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Ghosts and Haunted Places in New England

by Alan Brown

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Credit: Lisa Sacco

Houghton Mansion's library retains its original woodwork, hand-carved by Italian artisans.

Credit: Lisa Sacco

Carousel Gardens' exterior. Constructed 1879-1894

Do you believe in ghosts? New England ghost hunters say two of the most active haunted places in the region are Houghton Mansion in North Adams, Massachusetts, and Carousel Gardens Restaurant in Seymour, Connecticut.

Sample these scary stories from Ghost Hunters of New England by Alan Brown. Read on, if you dare...

Houghton Mansion
172 Church St.
North Adams, Massachusetts

Excerpt from interview with Josh Mantello, Berkshire Paranormal Group

"During an all-night investigation, several members of [Josh's] group ... heard a loud noise coming from another room down the hall. Two of the investigators walked down ... One of them exclaimed, 'I heard the sound coming from over here!' and pointed to a corner of the room. At that same moment, the other investigator took his photograph. 'He's pointing to an orb in the photograph,' Josh says. 'It's not transparent. It looks like it's emanating its own light instead of reflecting [the] flash ... I like to go there because I know I'll find something every time. I'll go there at 3 a.m., and I'll hear voices.' "

The Houghton Mansion, built in the 1890s for North Adams' first mayor, is now a Masonic Temple, said to be haunted by the spirits of owner Albert C. Houghton and his daughter Mary, both of whom died following a tragic auto accident, and chauffeur John Widders, who committed suicide on the property.

Legend has it that witnesses have seen a young girl in the cellar. "She comes in and peeks around the corner at you," Josh Mantello told Alan Brown. "If you walk toward her, she disappears."

For tours and events:
houghton-mansion.tripod.com
berkshireparanormal.com

Carousel Gardens Restaurant
153 North St.
Seymour, Connecticut

Excerpt from interview with Donna Kent, Cosmic Society of Paranormal Investigation

"The paranormal has held a lifelong fascination for Donna Kent: 'As a child, I would hear my name called ... when I was home alone from school, and it would sound like my Dad's voice ... Many years ago, I went to Carousel Gardens with a radio station [disc jockey who] was a skeptic. He was mocking the ghost ... As the night went on, [he] continued to provoke the spirit more and more. All at once, he said, "If there is a spirit here, I'd like to see something right now." At that moment, a wine glass sitting on a table across the room shattered, and all the shards formed a perfect circle on the floor ... [He] went from total skeptic to totally terrified in a matter of minutes.'"

Helena Ruth Wooster, one of the owner's five daughters, and her brother, Horace, are believed to haunt their old home. Ruth is said to have been in the habit of setting the table with porcelain dinner for her pets; after he death, witnesses reported seeing a gray-haired woman in the windows of her bedroom.

North Adams, MA: Houghton Mansion

Houghton Mansion
172 Church St.
North Adams, Massachusetts

Excerpt from interview with Josh Mantello, Berkshire Paranormal Group

"During an all-night investigation, several members of [Josh's] group ... heard a loud noise coming from another room down the hall. Two of the investigators walked down ... One of them exclaimed, 'I heard the sound coming from over here!' and pointed to a corner of the room. At that same moment, the other investigator took his photograph. 'He's pointing to an orb in the photograph,' Josh says. 'It's not transparent. It looks like it's emanating its own light instead of reflecting [the] flash ... I like to go there because I know I'll find something every time. I'll go there at 3 a.m., and I'll hear voices.' "

The Houghton Mansion, built in the 1890s for North Adams' first mayor, is now a Masonic Temple, said to be haunted by the spirits of owner Albert C. Houghton and his daughter Mary, both of whom died following a tragic auto accident, and chauffeur John Widders, who committed suicide on the property.

Legend has it that witnesses have seen a young girl in the cellar. "She comes in and peeks around the corner at you," Josh Mantello told Alan Brown. "If you walk toward her, she disappears."

For tours and events:
houghton-mansion.tripod.com
berkshireparanormal.com

Seymour, CT: Carousel Gardens Restaurant

Old Town, ME: Haunted Bar

Bangor Ghost Hunters Association

Of all Harold (Murray)'s investigations, two stand out. One of them was conducted at a bar in Old Town, Maine. Harold was called in by the owner of the bar at 2 a.m. He went to the bar alone because he gave his team the night off.

Harold was talking to the owner and the bartender when he felt someone's hand on his shoulder. He spun around, and no one was there.

"I turned my tri-field meter on, and it went thermal. I snapped a picture, but I couldn't see what I was doing, and I caught a corner of the bar. Whatever it was disappeared. About ten minutes later, the men heard someone drop one of the big steel tables in the upper bar. They searched the bar, but everything seemed to be in place.

At the time, the cameras were running, so the owner asked, 'What do you see through the infra-red?' We brought it down and hooked it up to his TV, and we picked up a spiritual voice of a woman calling the owner's name. This was accompanied by a floating ball of light." The men did not see the floating orb with the naked eye, nor had they heard anyone talking before they listened to the video. In addition, no women were present.

"We could never prove it to be a hoax. The owner and his father and a few family friends identified it as the voice of his deceased mother. He got out of the bar, gave the bar back to his father, went across the street, and opened up a pawn shop," Harold said. Harold will always remember this case because it was his first physical encounter with an entity.

Codville, ME: Cemetery

Bangor Ghost Hunters Association

Another memorable case was held at a cemetery in Codville, Maine. According to Harold Murray: "We were videotaping. We had five members and ten other people who were family members of the client. Over the first grave, there was a 'traveler' -- a ball of light. The camera picked it up. It was just going back and forth in a circle. At first we thought it was a firefly, but it didn't blink.

"We checked out the possibility that it was a car driving by, but there was no dirt road in that section of the woods or traffic lights. We found out later that it was a fresh grave. Someone had been buried that day, and we didn't know about it. We captured the light on video."

The cameraman recorded the light for two and a half minutes. Then Harold told him to stay there for five minutes and take more video, this time to the right of the grave. The entire time he was filming, the cameraman did not see the light in the viewfinder. The next day, the group returned to the cemetery and discovered that they had been filming over a fresh grave.

Waterbury, CT: House

Skeleton Crew Paranormal Research Society

One of the group's strangest investigations was conducted at a house in Waterbury, Connecticut. Jim (Petrino) said, "We got a call that some people were sitting on the front steps and would not go inside until we got there. When we arrived, the girls were trembling on the steps, and I thought, 'This must be a genuine good one.'... During the meeting, a twenty-year-old girl was crying and pointing hysterically, 'There it is! There it is! Can't you see it?'

"I said, 'No, we don't see it.' Rick and I said, 'No we don't see it.' She said, 'It's right there. Don't you see it?' We said, 'No, we can't.' " The young woman continued to point at an unseen presence for thirty minutes. At the end of the interview, the group was getting ready to leave when the young woman claimed she saw the ghost walking down the hallway into the bedroom.

"I didn't believe her by this time," Jim said. "I left my camera and my video and just walked down the hallway with her. She pointed to a corner of the bedroom and said, 'Don't you see it?' I said, 'Yeah.' There was a full-bodied apparition standing against the wall. I was thinking, 'What do I do now? I don't have my video camera or my still camera. I don't have anything.' I was afraid it would be gone by the time I returned with my camera, so I took two steps forward, and the thing turned to the side. I took one step, and it disappeared before it hit the wall."

Ashland, MA: John Stone Inn

W.R.A.I.T.H.

One of T.J.Tucker's most interesting investigations was conducted at the John Stone Inn in Ashland, Massachusetts. "It was just a friend of mine and I who went to the inn. There's a legend that John Stone haunts it and that the guy that he killed haunts it, but there's also a little girl who passed away there," T.J. said. "We both experienced the spirit of the little girl."

"She was basically wanting to play with us. She kept popping up everywhere we went. We were, like, 'OK, we can't play with you now.' But she was persistent. She kept trying to joke with us and to get us to play with her."

Vermont: Old School

Granite State Paranormal

A case in point is an investigation at an old school in Vermont. Legend has it that a janitor who passed away in the 1930s had been seen and heard in the school.

"One of my guys went over there," Jim Snell said, "and was walking around doing Electronic Voice Phenomena work. One question he asked was 'Do you know that you're dead?' The spirit answered back, 'I'm still breathing.' "

Jim returned to the school a few weeks later with a group from Vermont called VAPORS. "One of the girls and I had walked twenty feet down the hallway, and we noticed that the door to the bathroom was open," Jim said. "They had one of those infrared triggering devices on the wall panel near the inside of the door. So we checked the area between the door and whatever it was that set it off. We determined that you had to go a ways inside the bathroom to set it off. There was no way out of the bathroom, so whatever was triggering the motion detector was still in there."

Jim and the young woman walked through the building to a different location where they could still see the room, and they asked the spirit to do it again, and the light came back on. Still, Jim is unwilling to cite this incident as definite proof of the paranormal because, after all, a motion detector is an electronic device and therefore is prone to malfunction. "It could be a coincidence too," Jim adds.

Rhode Island: Boys' Reformatory

Rhode Island Paranormal Research Team, Scituate, Rhode Island

The group collected some very eerie EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) at Saconawa Prison, which used to be a boys' reformatory. "We had a recording of Ray and Barbara setting up the equipment, but in the background, you can hear someone saying, 'Get out!' in a very ominous voice," Andrew Lairdsaid.

At other locations, the groups have recorded similar threatening EVPs, such as "Get out of my house!" and "Get out and leave us alone!" Some of the language on the group's EVPs is so abusive that, in Andrew's words, it "would make a truck driver blush." The hostile tone of some of these EVPs can be traced, Andrew believes, to the fact that some of these spirits simply do not want to be bothered.

Not all of the team's EVPs are angry, however. "We recorded one in the Paine House that is a little girl's voice," Andrew says. "Her name was Sarah. She told us to look in a particular place. We did, and we found a ring."