor; at
the tip of the lower jaw is Montauk Point. In the days before
the white man came, a chief lived and died near Greenport
whose last command ordered his warriors to carry his body
to Montauk for its long rest. Moreover, he insisted that never
once should his body touch the ground from the time he left
his old home until he reached his last. The braves started
out with the litter high upon their shoulders until they came
to the section where Sag Harbor is now. By this time they
were tired and only the fear inspired by their departed leader
prevented their laying down their burden and resting. \Vhen
they came to a deep and extremely narrow crevice, they saw
12O THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
an opportunity to live up to their dead leader's command
and yet take the respite they badly needed. The crevice was
narrow enough for them to lay the litter across it in such a
way that the body was scores of feet from the earth below.
Having followed the letter of their chiefs command if not
the spirit, they lay down at a little distance to sleep. It
wasn't long before a terrifying scream awakened them, the
scream of their dead chief as he hurtled off the litter to the
rocks far below. What cries of terror and guilty conscience
the erstwhile pallbearers let out as they dashed away we do
not know, but any youngster in Sag Harbor will tell you
that if you pass the spot, you will hear them once again and
the old chief crying out to be taken on to Montauk and not
left forever halfway to his destination.
A ghost you can hear but not see is never so intriguing as
one that puts in a full appearance. Consider the Indian's
horse from down in the Southern Tier. The little girl who
had this experience has long since been a woman grown, but
when she tells of the day she took her father's lunch to him,
through the meadows and to the forest's edge, she grows ex-
cited and the story flows and rushes. In her girlhood they
lived on an isolated farm far from all neighbors. When her
father used to work in a field separated from the house by
some distance, the child loved to carry his lunch to him. Her
father, on the other hand, preferred that some older person
accompany her, for the path ran across one meadow and then
over a brush fence and into a dense wood. One day she
pleaded until her mother packed her off, lunch and all. It
was a desolate section then; there were no other houses for
miles around, and there were spots like the woods before her
HAUNTED HISTORY 121
that had never been touched by a white man's axe. The
meadow was clear going. Then she came to the brush fence
over which she must climb to get into the woods. Carefully
she got her footing and began to crawl over the barrier. Just
about halfway over she looked up, and there towering above
her was a mammoth stallion, rearing on his hind legs.
Her father got no lunch that day; he found the neatly
packed basket beside the fence on his way home for dinner.
The little girl had scrambled down a thousand times faster
than she had gone up and run pell-mell for home. Her father
had a satisfactory explanation for the sudden appearance of a
horse in a country where there were none. Their farm was
on land that had once been Indian country, and the red men
were buried all about the place. He believed, and years later
she still believed, that some Indian had buried his horse
nearby and that the spirit of the horse had risen from his
grave that warm summer day to prevent a hidden danger of
the wood from hurting her. It was an explanation which
pleased them and they kept it alive.
In Schenectady they tell of one of the last Mohawks in that
area who died in 1789. His name has not survived, but men
have remembered that in two of the ways of the white man
he excelled his teachers; he could outshoot them and out-
drink them. With these arts mastered he had long moved
among the men of the Dorp with austere familiarity. Now
and then during the year he would bring to town some meat
or fish to exchange for the few articles his simple way of life
required. While he was there he would practice a little drink-
ing and then drift back to his cabin on the Hill of Straw-
berries. On the August day of which I write he made a pres-
122
THINGS THAT CO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
ent of his mess of fish to an old friend, refusing anything for
it. His explanation was simple and pointed: "Great Spirit
call. Indian no need." For once he shunned the tavern and
getting into his canoe he started up the Mohawk, Boys who
were swimming off a sand bar reported a strange thing later:
the canoe moved against the current, driven by no visible
power, for the Indian sat in the stern, his head erect, his arms
folded serenely across his chest. They were the last to see him
alive. No one ever found his body, but the canoe they did
find the next day, drifting empty far down the river.
A week later a white man who had known the Indian was
HAUNTED HISTORY I o 3
fishing among the river islands when he glanced up and saw
the old Mohawk warrior sitting on the high bank. His arms
were clasped around his knees and his face was turned to-
ward his departed people. The white man thought merely
that the Indian wanted a lift to the mainland and so he rowed
close to the island and invited him to get in the boat. At the
first word, the Mohawk slowly turned his head and faded
from view. Afterward many others saw him, sitting by the
river's edge, always in the same position, his knees hugged to
his chin and his eyes watching the upper reaches of the valley.
Indian massacres of the Revolutionary period have left us
with their ghostly reminders, too. From Cherry Valley and
Cobleskill come tales of the partial re-enactment of those
violences, the screams and shots, the hurrying files of refu-
gees, sad cries in the night. But the story of Nick Wolsey and
his revenge stirs my imagination far more than these frag-
mentary tales. In the early days, close to the Hudson in
Greene County lived a white hunter and fur trader named
Nick Wolsey. He got along well with the Indians in their
nearby village because they could trust him; his dealings with
them were invariably above board and his word was as true
as his aim.
After some little time it may have been observed by the
wise old squaws of the tribe that it was not always beaver
pelts that brought Nick to the encampment. The man whose
sharp eyes could reckon the value of a beaver pelt had looked
carefully at the village lass named Minamee. One day they
were married among her people and then walked down the
valley trail to his snug cabin by the river. Except for the
jealous heart of her forsaken Indian suitor, the marriage was
1 24 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
approved by all her tribesmen. Once there was a sharp,
spoken clash between the loser and Wolsey, but it passed and
was forgotten as an incident in a day of frolic. The months
that followed were full of happy fruitful days for both the
bride and groom. Frequently he made trips to the fur traders
in Albany and came home with gold in his purse and hand-
some presents for his wife. By the time a year had swung
around there was a small son in the cabin and Nick Wolsey
was a happy man.
One evening Nick came back to the cabin after a good
day's hunting. Usually the quiet Minamee stood in the door-
way, the child in her arms, waiting. No smoke lazed from the
chimney and the doorway was empty. It was very silent in the
shadow-filled room. Nick stood warily for a moment under
the lintel until he saw the baby's head on the floor bloody,
the brown eyes open, the neck a nauseating clot of blood
where it had been severed from its body. Deep in the shadow
was Minamee, her eyes crazed, her arms clutching the bloody
corpse of her child. That night she died, but before that peace-
ful hour Nick learned of the drunken visit from her unfor-
getting suitor, who had wreaked his macabre vengeance.
Wolsey had recently been able to purchase a horse, and
now he rode to his wife's people. When his account had been
heard, the murderer was turned over to him and he bound
him tightly with willow withes. Back at the cabin the withes
were made still tighter, and then Nick Wolsey conceived a
diabolic plan of his own. The Indian had wanted Minamee,
but of the woman slim and warm he had made a corpse; well,
he could have the corpse. So he bound the living man to the
dead woman, tying them both to his horse. He lashed the
HAUNTED HISTORY 125
horse until it became mad with pain and then he loosened it,
letting it tear off through the woods, never to be seen again
as long as it lived. But sometimes life is not the longest limit
and Nick's horse with his grim burden is still galloping down
our valley roads. Men see them pass in the dusk and hear the
bellowing agony of the Indian, the end of whose punishment
is not yet.
Of all the ghost tales of New York, the best known comes
to us from the French and Indian Wars and has been told
and retold by such masters as Francis Parkman in his Mont-
calm and Wolfe and Robert Louis Stevenson in his Ticon-
deroga. It is the story of a Scottish officer named Duncan
Campbell who served under Abercrombie in the campaign of
1758.
Seldom in American history has a general planned more
stupidly and acted more cravenly than did General Aber-
crombie at Ticonderoga, but we must remember that the
Scots, English, and Americans who were sacrificed by his
fuddleheaded incompetence fought and died with tragic and
magnificent courage. With sixteen thousand troops, nine
thousand of them Americans, Abercrombie attacked Ticon-
deroga when it contained fewer than four thousand men, but
Montcalm sent him back to Lake George with his tail be-
tween his legs, the laughingstock of the provinces. This was
the low tide of the war for the enemies of France, but our
own attention is turned upon one of the two thousand casual-
ties suffered that day, Major Duncan Campbell of the Black
Watch regiment of Scottish Highlanders. He was one of the
twenty-six officers in that regiment (out of thirty-seven in all)
126 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
who left the fields in front of Ticonderoga as a casualty: nine
days later he died in the hospital at Fort Edward.
Duncan Campbell was the laird of the castle of Inverawe
on the banks of the River Awe, in the Scottish Highlands. In
the days after Bonnie Prince Charlie's attempt to take back
the British throne for the Stuarts, quarrels and name calling
continued in Scotland, sometimes with the sharpest bitter-
ness. One evening a party of gentlemen in the neighborhood
of Inverawe became involved in what was at first a political
argument and soon turned into a brawl. In the midst of the
hot words and drawn swords one man fell to the floor and
another sped off in the darkness to rap on the door of Castle
Inverawe, asking for sanctuary. True to Scottish traditions of
hospitality, the young laird took the fugitive in and hid him
in the far recesses of the castle, swearing on his dirk and as
head of the clan to protect the man from pursuers.
Almost as soon as he returned to the hall two clansmen
brought word to Duncan Campbell that his own cousin Don-
ald had been slain, and he realized that he was protecting his
kinsman's murderer. Remembering his oath, he swore he
knew nothing of the matter, but the conflict between his
loyalty to his oath and his loyalty to his kinsman caused him
deep concern. That night his was an uneasy sleep. Sometime
in the darkest of the night he opened his eyes to see his cousin
Donald standing before him: "Inverawe, Inverawe, Inver-
awel blood has been shed. Shield not the murderer." The
next morning Campbell made a compromise with his con-
science. He spirited his unwelcome guest to a cave on Ben
Cruachan, a neighboring height. However well this solution
may have satisfied his conscience, it did not please the ghost
HAUNTED HISTORY 127
of his cousin Donald, whose second appearance came that
very night, when he repeated his injunction of the night be-
fore. We do not know what Duncan Campbell intended to
do, but shortly after daylight he went up to the cave, only to
find it deserted. That night he slept better than he had on
the two preceding, but once more his dead cousin awoke him,
less angry this time, but no less decisive in his manner. "Fare-
well, Inverawel Farewell, till we meet at Ticonderoga." The
word "Ticonderoga" meant nothing to the gentleman, and
since his cousin did not reappear, the matter drifted from his
mind to be almost forgotten.
He joined the Black Watch soon after this and was busy
keeping peace and order in the Highlands. Eventually he be-
came a major and served the regiment well, going with it to
America a year or so after the war with France broke out. By
this time "Ticonderoga" had come to have a double mean-
ing for him, for while it ever brought back the solemn voice
of his ghostly cousin, it had also become in the plans of the
army an objective that had to be captured if the French were
to be driven from the Colonies. His fellow officers knew the
story and did all in their power to prevent him from worry-
ing as they sailed up Lake George with their bright banners
flying that July day in 1758. As they camped the night before
the battle, his cousin Donald came to him for the last time,
saying simply, "Duncan Campbell, we have met at Ticon-
deroga." He told his fellow soldiers that he would meet his
end that day. During one of the gallant, needless charges
against the sharply pointed trees the French had cut to form
an outer defense of the fort, Duncan Campbell received the
wound he died of a few days later.
1 28 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
If 1758 was a bad year for Britain in America, the year
1 759 was a far worse year for France; the war that seemed so
nearly won at Ticonderoga turned critically against the
French. Their defenses formed a triangle with Quebec on
the North, Ticonderoga and Crown Point on the east, and
Fort Niagara on the west. Frontenac (now Kingston, On-
tario), between Quebec and Niagara, fell in 1758, and thus
Niagara was left more or less isolated, except as they could
call for help from the far western French outposts and their
Indian allies. The British sent against them Sir William
Johnson. Fort Niagara is situated on a little neck of land
which the British cut off from the mainland, then bom-
barded at will. The two weeks' siege was nerve-racking and
terrifying for the French and Indians imprisoned in the fort.
Petty jealousies, long-controlled irritations, a thousand an-
noyances united with the normal fears of battle to make life
close to unbearable. It was a bad climate for two French offi-
cers who had fallen in love with the same Indian girl, and
they finally decided to settle the matter with sabers. In the
central courtyard of the fort they faced each other, en garde.
For a few minutes the besieged Frenchmen and Indians
turned their attention from the enemy beyond their walls
to the antagonists within. For a moment the sabers made
bright arcs of light as they flailed. But it was soon apparent
that one swordsman was far better than the other, forcing
his opponent back, step by step. Suddenly came a thud as
steel cut through flesh and bone and a head bounced along
the cobbled pavement, then a splash as the headless body
slipped into an open well in the courtyard. Almost before
he could lower his dripping saber, the victor faced empty
HAUNTED HISTORY 1 2 Q
space where but a second before his rival had stood. History
does not tell us if this skillful young sabreur fell in the ac-
tion at Niagara, but the shadowy body of his vanquished op-
ponent still can be seen at midnight, rising out of the well
and searching the blood-soaked pavement for his long-lost
head.
The period of the Revolution fathered a brotherhood of
headless ghosts and York State had its full share of them.
Long before Irving made the tradition of the galloping Hes-
sian famous, Yorkers were seeing these riders on their roads.
They were seen in other parts of the country, too, of course.
In the midst of die war two British officers saw one of their
own hussars, elegant and soldierly, come riding down Al-
len's Lane, Philadelphia, carrying his head before him on his
saddle. As he reached them, there was a great flash of light
and the hussar was nowhere to be seen.
Whether it was the same hussar or another of the clan
whom young Hansel met down Warnerville way, I cannot
say, but whoever it was things turned out badly for Hansel.
Grandma Mary Thurber told the Reverend \Vheaton Webb
about him when that wise and lovable man was collecting
the lore of the Schenevus Valley. It is a story Grandma Thur-
ber had heard from her grandmother, one of the Schoharie
Dutch Shafers, about her mother's brother and how he came
to be a drooling idiot. Hansel was Grandma Thurber's great-
grandmother's brother, a stout, good-natured, easygoing,
young buck who did the chores, courted the girls, lived a
normal farm-filled life. When he heard the old folks tell
about spooks and witches as they sat around a winter fire or
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
in the village store, he laughed at them. He had grown up on
stories of the Headless Rider who rode a black horse and cast
an evil spell over any who got in his way. Every now and
then some neighbor claimed that he had seen the Rider, and
Hansel's comment was always the same, like a man who
has thought up a good answer once and uses it over and over
again: "I'd like to meet the Headless Rider some day; I'd
trade him my own head for a loaf of bread." Then one day
in the woods the headless one came riding down the path
and Hansel was far too terrified to offer the exchange he
had promised so terrified, indeed, that when they found
him later on, all he could do was look at them with great
blue, unknowing, unseeing eyes. Always after that the brain
inside his fair head was withered and the spirit dead. A man
should measure his adversary before he lays down his chal-
lenge.
Not all the ghosts of the Revolutionary period were head-
less, by any means. In Pine Plains there is a house that was
once the Old Drover's Inn, a natural stopping place for cattle
drovers going back and forth between the Hudson Valley
and Connecticut. For generations there was a noisy ghost in
that place who slammed doors and paced up and down, re-
enacting the movements of his last hours. In life he was a
young physician who hung himself the night before he was
expected to go into the Continental Army. For many years
the rope hung from the rafters, for no one seemed to have
the heart to cut it down.
Fort Ontario, near Oswego, goes further: it has an official
ghost who dates back to Revolutionary times, for he wears
the red coat, white britrhes, and crossed belts of a British
HAUNTED HISTOKV 1 3 1
regular. His name is George Fykes and his tombstone can be
found in the military cemetery. Tradition has it that Fykes
appeared once to every new garrison over a long century, but
there have come no reports of troops stationed there during
World War II seeing the poor fellow, nor since the State His-
torian's office has undertaken the preservation of the fort.
Fort Ontario has a second ghost, or did have a few years ago.
W. J. Goad, who was stationed at the post in 1919-20 with
the Sixty-third Infantry, tells us, "It got so sentries refused to
walk Number 2 Post, and a board of officers was convened
to make an investigation. After receiving testimony from sev-
eral sentries, they confessed they had no explanation of the
manifestations which had the guard completely disorgan-
ized.'* It began when a guard noticed a light about the size of
a saucer following him as he walked his post. At first he
thought one of his comrades was playing a trick on him and
he ignored the whole matter, saying nothing about it. But the
next night another guard served and was concerned to see a
light following him. The two men got together and decided
that if a trick was being played upon them, then they would
do better to say nothing but take matters in their own
hands. While one marched the other hid in the recesses of
the building and watched. The light came at midnight, just
as the City Hall clock struck, and kept pace with the sentry
as he walked along. Never ahead nor behind, the light shone
brightly over the soldier's head, and as he watched, the sec-
ond man realized that it would be impossible for any natural
light to follow the path that the light was following. Soon
the word ran all through the barracks and an increasing num-
ber of men objected to guard duty at that time of night; men
Igg THINGS THAT GO BUMP IX THE NIGHT
who had fought the Germans heroically were taking no
chances with what they were roundly convinced was the spirit
of another soldier who long ago had walked the same post
and now, lonely and restless, had come back to a familiar
duty.
During the Revolution and after, there were a number of
stories about the ghosts that haunted Guy Park and Fort
Johnson, two of the noble houses Sir William Johnson built
along the Mohawk for himself and his son-in-law, Colonel
Guy Johnson. While the Revolution was still in progress
there was a black ghost who appeared in a room in the north-
xvest part of Fort Johnson, greatly to the annoyance of Colo-
nel Volkert Veeder, whom the Continental authorities had
placed in charge after Guy Johnson and his household de-
parted for Canada and the service of his King. It was at Guy
Park that occurred events which are still puzzling. Soon after
the close of the Revolution the Kennedy family who lived at
Guy Park began seeing at all times of day and night, Polly,
deceased wife of Guy Johnson. What was at first a nuisance
had just about reached the point of alarm when a German
came walking through the valley and inquired if the spirit of
Mrs. Johnson had not been seen there lately. He was told
that indeed she had, that her visits had become so frequent
that one room which the lady seemed to favor had been given
over to her since no one cared to share it with her. More as a
favor to the family than as something he himself wished, the
traveler suggested that he be allowed to spend the night in
the room. When he departed in the morning, seemingly spry
and healthy after his night in the haunted room, he assured
his hosts that the lady would bother them no more; nor did
HAUNTED HISTORY 133
she. Later the Kennedys began to wonder if they had been
bilked, if perhaps they had been the victims of a hoax from
beginning to end. There are those who will tell you that this
was a carefully worked-out scheme, based on the credulity of
the Kennedy family, to recover the treasure which the John-
sons hid in the house before they left. According to this
theory, the ghost was really the living servant of Mrs. John-
son, wearing her dead mistress's clothes, delegated to scare
the family out of the room where the valuables were secreted.
The spook-laying German was either a part of the plan, or an
interloper who knew what was afoot and beat the rightful
owners to the snatch. Of course, those who take their ghosts
straight will have none of this theorizing, and will merely be-
lieve that the German, versed in Old World Hexerei, was
able to rid the house of its supernatural tenant and out of the
greatness of his heart did so.
Half a century later Fort Johnson was haunted by quite a
different spirit. Early in the last century a store stood near
the fort, where one night a drunken fellow got in a fight with
the storekeeper, assaulting him and hurting him severely. But
the storekeeper was still full of fight; he grabbed a gun and
chased his assailant out of the store, up the street to the fort.
There the man ducked into the big house, running, terrified
now, up the stairs to the attic. As the drunk reached the attic
door, the grocer aimed and fired. The body came tumbling
down to his feet; on the walls were tiny rivulets of blood that
had spattered when the man was struck. The corpse was
taken to the cellar and placed (this is the only unbelievable
part of the tale) in a cask of whisky, where it stayed until
spring. As the ice began to break, the barrel was rolled to the
134
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
river's edge and then sent on its way to the sea. The dead
man's ghost claimed a room in the fort for many years, and
according to the testimony of the Wilson family, who
thought for a while of renting the place, it became noisy and
bothersome, banging doors and, in the cellar, opening one
door as soon as another closed. A daughter of the Wilsons
claimed later to have owned a photograph of the Fort John-
son ghost. She said it was all in white, standing by a door.
When I last heard the photograph had been misplaced, but
it ought to turn up any day now.
Another story that has come to us from the Revolutionary
HAUNTED HISTORY
period is the oft-repeated account of the Horseman of Leeds.
Every Greene County historian has had his own version, and
seemingly, every citizen of the country around Leeds has his
version. There is no separating chaff from wheat in this mat-
ter; rather, you choose what grains you like and grind out
your own flour. What follows is a composite containing the
essential features of many of the tellings and a selection of
details that suit my personal taste, for this is the manner in
which men tell this tale.
The village of Leeds lies in the foothills of the Catskills,
up from the Hudson River Valley a few miles. It was settled
early, and by the time of the Revolution it had living in or
near it a number of prosperous citizens, among whom the
Salisbury family were perhaps the most prosperous. Sur-
rounded by a thousand upland acres, they lived in a large
stone house which had been built in 1705. Throughout much
of the eighteenth century the owner of this property was an
arbitrary, overbearing man named William Salisbury, who
ruled his slaves and indentured servants with a will that in-
sisted on obedience, unquestioning and immediate. Among
the latter group was a young German girl named Anna
Swartz, who was paying with service for her passage from the
old country. She was a gay, laughter-loving girl who enjoyed
merry parties and the new ways of dancing she found here,
which were even better than the old village dances at home.
There was little or no gaiety on the Salisbury farm, and
about her only satisfactions came from the milch cows which
she enjoyed bringing in from pasture with a little dog that
had adopted her soon after her arrival at the farm. The hours
she labored were long and tedious, and the relaxations were
Ig6 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
rare indeed. Not far from the center of Leeds, there lived a
good-natured, good-for-nothing German family whose door
was always ajar to whatever lighthearted person wanted to
come in. It was not a place calculated to encourage sobriety,
virtue, or industry, but the people who went there had a lot
of fun. Salisbury learned that when she could sneak away,
Anna was going there, and he made it vividly clear that she
should go no more.
One night soon after this, word came up to him that the
girl had sneaked off the farm and headed for Leeds. This was
the last of a series of petty irritations; there was a streak of in-
subordination in the girl that needed disciplining. Such a
spirit and such actions could lead to trouble, and William
Salisbury had had enough. He strode to the barns and or-
dered a horse saddled while he went into the harness room to
pick up a ten- or twelve-foot rope. He jumped on the horse
and streaked to the village. He pulled up short at the house
of laughter and dismounted. For a moment he stood in the
doorway, liking what he saw even less than he had expected.
He called Anna by name and she came to him, half in fear,
half in anger.
The group in the house came to the door, and in the light
which flooded past them into the dooryard, they saw this
man, whose every motion betrayed his anger, tying one end
of his rope around Anna's waist, the other to the girth of his
saddle. He worked silently, speaking neither to the girl nor
her companions. He did not even glance up as he slipped his
foot into the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. He would
humiliate this girl, and teach her and her hoyden friends that
he meant to be obeyed.
HAUNTED HISTORY
The horse was still walking as they left the yard, but Salis-
bury touched its flank lightly with his heel until it had
struck up a leisurely jog trot. Soon the girl was panting, run-
ning as fast as her weary legs would carry her. Then, in the
darkness she stumbled on a rock in the road; as she fell, the
sudden tugging on the girth frightened the horse. First a
leap, and then his hooves were pounding down the country
road. Anna screamed, and her body was hurled bumping and
bouncing at the end of the rope. Salisbury tried to stop the
horse, but in one of its wild leaps he was thrown into the
ditch. He sat up, bruised and shaken, to see two spots of light,
bobbing and weaving in the darkness, the white rump of the
horse and the body of the girl.
Salisbury was by nature and instinct on the side of the law,
and he reported the accident to the proper authorities. He
was tried and convicted of murder and ordered to be hung,
but the sentence was not to be carried out until he was
ninety-nine years old. Until that time he was to wear a halter
about his neck as a perpetual reminder of his ordered fate. A
lenient judge permitted the rope to become a silken cord in
time, but his was a lonely life, isolated from his friends and
neighbors. The people began to avoid the road by his farm
after dark if they could, because too many had seen the white
horse and the bounding white form racing through too many
nights to be comfortable. Long after they all had died, her
favorite milch cow mooed and the little dog moaned as the
horse and girl passed by. Strangest of all was the womanly
figure that appeared on a rock near where Anna died. It
would sit and sing wildly, cry out and laugh hysterically as it
gazed at the lighted candle on each finger. Salisbury grew to
1 38 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
be an old man before his time, but he lived on, reporting to
the courthouse each year, just as he had been ordered to do.
The year he was ninety-nine he went as usual, but the judge
who tried him, all the jurors and the witnesses, everybody
was long since in his grave. There was no one in the year 1800
who felt called upon to carry out the sentence, so the old man
went back to his farm, the long years fulfilled, and yet death
did not come. When he had lived a full century he died, and
after that, when the horse ran in the moonlight there was a
rider astride, and so it has been for a century and a half.
Of all the different ways to exorcise a ghost, flames are the
most effective. This was how the Mansion House at Sodus
Point on Lake Ontario finally was rid of Asher Warner.
When the British troops came swooping down upon that
snug harbor town on a June day in 1813, they found a peo-
ple who had grown weary waiting for their foe. The attack
had long been expected, so long that the militia sent to de-
fend the best harbor on Lake Ontario had gone off about
other business, and the townsmen had settled back to chuckle
over the attack that had never materialized. Then they came,
ninety ships with their cannon and their cargoes of troops.
Townspeople and the handful of militia who could be col-
lected fought well, but they fought a pitifully hopeless bat-
tle. When the ships set sail again, they left utter desolation,
for their task had not been to take and hold a beachhead, but
to make useless to their enemy a point of departure for expe-
ditions against themselves. Only one house still stood; all
the others were smoldering ruins. That one remained be-
cause a British officer had not had the heart to disturb a
HAUNTED HISTORY
young American soldier, Asher Warner, who was dying of
his wounds and lay in that house. They gave him a pitcher of
water and left him. The bloody prints of his hands upon the
walls were seen by men yet living who could well imagine
his pathetic attempts to rise to his feet and join the battle
once again. And they saw on the floor bloodstains that never
came off. Asher Warner stayed in the house where he died
long years after they buried him in his grave, long after So-
dus Point was rebuilt and the foe became our friend. Only
the flames which destroyed the aged house could put him to
final rest.
One of the most fertile areas for ghost lore in New York
State is the section within a mile radius of Lindenwald, the
home of Martin Van Buren, on the outskirts of Kinder-
hook. We should remember that it was while staying at
Lindenwald that Irving heard the legend of the Headless
Horseman, which he moved to Sleepy Hollow when he came
to write it. If he had told the story as taking place in its
Columbia County locale, we would not be surprised to find
the area so ghost-ridden, but he took his yarn and his locale
and gave it a life of its own in the part of the valley he loved
so well. The Van Alen house built in 1737 a mile east of
Kinderhook is described to the last timber as the home of
the Van Tassels. For many years the place has been boarded
up, and I recall a pleasant summer's afternoon when Harold
Thompson, the dean of New York's folklorists, and I prowled
around the place, peeking into windows and attempting, in-
effectually, a minor case of illegal entry. We were prepared
to wait until midnight when a rider whom neighbor folk
140 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
believe to be Merwin, the original for Ichabod Crane, could
be expected to gallop off the concrete of Route gH and turn
down the driveway leading to the house. We were prepared
for him to ride as far as the leaning pine, growing where a
trickling stream flows under a driveway, and then we ex-
pected him to disappear. Midnight was only six hours away,
and it seemed to me that the wait would be well worth while,
but alas for the ambitions of scholars! The two ladies who ac-
companied us made it clear they would have none of it; they
were hungry, even if we didn't realize that we were, too. We
knew when we were defeated.
Less than a mile to the south along gH, behind great
masses of undergrowth hides Lindenwald, an architectural
hodgepodge standing as monument to the taste of the mid-
nineteenth century. The home that Judge William Peter Van
Ness built in 1797 was a solid, well-balanced brick house of
the postcolonial period. Its central hall and generous stair-
way gave the impression of gentility and hospitality that the
owner no doubt hoped to achieve. When Martin Van Buren
retired from the presidency, he bought the place from the
family of Judge Van Ness, under whom he had studied law.
Nine years later, Richard Upjohn, who had just completed
Trinity Church in New York, remodeled and enlarged the
house. He added a steep front gable, a rococo porch, a scal-
loped cornice, Italianate bell tower, and wings on the south
and west. Today the visitor is impressed by the imported
wallpaper of Van Buren 's period, the Brussels carpets retain-
ing their warm reds and yellows. The last time I visited Lin-
denwald many of the former President's possessions were still
there. Sometime the State will take over the place, as it
HAUNTED HISTORY 1 4 1
should, but when that day comes a quality will inevitably be
lost. The unmowed lawns, the weed-filled driveway, the
great, brooding trees that tower over the yard and outhouses
give the place an eerie and romantic quality. Friends of mine
who have lived there tell of shutters that unexpectedly bang
in the night, footsteps that slowly climb the stairs, weird
noises that drift through the house, aided, perhaps, by the hot-
air heating system that was installed in 1834 and seven fire-
places all connecting with one chimney.
Two of the ghosts that haunt Lindenwald were famous
men in their times, one a Vice-president, the other a Presi-
dent, of this country, for the people tell of having seen or
tell of others having seen both Aaron Burr and Martin Van
Buren in and about the premises. Aaron Burr, it xvill be re-
membered, was a friend of the Van Buren family, and Wil-
liam Van Ness was his second in the ill-fated duel with Ham-
ilton. There is one tradition that Burr came to Lindenwald
after the duel, but the evidence does not support this. That
he was a visitor there in the Van Ness times, however, is not
at all unlikely. When he appears, and both servants of the
house and neighboring fanners are said to have seen him, he
wears the lace cuffs and wine-colored coat, the suave smile
that nearly won him an empire. One who saw him told of the
wind blowing a ripping gale as Burr walked through the
orchard at Lindenwald, but it seemed not to touch him, and
there was no movement of the long lace cuffs, as if there were
an island of stillness about the little man.
The orchard is almost as ghost-ridden as the house, for
both Martin Van Buren and his butler, as well as Burr, have
been reported at different times under the apple trees. The
142 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
butler was a hardened toper who used to sneak off to the
apple trees to have a quiet snifter until one day, after an
argument, he went out to the orchard, not for refreshment,
but to hang himself. Then there was a woman who was
murdered near the gatehouse, and within the last generation
her lonely, white figure, too, has been seen moving about in
the shadows.
There were a goodly number of Negroes in the Kinder-
hook area, several of whom worked at Lindenwald. Aunt
Sarah was a vigorous, strong-minded martinet who ruled the
Van Buren kitchen with an iron hand and a genius for fine
cooking. She ruled it in solitary glory much of the time, per-
mitting other servants to enter only when they had her
permission, and then they were expected to leave as soon as
possible. Residents have told me that early on Sunday morn-
ings there still drifts up from the empty kitchen one of the
most delectable smells to be enjoyed in America, the lovely
fragrance of pancakes cooking on a buttered griddle this at
times when the fires are dead in the stove and the kitchen
empty of all living persons. I cannot help but wonder if
maybe the old cook doesn't come back and stir a weird batter
to drop upon a departed griddle over a fire that went out
long ago. But the pancakes have nothing to do with Tom
who was the servant of a Mrs. Wagner and a neighbor of
Lindenwald. Aunt Sarah, in her time, died, then Martin
Van Buren died, and the family left the vacant house in
charge of Mrs. Wagner until a buyer could be found. At
last word came that the new owners were soon to appear, and
it seemed advisable to put the house in order. Mrs. Wagner
told Tom to go over to the big house and get the kitchen in
HAUNTED HISTORY
shape, but Tom had known Aunt Sarah all too well, and he
was not sure it was wise to intrude upon one who had been
so explicit about her rights and her domain. After a deal of
muttering Tom went, but his stay was short. He reported:
"I went down into the cellar and then into the kitchen, but
the minute I took up a pan I heard a sound. As I looked up,
down the chimney came Aunt Sarah. She was covered with
soot, but her eyes were blazing, and the ends of her kerchief
stood up on her head just like horns. So I said to myself,
'Tom, you're getting out of this cellar as fast as you can, and
nobody's going to make you go back.' " Tom never did go
back, and if the pancakes are hers, there must still be times
when she rules her kitchen.
Another story takes us a mile or so west of Lindenwald to
the old brick school built on a little triangle of land formed
by Route 9 and another road from near the Van Buren estate.
Aunt Sally, a character known to many a present-day adult in
the Kinderhook section when they were children, had two
sons, unbelievably nicknamed Woodchuck Pete and Cottage
Joe. The old lady shared a belief with many Americans that
if you want to find buried treasure, you should do your dig-
ging at a crossroads, that you should, meanwhile, observe
absolute silence. She got a notion that there was buried
treasure near the old schoolhouse, and matriarch that she
was, she ordered the boys to collect picks, shovels, crowbars,
and come with her on the night she felt the moon was just
right. When they reached the spot where she was positive
they would find their fortune, she told them to start digging,
to keep on digging no matter what happened, and not to say
a word. They were used to doing what she told them, and
144 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
soon the dirt was flying. Pretty soon Cottage Joe's pick hit
something that gave out a hollow sound: just at that very
moment, as they straightened up to ease their backs, they saw
old Uncle Pete come walking down the side road. Uncle Pete
had been dead for years, but the boys went right on with
their digging; if the old man wanted to watch them that was
no affair of theirs. Now they began to shovel the dirt off the
top of a chest, a very old oaken piece with iron bands around
it. As they dug the dirt away from the corner of the box, they
were attracted by the sight of a newcomer approaching, a
man riding a huge black horse, carrying his head in his lap.
The horse breathed out billows of smoke from his nostrils,
and when he walked sparks flew from his hooves. The man
rode around and around them, but nobody said a word, and
both boys kept on digging. As they neatly cleared the dirt
from the sides of the chest they realized that dozens of Aunt
Sally's dead friends and kinfolk stood by Uncle Pete, watch-
ing, waiting. In the moonlight they drove the crowbars down
on either side of the box and put all their strength to the
task. Their mother stood watching them, feeling every move
they made, silently, prayerfully urging them on. Now the
chest moved in its hole. While one of them held it, the other
slipped a rope underneath; twice around it went, and they
wordlessly tugged at either side. One end rose, and Joe
stepped forward to get a better grip, but as he did, the rope
slipped in his sweating hand and the gold-filled chest hit his
foot with a terrific weight. A heartfelt "Damn!" came im-
pulsively from his lips, and as he spoke, the haunted gold slid
back into its hole, the dirt rolled down after it,the sod they
had so carefully piled to the side eased itself into place. Just
HAUNTED HISTORY 1 45
at that instant a small cloud drifted past the moon, and when
the light cleared again, Uncle Pete, the horseman, the old
departed friends were no longer there. There was nothing to
do but go home; never again could they hope to dig for
treasure in that place. So two weary boys and a heartsick
mother went slowly down the home road, listlessly dragging
the tools that were to have made them rich beyond all
dreams.
A distinguished North Country contemporary of Martin
Van Buren has put in an appearance in recent times in a
unique and very imaginative manner. I like a ghost that has
a fresh approach to his problem and eschews the hackneyed
rappings and tappings by which dull fellows make their
presence known; Dr. Samuel Guthrie of Sackets Harbor is a
ghost to my taste. It was Dr. Guthrie who in 1831 made im-
portant discoveries relative to the manufacture of chloro-
form. He manufactured "S. Guthrie's Waterproof Priming."
He invented the punchlock musket, and a method for con-
verting potato starch into sugar. His was obviously a rich and
curious mind that was not satisfied with the well-worn and
routine ways of doing things.
It began ten years ago when the family that lived in the
house the doctor had built in Sackets Harbor heard bones
rattle in the closet where he had kept his skeletons. But that,
as they realized later, was merely a curtain raiser for what
was coming. On the evening when the grandfather of the
family lay dying, his wife stayed silently with him, easing the
hard passage. She stood at the foot of the bed, slightly lean-
ing on the footboard, her hands folded before her. She could
not have told you how long her gaze had been searching the
146 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
pallid face of her husband when she sensed that they were no
longer alone. She looked to the side of the bed, and there
stood a white-haired man attired in clothes long out of date.
She recognized him immediately as Dr. Guthrie, for she had
been familiar with pictures of the builder of their home. The
suddenness of his coming, and under such circumstances, was
too much for the overwrought woman: she screamed and
then fainted. When members of the family rushed into the
room, they discovered her lying on the floor, but what was
even more curious was that the whole place was permeated
by the odor of chloroform, although there was not an ounce
of the drug in the house, nor had there been throughout the
old gentleman's illness. When they had picked up his wife
and begun to revive her, they turned their attention to him.
He was dead.
There must have been a time when one could have gar-
nered a rich harvest of ghostly tales along that romantic
thread of water, the Erie Canal. Not many have come down
to me, none very interesting. In the Rome Swamp one night
a young mule driver saw an awful white form rise out of the
towpath; it had a horrible face and great flashing teeth. The
boy struck out at it over and over again with a stick he car-
ried, but it landed on nothing solid. This kind of incident
was told by old-timers, sitting around an evening fire by a
string of tied-up boats. Another might corroborate such an
incident with his own memories of a similar fearsome critter
he had seen while spending the night in one of the many
canal-side taverns. Someone else in the group would have
heard of a canal captain who cut the throat of his cook and
HAUNTED HISTORY
'47
threw her body into the water. He would give them well-
documented reports of local farm folk who still could hear
her last scream on the anniversary of the deed. Another
would tell of a ghost to be seen along railroad tracks down
where a spur of the Shenandoah and Susquehanna Railroad
runs to one of the Pennsylvania lumber camps. When the
spur was being built, two of the workers got into a fight and
one of them was killed. Afterward, on moonlight nights men
saw the winner tote the dead man along the tracks in a wheel-
barrow, his feet hanging over one side and his head over the
other. The connoisseur of ghosts will be pleased to note here
148 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
the rather unusual circumstance of a ghostly corpse, for this
is a re-enactment of the moments after the man had been
killed, and so there is seen, or if you wish to be technical,
there is said to be seen, the ghostly spirit of a corpse. I know
of one other somewhat similar case. Down in Middletown the
corpse of a suicide has been seen a good many times hanging
from the tree where he died.
Slavery, the Underground Railroad, and the Civil War
provide the backgrounds for a number of stories which are
still current in my state. While there was no slavery in New
York after 1827, there are records of slaves being sold as late
as 1814 in the village of Altamont. The story of the Simmons
slaves comes from but a few miles farther up in the Helder-
bergs in the village of Berne. The central figure is a man
named Simmons, a Southerner from his speech and ways;
indeed, he made a point of his ancient lineage, and he passed
for what he called himself, a Southern aristocrat. Why such a
one as he purported to be should leave the warmth of his
homeland for the mocking blizzards of Berne seemed not at
all unusual to the natives; rather, it confirmed their first
favorable impression of the fellow, showed him to possess
sound judgment. He brought with him a dozen or more
slaves to work the six-hundred-acre farm he secured. The
brick building where he quartered them still stands, almost
as solid as it was in the years just before the War of 1812,
when Simmons built it. He was an enterprising man and
fitted in well with the community, where the trend was
toward industrialization. Not to be outdone by his neighbors,
he began building an axe factory, the earliest in that part of
HAUNTED HISTORY 149
Albany County. With his suave courtliness he soon persuaded
the fattest pockets in town to invest in the venture, but it
wasn't long before the factory stood empty, the venture a
failure, and Simmons and his household moved off to greener
clover. How many of his household went with him was a
moot point. People said there weren't half as many slaves
when he left as when he arrived, and others, that he had mis-
treated the Negroes badly, throwing them down a deep, dry
well to punish them and some of them died there. Then, on
rainy nights, men saw black-faced ghosts walking slowly
around the well, heads down, eyes averted. A later owner had
the well filled in with rocks but, for a century after, children
were advised to stay away from that part of the yard, espe-
cially when it was raining.
From a later period and a more southerly part of our state
comes word of a station on the Underground Railroad where
tragedy has left us another ghostly heritage. There is a house
down in Emmons, not far from the Susquehanna, which
served, as did so many York State homes, as a way station for
courageous colored men and women who were willing to
gamble their lives for freedom. A tunnel led from the house
to the river, but it was hastily dug, and in some parts the clay
walls were only held in place by wooden props. One spring
after the rains had saturated the earth, die walls were weak-
ened and on a certain night the tunnel came crumbling
down, trapping forever five or six Negroes who had just
arrived. Their screams and cries could be heard at both ends
of the tunnel, and even, faintly, above ground. On spring
nights when the frost is out of the ground and the rains have
150 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
begun to fall, they are still heard occasionally, these voices of
casualties in the long battle for human liberty.
In every war there are always some soldiers who do not
come home with their comrades, but who, in their own good
time, return from the far-off soil where they lie buried. New
York sent half a million men to the armies of Abe Lincoln
and it is only reasonable to expect that a few of them should
be among the restless dead. In Salem, in Washington County,
they tell of the Good Gray Ghost, a soldier in the War of the
Rebellion, who was for many years a familiar spirit in the
town. No one feared him; no one had reason to. A Miss
Kathryn Tierney of Albany used to work in his home when
she was a girl, and she remembers a summer evening when
she was walking alone in the garden and the Gray Ghost
approached her and called her by name. Like the others, she
wasn't scared, for it all seemed too natural, and he was far
too courteous and gentle in his demeanor to frighten anyone.
It must have been that he missed the gaiety he had known in
his youth, because there was hardly ever a party or big din-
ner in the house but some one guest would see him standing
in the shadows wistfully watching the fun. Time brings
changes even for those of the spirit world, and some years
ago the house was torn down to make room for a new school
and, as often happens, when his haunt was demolished, the
ghost no longer returned. There is a minor controversy
among the small fry of Salem as to whether a careful mid-
night watch within the school would bring them face to face
with the figure their fathers and grandfathers knew. My ad-
vice is against the experiment; it is most unusual for a ghost
to change his habitation. On the other hand, no one can
HAUNTED HISTORY 1 5 1
afford these days to stand in the way of true scientific inquiry.
A New York couple who moved to Jersey had a curious ex-
perience with the ghost of a man who had starved to death
in their house during the Civil War. Whether he was a spy
or an escaped Confederate prisoner is uncertain, but that he
starved to death was certain. The real-estate man warned
them about him when they first took the house, but they
were young and very much in love; it didn't seem likely that
they would be bothered. Nor were they, once they got ad-
justed to George. In a way, he became a silent member of the
family, never in the way, but always about the premises. They
could hear him at night, prowling about the kitchen, getting
himself a snack, plodding back and forth between the stove
and the kitchen table. As dusk fell during the winter, the
young wife getting supper in the kitchen would hear the
front door open and footsteps go down the cellar stairs; then
the furnace door would open. She would call out, "Is that
you, dear?" knowing full well that it would be another half-
hour before her husband would enter the front door, go
down the cellar stairs to fix the furnace. She felt better about
it if she made sure each time, and her question never per-
turbed George, nor did he ever answer. It was their guests
who saw George. They would awaken in the night, and there
they would see him across the guest bedroom, bent nearly
double as if in wretched pain, pacing back and forth, over
and over again. Some of their guests stayed only one night,
but others grew as used to him as their hosts. Not a bad
fellow once you caught on to his ways.
There was a legend current in Albany during my youth
which Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews made into a very
152 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
successful short story called "The White Satin Dress." It will
be remembered that in Lincoln's party on the evening he
was shot there was a young couple whose engagement had
recently been announced: Major Henry Reed Rathbone,
whose family were partners in the successful firm of stove
makers, Rathbone, Sard and Company, and Miss Clara Har-
ris, the daughter of one of Albany's most distinguished citi-
zens, United States Senator Ira Harris. It was certainly the
most terrible night of Miss Harris's life, and for years after-
ward its every moment stood clear in her memory. There
was the play, the shot that echoed through the theatre, the
splashing of blood, Major Rathbone's valiant attempt to
catch the murderer, the flash of Booth's knife as it stabbed
her fianc, the leap onto the stage, her own presence of mind
as she called out for water for the President. Time softened
the pangs of the tragedy, and sometimes it was but as a night-
mare dimly remembered. This was especially true after she
returned to Albany and became Major Rathbone's bride.
There was one memento, however, that could bring the
whole evening back to her on bitter wings; that was the satin
dress she had had made for the occasion. Never again could
she bring herself to wear it, nor to dispose of it. It hung by
itself in her closet, spotted with the blood of the nation's
beloved President and of her own beloved husband. Eventu-
ally the Rathbones decided to move from the home where
the dress had long hung. There was considerable discussion
about it: should Clara destroy it, or take it with her? For
reasons of her own she did not want to see it moved frop"
its place. A solution was hit upon; the lady moved out of
her old home satisfied that she had made the best possible
HAUNTED HISTORY 153
disposal of the gown. This much of the story I knew as a boy.
Mrs. Andrews's story deals with descendants of the family
which next occupied the house. They were related to a Gov-
ernor of Massachusetts, who, on one occasion, came to visit.
The Governor was faced with a difficult decision: a bill had
been passed by his legislature which he believed important
for his state's welfare, but it had provoked a major political
storm. It seemed unlikely that he could be re-elected if he
signed it and he could rationalize a veto easily enough. It
was the old question of whether to act like a politician or a
statesman. A man whose ambitions struggle with his con-
science doesn't sleep well, and the executive lay long in the
guest bedroom trying to resolve his conflict. At length he
slept, only to awaken with a start. There was someone in the
room with him; he raised himself on his elbow to see stand-
ing in the moonlight the figure of Lincoln, calm, patient,
and with an understanding smile upon his lips. Then the
presence was gone, and the Governor was alone with the
moonlight. He was wide awake now and he moved to turn
on the light, during which he knocked over on the floor a
volume of Lincoln's speeches which had been on the stand
by his bed. As he picked it up he saw the words, "Hew hon-
estly to the line; let the Lord take care of the chips." Then
he knew that he would sign the controversial bill, and he did
sign it. To his surprise he was re-elected that fall to serve his
state even more ably than he had before. His hosts, in the
meantime, had learned his story only to be puzzled by it, or
to put it down to the delusions of a tired and overwrought
mind. Later they were not so sure, for when they came to do
some remodeling in that part of the house, they found a tiny
154 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
closet completely sealed off from the room where their guest
had spent his troubled night and in the closet was the gown
with the stains of Lincoln's blood upon it.
When I first heard of the ghost train which runs one day
each April up the Harlem Division of the New York Central
Railroad, it sounded to me suspiciously like the famous train
that carried Lincoln's body on the long voyage home in the
April of '65. When I told Carl Sandburg about it, he sug-
gested that I look in Lloyd Lewis's Myths After Lincoln,
where indeed, I discovered that Mr. Lewis had published
the story. His version was remarkably like mine and had been
found in an Albany newspaper of a generation ago, where it
was reported as part of the folklore of our area. The principal
difference between his account and mine was that in his the
train was reported running on the Hudson River Division of
the New York Central where it belonged.
There are two trains, actually; the engines of both are old-
timers with wide smokestacks and much polished brass. Their
entire lengths are draped with crepe, giving the impression
of great shrouds on wheels. In the first train there is neither
engineer nor fireman in the cab, but on one of the several
flatcars which follow the engine there is a large band sound-
lessly playing its instruments; over the years the players have
lost all flesh and now are only skeletons. The first train is
followed by a second, this time with a single flatcar, draped
as is the one before it, but on this car is a lonely coffin, noth-
ing more, neither ghost nor skeleton. As the first train ap-
proaches, a black carpet seems to unroll along the track be-
fore it and all sound is blanketed. Men know which day in
spring the ghost trains have passed through, for all clocks
HAUNTED HISTORY ij-
stop and wait five to eight minutes before they begin again.
It must be that the eyes of men are no longer as keen as they
used to be, for there are only a few of the old-timers left who
know why one day each April the trains are all late as they
pull into Chatham. There can be no doubt that it is
Lincoln's train, divided into two sections, but what ghostly
dunderhead has switched it up the Harlem Division, instead
of up the Hudson River Division where it belongs?
War also breeds stories in which the returning dead seem
so like the living that they are mistaken for them, and World
War II was no exception. The reasons are simple enough to
fathom: it is then that families are separated, that death
strikes indiscriminately among the men who have gone to
the services; civilians and servicemen alike think in terms of
death each hour of every day.
For example, there is a story they told in Auburn about a
young man of that city named Captain "Brick" Barton. Cap-
tain Barton was the pilot of one of the B-24's operating from
English bases in the spring of 1943. He was very popular
with his crew, and despite the fact that they had suffered a
number of losses from flak and enemy pursuit planes, their
morale was high. Their most recent loss was Barton's copilot,
who had been hospitalized after the last raid, so that it was a
very young lieutenant on his first combat mission who sat
beside Brick as they took off for Frankfurt. They found their
target, dropped their load, and had just turned for home
when machine-gun fire from a German pursuit plane ripped
through the plastic glass, spattering Brick's blood over the
instrument panel and everything else in sight. Another burst
156 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
ripped into the controls, so that the young copilot took over
and began to fly home a badly messed-up bomber. The cap-
tain was entirely conscious and his mind was remarkably
alert for a man who had taken the punishment he had. Sitting
in his seat, completely relaxed, he refused to go back where
there was more room and where he could lie down. His mind
was on the plane, and as the weather grew soupier and the
motors responded with less and less enthusiasm to the co-
pilot's touch, Brick kept giving him helpful suggestions,
fruits o twenty missions over the Reich. For fifty-seven min-
utes the wise veteran and the youthful novice kept the plane
coming straight through to the field from which they had
departed. As they neared their radio tower, the copilot sig-
naled for an ambulance, for the sudden silence beside him
reminded him of the beating Brick had taken when the bul-
lets came streaming through the plane. No sooner had they
come to a stop and the copilot climbed down, than the flight
surgeon appeared. He complimented the lieutenant on the
way he had brought the damaged ship in. "I never could
have done it, sir, if Captain Barton hadn't given me pointers
all the way back from Frankfurt." The crew gathered beside
the big plane, but only for a second, for the physician who
had gone up to look Brick over was on the ground almost
immediately. He looked at the men, and then for a long sec-
ond at the lieutenant, before he spoke: "Men, I am afraid I
can be of no help to Captain Barton. He was killed instantly
and has been dead now for nearly an hour."
One evening during the war we were having dinner with
John Jacob Niles, the ballad singer. He had just returned
from a cross-country tour and we were swapping ghost tales.
HAUNTED HISTORY
He would tell one and I would tell one; we were having a
wonderful time. During a pause in the conversation when I
was bludgeoning my brains to match a beautifully told story
of his to which we had all listened with horrified delight, the
quiet voice of another guest, Mrs. Richard Eldredge, broke
the silence. "I heard a strange story in New York last week."
She paused, as though she were unwilling to trust herself
with the facts. But this is the story she told.
A gentleman named Oswald Remsen was in New York on
business. As usual, he stayed at the Harvard Club and regu-
larly ate his dinners there. He was on his way thither for
what he feared would be a solitary meal when a red light
prevented his crossing Broadway at Forty-fourth Street. As
he waited he noticed two officers of the R.A.F. right beside
him; they seemed to be checking their wrist watches against
the time flashed on the New York Times Building.
One of them turned to him and asked, "Excuse me, sir,
but is this Times Square?"
He assured them that it was and the three of them walked
across town together. The officers were full of questions, once
they got over a basic shyness. It was, he discovered, their first
trip to New York and they found it very exciting after the
restrictions of England. He remembered afterward that every
block or so one or the other of them would look at his wrist
watch, although this didn't impress him very much at the
time. A few blocks east he asked if they had any plans for
dinner. No, they were quite free. Wouldn't they like to dine
with him at his club? That was very nice of him and they
would be delighted. But as they spoke one of them took a
158 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
covert look at his watch; they looked at each other and
nodded.
It was a good dinner, with coffee and brandy and cigars
over which to linger. They talked of the war, of England, of
Oxford where Mr. Remsen had spent a pleasant, youthful
year. They even discovered a casual acquaintance in com-
mon. They were, he discovered, in the bomber command,
but like many in similar situations, they had no inclination
to talk about that. And every little while one or the other
of them would take a quick look at his watch. Once Mr. Rem-
sen asked rather timidly if he were keeping them from an
appointment elsewhere. They assured him they were having
a fine time. They talked about England and America, what
made them different and in what ways they were alike. They
talked of the world after the war, and their hopes for it. It
was the mature conversation of three intelligent men, dif-
ferent in backgrounds, in ages and in outlooks, but united in
their good will and values.
At five minutes before midnight they looked at their
watches simultaneously and both of them arose.
"Sir, we thank you very much; you have been very kind to
us. In one way it has been the strangest evening of our lives,
you know."
"I don't think I understand," said Mr. Remsen slowly.
"No, of course not. But you see, sir, just twenty-four hours
ago Bill, here, and I were killed over Berlin. And now we
have to be getting back. Good night and thank you."
And with that, both of them disappeared.
There is an American folk classic told during the Spanish
American War and World War I, which both Alexander
HAUNTED HISTORY
Woollcott and Bennett Cerf have reported, but it was told
during World War II in a version more timely and, to my
taste, more touching. I heard it on a day coach of the New
York Central from a woman who happened to sit next to me
from Syracuse to Lyons. She assured me that the circum-
stances were perfectly true. The woman in the story had been
known to friends of hers in the naval base where her own
husband had but recently been stationed, and whence she
was returning home.
Lieutenant Crockfield entered the Navy from civilian life
a few months before Pearl Harbor, and so he saw a good
many of those early, disheartening battles of the Pacific war.
His ship was damaged in one of these conflicts and put into
a Pacific Coast repair base where it stayed for several months.
While these repairs were going on, Mrs. Crockfield joined
her husband for. the best weeks of their lives. He went back
to sea, and she took a small apartment by herself to await
the birth of their child. Letters came quite regularly, consid-
ering that her husband was assigned to a force that was un-
usually active. She kept her mind away from the possibility
that anything could really happen to her husband; tragedy
might strike the husbands of her friends, yes, but never her
husband. The daughter who was born to her was a delight,
and her letters detailed every new development. His in reply
asked a thousand questions and spoke repeatedly of his yearn-
ing to see his wife and the daughter who had come to them.
One evening as she sat by herself rereading the letter that
had arrived that morning, she heard a noise in the child's
room. She went over and opened the door. There in the half-
light stood her husband in his tropical uniform, looking
l6o THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
down at the child. As she started to cry out his name, he
walked swiftly to the door at the opposite end of the room
and, without opening it, passed through to the other side.
After her first excitement and sinking alarm, she came back
to stand by the infant's bed. At her feet she noticed a pool
of water, and as she knelt to examine it she observed some-
thing green floating in it. She picked it up and put it between
two blotters. Later, after the inevitable telegram from the
Navy Department had come, she took the blotters and the
green thing to a friend of her father's who taught marine
botany in one of the California universities. He recognized
it after .some careful checking in the library. It was a fairly
uncommon type of seaweed, found in the South Pacific,
where it grows only on the bodies of the dead.
CHAPTER Six
In general we tend to think of folklore as only the oral
tradition current among unsophisticated people. What we
frequently forget is that there is also an oral tradition among
all sorts and classes of people. The commonest examples from
sophisticated circles are off-color stories, but there is also an
oral tradition of tales of the supernatural which often crop
up during the talk after a good dinner. We might call these
"urban ghost tales." The three stories from World War II
in the previous chapter are good examples.
161
l62 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Stories of this sort not infrequently find their way into
print and there may well be an interplay between the oral
stream and the printed page. The late Alexander Woollcott,
Carl Carmer, and Bennett Cerf have published stories which
they heard among their friends indeed, they have pub-
lished variants o the same stories but try to find some teller
who first met his favorite yarn in print. Always a cousin from
Long Island heard it from his landlady who knew one of
the participants.
We might note some of the characteristics. These stories
are usually told by persons of some education; the timing and
order of events betray an awareness of literary form. The
stories are told by people who do not, generally speaking,
accept the supernatural. The manner of telling is matter-of-
fact, but filled with details which give the impression of
reality and truth. The implication of the style is: "You may
not believe this story. I hardly did myself when I first heard
it, but this is what happened." The supernatural elements
are played down rather than emphasized. The voice does not
change its pitch for the climax but remains quietly confi-
dential and prosaically matter-of-fact. It isn't until the shock
of the climax has passed that the mind rejects what it has
heard.
The classic example of urban ghost lore is generally called
"The Ghostly Hitchhiker" or sometimes "Hitchhiking Hat-
tie." It has been growing and thriving in America for nearly
seventy years but came to full flower thirty-odd years ago. Its
widespread distribution, its acceptance, its curious, piquant
appeal, give it a special place in American folklore.
I recall the first time I heard of the ghostly hitchhiker. It
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER j 5*
must have been about 1920 when my father came home for
lunch one noon and told us of a book salesman who had been
in that morning with a story about a strange experience a
friend of his brother had recently had.
The man had been to a party out in the country near
Albany. About midnight he had bid his host and hostess good
night and started for home in a torrential autumn downpour.
He was driving a coupe, the right door of which was jammed
in such a way that it was impossible to open it. He went
slowly down the highway, peering intently through the area
the windshield wiper made clean for him. As he started to
pass Graceland Cemetery he noticed a girl standing by the
big gates; she was young and slightly built, and she wore a
thin white evening dress. Although she did not signal him
in any way, he had the feeling that only her innate dignity
prevented her from doing so. He pulled up the car and, after
rolling down the window, asked her if she would care to ride
into town. In a quiet voice she thanked him and admitted
that she would appreciate a lift. Because the right-hand door
was broken, he got out of the car and let the girl slide under
the wheel to her seat.
The rain was coming down now in torrents, and the man
was so engrossed with his driving that he paid his rider scant
attention. He did ask her where she was going, and she gave
him an address on Lark Street, not far from his own apart-
ment. They passed a casual word or two as they entered the
city, and he could have sworn later that she was there beside
him five minutes before he pulled up at the address she had
given him. But when that moment came and he turned to
look at her, she just wasn't in the car, although he had
164 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
neither stopped at any point along the way, nor could she
possibly have gotten through the door which was jammed
shut on her side of the car. The girl had just disappeared; if
there had not been a little pool of water on the floor of the
car where it had dripped from her drenched clothing, the
man would have begun to doubt his senses. As it was, he sat
in the car pondering what he ought to do. It was out of sheer
impulse that he got out and climbed the steps of the brown-
stone house at the address she had given him. No sooner had
he rung the bell than he foresaw what a fool he was going
to appear. Just then a light turned on and the door was
opened by a woman in a flannel bathrobe. He tried to figure
out the look on her face but he couldn't. He was sorry to
have awakened her and really, now that he had done so,
he felt very axvkward. But a few miles out of town he had
been driving along past the Graceland Cemetery when he
saw a girl in a white dress and
"You don't need to go on, young man. I know what hap-
pened. It's my daughter again. It often happens on rainy
nights; that's when she seems to want to get home. You un-
derstand, of course, that she has been buried up there for
nearly four years now/'
Thus I heard of Hitchhiking Hattie for the first time,
nearly forty years ago, and I would be willing to wager that
sometime you too have heard a similar story. For the fact is
that this is the most widely told ghost story in America; it
has antecedents and descendants, variants and analogues. A
thousand changes are rung on it but certain elements remain
constant. If we could fathom the total history of this one
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER ! 65
story, its origins, its periods of quiescence and activity, its
borrowings and lendings, its mutations and constants, its
sensitiveness to world events if we understood all this about
this one story we would have the answer to many of the rid-
dles of our folk culture.
First of all, note that the hitchhiking ghost is so lifelike
that it is thought by those who meet her that she is mortal.
It is this misconception that gives the whole group of stories
related to Hattie their point; the woman with whom a living
person has conversed and had commonplace human contacts
is a dead woman. Next, she is going someplace (usually
home), and she accepts the generous invitation of a young
man driving a passing vehicle. When her destination is
reached, she disappears or otherwise makes it evident that
she is not alive. All of the stories which truly belong to this
group fulfill these conditions, but there are others, bearing
only a partial relationship, which also require examination.
Where does a story like this, which is to be found all
over the country, get started? I don't know the answer, but
we can look at the possibilities. First of all, maybe it hap-
pened. It is always told in a manner which implies that this is
a true experience; the name of the city, the exact spot where
the girl is picked up, the name of the street where she wanted
to go, the name of the cemetery, the identification of the man
as a friend of someone known to the narrator all give it
verisimilitude. As you listen and for a few moments after-
ward, you think, "This is a strange experience indeed"; it is
only later that doubt enters in. It has the feeling of realness,
and only those who have never had a vivid, uncanny experi-
ence will wish to stand up and say, beyond all question, posi-
l66 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
lively and finally, "This never could nor did happen to any
man." However, most of us will agree that it is unlikely that
it ever happened, and most unlikely that it has happened in
so many different places over the last two score of years, for
the story is ubiquitous. There is every evidence that this is a
folk tale and suffers the usual sea changes of its kind.
I think that in the nineteenth century there were stories
in America out of which the later form developed. If it is a
folk tale, where did it begin? Nor can I answer that, but I
think that it has developed out of earlier Asiatic and Euro-
pean stories which contain the basic elements. In searching
for Hattie's ancestors we might start with the Chinese. There
is a book by Jon Lee called The Golden Mountain: Chinese
Tales Told in California in which there is a story of a young
man who is walking down the road one time when he meets
a beautiful girl who is weeping. She tells him that she is lost
and begs him to take her home; they walk along together,
but as they approach the house she has indicated, she dis-
appears. When the young man goes to the house, her father
consoles him by saying that this has happened many times
before and he is not to be concerned by it. Except that they
walk instead of ride, this ancient version is very close to the
story as told in this country.
My friend Paul DerOhannesian tells me that his parents
heard it in Turkey fifty years ago from fellow Armenians.
There was a young man, they say, who was traveling on
horseback through a part of the country which was strange
to him. He had been delayed, so it was necessary for him to
ride at night. As he started to pass a cemetery he was dis-
turbed to see a lady sitting beside the roadside, crying. He
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER 167
stopped his horse and asked her what her trouble might be.
She told him that she had to get to a distant town, but that
she was so tired and weak that she didn't have the strength
to make it. He quickly assisted her onto the horse, in front
of himself so that he could hold her on, and they proceeded.
Galloping along he began to notice that she was continually
growing heavier and increasingly difficult to hold. Never,
during the entire ride, did she speak to him. He reached the
town where she wanted to go about dawn, and by that time
he was thoroughly frightened and worried. He dismounted
and tried to help her down; it was then he discovered that
he was holding a corpse. A little crowd of early risers soon
collected and they were quick to put his mind at rest, or at
least that's what they tried to do, when they told him that
she came back in that fashion each year on the anniversary
of her death. They assured him that her relatives would
come along pretty soon and rebury the corpse. The girl's
tendency to grow heavier as the ride goes on is similar to a
trait of the Devil and of Jewish shedim who disguise them-
selves as sheep, or babies, or little men who grow heavier and
heavier before they disappear dramatically.
In the 1890*5 there was a young woman she was dead, of
course who hung around Delmar, just outside Albany, and
whenever a young horseman passed a certain woodland piece
on the way to a party, she would hop up behind him and
not get down until he had reached his destination. From that
same period and from various parts of upstate New York
comes quite a different group of stories which also bear a
relation to Hitchhiking Hattie of a later period. I have heard
the stories from four separate localities: Hoosick Falls, Fort
l68 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Hunter, Belfort, and Milford. There is a remarkable simi-
larity among them, as though they may have had the same
kind of popularity sixty years ago as did Hattie a few years
back. The rider in these stories is always a man, the driver a
regular teamster, and there is invariably something queer
about the rider's face. The way they tell it in Milford is char-
acteristic:
There was a teamster who did a big business hauling
freight across the back roads in Otsego County. "He was a
tremendous fellow, afraid of neither man, beast, nor Devil;
night nor day, it made no difference to him. One dark rainy
night he was hauling freight down the line, when out of the
darkness a man climbed onto the wagon seat right beside
him. Never said a word, just climbed on and sat down. The
teamster looked him over to see whether or not he should
kick him off; he couldn't see much because the man had his
collar turned up and his cap pulled down low. The teamster
didn't know just what to make of it, so they rode on a mile
or two, neither of them saying a word. Then all at once the
man pitched off the side of the wagon into the road. The
teamster pulled up and looked for the fellow, but it was so
tarnation dark he couldn't see nothin'I He yelled for a lan-
tern at a farmhouse up the road, and he and the farmer
searched for the stranger, but he had disappeared; there
wasn't a trace of him. Nobody would have thought much
about it, but a couple of trips later they found the teamster
himself lying in the road with a broken neck. He had fallen
off the wagon at the exact spot where he claimed the man
had disappeared into the darkness." That's the way Mr.
James Rowe told the story, and while he was hardly the man
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER ^9
to believe in ghosts, he allowed that that's what the neigh-
borhood agreed had been riding on the wagon with the team-
ster, and that is what was thought in the other communities
where similar events are retold. Often the rider's face is hard
to see, or it is muffled. The one who rode with Clarence
Hoffman, up in Belfort, climbed on the wagon near a ceme-
tery and brought a clammy chill with his presence; the buf-
falo robe was flat on the seat where his lap ought to have
been.
From this same period, the nineties, comes another story
which bears resemblance to these, but with certain striking
differences. In a number of these early stories one might sus-
pect that the Devil is involved were it not for the assurances
of the narrator that we are dealing here with the dead. And
who knows better than he who tells the tale?
There was a chap everybody called "Red" who worked in
Albany but lived in Kenwood, just south of the city. Every
night as Red walked home from work he was overtaken by a
man driving along in an old-fashioned buggy. Invariably
they spoke to each other and went their separate ways. This
happened for a long time, and then there came a night when
it was raining hard, and that night the driver offered Red a
ride, which he was glad to accept. Red tried to make conver-
sation, but his host gave him no answers, keeping his face
buried in the high collar of his coat. After a while, though,
he did turn his face and Red was shocked at the bright green
eyes which seemed to stare through him, and the skin which
was the color of a dead man's.
"Do you feel sick?" Red asked.
Still the man stared at him while his face changed until it
170 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
was suffused with a pale glow, whereupon he disappeared.
The horse started running faster and faster while the scared
and excited Red did his best to stop him. In this he finally
succeeded and got out of the buggy. The moment his foot
touched the ground, the man reappeared in the seat and
drove away as fast as he could go.
This is a divergence from our normal pattern of the hitch-
hiking ghost, for here the driver himself has returned from
the dead. We shall note other divergences as we move along
through this labyrinth of narrative, but none quite like this
one. These examples and there are scores of others of
forerunners of Hattie should suffice to make it clear that she
did not burst full-grown from the twentieth century, but that
she had ancestors in other lands and earlier times. I am con-
vinced that there is yet to be found a transitional story which
will bridge the gap between the forerunners and the popular,
widespread experience with which we are chiefly concerned.
One link between these early stories and the modern ones
is to be found in the story they tell round Watertown of two
men who were driving toward toira one very stormy night
when they saw a man standing by an intersection of the
highway. They decided that the weather being what it was
they'd give the old fellow a lift. He was a talkative chap, and
when they asked him if they could take him home, he gave
them the address and told them how to get there. Then
there were a few moments of silence, and they turned to
look into an empty back seat. Thinking that he might have
fallen out, they turned around and went back over the road,
but without result. When they went to the address he had
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER 1 7 1
given them, no one had ever heard of the man. They were
still not satisfied and so began a search of old city directories
and other pertinent records. Finally they found what they
were looking for: twenty years before, the man who lived at
that address had been killed at the very intersection where
they had picked him up.
It is significant, perhaps, that this is the only instance I
have heard in the twentieth-century versions in which the
rider is a lone man and the only one in which the residents
of his house could not identify the rider. I say "lone man"
because there is a curious case reported from Rochester of
an old man and old woman who got into a car near the Holy
Sepulchre Cemetery and asked to be taken to the main four
corners in the heart of Rochester, but who had disappeared
when the driver reached that spot. Except for these two
stories, our modern riders are always women. And with a
few exceptions, they are young women, girls in their late
teens or early twenties. The majority of exceptions concern
a nun, but one inversion of the usual circumstances concerns
a little old lady whom a young couple picked up by the gates
of a cemetery not far from East Homer, in the Finger Lakes
country. It was a wretched night, what with the wind and
thunder and lightning, and she said she was grateful for the
lift. Finally she leaned over the front seat and said, "If you'll
stop right up the road a ways, I'll get out in front of that
white house." But when, a moment later, the man stopped
the car, she was not there. The young man was excited and
went up to the door of the house, where a young woman
answered his ring. She heard him out and then said, with an
1 yg THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
air that indicated that it had happened often before, "That
was my mother; she has been dead about seven days now/'
But the rider, as I say, is usually young, often very pretty.
Her clothes are frequently a matter of note, for usually she
is dressed as for a party, often in evening clothes and not in-
frequently in white. They say that by a bridge between Rome
and Syracuse there used to appear quite frequently a girl in
her bridal gown, a girl who was killed on that spot as she
started out on her honeymoon. She gets in the car, and as
soon as she is over the bridge she disappears. Once in a while
the girls prove to be individualists and appear in red or plaid
or even a dark dress.
This girl who wanted to cross the bridge (apparently one
of the few American ghosts who had trouble crossing water)
is unusual, for most of her sister spirits either are standing
by the roadside or near a cemetery when they are picked up.
If it is by a cemetery, it is the one in which her body is
buried; if it is by the roadside, it is often the spot where she
met her death by accident in the Binghamton area this
used to be at a bad curve on Route 17, between Elmira and
Endicott, known as the Devil's Elbow. The weather, which
is usually stormy, is described and the type of automobile
sedan (the most frequent), coupe, or even truck or bus
made clear. All this gives the listener the sense of verisimili-
tude which helps to account for the almost universal appeal
of the story.
By and large, the behavior of these girls once they get in
the car varies but little. Many of them are silent, except for
the bare details of their home addresses; a few talk for a
while, then lapse into silence. Sometimes the disappearance
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER 1 73
comes very soon, sometimes after a ride of several miles;
others of the hitchhikers remain in the car up to the moment
when the car draws to a stop. A whole group of them get out
of the car and go in the house, but they present special prob-
lems and will be considered by themselves. A few of the girls,
instead of being shy and demure, enjoy a good time.
The scene is the busy Albany-Schenectady road, the main
artery between those two cities. There was a young chap who
worked in Schenectady but lived in Albany, as many do. One
evening he was driving home when he saw an attractive lass
standing by the road and he offered her a ride. They chatted
together, and she was a swell kid, such a swell kid that he
suggested a date the next night. So it was agreed they
would meet right where they had that night, at the same
hour. She told him her name and he left her at her home.
The next night was like the one before, only more fun, and
the young fellow knew that he was beginning to fall in love.
Each night they met and played and parted at her door, until
there came a night when she wasn't at the meeting place. He
waited around for a while and then went to her home. When
the middle-aged woman came to the door he asked if Mary
were home.
"You mean my daughter Mary?" the woman asked in-
credulously.
"Yes, I'm Harry. I've been dating her, you know. I've
brought her home here every night for nearly two weeks/'
"My dear boy, my daughter Mary has been dead for ten
years, and no other Mary has ever lived in this house."
Because Harry couldn't get the affair out of his mind, he
cracked up and went to a hospital for the insane, a not un-
1 74 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
common experience for these drivers.
There is considerable variety in the climax of the Hitch-
hiking Hattie stories based on discovery of the simple, if
unusual, fact that the girl who has seemed so sadly real is
not alive at all, and has not been for some time. Usuallv,
having discovered that his guest is missing, the driver goes
to the door and learns the truth from the girl's mother. The
method by which she identifies her daughter may be by her
name, by a description of her and her clothing, which is the
same as what she wore when she died or when she was buried.
Sometimes the identification is made by an article left in the
car, a scarf or a handkerchief, for example. Sometimes the
young man identifies her by a picture which he sees in the
living room, usually on the piano.
I have two stories which do not belong to the hitchhiking
tradition, but which have in common with it this identifica-
tion of the active dead by a photograph. One of these comes
from northern Italy where the events here told about oc-
curred to a man who was said to have been living in Sche-
nectady a decade ago. This man and a friend of his were
schoolboys when these events took place. There was a dance
at the next village and they begged a ride from a farmer who
was going in that direction with a wagon. After a few miles
the fanner took a different turn from the one they wanted,
so that they had to walk the rest of the way. Sitting on a mile-
stone at the crossroads was a young boy who called to them
and asked if they would do him a favor. After assuring him-
self that they were headed for his village, he asked if they
would carry a message to his parents. They agreed to do so
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER
right after the dance; he gave them the message and the
address. They had started on down the road a few feet when
one of them looked back; at this open crossroads, where there
was no possible hiding place, the boy they had left but a few
seconds before was nowhere to be seen.
But these were young bucks on the way to a dance and
they had no time to worry over mysteries. It was a good
dance, and they stayed until the musicians went home. It
was late but they decided that they should deliver the mes-
sage as they had agreed to do. They wandered through the
dark streets until they found the house they were seeking
and knocked at the door. An old lady came to open it.
"Does the Matrelli family live here?"
"Yes. I am Signora Matrelli."
"We have a message from your son."
Signora Matrelli left the doorway, but in a moment or
two her husband took her place. He was an angry man and
began to give the boys a sharp lecture on the fundamentals
of human decency and human kindness. The boys were
puzzled. What had they done? They brought a message and
they intended to deliver it.
"The documents which you are searching for everywhere
are in the top drawer of the bureau where you have already
looked, but under the paper in the bottom of the drawer."
Signore Matrelli turned on his heel and walked into the
house. Shortly afterward they heard a shout and he came
back to the door waving a paper.
Now he was all apologies. His wife had thought this was
a cruel prank, for their son had been killed at a country
crossroads six months before. But there was one thing he
176 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
would like the young men to do for him. He brought out a
group picture and asked if they could find the likeness of
the boy who had given them the message. They didn't have
the slightest difficulty doing it.
Another story involving a photograph was current in Al-
bany during the depression of the early thirties. A woman
was leaving one of the Catholic churches in Albany when she
met an old friend on the steps, with whom she stopped to
talk. In the course of their chat she said that for weeks she
had been praying for some sort of job, but that as yet her
prayers had gone unanswered. Her friend persuaded her to
go back into the church with her, and as they were leaving a
few minutes later, a young man came up to them and asked
if either of them was seeking employment. The woman said
that she wanted work as a housekeeper or as a companion, so
the young man gave her the name and address of a lady who
had just such an opening in her home. The next day the
woman went to the address and asked if there were anyone
there who needed a housekeeper and companion. The lady
of the house said that she certainly did, but she was surprised
to have anyone apply for the place because she had told no
one of her need. The woman pointed to a picture on the wall
and said, "Why, that's the young man who came up to me as
I came out of church yesterday morning and gave me your
name and address."
"My dear woman, that is hardly possible. That is a picture
of my son who died six months ago."
These two stories, coming from widely separated sources
and thirty years apart in time, bear a certain kinship to the
hitchhiking pattern, without belonging to it. In both in-
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER 1 77
stances, besides the identification of the ghost by the picture,
we have his considerateness of his family, an attitude com-
parable to Hattie's desire to get home to her family; we have
the seemingly accidental meeting of mortal and revenant, the
deception and eventual enlightenment of the former. Notice,
too, that in the Italian story we have a dance, an element
which, as we shall see, is a common feature of one group of
the hitchhiking stories.
Since we have digressed at this point, we might as well go
still further afield to consider the prophesying nun, whose
appearances were on so many people's tongues in the fall of
1941. In New York State it was reported from Buffalo to the
Hudson Valley. Basically it is the same story as the one they
tell about Hattie, except that the nun always made a predic-
tion about the war, frequently that it would be over in De-
cember of that year. It is noteworthy that in the towns near
Kingston, the nun was thought to be Mother Cabrini, the first
native American saint, of whom are told scores of miraculous
tales.
I was anxious to see if just once one could find the driver
of the car. My search took me down one blind alley after
another; finally I accepted what I should have known when
I began: folklore isn't history, it's art.
A taxi driver in uptown Kingston had a fare one day in
the autumn of 1941 who was a nun. When she got into the
car he was impressed by the fact that she looked very much
like Mother Cabrini to whose memory he was particularly
devoted. She said that she wanted to go to the Sacred Heart
Orphanage and they started out. They began to talk about
the war and the chance that we would enter it, a prospect
178 THINGS raAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
which disturbed the man very much. She reassured him that
the whole struggle would be over before December 8. Shortly
after making this prediction she fell into silence, but he
thought nothing of it until he pulled up at the orphanage
and turned around to find his cab empty.
I have heard thirteen versions of this story of the nun who
prophesies and disappears, and it seems to bear a significant
relationship to another story which was current at the same
time, one which concerns a prophecy but no ghostly dis-
appearance (of these I have nearly an equal number). They
told, for example, of a man and his wife who were driving
down on Long Island when they gave an old man a ride.
Like everyone else, they talked about the war and when it
would be over. With great confidence the stranger said that
it would be over in September, 1942. The couple was some-
what incredulous and took no pains to hide the fact. "It is as
true," he said, "as that there will be a dead man in this car
before you reach home." Shortly after that, he asked them
to stop and let him out. They drove along for a while until
they came to a crowd in the road where there had been an
accident. The State Police asked them to carry a man who
had been hurt to the hospital and they willingly agreed. But
on the way to the hospital the man who had been in the
accident died.
From a literary point of view the best of the stories of
mysterious riders are the ones which come to their close by
the girl's grave, where there is indisputable proof of her
recent journeyings forth. Let me offer you two versions, each
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER
of which, with its relatively minor differences, represents a
variation in the ways the people like to retell it.
There were two fellows who were driving a two-door sedan
toward Schenectady. As they started to pass St. Patrick's
Cemetery they saw a young woman in a white evening gown
standing in the middle of the road. She signaled to the men,
and when they stopped for her she asked if they would take
her to her home in Schenectady. The men were in the front
seat, and she sat in the rear by herself. She was cold sitting
back there alone, so one of the men took off his coat and she
put it around her. When they got to the address, she asked
them, as a great favor, to wait a few moments till she went in
the house she would only be a moment. Then, as if it were
an afterthought, she said laughing, "If I haven't come out in
an hour, you'd better come in and get me." As she turned to
go, she tossed a gossamer evening scarf to one of the boys.
Just why they waited for her, they never knew but they did.
After a spell of sitting they both began to be restless and
annoyed as men will who have to wait for a woman long
before the hour was up. Finally the man who was missing
his coat went up and rang the doorbell. When an elderly lady
answered it, he asked if he could speak to the young woman
who had entered the house an hour before. There had been
no one entering the house that evening, and no young
woman lived there. It was then that the man noticed the
picture over the fireplace. "There she is, that's the girl who
came in here with my overcoat a little while ago."
"But that couldn't be possible. That is my daughter who
has been dead these many years."
It was then that he showed her the scarf, and she had tc
1 80 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
admit that it was identical to one which had been her
daughter's favorite. Puzzled and dissatisfied, he went back to
the car. They did their errand in town and started home. As
they passed St. Patrick's Cemetery they slowed down.
"Stop the car. I want to look at something."
He got out and walked inside the fence. On a little rise
near the roadway was a small, neat gravestone. What had
attracted his attention was his overcoat, draped over the front
of the monument.
By this time you have probably had all you want of this
girl who cannot stay put once she has been buried, but who
must forever be getting strange men to take her home. One
more and we shall have finished with her. This is the version
told by a member of New York City's police department and
the scene is Brooklyn. Many isolated strands which we have
seen scattered through the other versions are all brought to-
gether into the fabric of this one, which is my favorite.
Patrolman Anderson lived in Brooklyn, but his beat was
up in Harlem. One night as he was on his way home in the
subway, he looked across the aisle and saw a fellow staring at
him. He stared right back. Finally he asked the man, "Don't
I know you?"
"I don't know. My name is Jack Larson."
"Sure it is. I thought I knew you. I haven't seen you for a
long time. Where've you been?"
"Well, I've been away. As a matter of fact, I only just got
out of the hospital. Some people think I lost my mind. Me,
I'm not so sure."
At this, Anderson moved over beside him and listened as
the train hustled along the tracks.
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER 1 8 1
"I had a friend who worked on the docks with me. One
night we stopped in at a gin mill to have a drink before going
home. There was a cute-looking girl sitting at the bar, so we
went over and began talking to her. Then we bought her a
drink and had one ourselves. I guess maybe we even bought
a couple of drinks. When we were ready to leave we asked
her if we could take her home I had an old wreck of a car
I was driving then. She said, all right, she was ready to go.
But when I told her to get her wraps, she said she didn't have
any. We went outside and it was cold, so I slipped off a heavy
sweater I was wearing and told her to put it on. I asked for
her address and she gave it to me, but when we were still a
number of blocks from her house, she said she wanted to get
out. I told her she didn't want to get out by no old cemetery
and that I would gladly take her home and just leave her
there. But she said she'd walk the rest of the way; she didn't
want her folks to know that she'd been at a gin mill and
picked up a couple of fellows. She was stubborn about it, so
we let it go at that and drove off by ourselves.
"But she had gone off with my sweater. I didn't think
much about it, but a few days later my friend and I decided
that we'd like to see her again. There was something about
that girl a man couldn't forget. We didn't see her around the
joint where we had picked her up, so we went around to the
address she had given us and asked the old lady who came
to the door if Alice was there she'd told us her name was
Alice. She said there wasn't any girl lived there by that name
now. Well, we told her ho%v we met Alice and about the
sweater and about how we brought her home or almost
home that other night.
l82 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
"She listened to us for a few minutes and then said to come
inside. 'You wait here a minute/ She went off and came back
with a picture. She showed us a picture of Alice and we said
that was the girl. There was a long silence then and we
started to leave. Then she said very slowly, 'That girl is dead.
She is my own daughter. If you see her again, you let me
know/
"The two of us went home, but the thing preyed on our
minds. A few days later this friend of mine I've been telling
you about was working with me on the barge and he started
to cross the plank we used as a gangplank. He got in the
middle of the thing and he began to choke; he put his hands
up to his throat as though someone were strangling him, and
when he did it he lost his balance and fell into the water, be-
tween the barge and the dock. So far as we could tell, he never
came up. Not even once.
"By this time I was getting more and more nervous. I
decided to go see a doctor. He told me to go away for a while.
I did, but that didn't help any; all these strange things were
on my mind all the time. I got worse instead of better. I was
sure I would be next. All the time I was afraid I was going
to die. The doc, he said I had to prove to myself the girl was
really dead, because if she was really dead, she couldn't hurt
me. He said, if she was in her grave and if I was sure of it, I
wouldn't worry any more. That seemed reasonable, because
if she was in her grave she couldn't be in no gin mill or any
other place. So the doc and I went to see the mother, but she
wouldn't agree to having the girl's body dug up; nobody was
going to touch her girl's grave. After we left her, the doc, he
THE GHOSTLY HITCHHIKER 183
kept saying how it was necessary that I be sure in my own
mind that she was buried, or I would lose my mind.
"We went out to the cemetery, the two of us, and we talked
to the head gravedigger, and after we slipped him some
money, he said O.K., but he didn't like it. It might get him
into a heap of trouble. That night we went out there. We
found Alice's grave and began work. It was tough going be-
cause it was winter and there was snow. It was awful cold and
the ground was terrible hard. About halfway down, the
gravedigger lit out, said he didn't think he ought to be there.
We got down to the rough box, and doc was bushed and
said he'd leave me to finish it up alone. I'd be all right,
wouldn't I?
"I was all right. The moon was bright and I could see
what I was doing. I pried the top off with a crowbar and then
lifted the lid off the coffin itself. Alice was in the box all right
or what was left of her. But she was wearing my sweater."
Why do these girls wander along our highways, waiting
for the driver who will stop? They are lonely, wet, unhappy;
they want to go home to the warmth and protection of their
mothers. But they don't quite get there; instead they go back
to the grave. But they return next week or next year to
embarrass or sadden the living. They are not yet at rest. Be-
side the road filled with high-powered cars, overhead the jets
flying, they stand patiently waiting in the rain.
I used to have a neighbor highly trained in the teachings
of Dr. Freud. He explained to me once why this story sur-
vives and thrives in an unbelieving age. I listened quite
politely, then we had a drink and talked of other things. I
184 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
prefer to leave its popularity a mystery, as I prefer to leave
many things mysteries. I'm not one of the "old believers"
Robert Frost speaks of, but on the other hand, I have tried
to avoid any taint of the scientific. It's getting harder and
harder to do. Good night, Hattie.
NOTES AND SOURCES
The bibliography of ghost lore and especially of ghost lore in
America is not very extensive, nowhere near as extensive as the
bibliography o witchcraft, for example. There is no American
book so comprehensive as T. F. Thiselton Dyer's The Ghost
World (London and Philadelphia, 1893), with the possible ex-
ception of William Oliver Stevens's Unbidden Guests: A Book of
Real Ghosts (New York, 1945), which I am happy to recommend.
There are a few collections of American ghost tales which the
hauntophile ought to have on his shelf:
John Bennett, The Doctor to the Dead: Grotesque Legends
and Folk Tales of Old Charleston (New York, 1946);
Carl Carmer, The Screaming Ghost and Other Stories (New
York, 1956), a retelling of a score of tales by upstate New York's
master raconteur;
Jeanne de Lavigne, Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans (New
York, 1946);
Hector Lee, The Three Nephites (Albuquerque, N. M.,
1949), a scholarly study of Mormon ghost stories;
Marion Lowndes, Ghosts that Still Walk: Real Ghosts of
America (New York, 1941);
Danton Walker, Spooks Deluxe (New York, 1956), a col-
lection of stories told by sophisticated friends of the author;
Henry Yelvington, Ghost-Lore (San Antonio, Texas, 1936),
a Texas collection.
Some of the stories told in this volume appeared in different
versions in my juvenile, Spooks of the Valley (Boston, Houghton
Mifflin, 1947).
In general, these stories were collected by students at New
185
l86 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
York State College for Teachers, Albany, between 1940 and 1946.
In the following sections the names of the collector and his in-
formant will appear unless a source is given in the main text.
Preface from an Old Hang Yard
The folklore of Cooperstown is best found in the following
books by James Fenimore Cooper (the Younger): The Legends
and Traditions of a Northern County (Cooperstown, 1920) and
Reminiscences of Mid-Victorian Cooperstown and Sketch of Wil-
liam Cooper (Cooperstown, 1936).
CHAPTER i: Introducing the Dead
The story of Ferris, the lively corpse, was told to Helen KIoss
of Albany by her mother. The tale of the man who milked the
cow was overheard on a bus by Peggy Palmatier on April 20,
1946; Mrs. Walter J. Drew, who told Nevalyn C. Bruce about the
woman who appeared in church at the time of her suicide, is a
nurse and student of genealogy in Schenectady. Stephen H. Side-
botham heard of the procession of headless ghosts from Mr. and
Mrs. Nathan Cottrell of Groveside; the story of the old German
with his rifle full of charms was told to Doris Little by Mrs. Mary
Redington, an elderly citizen of Otego. Albert Schaff, once sher-
iff of Lewis County, gave Genevieve Smithling the account of the
headless milker, and Jane Ruth Cothren heard of the Revolu-
tionary soldier from Miss Cora Outhouse. The worker at the
Watervliet arsenal was Charles Beidle, who told his story to Janet
Gould. Steve Sidebotham heard of the bloody hands from the
Cottrell family mentioned above. Mrs. John O'Brien of Herkimer
heard about the talking hair from the woman who heard it talk,
and Mrs. O'Brien told Shirley Wurz (now Dean Wurz). Ruth
Layne collected the story of the disconnected ghost from John
Parker, a barber in Poughkeepsie. My filing system seems to have
broken down so that my sources for the Quaker lady from Troy
are incomplete sorry. The Death Coach material came from a
NOTES AND SOURCES 1 87
number of students: Ruth Donovan, who collected from Mrs.
May Gagnon of a French-Canadian family in Cohoes and from
Mrs. Frank Gero, Cohoes millworker; Herbert Ford from Mrs.
John J. Quinn; Mrs. Ruth G. Nevin from Miss Marian Fitzpat-
rick, teacher in Troy High School.
CHAPTER 2: Why They Return
The grandfather who put on his pants was seen by Mrs. Wil-
liam Ten Broeck of Albany who told Catherine Martin; the mur-
derous veteran was described to Flo Garfall of Johnstown by
two neighbors, Mrs. Nina Precopia Colletta and her daughter,
Mrs. Angelina Precopia Renado. The widow of Glenmont story
was told by Louella Wilkes of Delmar to Eleanor Wagner. The
Schoharie father who beat his daughter's suitor was a story re-
counted to Ruth Layne by Bill Henderson of Schoharie. The
husband who sought his wife's forgiveness lived just outside Bos-
ton and the story was remembered by Mrs. E. Pettit when she
talked to Marjorie Verch in Albany. The story of Mrs. McDer-
mott, who broke up poker playing in Lowville, was also collected
by Marjorie Verch, but from Daniel O'Brien, teacher and lawyer.
Mrs. R. S. Jones of Ilion was raised in Walton and told her
granddaughter, Peggy Palmatier, about the octagon house. The
story of the priest who directed the repairs on his church was told
to Louise C. Welch by her Albany neighbor, Miss Catherine
Sweeney.
An Irish version of the story of the priest and mass is told by
James O'Beirne in New York Folklore Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 3.
In this version the priest is the great Father Matthew. Father
Eugene Serafin, O.F.M., Croghan, told Geraldine M. Rubar
about the Wellsville priest. The tale of the priest who rattled
the safe comes from Mrs. James Clancy, who told Dorothy Stew-
art in Albany. Anecdote about the priest in Toledo, Canada, was
reported to Genevieve Smithling of Lowville by her mother, Mrs.
Leo Smithling. Margaret Byrne collected the story of the Visita-
l88 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
tion Parish, Brooklyn, from Joan Hylind who heard it from her
paternal grandmother of Huntington, Long Island. Dennis Han-
nan of Glens Falls told his namesake and grandson about St.
Mary's Church in that town. The lady who told Lorraine Malo
of the ghostly church service in Formicola "did not wish to have
her name revealed." Jewish ghost stories are very rare, if my ex-
perience is trustworthy. Abraham Shohan, from whom Rosalind
V. Kemmerer collected this one of ghosts in the synagogue, was
born in Smorgon, Poland, came to the United States about 1902,
graduated from M.I.T., worked on the Panama Canal, ultimately
became a farmer near Rhinebeck.
The story of the sailors at Sodus Bay came from Mrs. Alice
Bray McGinty of Albany; Ed Strecker of East Chatham told John
Witthoft about the boss of the cheese factory. The tale of old
Jim, the drunk, comes from Pauline L. Petersen, who heard it
from Sarah Jump of Elnora. There are a number of stories from
Charles Austin of Utica in my archive, collected by Lauretta Ser-
vatius, a friend of Mrs. Austin's daughter, Edna. Mr. Austin
conies from New Hampshire, is a machinist and inventor in one
of the Utica mills. Three Polish stories in this chapter were told
to Felicia Zielinski by her grandmother, Mrs. T. Hermus, who
came here from Valno, Poland; the first of them concerns the
elopers. The bridegroom who rescued his bride from the dead
was collected by Herbert W. Ford from Catherine Quinn of Al-
bany. This is one of those nubbins left from a longer, more elabo-
rate tale, told with colorings and decorations long since worn
away. For a Scottish relative which has kept its full detail, go
look up "Tarn Lin" (number 35) in Professor Francis James
Child's English & Scottish Popular Ballads. The St. Agnes' School
ghost story comes from Catherine Sweeney, who told it to Louise
C. Welch. Lorna Kunz of Westmoreland heard about Mr. De-
Vinney from her mother, Mrs. Walter Kunz.
The story of the miserly parents of East Schodack came to Mrs.
Ruth Geiser Nevin from Miss Ella Bedell, R.F.D., Troy. The
tale of the sinful father and his reckless son was told to Constance
NOTES AND SOURCES 1 89
T. Titterington by Isabel Malby of Albany. Mrs. Sue de Peystei
reported on the mother who directed her daughter to the right
bedroom. The Polish story of the road-walking mother came from
Felicia Zielinski, whose grandmother told it. Michael Welch,
once Postmaster of Mechanicville, but born in Waterford, Ire-
land, told his granddaughter, Frances Welch, the story credited
to him. The story of the Pole buried on his left side is from Mary
Straub, who heard it from her mother, Mrs. Joseph Straub, who
lives in Chester, where Polish citizens have developed one of the
onion-growing centers of the country. Katherine Egord Jackson
learned about the goose woman from her mother-in-law, Mrs.
Vera Jackson, who came to this country from Pruzhany as a
young girl, now lives in Queens Village, Long Island.
James Casey of Schenectady told his wife about the widower
and his wife's shoes; he had heard it in Dublin, Eire, from a Mrs.
Garrity, who told it to a friend of Mr. Casey's on the eve of the
friend's second marriage. Mrs. Madeline Cote heard of the soli-
citous mother from a Rensselaer beauty-shop operator named
Janice.
For more about Pang Yang, see Warren Sherwood's History
of the Town of Lloyd (New Paltz, N.Y., 1953); for more about
Jemima Wilkinson, see Whitney Cross's The Burnt-Over District
(Ithaca, 1950). See also Mr. Sherwood's book of poems, full of
folklore and local color, Poems of the Platt Binnewater, com-
piled by Mabel E. L. Lent (New Paltz, N.Y., 1958).
The story of the brakeman who woke his mother was collected
by Boyd R. Severn from his mother, who heard it from a practi-
cal nurse who cared for her; this is a Michigan story. Anne Mur-
phy's mother, Isabel, told her about her neighbors, the Goodells,
up in the Fairfield section. The tale of the hunters of Nyack was
remembered by Leo Heymann of Congers, who told Shirley
Gross. Shirley Hartz's family have lived in Callicoon for four
generations; it was from a neighbor, Henry Ferber, that the story
of the warning in the tannery came. Chuck Tolley himself told
Richard Dimock, toolmaker and scoutmaster of Ilion, about the
1QO THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
phantom brakeman; Mr. Dimock told Claire Crump who re-
ported it. The Polish lady of the manor is another story told by
Mrs. Hermus to Felicia Zielinski.
CHAPTER 3: Haunted Houses
The nailed door is a story told Louise Welch by Henry Aus-
tin. Harold W. Thompson published the story of the Harden-
berg Mansion in Body, Boots and Britches (Philadelphia, 1940),
the great New York State folklore compendium; it was also col-
lected by my student, Ruth Fasoldt. Huldah H. Wendt says the
Alder Creek story was general knowledge when she was a girl in
that area. The tale of the furniture-moving ghost in Waterford
was remembered by Mrs. Brouillette, an elderly lady of French-
Canadian birth, long a resident of Waterford. A friend of Mary
Studebaker, Mr. Wodin of Crescent, learned of the ghost there
from his cousin who lived in the haunted house (Mr. W. wouldn't
ordinarily have believed in ghosts but his cousin was a very reli-
able fellow). It was Mary Ann Ditto's family that lived in the
house in Port Byron soon after they arrived from Italy; she told
Ruth Blake. Shirley Wurz heard of the Port Leyden ghost from
Mrs. John O'Brien. There are literally scores of stories of ghostly
lights; these have been chosen at random. Thelma Gertrude Bar-
low's people have lived in and around Schenectady for genera-
tions; her story of hidden money comes from her mother. The
dismal tale from Waterford was told to Harold Weber, Jr., by
his mother.
"Four Months in a Haunted House" appeared in the Novem-
ber, 1934, Harper's Magazine, but the author had described his
experience to me before the artide was published. The New York
Times carried an extended daily account of the Herrmanns' diffi-
culties; an excellent summary with pictures was in Life, March
10, 1958, entitled "House of Flying Objects."
When Jane Heath worked in the American Locomotive Works
in Schenectady she heard about the girls and the piano player
NOTES AND SOURCES 1Q1
from Mary Mele, who had heard it from her mother. The story
of the blood spot was collected by Huldah Wendt from Mrs.
Henry Powell. Mr. Herman Schreiber, -who gave his granddaugh-
ter, Dorothea Silvernail, the charm for getting rid of ha'nts, was
born near Leipzig, Germany; he came to this country about 1888
and settled near Boston Corners, New York. Patricia Dunning
heard about the wailing baby from her friend, Beth Harper,
whose grandfather had heard the cries as he passed the lonely
chimney.
The tale of the widow of Sag Harbor comes to us from Lois
Holstein, whose college friend, Eloise Worth, is a Sag Harbor
native. The story of the happy crowd at Shelter Island was re-
called by Mrs. Alfred Renshaw and told to Jean Adams in New-
tonville. The story of the mother and child under the porch was
told to Lorraine DeSeve by Lillian Carroll, an Albany secretary
who summers in Vermont. Joan Quinn heard of the tale of the
money behind the paintings from Mrs. P. McCormick of Troy.
Barbara Updyke and Grace Shults, collecting as a team, got the
story of the house where the murder was re-enacted from Mrs.
Irene Lockwood of Warnerville, who heard the story from her
mother and father.
I have three versions of the house that wasn't there, all very
similar, all located in the Albany-Troy area: I have used the ver-
sion written out for me by Sunna Cooper, who did not take the
folklore course but knew I was interested. Lorraine Malo has a
version about an inn outside Albany, told to her by Julia Geno-
vesi, a college student of Italian background. And out in Painted
Post, Paul Penrose heard the tale from Clyde K. Cook, but in
that version it concerned a back road near Troy.
During the war many of my students married, and some of
them, in doing their folklore field work, learned a good deal
about their new parents-in-law and the traditions which were
theirs. Jane Weir Damino was one of these girls, and it was from
her father-in-law, Horace Damino, bora in Castiglione, Italy,
that the account of his mother came. Another family tradition
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
came from Vincenzo Rossomondo, told to Fannie Verdiani of
Syracuse. And the story of the coffin full of gold was told by Peter
Marchetta to Jane Heath.
Mrs. James Huntington first told me about Elizabeth Phelps,
but I have also heard the tale since from the good doctor himself.
There is a charming book by Dr. James Lincoln Huntington,
with photographs by Samuel Chamberlain, called Forty Acres
(New York, 1949).
CHAPTER 4: Violence and Sudden Death
Louis Neubauer first reminded me of the Cherry Hill ghost;
for an account of the murder, see Trial of Jesse Strang for the
Murder of John Whipple (Albany, 1827). F <>r the story of the
Woman in White, see West Bank of the Hudson River: Albany
to Tappan (Coxsackie, N.Y., 1906). Clarice Weeks, who was
weaned on the local history of Greene County, found Sam Fris-
bee, retired guide, in Athens, New York.
The story of the spirit in the water came from Mrs. Rose Ma-
lerba, Albany, who told it to Frances M. D'Antonino. Dorothea
Silvernail heard about Red Halloran's car from a Millerton
schoolboy, Richard Miller, who had heard it in New York City.
Both Paul Penrose and Isabel Campbell collected the story of
the two hunters from Henry A. Austin of St. Regis Falls. Miss
Campbell's version spots the scene as near Jennings Mountain be-
tween Saranac and Tupper Lake. That repulsive liver story came
from Florence Garfall who was something of a character herself
fifteen years ago-and she heard it from Mrs. Grace Velardi of
Johnstown, who was born in Copasela, near Naples, Italy.
According to Doris Shultes, Gordon Peattie of Beacon can take
you to the tree where the Hughsonville ghost watches. For fact
and fancy about Captain Kidd, see Willard Hallam Bonner's
Pirate Laureate: The Life and Legends of Captain Kidd (New
Brunswick, N.J., 1947). The GOD charm was collected by Al-
NOTES AND SOURCES l g
len Simmons from Miss Kathryn Slader of Jug City, near LeRoy;
this treasure, by the way, was also protected by a man ten feet
high-treasure's still there. There's a lot of Tory gold up in the
Helderbergs near Berne, where Frank Hochstrasser, owner of
White Sulphur Springs Park, told Ed Tompkins the charm for
finding treasure. The Italian story of the little boy and the tat-
tered fisherman was collected by Jane Heath from Mary Mele,
whose mother was born in Italy and told it to her. "Mazzo Mao-
riello" came from James Quini, now of Amsterdam, New York-
born in Supino, in the province of Frosinone, Italy who told
the story to his daughter, Victoria. The Trenton, New Jersey,
ghost story was told to Margaret Seiffert by Mrs. S. N. Hanna,
whose mother knew the woman who found the money.
The Pine Plains rope story was collected by Lulu Kisselbrack
from Horace Bowman, whose family history has long been in-
tertwined with the doings of Pine Plains. One of the farmers at-
tending the Katsbaan church told the story to the summer pas-
tor, Reverend Donald Swarthout, who told Jane Waldbillig. The
story from Saugerties about the attic with no lights is from Ei-
leen Pierce, collected from Mary Emerick, who heard it from her
grandmother, Mrs. Shultz of High Woods. Mrs. Edna Leona
Jones Smith collected the story of the telephone-dialing spook
from her sister, Katherme J. Kinney of Ilion. The fishing ghost
of the Kuyahoora Valley was part of the local tradition when
Henry W. Wicks was growing up in those parts.
I first learned of the Pink House of Wellsville from a 1939
Master's thesis at New York State College for Teachers by Mar-
garet T. Flanagan, History and Folklore of Allegany County,
written under the direction of Professor Harold W. Thompson.
Then, my student Theodora Hoornbeck collected the story from
Helena Higgins in nearby Hornell. The final story is from Pro-
fessor Thompson's Folklore Archive at Cornell, collected by Mrs.
Edward W. Wilson of Ithaca, who heard it from Mr. Ceil Osbeck
of Wellsville.
194 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
CHAPTER 5: Haunted History
The Indian chief of Conesus Lake was a favorite story of
George Sackett, storekeeper of that area, who told Harold Ash-
worth, not to mention hundreds of other summer customers. The
Indian Lake story was collected by Edith and Helen Caldwell
from Mrs. John S. Fish of Morrisonville, formerly a teacher at
Indian Lake, whose husband descended from Chief Sabeal. "All
the kids know the story of Hootin' Boys Hollow," according to
Jean Hansen, who was a high-school sophomore fifteen years ago
when she told it to Fred Beyer. Mrs. Ann Hamilton of Painted
Post was ninety-three when she told Lucille Grants about the
horse that appeared to her when she was nine. Lois Hampel Kra-
mer was lucky enough to collect from Percy M. Van Epps, his-
torian of Schenectady County, who told her about the "last of
the Mohawks." Nick Wolsey and his revenge is taken from an ex-
cellent Master's thesis written at New York State College for
Teachers by Charles F. Wilde, Ghost Legends of the Hudson
Valley (Albany, 1937).
The Frenchmen's duel at Fort Niagara was a story collected by
Jeannette Buyck from Mrs. Leslie Moore of Henrietta. My college
roommate and gentle friend, Reverend Wheaton P. Webb, some-
time chronicler of the country about Worcester (New York, of
course), tells me he heard of Hansel of Warnerville from Grandma
Mary Thurber. The ghosts of Fort Ontario were described by
W. J. Goad in the Oswego Palladium-Times, February 28, 1941.
The Fort Johnson material comes from Marguerite D. Bost-
wick, who learned about the Wilson family and its experience
there from Miss Annie E. Wilson, who was nearly a hundred
years old and in the Home for Elderly Women in Amsterdam,
New York. The hoax at Fort Johnson is reported by Jeptha R.
Simms in History of Schoharie County and Border Wars of New
York (Albany, 1845).
The Horseman of Leeds deserves a careful bibliographical
study which space does not permit here. So far as I know the
NOTES AND SOURCES 1 95
earliest published account was in Harpers New Monthly Maga-
zine, Vol. LXVII, June to November, 1883; the next year it ap-
peared in Beer's History of Greene County, and later in C. M.
Skinner's delightful pioneering folklore collection, Myths and
Legends of Our Land, Vol. I, No. 25, in Harold W. Thompson's
Body, Boots and Britches (Philadelphia, 1940), and in Charles
F. Wilde's Ghost Legends of the Hudson Valley. Louis C. Jones,
in Spooks of the Valley, and scores of other writers of the Hudson
Valley have told it, and the people continue to repeat it, adding
their own favorite details. I have used a composite version made
by Clarice Weeks who grew up with the story in her ears. Some-
time I hope to do a scholarly study of the relationship of his-
toric fact to folklore in this case.
The tale of Asher Warner of Sodus Point was remembered by
Mrs. Millie Pitcher of Sodus Point, the somewhat eccentric friend
of Shirley Mills. Three students collected valiantly in the Lin-
denwald area, round about Kinderhook. Elizabeth B. Colyer
fruitfully interviewed Archie LeBrecht of Valatie, and Evelyn
Patchin learned from John B. Pruyn, lawyer and businessman,
stories about Lindenwald he had heard as a boy from Negro serv-
ants. Word that Aaron Burr visits the orchard came from D. Pin-
dar Jones, reported by Howard G. Bogart.
Anita Mae Leone heard about Dr. Guthrie from a schoolmate,
Janet Inglehart, who heard it from the family recently living in
Dr. G.'s house. For a biographical sketch of Samuel Guthrie,
M.D., see Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography by Howard
A. Kelly (Philadelphia, 1913), Vol. I. Quite a fellow. Stories about
ghosts along the Erie Canal came to Shirley Wurz from her uncle,
James O'Brien, himself once a driver on the canal. The item
about the murdered cook was told to Howard G. Bogart by
George K. Foote, that of the murder victim in the wheelbarrow,
to Mary Stengel by Elmer Hensel.
Edgar Tompkins learned of Summons's slaves from Jesse Wood,
leading senior citizen of Berne. Catherine Smith's uncle, Paul
ig6 THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Smith, an Oneonta lawyer, told her of the Emmons station on
the Underground Railroad and its tragedy.
Everybody in Salem has his own version of the Gray Man;
three students brought in reports: Mary Frances Cook, Joan Si-
vers, and Jeanne Arnold, now a crack reporter on the Albany
Times Union. The Civil War ghost from New Jersey was part of
a conversation that took place when Jeannette Buyck of Henri-
etta met Mrs. Esther Sudovsky of Texas and New York City on a
train trip. Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews's The White Satin
Dress (New York City, 1930). The tale of Lincoln's funeral train
was collected by Albert G. Tyler of Millerton from John W. Bur-
gen of New York City, a conductor on the Harlem Division of the
New York Central.
I have two versions of the Captain Barton story: one from
Ruth McCarthy and the one I have used, collected by Helen
Walsh from her cousin, Mrs. James Monahan of Auburn. I am
ashamed to say that I failed to note the name and address of the
woman who told me about the seaweed.
CHAPTER 6: The Ghostly Hitchhiker
Those interested in the scholarly treatment of this theme will
find three articles in California Folklore Quarterly (now Western
Folklore Quarterly): Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey,
"The Vanishing Hitchhiker," Vol. I, No. 4, pp. 303-335; "A His-
tory of the Vanishing Hitchhiker," Vol. II, No. i, pp. 13-26;
Louis C. Jones, "Hitchhiking Ghosts of New York," Vol. Ill, No.
4, pp. 284-292. My archive has seventy-five versions or related
stories; other versions have appeared in innumerable newspaper
stories, magazine articles, and collections.
The story from Delmar was told to Catherine S. Martin of
Selkirk by her mother; Mr. Rowe told the Milford version to his
granddaughter, June Dixon. The story of Clarence Hoffman of
Belfort comes from the mother of Geraldine Rubar, Mrs. Henry
G. Rubar of Croghan. The tale of Red and his strange driver
NOTES AND SOURCES 197
was collected by Ruth Layne from Charles Van Buren of Albany.
The Watertown version comes from Muriel Hughes, who col-
lected it from Mrs. Mary MacDonald of Watertown. The couple
who rode into Rochester were described by Dorothy Joyce Hall
to my student Richard C. Smith. The story of the old lady from
East Homer was reported by Edith Beard, who heard it from
Mrs. Carrie Henry. Flo Garfall was told about the girl who has
trouble crossing the bridge between Rome and Syracuse by Janet
R. Smith. Ida Occhino of Endicott had heard about the boy who
met the girl on the Albany-Schenectady Road and dated her,
from a friend in Schenectady several years before she took the
folklore course. The Italian story of the boy who sent a message
home was collected by Jessie K. M. Malheiros from Frank Smith,
also of Schenectady. The anecdote about the woman in Albany
who heard about the job was collected by Frances Welch from
Agnes Sullivan. The Mother Cabrini story told here was told to
me by William Tucker of Kingston, and he heard it from his
brother, Frank. This version of the dead man in the car is one of
three brought in by Elizabeth Prouty, who heard it at a party in
Elizabethtown. Elizabeth Dorman heard about the overcoat on
the gravestone from Armida De Tommasi, at that time a clerk in
the Watervliet arsenal and, finally, the story of the Brooklyn
sweater girl was collected by Harriett Abrams from a New York
City patrolman, Arthur Gustavson.
Many of those who told these stories between 1940 and 1946
must now be dead, and many of the girls who collected them
have changed their names and moved away. I regret that I have
been unable to take cognizance of these changes, but to each of
the informants, living or dead, to each of the collectors, male or
female, single or double, my warmest thanks.
NOTE: All place names are New York State unless otherwise noted.
Abercrombie, General James, 125-
26
Abrams, Harriet, 197
ace of spades, 50
Adams, Jean, 191
Adirondacks, 94
ages of ghosts, 16
Albany, 6, 26, 27, 33, 36, 61, 76,
87, 93, 151, 163, 169 176
Albany-Saratoga Road, 30
Albany-Schenectady Road, 173
Alder Creek, 60
Alsatian source, 26
Altamont, 148
Amsterdam, 105
Andrews, Mary Raymond Ship-
man, 151
animals, ghosts of, 15
Apparition of Mrs. Veal, The
True Relation of the, 10
Archive of New York Folklore, **,
xii
Armenian source, 166
Arnold, Jeanne, 196
Ashwoztb, Harold, 194
Auburn, 155
Austin family, 31
Austin, Charles, 188
Austin, Edna, 188
Austin, Henry A., 59, 190, 192
Ballinrobe, Ireland, 6
Barlow, Thelma Gertrude, 190
Barre, Italy, 91, 92
Beard, Edith, 197
bedclothes removed, 60, 61, 90
Bedell, Ella, 188
Beidle, Charles, 186
Belfort, 168-69
Berne, 148
Beyer, Fred, 194
Blake, Ruth, 190
bloodstain, 69, 86, 139, 152-53
Bogart, Howard G., 195
Bostwick, Marguerite D., 194
boundary stone, ghost guarding, 2*
Bowman, Horace, 193
Boyntonville, 12
bridges, 172
Brooklyn, 26, 27, 180
Brouillette, Mrs., 190
Bruce, Nevalyn C., 186
Burgen, John W., 196
burial, irregular, 41, 4*Ht3> 61, 68,
fo, 73- 86* 89
Burr, Aaron, 141
199
200
Buyck, Jeannette, 194, 196
Byrne, Maigaret, 187
Cabrini, Mother, 177
Caldwell, Edith, 194
Caldwell, Helen, 194
Callicoon, 51
Campbell, Duncan, 125-26
Campbell, Isabel, 192
Cape Cod, 63
Carmer, Carl, 162
Carroll, Lillian, 191
Casey, James* 189
Castiglione, Italy, 78
cat, ghost of, 15
Cerf, Bennett, 159, 162
chains, 39, 58
charm
to hold ghost, 41
for protection from ghosts, 13
for securing haunted treasure,
103
Chatham, 155
Cherry Hill, 87-89
Cherry Valley, 49, 123
Chicago, Illinois, 93
Chinese source, 166
Civil War ghosts, 150-51
Clancy, Mrs. James, 187
ClayviUe,6i
clergyman, viii, 6, 20, 25 ff., 29, 42,
43*75
Coad,W.J.,i94
Cobleskill, 123
Cohoes, 6, 16
collecting folklore, xi
Colletta, Mrs. Nina Precopia, 187
Columbia County, 139-45
INDEX
Columbia University, 63
Colyer, Elizabeth B., 195
ConesusLake, 118
Constableville, 69
Cook, Clyde K., 191
Cook, Mary Frances, 196
Cooper, Sunna, 76, 191
Cooper, James Fenimore, family
of, viii
Cooper, Judge James Fenimore,
vtii
Cooper, Richard, viii
Cooper, Susan Fenimore, viii
Cooperstown, vii f x, xii, 88
Cork, Ireland, 8
Cornell University, x, xi f 114
Cornwall, England, 64
corpse
ghostly, 148
living, 6 ff.
mutilation of, 43, 97-98
Cote, Mrs. Madeline, 189
Cothren, Jane Ruth, 186
Cottrell, Mr. and Mrs. Nathan, 186
courtesy to the dead, 80
cow, ghost of, 15, 137
Grants, Lucille, 194
Crescent, 60
Crump, Claire, 190
curfew, 79
Damino family, 78
Damino, Horace, 191
Damino, Mrs. Jane Weir, 191
D'Antonino, Frances M., 192
Death Coach, 16
death warnings, 46
Defoe, Daniel, 9
INDEX
201
Delmar, 167
DerOhannesian, Paul, 166
de Peyster, Mrs. Sue, 189
DeSeve, Lorraine, 191
De Tommasi, Armida, 197
Devil, 167, 169
Devil's Elbow, 172
Dimock, Richard, 189
Ditto, Mary Ann, 190
Dixon, June, 196
dog
effect of ghost on, 39
ghost of, 15, 137
Donovan, Ruth, 187
doors, windows, shades, shutters,
59-60, 109-10
Dorman, Elizabeth, 197
Drew, Mrs. Walter J., 186
Dumpling Hill, 13
Dunning, Patricia, 191
East Chatham, 30
East Homer, 171
East Schodack, 37
East Schuyler, 10
Eldredge, Mrs. Richard, 157
Eliot, George, 89
Emerick, Mary, 193
Emmons, 148
Erie Canal, 146
European sources, 26, 104
Fasoldt, Ruth, 190
Ferber, Henry, 189
Fish, Mrs. John S., 194
Fitzpatrick, Marian, 187
flames, supernatural, 54
Flanagan, Margaret T., 193
flying objects, 66-67. See also pol-
tergeists.
Folklore, Archive of New York, xi,
xii
Foote, George K., 195
Ford, Herbert W., 187, 188
Formicola, Italy, 29
Fort Hunter, 167-68
Fort Johnson, 132
Fort Niagara, 128
Fort Ontario, 130-31
Fort Ticonderoga, 125-27
Forty Acres, 81-84
"Four Months in a Haunted
House," 63
French and Indian Wars, 99, 125-
29
Frisbee, Sam, 89, 192
fingerprints, ghostly, 95
furniture moved, 60
Gagnon, Mrs. May, 187
Garfall, Florence, 187, 192, 197
Genovesi, Julia, 191
German sources, 13, 70, 96
Gero, Mrs. Frank, 187
ghost
activity of
appearance at time of death,
begging forgiveness, 22-23
caring for children, 45, 60
combing hair, 33-36
completing unfinished busi-
ness, 54 ff.
dialing phone, 109
directing completion of
church, *5
202
ghost Continued
activity of
fishing, 1 10
fixing roof, 10
giving advice, 54
guarding treasure. See treas-
ure, haunted
holding religious service, 27-
29
milking cow, 10, 13
piloting plane, 155
playing music, 68, 154
praying, 10
prophesying, 177-78
protesting or punishing, 36-
45
re-creating past, 75
re-enacting own death, 20-21
resuming normal pursuits, 30-
56
saying mass, 26-29
serving the living, 45-54
warning of danger, 53
character of, 15,55, 7
form taken by, 6-16
animal, 15, 45, 103
corpse, 148
giant, 101, 193
light See light, ghost as
"presence," 68
intentions of, good, 17
rescued from the dead, 36
ghost lore
attitude toward, i
psychological bases, 4, 5
Glenmont, 20
Glens Falls, 26,27,48
INDEX
Golden Mountain, The: Chinese
Tales Told in California, 166
Goodell family, 48-49
Good Gray Ghost, 150
Goodwin, Dr. T. Campbell, ix
Gordon, Hanford Lennox, 112-13
Gould, Janet, 186
Gray Lady, the, 48
Greene County, 89, 123, 135-38
Greenport, 119
Gross, Shirley, 189
grotesque ghost, 14, 146
Groveside, 12
guardian of haunted treasure, 105-
06
Gustavson, Arthur, 197
Guthrie, Dr. Samuel, 145
Guy Park, 132
Hadley, Massachusetts, 81-83
Hall, Dorothy Joyce, 197
Hamilton, Mrs. Ann, 194
Hamilton College, x
Hamilton, Sally, 89, 91
Hanna, Mrs. S. N., 193
Hannan, Dennis, 188
Hansen, Jean, 194
Hardenberg Mansion, 60
Harper, Beth, 191
Harper's Magazine, 63
Harris, Ira r 152
Harris, Miss Clara, 152
Hartz, Shirley, 189
Harvard Club, 157
haunted houses, 57-1 16
haunted treasure. See treasure,
haunted.
Haverstraw, 45
INDEX
headless ghost, 52-53, 129, 130,
159-44
Heath, Jane, 190, 192, 193
Helderberg Mountains, 69
Henderson, William, 187
Henry, Mrs. Carrie, 197
Hensel, Elmer, 195
Hermus, Mrs. T., 188, 190
Herrmann family, 65-67
Heymann, Leo, 189
Higgins, Helena, 193
Highland, 46
hitchhiking ghost, 161-84
Hitchhiking Hattie, 161-84
Hochstrasser, Frank, 193
Hook Mountain, 50
Hoornbeck, Theodora, 193
Hoosick Falls, 167
Hootin' Boys Hollow, 119
horse, ghost of, 15, 120-21, 137,
144
Horseman of Leeds, 135-38
"House of Flying Objects," 190
Hudson River, 89
Hughes, Muriel, 197
Hughsonville, 100
Huntington, Dr. James Lincoln,
81-84
Huntington, Mrs. James Lincoln,
192
Hyde Hall, ix
Hylind,Joan, 188
inanimate objects, ghosts of, 15,
i47 154
Indian Lake, 118
Indians, vut, 49, 64, 99, 1 17-25
ghosts of, 13, 117-25
203
Inglehart, Janet, 195
Inverawe, Scotland, 126
Ireland, 6, 7
Irish sources, 6, 16, 26, 33, 42, 44,
187
Irving, Washington, 12, 129, 139
Italian sources, 15, 26, 29, 78, 80,
91, 96, 104, 105-06, 175
Jackson, Katherine Egord, 189
Jackson, Mrs. Vera, 189
"Jacobs, Harlan," 63-65, 190
Jewish source, 29
Johnson, Colonel Guy, 132
Johnson, Mary, 89
Johnson, Polly (Mrs. Guy), 132
Johnson, Sir William, 128, 132
Johnstown, 20
Jones, Agnes Halsey, 96
Jones, C. Edward, 2
Jones, D. Pindar, 195
Jones, Peter, 47
Jones, Mrs. R. S., 187
Jump, Sarah, 188
Katsbaan, 108
Keck, Sheldon, viii
Kelley, Margaret, 6
Kemmerer, Rosalind V., 188
Kennedy family, 132
Kenwood, 169
Kidd, Captain William, 99-100
Kinderhook, 139 ft
Kingston, 177
Kinney, Katherine J., 193
Kisselbrack, Lulu, 193
Kloss, Helen, 186
Kramer, Mrs. Lois Hampel, 194
2O4
Kunz, Lorna, 188
Kunz, Mrs. Walter, 188
Kuyahoora Valley, 109
Lake George, 125-27
Lake Ontario, 30
laying ghosts, 6, 13, 20, 44-45 59>
61,69-70,71,86,93-94,139
Layne, Ruth, 186, 187, 197
LeBrecht, Archie, 195
Lee, Jon, 166
Leeds, 135-38, 194-95
Lent, Mabel E. L., 189
Leone, Anita Mae, 195
LeRoy, 103
Lewis County, 13
Lewis, Lloyd, 154
lifelike ghosts, 9-10, 161-84
light, ghost as, 12, 48, 53, 61, 62,
86, 108, 131, 137
Lincoln, Abraham, 152-55
Linden wald, 139-42
Little, Doris, 186
Little Falls, 148
liver, removed from corpse, 97-98
Lockwood, Mrs. Irene, 191
Long Island, 71, 119-20, 145-46,
178
Lowvttle, 23
McCarthy, Ruth, 196
McCormick, Mrs. P., 191
MacDonald, Mrs. Mary, 197
McGinty, Mrs. Alice Bray, 188
Malby, Isabel, 189
Malerba, Mrs. Rose, 92, 192
Malheiros, Mrs. Jessie K. M., 197
Malo, Lorraine, 188, 191
INDEX
Maoriello, Mazzo, 105-06
Marchetta, Peter, 192
Mariaville, 22
Martin, Catherine S., 187, 196
Massachusetts, 22
Matteawan State Hospital, 15
Mele, Mary, 191, 193
Middletown, 148
Milford, 168
Miller, Richard, 192
Mills, Shirley, 195
Monahan, Mrs. James, 196
Montauk Point, 119-20
Moodna Kill, 89
Moordenerskill, 89
Moore, Mrs. Leslie, 194
moths, 64
murder, 20, 59, 76, 86, 88, 91-92,
94-95* 10 4* i*4 1*6
Murderer's Creek, 89, 91
Murphy, Anne, 189
Murphy, Harry, 48
Murphy, Isabel, 48, 189
music, played by ghosts, 68, 154
Myths After Lincoln , 154
Negro ghost, 60, 142-45* 148-49
Neubauer, Louis, 192
Nevin, Mrs. Ruth Geiser, 187, 188
Newburgh, 89
New Hampshire, 31
New Jersey, 151
New Paltz, 46
New York Central Railroad, 154-
55
New York City, 10, 93
New York State College for Teach-
ers, ix, 185-86
INDEX
New York State Historical Asso-
ciation, xi, xii
Niles, John Jacob, 156
noises, ghostly, 58-59, 130, 141,
145, 151. See also sounds made
by ghosts
Nyack, 50
O'Beirne, James, 187
O'Brien, Daniel, 187
O'Brien, James, 195
O'Brien, Mrs. John, 186, 190
Occhino, Ida, 197
octagon house, xii f 24
odors, ghostly, 142-46
Osbeck, Ceil, 193
Oswego, 130-31
Otsego County, 168
Outhouse, Miss Cora, 186
Palmatier, Margaret, 186, 187
Pancake Hollow, 46
Pang Yang, 46-47, 189
Parker, John, 186
Parkman, Francis, 135
Patchin, Evelyn, 195
"Pauline," 112-13
Peattie, Gordon, 192
peddlers, 12, 86
Penn Yan, 47
Penrose, Paul, 191, 192
Petersen, Pauline L., 188
Pettit, Mrs. E., 187
Phelps, Elizabeth Porter, 81-^83
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 129
photograph of ghost, 37, 134
identification by, 174 ff.
Pierce, Eileen, 193
Piercefield Hill, 59
Pine Plains, 108, 130
Pink House, 112-16
Pitcher, Mrs. Millie, 195
Pittstown, 14
Polish sources, 32, 41, 43, 54
poltergeists, 63, 67, 68, 78
Pomeroy, Ann Cooper, iriii
Port Byron, 61
PortLeyden, 61
Porter-Phelps-Huntington family,
81-83
Poughkeepsie, 14
Powell, Mrs. Henry, 191
prophesying ghost, 177-78
Prouty, Elizabeth, 197
Pruyn, John B., 195
Public Universal Friend, 47, 189
Quini, James, 193
Quinn, Joan, 191
Quinn, Mrs. John J., 187
railroad ghosts, 52, 154-55
Rathbone, Major Henry Reed,
Redington, Mrs. Mary, 186
Renado, Mrs. Angelina Precopia,
187
Renshaw, Mrs. Alfred, 191
Rensselaer, 45
Rensselaer County, 89
return, causes of ghostly, 18, 19-55
Revolution, American, 13, 49, 99,
130-38
Rochester, 171
Rome, Italy, 106
Rome swamp, 146
206
Roscommon, Ireland, 7
Rossomondo, Teresa, 79
Rossomondo, Vincenzo, 192
Rowe, James, 168, 196
Rubar, Geraldine, 187, 196
Rubar, Mrs. Henry, 196
Russia, 64
Russian source, 45
Rye, 58
Sabeal, 118
Sackets Harbor, 145-46
Sackett, George, 194
Sag Harbor, 71,1 19-20
St. Regis Falls, 94
Salem, 150
Salisbury, William, 135-38
Sandburg, Carl, x, 154
Saugerties, 108
Schaff, Albert, 186
Schenectady, 32, 61, 68, 104, 1*1,
'79
Schenevus Valley, 129
Schoharie, 21
Schreiber, Herman, 191
Scopes, Frank, 87, 88
Scottish source, 125-27
Seaford, 65-67
Seiffert, Margaret, 193
Serafin, Father Eugene, 187
Servatius, Lauretta, 188
Severn, Boyd R., 189
shades (window). See doors,
ihadow, absence of, 50
shedim, 167
Shelter Island, 7 1
Shenandoah and Susquehanna
Railroad, 147
INDEX
Sherwood, Warren George, 46-47,
189
Shohan, Abraham, 188
Shultes, Doris, 192
Shults, Grace, 191
shutters. See doors.
Sidebotham, Stephen H., 186
Silvernail, Dorothea, 191, 192
Simmons, Allen, 192-93
Sivers, Joan, 196
Slader, Kathryn, 193
slavery, 148-49
Smith, Catherine, 195
Smith, Mrs. Edna Leona Jones,
193
Smith, Janet R., 197
Smith, Paul, 195-96
Smith, Richard C., 197
Smithling, Genevieve, 186, 187
Smorgon, Poland, 29
Sodus, 70
Sodus Bay, 30
Sodus Point, 138
sounds made by ghosts, 14, 31, 38,
68, 80, 82, 86, 108-10, 123,
154. See also noises, ghostly
South Troy, 73-74
Southern Tier, 120, 172
Spanish-American War, 158
Spiegletown, 76
Stengel, Mary, 195
Steuben County, 75
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 125
Stewart, Dorothy, 187
Strang, Jesse, 87, 88
Straub, Mrs. Joseph, 189
Straub, Mary, 189
Strecker, Ed, 188
INDEX
Studebaker, Mary, 190
Sudovsky, Mrs. Esther, 196
suicide, 20, 43, 107-16, 130
Sullivan, Agnes, 197
Susquehanna River, vii, 149
Swarthout, Reverend Donald, 193
Sweeney, Miss Catherine, 187, 188
taboo
against speaking, 104, 143-44
against touching ghost, 35
Ten Broeck, Mrs. William, 187
Thompson, Professor Harold W.,
x,xi, 114, 139
Thurber, Grandma Mary, 129, 194
Ticonderoga, 125-27
Tierney, Miss Kathryn, 150
Titterington, Constance T., 188-
9
Toledo, Canada, 27
Tolley, Chuck, 52-54, 189
Tompkins, Edgar, 193, 195
Tories, 99
Tozzi, Detective Joseph, 66-67
train, ghost, 154-55
treasure, haunted, 13, 70, 80-81,
99-107, 143-44
Trenton, New Jersey, 106-07
Troy, 16, 76
Tucker, Frank, 197
Tucker, William, 197
Turkey, 166
Tyler, Albert G., 196
Underground Railroad, 149
unfinished business, ghosts' com-
pletion of, 2 130
unseen presence, 82-83
207
Updyke, Barbara, 191
Upjohn, Richard, 140
Van Alen house, 139
Van Buren, Charles, 197
Van Buren, Martin, 139-43
Van Epps, Percy M., 194
Van Ness, Judge William Peter,
140
Van Rensselaer family, 20, 87, 88
Veeder, Colonel Volkert, 132
Velardi, Mrs. Grace, 192
vengeance, 126
Verch, Marjorie, 187
Verdiani, Fannie, 192
Vermont, 73
violence and sudden death, 16, 85-
"6, 137, 171
Wagner, Eleanor, 187
wakes, 6, 8
Waldbillig, Jane, 193
Walsh, Helen, 196
Walton, xii f 23-24
Warner, Asher, 138-39
Warnerville, 129
War of 1812, 138-39
Washington County, 150
Watch Hill, 13
Waterford, 60, 62
Watertown, 170
water urn, entering of spirit into,
Watervliet, 13
Webb, Reverend Wheaton P., 129,
194
Weber, Harold, Jr., 190
Weeks, Clarice, 89, 192, 195
Welch, Frances, 189, 197
208
Welch, Louise C., 187, 188, 190
Welch, Michael, 42, 189
Wellsville, 26, 112-16
Wendt, Huldah, igo, 191
Westchester County, 38
Westmoreland, 36
Whipple, John, 87, 88
white figure, 51, 172
"White Satin Dress, The/' 151
Wicks, Henry W., 193
Wilkes, Louella, 187
Wilkinson, Jemima, 46, 47-48, 189
Wilson, Miss Annie E., 194
Wilson, Mrs. Edward W., 114, 193
windows. See doors.
INDEX
witchcraft, 68
Witthoft, John, 3, 188
Wodin, Mr., 190
Wolsey, Nick, 123
Wood, Jesse, 195
Woollcott, Alexander, 158-59, 162
World War I, 20, 158
World War II, 155-60, 178
Worth, Eloise, 191
Wurz, Bean Shirley, 186, 190, 195
Yorktown Heights, 13
Zielinski, Felicia, 188, 189, 190
