Wicked Wednesday-The Spirit of a Place

Jessie: Finishing up the last week of summer vacation!

Since both Barb and Julie have books that released this week with a heavy emphasis on the darker side of a place I wondered if you have any memories or stories ( that you believe or don’t) of haunted locales? Houses, towns, wooded groves or misty lakes, I am interested in them all!

Edith: So many congratulations to Barb and Julie! I can wait to read both the new books. A friend was staying in our guest room a few years ago. Our house was built in 1880. Bonnie woke up in the night and saw a woman in an old-fashioned nightgown standing at the end of the bed. She wasn’t malevolent and didn’t speak or move but stayed there for some time. Bonnie turned over or something and when she looked again, the woman was gone. I get shivers just thinking about it! I’ve never seen the woman in white, but I kind of wish she would reappear.

Barb: As regular readers know, my mother-in-law ran a bed and breakfast in an old sea captain’s house in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. My husband’s Aunt Connie, who was given to that sort of thing, firmly believed a female ghost resided in the back bedroom called the Garden Room. One night, after my husband and I owned the place, we had a house full of family and Bill and I ended up sleeping in the Garden Room with our cocker spaniel MacKenzie. The dog was a nervous wreck all night, panting, walking around on his toenails, and generally keeping us awake. Finally, exasperated and nearing dawn, we threw him out of the room. He immediately settled in the hallway and fell into a deep sleep. I think there were squirrels in the walls, but I think Bill kinda wonders…

Julie: I lived in an apartment in Brookline years ago, and we had a poltergeist. My roommate and I were talking once and a can of bug spray flew off the top of the refrigerator at us both. She told me that when she’d lay on her stomach and read, a red light would flash on the page. One night I heard a crash in her room, and the large mirror that had been resting against the wall on the back of her very crowded dresser top had fallen. It was face up, and not broken. Nothing else was disturbed, but a pair of ceramic earrings she had were crushed under the mirror. The earrings were of a skeleton face and a cross. Yup, we moved.

Sherry: Oh, that is scary, Julie! When we lived at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts our house was near the Minute Man National Historical park which runs from Lexington to Concord. It’s where the first battle of the Revolutionary War took place and the woods were said to be haunted by the soldiers who died that day. I never had any weird experiences but others did. Another haunted place not too far from there is the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. I used the story of the woman who haunts it in All Murders Final.  I’ll have to save the story of the haunted houses on F.E. Warren Air Force Base for another day as is my encounter with Cary Grant’s ghost.

Liz: My favorite topic – haunted stuff! I had a friend from college who said the house in Marblehead her grandmother lived in was haunted. She promised to invite a bunch of us over for a slumber party but alas, it never happened. I’ve never had any haunted experiences, to my dismay, but I keep hoping. Eventually I’m going to have go stay at one of those hotels famous for the hauntings just to get it out of my system.

Jessie: I love all these stories! I do love a bit of woo! Any supernatural experiences I have had have not been related to a specific place and so would be best in a different post but I would say that there are places that either feel wonderful to me or give me the creeps. One of my children participated in an after school activity in a building in a different town that I felt had repellent energy. There was just something about it that made me uneasy. I made sure to stay with the other parents when coming and going from the events there. It turned out several assaults were committed there not long after we started attending. I don’t know that it was the spirit of the place but I was truly glad I trusted my instincts.

Readers, do you believe a place can have a strong personality, either malevolent or benign?