It’s Fun To Believe In Ghosts

Welcome to the October 2016 edition of Jud’s New England Journal, the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, the Editor-in-Chief of Yankee Magazine, published in Dublin, New Hampshire since September 1935, and The Old Farmer’s Almanac published since 1792 in Massachusetts and then, since 1939, in Dublin. It’s Fun To Believe In GhostsEspecially around Halloween!   New Englanders want to believe in ghosts but we are often too practical to believe anything we haven’t seen, heard or touched. Well, it so happens I personally have seen a few ghosts. Several years ago, for instance, one appeared in front of my incredulous eyes, in the Massachusetts State Hall of Flags. It was clearly discernible in one of the Italian marble columns there. Still is, I assume. A tourist attraction as popular as the flags themselves, it’s known as the “Bride in White.” If you’ve had a wine or two at lunch, as I had that day, you can also view the “Kissing Cavalier” on the other portion of the marble stairway leading up from Doric Hall, the ghost of a chicken on the marble fireplace in the Senate Reading Room, the ghost of an English bulldog just outside the Reading Room, and perhaps most startling, the ghost of William Cullen Bryant on the lower portion of another marble column outside the Hall of Flags. The Massachusetts State House is a historic and rather eerie place. One of the most famous New England ghosts, whose scary voice was heard by thousands of people around the world, was in New Milford, Connecticut, back in 1930. Known as “The New Milford Ghost,” it consisted of a series of faint, ghostlike voices emanating from a small shed behind a restaurant on the north end of Railroad Street. “Someone please help me,” the ghost moaned. “I’m a little baby buried forty feet underground. Help!” Another day the voice was that of a murdered man seeking revenge. Then there was an Indian chief who had lived in the area two hundred years earlier. And others. At one time that year, thousands of outsiders, including members of the clergy, spiritualists, newspaper reporters from around the county and even from Europe, as well as the merely curious, were in New Milford to hear the ghost or ghosts. Even the most famous radio newsman of his day, Gabriel Heatter, reported on the New Milford ghost in one of his nightly broadcasts to the nation. After a few weeks of bedlam—and very good business for the restaurant—the police barricaded the shed, the voices stopped, and everyone went home. It seems that when an old refrigerator in the shed was sold, the wiring that went underground to the restaurant kitchen was removed. But the old cable that encased the wiring was not. By accident, two of the “ghosts” who owned the restaurant discovered they could communicate between the kitchen and the shed via this cable, which weirdly distorted their normal voices. In a clandestine night operation, they then extended the cable through three adjacent stores to a hidden outlet in the men’s room of Garcia’s Tailor Shop. It was from here that they proceeded, for about two chaotic weeks, to spook the entire Western world. Oh, for sure, it’s such fun to believe in ghosts.