Ghosts of the SouthCoast (5 page)

In 1877, a group of wealthy businessmen known as the Onset Bay Grove Association saw the resort area that was then known as Pine Point as the
perfect place to build a spiritualist camp. The association had taken its name from
Oknowam
(another form of Agawam), which was Wampanoag for “the sandy landing place.” The camp was dedicated on June 14 of that year and became one of the country's premier spiritualist camps, rivaling Lily Dale in New York for its sense of community and Victorian splendor.

However, rising skepticism of the spiritualist movement soon put a target squarely on Onset. A book called
Some Account of the Vampires of Onset, Past and Present,
published by the Press of S. Woodbury and Company of Boston in 1892, portrayed spiritualism in a negative light, attempting to debunk many popular mediums as frauds and many of the cornerstones of the movement as hoaxes. Of course, none of the material in the book is at all directly related to the Onset camp, but that didn't stop it from tarnishing the camp's image.

To counteract some of the negative publicity of the book, the Onset Bay Grove Association decided to erect a memoriam to the Native Americans whose spirits they believed helped guide them in their lives. In 1894, work was completed on the On-i-set Wigwam, which would honor the Wampanoag heritage while offering a place for spiritualists to convene and worship. A healing pole in the center of the octagonal wooden structure helped cure what ailed visitors on a physical, emotional and spiritual level.

The On-i-set Wigwam was built in 1893 and is still in use for spiritualist services today.

More than one hundred years later, the wigwam still stands, with the plaque hanging over the entranceway that reads, “Erected to the Memory of the Redmen, 1893. Liberty Throughout the World and Freedom to All Races.” Not far from the wigwam, the First Spiritualist Church of Onset still conducts regular services as part of the more modernized version of the Spiritualist Church.

It's no surprise that ghosts should be associated with an area where many share a belief system that actually welcomes and invites their presence. So many stories have come out of the cottages that surround the wigwam and the Victorian houses that dot the waterfront, but unlike other ghost stories in which the spirit is a tragic figure, these spectral visitors are considered old friends there to lend a ghostly guiding hand.

Just west of Wareham is what is known to locals as the Tri-Town region, consisting of Marion, Mattapoisett and Rochester. It's a unique dichotomy of three towns that in some respects could not be any more different, yet they share a common bond among them.

Originally, the three towns were actually villages under the general domain of Rochester, when Marion was known as Sippican after the Wampanoag tribe that inhabited the area.

Sippican broke off first, incorporating as Marion in 1852 after Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion. It later became a favorite spot of U.S. presidents Grover Cleveland and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mattapoisett—a Wampanoag word meaning “a place for rest”—followed suit in 1857. Over time, Marion and Mattapoisett developed as seaside communities with many wealthy residents, while Rochester maintained more of a rural, agricultural identity.

Even today, each town has fewer than six thousand permanent residents, and the small-town feel of each community means they often consider their ghosts to be almost part of the family.

Elizabeth Sprague Taber was Marion's greatest benefactor during its formative years. Upon her death, she left instructions in her will for the founding of a private school on the shores of Sippican Harbor on a piece of land she owned. In 1876, Tabor Academy opened, named per her instructions after Mount Tabor near the Sea of Galilee, where the transfiguration of Jesus Christ is said to have taken place.

Tabor Academy has become of one New England's most prestigious schools since its founding, partly due to the guiding hand of Walter Huston Lillard, who served as headmaster of Tabor from 1916 until 1942. During that time, Tabor enjoyed its largest growth, and the freshman dormitory was named Lillard Hall in his honor.

Throughout the years, a legend has developed in which a male student, either homesick or distraught over bad grades, hanged himself on the top floor of Lillard Hall. While there is no official mention of such a suicide at Tabor Academy, true believers cite that it happened in the early days of the institution when such things would not be made public.

Lillard Hall at Marion's prestigious Tabor Academy.

Reportedly, students living in Lillard Hall can hear strange voices and other sounds coming from the room where the boy hanged himself. The room is still assigned to incoming freshmen, and legend has it that those who stay in the room often suffer from feelings of dread and despair and are also prone to bad grades. Is there something negative that is somehow attached to the location that led the boy to commit suicide? Is his spirit now trapped in limbo and somehow affecting the current residents of where he met his untimely end?

It's all too easy to consider a cemetery to be haunted, but think about it—if you were a ghost, wouldn't the cemetery be the last place you'd want to hang around? It is one thing if, for reasons unknown, a spirit is somehow imprinted to the place where the physical body died. But to think a spirit would want to willingly stay where the body is laid to rest is pretty macabre, even when we're talking about a ghost.

Yet so many cemeteries and graveyards are reputedly haunted, and paranormal investigators just starting out continue to use them as their training ground. But in one Mattapoisett burial ground, the paranormal might not be so benign.

Ellis–Bolles Cemetery gets its name from the Ellis and the Bolles families that make up a majority of the plots, which date back from the early 1800s until around the 1950s. It stands in the middle of a nearly deserted and mostly dirt road called Wolf Island Road that, at night, increases the creepy factor on the way to the cemetery.

The most prominent legend associated with Ellis–Bolles, like most good ghost stories, has its roots in truth. During King Philip's War, the wooded areas of Rochester and Mattapoisett made a strategic hiding point for both sides. It's alleged that in the vicinity of where the cemetery now stands, there was an ambush and the captured prisoners were subsequently hanged from the trees on Wolf Island Road. No one is exactly sure which side ended up on the business end of the noose, and the ghostly shadow figures often reported to be dangling from the branches in modern times offer no indication as to who won that particular scuffle.

The Ellis–Bolles Cemetery has some spooky gravestones and some even spookier legends.

Another Wolf Island Road legend has grown over the years, this one with nothing more than its continued telling to back it up. According to the tale, in the early 1970s a carload of teenagers were cruising around in a Ford Mustang and went speeding down the dirt road. At some point, the driver rammed his Mustang into a tree and everyone in the car was killed instantly.

According to the legend, if you head out onto Wolf Island Road, park your car and blink your headlights three times, off in the distance you will see another pair of headlights blink back in your direction, before you hear the loud roar of a Mustang's engine and see the headlights speeding toward you, even though you can't quite make out the car to which they belong. You can feel the ghostly vehicle and its occupants as it passes through your car, but by that point the only thing you'll see are taillights fading in the distance out your back window.

Of course, this is also a common story associated with many other graveyards—I know of at least one in Massachusetts that shares a similar lore—but that doesn't stop the locals from passing it on.

In the trips that I've made out to Ellis–Bolles Cemetery, there has never
been a phantom Mustang and I have yet to see hanging Wampanoags or colonists in the trees, but I have acquired interesting evidence. When we began
Spooky Southcoast
radio in 2006, cohost Matt Costa and I decided we should check out Ellis–Bolles one night on our way into the WBSM studios. Armed with digital cameras and tape recorders, we spent about an hour poking around not long after the sun had gone down.

In looking at one grave, Matt noticed strange pitting on the granite of the tombstone and pointed it out to me. I responded by saying, “That's weird,” and on the audio tape we caught an EVP that sounded to me as if it was a voice repeating the word weird. It had a high-pitched squeak to it, almost as if it was a female voice. It is not uncommon for the voices on EVPs to repeat what the investigator has said, and often times it is done so in a mocking fashion.

We sent the EVP out to different experts to have it analyzed, and what came back was very interesting. One analysis placed it outside the normal human speaking range and determined that was being said was actually something more akin to Marion or Miriam. Now, Ellis–Bolles is only a stone's throw from Marion, so that's one possibility. But we also went back on a return trip along with our show's science advisor, Matt Moniz, and discovered a grave near the spot the EVP was recorded with the name Mary.

On that return trip, the two Matts were investigating a grave with a symbol on it while I was on the other side of the cemetery and we each had a recorder rolling. Matt Costa was recording on analog tape, while Matt Moniz and I each ran digital, albeit at two different settings. When Costa asked Moniz about the symbol, Moniz informed him it was a Freemason symbol. Immediately after, we caught an EVP repeating the word Freemason—on all three recorders. Even more incredibly, I was standing about twenty feet away from the two Matts when it imprinted on my recorder.

Whatever may be present at Ellis–Bolles Cemetery, it definitely seems to have strength greater than that of your usual graveyard ghost.

The town of Rochester is mainly an agricultural community, comprised of cranberry bogs and farms. They have a county fair each year that is a testament to the spirit of community and the blue-collar nature of this farming town.

Another testament is just how tight-lipped they seem to be about many of their ghost stories. Even at a time when talking about the paranormal is almost considered normal, it's hard to get a Rochester resident to open up about any experiences they may have had.

However, I have had a few off-the-record discussions with residents who tell me it's not uncommon to be driving along these rural roads late at night and see spectral beings out walking the fields. While there haven't been strong enough intelligent haunts to put Rochester on the paranormal map, it seems as though there's plenty of residual activity going on.