Barbara Sillery - Haunted Cape Cod

Other Books in Pelicans Haunted America Series

Copyright 2021

By Barbara Sillery

All rights reserved

The word Pelican and the depiction of a pelican are trademarks of Arcadia Publishing Company Inc. and are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

ISBN 9781455626427

Ebook ISBN 9781455626434

Photographs by Barbara Sillery unless otherwise indicated

Printed in the United States of America

Published by Pelican Publishing

New Orleans, LA

www.pelicanpub.com

To Glinda Schafer, an extraordinary artist and an extraordinary friend. Thank you for all the years of being there for me.

Contents

Prologue

In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts,... and gods.

Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

In my previous two books, The Haunting of Louisiana and The Haunting of Mississippi, I chronicled the deeply rooted and often quirky mysteries of Southern folklore. Here on Cape Cod, this peninsula-turned-island, Yankee ghosts are staunch and stubborn. They are here whether you believe or not: they gallop on horseback, stroll along the beach, play hide-and-seek, race up hills, dance naked in a cupola, pilfer make-up, stop a clock, move chairs, rock beds, block doors, and rattle windows. They are the history of the Cape, woven into myth and legend but steadfastly steering their ghostly vessels through the treacherous shoals of the present.

Each of the chapters ends with lagniappe (lan yap), a Creole term for a little something extra. When a customer would make a purchase, the merchant often would include a small gift. The tradition dates back to the seventeenth century in France. When weighing the grain, shop keepers would add a few extra kernels. Cest pour la nappe (Its for the cloth), they would say, as some of the grains tended to stick to the fibers of the material. In New Orleans, where I lived for more than three decades, lagniappe is an accepted daily practice. It is a form of good will, like the thirteenth rose in a bouquet of a dozen long-stemmed roses. The lagniappe at the end of each chapter offers additional background on the ghost or haunted siteperhaps just enough more to entice you to visit these Cape Cod locales and seek your own conclusions.

The ghost of Samuel Nickerson may linger on at the Ocean Edge Resort in Brewster.

An old cemetery on the Cape, where the ghosts do not always rest easy.

Highfield Hall in Beebe Woods.

A Tangled Tale

High in the wooded hills above Falmouth, two brothers built two mammoth mansions: Highfield Hall and Tanglewood. One mansion lives on, while the saga of the souls of the lost mansion has migrated to the structure still standing. Tracking the origins of any good ghost story is much like an archeological digeach fragmented artifact or bone must be carefully dusted off and held to the light to discern where it fits.

Popular local legend holds that the ghost of Highfield Hall is Emily Beebe. Her heels make tiny clicking sounds as she descends the main staircase from her second-floor bedroom to the wide central hallway. The phantom Emily is on her way to join brother Arthur and his wife for a glittering dinner party at their Tanglewood estate. Alas, poor Emily gets lost in the woods because her brothers home has vanished. The confused spirit wanders aimlessly until she finds the path back to Highfield, where she is doomed to repeat her nocturnal journey over and over.

Besieged by requests from various ghost-hunting groups to communicate with the spiritor spiritsof Highfield Hall, the non-profit board that manages the historic property originally refused. We did forbid it for a long time, but in 2012 we relented, says a resigned Barbara J. Milligan, former CEO and president of Highfield Hall and Gardens. Last year, we said, yeslets just get it over with. The reversal of the no-ghost-hunting policy came about because the board felt that an additional source of revenue would be helpful. We opened ourselves up to the possibilities that maybe there was something we could use for an entertaining tour. Milligan avoids identifying the paranormal group that was allowed to conduct the investigation. They came in and made a presentation to us afterwards. They told us, We definitely found entities, or whatever they call it. There is a tinge of regret in Milligans voice as she relates the conclusion of the investigation. They had to work very hard to show us anything. They played a digital recording back for us and they say its a voice, an EVP [Electronic Voice Phenomenon]. After listening to the recording several times, Milligan told the investigators that the EVP sounds like a member of your team. The investigators then produced images of orbs. Many parapsychologists define orbs as balls of energy or light that are the remnants of the deceased, much like fingerprints left behind. Milligan asked the paranormal team whose spirit they thought they had found. They told us, We believe this is Emily because she died here. And Im like, No, she didnt.

Emilys ghost reputedly walks down the staircase at Highfield Hall.

The knowledgeable executive in her fitted lime-green jacket rolls blue eyes beneath a halo of pale blonde waves. She is aware that this group, like so many others, has identified the wrong Emily. She is probably talked about the most because she lived the longest, so she is part of the story, but Emily Beebe of Highfield Hall lived until she was almost eighty and died in Boston. Both Milligan and Highfield Halls board of directors abandoned the idea of a haunted tour of the historic home. We thought if there is anything... to these ghost stories, lets just use it to make money. That is one of the reasons we brought this paranormal group in... but there was not enough to hang any program on.

Yet, there was more than one Emily in the family, and the true Beebe family history is rife with depression, mental illness, shootings, and suicides. The two family mansions, Highfield Hall and Tanglewood, suffered from neglect, abandonment, lawsuitsand in the case of Tanglewood, total demolition. Reports of hauntings, apparitions, and paranormal activities flourished from the time the last Beebe left the premises in 1932.

With the arrival of the railroad in Falmouth in 1872, the small farming and fishing community emerged as a prime summer destination for residents of sweltering cities such as Boston and New York. Wealthy manufacturing czar James Madison Beebe was among the first to see the towns potential. James and his wife, Esther, purchased a summer home they called Vineyard Lodge on Shore Street. With an eye for future expansion, James Beebe also purchased seven hundred acres of prime hill land above the railroad station.