Ghosts Central

I first became intrigued with the genre during a trip to London in June of 1983, when I noticed a ton of walking tours. Because I’m a tasteful, high-literary type of person, I signed up for two of them: “Follow in The Footsteps of Jack The Ripper,” and “Ghosts of London.” Even in the bright light of nearly-Nordic late afternoon, I quivered in my shoes. The most disquieting story was The Curse of Green Park.

Nowadays this area sits in the heart of London but, back in the plague days -- let’s pin this one at the infamous 1666, grimly known as the Year of the Beast  -- Green Park was a field at the periphery of the teeming town, where surplus dead bodies were carted out and slung into an open grave. You know the drill: lime scattered over the cadavers, more bodies, more lime, then a layer of soil. Ick. Ick. Ick.

Today Green Park is a strange place indeed. It’s green, certainly, and the lawn is dandy, but the greenest thumbs in the realm have never been able to cultivate flowers there. Go see for yourselves: No flowers. And this in a city where every windowsill, gas light, and panhandler who has stood too long on one corner, holds a planter spilling over with primroses, daisies, and peonies!

Not Green Park. Also, try to picnic there or sit on one of the wrought-iron benches. You’ll find a strange melancholia seeping into you. Run. GET OUT! It’s coming from inside the park!

Same thing with the Boston Common below Beacon Hill. You can read all bout it in Ghosts of Boston Town, written by some zombie bimbo whose name I’ve long forgotten.

So back in ’91, when I moved to the Island year-round, I launched a guided tour business. My most popular walk was Ghosts of Edgartown. Pretty soon I wised up, jettisoned the straight history junkets, and added Ghosts of Oak Bluffs and Ghosts of Vineyard Haven to the program, winning a reputation as the lady with the lantern who takes people into graveyards, and stands in front of houses, and scares the beejesus out of people renting for the week.

Author’s note: Whenever I write about things that go bump-and-grind in their nighties, my computer gets hinky. For this particular story, I’ve had to hit “save” after every line because the text keeps disappearing. Give me a sec to wrangle with the spooks, and see if we can continue unmolested . . .

Okay, back to work. A couple of years ago, I passed the torch of the tour business to my friends, Gary Cook and Karen Altieri, but I still get updates from people far and near about Island locales whose psychical pH is not what you’d quite call healthy. 

This week I heard from a guy whom we’ll call Taylor, a Massachusetts firefighter (we love those boys, don’t we?) who, with some other firefighter pals, owns a cottage at 55 Tuckernuck, Oak Bluffs. This address is the site of Chapter 8, Little Girl Lost in Vineyard Supernatural (Down East Books, 2008), written by someone whose name also escapes me.

In Little Girl Lost (with a spooky photo by Nancy White of Arlington), we learn about a Rhode Island family of four who rented the old Victorian cottage for two weeks in the summer of 2005. Night after night, phantom kids rampaged up and down the stairs, laughing demonically, like Bart Simpson after he, say, sets out whoopee cushions at a parent/teacher conference. Meanwhile, at the cottage on Tuckernuck, the living kids sweetly slept. One evening after supper, the family endured the following ruckus:

“On the east side of the house, a single thump sounded, as if a drunken giant had come to call, knocked once, then passed out. The family members looked at one another in surprise. Moments later another hard, hollow thump hit the house, this one coming from a wall closer to the street. Only a moment later, another one landed on the west front corner of the house, as if whoever was doing the pounding had jumped the length of the thirty-foot porch in a single bound. Thump after thump completed a circuit of the house. Another round ensued, this one faster.”

Taylor told me that, recently, as he turned the pages of his newly-acquired copy of Vineyard Supernatural, he realized that Chapter 8 was all about his own digs! “Guys, listen to this!” he told the buddies who’d traveled up with him for the weekend.

Taylor said the hauntings persist. Mosquito nettings drape the children’s bed upstairs and, from time to time, invisible fingers poke the thin veils.  Once, a guest at the house spied an old man seated on a rocker out on the porch. The friend ventured outside to see which stranger had made himself so uncommonly comfortable, and no one, you guessed it, was there.

On another occasion, seven of Taylor’s homies congregated in the front parlor, seated around a TV to view Il Rigoletto at the Met. April Fools! They were watching a football game. All at once, every appliance, including the television, and all the lights but one, flashed off.

One of the guys was an electrician. He checked the fuse box. Everything was ON ON ON, all down the double columns. He couldn’t for the life of him explain how a single lamp would remain lit amid this baffling blackout. He looked thoughtful for a moment then, whoomph! power was restored.

A neighbor lady told Taylor that her sister’s mother-in-law’s cousin (yes, it gets confusing sometimes) knew a young woman who’d been murdered in one of the homes on their short block; could have been his home.

I’m on the case.

BTW, the out-of-print Haunted Island: True Ghost Stories of Martha’s Vineyard (Down East Books, 1994) has just been reissued in all the e-book hoopty-loos, including Kindle, Android and Frankenbooks. Can’t remember who wrote Haunted Island either.