ROCKINGHAM — New England has a long and rich history of ghosts and unexplained events, and the valley around the Great Falls is no different.
The Commons chased down a couple of ghost stories and was invited along to photograph spirits. You make up your own mind whether you believe or not.
Nancy, who told her tale on the condition that she be identified by her first name, lives in an old Victorian house built in the late 1800s in Bellows Falls for a bachelor.
“His mother must have helped him design the house, because there's a ton of closets, more than any other Victorian I've ever seen,” she said with a laugh.
For years, Nancy owned a cat that triggered her husband's allergies. The cat lived to 23 years old. “I'll never get another cat. I respect that he lived with it all those years,” she said.
Now she has a dog, Joey, a medium-sized mixed breed, and the two of them will sit together at night watching television or maybe reading.
Then the dog will behave strangely.
“It's always dark, it's always quiet, and we're always alone, just Joey and me,” she said. “She sees something in that hallway I can't see, and it raises her hackles.”
“When it's quiet, all of a sudden she'll sit up and look towards the hallway - and it's always in the same spot,” Nancy said. “It's not a smell, because her nose twitches when she smells something. The hairs on the ridge of her back will raise up, and she'll just sit and stare at that spot in the hallway.”
Nancy describes the TV room as off the master bedroom and part of a suite of rooms. “I don't know what the room could have been,” she said. “Maybe a dressing room.”
Nancy said this has happened on and off since they have lived there; the last time was “sometime this summer.” She said her husband remains skeptical, as he is always out of the room when it happens.
“I'm convinced animals can sense things we can't,” she said.
Nancy said she senses and sees nothing, and it never makes her feel uncomfortable when Joey goes on alert.
A ghost in the cook's room
Dot Read, owner of Readmore Inn and Bed and Breakfast in downtown Bellows Falls, notes on her website that the former cook's room might have a resident ghost.
She should know. She's the one who heard it.
The dressing table sits against the wall just to the right of the door into the hallway from the room, now a guest bedroom.
When she and her husband, Stewart, were renovating the house between 1997 and 2000, they stayed in the room while working on the rest of the house.
Read recalls standing at the dressing table one day, brushing her hair and looking in the mirror. Suddenly, she heard a knock on the door. She demonstrated an ordinary knock - like a knock from someone about to enter a room.
Imagine Read's surprise when she opened the door and no one was there. Her husband was nowhere near and denied he was the culprit, and no one else was in the house.
“It didn't scare me. I felt like whoever it was, they were polite,” she said with a laugh.
Read said it happened quite a few more times during the couple's tenure in the room before they moved into their third-floor quarters, but admits that since the house was finished, it has not happened to her knowledge.
“We had a couple of guests who thought they might have heard something in the room,” she reported. “One thought she heard a soft knock and no one was there, and the other heard something like a crash of something falling over in the room, that hadn't.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe the ghost is used to us now,” she said.
Read said during the same time period, there were several other incidents of unexplained noises in the house outside the Teddy Roosevelt Room off the second-floor atrium.
“My mother told me about it one morning after she'd stayed the night in the room,” Read said. “She came down to breakfast and asked me why our dog was in the hall last night. She'd heard what she thought were his tags jingling. The dog had been upstairs with us all night.”
Read said her mother described the sounds as similar to metal objects clinking against one another. Her mother is not the kind of person to hear things, she pointed out.
Nor was she the only one who has heard the sound. Read said a couple of other people who stayed in the room heard it, too.
“One woman asked the morning after they'd slept there what someone was doing delivering tea in the middle of the night. She thought she'd heard a tea cart jangling by outside her door. There's no tea cart, and we definitely weren't delivering midnight tea,” Read declared, smiling.
The Readmore is also well known for the gargoyle that sits atop the northeast corner of the house on the roofline.
The gargoyle sits reading Grimm's Fairy tales and is said to leave the roof only to find something new to read.
“It's a friendly gargoyle,” Read said. “It's reading a book… read more, get it?” she said with a smile. “It's guarding against illiteracy.”
A magnet for spirits
Michael Reynolds claims to have experienced many ghostly spirits in his life. “I seem to attract them,” he said.
Reynolds said that he grew up in a Victorian house “seriously haunted by a poltergeist,” so he is not new to ghostly happenings. He and his partner, Roger Riccio, own and operate the Rivermist Bed and Breakfast, also in downtown Bellows Falls.
Reynolds writes that “our pets react to unseen entities, affixing their gaze […] in mid-air and barking at something we cannot see,” explaining just one of a multitude of hauntings he and Riccio have witnessed.
“One night Roger awoke to find a darkened figure standing perfectly still, staring at him as he slept. He and the phantom stared at each other for so long that Roger eventually succumbed to sleep without ever witnessing the spirit vanishing,” Reynolds continued.
“Once while standing on the front sidewalk peering through the window, I saw a shadow cross the parlor wall when nobody was in the house,” Reynolds wrote. “We frequently hear somebody stomping down the second-floor hallway.”
As if that is not enough, Reynolds wrote, “We often smell odd odors such as flowery cologne, unaccountable food scents, or most frequently the unmistakable pungent smoke of a cigar.”
Reynolds said the terrifying experiences, first as a child and now an adult, led him to research ghosts.
“The fact that understanding dispels fear was the motivating factor,” he said. “I've read about many strange things in an effort to understand my own circumstances. However, no amount of reading lessened the terror I experienced in my childhood.”
Reynolds said he had experienced ghostly presences elsewhere as well, and agreed to meet at the Old Rockingham Meeting House for show and tell.
On a bright and warm autumn day, Reynolds conducted a tour through the two-story building, pointing out where a previously closed gate to one of the upstairs stalls had swung open in front of him. Nothing happened during the visit.
After stepping to the front of the balcony that faces the pulpit below, Reynolds snapped several photographs. In fact, he was taking photographs throughout the tour.
Suddenly, he said, “I've got some orbs.”
Three different spheres, or orbs, appeared in his photograph, apparently floating below in the gallery of the Meetinghouse. A second photograph of the same spot, this one from a reporter's camera, detected nothing.
Later, Reynolds blew up the photo, confirming five orbs.
Many people all over the world have begun gathering specifically to attract and photograph such phenomena. They are supposed to be attracted by vibrations emanated by living beings present.
Googling “orbs” on the images search page brings up hundreds if not thousands of photographs people have taken around the world of orbs or spheres.
“I get them a lot,” Reynolds said.
A tour of the cemetery found no more orbs or ghostly presences, but did find wonderful old slate carved tombstones from the 1700s, haunting in their grief still palpable after centuries at the passing of loved ones.
Reynolds pointed out the ancient underground chamber similar to others found around New England whose history is unknown, but are suspected to be of ancient Celtic origins.
Its interior is small, and only a child-sized body could be stored inside during winter months, if indeed that is what it was used for. Facing directly east toward the autumnal rising sun, it may have had other uses for the ancients who built it.
Whether or not you believe in ghosts, orbs or animals that can sense ghostly presences, it does not take long to find someone who can recount an event they cannot explain somewhere in the ancient valley above the Great Falls, where people have lived and died for thousands of years.