Holly Nadler - Vineyard Supernatural: True Ghost Stories from Americas Most Haunted Island

M y profoundest thanks go to my editor, Karin Womer, at Down East Booksthis is our fourth book together, so between us weve demolished a whole acre of forest. Many thanks to intrepid archivist Eulalie Regan at the Vineyard Gazette , who played the Watson to my Holmes (or maybe the other way around) when she learned no one had ever written truthfully about Rudolphus Crocker and his part in the Great Fire of 1883. Also Eulalie has placed in my hands countless envelopes with clippings about fascinating islanders whose lives have intersected with so many of these stories. And, speaking of old Rudolphus, thanks are in order to Charlie Utz, publisher of Vineyard Style Magazine , and historian Chris Baer for being the first to break the real story.

And speaking of the Vineyard Gazette , many thanks to editor-in-chief Julia Wells, editors Lauren Martin and Jim Kinsella, and everyone else in that venerable newsroom, who extends a warm welcome whenever I visit. I also love it that they let me write about everything under the sun, including ghosts, in my weekly town column.

I appreciate all the help Ive received from the folks at the Oak Bluffs Library: Danguole Budris, Matthew Bose, Anita Parker, Pamela Speir, and Rosemary Hildreth.

Im grateful to Vineyard Haven psychic Karen Coffey for sending me down some most intriguing paths. Robert Alger, of Pilgrim Paranormal Research, has been an invaluable resource and generously allowed me to use one of his photographs in the book. Its been fun hanging out with him and his cohorts, Patrick McAllister and Bob Kent, on ghost-hunting stakeouts, and a huge extra thanks to Pilgrim Paranormalists Scott Stalter and Donnie Reese for building my Web site, www.VineyardGhosts.com.

Over the years, thousands of people have participated in my ghost walking tours, and the accounts many of them have imparted during the hour we spend together have contributed to my own personal Wikipedia of the supernatural. Thanks also must go out to all the island spirits whove found a way to make me sit up and take noticelife is so much more magical when theyre out and about.

Thank you, too, to my fantastically loving, talented, supportive, and hilarious son, Charlie, now living in Los Angeles and following the promptings of family genes to be a writer. To my sister, Cindy; mom, Trina; brother, Owen; and sister-in-law, Faith: thank you for being in my life. Much love and gratitude to Marty Nadler, the best ex-husband in the world. My pets, Huxley and Beebe, are hardly the best dog and cat in the world, but they keep me laughing. My heart always warms to my closest women friends on the Vineyard; in alphabetical order, Donna Bubash, Paula Catanese, Jessica Harris, Injy Lew, Gwyn MacAllister, Lisa Rohn, Marcia Smilack, and C.K. Wolfson.

I ts finally happening. In the oldest parts of our countryof which Marthas Vineyard is oneweve stacked up layer upon layer of human history, with all the dramas, clashes, and lost souls imprinted on the air like a tiramisu of sugar, cake, and mascarpone cheese all squashed in a glass bowl.

This island is so richly haunted because it has drawn to its shores many of Americas most restless seekers without providing them with any lasting comfort or solace, beginning with the original band of Puritans who tried to Christianize the resident Indians but ended up killing most of them with European diseases. In the nineteenth century we had a continuous clash between the sacred and the profane as religious groups looked for God and the tourists arriving on their heels looked for saloons and cathouses and cheap real estate. For those with means, the island holds an irresistible beauty, but this ragged, soil-poor land has forced many of the less fortunate inhabitants away to perish at sea (or, in contemporary terms, to be cast adrift in a larger world of asphalt landscapes and death in living).

This is also a place where for centuries secrets have been keptaided and abetted by reporters and historiansin a manner that jeopardizes the mental health of the living and the psychical health of the dead. When this happens, negative vortices flourish. In these places angels fear to tread, and so do your run-of-the-mill visiting spirits. With the telling of these stories, we can only hope that some of those blockages in our landscape might at last become unstuck.

Good, bad, and indifferent, weve got hosts of ghosts. The Vineyard is now on a par with ghost-riddled England, though in both New and Olde England the spirit world has put its own regional stamp on ghostly legends. Instead of chain-clanking dungeons, Marthas Vineyard has spectral schooners, and instead of castles with ghostly knights and ladies, we entertain the wraiths of Native Americans, runaway slaves, pirates, and mariners, many of them touching down in old captains houses or doll-sized Victorian cottages, or hovering in the vicinity of eighteenth-century tombstones that lie forgotten alongside twisting dirt roads.

Vineyarders have always lived just far enough out to sea that in our long lonely winters we may turn a bit mad, hemmed in by frozen shores instead of asylum walls. On the other hand, unlike Nantucket and other more remote islands, Marthas Vineyard is close enoughseven milesto the mainland that the tidal currents of the real world keep things stirred up here.

Theres another element in our psychical makeup that I feel compelled to mention: Those of us who live here year-round without trust funds or fortunes made elsewhere are often deeply apprehensive because its so very hard to earn a living on this rock where there are never enough jobs. It has always been this way: the summers three months of income barely stretching through the desolate months of winter.

And yet were loath to leave. The rest of the world seems unnecessarily harsh, unnecessarily ugly. Here, during an early morning walk you can watch a formation of geese flapping skyward, observe pink mists rising over a saltwater inlet, and pass by a twinkling, frosted field stretching to a stand of snow-capped pine trees. Living here feels like a doomed love affair; it brings you no peace, but you know your lover is more beautiful, more exciting, and infinitely more kind than anyone else in the world. This brand of agony and ecstasy attracts both angels and demons to the Vineyard. It also recalls certain souls who have ostensibly passed on but who find it just as difficult to leave the island in death as in life. Call it a spirit world agoraphobia.

A gentleman from Dublin who visited my bookstore recently said with a small amount of pride, In Ireland, ghostsre thick as molasses.

Here too.

Lately Ive been advising people to stop ignoring the eerie stimuli bombarding their sixth sense, and to take note of the experiences that let us know were not alone here, we easily frightened, fragile, alive ones. A normal persons day is packed with the supernatural, and yet we unceasingly convince ourselves we only imagined the evidence of it; what just happened couldnt have happened.

Even those of us who believe we dwell within a prism of universes are habitually blind, deaf, and dumb to most of it: the footsteps in the attic (as we remind ourselves we have no attic, hence no footsteps), the stunning coincidences, the precognition of a phone call or a visit, the lost object that suddenly seems to find us , the tap on the shoulder when no ones there, the charged atmosphere that repels us as we round the corner of a two-hundred-year-old shipping station, an old farmhouse that gives us the williesthe same one where the owners have moved out, where painters and carpenters have refused to work alone in certain rooms, and where a neighbor has heard screams erupting late at night from the empty third floor.