Specters by the Sea

From: Anonymous
Story type: Ghost
Location: Martha's Vineyard, MA and Fisher's Island,NY 
Source: Email Submission

I have had several brushes with ghosts in the old New England houses I have worked in (I cook). For one job, I stayed in a rental house on Martha's Vineyard with an elderly gentleman. One morning, when I was alone in the house and downstairs in the kitchen, I heard someone walking around in his bedroom, the upstairs bedroom directly above my head. It was the distinct pound, pound of feet pacing the floor. Naturally, I was freaked, but was determined to squelch my ghostly suspicions and chalk it up to some natural, logical phenomenon. Yet I began to notice it a lot after that, and I couldn't come up with any weather-balloon-esque explanation. The footsteps would commence like clockwork at 8 A.M. and then again at about 6:30. I didn't always notice it, or the elderly gentleman would be up there and it wouldn't be mysterious. But the days when I was alone and I heard it start up, I felt very uncomfortable. Also, sometimes when I would sleep a bit late, a knock-knock-knock would wake me up. I would say, "yeah, I'm up," but it would continue, knock-knock-knocking rapidly, in a businesslike manner. Finally I would get up to open the door, expecting to see my employer standing there with a you've-been-naughty look on his face, but there would be no one there.

The old man left the Island a week before me, and I had to stay in the house alone, much to my anxiety. When I went up to take the sheets off his bed to wash them, the ghost seemed to get very angry. It began STOMPING wildly around the room. This didn't stop until I took a deep breath, bit my lip, and went back up to put the sheet back on the bed. It was like the ghost was saying, "this room is in disarray, fix it!" I think I was dealing with an anal-retentive ghost who in life had been highly ritualized.

During another cooking job, in a house on Fisher's Island, the wing of the house in which I slept alone had extremely bad energy. It was a huge house, and to get to my bedroom you had to walk down all these halls with all these gaping empty rooms. Whenever I began to make my way from the kitchen back to my room, I felt yucky. I thought it was just that having all those open empty rooms made me nervous (the bogeyman lurking behind every half-closed door). But it was more than that. My friend had cleaned that house the previous summer and didn't like the feeling that enveloped him back in that wing at all. And when we were back there together, we would always fight. It was if that part of the house itself was malignant, while the rest of the house was fine. I can't explain that one.

Finally, another house I worked in on Fisher's Island was the most haunted of them all. I lived there alone during the week as the family only came up on weekends. The first night I stayed there, I was alone. As I opened the door of the back stairs and began to ascend the stairway, terror washed over me and my heart started to pound in my chest. I raced up the stairs, ran into my bedroom, and shut the door. I felt a little better, but as I began to wash my face, I had the odd feeling that someone was behind me. I kept looking up into the mirror to see the reflection of the room, expecting to see someone there, like in a horror movie. Oh, it's just a huge creepy old badly-lit house, I told myself. I've seen too many movies. But the feeling that someone was watching me, in the room with me, persisted. I went to bed, pulled the covers over my head, and soon fell asleep.

The next night, my friend and I were watching TV in the TV room, next to the hallway in which the back stairs are located. One has to pass by the door to get to the bathroom. I told my friend of my feelings the previous night, and as we had discussed at length his ability to "feel" the energy of ghosts, I asked him if it were possible anything could be in the house. He said he didn't think so, that I was safe.

But the next day he admitted to me that he had only told me this to keep me from being frightened that night. He said just before I had asked him this, he had gone to the bathroom and felt an energy in that hallway so strong that he had to go into the bathroom and breathe deeply to recover from it. So I said, okay, we are going to go around this house "feeling" for ghosts! I didn't quite believe in this ability he had, it seemed a bit kooky and so forth, but I said, I'll follow you around while you do it. He said, you are going to do it with me. He told me to relax and open myself up to feeling whatever there is to feel, to go inside the quiet place within myself where I could empathize with other people's emotions by sensing their energy fields (something most of us do all the time without thinking about it). So, I tried to do as he said, and we went from room to room. When we opened the door at the top of those back stairs to what was once the baby's room, he quickly closed it and said, "it's in there." We went to some other rooms, and then came back to that one. I told him to open the door again. He did, and went "Whoa! It doesn't want me in there!" and slammed it. We then walked directly across the way to the long, rectangular library. He was ahead of me; I was closest to the door. As I stood there, all of a sudden, this WHOOSH of energy ripped through my body, electrifying every nerve, making my heart pound so fast I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I panted a quickly crescendoing, "OH SHIT!" and then my friend felt it too, went "HOLY. . . !" and we ran as fast as we could back down the stairs, the thing hot on our tail. The way he saw it, the ghost had told him the first time he opened the door, "I'm in here, leave me alone." The second time, it was pissed off, and it was like "I told you to leave me alone!" in a scolding manner. Because it was cross, it followed us into the library, going through my body to get to him.

From then on, I knew what "feeling" for ghosts felt like. I am, like him, very intuitive and in touch with my body. I could always tell where the ghost was at any given time; it would move around, but would only stay in that particular area: either on the stairs, the baby's room, that hallway, the library, or the downstairs bedroom right next to the stairs. It was mostly on the stairs and in the baby's room though, so we tried to construct a story about what might have happened. Did the baby die? Did someone fall down those stairs?

Up to this point, we had no prior knowledge of the house or its history, so everything we knew came from our experiences with the extremely strong energy we felt there. So, we decided to ask the family about it. When I asked the eldest son if the house might be haunted, he said, "Oh yes, it is." He said it was built by the Stanley's, of Stanley Tools fame. Mrs. Stanley had lived for years there as a convalescent, and then died there. He went on to tell me how it was known across the Island as a very haunted house. There are workmen who won't even come up the driveway because they are terrified of it. Apparently, many have had really terrifying experiences there. Footsteps coming up the stairs. Windows opening by themselves. One man had an experience that was so terrifying he can't even talk about it.

And when my friend told another member of the family we had felt the ghost in the baby's room, she said, "Oh, that's interesting, because I think the baby did die."

The ghost and I came to have a good relationship. It no longer followed me around, or watched me skeptically as it did the first night I was in the house.

One other notable other-worldly experience of that summer: one night as my friend and I were talking in the kitchen after dinner, a chill came over him, and then grew stronger and stronger until he couldn't stand it and had to run outside. I felt nothing but the humid, oven-warmed air. He sat in his truck for a while trying to shake the feeling. Then he went upstairs to my apartment over the garage (which I lived in after the initial stay in the main house because it took a while for it to be painted). He still couldn't shake it. I told him I didn't think it was the ghost, because it didn't go in the kitchen, and it certainly wouldn't follow him outside. He said the next morning that he still felt the chill as he fell asleep that night.

The next day his girlfriend called from San Francisco to tell him that her cat had died the night before, with which he had been close. He said, "Did he die at 8:30?" She responded, "Yes, how did you know?" He replied, "Because he came to say goodbye to me."

This world is certainly a mysterious place in which to live.

---Anonymous