Off-the-Shelf

Halloween Tales

It is the afternoon of October 31st. The sun is past its zenith and headed toward the western horizon. Soon, twilight will arrive and Halloween will awaken with ghosts and goblins and grinning jack'o'lanterns.

I wrote the following article for the current issue of the Barnstable Patriot. If you want to read more about the legends I mention, check out Elizabeth Reynard's book "The Narrow Land." And a number of the ghost stories can be found in Mark Jasper's book "Haunted Cape Cod and the Islands." Until then ......

Things That Go Bump in Barnstable
 
by Jack Sheedy

In a blaze of red and orange the final day of October ends. A planet in the western sky blinks to life as purple twilight touches down upon the sacred landscape of wise, old houses and tapering church spires. Darkness slowly envelopes the aged gravestones and wandering stonewalls. Bats take flight as somewhere in the distance, a solitary coyote can be heard baying against the backdrop of a rising waning moon. A sudden wind across the great marsh wails like the final breath of a dying soul. Halloween has returned to Barnstable.

The town and her villages are awash in haunted tales and strange phenomena, cobwebbed stories that have survived to modern day. And if you believe such tales then you may wish to bolt your door this Halloween until dawn breaks upon the following morning.

These tales begin with legends from centuries ago – legends of witches, ghosts, black cats, and even the spirit of a mournful Scotsman. One of the earliest tales comes from the Native Indians and involves an old woman named Granny Squannit who lived in a beachside cave at Cummaquid. A medicine woman who was known for driving the Devil out of mischievous young boys, her distinguishing features included long hair that covered her face and a solitary eye in the center of her forehead. She claimed any gold buried in the forests or in the dunes, and marked the location of these treasures with glowing orbs. Over the years some locals claimed to have seen Granny Squannit’s orbs, but it is not reported if her gold was ever found.

At Grand Island, between Cotuit and Osterville, lived another woman with an interest in gold, yet her motives were quite sinister. Hannah Screecham, considered a witch by the locals, befriended pirates that visited the southern shore and helped them bury their treasures. Occasionally, Hannah would kill a pirate and bury him in the sand along with the treasure. Yet, when she attempted to dig up the gold for herself she was haunted by the pirates’ ghosts. Today, Hannah’s ghost walks the dunes along with the ghosts of the pirates she murdered so long ago. And her evil screeching can still be heard on stormy nights.

Meanwhile, in the vicinity of Sandy Neck, comes the story of a Scottish ghost known as Robert the Scot. A manservant to a wealthy physician, Robert was implicated when the doctor turned up dead and the dead man’s wealth in the form of gem’s and jewelry turned up missing. Soon, Robert also wound up dead and was buried in unhallowed ground at Scorton Hill in Sandwich. His restless spirit roams the countryside, searching for the missing gems in order to prove his innocence. It is said that imbedded within the breezes in the vicinity of Scorton you’ll hear the wailing sigh of Robert the Scot’s bagpipes.

Just south of Barnstable village is a forest that has been haunted for centuries, since the days of the local witch Liza Tower Hill. Born in the early 18th century, she grew up in the forest and lived there throughout her adulthood, in the vicinity of Mary Dunn Pond. In the forest she would dance upon the surface of the pond as devilish fish swam below and mutant animals gathered along the shore. On at least two occasions she was accused by local men of turning them into a horse and then riding them to Witches’ Sabbaths, sometimes as far away as Plymouth.

Even after her death, locals claimed to see her ghost in the forest, most notably witnessed by a Dr. Richard Bourne on Christmas night in 1810. On that evening, the good doctor made merry with the ghost, and drank and danced with her well past midnight. In the morning he awoke alone in the woods, most likely cold and a little hung over.

Over the centuries, strange lights were seen in the woods along Mary Dunn Road, so named for a former slave who lived along this route and who was “burned to death in 1850 in her little cottage half-way between Hyannis and Barnstable on the Indian Trail” according to historian Donald G. Trayser’s in his book Barnstable: Three Centuries of a Cape Cod Town.

The ghost of Liza Tower Hill is also associated with the Allyn House, a red saltbox along Route 6A considered among the oldest dwellings on Cape Cod, built around 1680. In this house the witch’s daughter Lydia worked as a servant for the Allyn family. It is said that whenever her daughter was mistreated or made to work especially hard, Liza Tower Hill made her presence known by banging on the walls, breaking up furniture, or causing the Allyn children to come down with a fever. The witch often took the form of a black cat, her familiar, and even up to modern day black cats have been seen roaming about the property.

There are a number of haunted buildings along the Old King’s Highway, but perhaps the most haunted of them all is the Barnstable House. Built in 1716 by James Paine, an ancestor of Declaration of Independence signer Robert Treat Paine, it seems that pain and sorrow was part of the building’s history since nearly the beginning. An underground river passes beneath the house and it was here where the owner’s young daughter was drowned. Another owner, Edmund Howes, hanged himself from a tree on the property. Still another, a Dr. Samuel Savage, was rumored to have practiced black magic in the house. Over the past three centuries the Barnstable House has amassed eleven ghosts according to psychics who have visited the building.

During the 20th century the place was run as an inn and restaurant. Typically, patrons would sit down at a table and be approached by someone dressed in old garb, whom they would assume was a waiter or waitress, only to find that no one by that description was on the wait staff. Others witnessed candles lighting by themselves or fires spontaneously igniting in the fireplace. A rocking chair in the parlor has rocked under its own power. And then, as told in Mark Jasper’s book, Haunted Cape Cod & the Islands, “There is another presence that is thought to reside in the dark, damp cellar. This spirit has been identified as the cantankerous Captain Grey. He is known as the ‘door slammer.’”

The most popular story associated with the building involves a late-night fire during the early 1970’s. Upon arrival, members of the fire department noticed a woman in a third story window of what should have been an empty building. Upon gaining access to the upstairs room, they found it empty … only to discover what appeared to be a woman with long blond hair and wearing a long white gown hovering above the front lawn. Soon, the image disappeared.

Tales of ghosts, strange noises and other unexplained phenomena have become attached to other Route 6A locations, such as the Lamb & Lion Inn, Beechcroft Inn, Crocker Tavern, and even the old carriage house behind the former Trayser Museum (now the US Coast Guard Heritage Museum). But if ghosts are not your cup of tea, how about local sightings of flying saucers, sea monsters, or even Sasquatch?

According to reports found on the Internet, this area was visited by UFO’s during the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. Two sites (www.cufon.org and www.ufo-connection.com) refer to an episode in 1953 that saw a jet take off out of Otis Air Base to investigate strange lights in the sky. The jet mysteriously crashed. Fifteen years later, a glowing UFO was seen landing late at night in Barnstable, somewhere in the vicinity of Race Lane. And ten years after that, a pair of motorists traveling through town along the Mid-Cape Highway witnessed a flying object, reporting that they could actually see creatures moving in the spacecraft’s windows.

Meanwhile down at sea level, stories of sea serpents in Cape waters predate the Pilgrims’ arrival as Henry Hudson claimed to have seen one here in 1609. A century later, Benjamin Franklin’s uncle saw a floppy-eared serpent with the head of a lion in Cape waters. And though it would seem there have been no Lake Wequaquet Monster sightings, in 1833 a serpent was such a nuisance pestering mariners in Massachusetts and Cape Cod bays that a whaling crew was sent out to harpoon the beast, but the serpent could not be found.

Yet, not all strange creatures around these parts hover in the air or swim in the salty brine. About a quarter century ago, along Route 151 in the neighboring town of Mashpee, a “Bigfoot” sighting occurred. According to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization as documented on their website www.bfro.net, two witnesses observed “a tall dark hair covered bipedal creature.” The sighting ended when the two witnesses “drove off at high speed.”

So this Halloween, when your doorbell chimes, don’t be so sure that it’s just the neighbor’s kids in costume. It could be something even more sinister!