Amazing Stories My Walking Tour Folks Told Me

I like to think I was one of the first people to start the cottage industry of guiding folks on walking tours of local ghost haunts. This began back in ’91 when the three Nadlers moved to the Vineyard full-time.

We’d been summering here (whoda thought summer would become a verb?) while working as TV writers in LA and NY. But now the time had arrived for us to find so-called real jobs. I got hired by a real estate office, wrote for magazines, and devised a roster of walking tours.

In short order, my more conventional tours fell by the wayside, not that I was ever able to keep things perfectly kosher. There were no walks devoted to Whaling Captains Homes & Gardens. No, my rambles had names like The Rich And Famous And Dead of Vineyard Haven, and From Camp Meet To Cathouse: The Sacred And Profane Oak Bluffs, and Amazing Sea Stories And Unsolved Murders.

I still think these were darned fun excursions, but sometimes I’d get 12 people showing up, other times 2 or 3 or a big fat 0. I was downhearted.

But one tour hit itself out of the park every time: The Ghosts of Edgartown. This one drew crowds every week on the evening it was offered. And I am not, all evidence to the contrary, a total idiot. I upped that tour of Edgartown ghoulies and ghosties to twice a week.

In August there were nights when 50 or 60 walkers materialized. If you overlooked all the hours of research that contributed to the stroll, and the mental gymnastics required to shape a handful of true ghost stories around a perfect 70-minute walk in the nighttime fairytale of Edgartown, then this was, as the old song goes, nice work if you can get it.

I made up none of the tales. For example, I interviewed a woman who cleaned homes who told me about a ghost in a captain's house on Morse Street in Edgartown. It had whispered a sad prayer in her ear as she vacuumed: “Mere Marie, priez pour nous maintenant et `a l’heure de notre morte” (Mother Mary, pray for us now and at the hour of our death). The next step for me was to plunge into the historical archives where I discovered a scion of the Morse Street family had gone down in flames in a Northrop night fighter over Normandy during World War II. Then, of course, I and my readership and my walking tour folks needed to connect the dots: Maybe, just maybe, the last words the pilot heard were contained in this prayer, “Mere Marie”.

Stories such as this one made their way into my first collection of local ghost stories, Haunted Island and, of course, into my walking tours, provided they could be shoe-horned into that perfect 70-minute town stroll.

But it turned out my guests had darned good yarns of their own to impart. Normally they waited until the end of the tour to turn the tables and entertain their guide. One man, from the North of England, told me his brother had died some months before, whereupon, among other postmortem arrangements, he’d cancelled the cell phone of the deceased and tucked it into a drawer with his own socks and underwear. One day he heard a beep coming from the dresser. He found the defunct phone, fully lit, with a text message: “HI, JIMSY” (the surviving brother’s childhood nickname).

That story reminded another walker of something she’d read on the Internet news-wire: A woman in Blackpool, England, had been buried with the mobile she loved more than life itself. Some months later, members of the family saw their loved one’s number show up on their own phones. No messages, only this sign that a call had been placed from, well, who knew where?

But here’s the story to end all stories because I do believe it has the capacity to make us stop and think and to recall, once again, Hamlet’s invocation to his old friend, “There are more things in heaven and in earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

It was the Tuesday following 9/11/2001. As you’ll recall, none of us did much of anything in the week that followed the catastrophe, other than to mope, stay strong, and to help: Anyone need blood? Money? Casseroles?

In the following week, I resumed my walking tours. On this night in September 2001, my group paused before a split-rail fence, an open field and, beyond that, the exquisite view of a nighttime bay with the random lights of Chappy twinkling in the distance. It was then that a family of four broached their story.

They lived in a small village in New Hampshire, terraced into a mountain range. It just so happened that a contingent of friends and neighbors had organized a trip to New York. This band traveled to Boston, and boarded one of the two planes that crashed into the Twin Towers.

But immediately before, a strange event had occurred.

In this small New Hampshire town, on Monday, September 10, at around nine o’clock that night, all of the dogs of this mountain hamlet began to howl. It started with a couple of hounds, then quickly escalated into a bizarre choir when every dog in town pitched in for the eerie lament. At last the chorale died away, like the final several monks' intonations of a Gregorian chant, albeit a dissonant Gregorian chant: Let’s be real here: dogs’ wails are seldom, if ever, a lovely sound.

So here was the question this family from New Hampshire posed to me: Could the dogs of their village have sensed something evil coming their way? After all, animals are known to react with uncanny precognition before tsunamis or earthquakes. Why not mass murder of beloved townsfolk?

I told them they already knew the answer, an answer buried deep within their hearts: The chorus of dogs had been a warning, an omen, a supernatural event, a bereavement in that void where we’re delivered of the continuum of linear time.

What do you think? We already know Hamlet’s opinion on the subject.  

Want to read more of Holly's columns about about the Island's haunted history?

• Night at the Haunted Museum
• The Lady In Black at The Island Movie Theater in Oak Bluffs
• Ghosts Central
• Ghost Hunter’s Log

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