New England Ghost Stories - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 5/16/24

that's before the Internet and everything. They were very much regional celebrities, and I was just intrigued at the idea that you could even make a living looking for ghosts and strange things all over And I went to school to be a journalist, started that way and loved covering these weird stories, and I guess the rest is history.

folks like that. But but but these were my neighbors, you know, Lorraine went to our church, and so I think that you know, say what you will about what they've done, but I mean they were pioneers in a lot of ways.

did what they did for their whole adult lives. So I think part of it is going to be, you know, the test of time, how many people stick with it and keep doing the work and keep documenting it and being as objective as they can.

all kinds of very short listings. You know, this town contained these these three factories, this one had this farm, this many cows. But there's one listing that says Ramtail Factory and then in parentheses says haunted. That's it, and it's become Rhode Island's official haunt. In the census. It's the only time you see ghost or haunting or anything. And when you hear about the story, you realize why

this is so compelling. So the Ramtail Factory was a water driven factory, a woolen mill that first opened in the early in the mid eighteen hundreds, and it was sorry I found. It was found in eighteen thirteen by four people, but one of them was Peleg Walker and William Potter, and these business partners started this mill and each day Peleg Walker's job was to ring the work bell to get people to work, and they would come

in and do it. And eventually Pelig Walker got into some financial troubles and needed to be bought out, but he didn't want to leave his business. But basically his partner said, we'll buy you out. You'll have your money, but you're gone. You're out of the business. We want you out. And so Peleg had the keys to the factory and said, you know, the next time you get these keys, that will be out of the hands of

a dead man. And that night was supposed to be his last night, and as he locked up the factory, he stayed inside and he took his own life. And the following morning, well, the bell didn't ring, and eventually people get curious, you know what, we're running late, what's going on, And then when they finally got inside, they found him. Now everyone was sort of spooked working at the mill after that. Strange things were happening at one point.

One of the accounts was that the water wheel was running backwards to gravity, you know, was running against the stream and so on. But when the factory eventually burned down, people would still hear the bell ringing to call you to work. Even though the bell was gone, people would see a lantern moving through, you know, moving through in the night and in the dark. And Pillig's walker, his grave epitaph is so ominous. It says, you know, life how short, eternity how long? And we believe he's the

one that's still out there. And even though the factory is long gone, there's nothing but woods and some cellar holes and some stone walls out there. Today people claim to still hear the bell. His grave can still be visited, not not too far from where the foundations are, and the story endoors and it's been known since eighteen eighty five as Rhode Island's official haunt.

a little more to see. And I think people were intrigued even back then, not just that the woods are beautiful and the stream is nice, but that the story kind of calls to them. So that's the thing, George about a haunt. When I tell you, if you go to this place, this specific location, and it's haunted, you're intrigued enough that you want to go and find out for yourself. Right, you go and you say wow, even if you say I'm a skeptic, I don't believe. Well,

but enough of you says but I'll still go. Look or maybe you look and you get more than you bargain.

for it. But the backstory is amazing. So there was a wealthy gentleman named Thomas LeCount and he was a grocer from Niana, Connecticut, and he had a two and a half story home on the south shore of Gardner Lake. But he also owned some land on the eastern shore of the lake, and he really wanted to move his

home to the other side of the lake. It was done back then, very expensive, very tricky process, as you can imagine, to lift a home, get it onto you know, sort of some sort of a cart where you can move it with horses and so on. But that's when

they came up with an idea. In the winter of eighteen ninety five, it was so cold that the lake had frozen more than ten inches thick, and that's when an engineer came up with the brilliant idea, We're going to just lift this house and we're going to put it on sleds and just drag it across the frozen lake to the other side to where your property is easy, no problem. This will be the easiest house move they've

ever done. And it was such a cold winter, and sure enough, February comes long and they get the house lifted, they get it on skids and they start dragging it across the ice and it's going well, it's going pretty well. They get it maybe, you know, a few hundred feet out onto the ice, until they run out a day and they have to come back the next day with more horses. No problem, you know, this is all going fine. The next day they come back and the ice starts

to crack, and uh, oh, there's a problem. And now the house is is breaking down into the ice and sinking. What they didn't know, and what nobody knew, is that there's there's a dam that controls some of the water. And while the process would have gone just fine. The dam was was released the night before to let some water down further down the stream, it was just enough to create create a gap between the ice on the lake and the water.

become a rescue mission. But of course the house had a piano in it, and it had a wood stove and things like that, things that were just too heavy to pull out of this house that just kept sinking and sinking, and for the rest of that winter people would ice skate around it. There were postcards made of this house, picture it going in at like a fifteen degree angle. And then of course spring came and the

house just slowly sunk. And for years you could see this house out in the middle of the lake, just slowly disintegrating. But the piano was never rescued. And the story that endoors is that you can still hear the piano playing out on Gardner Lake.

And then you go back in time and you see these amazing postcards and you see the pictures and you say, oh, this was a time where someone was trying to do something creative from an engineering point of view, and it turned into a disaster.

New Hampshire. It's gorgeous. When you come up to it, you see this sprawling, incredible, you know, white and red hotel, and then behind it is just these majestic mountains. It is absolutely gorgeous. I was built in nineteen hundred. It was a very expensive project built by Joseph Stickney. He hired two hundred and fifty Italian artisans for the construction, and he followed this old superstition to vary the number of steps to the second floor in order to confuse

the ghosts. So there's two main staircases when you walk in today, one by the front desk and one by the ballroom, and there's a different number of steps, so the rise and run is just a little bit different. So you could say they were superstitious right from the

get go. Now, Stickney had married a younger widow named Carolyn, and when Stickney passed away within the first year of the hotel being opened, Carolyn inherited everything and she became known as the Princess because she eventually married French royalty. And she would throw these lavish parties at the Mount Washington. She would invite all the fanciest people around who were coming to vacation and holiday in that region, and she

always was last to the party. She used to like to look down over the balcony and see how all the other women were dressed, so she could make sure that she was dressed better than all of them, and then she would of course make her grand entrance. She would even stick there, stick around there in the winter. This is where she was happiest her This was her castle, and eventually once she passed away that first winter they

used to close it up for the winter. Back then, that first winter they would say lights on and say, well, that's strange, we must have left something on, and they'd have to go back and check. But pretty soon they realized it's it's absolutely her spirit still floating around there, and seeing a woman peek over the balcony became commonplace. Her main suite is called the Princess Room that's haunted, and people requested months out in order to stay there

and try to experience something. And when you check into the hotel today, there's a painting of her up on the wall and a kind of like a faux banister that they've put in front of the painting, so she's literally looking down on you just as you check in, and the stories just endure, you know, with so much time that's passed there, there's been so many ghost sightings throughout that building. You know, hotels are such transient places. Of course, some people go there with no intention to

check out she was. You know, she's not the only ghost there, but she absolutely is the most prominent.

spooked and easily fooled and so on. But King William's War was raging just to the north in Canada, and this is a war between the Native Americans, French, and the British, and it's creating a refugee crisis. That's sending colonists and as they head south through what is now modern day Maine, they're coming to the region of Gloucester and the region of Salem. And so you've got refugees

looking for shelter. You've got you know, Native Americans that are that are out there, you know, fighting for their land, and you've got preachers in the pulpit saying, you know, these these are heathens. They're there words not mine. Of course,

they're saying, these are in league with the devil. And when you hear about a village being wiped out or a family being wiped out by by soldiers of Native American soldiers, it's not that much of a stretch to think that there really is evil out there, and so everybody's scared. So the Salem witch trials that that's the context for that, but that's also the context for what's happening in Gloucester. People are spooked, and it was the it was the summer July of sixteen ninety two when

you have you have strange sightings around Gloucester. Now, at first they think they're just seeing French and Native American wars outs in town, which is cause for alarm, but then those scouts can never be found. Everybody's on high alert, you know, they've they've got the garrison armed, they've got people coming in, you know, looking for for any sign of trouble, and.

steal something or get information. Chases the men down, but then they vanish. And you could say, okay, that's just that's just one example. Maybe you know they just got away and gave him the slip. But now everyone's on high alert and events like this keep happen. Pretty soon you're seeing more and more scouts. Soldiers are shooting at them, claiming I hit them. I'm sure I hit them. But

then you go and there's no one there. And so eventually when you've got you know, night after night weeks of this of now garrison soldiers on the watch all the time saying we're seeing them, we're shooting at them, we're chasing them, and you can't find a single one either. Everyone's a terrible shot, or there's literally ghosts, literally ghosts that are hunting them down and keeping everyone on edge.

So you've got the Salem Witch Trials, and next door you've got the Specter Leaguers of Gloucester that's got everyone completely scared all the time.

I think we should set lofty goals. And as I started doing this, and as we started to build an audience, something sort of amazing happened. The stories became crowdsourced. People started telling hey, have you heard about this? Have you heard about that? And you start to realize just how

powerful these stories are. I mean, they all belong to a community, you know, and the community identifies with it and takes ownership of it and shares that story with people that they trust, and it's a really profound and powerful thing, and it's a profound connection to our past.