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The haunted Hamptons and ghosts from the sea from Long Island’s south shore

With hundreds of souls lost to the sea off Fire Island, there are countless shadows seen walking in the mist, all along its famed beaches.

The haunted Hamptons in many ways gave birth to haunted Long Island … with an unhealthy dose of folk horror born from witch trials, ghosts washed up from the sea, and almost four hundred years worth of history.

It’s said that the longer a place has been occupied, the more relics from the past, the more the likelihood of ghosts. The Atlantic shore, and eastern end of Long Island is rich with both.

In the beginning, Long Island was home to native Americans, who had an advanced culture here. Different tribes lived somewhat amicably together on the narrow island. They farmed, they hunted and they fished. When the Dutch came, the natives thought there was room for everyone. But the white men kept coming, and eventually many of the native people abandoned the area. There was some resistance, easily put down. Those that chose to stay were felled by an invisible enemy … smallpox, which the Europeans brought and the natives had no immunity to.

While the Dutch were building a foothold on Manhattan, the English were landing on the eastern tip of Long Island. In 1640, an Englishman, Lion Gardiner, late of Connecticut moved to the island which still bears his name, nestled between the north and south fork of Long Island. His influence was soon being felt by the settlements that began to spring up on Long Island itself.

Change came a bit slower to the eastern end of Long Island. For the uninitiated, haunted Long Island shoots out from Manhattan into the Atlantic, long and thin like a shark. On the eastern tip, like tail fins of the shark, it breaks into the two forks.

Between the tips of the forks lies Gardiner’s Island.

Today, the island is still owned by Gardiners, albeit sometimes jointly in an uneasy family truce. Speaking on his family, the 16th Lord of the Manor, Robert Gardiner explained “we have always married into wealth. We’ve covered all our bets. We were on both sides of the Revolution, and both sides of the Civil War. The Gardiner family always came out on top.”

As any fan of gothic horror can tell you, this is a recipe for a family curse, as well as family ghosts.

Settlements on Gardiner’s Island were followed by British settlements at Southold on Long Island proper in 1640, then Southampton, Hempstead, Huntington, Brookhaven, Smithtown and East Hampton, all within fifteen years, moving east to west.

By 1664, all of Long Island, as well as the Dutch colony of New Netherlands was in English hands.

As Captain Kidd made his way back to the U.S. mainland in 1699 after his spree, he stopped at Gardiner’s Island, and buried a chest and a box of gold, as well as two boxes of silver. He did so with the blessing of the owner of the Island, who received a piece of gold cloth and a bag of sugar for his cooperation. It’s also said he laid a death threat on Gardiner, not to dig it up or divulge its location, which he did when Kidd was being tried by the courts in Boston. He produced the treasure, but kept one diamond, which he gave to his daughter, Mary.

Gardiner’s second daughter, Elizabeth was dead by this point, having died in 1658, of a sudden affliction. The day before her death, she fingered another East Hampton resident as the cause of that affliction, the witch Elizabeth Garlick.

So within twenty years of the British landing on Long Island, the supernatural was alive and well.

The dangers of the whaling industry brought riches and specters to the south shore of haunted Long Island. In the seventeenth century, a more pressing danger here in East Hampton was thought to be witchcraft.

With the English comes witchcraft to eastern Long Island

The village greens on haunted Long Island are time capsules. Focus straight ahead and it’s the 1600s. Adjust your field of vision a slight amount and it’s the nineteenth century. By standing in the middle and turning in a circle, widdershins of course, you can see four hundred years of history flash by.

On the village green in Setauket, and again in East Hampton, you can make out voices from the past, speaking of witches charged, arrested and awaiting trial. Standing there, seeing the relics of the past surrounded by modern beauty, it’s easy to hear accusations like that and wonder how people can be so stupid?

But if you stay quiet, and it’s a cool fall day, after the leaves have changed, you might find a dark spell coming over you, and as you slip back in time, suddenly it doesn’t seem as tame and convenient as you thought. To the west lies the forest, native Americans, and beyond them, the Dutch. Your enemy. To the east, the Atlantic Ocean. You’re surrounded by death.

And in your midst, a witch.

The people who founded Long Island were well versed in the stories detailing the ways of witches. Whether it was the fear of the unknown, or just fear of those different from you, it didn’t matter. A steadfast belief in the dangers and presence of witches was a reality. You didn’t have the luxury of deciding if you believed in witchcraft, ghosts or even demons. People more educated than you were certain they did. So you worried more about how to protect yourself from them.

A modern example? Today we turn to our leaders for guidance, and those who consider themselves educated and intelligent listen to the people believed to be experts. And follow their advice. So we get a vaccine- myself included, while those who choose to make up their own mind, based on beliefs rather than expert testimony often don’t.

With this same logic, if you got a Covid vaccine this past year, you’d likely vote in an examination to send a suspected witch to trial. And if found guilty, demand her life. Because most of the leaders – political, religious and social all believed firmly in the existence and dangers of witchcraft.

The ghost of a grieving lighthouse keeper is believed to have hung himself here, from the top of Fire Island Lighthouse.

Today we call it superstition. Back then it was called self preservation

I always assumed the south fork of Long Island was a different story. Everyone knows about the Hamptons, and even out at the tip, you have Jimmy Buffet, Dick Cavett and Woody Allen. I never had any reason to go out there.

And then I had a wedding to attend in Montauk. So one afternoon I plotted my course and headed east.

I started coming into villages with the surname of Hampton … Westhampton, Southampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton … and I found myself stunned. You can tell the well-heeled live here. It’s clean and uncluttered. But also full of history. By the time I hit Easthampton, I’m agog. There are windmills. Fucking windmills. I briefly consider blowing off the wedding. But I’m also the photographer, so I soldier on.

A few weeks later I get a call from Linda Mackey. She’s writing Haunted Long Island II, and wonders if I’d do some photography for it. I’m up for that. She sends me a shot list, and I see I’ll be going to the Hamptons.

Sailors from the doomed ship the Louis V. Place are believed to haunt Lakeview Cemetery in Patchogue.

A chilling tale of the ghosts of drowned sailors buried at Lakeview Cemetery in Patchogue

There are four sailors buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Patchogue, New York from the schooner The Louis V. Place, lost off Fire Island in February 1895. The voyage was plagued by the weather, which caused the ship to ice up, becoming what was described as “a floating iceberg.” When it ran aground off a sand bar on February 8, the sailors were suffering from hypothermia and too frostbitten to aid rescuers, who were forced to turn back and return the next day.

That night in an attempt to fight off the icy waters crashing over the decks, the doomed sailors climbed the rigging, one last time. Out of eight crew members, six froze in the rigging, two were rescued still alive, but only one survived. The captain fell into the sea, and going against the current, his body floated 30 miles to within yards from his home in Hampton Bays.

It’s said that moans and wailing can be heard coming from the graves, and a mist forms which rises into the trees, like sailors climbing into the rigging.

FIre Island Lighthouse is believed to be haunted by a former light house keeper, who has been heard racing up the stairs to hang himself from the top.

Is the Fire Island Lighthouse a beacon for ghosts on Haunted Long Island?

Fire Island was originally popular with whalers, back in the 17^th century, and saw a fair bit of piracy. In 1826 a lighthouse was built, as it was a dangerous stretch of coastline. By the 19^th century, the whales were pretty much all gone, but by then there was other ocean traffic in the area.

In the 1850s, the merchant ship The Elizabeth ran into problems. Smallpox spread through the ship, killing the captain, leaving an untrained crew which ran the ship aground off Fire Island during a storm. They thought the lighthouse there was in New Jersey.

Sarah Margaret Fuller, a scholar, literary critic and author was drowned in the wreck, and it’s said you can still see her walking along the beach. She was different than the usual shipwreck victim of the time, a person perceived to be of importance. So the old lighthouse came down and a larger, more modern one was built.

On Fire Island itself, the lighthouse is said to be haunted by a ghost of a former keeper of the light.

The keeper and his family stayed on while the new lighthouse was under construction. Come winter, building halted for a bit, and during this time his daughter took sick. The bay was frozen so the doctor couldn’t get there, and the girl died. The mother left and never came back, and the keeper is said to have lost his mind from grief, and hung himself when the new lighthouse was completed, from the trap door at the top.

His ghost haunts the gift shop at the bottom, as well as the sound of his footsteps climbing the stairs, followed by crazy laughter coming from the top, just before you hear him tie off the rope and jump, followed by a gut-wrenching crack.

Ghosts from the Ketcham Inn in Center Moriches have been reported at least since the 1930s, and quite possibly before.

At the Ketcham Inn, one of haunted Long Island’s oldest ghost stories, and archaeology shows fear of the supernatural goes much further back

Benjamin Havens, who owned the inn in during the Revolution was believed to be part of George Washington’s spy ring, and presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both stayed here. Old time music has been heard coming from the inn when no body was inside, heavy door latches are heard opening and closing, and at times the door itself then swings open, revealing no one there.

The ghost is believed to be a young lady who lived here early on here, and who died in a fire. There’s evidence of that ghost story dating to the first half of the nineteenth century, but it was certainly well known by 1930.

While restoring the house, items were found hidden in the floors, such as shoes, which was believed to be done in the colonial era for protection from ghosts, witchcraft and other things that go bump in the night.

One wonders why they were put there? What caused the fear that led to that? There were no witches on Long Island convicted of the crime. But the belief lived on, all the same.

Dating from the seventeenth century, The Halsey House in Southampton is believed to have seen native American attacks and more recently, ghosts.

Does a seventeenth century ghost haunt the Halsey House in Southampton?

Thomas Halsey was one of the founders of Southampton, one of the earliest English settlers back in 1640. His son Thomas, who accompanied him built the house which has stood to this day. In 1648, Elizabeth Halsey, wife of Thomas was killed and scalped when she was attacked by native Americans from the Pequot tribe, down from New England. It’s often said this happened here, which would account for strange occurrences.

It has a reputation for being haunted, as any house this old would, with reports of cold spots, and the feeling you’re not alone.

Is it Elizabeth which haunts the Halsey House, or one of the many others who lived here over the centuries?

The Halsey House in Southampton is believed to be haunted by several ghosts, including one former owner who sits on the porch and pops ladies on the bottom with a BB gun.

Upscale ghosts haunt the upscale Harpoon House in Southampton

Dating back to 1684, today the Harpoon House is an upscale guesthouse, with an adjoining full service restaurant – BluMar Hamptons, and AM Nightclub. Both equally upscale.

The Harpoon House was the former Post House, the second oldest building in Southampton.

The New York Times reported a witness stating that he saw two ghosts dancing here “like whirling dervishes” back in 2008. Other apparitions have been sighted, the sounds of wild parties are sometimes heard, and one former captain of the restaurant reported of hearing several voices, like people at a table talking, and seeing on the wall the shadows of a group of people walking by.

Little Beatrice is believed to haunt this windmill on the ground of the old Southampton College.

Little Beatrice and the haunted windmill of Southampton College

Before we get too far from Southampton we have to swing by Mill Hill Windmill, which originally stood in the village of Southampton, and is now located in the Shinnecock Hills outside of town.

Built in 1712, standing at the shore it was a landmark for sailors, till it was moved to its present location in 1890, when to prevent it being torn down, a wealthy lady of the area purchased it.

It was later sold to the Claflin family, who built a 30 room summer cottage on the estate. Their daughter Beatrice is believed to have fallen down the stairs to her death in the windmill.

When it became a part of Southampton College, and used for classes, students sometimes reported a feeling of being watched, that someone else was in the windmill with them. A little girl’s face and shoulders have been seen looking out the windows, and students passing by at night have spoken of a quiet, child’s voice, calling out to them.

The ghosts of little children in the basement fear the ghost of an angry old man on the third floor of the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor

On to Sag Harbor, and ghosts from the whaling era on haunted Long Island

It’s a short trip from Southampton to Sag Harbor. Sag Harbor sits right in the crotch of the two forks of eastern Long Island. Though its history only dates to the early 1700s, the past bubbles up more frequently here than in some places to the west which are even older.

Out here people weren’t so quick to pave over things. It’s the Hamptons, there’s a lot of money pouring in. And people with money love a good view. They’re here for the quaint towns, the picturesque old houses, and for the prestige of being in the Hamptons. They’re willing to buy houses just to tear down for an unobstructed view of the sea.

And they’re willing to pay to keep things that way.

So as you move east you see more old houses remaining, the nicer ones, many with historical markers in front, or small signs on the house itself. There might not be ghost stories to go with them, but it’s an almost visceral feeling, that there’s something happening out here.

Once in Sag Harbor, in the center of town, the past opens up to you, several eras living side by side.

In fact, in 1895, The New York Times reported that young men were seeing a six foot tall ghost, with a musket and long hat, and the young women of the town were remaining indoors.

Across the street from the library is Mrs. Sage’s home, and open to the public as The Whaler’s Museum. It’s haunted too.

The John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor, haunted by children and a grumpy old man

The John Jermain Memorial Library was a gift to the town from Mrs. Russell Sage, who also donated the park, the high school and after her death, the house across the street which is now the Whaler’s Museum.

She wanted something nice to look at from her front porch, so she had it designed in a Greek Revival style, complete with dome. She did herself proud.

The ghosts of little children are believed to haunt the children’s section. But according to ghost hunters, the little ghosts don’t like going to the upper floors because of the grumpy old man, whom they are all afraid of. He’s been noted before, a malicious presence, and known to occasionally roll chairs across the floor.

The Whaler’s Church in Sag Harbor is believed to host a number of ghosts, mainly centered around the choir loft.

Whaling era ghosts still walk around haunted Long Island’s Sag Harbor

The building with the most stories attached seems to be the Whaler’s Church. It’s a formidable Egyptian Revival structure, and once boasted a 168 foot steeple. But that came down in the hurricane of 1938, crashing into the Old Burying Ground.

The choir loft appears to be the most haunted part. An organist, practicing alone one evening saw two melting faces on either side of her when she looked into the organ’s mirrors. And a maintenance worker found himself mysteriously shut in a crawl space, when the door slammed closed and locked itself .

And a faithful member of the church made an appearance in the choir loft the night he died, recognizable by his long beard.

The daughter of a former miller still haunts the burial ground adjacent to Gardiner’s Windmill in East Hampton.

Why is the jewel of the haunted Hamptons, East Hampton, one of the least haunted places on the south shore?

As soon as you make the turn into East Hampton the village pond lies to your right. Then there’s a windmill, towering over the burial ground of the people of early East Hampton.

Lion Gardener lies here, who died in 1663, one of the original settlers, and a larger than life figure. That was his windmill we passed back there. The family decided the original grave markers weren’t good enough, and dug him up and erected a more suitable crypt, with him carved in stone as a medieval knight.

One of his daughter’s was afflicted with a mysterious illness, and she fingered Goody Garlick as a witch and the culprit. That should have been enough to have the unfortunate woman hanged in that era, but she managed to defy the odds and lived to a ripe old age after being found innocent.

None of these parties appear to haunt the cemetery. That honor is reserved for a daughter of the miller who worked at the Gardiner Windmill nearby.

East Hampton’s rural past sits just across from the present, with eras mingling together, along with a history of witchcraft accustations.

Walking around East Hampton in the cold, with snow on the ground, I was amazed at how I could be transported back in time. It’s said that they put the cemetery in the middle of town because in Britain, they were situated on the edge of town. And they wanted to be as different from the home country as they could be.

With that, and the historic buildings that remained and have been preserved, and of course the windmills, it’s easy to slip back into the colonial era. Then turn and look across the road and it’s a hodgepodge of all the eras that have come since, with a strong focus throughout on the nineteenth century.

You can’t help but wonder, where are all the ghosts? There are a few ghost stories from East Hampton. One 13 bedroom house at 52 Middle Lane is haunted by Barton Kaplan, who drowned in the pool after an evening of fun and libation. A former owner also shows up at the Mill House Inn. And the Grey Gardens, at 3 West End Road can boast U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater as a witness to the multiple hauntings in that home.

There are a few more, but for the most part, it’s eerily quiet. But this is the Hamptons after all, some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Ghosts could lower the property value, and even apart from that, there’s a New England quality to the people. Some things, especially skeletons, are best kept in the closet.

A little girl ghost has been spotted, and occasionally run over along this stretch of Old Montauk Highway.

Drivers Beware! Ghosts haunt the highway from the Hamptons to Montauk

You leave East Hampton on Old Montauk Highway, and once you’re past yet another windmill, you soon find yourself in the Pine Barrens. The area is aptly named, as the trees are twisted by the wind here, stunted, with little else but brush growing. The closer you get to Montauk, as the land narrows and the ocean closes in, the wilder it feels.

Just past Amagansett there’s a stretch of highway which is believed by many who have seen her to be haunted by a little girl.

It’s not just the highway, as she’s also been seen walking down the beach. Sometimes she’s seen walking on or across the highway with her mother. According to one particularly chilling tale, “I could remember what she was wearing clear as day. She was in a dark red dress with white trim and a white bib style front to the dress. Her hair was brown and was up in a ponytail.”

She turned to look at me, but before our eyes could lock I slammed both feet on my brakes. My car slid at least 15 feet until I heard and felt two distinct bumps in my steering wheel. I became frozen by the idea of running a child over since I have 6 nieces myself.”

When he got out to check, there was no one there.

Ghosts of native Americans and the well heeled of the early twentieth century walk side by side in at Montauk Manor.

Native American ghosts haunt side by side with specters of the upper classes

Sitting high above the village of Montauk, on Signal Hill is Montauk Manor. The tony atmosphere of East Hampton tones down in Montauk, but not by much.

Montauk is the Hampton’s surfer brother.

It wasn’t always this way. In the early part of the twentieth century, Carl Fisher who had drained a swamp and built Miami Beach, and later The Indianapolis Motor Speedway built a 178 room Tudor Hotel atop Signal Hill. He even dug a harbor for his new resort, and for a while it was a world class tourist mecca.

Then came the depression, and it never really got back on its feet. At the building’s lowest point, it lay empty for twenty years, a target for vandals and ripe for the birth of ghost stories.

Then came a new lease on life, and as the building sprung back to life, the ghost stories finally started getting around.

It’s possible Montauk Manor was cursed from the beginning. Next to Signal Hill is Fort Hill, where the native Americans once had a formidable fortress. Unfortunately, when the Narragansetts attacked the Montauketts in 1654, the Montauketts chose to leave their safe confines and fight in what became known as Massacre Valley.

You can tell by the name the outcome of the battle.

It’s said that the Montauks buried their dead atop Signal Hill, which would make Montauk Manor an incredibly, expensive, and likely cursed desecration of sacred ground. And it would explain why there are so many sightings of native American ghosts here.

But the more recent dead haunt the place as well, remnants from it’s glory days early in the twentieth century.

They’re not confined to the hotel. Montauk is believed to be alive with the spirits of the dead, and the ghosts of native Americans have been seen crossing Old Montauk Highway numerous times.

The iconic radar installation at Camp Hero

Stranger Things abound in Montauk

Netflix’s Stranger Things was inspired by the legends and rumors associated with Camp Hero, out past Montauk, near the very tip. Associated with the fabled Montauk Project, it’s impossible to say what did and didn’t happen here, or what was and wasn’t studied, discovered or unleashed on the area which is believed to still haunt the park to this day.

But that doesn’t stop people from speculating.

Camp Hero State Park does have a cloak of mystery about it. But then again, you’re out at the tip of haunted Long Island, surrounded on three sides by water.

That something was going on here isn’t the question. It was a military installation, and they did build a faux village to hide the coming and goings. The Germans did land a short distance from here, at Amagansett, during World War II as part of an espionage mission which went horribly wrong. All but two of those who landed on this beach ended up with a noose around their neck.

If you walk the beach between Camp Hero and the lighthouse, you can’t miss the remnants of that war, concrete bunkers to defend against an invasion that never came.

Military installations from World War II along the beach between Camp Hero and Montauk Lighthouse

At the very tip, Abigail of Montauk Lighthouse haunts the tip of haunted Long Island

The British used the high ground here for watch fires during the Revolution. George Washington remembered its strategic location and commissioned a lighthouse during his term in office.

The lighthouse was necessary as this is a treacherous stretch of ocean, with many ships, and many lives lost. One of those was a young lady by the name of Abigail. History has forgotten, or never knew her last name.

When the ship that carried her went down in a winter storm, she made her way to the beach below the lighthouse. It’s said she was carried up the cliff by rescuers, but she died within.

Her voice and soft cries are said to ricochet off the thick walls. She’s been seen climbing the steps, strolling the grounds and beach. She tugged on a worker’s shirt repeatedly, and other staff in the gift shop speak of furniture moving in the middle of the night, pictures swinging on the walls and strange noises.

The ghost of a young lady named Abigail who haunts Montauk Lighthouse, on the tip of haunted Long Island.

The Haunting of Long Island

I’ve often wondered why Long Island is so haunted? The easy answer is there is almost 400 years of history here, which is plenty of time to accrue ghosts.

But it’s more than that. Standing here atop the bluff, looking dead east, the nearest mainland is Portugal. The beach below, the furthest point east, more or less of Long Island has its own ghost. The haunting of Long Island starts right here. The first European settlement on Long Island started on the north fork, far to the east as well at Southold. And it has its ghosts too.

The further west you go, it seems the younger the ghosts are. Out here on the forks, the eastern most part of Long Island history hasn’t had so many layers covering the originals. It’s easier to bubble up to the surface.

From the eastern most tip, to the jagged western edge awash in the glow from Manhattan, the supernatural populates haunted Long Island as surely as the living. From the riches of the north shore, to history of the southern coast, and Fire Island out in the Atlantic, the belief in ghosts, witches and other children of the night have haunted Long Island from the beginning.

And continues to this day.

What to wear on haunted Long Island

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Tales of Old Stony Brook III: What dark, deceptive spirit haunts the Country House Restaurant if it’s not Annette Williamson?

Featured articles (Footer), Journal, Long Island, Pubs and Taverns, Tales from Stony Brook

Annette Williamson and the Country House Restaurant in Stony Brook is one of the most often told ghost stories on Long Island. It’s said that the house, almost three hundred years old, is the most active haunted house on the island. It’s hard to dispute that, but one thing that’s almost certainly true … whoever haunts the Country House Restaurant isn’t Annette Williamson.

According to Bob Willemstyn, owner of the former Obediah Davis/Thomas Hadaway House, now the Country House restaurant, the ghost of William Sydney Mount, famed nineteenth century artist who lived down the road, still shows up on occasion for a seance, as he did back in the nineteenth century.

He related his story to me, that on at least four occasions over the years, a cloaked figure has been reported in the restaurant, once standing near the entrance to the bar near a side dining room, just across from where we spoke. In addition, there are times when things mysteriously break, like wine bottles being thrown from the shelves in the basement while he stood by watching, which he also believes might be the dark presence of William Sidney Mount.

But the most active spirit in the Country House Restaurant, the site named by noted Long Island historian and ghost hunter/psychic Kerriann Flanagan Brosky as Long Island’s most active, is Annette Williamson, who is believed to have lived, and died here during the American Revolution.

She’s been witnessed everywhere, from inside the house, to people seeing her looking forlornly out the front window, to floating above the roof.

Willenstyn has also related that when he encounters her spirit, he feels an overwhelming sadness and your eyes will well up. He’s witnessed people cry from the feeling.

And then there’s the ghost from “across the street,” a malevolent spirit which has been known to smash glasses in front of your face.

The Country House has a full range of haunting elements, including the above mentioned spirits, fully visible apparitions which interact with the living. Annette Williamson even tried to entice the child of one of the patrons, a little girl, into the men’s bathroom to play. There are footsteps, walking as well as running. Light flashes are common, seemingly without normal causes. And for those who believe in such things, more orbs and EVPs than you can shake a stick at.

Additionally, there’s the poltergeist activity, perhaps the most belligerent form of the supernatural.

And yet to dine there for most is an entirely different experience. It’s high end, fitting for a restaurant with so much history. But the ambiance is lighthearted, feminine almost. As though Annette has influenced the very decor.

Though even the owner admits the upstairs is an entirely different story.

The haunted Hawkins-Mount Homestead in Stony Brook — Noted Long Island artist William Sydney Mount lived in the Hawkins-Mount Homestead, built about 1725 and a short walk from the Country House Restaurant. Mount was a spiritualist for a time, and used to visit the Country House, historically known as the Hadaway House for seances. The Hawkins-Mount Homestead is believed to be haunted as well.

Who was Annette Williams?

The main source of the story, which now lies all over the internet is Kerriann Flanagan Brosky’s book, Ghosts of Long Island. Most of the tale is told to her by Willenstyn, and involves sightings of the lady going back to before he worked there, let alone owned the place.

According to Ghosts of Long Island, she was murdered either for being thought a British sympathizer, or hung in her bedroom by the British themselves. As the legend goes, her parents had left her in charge of the servants and slaves, and went to New Jersey where they had property. There they were killed for supporting the fight for independence.

Everyone involved admits the historical details are sketchy, as you’d expect from that time period. What happens at the Country House restaurant is modern history though, and witnessed by a lot of people, both customers and employees.

There are mysterious lights, accounts of people hearing their name spoken behind them and turning to find no one there.

Though the official line, as befitting a working restaurant, the spirits are friendly and somewhat comforting, many of the ghostly experiences reported there are anything but that. One reporter had a drink thrown in their face by Annette. The current owner was once telling the story to a friend who was expressing his disbelief, when a chair came hurtling through the air at them, just as they caught a glimpse of a white garment turning the corner from the room.

And of course there is Annette herself. Typically in hauntings, no one sees an apparition, or it was seen in the distant past. But Annette has been seen by numerous people, numerous times, through the present day. She can be playful, stealing the owner’s tietack and leaving it by the fireplace where she was supposedly hung. She can be helpful, opening stuck windows.

Perhaps it helps the romance that by all accounts she’s very pretty. And though there are reports of other ghosts, it is Annette that has stayed longest, is experienced most frequently, and seems to have made a home which she enjoyed for a very short life, a home for eternity.

That in a nutshell, is the story of Annette Williamson and the Country House Restaurant. With so many people witnessing so many phenomenon, it’s hard to deny that the Country Restaurant is haunted.

But by Annette Williamson? Quite frankly, I don’t believe she even existed.

The colonial era Stony Brook Mill Pond on Long Island — The mill pond at Stony Brook, just down from the Country House Restaurant. This stretch of road has several homes with tales of the supernatural, including the colonial era mill still standing at the end of the pond.

Looking for evidence of Annette Williamson

It was November of 2008, and I was just getting started with these stories. Stony Brook was nearby and I love the place. It’s where I stayed the night before my first job interview on Long Island having driven a thousand miles for it. It always felt like home, albeit a home from another lifetime.

It feels very New England here, which makes sense, as this end of Long Island was home to some of the earliest settlements, often populated by people coming down from the Massachusetts and other English colonies. Walking around Stony Brook in the fall is an unexpected slice of perfection.

I was there to visit the Obediah Davis cemetery, which is where Annette Williamson is buried. I had read it was hard to access, up a steep hill without a path. But it turns out there’s a street that goes up there. There’s even a sign when you access it from the road, rather than slogging up the steep hillside from the Country House Restaurant.

It does exude atmosphere, with many of the graves dating from at least the earliest part of the nineteenth century, and many with curious inscriptions. I did find three Williamson tombstones, but no Annette. There were too many to examine and too little time to do so.

So I made a mental note to come back to it.

The Country House lives up to its reputation for fine dining, and it’s a lovely atmosphere. Not particularly haunting, but that’s more of a cerebral thing. If you know about it, it colors the ambiance. If you don’t, it’s a romantic dinner for two. Or one in my case. But I had a good conversation with owner, and found him to be credible. But oddly enough, though he mentioned William Sydney Mount’s ghost, he never mentioned Annette.

Entrance to the graveyard where Annette Williamson was claimed to be buried — Entrance to the Obediah Davis Cemetery, where Annette Williamson is believed to have been buried. The cemetery sits on a hill overlooking the Country House Restaurant, as well as several other houses dating from the colonial era. The dead from the southern entrance to Stony Brook were oft times buried here in early days.

Twelve years later, I remember to finish it.

I’m gathering all my old Long Island stories into a book. It’s easier than I expected to put myself back there, though it’s been about a decade since I set foot on Long Island. Which is good, as there’s likely a bench warrant out for me for a parking violation in the Bronx.

So I go to find my article on Annette Williamson and the Country House Restaurant, and remember I never wrote it! I didn’t write it because I couldn’t find the tombstone. I had read the dates on the stone matched the story, and I wanted to get the dates right for her death.

That tombstone is essential in determining the truth of the story. Because it wasn’t gleaned from history. Instead, it was told to the owner by a British psychic who happened by a couple night in a row, the second night with a Ouija Board in tow. And it’s from him that nearly all the elements of the story of Annette Williamson comes from.

His claims were verified by Ms. Brosky’s accomplice, Joe Giaquinto, a very well-known psychic and self professed ghost buster. In fact Mr. Giaquinto speaks of Annette as though she’s almost adopted him, frequently coming to speak to him.

Ms. Brosky, who is a historian first, rightly frames the importance of the stone when she says “According to historical records, the only insight into the Williamson family living there appears on the gravestones of two of its members.” She points to two headstones, John Williamson and Annette Williamson. Being buried in the family plot would lead one to believe that they lived in the family home.

I looked online, because the Long Island ghost hunting crowd is nothing if not thorough. If it was there, someone would have found it. Especially since you can pretty much drive up to the cemetery.

Nothing.

According to historical records, the only insight into the Williamson family living there appears on the gravestones of two of its members.”

I had recently watched one of Ms. Brosky’s webinars on their investigation into Annette Williamson and the Country House Restaurant, and remembered them showing the stone. I went back and watched again, and they do show us a photo, and it’s of the three stones I had taken a photo of on my first trip there.

The stones were in place and look pretty much identical to how they looked when I visited. But perhaps they were still mostly unreadable from moss or lichen. And there are actually four members of the Williamson family buried there. The only recorded female I can find through official records and poking around the stones is a woman named Hannah, who died in 1827 and is buried next to her husband, William. In the video, Joe Giaquinto misidentifies William’s stone as Annette’s father, but his stone shows that William Williamson died in 1831.

If the stones were covered and illegible at the time, it’s understandable. If you can only make out a few letters, Hannah could easily be mistaken for Annette. But it’s hard to figure how William as her father fits the story told by the psychics, as they had Annette’s mother and father being killed in the war in New Jersey. These graves are all for people who died in the nineteenth century.

So it would appear, there is no tombstone in the family plot with Annette Williamson’s name on it. Which would make sense. This family cemetery is the Obediah Davis cemetery, named for the man who built the house the County House restaurant is in, and where his family lived for four generations. And by all accounts, all through American Revolution.

In short, there is no evidence at all that the Williamsons lived there. In fact, the Williamsons lived just around the corner, and the family history is well known and well documented. There is no Annette in that family either.

But why are Williamson’s buried in the Davis family cemetery? That’s simple. There are many people in that cemetery who don’t bear the name of Davis. And the Williamsons lived just down the hill from the cemetery. As one of only six burial grounds in Stony Brook today, it’s the obvious place to bury your dead, when it’s in your own back yard.

The purported grave of Annette Williamson, the ghost of the Country House Restaurant in Stony Brook, NY — The Williamson family plot in the Obediah Davis Cemetery. The three stones pictures are for Hannah, John and William Williamson, all of whom died in the nineteenth century, several decades after the Revolution. These are the stones usually pointed out as Annette’s grave.

What is in a name? History.

Annette told the psychic that she and her family were Dutch, which when I read that again, struck me as wrong. Williamson isn’t a Dutch name. It’s Scottish in origin, which fits with the demographics of the area, and the Williamson family living around the corner. There is a Dutch variant, but that’s not what’s on the tombstone or in the historic record for the family in Stony Brook.

What’s more, this was an English colony. A few generations earlier, New York City was New Amsterdam, and much of Nassau county to the west was Dutch. But when the British forced them out, they went inland for the most part, not further out on Long Island. And if

And for that matter, I wondered about the name Annette. That’s also not a Dutch name, but in fact French, and wasn’t popular there even till late in the 19th century. I did records search for Annettes in New York in the colonial era, and found next to nothing. The name simply wasn’t used.

There are variants, but the only one that really sounds like Annette is Janet. That also wasn’t in vogue either during that era.

The grist mill in Stony Brook, on Long Island, New York — The grist mill at Stony Brook is believed to be haunted as well, by another lady in white. Which leaves at least three ghosts of women dating from the colonial era within a mile.

Loyalists in Suffolk County

There were thousands on Long Island loyal to the King during the revolution. Particularly after the British took the island after the Battle of Brooklyn. The biggest demographic most likely to support the king was farmers, and this was farmland back then. The Davises and the Williamsons were farmers, though carpentry appeared to be the Williamson’s main trade, and though Davis was a noted supporter of the colonial cause. One of the Williamson’s also fought for the colonials in the Revolution, so it’s hard to imagine how Annette would be considered a loyalist.

So why would the locals have taken a particular dislike to a young lady who merely had British soldiers occupying the family home. That was a common occurrence on Long Island, the person owning the house had no choice, and nowhere else does it seem to indicate a particular allegiance to the crown or not.

And even if she was a loyalist, there were hundreds of farmers so loyal to the king on this part of Long Island that they signed an oath of allegiance.

It just doesn’t make sense.

You could make the case that the other story is true. That in fact, she was hung by the British in the Country House. But that would mean the psychics were wrong. And the story came from the psychics to begin with. If the psychics got her manner of death wrong, her name and nationality wrong, and where she was buried wrong, perhaps the whole story is wrong?

Annette Williamson and the Country House Restaurant is one of the most popular ghost stories on Long Island — Annette is often seen peering out the window, second from the left on the bottom floor. Though it’s hard to imagine how anyone could get a good look at her from the road and across the yard.

Which begs the question, who haunts the Country House Restaurant?

Bob Willemstyn specifically told me about his belief that William Sidney Mount has haunted the place, a dark spirit. His description of Annette usually touches on the overwhelming sadness of her. He’s the one who lives with the spirits there on a daily basis, and his description of them isn’t exactly bright and cheery. A fact borne out by all the employees who have quit after having the shit scared of them in the Country Restaurant.

And one has to remember, this house has a history of slavery, which is bound to have wound up the negative energy here to the breaking point.

I touched on the film The Legend of Hell House in my article about the Hawkins-Mount Homestead, home of William Sydney Mount. Though the film is obviously fictional, it makes some important points about multiple hauntings in one location.

The story revolved around a scientist who believed ghosts to be nothing more than residual energy, and how his opinions clashed with two mediums who were investigating with him the Mt. Everest of haunted houses. One of the two mediums believed she was learning the truth of the haunting from a spirit there, which preyed on her feelings and sympathy.

The other medium stayed shut off and just wanted to survive the experience.

At the root of the film was a question. Were the hauntings from numerous spirits, or one spirit which directed the others, giving the appearance of multiple hauntings.

This is a common belief, from Jesus to Aleister Crowley, that some ghosts are essentially what some call demons, ancient, formless beings taking the appearance of whatever ghostly shells are floating about, giving the appearance of a familiar, and trustworthy spirit. And as I can attest, you can’t trust these spirits. They aim to deceive.

There’s an obviously dark spirit which haunts the Country House Restaurant. And one who claims to be the ghost of a beautiful, attractive woman (by modern standards more so than colonial), wrongly robbed of her life, who gives those who interact with her a false name and history. To me, that’s more than a bit creepy.

Psychics who visit the Country House on a regular basis assure us that Annette is harmless, and downright helpful for those involved in spiritualism.

But one account has Annette following a psychic home, and every time she turned on a light, the bulb blew. Another psychic says she not only followed him home, but still frequently speaks to him to this day.

In short, we’re talking about a ghost which not only haunts a house, but assumes a false identity and follows you home. Which is new twist on an old tradition. A mint and a poltergeist at the end of beautiful dinner.

Dinner at the Country House Restaurant — Dinner at the Country House in Stony Brook can border on the supernatural, for the flavor alone. Certainly high end, with dinner running $40-50 a person, it’s pricey, but worth a visit.

On the value of psychic testimony in supernatural investigations

That testimony derived through psychic phenomenon can be downright dangerous hasn’t been in dispute in this country for over four hundred years. The practice of accepting evidence from the other side without physical evidence to back it up was banned here following the Salem witch trials, and the wrongful execution of 20 people in the late 17^th century.

The story of Annette Williamson is wholly dependent on psychic testimony. The physical evidence that psychics point to in order to give credence to their communications with Annette – her tombstone – appears to be nonexistent. There are those who claim to have seen her grave, to have photos of it, and yet never produce the evidence.

There is no historic record, nor even early written accounts to back the story. Is it possible the story is true but simply lacks physical evidence due to the passing of time? Of course.

But to get to that belief, you have to first dispel the physical evidence that does exist. The house in question was owned by the Davis family, not the Williamsons. The Davis’ are on record as living here during the Revolution. The Williamsons did exist, lived a short distance from the house, and buried their dead in the same graveyard, where Annette Williamson is said to be buried. The only photos of the graves produced as evidence, are of the Williamson family, and none of those family members even died in the same century as the American Revolution. And none are named Annette. Even the girl’s name doesn’t fit the story … a Dutch girl with a French first name, attached to a Scottish surname, living in a very British colony.

There’s a simpler solution … the psychics are wrong. Harry Houdini spent a good chunk of his life exposing fraudulent mediums, the kind who preyed on people’s pain, fears and grief, and offered them hope, for a price. He didn’t discount the possibility of psychic phenomenon, and certainly not life after death. But he was suspect, and rightly so, of the motives of many spiritualists and mediums.

I’ve known a few psychics in my time, and some of them could do amazing things. Some of them were downright charlatans. And it’s been that way since the Babylonians.

It’s possible the unknown psychic who first told the story of Annette to the owner of the Country House Restaurant had been in the Obediah Davis Cemetery, and had seen a stone. Perhaps as the story goes, it was fallen, covered in leaves, dirt and debris, and the name of ANNEDAVIS on one of the stones, who died in 1785 (2 years after the Revolution ended), was misread. And from that stone he chose to weave a tale, perhaps for a free dinner.

If you choose to give the psychics the benefit of the doubt, the best you can say is they are deceived by the spirit, into believing it’s someone that it’s not. That means Annette isn’t all glittery light and unicorns as they’d have us believe. But something much darker.

Regardless of whether the story of Annette Williamson is true or not, doesn’t mean the Country House Restaurant is any less haunted. It just means nobody knows exactly who is haunting it. And that perhaps the haunting isn’t as wholesome as we’re led to believe.

So who haunts the Country House Restaurant in Stony Brook? The truth is nobody knows. Beware anyone who says otherwise, for as Houdini would say, they’re likely trying to sell you something.

The death, resurrection and retribution of Zona Heaster Shue, The Greenbrier Ghost

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Back in 1897, when Trout Shue snapped the neck of his wife, Zona Heaster Shue, the Greenbrier Ghost, he believed his troubles were over. He didn’t know it at the time, but the ghost of his murdered wife had two accomplices – his mother in law and his ex wife – who ensured he remained haunted for the remainder of his short life, spent in a West Virginia penitentiary.

Now Trout Shue didn’t get a fair trial. He wasn’t convicted on the circumstantial evidence the prosecution presented. It was a ghost story, a rumor everyone knew, the jury included. The defense had to take the story down.

They failed, and Trout Shue was shipped off to prison based on spectral evidence, banned since the Salem witch trials.

It doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty either. It just means that people believed the ghost more than they believed Trout Shue.

The Greenbrier ghost was a popular folktale in the hills and mountains of West Virginia, and it’s certainly based on real people and a real murder. At the time, it was firmly believed to be true. The importance of the tale isn’t lost on the state of West Virginia. Near her grave on the side of a mountain in West Virginia is a historic marker, that makes West Virginia the only state to claim to have a murder trial reach a conviction with the testimony of a ghost?

The marker reads: “Interred in nearby cemetery is Zona Heaster Shue. Her death in 1897 was presumed natural until her spirit appeared to her mother to describe how she was killed by her husband Edward. Autopsy on the exhumed body verified the apparition’s account. Edward, found guilty of murder, was sentenced to the state prison. Only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer.”

Trout and Zona Shue, likely on their wedding day in October of 1897. This is likely the dress he had her laid out in for burial, which folklore has led us to believe was done to disguise her broken neck. However, it’s quite likely it’s the only nice dress she owned.

In the mountains, people believed in ghosts

They were used to death, as there was always a lot of it about. The line between this world and the next can be blurry in a mountain mist. The dead cross over, and most people knew it. It was just accepted. You hear it in the folk songs, the fiction and from the storytellers.

A folk tale is a living thing. With each generation the story grows. Facts are secondary to a good story.

And the Greenbrier ghost is a good story … The good looking drifter with a secret history of spousal abuse and murder, blows into the county and sweeps a young lady with a checkered past off her feet. Her mother’s intuition screams “beware!” but her daughter doesn’t listen. A few months later they’re burying the daughter in the frozen ground of a West Virginia cemetery.

Her death attributed to natural causes, her ghost appears to her mother, tells her that she was murdered, how she was murdered and to go to the sheriff and “tell on him!” The mother does just that, the body is exhumed and they find the mother’s story is corroborated. The husband is arrested and put on trial.

The defense blunders in attacking her mother and the story of the ghost in court, trying to poke holes in it. It backfires and the jury believes the mother’s ghostly tale. The husband is sent to prison where he dies a few years later during an epidemic.

But the truth is a darker tale than even that.

View towards Little Sewell Mountain. Directly ahead, a mile or so in the distance was the home of Jacob and Mary Jane Heaster, and their five children. Zona was the middle child, the rest were brothers, and the isolation of the Appalachian foothills instilled in her a desire to break free.

A short life begins at the foot of Little Sewell Mountain

Zona Heaster Shue was born at the foot of Little Sewell Mountain, a bit north of Meadow Bluff. As far as we know, Zona never left Greenbrier county. The middle child, with four brothers, raised in a god fearing home, not much is known about her short life. It’s not for her life that she’s remembered, but for her afterlife.

Today, Greenbrier county is still far removed from the hustle and bustle of city life, with a population of about 34,000, spread out over a thousand square miles, mostly mountainous, with steep valleys, dense and dark woods and winding streams.

On the map, it doesn’t look like there’s much distance between towns. But that can be an illusion. In reality that little space on the map might be filled with a mountain and these towns weren’t that large to begin with, sometimes nothing more than a few scattered farm houses.

Nature could feed you as there was wildlife in abundance. The drawback is that some of that wildlife could kill you. So you turn to farming, but the land is rocky and steep. Still, you can raise a family and make a living. Barely.

The weather isn’t your friend. Spring and autumn are gorgeous. The summer is oppressive, humid to the point of saturation. Winter can kill you with the cold, ice and snow.

Greenbrier people, held together and seasoned by a hard way of life

Life was tough and there were almost as many ways to die as there were people, paramount among those being disease, which folks would talk about like it was a person. For death could strike quickly like a knife in the back, and spread almost as fast. It wasn’t unheard of for a person to wake up healthy and be dead by dark.

For a newborn, the chance of reaching adulthood was far less likely than today. If you were a parent, wanting to raise a family, it paid to have a lot of children. When epidemics swept through an area, as it did every few years, it struck the very young and the very old the hardest.

Your children aren’t just your pride and joy, but an essential source of labor to help around the house and the farm. Most farms were small and could never support more than one family. When you reached adulthood, you were expected to go out and find your own way, if you were one of the superfluous kids that stood to inherit the farm. Daughters were married off, for marriage was still one way to grow the family’s reputation and standing, not to mention the number of acres.

When you grow up in a small town, and live in a small town, that little piece of geography becomes your whole world. Time, and progress moves slowly, and when that happens, it feels like your life is flying past. Or dragging tedious slow.

In such an isolated area, your neighbors and kin were your social safety net. You knew everybody’s name and their family history. Your family name can make or break you and your reputation is everything. Your name is how you get a loan when the crops don’t make it. It’s what convinces a parent to let their daughter marry you. And it’s not just your name, but your family’s name that gets blackened when things turn bad.

Even in the hills, you live under the microscopic eyes of your neighbors

And in 1895, things had turned bad for Zona Heaster Shue, who was about twenty one or two years old. She had given birth to a child out of wedlock with a man named George Woldridge. One writer said it was a boozy buggy ride, hopped up on moonshine and hormones. George didn’t have any money, not much of a job and couldn’t support a wife, let alone a wife and kid. And according to the story, wasn’t even sure if it was his.

So George avoided the shotgun and the minister.

Strongly attractive and from the looks of her photo, rather intense, it would have been easy for Zona to have been cast out from the community. Perhaps she went to stay with a relative for the last few months? Or just stayed on the farm, rather than visiting her cousins in Falling Springs, ten miles or so across the county.

Whatever happened, there are no documented reports of the baby beyond its birth. It simply vanishes. Ancestry.com even offers a free subscription for anyone who can find where the child went.

The middle child breaks free

Zona was the apple of her daddy’s eye till the apple got a worm in it. It was up to the mother to straighten out the wayward daughter, and if possible, keep her reputation intact till she could be married off and no longer her parent’s worry.

After all, if Zona had kept her baby, it would have been up to her parents to feed it and likely raise it. They could barely make ends meet. The last thing they needed was a another mouth to feed, and a black mark on the family’s reputation.

Zona’s mother, Mary Jane Heaster, was by all reports an upstanding, god fearing and it should be added, strong willed woman.

Their home in the shadow of Little Sewell mountain, was quite a ways from the nearest big town. It was a rugged life and Zona felt confined there.

It’s believed that Zona used to visit her cousins on her mother’s side in Falling Spring, now known as Renick, about twenty five miles away. It wasn’t the city, but it wasn’t at the foot of the mountain either. She’d already learned, the hard way, bad boys are more fun. But she likely had had enough of bad boys who lacked a decent job.

And so Zona fell for the blacksmith.

Trout Shue and the mysterious deaths of his previous wives

Erasmus Stribbling Shue, known as Trout was in his early thirties when he showed up in Greenbrier county back in 1895. Tall, and muscular with trembling lips and piercing eyes which were said to turn black with anger, he turned Zona’s knees to jelly.

Shue was born in Mossy Creek, over in Fayette county, the son of Jacob Shue, a respected blacksmith, and Trout followed in his father’s trade. Some years later Jacob Shue moved his family to Droop Mountain, which borders Greenbrier county.

Thirty four years earlier, it was the site of one of the most important battles of the Civil War to have taken place on West Virginia soil.

That battle still haunts the mountains of West Virginia. While Trout was still living there with his parents, a retired logger who went by the name of Edgar Walton decided to spend the night in what is now Droop Mountain State Park. After building a fire near a Confederate cemetery, Walton saw before him a headless ghost of a soldier buzz past him.

And he’s not alone. Other visitors to the park have reported hearing battle noises, as well as screams and wailing, and visible apparitions of the soldiers.

Today these stories are scrutinized, while in Shue’s day they were accepted more readily. Even Trout would likely have been a believer. Ghosts weren’t questioned as they are now, as these were a poor and often uneducated population. They hadn’t learned to be skeptics yet, and that would prove to be Shue’s undoing.

According to the Greenbrier ghost legends, Trout was a mystery, as Pocahantas county is described as having been another world apart from Greenbrier in those days. He took work as a blacksmith in a shop belonging to James Crookshanks. It wasn’t long before his path crossed Zona’s.

In Trout Shue, Zona found a release for her passion, as well as stability in that it was more than a drunken one night stand. Shue had a real job, and to everyone around them, it was obvious that they were deeply in love.

But Trout had baggage himself.

To begin with, Shue was about a decade older than Zona. And he’d been married before, most recently to sixteen year old Lucy Ann Tritt. During the trial, the talk around Greenbrier county was that Lucy was only sixteen and immediately after the wedding, they settled on Droop Mountain. About six months later she was dead under mysterious circumstances. The explanation usually given is that while working on the chimney, Shue dropped a brick which landed on her head.

This seems far fetched, as she died on February 11, 1895. A person doesn’t typically do masonry on a chimney, when you live on a mountain in West Virginia in the coldest part of winter.

In reality, there likely isn’t any mystery about Lucy Ann Tritt’s death. When a girl married at that age and immediately left the county, there was bound to be talk that she was pregnant. Her death less than eight months later is then quite logical, and likely occurred during childbirth. That no child is spoken of, means it probably didn’t survive, and both mother and child were buried in an unmarked grave in the same cemetery where Shue’s family is interred.

After her death, the official narrative says that Trout decided to move to Greenbrier county, a complete stranger, to escape his past. But in truth he was moving back to Greenbrier, and confronting his past head on.

What no one seems to catch is that Shue was already in the county when he married Lucy, who lived in Greenbrier, less than seven miles southwest from Zona’s family home. Certainly close enough that if there was anything sensational, they’d be familiar with Trout’s name.

The 1880 U.S Census has Lucy living with her parents, Isaac Tritt, a farmer, and his wife Elizabeth, along with six brothers and sisters. She was nine years old at the time, which makes her nearly a decade older than she’s portrayed in the folk tale.

The section of Greenbrier county we’re dealing with. It’s a little less than twenty miles as the crow flies from the east to west. The red dot to the left is where the Heaster’s live, and Zona is buried. The dot in the lower center is where she lived, and died with Trout Shue in Richland. The upper right dot is Falling Spring, where Zona’s uncle lived with his family, where she often visited and likely met Trout. Trout Valley is at the upper center, and Droop Mountain is just out of the scope of this map, to the north.

A bit of Greenbrier County geography

By now the geography of this story is shaping up.

Zona’s family lived a few miles north of Meadow Bluff, about twenty some odd miles to the northeast from the county seat of Greenbrier county, Lewisburg. So his first wife lived deep into Greenbrier, and it can be safely assumed he lived near there at the time.

North of Lewisburg about sixteen miles is Falling Spring, now known as Renick, near the Greenbrier River. It’s another small collection of farms, but with more people than where Zona lived. Her uncle, Mary Jane Heaster’s brother lived there, with his wife and daughters, and Zona visited often.

It can be assumed she traveled there with her family, much of the way along the Midland Trail, which went right past the house where Zona would later be killed. The house was grand enough, and the man who built it notable enough, that they surely would have recognized it and know the story behind it. After all, the town they were passing through was named for the man, Livesay’s Mill. Which was itself pretty much a part of the area known as Richlands, named for the quality of the ground.

Just past Richlands, you steer north to Falling Spring. You could travel from Meadow Bluff to Falling Spring on a horse in a few hours. By wagon or buggy it was most of a day, as it was all dirt and often mud roads.

These aren’t necessarily towns as we know them, but scatted collections of houses, often tied together by blood and marriage.

Just north of Mary Jane’s brother’s farm in Falling Spring was land belonging to the McMillion family.

One of the McMillion boys, Tinker, married Allie Estaline Cutlip, who was seven years his senior and appears to have been his first cousin. They had grown up together, and stayed in Falling Spring the rest of their lives, raising a family, along with the daughter from Allie’s first marriage, to Trout Shue.

It’s said Shue told people he preferred to be called Trout, a nickname. One of the most popular ways people pick a nickname is to use the place from which they came. Just to the west of Falling Spring is Trout valley. It’s reasonable to assume that he first came into Falling Spring from Trout valley, before meeting his first wife some ____ years earlier.

Also, consider this …

The first families you come across when you leave Trout Valley are the McMillions, Allie Shue’s family. And just a few miles to the northeast of both Falling Spring and Trout valley is Droop Mountain, where Shue was raised. Come down off Droop Mountain into Greenbrier County from that direction, and what family do you run into first? The McMillions.

Droop Mountain is just a short distance from Falling Spring, where Trout likely met Zona. Trout was raised here, and at times in his life seemed to retreat there.

A first wife who not only didn’t die, but never gave up making Shue’s life hell

Trout and Allie got married in 1885 and had a child together two years later, a girl named Girta Lucretia Shue. During this time the couple lived in the bride’s hometown in Falling Springs in Greenbrier county, the same tiny town where Zona often visited her cousins.

Legend has it that Trout used to rough up Allie. It got so bad, some of the local boys came into the house one night, yanked Trout from his bed and tossed him in the frozen Greenbrier river. As a chilling warning.

Shue later denied being cruel to his wife, but the rumors preceded him. He claimed she was unbalanced and that the chid was being raised by Allie’s parents.

About a decade after Shue was sentenced for murder, the ghost story made a resurgence, and some newspaper accounts stated definitively that Shue had killed all three of his wives.

Which is obviously not true as Allie was very much alive. And likely still quite pissed off at that worthless bastard that ran out on her and their daughter. Even if it wasn’t his choice that he was sent to prison for two years.

Horse theft up in Pocahontas county.

Now it’s a decade later, 1897 and Allie and Tinker are in the county seat of Lewisburg, picking up a marriage license. Their first child had been born a couple months earlier.

The next week, in that same courthouse, Trout Shue and Zona Heaster come in to pick up theirs.

Can you can tell the kind of man by the company he keeps?

It was the first of May
a lovely warm spring day
I was strolling down the street
in drunken pride

but my knees where all aflutter
and I landed in the gutter
and a pig came up and lay down by my side.

As I lay there in the gutter
thinking thoughts I could not utter
when a lady passing by did softly say,

“You can tell a man who boozes
by the company he chooses…”
And the pig got up and walked away.

Anonymous Irish Verse

Trout Shue has developed a bad reputation since he died, which could well have been warranted in his life as well. But the thing that strikes me, is after the death of his second wife, why did he return to a town where according to the stories, the locals had thrown him into the river, and he had a bad reputation as a horse thief, a wife beater and an ex con?

But prior to murdering his third wife, did he warrant such a bad reputation?

The name James Crookshanks carried a lot of weight in Falling Spring. According to local history, his influence in that area was strong. Crookshanks appears to have owned a few forges scattered along the main roads through this area, down to the Richlands, and likely a larger shop in Lewisburg. These forges were mostly self-reliant, and their main business was shoeing horses and repairing buggies and wagons along the main roads.

To man these forges he needed hard workers he could trust. Trout Shue was a blacksmith, and the son of a noted blacksmith as well. Crookshanks likely had the business sewn up in Falling Spring, so when Trout lived in Falling Spring with his first wife he likely would have worked for Crookshanks then.

It’s reasonable to think that after his release from prison, Trout Shue moved back Greenbrier county, as he was there when he met his second wife. If she was indeed pregnant at the time, it would have been logical to take her to his parent’s place on Droop Mountain. When she died, he decided to move back to Greenbrier, and simply crossed the county line and took up residence in the first town he came to. Falling Spring where his first wife was about to remarry.

As Crookshanks was a respected man, he wouldn’t likely hire someone with the tarnished reputation that Shue bears in folklore. Indeed, in most of the contemporary newspaper accounts, Shue isn’t portrayed as particularly mysterious or diabolical. His reputation grew darker as the facts receded and folklore took over.

As if you needed to get darker than twisting the head off your wife.

Richlands, West Virginia today. There are actually fewer houses now than then. Zona and Tout lived in the distance, just to the right of center on the hillside.

The marriage of Zona Heaster and Erasmus Shue

There was said to be one obstacle to their marriage, Zona’s mother Mary Jane who took an instant dislike and distrust of Erasmus Stribbling Shue. In her eyes, Trout was the devil himself, and she was dead set against the marriage.

The facts were bad enough. He’d been married before, twice, abandoned his child and been in prison. That’s not your dream son in law.

But a mother’s wish has little sway over a daughter’s desire, and in November of 1896, in the Methodist Church at Livesay’s Mill, Zona and Trout were married. They set up house in a two-story frame home that had once been the residence of the founding father of Livesay’s Mill, William G. Livesay.

His boss, Crookshanks was married to a descendent of Livesay, and likely either owned it herself, or was part owner. Once again, if Shue has such a bad reputation, they likely wouldn’t have rented to him their ancestral home.

And so they were settled into what is now the still tiny settlement of Richlands, West Virginia, a hard working and by all accounts, devoted husband and his doting wife.

Perhaps for some reason the older Crookshanks took a liking to Shue, and thought it best to get him out of Falling Spring. At any rate, Zona was closer to home if she chose to visit. And close enough to her cousins, so she wouldn’t feel isolated in Livesay’s Mill.

But just after the ringing in of the new year, 1897, Zona took sick. For the next couple weeks, Zona was looked after by Dr. George W. Knapp, who now lies buried in the cemetery at Richlands, though the cause of her ailment is something of a mystery. There were rumors that Zona was pregnant again, and perhaps this was the reason she and Shue married so quickly. Trout stayed by her side, and witnesses testified during the trial that he was a devoted husband and truly cared for her. Which makes it a mystery why a few days later he broke her neck.

Trout and Zona lived in the house built as the family of William G. Livesay, founder of Livesay’s Mill. Shue’s boss, James Crookshanks was married to a descendent of Livesay. The house still stands today.

The mysterious death of Zona Heaster Shue

Here’s the legend …

It was January 22, 1897 and blistering cold in Richlands, West Virginia. If you want to be precise, the house that eleven year old Anderson Jones was approaching from the northwest was in Livesay’s Mill, but the border between the two towns was lost in the fields that now lay frozen under the young African American’s boots.

Trout Shue had been by his house earlier that morning on the way to the forge and asked his mother, affectionately known as Aunt Martha, if her son could check on his wife later on. She was needing help pickling some eggs, and had no business being out in the cold gathering them.

Anderson was already busy that morning, but Aunt Martha promised she’d have him look in on Zona when he got back.

Shue was agitated and came back four times to find out if Anderson had been there yet. He hadn’t.

It was after lunch before Anderson reached the front porch of Shue’s house and knocked at the door. There was no answer, so he opened the door a crack and called out for Mrs. Shue. Still no answer. He went on in and there lying on the floor was Zona Heaster Shue, at the foot of the stairs, stretched out, with her feet together. One hand was on her abdomen and the other was lying next to her. Her head was turned slightly to one side and her eyes were wide open and staring.

Anderson freaked and ran screaming across the field toward his own home. His mother heard him and came running. Together they ran and told Shue, then fetched Dr. George Knapp.

When Doc Knapp reached the house, Trout was in the bedroom, cradling the head of his dead wife, inconsolable. After finding her corpse, Trout had dressed her in a fine dress, if somewhat old-fashioned, with a tall, stiff collar, veil over her face and around her neck, what he said was her favorite scarf. The doctor at first examined Zona for signs of life. Finding none, he made a cursory examination for the cause of death, which seemed to agitate Trout in his grief, and knowing all too well of Zona’s ill-health, he determined that the cause of death of “everlasting faint,” which he later changed to childbirth.

View from the kitchen to the stairs in the Shue house at Livesay’s Mill.

Clearing the fog from Zona’s death

Unfortunately, much of the details presented during the trial were lost, as all the court records burned in a later fire. The trial did make the papers, but unfortunately, until the more sensational testimony was given, not a lot of information was printed.

Storytellers hate a vacuum, and happily fill the gaps in with their own flourishes. There was a lot of talk about this case around Greenbrier county, and no shortage of rumors and theories, all of which colored later accounts.

Luckily in 1910, Anderson Jones was interviewed about that day, and dropped a few clues in the process that help separate fact from fiction. While adding a few flourishes of his own.

Jones’ interview is a source for the claim that Shue came by four times. But the earlier accounts say he came by again only once, at 11 a.m to ask if Anderson had been there yet and for him to tell his wife he wouldn’t be home for lunch. Jones wouldn’t necessarily know how often Shue had been there as he wasn’t there himself. He could be excused for stretching the tale a bit.

He also described finding the body … “Going to the house, I felt that something was wrong. All of the doors were closed and there was an air about the place I did not like.”

“Reaching the steps, I saw a trail of blood. That scared me, but I went to the door and knocked. No one answered. I tried it and, finding the door unlocked, walked into the kitchen. The trail of blood continued across the floor to the dining room. This door, too, was closed.”

“Once more I knocked. and, getting no answer, walked in. I stumbled over Mrs. Shue’s body. There she was, stretched out or the floor, looking right up at me through wide-open eyes. She seemed to be laughing.”

“I was frightened but still able to reach down and shake her. She was stiff and cold, Running from the house, I called across the field to Aunt Martha, ‘Mrs. Shue is dead!’”

“As she ran to the house, I went down the road for Mr. Shue, finding him at the blacksmith shop with Charles Tapscott. When I told him what I had found, he let out a yell and, with Mr. Tapscott, started for the house. I continued on to get Dr. Knapp.”

What he describes differs in some ways from the commonly told story. What I previously had trouble understanding is why wouldn’t the obvious cause of death for a woman found at the bottom of a set of stairs be from falling down them? The answer is that she wasn’t at the bottom of the stairs. She was in the dining room, and the stairs were on the other side of a closed door.

The trail of blood was discussed at the time, though it’s often missed in the folk tale. And that’s where it gets weird.

Ask yourself, after a very brief courtship, two people – one who had a child out of wedlock, the other on his third marriage – suddenly get married. A couple months later his wife takes ill, with an illness nobody wants to talk about. Three weeks later she’s found at the end of a trail of blood, dead. The cause of death is listed as childbirth.

In other words, a miscarriage.

Anderson says he alerts his mother and she takes off for the house while he goes to tell Shue. Which means Aunt Martha is already there when Shue arrives. So he didn’t have a chance to do anything to the body unseen.

When the doctor arrives, Shue has moved her body upstairs to bed, but he hadn’t changed her clothes. She wasn’t wearing the high necked dress. He assisted others in helping dress her after the doctor left, and chose the high necked dress as it was her wedding dress, and possibly the only nice one she owned.

Stripped of the folkloric elements, the scene is more believable, and the doctor’s diagnosis makes sense.

Shue did keep his wife’s head in his hands the whole time she was being examined, and likely while she was being dressed. Cradling your dead wife’s head is natural for a grieving husband. He didn’t, as legend states, pick out and dress his wife in a garment which covers her neck. It can be assumed ladies of the area, or even Aunt Martha did the actual dressing.

Zona Heaster Shue is laid to rest

Dr, Knapp sent riders to inform Mr. And Mrs. Heaster of their daughter’s death. Her body, accompanied by her son in law and others from Richlands, followed suit the next day.

The day after came the funeral and still Trout was out of his head with grief. He refused to leave his wife’s side during the wake, spending most of the time still cradling her head in his hands, holding a pillow to the side of her face to keep her comfortable. On the other side of her head he had folded a sheet for that same purpose.

At times Trout leapt up and paced the room, showing great energy in contrast to his overwhelming grief, which the other mourners put down to his mourning. But Shue’s odd behavior aroused the suspicion of more than one person at the wake, some of whom noticed that as the corpse was being taken to the cemetery, the head flopped about more than one would expect.

Zona was buried in the graveyard of Soule Methodist Church on January 25, up on Sewell Mountain, in a grave which remained unmarked till 1979. It took almost a hundred years before the congregation of the church erected a marker for the most famous person buried there.

Zona’s obituary ran in the Greenbrier Independent, page 3 on January 28, 1897. It read “Mrs. E. Z. Shue, wife of E. S. Shue, died at her home in the Richlands this county, on Sunday last, the 24th inst., aged 22nd years. Mrs. Shue was a daughter of Mr. Hedges Heaster, of Meadow Bluff district. Mr. Shue formerly lived in Pocahontas county.”

It would be about a century before this seemingly innocent obit became the main reason skeptics doubt the claims of Mary Ann Heaster and her daughter’s ghost.

A mother’s love brings back a daughter from the grave

Zona’s mother, Mary Ann Heaster wasn’t just suspicious of Trout Shue. She was convinced. When told of her daughter’s death, Mary Ann responded that “the devil has killed her.”

Keep in mind, by this time she’s already aware of Shue’s reputation from her family in Falling Springs, where his ex wife lives. She likely has heard the rumors of his second, from neighbors in her own district. This isn’t a mother’s intuition. It’s a reasoned guess based on a mix of fact and rumor.

After the funeral, she had removed the sheet which had been used as her daughter’s head prop, and at first tried to return it to Trout, who refused it. Taking it back home, she began washing it by hand, and was chilled to see that as she did so, the water in the basin turned blood red, and a foul odor of death emanated from the cloth. The water then cleared, and Mary Ann might have put the incident down to her imagination, had she not then seen that the sheet was now stained pink.

Convinced it was a sign, and having no recourse left except to her god, Zona’s mother began to pray. Each night she begged that Zona would return to her and tell her the truth of her death.

The prayer paid off, and on a dark and moonless West Virginia night, a radiant, white light appeared to Mary Ann, which then faded away. On the next night Zona appeared herself, not as a wispy form, but as flesh and blood, corporeal and cold to the touch. For the next three nights Zona appeared to her mother and told her the story.

On the night before her body had been discovered, her husband had come home and was pissed off when he saw that she hadn’t cooked any meat to go with supper.

The specter went on to tell her mother that her husband, in a blind rage overpowered her and closed his fingers around her throat. Such was his fury that Trout hadn’t merely choked his wife to death. Instead, his iron strong grip had mashed her windpipe, ruptured and tearing ligaments before finally breaking her neck, snapping it between the first and second vertebrae.

After relating this tale, as the seemingly reanimated corpse of her murdered daughter made her way towards the door and away from her mother for the last time, Zona turned her head towards Mary Jane, completely around on her body, to show her that indeed her neck had been shattered.

The autopsy of Zona Shue was carried out in the presence of her husband, who whittled the whole time. It did show a broken neck, but also signs of strangulation. This conflicts with what the ghost told Zona’s mother, who said Trout had snapped her neck.

A mother’s vengeance

That’s the legend of what Mary Jane Heaster testified to in court. In reality, what she said was that Trout Shue had put a hand on each side of her head and snapped her neck. Aside from that, the story is essentially what she recounted in court.

When faced with the ghost of your dead daughter, pleading to you to exact vengeance, you’d likely take it seriously. Mary Jane certainly did.

Building the case against Shue was made easier by her brother and sister in law, who probably both knew Shue, and certainly knew his ex wife, who was now their neighbor.

Allie is the obvious source for Shue’s background in the legend, and it can’t be said with a straight face that she harbored no ill will towards her ex. When news reached the Falling Spring folk about Zona’s ghost, it was the beginnings of what one newspaper called a coalition of people out to get vengeance.

The rumors spread, both about the murder and Trout Shue’s unsavory past.

Alon with her brother in law, Mary Ann Heaster paid a visit to the county prosecutor, John Alfred Preston, pleading with him to open the case once more, telling him of the visitation of her daughter. Whether Preston believed Mary Ann is not known, but he had heard the stories which were circulating.

After asking around and finding that several people in the area had the same suspicions, he spoke with Dr. Knapp.

Knapp had remained somewhat troubled about Zona’s death himself, as Trout’s grief prevented him examining the body as thoroughly as he liked, and he told Preston so. Armed with this information, and the word of several locals who had reported seeing bruising on the neck of Zona, he ordered that the corpse be exhumed, a ballsy act unheard of in rural West Virginia at the time.

When told about the scheduled autopsy, Trout Shue naturally “vigorously complained.” But as next of kin, he was informed that his presence there was mandatory. He’d go willingly or by court order. He said he knew he’d be arrested, “but they will not be able to prove I did it.”

This statement, which Shue repeatedly made up to and during the trial could have two meanings. The diabolical one is the obvious. He’d covered his tracks. However, his relatives later would point to another obvious meaning, that they couldn’t prove it because he didn’t do it.

On March 9, more than a month after her death, Zona was dug up and brought to Nickell schoolhouse, now gone or lost to the woods. Trout Shue accompanied the small party of neighbors, led by Prosecutor Preston and Doctor Knapp, as well as some local law enforcement. The neighbors recruited to dig up the grave refused until threatened with prosecution, such was the stigma of the time of disturbing the dead.

Trout whittled while the three doctors headed by Dr. Knapp sliced. The body was in remarkably good shape, as the West Virginia winter kept it chilled. As is common practice in an autopsy, they examined Zona’s stomach for poison, and checked the other vital organs of the chest and abdomen.

Anderson Jones accompanied the party to the autopsy and tells the story. “Dr. Knapp was working around Mrs. Shue’s head. I could see Shue was getting more nervous. His whittling was not so good.”

“Suddenly, the doctor turned to Mr. Preston. They whispered together for a few minutes. Then, Mr. Preston turned to Shue and said: ” ‘Well, Shue, we have found your wife’s neck to be broken.’ Shue’s head dropped. A change came over him that I can’t explain. But it certainly proved his guilt to me.”

The Pocahontas Times reported that: “On the throat were the marks of fingers indicating that she had been choken [sic]; that the neck was dislocated between the first and second vertebrae. The ligaments were torn and ruptured. The windpipe had been crushed at a point in front of the neck.”

Shue was arrested, and yet as they passed his house in Richlands on their way to the jail of Sheriff Bill Nickell, they stopped and he cooked the whole party breakfast. They then rode on where Trout was held without bail for the first degree murder of his wife, Zona Heaster Shue.

Shue’s trial was held in Greenbrier County Courthouse, which still stands in Lewisburg.

The racial perspective in the trial of Trout Shue

On May 20, 1897, the Pocahontas Times reported, “Trout Shue, now in jail awaiting trial for the murder of his wife, has threatened to kill himself,” so it must have discouraged him as well. Or perhaps he was grieving for his wife.

In those days justice wasn’t swift, and it wasn’t till June that circuit Judge J.M. McWhorter made his way to Lewisburg. While waiting for his arrival, Prosecutor Preston tried to shore up his case against Shue, with the help of his assistant prosecutor Henry Gilmer. After all, the evidence against him, discounting the spectral evidence was purely circumstantial.

Shue’s lawyers must have been horrified when they saw how the story of Mary Ann’s visitation by the Greenbrier ghost, and the treacherous picture painted of their client had permeated the Greenbrier social consciousness.

Shue’s enemies in various parts of the county had decided not to wait for the judge and instead tried him in the court of public opinion. Having no family in the county to defend him, he was guilty before the judge dropped the first gavel in the courtroom. Likely with the jury as well.

For his part, Shue hired Dr William Rucker and the first black attorney to practice in a Greenbrier court, James P.D. Gardner. It’s not known if Shue hired them because he thought they were the best men for the job, or if they were just assigned the role.

Having the first black attorney to practice in a Greenbrier court wasn’t to the defendant’s advantage in the last part of the nineteenth century. If there are two things many southerners disliked, it was blacks taking on more prominent roles and positions of authority. The second thing people disliked, then and now, are lawyers. A black man entering the legal profession was enough to earn the adjective “uppity.”

In hindsight, it was a strike for racial equality. But also a strike against Shue with that jury that alone would have likely ensured that he would be found guilty.

Mary Hane Heaster gave evidence during the trial that Shue’s guilt was told to her by her daughter, Zona Shue’s ghost. Though the prosecution didn’t enter it as evidence, the defense was forced to in order to discredit the story. They weren’t able to crack the witness, and observers at the trial said it was her testimony that convinced them of his guilt.

Ghostly evidence comes to light in the trial of Trout Shue

Awaiting trial, Shue told another inmate that the case would never stand up in court, and that he would soon be freed, and hoped to eventually marry seven times. This of course came out during the trial as well.

If there’s one thing you can say about Trout Shue, even through the murky waters of folklore, the man didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.

June 30, 1897 and the trial of Trout Shue for the murder of Zona Heaster Shue began in Greenbrier Court. Prosecutor Preston kept his case to the earthly facts, including testimony from several people of how Trout had refused to let anyone near his wife’s body during the wake and funeral, as well as the stiff, high necked collar and scarf with a large bow tied around her neck. Others related how after the funeral, Shue’s grief seemed to have dissipated quickly, and he showed no signs of mourning and behaved nothing like a man who had lost his wife of little more than a couple of months.

He couldn’t introduce the spectral evidence, but he made sure the local gossip got to the jury.

Spectral evidence was most prominently noted in the Salem witch trials, of 1692. Those victims were convicted based on the testimony of girls, who claimed to receive information from spirits only they could see. Those trials resulted in the executions of twenty innocent people, and the madness was only broken when spectral evidence was finally declared inadmissible in court.

Besides, Preston didn’t have to put Mary Jane Heaster on the stand to recount the story of the ghost. Everyone already knew it.

Then came the defense, and they tried to offer alternate theories. There were other explanations for a broken neck, including the typical jostling of body in January, both in dressing, putting in the coffin and carrying in a wagon for over fifteen miles across frozen roads. Then Rucker and Gardner turned to the circumstances that had lead to the autopsy in the first place, the visitation of Mary Jane Heaster by her deceased daughter Zona.

Modern writers tend to think they put her on the stand to make a mockery of how the case was reopened. But the reality is, since everyone had heard about it, they had no choice but to ask her about the ghost and try to punch a hole in her story.

Mary Jane Heaster was about fifty years old when she took the stand. Our picture of her is as a younger woman, dark haired and determined looking. That must have been thirty years earlier or more, before a hard lifetime of being the wife of a poor farmer living at the foot of a mountain in West Virginia.

Responding to attacks on her character, Mary Jane replied that she was not a superstitious woman, she was a good Christian and that Zona’s appearance was not a dream. According to the Greenbrier Independent, which printed the entire transcript, an event unheard of at the time:

Q.-I have heard that you had some dream or vision which led to this postmortem examination.

A.-They saw enough themselves without me telling them. It was no dream – she came back and told me that he was mad that she didn’t have no meat cooked for supper.

The defense attacked Mary Jane mercilessly, which backfired as she responded with dignity and stuck to her story. She was just like the people in the jury box. She believed in the power of a mother’s intuition, just like they did. That the ghost of a murdered girl could appear to her mother was completely believable. And most of all, when a wife is killed, the husband is the natural suspect. And Mary Jane Heaster, and likely Shue’s first wife, made sure he looked as guilty as he could before he ever stepped into the witness box the next day.

“Shue was on the stand all Tuesday afternoon. He was given free rein and talked at great length; was very minute and particular in describing unimportant incidents; denied pretty much everything said by other witnesses; said the prosecution was all spite work; entered a positive denial of the charge against him; vehemently protested his innocence, calling God to witness; admitted that he had served a term in the pen; declared that he dearly loved his wife, and appealed to the jury to look into his face and then say if he was guilty. His testimony, manner, etc., made an unfavorable impression on the spectators.

– Testimony quoted in the Greenbrier Independent, 1 July, 1897

The verdict comes in on Trout Shue

The jury took less than an hour to return a guilty verdict. Shue had told reporters in jail that he would never be convicted, as there was no evidence against him. Which also seemed to backfire, as this was listed as among the reasons his guilt was so readily apparent.

Shue was sentenced to life in prison, a sentence which was almost never carried out, as an impromptu lynch mob formed to exact the vengeance that they believed the court had failed them in. It was only because of the quick-thinking of a determined deputy that the mob was turned back, and eventually four of them faced charges for their attempt on the life of Shue.

As for Shue, he was sent away to the West Virginia State Prison in Moundsville, where three years later he fell victim to an epidemic that passed through the cell block.

At least two plays and a musical have been based on the story of Zona and Trout Shue, as well as several books – both fiction and non-fiction, and several songs.

The legacy of the Greenbrier ghost

As with most court cases, the furor over Zona Shue’s death soon died down. But it didn’t disappear. It was kept alive through folk tales, and the occasional newspaper article.

Newspapers in the early twentieth century were into the sensational. Many stories were written as much for entertainment as for education. Facts could be something as simple as convincing someone to say it. Even if they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.

A good example is from The Independent-Herald in Hinton, West Virginia from February 18, 1904. The writer claims to know Mary Jane Heaster well, and describes her as a “thoroughly credulous old woman, and that we believe as the jury in the case believed, that she told the truth in regard to her dream and presentiments.”

Shue is portrayed as a “rare type of brute criminal” who had killed all three of his wives, which was demonstrably false. But by then Shue was dead in prison, and there was nobody to set the record straight.

And then the story became a folk tale with each generation adding its own flair. Along comes facts from time to time but instead of removing the folklore, they just add to it. In the 1950s the folktale underwent a resurgence, as it was printed in various West Virginia newspapers. Unfortunately, they didn’t go back to the original source material for their research.

So in the end you’re left with a story so full of holes you can’t help but wonder how the man was convicted to begin with?

The Skeptics arrive

In her book, “The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives,” Katie Letcher Lyle makes note of the fact that on the same day that Zona’s death was reported in the Greenbrier Independent, there ran an article about a case in Australia, where an eyewitness to a murder invented a tale about how the ghost of the victim had appeared to him, pointing to the spot where the unfortunate lie buried.

When she wrote the book Ms. Lyle believed that Mary Ann read this article and found inspiration there, then simply invented the tale of Zona’s visits.

This is the argument most skeptics make when trying to prove that the ghost wasn’t real. She got the idea from the newspaper and simply copied the idea.

But that begs the question, could Mary Ann even read? The aforementioned Independent Herald article, where the writer claims to know her well, describe her and her husband as “poor uneducated country people.”

Yet in the 1880 census, they are listed as able to read and write. But you have to keep in mind that the ability to read a few Bible passages and write your own name during that time and place constituted literacy. And some were embarrassed and simply lied when asked.

Also, Lewisburg is quite a ways from Meadow Bluff, and Mary Jane lived a ways from there. They didn’t have the money to buy newspapers. But yes, it’s likely someone at least gave her a copy of the obituary, if not the whole paper. And if she could read, she surely read the whole thing, including that article.

Then in a subsequent book, Layle changes course, after having read the early work by British researchers who traveled to America to study the case and talk to the participants. She believes, the last I heard, that Zona’s ghost was real.

This delightfully strange drawing is said to have been made by Trout Shue while in prison. It’s been interpreted as being Trout and Vona, and even that it proves his guilt. But I’ve yet to read or see any evidence that Shue was anything but clean shaven.

Was Trout Shue guilty?

I began to wonder, could there be any signs that Shue might have been innocent? That’s seldom mentioned in stories about the Greenbrier ghost.

In a modern courtroom, the case against Shue would have never stood up. But at the time, adherence to the law was looser. It was easier to convince a jury of a man’s guilt without having to deal with the nuances of law.

Shue was portrayed as an outsider. Though he was born in another county, on the border, he was familiar with Greenbrier, had lived there a number of years and by all accounts was well liked,, until the death of Zona.

In rural areas, even today, old America still exists. When charged with a crime, and the more heinous the crime the more likely, you’re believed guilty until proven innocent, especially if you’re an outsider. The obvious answer must be the answer … ain’t no reason to look any deeper. After all, you can tell the makeup of a man by looking in his eyes. You learn to trust your intuition, and especially when colored by rumor and outright lies, Trout Shue wasn’t the kind of guy you could trust.

Shue had at least two women out for vengeance against him, in a world where a man’s reputation made or broke him. They were convinced he was guilty, and set out to make sure he hung for it. And they had a ghost for an accomplice.

This is a trial that took place over a century ago, where most of the records are lost, and we’ll never know the whole story. We take it on faith that Shue was guilty for the same reason the jury did. We believe the ghost story.

Writing in The Monroe Watchman, an unknown reporter’s father attended the trial as a spectator. Writing in 1971, Watchman states that according to his father “Those who witnessed the trial were much impressed with her sincerity and the jury of twelve good men of Greenbrier County and Judge J. W. McWhorter evidently believe her. The question of whether a person can return from the grave was very well answered.”

In short, Trout Shue was convinced based on spectral evidence, just as the victims in the Salem witch trials. A desperate and unavoidable move by the defense spelled his doom. But it was already etched before his mother in law took the stand.

The defense was summed up this way … “There was no living witness to the crime charged against Defendant Shue and the State rests its case for conviction wholly upon circumstances connecting the accused with the murder charged. So the connection of the accused with the crime depends entirely upon the strength of the circumstantial evidence introduced by the State. There is no middle ground for you, the jury, to take. The verdict inevitably and logically must be for murder in the first degree or for an acquittal.”

Public opinion is easily sussed out in the case. After all, some of the good people of Meadow Bluff were going to lynch him after the trial. People associate lynchings with blacks, which is true in more cases than whites. But it’s also true that in their thirst for vengeance, American mobs were no more sympathetic to white skin than black.

Or perhaps in this case, they were sending a message both to the prisoner and his lawyer.

So yes Shue should have gone free. But that doesn’t mean he was innocent. And it doesn’t mean Mary Jane Heaster didn’t talk with her dead daughter.

Was Mary Jane Heaster telling the truth about the Greenbrier ghost?

Mary Jane Heaster never recanted her story of the ghostly visitation of her daughter Zona. Zona was, as far as anyone can say, at peace, and no reports were ever heard of her again.

But Mary Jane never stopped talking about it, no doubt still smarting from the fact that her daughter’s killer didn’t hang right in front of her.

It’s pretty obvious, even from this late date that she was armed with information from her sister in Falling Springs, who likely enlisted Shue’s first wife, at least for background on him.

That the whole county knew the whole story before Mary Jane Heaster walked into the courtroom is evidence that she waged a bitter public relations campaign against Shue, that went on even after he was dead. But that doesn’t mean the ghost didn’t appear, and give her a good reason to fight so hard.

You have to admit, armed with information from her family and new friends, she could easily have made up the details of the house, the layout and much of what she offered as proof that her daughter’s otherworldly testimony was true.

Except one thing. The details of the broken neck, and how she was killed. A broken neck yes, she could have guessed that. But was she that well versed in human anatomy.

It turns out, no she wasn’t. Here’s what she actually testified to in court that the ghost said, “I told him supper was ready, and he began to chide because I had prepared no meat for supper, and I replied that there was plenty; there was bread and butter, apple sauce, preserves, and other things that made a very good supper, and he flew mad and got up and came toward me when I raised up and he seized each side of my head with his hands and by a sudden wrench, dislocated my neck.“

“According to the autopsy, on the throat were the marks of fingers indicating that she had been choken [sic]; that the neck was dislocated between the first and second vertebrae. The ligaments were torn and ruptured. The windpipe had been crushed at a point in front of the neck.”

In short, she was strangled, and her neck broken. What the ghost described was a broken neck, and no strangulation. The autopsy results proved the ghost wrong.

My verdict on the Greenbrier ghost

We’ll never know if Trout Shue went down because of a vendetta against him, or whether he was the person he’s portrayed as. The evidence was lost to history.

If Mary Jane’s story is true, she had every reason to go after Shue with all ten nails bared and scratch out his very eyes. The ghost of your dead daughter has a way of kicking in a mother’s protective instinct, so she can be forgiven for going beyond the pale. Did she embellish the story to make Shue look more guilty? I’m sure of it. But it doesn’t mean the gist of it isn’t true.

I have my own theory, because a case like this invites you to draw your own conclusions.

I think Zona met Trout that day outside when he got back from work. They argued, and she felt a warm gush of blood trickling down her thighs and realized she was miscarrying. Trout was likely enraged already, and she turned and ran into the house. Perhaps he blamed her for losing the child, because there was a good chance he only married because she was pregnant. Or perhaps she had caused herself to lose the child, with a variety of folk remedies at her disposal.

For whatever reason, in the dining room she turned and he snapped her neck. Seeing the trail of blood, he realized the doctor would think she died from the miscarriage. And so he went with that story, and the doctor bought it.

And I believe Mary Beth Heaster saw something that she believed was her daughter’s ghost.

And why not?

It might not have been nothing more than mist in the room, or it could have been much like she described. Either way, it convinced Mary Jane that her daughter wasn’t at rest and she needed to take steps to help her find peace.

Maybe she did read that article about how the ghost story convicted a criminal who would otherwise go free, and took inspiration from that, and combined it with her own experience. And perhaps she had help in fleshing out the details to make it more believable and to point more clearly to Shue’s guilt.

But you have to admit based on the evidence that we have, she was able to point to the fact that her daughter’s neck had been broken, when the doctor who examined her wasn’t able.

In the end, like all ghost stories it comes down to whether you believe what the storyteller is telling, and whether you believe a living person, or the Greenbrier ghost.

A Field Guide to ghosts on Long Island’s North Shore along Rt. 25A, where you find more hauntings per mile than just about anywhere else

Gold Coast, Journal, Long Island, Tales From Head of the Harbor & St. James, Tales from Stony Brook

If ghost stories are to be believed, then Long Island must be one of the most haunted regions in the country. This fifty mile drive averages about one ghost every two miles. And this isn’t close to a comprehensive list.

Officially the main road is called New York State Route 25A, but it goes by many names … Northern Boulevard, North Hempstead Turnpike, Jericho Turnpike, North Country Road … as it merges for a while with other roads before splitting off and going its own way once more. It’s been a main east west route since the days of native Americans. Each culture which has passed through here has left its ghostly stamp on Long Island.

You’ll have to leave 25A to find many of these places, but I promise, you won’t have to go far.

Some of these sites are open to the public. Some you can go inside, some you have to wander around outside, keeping an eye on the window for ghostly eyes following you. Still others are hard to see. You might have to settle for a peek through the bushes.

But all of them have stories to tell. Stories of their past, of our past, of life on Long Island. Or in this case, life after death.

The boathouse at Cedarmere near Roslyn Harbor is said to be haunted by a Victorian era lady in white.

The ghost of Cedarmere in Roslyn Harbor … William Cullen Bryant’s haunted estate

Our journey begins at Cedarmere in Roslyn Harbor, the country home of William Cullen Bryant, famed nineteenth century poet and journalist. Bryant is usually thought of as a New Englander, but in reality he spent most of his career in New York, and Cedarmere was where he lived out his life. It was originally a Quaker farmhouse, which Bryant added onto as he expanded the estate. Most of the house burned in 1901, but was rebuilt by his descebdebts using similar plans. It stayed in the family till 1931, when in accordance with Bryant’s will it was donated to Nassau County.

Cedarmere’s haunted reputation includes the sighting of a native American, sometimes seen walking across the grounds at dusk, which is fitting considering the strong presence of native Americans on Long Island.

The grounds include a beautiful Victorian style mill house, where a lady in white from that era has been seen, quiet in her solitude. The house itself has reports of doors opened or closed by unseen hands, strange knocks and taps, as well as shadow people and misty forms.

They couldn’t take it with them, so they stayed behind instead at Glen Cove

Glen Cove attracted some of the richest of the rich in the early twentieth century. The biographies of these families usually include stories of brutal treatment of others in order to build such fortunes. So perhaps it’s a heavy conscious which keeps them tied to places where they lived.

Or perhaps it’s the houses themselves, which trapped their former occupants?

Charles Pratt was one of the pioneers in the oil industry, eventually partnering with John D. Rockefeller to form Standard Oil. The riches from that flowed through the family and poured out into Glen Cove for generations. There are still five massive, ornate estates here built for Pratt’s sons, as well as their own cemetery, which is worth a visit just to see the Romanesque mausoleum, complete with a Bridge of Sighs.

Glen Cove Mansion Hotel and Conference Center in Glen Cove was once the home of John Teele Pratt and Ruth Baker Pratt, who both loved the place so much they’ve never left. It’s been used as the setting for several films including North by Northwest and Sabrina.

The Manor, now Glen Cove Mansion Hotel and Conference Center was built for John Teele Pratt and Ruth Baker Pratt. While Ruth Pratt was still alive, it was used to film scenes for the Hitchcock film North by Northwest, as well as Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn.

The original owners loved the place so much it seems, that they’ve decided to stick around. A man in a dark brown suit, presumed to be John Pratt is often seen in the main hallways. His wife seems to favor the pub, where she’s been known to play the jukebox and to switch the TV to CSI, which seems to be her favorite show.

One could easily spend a day or more wandering Glen Cove’s gold coast architecture. The crown jewel of those houses remaining is often considered to be Winfield Hall, build by Frank W. Woolworth. Made of pink marble, it’s off limits to the public, though you can catch glimpses of it through the trees.

Winfield Hall was built by F.W. Woolworth in Glen Cove, New York. Woolworth only lived in the house for about a year, dying in his bed in 1919. There are ghosts rumored to be in residence at Winfield. Even if Woolworth isn’t one of them, he’s left his mark indelibly on the place.

According to Monica Randall, Mr. Woolworth and perhaps a few other members of his family continues to live on at Winfield. The story she documents in Winfield: Living In The Shadows of the Woolworths is quite harrowing, even if at times one wonders where the facts end and her imagination begins.

But anyone who has stood outside that imposing building can attest, there’s something dark about the place.

Shu Swamp also known as the Charles T. Church Nature Preserve near Oyster Bay has some of the most curious natural scenery on Long Island, haunting in its own way. Reports of devil worshipping filter in, as it does at nearly woodland on Long Island. In the early days of the colonies, the creek here marked the boundary between the British, who settled on the eastern end of Long Island, and the Dutch and their colony of New Amsterdam.

Colonial era ghosts, the ghost of slavery and a rough rider haunt Oyster Bay

You can go south from Glen Cove back to Northern Boulevard, which Route 25A is known by along this stretch, or you can wind through the labyrinth of roads that lead to Oyster Bay. If you have time, I highly suggest the winding route, which cuts through one of the more wooded areas of Long Island. Houses alternate between the very old and the very opulent. You can spend a lot of time just admiring the gates even.

As you inch closer to Oyster Bay, you’re moving into some of the most historic areas of the island as well. The original border between Dutch control and the British passed through here, which was the brook which passes through Shu Swamp, a county nature preserve well worth wandering. The last port that Captain Kidd stopped at before being taken prisoner was at Oyster Bay, where he came ashore to visit a friend and begin the process of negotiating his surrender.

The village of Oyster Bay is old, quaint and like much of Long Island, has a bit of a New England feel. Raynham Hall stands in the village itself, a snapshot of the colonial era on Long Island. The history of Raynham Hall begins in 1740 when it was purchased by Samuel Townsend, a young shipping magnate, to take advantage of Oyster Bay’s natural harbor. Townsend went on to aid George Washington as one of the leaders of his spy ring on Long Island.

Raynham Hall in Oyster Bay was a center for George Washington’s spy ring during the revolution, and the ghosts stretch nearly that far back. It’s now operated as a museum and open to the public.

Slavery was a part of life at Raynham Hall, as Townsend not only owned slaves, but benefitted from their labors through his shipping business. He wasn’t an anomaly in colonial Long Island, as it was a standard practice at the time. Though no less horribly or horrifying than what went on in the south. It’s no wonder that so many colonial era structures on Long island are haunted, for that time was full of horrors.

Even the first known Valentine sent in the United States, presented to one of the daughters of the owner who lived at Raynham Hall, found cupid’s arrow missing its mark. Sally Townsend the daughter of Samuel Townsend had caught the eye of a British officer who was lodging at Raynham Hall during the British occupation. It might have gone better, had her father not been working with Washington as a spy, and Sally overheard the British plans, which she relayed to her father.

Since then Sally has been spotted in her room and the older part of the house. A cold spot is regularly felt in her bedroom as well. Newsday reports other sitings, believed to be a servant who once worked here. But there are a number of ghosts in Raynham Hall, and so far nobody has been able to put names to them all.

The best part is Raynham Hall is open to the public and contains many fascinating exhibitions of a non spooky nature.

The road from Oyster Bay back to Route 25A is another gorgeous stretch of scenery, with Oyster Bay to your left. When you reach the end of the water you hang a left and begin climbing Sagamore Hill to Teddy Roosevelt’s house.

Sagamore Hill was the home of president Teddy Roosevelt, and after his death, his family kept it exactly the way it was in his life, and is now a museum. Try to his contrary nature, the old bastard still refuses to leave.

To stroll the grounds is free, but the inside is well worth a visit too. Teddy came out to Oyster Bay from New York City for summers since he was a child and at the age of 22 bought the property where he would build his home. He lived out his life here, raised his family and died at Sagamore Hill.

It’s also said that he never left. After his death the house was kept exactly the way it was when he was alive, and even one of his grandchildren wrote of feeling his presence in various rooms. It’s also thought his wife still remains, who lived for some time after Teddy.

The Memorial Cemetery of St. John’s Church near Oyster Bay Cove has a creepy ambiance, and feels more like a garden than a graveyard. Which should be expected, as it was designed by the same fellow that designed Central Park in New York City.

Where the road to Oyster Bay meets Route 25A, you find the Memorial Cemetery of St. John. I’ve never heard any ghost stories about the place, but it’s well worth a visit. Much of it is wooded, with trails running through the woodland, punctuated here and there with rather opulent tombstones and mausoleums. It was designed by the same fellow who designed Central Park, and it shows what a cemetery can be when you give the dead a bit of space.

Muttontown Preserve in East Norwich once housed two large estates. Chelsea still stands, French turrets intact. The remains of King Zog’s mansion can still be found by wandering the trails, but beware as many legends surround the place. And it’s damned easy to get turned around.

Jealous ghosts of the whaling era in the footsteps of George Washington at Cold Spring Harbor

As you pass from Oyster Bay you begin to leave behind the Gold Coast mansions. They still dot the area, just not as frequently. What you get instead is a trip back into the colonial era, as well as Long Island Sound opening up beside you. Long Island Sound sometimes lies visible to your left the woods grow thicker, and the small towns look much like like they do all over the country, with businesses packed in along the main street. Albeit on the north shore, the businesses tend to be of a pricier caliber, and trendy bars and restaurants are more common.

Route 25A was always the major thoroughfare along the north shore. Following the revolution, Washington made a circuit around Long Island, starting down the south shore, then cutting across and coming back along the north shore, down 25A. After the island was lost to the British in the Battle of Long Island, it avoided major conflicts, though skirmishes were fairly common. There was resistance, but a large percentage of the population were against the revolution. The British Army occupied Long Island, and it’s believed Washington’s jaunt around the island was to rub it in their faces.

Whatever the reason, Washington’s visit left its mark, and no doubt helped many historic buildings survive because of the association. It’s just a question of knowing where to look. Because everywhere you look, the further east you go, the more history you see.

The ominous facade of Chelsea Manor in Muttontown Preserve has inspired several supernatural legends.

Off to your right you find Muttontown Preserve. Lost in the woods there is the remains of King Zog’s mansion, torn apart by treasure hunters even before the wrecking ball finished the job. At the other end of the woods is Chelsea Manor, where the children’s grandfather could recite his latest poem The Night Before Christmas.

Then you’re in Cold Spring Harbor, immortalized by a Billy Joel album of the same name. I’m not a fan. But if there’s a musical association to me with Cold Spring Harbor, it’s John Lennon, who had a summer home here.

Cold Spring Harbor itself is a throwback to the 19^th century, where you can still feel its history as a port for whaling ships. It looks and feels like its been snatched right off the coast of New England, with its narrow main streets, dotted with tiny shops and Victorian houses.

Cold Spring Harbor was once the home to the whaling industry on Long Island. Much of the early architecture still exists, still housing the ghosts who once inhabited them.

At least one, The Gourmet Whaler has its own ghost, frequently sighted and felt in the basement. But walking the street at night, you can feel more than that looking out at you from darkened windows.

Then there’s the Harbor Mist, once a brothel, now a restaurant and B&B. A deckhand on a whaling ship came back to Cold Spring Harbor early and found his true love working out of one of the rooms here, and shot her and her customer, who have both been seen and heard there in the years since.

I had a curious experience in Cold Spring Harbor. There was a shop there, now gone which I used to visit regularly. There was an elderly woman who worked there, quite distinguished looking, I always found her working in the back of the store and she always waited on me. Her clothes weren’t old fashioned, just traditionally classy.

One day, after not having shopped there for some time, I stopped in. The lady was nowhere in sight, so I asked her replacement about her. She said she knew of no older woman who had worked there.

Some time later, around Christmas I drove past, and happened to glance at the store. There looking out the front window was the woman.

Coindre Hall on Huntington Bay is believed to be haunted by spirits of the prohibition era.

The rich hug the harbor while the colonial ghosts move inland in Huntington Village

It’s a short drive from Cold Spring Harbor to Huntington Village, where you dip down the hill and into the village proper. Long Island Sound is off to the left, through the residential sections. On the western shore of Huntington Bay you find Coindre Hall

Coindre Hall is a 40 room medieval French château built in 1912 for a pharmaceutical baron. On the outside it is gorgeously intact, with the lawn sloping down to the sound, where you find a boat house built in the same style. Later it became a boarding school ran by the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, until it was bought by Suffolk County. It was used by bootleggers during prohibition and one of the ghosts seen walking the halls resembles a gangster from that era, who it is supposed to have met his end in the tunnel that leads from the house to the boathouse.

Other spirits of that era have been seen, looking far more happy and joyous than the gangster.

Once known for it’s fortress like design and a macabre design sense that included antique children’s tombstones imported from Italy, all that remains of Ferguson’s Castle aka The Monastery is the harbor entrance. It’s a tale of how an upscale family takes a turn towards tragedy, with haunting consequences.

Across the harbor from Coindre Hall you find the remains of Ferguson’s Castle, built for Juliana Armour Ferguson, the heir to the Armour Hot Dog fortune. It was designed to resemble a medieval, European monastery, and in fact is still referred to as The Monastery. She went as far as to make the rooms resemble monk’s cells, and used the tombstones of children who died in Europe over 300 years ago as decorations, going as far as to make benches from them.

Mrs. Ferguson loved children, as many people who knew her when they were children happily attest. Her own children were a source of sadness and worry, and eventually maddening grief. A daughter’s divorce was a major blow as at the time divorce, particularly in a family such as hers was more than scandalous. Another son died during World War I, and she had a mannequin brought to the dinner table each night, dressed in his clothes.

It’s that which provides the most horrifying specter reported here. When the building was being torn down, people reported seeing her ghostly figure descending the stairs for dinner.

Today all that is left is a gatehouse, a boat dock and the lower entrance, once a tunnel which led up into the house. And lots of memories.

Conklin Farmhouse dates to the colonial era, and is haunted by multiple ghosts, including a playful child. Once in the countryside, today the bustle of Huntington VIllage has surrounded the house.

Back down into Huntington Village itself, things get a bit congested. Up at the top of High Street you find the Conklin Farmhouse, surrounded now by the village which grew up around it, finally hemming it in on all sides.

It was built by the Conkin family about 1750, and remained in the family for about 150 years, before being donated to the Huntington Historical Society. During the revolution, David Conklin was imprisoned by the British, leaving his wife to run the farm and raise the children. This task was likely made easier by the family’s slaves, a small detail usually left out of the historic account, and is another reminder of that ancient scar which still haunts Long Island.

People who have lived there for a time reported feeling someone touching them, laying a hand on their shoulder when no one was there. Another spoke of waking to feel something like a small child laying on their head, smothering them. Another said she awoke to the sound of someone calling her, and opened her eyes to find a young girl there, watching her, who quietly disappeared.

Old Burial Hill, Soldiers and Sailors Cemetery, Huntington Village

Then there’s the museum volunteer who disappeared, and the last place she was seen was in the Conklin Farmhouse. Legend has it that she’s buried in the basement, which is known to have an oppressive chilling mood. But one would think the police have already looked into that lead, and it becomes yet another mysterious body in the basement story.

As you leave the village the colonial past is on full display. Old Burial Hill was once the site of Fort Golgotha, where the British were quartered during the revolution. They used the tombstones to bake their bread, which left the loaves with inscriptions cooked into them. A bit further down is the village green, now mostly forgotten, and along the side a row of colonial era houses, as well as the old armory from the revolution.

The vast number and size of KIng’s Park Psychiatric Hospital are a chilling testimony that a lot of sad things went down here. Legends abount, from the grisly to the supernatural, but it’s unlikely that any can co

A trip to the funny farm and a drink with a ghost in Smithtown

King’s Park Psychiatric Center lies a few short miles north of Rt. 25A in King’s Park. King’s Park was built to house patients from New York City and Long Island, on a farm setting. The idea was a bit of work would be good for them, and it’s said King’s Park was the original “funny farm.”

It grew on a massive scale, and many of the buildings, some quite impressive still stand though most are in ruins. It’s found within Nissequogue River State Park and there are lovely walks along the river. But you’re not here to enjoy the forest or the water. Except perhaps the water treatments?

All the horrors story cliches you hear about insane asylum find their truth in King’s Park. It all happened here, and the adventurous types are always slipping into the buildings and exploring. Some of those tales are terrifying, sounding as though they’ve been torn from the scripts of a thousand horror movies. Those films about asylums likely have King’s Park in mind as well.

One place you shouldn’t miss is the pauper’s field. The landscape is strewn with bodies of the forgotten, buried without markers, living life with madness and ultimately succumbing to it.

Then it’s back to 25A and a short trip till the giant bull signifies you’re entering Smithtown.

If you’re needing a drink or a bite to eat, Katie’s right there on Rt. 25A in Smithtown would be the appropriate spot. A local watering hole since the early twentieth century, it features live music as well, so it can be a busy place.

Katie’s in Smithtown is likely the most investigated haunting on Long Island, and its yet to be debunked. It’s also a good place to stop for a drink and check in with the ghosts.

That doesn’t stop the ghosts. There’s a lot of poltergeist activity here, much of it caught on security cameras even. Invisible hands have saved a person from falling off a ladder, and once punched a biker in the gut, downstairs in the billiard room. The ghosts down there are said to be more menacing than those upstairs.

There’s no shortage of theories on who or what could be haunting Katie’s. It’s been investigated by many of the big name paranormal shows on cable, newspapers, magazines and paranormal societies. Charlie Klein, a bootlegger and bartender who worked here in the twenties is a prime suspect. He killed himself across the street out of fear of being sent to prison, and he was once part owner of the hotel which stood here.

That hotel burned, allegedly taking several people with it, who might also be responsible for the hauntings. Children are sometimes seen and heard, which cold fit with that story as the building has never been a home. Another investigator said it was the ghost of an old man who was a regular here and died on his stool.

Regardless of who it might be, the one thing you shouldn’t count on is the ghost picking up the tab.

Deepwell Farm in St. James has a distinguished ghost roaming its halls.

Into the Three Villages where the ghosts are very old

Outside of Smithtown Route 25 and 25A splits, with the latter heading northeast. You stay on that. You’re now on North Country Road, and it truly is a country road. This was farmland, before it became residential with a smattering of commercial along the highway.

On your left you’ll see Deepwell Farms, built about 1845 in a Greek Revival fashion. The resident ghost there is a gentleman, with salt and pepper hair, ascot and smoking jacket.

St. James General Store is still an old fashioned general store, complete with the ghost of a little girl.

Just off of 25A is St. James Country Store. This was one of the favored areas for the NYC elite to summer in during the early twentieth century, and the ledger from those days reads like a who’s who of film and politics. It’s still an old fashioned country store, despite having distinctly modern items for sale. The floors still creek, the layout is still early twentieth century, they have a candy counter and a little girl ghost, who is known to haunt the staircase that leads to the second floor.

Down Moriches Road you take Cordwood Path and you’re in a loop that curves around and comes back up along the harbor. This is Harbor Road, a swanky area still, which you’ll find out if you park your car along here for any length of time. The police will remind you in a none so gentle fashion. To your right, facing the harbor you see a curiously shaped house, up on a hill, and if it’s at night there will be a light on in the top floor. According to legend, this was Mary Hatchet’s House, where she chopped her father into bits.

The Wetherhill House, aka Mary Hatchet’s House in Head of the Harbor. Legends have sprung up about this house that encompass the whole area along the harbor..

In truth it was the home of the mother in law of Stanford White, the noted 19^th century architect. Noted for his ability to design grand buildings with a unique American style, he also boasted a notable mustache and an unfortunate sexual drive. The latter led to his demise, shot in the face by the husband of one of his underage, ex lovers. The sad thing is that led to a Hollywood film, and he’s known more for that than his architectural accomplishments.

Mary Hatchet’s house isn’t one of them. He pronounced it the worst design he ever came up with, but in fairness, it was his mother in law’s idea. It rather puts to rest the idea that this could have once been Mary Hatchet’s house, at least in the sense that people think of that phrase.

He lived at Boxwood, an architecturally significant house which stands in the woods just before you reached Cordwood Path. Just prior to that you passed The Carman -White house, a white Victorian built in the 19^th century. Stanford White’s wife had purchased it, along with other land in the area, and following his murder she moved from Boxwood to the Carman-White house.

Subsequent tenants of the Carman-White house spoke of listening to two old women talking in the adjoining room, who might have been the original tenants of the house – two spinsters. Footsteps were common, as well as the sound of someone walking upstairs with a cane. An old portrait was found in a closet with a shattered frame, and repairing that seemed to cause the noises to stop. One woman later reported however, that she heard a voice telling her to go upstairs and when she did she found her baby, choking and turning blue. She was able to save it, but had the voice not told her to check on it …

Head back to 25A and before you know it you’re in Stony Brook, one of the Three Villages which include Old Field and the Setaukets. St. James is frequently lumped in as well. You’re now in one of the most haunted areas of Long Island, or anywhere I’ve been to be honest. Nobody can say why, except perhaps these neighborhoods are very old.

Hawkins-Mount Homestead, once the home of WIlliam Sydney is believed to be haunted by the artist’s sister.

Just down 25A you find the Smith-Hawkins house, which was later the home of one of the most prominent artists to come from New York in the 19^th century, William Sydney Mount. The occupation of artist could be tough in those days and one of his specialties in his early career was painting portraits of people’s dead relatives prior to burial. Sometimes the process had to be delayed, and Mount had to view the deceased through a coffin with a glass window, to protect him from the smell.

The house has a long history, being built in 1757 as a store, post office and ordinary. It’s also been a tavern and hotel, and was a center for the Setauket spy ring, which served Washington in the Revolution. Hawkins was also a Freemason, and it’s this connection which some believe drew Washington to stop here on his victory lap after the war.

The main ghost here appears to be William Sydney Mount’s sister, named Elizabeth. Mount himself was a firm believer in ghosts, and for a time, spiritualism. He wrote of a number of supernatural experiences in the house. His ghost isn’t seen here, but instead at the bar the Country House Restaurant, just across the field.

The Hadaway House, now the Country House Restaurant, Stony Brook

The Country House Restaurant was known as the Hadaway House, and Mount was friends with the people who lived here, and he attended seances they held. But the most tragic ghost in the Country House Restaurant is another lady in white, either hung in an upstairs bedroom by the British for fighting against the crown, or downstairs by angry townspeople who believed she was working for the British. She’s an attractive ghost by all accounts and is rather active.

The Stony Brook Gristmill has been in operation since colonial times and has its own lady in white.

A few blocks away is the Stony Brook Grist Mill, built in 1751 and still in operation. It’s a step back into time. In the lower section is a set of scales which occasionally swing on their own, blown by a mysterious cool breeze.

Upstairs is yet another lady in white, seen on a number of occasions and believed to be a former apprentice here.

The Joseph Smith Hawkins house in Stony Brook dates from 1757 and whose ghosts include a menacing elderly woman, and a black man.

Continuing on, in East Setauket you find the Sherwood-Jayne House, which was built in the 1730s. This was a farm for 150 years, and it’s been faithfully restored to the 1800s. Perhaps it’s this attention to detail that holds the spirits here, which include voices from unseen visitors, cold spots and a man in a blue coat, nervously pacing the grounds.

Sherwood Jayne House, c. 1730, East Setauket

On the way back to Route 25A, don’t miss the East Setauket Village Green. Beautifully preserved, with two churches and graveyards full of beautiful markers, it’s also the site of a Revolutionary War battle.

Visit in the fall and it’s the quintessential Long Island autumn experience. The mill and mill pond is a great walk, the architecture in this area is gothic, Victorian, early Long Island and the place casts its spell on you. There are rumors of a ghost at the barn by the pond, and also the Emma S. Clark Memorial Library, but in truth, the whole village green is hauntingly beautiful.

Setauket Presbyterian Church, c. 1812, is one of two historic churches on East Setauket village green. In addition to the beautiful setting and early American architecture in the neighborhood, there was a skirmish here in the revolution.

How to end any journey? Dinner, drinks and devil worshippers!

The pace of life begins to slow down the further east you travel on the north shore. At Mt. Sinai you find the Mt. Sinai Congregational Church, first established in 1789. Seaview Cemetery is adjacent to the church, and is a hauntingly beautiful, quiet spot.

Behind the church is a nature preserve, once known as the Chandler Estate. The buildings here had long fallen into ruin since its prime, in the days the newlywed Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller lived there. Once abandoned, the houses in the woods were according to legend, occupied by devil worshippers, before being razed, which gave the woods its name of Satan’s Trails or Devil’s Gate.

Since then it’s kept up its reputation for cult activity and who knows? Perhaps inspired by the legends some Wiccans or others might occasionally use the trails for rituals. But the legends of innocent hikers being taken for sacrifice are quite likely fabrications.

Satan’s Trails have a reputation for devil worshipping and cult activity. Though likely nothing more than urban legend, it’s still an enchanted woodland.

Satan’s Trails does have a reputation for ghosts, including the unfortunate Ms. Monroe. It’s easy to imagine why a spirit would want to live on in an enchanted woods overlooking the sea, and it’s easy to see why the human mind would conjure up ghosts as well here.

But whether there are ghosts are not, it’s a lovely walk.

And that sums up the appeal to a ghostly drive down Route 25A across Long Island. You likely won’t see any ghosts, particularly when driving by in a car. But you get a lot of history, develop an understanding of the area, and if that’s your thing, you are treated to one of the nicest drives anywhere.

DEKS American Restaurant in Stony Point offers a good menu, for both drinking and eating in a comfortable, publike atmosphere. There’s a good chance somebody at the bar can tell you about the ghosts.

Back on the highway it’s a short drive to Rocky Point and DEK’s American Restaurant, where you find the best cheeseburger on Long Island on the menu, a tasty range of libations, as well as the occasional poltergeist and full bodied apparition.

Or if you’ve a mind, and have the time, you can drive out onto the north fork of Long Island and have dinner upscale at the Jamesport Manor Inn. It was originally a family home, growing ever more elaborate as the family’s fortune grew. Along with fortune came tragedy and the family fell from grace, so the house became a restaurant. It burned later in the twentieth century but was rebuilt from detailed plans. A chance encounter with a guest who swore that lighting a certain candle would bring the ghosts back seemed to work, and since then the new building has been as haunted as the old.

Jamesport Manor Inn, dating from 1750 on the north fork of Long Island, is worth the drive for a dinner with ghosts.

This is just a sampling of the ghosts along the north shore of Long Island, the ones that have made it into folklore, and occasionally history. There are ghosts all over this island, befitting its place in American history as one of the oldest continually lived in areas of the country. Millions of people have lived here, many lived tragic lives and have seemingly unfinished stories to tell.

What to wear on weird Long Island

SHOP

Monster hunting in southern Illinois at Alton, the Murphysboro Mud Monster, Harrisburg, Enfield, Mt. Vernon and more … and why not Bigfoot while we’re at it?

Journal, Mississippi River Valley, Southern Illinois Hauntings and Legends, Terrestrial Anomalies, Extra-terrestrial visitors, hairy monsters, abandoned asylums and assorted weird tales

Reproduction of the Piasa near Alton, Illinois, based on a sketch made long after the original was worn away. It’s believed that the wings were added later on when the original had been repainted, and that prior it represented the underwater panther which ruled the underwater realm.

Southern Illinois is a strange place. Those of us descended from the early settlers come from an anti-social stock. They were those who pushed into the Appalachians from the early colonies, only to find those remote regions too crowded. The pushed on through the passes and gaps, settled for a few years then noticed there were still too many neighbors. So they took to the great rivers that flowed into the unexplored heartland. Then pushed further, along the smaller rivers till they found a place suitably quiet from human interference.

Today the population is still somewhat belligerent and anti-social. This is Illinois, but we hate Chicago. Our education system is surprisingly good, but still much of the population doesn’t care much for book learning. Experience teaches them all they believe they need to know. Science, historians, the media and especially politicians aren’t particularly trusted. They believe in what they can taste, feel, smell and see.

And of course, God. This is the Bible belt after all.

Depending on where you fall in belief in strange creatures, the area is ripe with the type of people easily prone to superstition, and gullible enough to fall for pranks.

This is true. But the plethora of monster sightings in this area, stretching all the way back to the native Americans can’t be so easily dismissed. Many of those who came forward and filed police reports were not only honest, well respected citizens, but often quite well educated and brimming with intelligence.

They just happened to see shaggy, hairy creatures out in the woods. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

View of St. Louis, Missouri from the top of Monk’s Mound in the ancient native American city of Cahokia. Alton lay just upriver from Cahokia, and representations of many fantastical beasts can be found in their culture.

In 2017, Illinois logged the second highest number of Bigfoot sightings in America, with most of them coming from the southern tip. The Shawnee Forest stretches from the eastern border along the Ohio Rive to the western and the Mississippi, down to where the great rivers meet, like a sylvan patch of pubic hair on the trunk of the state. The area is known for rolling hills, steep bluffs, high hills and dark hollows. Each spring and fall, the famous Snake Road is closed to allow the reptiles to migrate to their summer and winter homes.

When the government bought the land in 1939 for a national forest, under Franklin Roosevelt, it was mainly exhausted farmland. Most of the trees which blanket the landscape were planted then.

When the settlers came this was old growth forest, teeming with predators like bears, wolves, mountain lions and rattlesnakes. Today the super predators are gone, except for a few wolves reintroduced to the area, and of course the snakes.

And perhaps, Bigfoot and other creatures which most people don’t believe even exist. But many of the people who live here, and those who lived here before us beg to differ.

Southern Illinois has perhaps more in common with the south than the north. In the Civil War, much of the southern part of the state was sympathetic to the southern cause, with an underground rebellion working out of the Shawnee hills. Today you can still hear it in the accent, and in an appreciation of a good story.

Urban dwellers put down those who believe in such things as giant birds and hairy beasts as gullible, superstitious. Those who live here shake their heads and sniff, “city folk don’t know shit.”

I fall somewhere in the middle. I’m educated enough to know that the evidence for such creatures is scant, and eyewitness accounts about anything is notoriously unreliable. But even I’ve heard and seen strange things in the forest.

So as traveling in the age of Covid is limited, I decided to track down some of the stories I’ve heard from this area in one form or another my whole life and to ask myself a question. Not whether I believe these creatures exist, but what is it about this place that makes it ripe for legends?

View of the Mississippi from the river bluffs.

Prehistoric creatures high on a bluff over the Mississippi leave a tantalizing clue for those came after

Father Jacques Marquette, a 17th century French explorer is our source for the first report of a strange creature that was part of the native American mythology of the area, and dubbed by some to be an underwater panther.

Whilst passing down the Mississippi near present day Alton in 1673, Marquette wrote in his journal that “While skirting some rocks, which by their height and length inspired awe, we saw upon one of them two painted monsters which at first made us afraid, and upon which the boldest savages dare not long rest their eyes. they are as large as a calf; they have horns on their heads like those of a deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a beard like a tiger’s, a face somewhat like a man’s, a body covered with scales, and so long a tail that it winds all around the body, passing above the head and going back between the legs, ending in a fish’s tail. green, red, and black are the three colors composing the picture. Moreover, these two monsters are so well painted that we cannot believe that any savage is their author; for good painters in France would find it difficult to reach that place conveniently to paint them. Here is approximately the shape of these monsters, as we have faithfully copied it.”

The underwater panther made an appearance as well on a 1682 map of the area by another Frenchman, the cartographer Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin.

It’s known today as the Piasas, and it’s unclear whether it gave its name to the area, or the creature became synonymous with where it was believed to live. In a book by Thomas Hutchings in the 18th century, Alton, Illinois is given the name Piasas. And later, another French explore gave the name Hauteurs De Paillisa to the cliffs above where the original painting was found.

Reliable reports of the paintings existence end in 1698, when it was reported to be barely visible. It’s possible that it was repainted, perhaps incorrectly as in 1836, John Russell described the creature as the Piasa Bird. And overnight, the legend took on wings.

Monks Mound at Cahokia is the largest pre-Columbian earthwork in the America’s, and the largest prehistoric mound in the United States and Canada. The native Americans at Cahokia believed in both the underwater panther and its nemesis, the Thunderbird.

According to Russell, the “name is Indian, and signifies in the language of the Illini, ‘THE BIRD THAT DEVOURS MEN.’” The Piasa once terrorized Native American villages, Russell claimed, killing many warriors before it was slain by the chief Ouatoga, who had offered himself as bait and had 20 warriors with poisoned arrows wait in ambush for the monster. When the Piasa swooped down to attack Ouatoga, it was killed by the barrage of poisoned arrows, thus saving the tribe.

Unfortunately that story, as well as a cave inhabited by the Piasa filled with human bones turns out to be bullshit, as Russell later admitted he more or less made it up. But its resemblance to the Thunderbird or Manitou, which was an authentic native American belief made it easy to believe Russell’s tale.

It’s possible that the mural was first painted before 1200 CE, at the height of Cahokia to the south. Cahokia was a city of 20-20,000 people of the Mississippian culture, best known for their mound building. The icons they created are found on everything from carvings to pottery, and quite often include Thunderbirds, bird men, gigantic snakes and other creatures.

It’s thought by some that the painting at Alton was to identify this stretch of the river as being under their control, a warning if you will. By the time that Europeans arrived here, not only had the native culture forgot who created the painting, as Cahokia had been abandoned long before, but they no longer realized what the creature actually was.

Still, the modified painting could be confused with a Thunderbird, at least to 21^st century eyes. And we know that they native Americans believed in that. At least metaphorically.

But was it ever thought to be a real creature, and could it exist today? Did giant birds once fly high over Alton and Cahokia? In the summer of 1977, a boy in Lawndale, Illinois, was reportedly snatched from the ground and carried thirty feet by a large bird, before the boy’s mother managed to beat the bird into letting her boy go.

And forty years ago, near Decatur, Illinois, John D. Walker, a teenager out for a walk with a friend, reported seeing a bird with a twenty foot wing span glide past. When asked later, in 2007 what it could have been, he said Thunderbird.

The top of Millstone Bluff, in the Shawnee forest and the location of a series of native American petroglyphs.

Combing Millstone Bluff in search of the native American Thunderbird

Visible for miles, Millstone bluff rises above the uplands of the Shawnee Hills like a native American version of Glastonbury Tor, about 145 miles southwest of Cahokia. Like that culture, the native Americans at Millstone Bluff left their iconography behind, with terrifying creatures recorded in stone.

During the days of the settlers, millstones were made here, giving the hill its name. But its the native American village which thrived here just after Cahokia was abandoned that gives the site its importance.

It’s a relatively easy hike, less than a mile unless you take the long route, and only the first part is truly uphill. As you begin to reach the top you first notice the stones heaped up into a wall, built by later Woodland Indians, before you come across the box gravers of the cemetery from the older culture.

There are still 23 box graves, though all empty now. Box graves were constructed of four walls, made of easily breakable stone which could be shaped into an equal sided rectangle, with the same type of stone used for the roof. The floor was usually stone, shell or broken bits of pottery, and quite often belongings or other items were buried with the dead. At times, the graves reused, the older skeleton taken apart and moved to the side.

Native American box graves atop Millstone Bluff

From the moment you stand atop Millstone Bluff proper, there in the midst of an ancient graveyard, you feel you are in the midst of a community, a place where people lived. Albeit in a way completely foreign to us now.

From this point on the wood chipped trail levels out and it’s easy walking. As the trail winds around the hillside you find yourself on the bluffs. Steep climbs are handled with solid wooden stairs, secured with railings. Signs point out the petroglyphs on top, thankfully as otherwise you’d never spot them.

As it is, staring at the rocks, looking for the thunderbird is like looking at one of those Magic Eye photos. You know it’s there, you just have to adjust your eyes to see it.

You get the sense after a while that you’re more likely to see it by looking up, into the sky, or out over the Shawnee hills from this high point. Millstone Bluff is far enough away from any towns and highways as to render it quiet, a rarity even in the Shawnee Forest. I’ve never seen many people there. Hell, I’ve never seen anyone else there. Maybe I’m lucky.

Because it takes quiet and solitude to begin to see the world in a new way. To find that connection to nature where it’s easy to believe anything can exist. You see the sparrow, the robin, the hawk, the eagle and it seems the most natural thing in the world for a larger bird to exist, one which rules over all the others.

Petroglyphs at Millstone Bluff. The Thunderbird can be made out just left of center. Scattered on the rock are several smaller images, including another Thunderbird as well as a giant snake. .

Look up and out and high overhead from the top of Millstone Bluff and you’re likely to see birds. Large birds. For those of us lucky enough to live in places where you see things like turkey vultures, owls, hawks and eagles, it’s nothing new. But it’s still miraculous. We don’t feel like prey when we see an eagle. In fact, soaring overhead, you feel protected. It’s easy to see how one truly large bird, larger than the rest could spark the imagination of the native Americans.

The native Americans didn’t write things down in language that we can understand. They wrote in images, which they could comprehend, even though we’re baffled by them today.

We know that the Thunderbird ruled the world above ground, keeping at bay the underwater panther which ruled that realm. Ironic then that the great panther on the bluffs at Alton should over time become a Thunderbird.

Some believe that world was ruled by the Great Horned Serpent, and serpents are found carved into the rocks at Millstone Bluff. You have to wonder, were these carvings meant to ward off, or attract these creatures?

Away from the bluffs and into the forest you find the remains of the village, now nothing more than sunken depressions of 25 houses, scattered around a central plaza. After 200 years, the inhabitants burned the village, cleaned it up and disappeared. From here the trail is shady and it’s a different world again within the trees, away from the open bluffs, the sky filtered by the canopy overhead. A shelter from the creatures above, high above the denizens of the waterways. It’s only the creatures of the forest you have to fear.

The Loup Garoua, a European werewolf myth was brought by the French and French Canadians to the heartland of the new world, in this case Vincennes, Indiana, along the Wabash river which flows along the Illinois/Indiana border. The legends of fantastic creatures extends across the river.

Early French settlers bring the werewolf to the region, and its howl echoes in the southern Illinois woods

Vincennes, Indiana was one of the earliest settlements in this area, founded in 1732 by French fur traders on the banks of the Wabash river, which separates Indiana from Illinois.

The trading network which ran along the rivers not only traded furs in what would later be adjoining states, but folklore as well.

The native Americans were here for about 3,000 years before that, using naturally formed hills for burials and ceremonial purpose, sometimes shaping the hills themselves. Most people still believe they’re man made, rather than a natural feature skillfully modified.

The French brought along their legends, including the Loup Garou, or creature that was part man, part wolf.

Werewolf.

At Vincennes and along the Wabash, the typical European werewolf beliefs merged with native American beliefs in shapeshifters and coming from Canada, the Wendigo. According to Canadian scholar Basil Johnston, “the Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody … Unclean and suffering from suppuration of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.”

The Wendigo was also a cannibal, and in some cultures absolutely huge, growing larger each time it ate someone. In Vincennes, the area along the Cathlinette Road which led south from town was known to attack travelers on that road.

Another tradition found in old Vincennes is that of the hairy wild man, or man-mountain. Richard Day, a Vincnnes based historian quotes a newspaper description in 1829 of a man-mountain in Georgia’s Okefenoke Swamp … “Huge footprints were found–18 inches long, nine inches wide, with a six-foot length of stride. Nine hunters followed the track. Suddenly they saw a 13-foot-tall giant advancing toward them “with terrible look and ferocious mien.” The hunters shot their guns, but it didn’t stop the monster. Enraged, he wrang off the heads of five of the men before falling dead. The other hunters fled in terror.

There were inevitably reports of local wild men.”

I came across the above on the website, Folklore, Legends, Tall Tales: An Interactive Casebook for Knox County, Indiana, by a friend of mine, Richard King, former reference librarian at Vincennes University. Richard has an interest in all things local and strange and has a fascinating site with tales from southern Indiana, as well as some from neighboring southern Illinois. In fact, I’ve stolen liberally from Richard’s work over the years, as he was the first to point me to the story of Big Jim the Rattlesnake from my own hometown.

Richard’s site also led me to another story which made a lasting impression on southern Illinois folklore, which came from The Saturday Herald in Decatur, Illinois, in 1883. The headline read “A Roaming Madman – Startling Experiences of An Illinois Lady with a Wild Man – As Naked as the Day He was Born.”

Centreville, Ill., Sept . 4 – A wildman, naked as Adam, has been roaming around the country in this vicinity for several days, causing intense excitement and consternation among the farmers’ families. His long tangled beard and matted hair, his tall athletic form and the fierce look out of his eyes make him an exceedingly unpleasant person to meet in a lonely spot. He is begrimed with dirt from head to foot, for he never gets a bath except when it rains or when necessity compels him to wade a creek in search of prey. He was seen by the wife of Dr. John Saltenberger, who lives about three miles west of this place. Mrs. Saltenberger was returning home shortly after nightfall, and was near the Stelzelriede farm. The wild man crept stealthily out of the orchard, and when near the buggy, made a rush to stop the horse. The lady gave the animal a frantic cut with the whip, and he bounded along the road at a furious pace, but almost before she had recovered her breath, the wild man had overtaken her and leaped into the vehicle from behind. He uttered not a word, and seemed immediately to become as badly frightened as the lady herself. He spring down and ran rapidly towards the woods. A telephone message was sent to Belleville, yesterday, asking the sheriff to come and capture the creature. Young men of the settlement are searching the woods in every direction today, but some of them are not over anxious to encounter the monster. Superstitious persons declare it to be the ghost of one of the Stelzelriede family, five of whom were murdered and robbed about eight years ago. Others are puzzled to decide whether it is the Missing Link or an escaped lunatic

Along Gum Creek near Mt. Vernon, IL, a preacher, wandering the creek whilst hunting squirrels encountered a creature he described as a baboon.

Squirrel hunting preacher fends off baboon attack in the woods near Mt. Vernon, Illinois

Another Indiana publication pointed me to another Illinois folk tale about fantastic beasts. The March, 1946 issue of Hoosier Folklore contains an article from the southern Illinois community of Mt. Vernon.

Gum Creek is bottom land there, and during the summer of 1941, a local preacher was squirrel hunting in the woods along the creek. For the uninitiated, squirrels, when cooked are liked a wiry rabbit. Usually kind of tough and very gamey tasting. Squirrel brains fried however, is said to be a delicacy around here. I can’t vouch for that, particularly after the mad cow scare a warning went out on eating squirrel brains.

At the time, this area around Mt. Vernon was still pretty wild and somewhat remote. As the article tells the tale, when the preacher was stalking the woods “ a large animal that looked something like a baboon jumped out of a tree near him. The preacher struck at the beast with his gun barrel when it walked toward him in an upright position. He finally frightened it away by firing a couple of shots into the air.”

“Later the beast began to alarm rural people by uttering terrorizing screams mostly at night in the wooded bottom lands along the creeks. School children in the rural districts sometimes heard it, too, and hunters saw its tracks. By early spring of 1942, the animal had local people aroused to a fighting pitch. About that time, a farmer near Bonnie reported that the beast had killed his dog. A call went out for volunteers to join a mass hunt to round up the animal.”

“The beast must have got news of the big hunt, for reports started coming in of its appearance in other creek bottoms, some as much as 40 or 50 miles from the original site. A man driving near the Big Muddy River, in Jackson County, one night saw the beast bound across the road. Some hunters saw evidence of its presence away over in Okaw. Its rapid changing from place to place must have been aided considerably by its ability to jump, for, by this time, reports had it jumping along at from 20 to 40 feet per leap.”

“It is impossible to say how many hunters and parties of hunters, armed with everything from shotguns to ropes and nets, went out to look for the strange beast in the various creek bottoms where it had been seen, or its tracks had been seen, or its piercing screams had been heard. Those taking nets and ropes were intent on bringing the creature back alive.”

The swampy wetlands of Tuttle Bottoms, home of a creature which bore a strong resemblance to a giant anteater.

A large, white, shaggy haired creature stalks the swampy woodland of Tuttle bottoms, near Harrisburg, IL

Harrisburg, Illinois is about a thirty minute drive from here. As you go south, the landscape becomes hillier. Just before you reach Eldorado, if you look quickly you’ll see the height of Cave Hill, in the foothills of the Shawnee Forest peeking back at you in the distance. As you approach Harrisburg, those hills stretch out to your left, the wilderness beyond.

The Saline river branches out near here into three forks, the middle fork passing just north and east of Harrisburg. To the northwest of town you find Tuttle bottoms, a sometimes swampy lowland which lies to the south of the river.

Harrisburg is a good sized town for this area, at its peak in the 1930s boasting 16,000 people. There was a demand for the coal found in this area, which started to decline as the demand for cleaner coal grew. Then it lost its railroad, and the wetlands surrounding the town were unfit for extended development. So now it’s down to a population of about 9,000.

In the sixties there wasn’t a lot for young people to do. But country roads and raging hormones beckoned, and many a young person found themselves parked in a car in the dark of night, out in Tuttle bottoms.

Today the road leading out of Harrisburg towards the lowlands is lined with modern, rather well to do houses. The road is flanked with trees and it’s fairly wooded, and still hilly till the road curves and goes down and the houses become further spaced, and the woods alongside the road become dense, forming a canopy overhead.

Streams flow through this area, some cleat, some dark and dank, others coated in green looking like primordial swamps. It’s the perfect place for a creature.

It was in the sixties that reports of a strange beast began to pop up, frantic teenagers describing it as hairy, huge, looking like an overgrown anteater. Hunters saw it as well, sometimes describing it as a large bear. Bears were prominent here in the 19^th century and in fact, the main source of meat for the early settlers. But they’ve been gone for a long time.

Strange tracks were said to be found, and the rumors piled up. Soon there were tales of devil worshippers, and of a series of murders was rumored to have occurred here.

One online post even describes what the person said looked like a “prehistoric pterodactyl,” which swooped down on the roof of the car and followed it for some distance.

In short order, Tuttle bottoms became the type of place that mothers warned you against. And the type of place people flock to in search of the weird. Get enough of them together, mix in beer and weed and people will find the weird.

Much of Tuttle bottoms is open farmland and quite flat. It’s easy to see how the area can become a swamp in wet weather, when the river’s up. Cornfields give the place a menacing Children of the Corn feel. The prefab houses give way to old farmhouses, and there’s a mysterious, closed feel to the place.

That feeling was belied by the woman we no doubt freaked out as we pulled into her driveway and circled back around as she was leaving. She turned around to follow us as we approached her house, and waited patiently for us to leave. I stopped to ask where we might find Tuttle Cemetery, our quest. She kindly told us it was on her property, and there was nothing left now. Time had eaten away at the old tombstones, as is often the case with old country graveyards around here. Tombstones were often do it yourself projects, and it was easier carving in sandstone and some of the softer rocks. But they didn’t last like marble or granite.

But she was kind, almost apologetic and we went our way, back onto the backroads and wandered a bit more. We didn’t expect to see the Tuttle bottoms monster, but we wanted to get the feel well enough to make it seem like it could exist. That we succeeded at.

According to the Harrisburg Daily Register, the police department reported that they’ve received over fifty reports of the Tuttle Bottom Monster since the sixties. They even dug up what is believed to be the first report of the monster, in 1963.

The roads cutting through Tuttle bottoms has long been a place frequented by those looking for privacy. In fact, couples parking are a common source of creature sightings.

“Saline County Sheriff James L. Thompson spent a busy night last night, starting about 11 p.m. and ending about 4:30 a.m. The Sheriff said he ran across a youth at Tuttle Bottoms about 11 p.m. The young man was armed with a rifle and told Thompson that there was a monster loose in the bottoms. He said it was eight feet long, four feet high and had a nose like an anteater. The young man put his rifle in his car and left, and later Thompson ran across about a dozen boys, armed with shotguns and other weapons and all looking for the “monster” in the bottoms. Their Sheriff soon dispersed the boys and sent them home.”[1][better source needed.”

Some say the monster is up to eight foot long, some say it walks on four legs, others two. The common feature seems to be a long snout, like an anteater. The creature didn’t appear to be hostile, and in fact, one couple reported it walked right up to them.

When I read that I thought of a dog coming up to people, on four legs. And something clicked that I’d read earlier. One researcher has discovered and I verified myself, that there was a zoo in nearby Mt. Vernon up until 1955. When it was closed down, according to the story, the animals weren’t properly dealt with. In fact, the man charged with doing that was cited for failing in his duties, as among other things, some of the animals were released into the wild.

Including a giant anteater.

It’s certainly possible that a creature that large could survive the local predators. And make the trek from Mt. Vernon to Harrisburg. God knows there are enough bugs to keep a herd of anteaters well fed around here.

He also believes the Mt. Vernon Zoo could be the source of many of the strange creatures reported around here in the sixties and beyond. By now certainly, the life span of these animals are long past.

But good stories never die.

Another common feature to creature sightings are waterways, like this creek through Tuttle Bottoms near Harrisburg, Illinois. Though sightings dropped off long ago, Tuttle bottoms still retains its eerily beautiful mystique.

The Chittyville monster rears its large head as oversized man-like beasts appear to romancing couples throughout the area

In the sixties, hairy beasts started springing up all. The Carbodale, IL newspaper The Southern Illinoian told the story of a man whose date spotted a creature ten foot tall, covered in black hair with a head as big as a steering wheel in 1965.

For the record, steering wheels were real big back then.

The man didn’t see the beast, but when he went back the next day he found a depression in the grass where a large animal had slept.

In the April issue of Argosy, 1969, an article told of 12 deer hunters who all saw “something black…they didn’t shoot, it was manlike,” in a Wisconsin wood, north of Illinois. It was described as “a large and powerfully built man covered with short, very brown or black hair and with a lighter and hairless face and hairless palms. The head appeared smallish, also with short hair, but the neck appeared to be enormous and so short as to be almost nonexistent. The shoulders were very wide and large and the torso barrel-shaped.”

The Bigfoot statue in the Shawnee Forest near Garden of the Gods

Bigfoot steps in front of the cameras and becomes a television sensation

I first read about Bigfoot in Reader’s Digest. It was an article on the film of Bigfoot, you know the one, shot by Patterson and Gimlin in 1967.

It’s the iconic image of Bigfoot, and fifty years later, the 53 seconds with the creature has yet to be convincingly proven to be a fake. This despite two men coming forward confessing that they’d had a hand in creating the hoax.

But the film’s creators never strayed from their belief that what they shot that day was a real Bigfoot.

As the sixties wore on, Bigfoot became more popular. My parents let me stay up one night and watch Patterson talk about it on Johnny Carson. I was fascinated.

Then I was hooked. On November 25, 1974, CBS broadcast Monsters! Mystery or Myth, a documentary about the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, and the next day at school it was the most popular topic. Co-produced by the Smithsonian and written by Robert and Frances Guenette, it gave an air of respectability to Bigfoot which it had been missing.

Thirteen years old at the time, I even bought the book.

As might be expected, Bigfoot sightings picked up. But some were quick to point out that these new sighting were nothing new at all.

While aquatic creatures in the films tend to be reptilian, the bizarre mammals which are often spotted in woodlands are tied to waterways as well. This makes sense, as they could travel great distances along rivers and streams which are seldom cleared of trees and brush, and would provide cover, as well as drinking water and food.

A teenager’s hoax born on Cole Hollow Road brings back memories for an older, more honest generation, and monster hunters shoot themselves in the foot

It was July of 1972, when an East Peoria teen made the claim that he, along with other friends had seen a hairy, stinky, 12-foot tall creature with white hair in the area around Cole Hollow Road. He claimed it then let out a screech which sounded like a human version of a train whistle.

That led to an armed posse taking to the woods to find the creature. The adventure ended when one of the participants accidentally shot himself in the leg.

Years later, the boy confessed it was all a hoax.

Yet others who saw mysterious creatures in the area stood by their story. The increased talk of hairy beasts in the Illinois woods prompted Mrs. Beaulah Schroat of Decatur to write into the Decatur Review.

To the Editor:

In reference to the creatures people are seeing, I am 76 years old. My home used to be south of Effingham. My two brothers saw the creatures when they were children. My brothers have since passed away.

They are hairy, stand on their hind legs, have large eyes and are about as large as an average person or shorter, and are harmless as they ran away from the children. They walk, they do not jump.

They were seen on a farm near a branch of water. The boys waded and fished in the creek every day and once in awhile they would run to the house scared and tell the story.

The train tracks where the Enfield Monster was known to frequent.

The Enfield monster shows the pitfalls of reporting what you see, even in the land of honest Abe Lincoln

It’s often been said that the people of southern Illinois are honest. It’s the land of honest Abe after all. And I have to admit, I’m honest to a fault in no small degree from growing up with the tales of Abraham Lincoln goading me into being more honest than any human should probably be.

So when someone from here comes out with a tale about seeing large, hairy creatures in the woods, I tend to listen. Because it takes real courage to tell a tale like that in a small town.

Enfield, Illinois lies about ten miles from my hometown of Carmi, and in the seventies I was eating breakfast before school, when a report came on the radio about a resident there who had seen and shot at a large hairy creature in his backyard. Over the next few days other reports came in, then another report from the original man. Journalists from around the country came to Enfield, anthropology students, assorted freaks. Some claimed to see the beast themselves, others recorded its cry. Many people found its tracks.

By this time Enfield was world famous for its monster. The sheriff was eager to squash the story, and told the man who had first reported it that if he reported it again, he’d be arrested. Rumors swirled that the man was crazy, or an alcoholic or both. His wife just wanted the ordeal to end. Eventually the reporters went home and it did.

I felt sorry for the man. I’d seen ghosts, and most of those I told reminded me that ghosts don’t exist. Only crazy people saw ghosts. I knew how hard it was to tell people you saw something there which shouldn’t be there.

Thirty some odd years later I’m drinking with a fellow in a local bar. He’s a few years older than me and the Enfield monster comes up in conversation. He laughs and tells me the story. It was a friend of his in a gorilla costume. The police had known the truth early on, but didn’t want to go public to protect the kid’s reputation.

Unfortunately, nobody thought to do the same for the old man. But that’s the risk with telling the world you believe in Bigfoot.

Yet the important thing is, he might have been insane, he might have been an alcoholic. Or he could have been completely sane and a teetotaler. I didn’t know the fellow, so I can’t say. What counts, is he was telling the truth. He did see something. Even though everyone else thought he was balmy.

Remember that next time you dismiss those who tell wild, fantastical tales.

Today the case is used in schools to study mass hysteria and other sociological issues. But what about the other witnesses, those who couldn’t have seen the man in the monkey suit? Well, it got people out into remote areas, looking for things.

When you go off into the bottoms and woodlands of southern Illinois, you’re quite likely to find something.

The Big Muddy river at Murphysboro, Illinois lent its name to the Big Muddy Monster, which was frequently seen in the 1970s throughout the area.

The Murphysboro Mud Monster takes up residence along the Big Muddy river and keeps the community on edge for several years

Around ten o’clock at night on June 26, 1973, Cheryl Ray and her boyfriend Randy Creath were in his parent’s house and heard something in the woods around Murphysboro’s Westwood Hills. Randy got up to investigate, with Cheryl following behind. He hurried her up and told her to come see what he was looking at.

“The thing I remember was the bulk of it, the shape, the human form, and the stench of the river slime it apparently had on it. It was about eight feet tall, and at least as stocky as ny football player. We were within 15 feet of it, close enough to see the body, the texture of the fur, long and hairy, like an English sheepdog,”

“It was real tall, hairy,” Mrs. Rath said, “I think it was white, but it was dirty, matted. It had a real bad odor. It was really rank. I never smelled anything like it. It seemed like an eternity we stood there, and then it just turned around and walked off into the woods. We could hear it trampling through the woods.”

The Murphysboro police, who were kept relatively busy investigating monster sightings in the area around that time came out to investigate. According to Murphysboro Police Officer Ron Manwaring, “I heard some unusual shrieks, smelled the foul smell, and saw the ground trampled down in the area, where they said this thing was standing,” he recalled.

Jerry Nellis, another investigator brought along a trained dog, who followed it, stopping frequently to pick up the trail from a slimy residue the creature had left on the weeds. This was a well trained dog, trained to attack as well as track, and it never shied away from anything. Eventually it came to an abandoned barn, which the police canine refused to enter. As they coerced it into the barn it immediately turned tail and ran out. When the officers searched the barn themselves, they found nothing.

The Big Muddy Mud Monster had escaped.

The first report of the creature came from a couple parking at the boat ramp at Murphysboro which gives access to the Big Muddy river.

Following the trail of the Big Muddy Mud Monster around Murphysboro, and debating whether to dismiss the witnesses or the experts

Murphysboro, population of about 8,000 people is like countless small towns in Illinois. Near the tip of the southern end of the state, it lies ten miles from the Mississippi river. The Big Muddy river, from which the monster derives its name flows on the southern edge of the town, curving up the eastern boundary as well. The Big Muddy is aptly named, brown in color, not too far across and at times does carry a peculiar smell, from rotting vegetation, run off from fields and decomposing fish and other wildlife which you frequently find partially eaten along its banks.

We were winding our way down the narrow streets, aiming for the river when we came to the entry of Riverside Park. The first sighting of the Big Muddy mud monster occurred some miles away at Cairo, where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet. There a jogger had reported seeing it at the levee which protects the town on July 16, 1972.

Eleven days later, while there was carnival in town set up here in Riverside Park, several carnies reported seeing it. It didn’t seem dangerous, merely curious about the ponies which came along with the carnival. As we wound along the roads in the park, the only unusual creature we saw was a rather large, red fox, hunting for snacks left behind from Labor Day picnickers.

Today we’re looking for the boat ramp where the first sighting in Murphysboro took place. When we found it, I kept in mind that at the time this area was a bit more remote, with fewer houses. At night it would have been almost completely secluded, as few people have use of a boat ramp late at night.

A large parking lot is adjacent to the boat ramp, shielded from view from the rest of the town by a line of trees, the river more or less hidden by another stand of trees on the southside of the lot.

It was there that two lovers were parked in the dark of night that year on July 26. It was the worst part of summer, and summers in southern Illinois can truly suck. Some say it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. I say it’s both. And having spent a lot of time wandering the rivers of this area, I can truly imagine the type of stench any creature that lived along the river must carry.

Their trust was interrupted by the sound of something moving in the trees next to the river. First it was a scream that caught their attention. It was a dark night and the woman claimed she couldn’t make out what was shrieking, but she certainly heard it. The man saw it, giving a description that matched what the jogger saw in Cairo, and what would become the standard description of a light colored beast, covered in matted hair, standing about seven foot tall and stinking to high heaven.

The couple went directly to the police station, who investigated. They found tracks and when taking photos of them, the shrieks began again. The police high tailed it back to their squad car, one officer dropping his gun in the flight. They radioed for backup.

Over the next four years, 21 people reported the Big Muddy Mud Monster to the police, nine of which saw it here in Murphysboro. The night after it was spotted by the carnival workers, a crowd gathered to search for the beast, several bringing guns.

Guns and fear don’t go well together. Never have.

On April 15, 1852, Mrs. Michael Catt of Decker, Indiana thought it would be fun to don a sheet – ghostlike – and scare the family. Her son in law fell for it and shot her dead in his fright.

In 1908, in Gibson County, Indiana, a large cat thought to be a panther which ranged from there into Illinois was on the prowl. When it moved into Snyder’s Gulch, the locals hunted it down. All they managed to do was nearly shoot a tramp who they’d chased into a tree, thinking it was the panther.

In 1972, In Murphysboro, Illinois, the police closed Riverside Park for fear of accidents as locals were planning to hunt for the Big Muddy Monster, which had been seen in the area. A local resident, one Mrs. Rath claimed that the community was so much on edge that “there would be a big riot if somebody said ‘Boo!’”

On June 19, 1976, the Big Muddy Mud Monster was once more back in the Westwood Hills subdivision, where it had been spotted by Cheryl Ray and Randy Creath, as well as once before them. This time it was three youths which saw it, and their parents vouched for their kids.

After that it stopped. Today, many of those who filed reports, conveniently provided on the City Of Murphysboro website, along with the complete police file, stand by their story. Others won’t talk about it, saying that people didn’t believe them and ridiculed them then, and would now as well. At least one of those people’s wives said despite her husband’s reluctance to talk about it, he still dreams of it.

Cheryl Ray, now married in Florida and with a last name of Rath, said “I wasn’t going to make up anything like that. I got a lot of kidding, but I know what I saw.”

Anthropologists and other experts tend to discount the reports, claiming the sightings were at best a misidentification, at worst victims of a prank. But they’d have to, wouldn’t they? Science relies on facts, not eyewitness accounts. The muddy footprints the police found were inconclusive, and no police saw the creature, though several heard its cry.

A later Police Chief Larry Tincher, isn’t so quick to dismiss the reports. Quoted in The Southern Illinoisan in 1985, Tincher said “I’m confident these people saw something, These people were too frightened. What makes it hard to believe it was some man in costume is knowing about all the hunters around here with rifles. It would really be taking a big chance.”

Cheryl Ray’s old boyfriend, Randy Creath, now a minster summed up his experience and its lasting effect. “It reinforced my belief that humanity is not nearly as intelligent as we think. Our system of natural laws is not really as fixed as we would like to believe. We don’t know nearly as much about the world as we pretend.”

After receiving a report of the creature near a subdivision near Murphysboro, the police tracked it with the help of a dog. Eventually the trail led to an old barn, which the dog refused to go into. When pushed inside, the dog ran back out. By the time the police went inside, the barn was empty.

Finding Bigfoot finds no Bigfoot, but people believe on, even in an age when people believe in almost nothing

The 100^th episode of Animal Planet’s series ended the shows run, without actually finding the creature. That was a foregone conclusion as any tv show has to work so far in advance that had they found Bigfoot, the news would have been out long before the show aired.

These shows aren’t about proving anything, they’re about selling advertisements. Even the Bigfoot enthusiasts knocked Finding Bigfoot, but they miss the point. The show as about entertainment.

Bigfoot has become an icon in our culture, of a somewhat wacky legend which just won’t show its face, and won’t die.

What I find convincing in a way, is that in the internet era, when you’d expect these old legends to roar back to life with new sightings, it doesn’t really happen. Sure, now and then someone will speak up, but for the most part, it seems like the creatures moved on or died off. As one would expect.

There is little scientific evidence for the existence of large, hairy, manlike creatures in southern Illinois, or anywhere else for that matter. The samples of fur given to scientists to investigate turn out to be human, animal or plant. There are so many hoaxes out there that almost nothing, particularly eyewitness accounts can be believed now. Unless you actually know the people who make the claim, and can look into their eyes as they tell you.

Drawing of the Big Muddy Monster by Randy Creath, provided to Murphysboro police after he and his girlfriend spotted it in his backyard. Years, later and now a minister, when asked about the creature Creath replied It reinforced my belief that humanity is not nearly as intelligent as we think. Our system of natural laws is not really as fixed as we would like to believe. We don’t know nearly as much about the world as we pretend.”

But to dismiss the legends outright means dismissing the word of countless people after almost 200 years of living here. Those people weren’t always nut jobs, publicity seekers or those out to make a buck selling a story. They were our neighbors, friends and relatives.

As the police so often say after taking their statements, these people obviously saw something, and quite often it scared the hell out of them. We know nature here, we know the critters that populate our region. And when we know when we see something that doesn’t belong there.

Even if we can’t say what it is.

The Shawnee Forest is a huge, remote region. There are places deep in the woods that people seldom go. There are large animals aplenty to support a small colony of large creatures. And humans trodding through the forest would make enough noise that a wild animal would certainly hear it coming. Even one uncannily human like.

Noted anthropologist Jane Goodall, who knows a thing or two about large, hairy ape-like creatures, when asked about Bigfoot by NPR stated that “I’m sure they exist.” When pressed on it, she laughed and said “Well, I’m a romantic, so I always wanted them to exist. You know, why isn’t there a body? I can’t answer that, and maybe they don’t exist, but I want them to.”

That’s the best summing up I can find for the mysteries that haunt southern Illinois and much of the world. When we know everything, there is no longer any mystery. And a life without mystery, is a dull life indeed.

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Winfield Hall: What are the mysterious secrets of F.W. Woolworth’s haunted Long Island home?

Gold Coast, Journal

Author’s Note: As I was editing my writings on Long Island recently I made a discovery. I’d never written about Winfield Hall. It was one of the first haunted houses I went searching for, and had wandered around it a few times. It was one of the stories that captivated me, and I’d forgotten all about it for over a decade.

Then I found Monica Randall’s Winfield: Living in the Shadow of the Woolworths on Amazon, digital even, and found myself drawn to it once more.

At its heart, Winfield Hall is the record of one man. Not the family that lived there with him, nor those who came later. Those who found ill fortune within its walls were just collateral damage.

It’s F.W. Woolworth’s temple to himself. And it’s damned hard to find love and happiness in a house built for a narcissist. Even for those who shared his name.

When it comes to haunted houses, there are some which are legendary.

Winfield Hall. It even sounds like a haunted house. A massive chunk of marble stacked up in an imposing fashion in the town of Glen Cove, on Long Island, it was built by F.W. Woolworth. Went by Frank, unless you had to call him Mr. Woolworth, which most people did.

By the time he built Winfield Hall, he’d already built the tallest building in the world, The Woolworth Building, having made a fortune selling things which cost five or ten cents. Winfield Hall was only slightly cheaper than the Woolworth Building.

The house that Frank built had nine bedrooms and ten baths, sixteen fireplaces. Plus a library, study, music room, ballroom, billiard room, formal dining room, solarium plus porches, patios and secret passages. All decked out in marble, exotic hardwoods and gold.

There was an older house on the site which Frank bought, mainly to house the art he’d collected, and his family which he’d neglected. That house mysteriously burnt. The fire wasn’t particularly mysterious. The fact that he’d already drawn up plans for Winfield Hall set tongues a wagging though.

Winfield Hall was built to be showy, and it succeeds. From the imposing arch over the front gates, echoing the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the driveway leads up a slight hill, obscuring the house beyond. A gentle curve and the garage and bell tower appears, the fountain and then the house, the marble still gleaming after all these years.

Gate at Winfield Hall — The front gate at WInfield Hall is based on the design of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, built for Napoleon. Woolworth had an obsession with Napoleon, and references to the emperor are to be found all over Winfield. Woolworth slept in a bed once owned by Napoleon, as was the rest of the furniture in that room.

The lady of Winfield Hall

Once upon a time the drive was lined with life sized Grecian statues, which have long since disappeared. A lot of the Gold Coast of this period has disappeared.

Winfield Hall is the only marble house left standing on Long Island. If the exterior isn’t enough marble for you, the seemingly simple staircase design in the foyer is pink marble, and cost in the neighborhood of two million dollars in World War One dollars. That’s $47,000,000 in today’s dollars, or enough to buy about 90 averages houses in the surrounding area.

The ceiling in that room is trimmed in 24kt gold. And there are fifty five more rooms awaiting you.

Monica Randall, who lived in the house for some time came away from there with a new appreciation for the supernatural. Most of what we know about what goes on inside those walls came from her, and her book Winfield, Living in the Shadow of the Woolworths. It’s a fascinating tale, part history, part folklore, part gossip and part memoir. That the lines between all these are blurred doesn’t take away from its importance.

Remember, as much as anything else, this is a ghost story, and ghost stories can seldom be said to be completely factual. We’re still waiting on that definitive evidence that ghosts still exist, let alone the rules under which they operate. Any discussions of ghosts will therefore always be somewhat subjective.

The important question, is does the book make you believe? It does. It was a little detail that made me a believer. The way she described hearing voices in the house, mumbling, undecipherable but you could tell they weren’t of that time … I’ve heard those voices myself. In a few different places.

If you Google Winfield Hall, you’ll usually find at least a mention of Ms. Randall’s book in whatever you choose to read, along with stories told by others. What they usually leave out, and often don’t even realize, is those stories come from her book as well. Judging from how often they’re retold online, they must be believable.

Most of the reports of ghosts end with the last chapter of her book. Though of late, there have been reports of the supernatural from the company which currently leases Winfield as their corporate headquarters.

The foyer of Winfield Hall as it looked in the days of F.W. Woolworth. The staircase cost $2,000,000 at the time, and to the right is the family crest over the fireplace, with Woolworth and his family’s portrait.

A view of Winfield Hall

The first time I came up the driveway to Winfield Hall was on foot, blatantly trespassing. I had hoped to get a glimpse of the house from the road, but that’s impossible, and the front gate was open. I parked the car and walked in.

I was braver in those days. Or more stupid. Around that same time, the Russians let loose a pack of dogs on me outside one of their retreat houses, also on Long Island as I climbed a tree to take photos over the fence. The whole time CIA operatives were laughing their asses off in the top floor of the old folk’s home across the lawn, where they spied on the Russians.

The next time I tried crashing Winfield Hall I wasn’t so lucky. I finally found the nerve to drive through the gates, only to find several people already there, who obviously belonged there, and knew I didn’t. Not having a Long Island accent, and Indiana plates on the car, I plead stupidity and asked if they knew where the Holocaust Museum was.

They said no, even though it just was just down the road.

I hadn’t figured out yet that you could drive down the side streets and get great views of the house. In particular, the gardens in back of the house, with statues, gazebos, wide staircases – it looked like Gatsby and Daisy might stroll out at any time.

But that’s a small consolation for missing the view from the front drive, as the house comes slowly into view. It looks small in photos, but in person it looms.

And there in the trees off the veranda, you could swear you see a lady in a blue dress looking out on you.

Summer house Winfield Hall — In the garden at Winfield Hall.

From rural poverty to a titan of business

When Frank was a boy, he wanted to buy his mother a birthday present. He only had fifty cents, so he took his brother shopping to do the best they could. They saw a scarf in the window, it was in their price range it turned out, but the sales clerk made fun of them for paying in loose change.

That stuck in Frank’s craw. He decided then and there, and told his brother, he wanted to start a store where anyone could shop, rich or poor, and buy several things for fifty cents. And not be made fun of for paying in change.

That scarf built an empire that changed retail shopping in America, and soon enough the world. It turned out Woolworth Five and Dime was actually more popular in Britain than here. A slightly different name to reflect the currency, but the same concept. Get the best price straight from the manufacturer by buying in bulk, display the product so it sells itself, and fix the price.

Frank got stinking rich off people’s nickels and dimes. His noble aspiration accomplished, he found himself addicted to business as a competitive sport. There was always more money to be made, more ways to show off your wealth. And many rich men showing off their own success to compete with.

That meant he didn’t have much time for his family. He showered them with gifts, and with one of the most amazing homes ever built. But you can’t buy time.

It’s one thing his wife complained about before she slipped into premature senility and madness. Jennie Creighton had rescued Frank when he had a nervous breakdown following the failure of his first business. She nursed him to health, got him his old job back, at a higher salary and was there when he built his empire. And watched as she lost him to a golden idol.

Above the fireplace in that foyer is a Coat of Arms he designed. It’s like Woolworth himself, pompous and overblown. He’s in profile at the top, looking regal in a medieval helmet, marching off to war. His wife’s profile is below him, encased in a knight’s helmet, obscuring her entire face.

Below that are his three daughters, with a crack right through one’s portrait. From that night …

The clock tower on the garage at Winfield Hall. When new owners redecorated parts of the house, they put a fortune of furnishings and clothes into the garage to rot.

The interlopers at Winfield Hall

There’s something curious about Winfield Hall. There are times it doesn’t want company.

When there were no more Woolworths to keep it occupied, it sat empty for years, before Julia Louise Parham, the wife of Richard S. Reynolds, founder of the Reynold’s Wrap fortune bought it. From what I can tell it was her house more than his. She lived there for years, alone most of the time except for the dwindling number of servants and gardeners. One or two people living in the house doesn’t matter much to the Hall. It takes more people than that to fill Winfield.

She kept the house pretty much the way it was when the Woolworths left it. But it is said she did start keeping the Marie Antoinette Room locked.

After she moved on Winfield became Grace Downs Academy, a business school for young ladies, more correctly a finishing school, until they ran into some mysterious misfortunes with a few of the students. A secretary staying in the Marie Antionette room woke in the middle of night by a crying woman, who told her that soon she would be joining her. Within a couple of months the secretary was dead of a heart attack. A student who smuggled her boyfriend into the house also spent the night in the room, saw that same spirit and was soon dead of a car crash.

Rumors still swirl that Mrs. Reynold’s heard the woman crying in that room at night which is why she took to locking the door. She also said it was always cold in there. And of course she had heard the rumors of what was supposed to have happened there.

At any rate, scandal and the extraordinary costs in keeping up Winfield spelled doom for the Grace Downs Academy and it was put up on the auction block, along with its contents in 1976.

The furnishings the academy didn’t use went into storage in the garage, where it’s likely that millions of dollars of items were ruined by weather and rodents. Most of the rest of the original furnishings disappeared in the auction, items worth tens of thousands of dollars going for a few hundred. At the auction itself the house failed to sell, and it looked like it would be razed. But was then bought soon by Martin Carey along with other investors, which counted a brother as governor of New York.

Today it’s the headquarters of the Pall Corporation, which makes industrial filters. A not so glamorous use of one of the grandest houses ever built on Long Island.

Though glamour continues from time to time. Several tv shows and films have been filmed there, including porn. Taylor Swift recently recorded a video at Winfield. It’s helped pay its own way over the years.

What you don’t find here are the kind of joyous lives it would appear on the surface that Winfield was built for.

When is a house not a home?

One thing Winfield Hall doesn’t seem to be good at is being a home.

Woolworth didn’t have time to enjoy it in life, as he died two years after the home was built … septic poisoning from an infected tooth. One of the richest men who ever lived was felled by a fear of dentists.

Stories abound that Woolworth was fascinated by the occult, particularly Egyptian occult practices. There are certainly bizarre elements of Egyptian art in Winfield Hall, as well as the mausoleum where most of the Woolworths of that era lie still. It’s also true that hidden throughout the architectural details of Winfield Hall is the face of Frank himself, looking down when you least expect it.

Whether true or not, it’s believed by many that Woolworth still wanders his marble mansion. In particular, he’s been known to play the pipe organ, even though he couldn’t play it in life, and supposedly hired a full time organist. It was so loud the neighbors could hear him banging away, and there have been several who claim to hear it in the night, even though it’s no longer playable.

Monica Randall seems convinced that it’s not just the ghost of Woolworth that remains in Winfield. There are many secret passages, secret rooms built into the design of the place. It’s her belief that undisoved in Winfield is a replica of the King’s Chamber from the Great Pyramids, and there you’ll find the ancient Eqyptian sarcophagus he was known to have bought, and inside the man himself.

After all, it took nearly a year to build the Woolworth tomb, and during that time his corpse had to be stashed away someplace. Perhaps it just never made the final journey, and was never supposed to.

Winfield is a man’s house. It’s not feminine. In particular, it’s one man’s house, and perhaps nobody could ever really understand its secrets except for Frank.

Woolworth also bought relics of Napoleon, whom he was fascinated by. It’s said that his servants grew accustomed to seeing their boss walk around the house in a uniform once worn by Napoleon.

Woolworth was obsessed with the little general, that much is obvious. He slept in a bed which once belonged to him, in a bedroom which connected to his mistress’s bedroom – The Josephine Room- by a hidden passage.

Meanwhile his wife slept in a plain room at the far end of the house, with a single bed and a rocking chair, her mind gone and a nurse sitting outside the door.

Along with the peculiar carvings of Woolworth’s mug blended with mythological and other symbols, you find bees, the symbols of Napoleon. Napoleon was obsessed with the Eqyptians and their ideas of immortality, just like Woolworth.

So maybe symbols of Egyptian deities, or serpents wriggling across the ceiling was just another fascination. Or maybe it was much more, something that made the house more of a living thing.

The bizarre nature and details of the place are such that Woolworth’s granddaughter described Winfield Hall as a house of horrors. This was Woolworth’s baby, one of his last major projects. Say of it what you will, what it does well is reflect Frank’s personality. It takes a megalomaniac to build a house like this, just as it takes one to build a business and fortune like he did.

Winfield is still there whilst most of the other mansions of that day have gone away. Even in its stripped down state, it still contains the code Frank designed into the place. His thoughts, beliefs, dreams and other secrets are still written there, still undeciphered.

Regardless of where his body lies, F.W. Woolworth still lives in Winfield Hall.

Statue at Winfield Hall — Statue from the Neptune Fountain at Winfield Hall. Though there are several life sized statues still at Winfield, at one time the length of the driveway was lined with them.

The crack in the mantle

The most famous ghost of Winfield Hall is believed to be that of Woolworth’s daughter, Edna. She had fallen for one of her father’s business associates, who turned out to be a loser. He drank, cheated and made his wife’s life a living hell. But he was rich, well connected and so he must be forgiven. Again and again.

The official record states she died from suffocation, brought on by an infection, in her room at the Plaza Hotel. A more commonly accepted story is that when she found out about yet another mistress, she donned her finest lace dress, and knocked back a fatal dose of poison.

That same night, out on Long Island, F.W. Woolworth was having a party. A storm had come up out of nowhere and a bolt of lightning came through the open window and struck the mantlepiece, the one with him and his family’s portraits. The lightning strike somehow spared the mantlepiece, except for a crack through his daughter Edna’s face.

You can find less sensational accounts, but that’s the basic story and that’s pretty creepy.

There are those who say she fell in love with a chauffeur, or someone else of a class which her family deemed a nobody. She wanted to ditch the loser husband and follow her heart. Daddy wouldn’t have any of it, and if daddy said no, that’s the end of the story.

Some say she died at Winfield, in the Marie Antionette room, and that’s why that door was always locked. Even before Mrs. Reynolds moved in.

Students of the Grace Downs Academy talked of hearing a woman crying behind the door of the locked Marie Antionette Room. She’s been seen walking the halls, in various rooms and according Wikipedia, which normally doesn’t go in for such stories, the gardens.

For many, Winfield Hall is a house of horrors. It was built to be where the emperor of capitalism was going to live out his days in opulent exile, surrounded by his family and friends. Instead his fortune went to his wife alone, as he had neglected to sign his final will. Her mind was almost completely gone by then, so when the fortune came to his granddaughter, Barbara Hutton, it made her one of the richest women in the world.

She was the unfortunate child of Woolworth’s daughter Edna, the one who found her mother’s body. Following her mother’s death, she was sent to live at Winfield with her grandfather, who died within a year as well. By most accounts, she wasn’t fond of the house either.

Since she gained her mother’s inheritance, as well as what she received on the death of her slimy father, the brother of E.F. Hutton, she was one of richest women in the world. She became one of the most famous socialites of her day, “the poor little rich girl,” and married often, including to Cary Grant. It’s said all of her husbands with the exception of Cary took her for all they could. What they didn’t take, she freely gave away. It’s believed at the time she died she was down to $3,500 bucks.

Oddly enough, she bought an estate in Britain which had recently burned, tore it down and built a new house, more grand than the first. Echoing her ambitious grandfather, it had the second largest garden in London. Eventually she sold it to the U.S. Government for a buck.

Garden statue at Winfield Hall — Grecian Statue in the gardens at Winfield Hall.

A voyeur at Winfield Hall

One trick I learned trespassing on the Gold Coast of Long Island was the tweed suit. It’s a timeless look and it was pricey. But when you wander the Gold Coast with hair below your shoulders you’re an old hippie and they call the cops. Wear the suit and an impressive camera and you’re an artist.

Still, I couldn’t just walk up to the front door of Winfield Hall freely, I had to resort to what people did in the old days, when folks like the Woolworths lived behind the fence. I peered through the cracks.

For a while, much of the fence was torn away, exposing the side of the house overlooking the gardens. I felt like a voyeur, hoping to catch the glimpse of that lovely lady in blue, who I knew was out of my league, in life just as surely as she is in death. I laughed at myself and the thought … till I suddenly flashed on the image of a bit of curl and an eye staring back at me terrifyingly through the greenery.

It was my imagination, but it was easy for the imagination to run wild here. Winfield isn’t in ruins, it’s fairly well kept. But it’s a shell of itself, and you don’t feel like you’re looking into the past, but rather a faint echo of the past.

There’s something missing in the garden at Winfield Hall, as well as the house. It’s missing life. Or perhaps that was never Frank’s intent, to create a home for the living. Perhaps it was built to be his great pyramid disguising his tomb. And perhaps, like Great Pyramid itself, the tomb is empty.

For a second there, hiding in the shadows and hidden in the bushes, I thought I saw a woman hurry by in front of me, the faint fragrance of flowers, and the sound of a dress swishing past. My imagination added a soft laugh. Or could it have been crying?

It didn’t matter. Imagination or not, at Winfield, if your name isn’t Woolworth, you don’t belong. And that ghost was out of my league.

Winfield Hall Gardens — The gardens at Winfield Hall are believed to be haunted by a mysterious woman in a blue dress. She’s believed to be Edna Hutton, F.W. Woolworth’s daughter.

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