Cape Encounters: Contemporary Cape Cod Ghost Stories - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dan Gordon first experienced the magic of the Cape as a child vacationing two weeks each summer in Chatham. His admiration for the Cape's soulful homes inspired him to spend the last decade researching the Cape's ghost stories. He has covered global baseball for the Providence Journal. His work also appears in Elysian Fields Quarterly and Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives: Sports Figures published his profile of Pedro Martinez. His writings on baseball in Nicaragua and Japan will appear in Baseball Beyond Our Borders (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming), a compilation of essays on baseball around the world. Gordon has appeared on radio shows around the globe to discuss the topic of ghost stories on Cape Cod, including a recent appearance on RTE FM2. Gordon is currently working on a compilation of ghost stories from baseball diamonds around the world.

Gary Joseph, a lifelong Cape resident, has long been interested in accounts of ghost encounters. As a child, he enjoyed listening to adults tell these stories and observing the way people told them--their expressions, their mannerisms, and how they captivated an audience. He also writes about film, natural history, and the outdoors.

Aus dem Klappentext

In this fascinating collection, residents of Cape Cod share stories about ghosts who descend staircases that no longer exist, kiss sleeping women, flip theater seats, fold laundry, and join musicians onstage.

What these ordinary Cape Codders have to say may challenge your notions of haunted houses. Whether you're amused or comforted, puzzled or disturbed by these stories, they are above all thought-provoking and entertaining.

They also capture the unique charm of the Cape--a combination of tradition, natural beauty, maritime lore...and mystery. Enter Cape Cod's historic soulful homes and discover a world in which the past is very much alive.

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Reverberations

Bruce Mackenzie, a seventy-two-year-old international businessman and former professor at Boston University and United States Military Academy at West Point, was cordial and refined. He wore dark tan chinos and a red sweater. His sentences sometimes trailed off, and he often interrupted himself to rephrase his thought. He sat up and talked faster in response to our questions, stimulated by conjecture and trying to rationalize why he has experienced a ghost for as long as he can remember, and explain what gap exists between science and the understanding of ghosts. Later in the conversation, he belly laughted at his remarks, especially as he tried to typify the ghost.

We were seated in comfortable upholstered chairs in the living room of his seventeenth-century full Cape in Orleans. It was a sunlit room with a low ceiling with exposed beams.

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Cape Codders were always heavily sea-oriented, making their living one way or another from the sea. Sometimes they'd go away for months and come back with boats full of salt herring or cod. Shipping traffic developed after the Revolution, from Boston down to Virginia, especially along this whole cape down through Fall River, New Bedford, Providence, New Haven--"haven" meaning harbor. And the ghost story of this house is that at Nauset Inlet and Nauset Beach there were land "pirates." Mooncussers. In the nineteenth century there were hundreds of shipwrecks out there. Schooners would get a little too close to the shoals. Of course, in those days, if you had strong storms, squalls, and fog, you could easily get lost. So the Mooncussers developed a strategy of putting lanterns on the shoals on foggy or stormy nights so that ships thought they were channels. And that would attract ships to the shoals, and then they would kill the people and take the treasure.

One of the inhabitants of this house in the 1810-1830 period was part of an Orleans gang of Mooncussers. After a number of these successful ventures, the local constabulary apparently were lying in wait for them over on Nauset Heights. Though the gang escaped, the constables pursued the owner of this house back here. He knew they had recognized him and were coming for him. So he went in the attic and hanged himself, and he has been here ever since.

We have certainly heard him, and his presence has been quite real over the years. And that goes way back into the 1920s and '30s.

My mother and father would hear voices in the attic, and we would hear strange cries very often at night. My mother designed hooked rugs and taught people how to make them. When she was doing that and was very busy, apparently, he would respect it; but when she would go to bed or just started reading, he felt that it was time for socializing, in whatever limited form he could do. And my mother would say, "Oh, shut up and go to bed." I grew up with it. He was not a hostile ghost, but, apparently, he tended to just want a bit of company from time to time.

I can remember sleeping upstairs on Thanksgiving in the mid-1930s and hearing strange cries and definitely being frightened enough to come downstairs to the bedroom where my mother and father were sleeping. And they said, "He won't hurt you." They had absolute faith that the Mooncusser was still here.

My mother died in 1970. She had lived down here alone. (I had been away a great deal of the time.) One winter my daughter Pia and her husband stayed in the house. She had heard it before, but this was the first time that the phenomenon was extraordinary. She was sitting in this room with her husband and the snow was, oh, almost a foot deep outside. They heard voices and tapping on the door. They tried opening the door, but it was frozen. They looked out the window, and they couldn't see anything, and then she heard darker, heavier voices and also some children's voices by the front door and the door by the kitchen. So they put on their winter clothes and boots and went out, and there were absolutely no footsteps and no traces of anybody. If somebody had bodily come up, they would have seen it.

Since then, I've heard it upstairs primarily. I go up to the attic to put things up there. I don't expect to find anything but I can see.... You've got the old boards about that wide. But I don't think he's solely in the attic. And very often I feel a presence in the room, still. I'll feel somebody standing there. I can be on the bed, and I can feel something there. Every once in a while I'll go in the kitchen and I'll see the pots start moving. The doors and windows are shut, and we're not having any Richter-scale events. There is something that is disturbing the air.

Many guests who stayed here--we've lent the house to people--come away so stressed. they would turn around and swear somebody was in the room. They'd come back afterward and say, "Really, very strange." We didn't talk about it too much. We didn't want to make people nervous.

There's the ghost of old Namskaket Road. Most of the time he's just present, immanent. I think that most of the time he probably feels reasonably comfortable in this place. And, at this point, there's continuity. I've been in and out of this house for almost sixty-five years. It's like people who've had breakfast together for thirty years--they don't necessarily have to have a conversation.

At the moment, the ghost seems to be very much at peace. Maybe it's because I still do say "hi" to him when I come in. And I don't pretend he's not there. Maybe ghosts age! Who knows?