Ghosts on the Coast of Maine Page 4

  Besides, the unfortunate seagoers were probably half dead by the time they were discovered. Between fighting ocean waves, getting dashed on the rocks, and being exposed to low temperatures, they must have been spent. A strong twist of rope around the neck would have easily finished them. I’m not saying the “murders” should be condoned, but circumstances do make that version of the story more plausible. Murder would also have been motivation for the simulated strangulations.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE INVISIBLE ESTATE

  Traveling up Route One, one would come across a town nestled in the deep woods atop a hill going down to the ocean. It is a town of surprises, especially about evening. The trees that line the narrow roads of Northport are so thick that they form clusters of forest around the houses. Even going slowly in a car, one is startled by the appearance of these narrow, high-roofed dwellings that seem to pop out of nowhere.

  Most of these houses belong to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, with little odd-shaped windows and peculiar wood carvings decorating the eaves. One of them is shared by three old women, whose portrait bears a marked resemblance to the females that spun the fates of mankind in Greek mythology. Nevertheless, they are all kind enough to share their knowledge about an event that occurred in their town the night of December 16, 1954.

  It was a night full of Christmas cheer and eager anticipation at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Cosgrove. This affluent couple had inherited the family real estate business, enabling them to indulge in all the luxuries of the day: two Cadillacs, a Rolls-Royce, a greenhouse of exotic plants, and a private golf course. These were the trimmings of a magnificent estate furnished with the finest quality furniture and items throughout.

  The Cosgroves were even lucky enough to secure two intelligent and loving people to watch over their children and the house whenever they were gone. Mr. and Mrs. Walden adored the Cosgrove boys, aged five, seven, and nine, and treated them like grandchildren. They knew how to be strict, though, when necessary. The youngest one was forever leaving his toys about, setting up potential booby traps for unsuspecting passersby. Mrs. Walden patiently trained him to pick up after himself. It was Mrs. Walden who had told her employers of the creative playthings she had seen in a Boston store catalog.

  That was why that night Mr. and Mrs. Cosgrove were on their way to Boston on a shopping spree for the children. They had softened the blow of their departure by choosing that day to decorate the whole mansion, inside and out. They had put up the tallest and fullest Christmas tree they could find. Colored lights illuminated trees, bushes, the outside of the house, and a special Santa Claus display on the roof.

  The three little boys were not in a mood for early bedtime, so Mr. and Mrs. Walden read the boys’ favorite stories until they nodded off to sleep. The substitute grandparents lifted the children out of their slumbering positions into their beds and retired themselves. That was the last peaceful moment in the lives of these five people.

  An hour later found them choking and gasping for air, as they battled the smoke and flames of a fire that ripped through the large house and crumbled it to the ground. It left nothing but two chimneys, some badly warped household appliances, and a set of iron lawn chairs and table.

  Firemen and neighbors fought the blaze for hours, saving the house next door, but they were too late to do anything about the two adults and their young charges. The charred remains of Mrs. Walden and the children lay in the southeastern corner of the foundation with those of Mr. Walden twenty feet away. Mr. and Mrs. Cosgrove came home to a graveyard instead of a holiday house. They could only stare in mute grief at the sole remnant of their little boys’ world: a toy sailboat resting unharmed, on the iron table.

  No one knew the cause of the fire. It could have been the furnace or could have been a faulty electrical system. What everyone did realize was that money isn’t everything. A wonderful life of comforts and riches had been reduced to ashes in a matter of minutes.

  The saddened parents moved away, and the land passed on to a multimillionaire from Chicago, and then to a Texas oil man who married a local girl. Neither party built over the location of the catastrophe. They both left the stubble of a chimney standing in a field of its own and constructed tennis courts and other buildings up the hill from it.

  The “Three Fates” look over their coffee cups and caution to beware of the site. They say that Brent Severson, a well-respected farmer, was walking along the road by that place one night and heard some little kids screaming their lungs out. There was a light in the trailer across the road, but nothing extraordinary was going on. The house across from it seemed to have nothing going on either, and they were the only two homes around that had any kids. Severson looked over to that field and saw that half a chimney just sitting there growing weeds around it, and he decided to walk briskly the rest of the way home.

  Cal Owens, a town preacher, was known to have been walking by the place with his two daughters, when they all heard crying and screaming of small children. They knelt down right there in the road and prayed a bit. Then they went home to tell Mrs. Owens.

  Another time a family was visiting the area on vacation. It was a cloudy day, no day for the beach, so the parents left their kids to play in the town park. The husband and wife got their camera out of the car and started walking up the hill, towards the Cosgrove estate road. The stone chimney ruins caught their eye, and they took several snapshots of the area.

  A week later they got their pictures back, and instead of the photos of an old chimney, there were the pictures of a huge white mansion with two chimneys, all intact. The couple figured that the developing studio had mixed up their pictures with someone else’s, and checked it out. No, there had been no mistake. There were also no photos of a lone chimney.

  Within the last three years there have been so many incidents of people taking pictures of a “house that wasn’t there,” that Northport has become famous for its unusual haunted house. There’s even a photograph hanging on the wall of the local diner. You can hardly get more significant than that.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TAUKOLEXIS

  You won’t see him in the middle of the day, when tourists are winding their way around the tower after paying their dollar at the desk. The visitors are curious about the old iron artifacts, the muskets, the view from the top. The children point out the cannon balls and try to move an extra large one attached to a podium. They all pass him by. No one thinks to prowl around the huge jagged boulder lightly veiled in the damp shade of the foundation. It is here that his spirit lurks, to remind us of the pain endured in imprisonment.

  Taukolexis came to be a prisoner in Fort William Henry, at Pemaquid, by doing a friend a favor. The date was February 1696. Chiefs Egremet, Toxus, and Abenaquid had stopped at Taukolexis’s camp to seek company for a peacemaking journey to Fort William Henry. They noticed a tall, stalwart man squatting by a fire and asked him to come along. The man looked at them with strong eyes and told them that he would be unafraid to go, but that his wife and children were sick and needed his care. There was another man, equally as able as he and compassionate enough to take his place on the trip, his friend and neighbor.

  So it was that Taukolexis went with the three chiefs to see if a prisoner exchange could be worked out with Captain Crabb, commander of the fort. The men stopped at another Indian camp and gained several recruits before arriving at their destination, white flag in hand. Considering all the recent fighting that had occurred between the French and Indians and the English settlers at Pemaquid, everyone knew that the operation, though wellintended, would be risky.

  Fort William Henry was such a bone of contention because it was of great importance to all parties. The Indians wanted it free and clear for transportation. They wanted to be able to paddle their canoes around that point, instead of the treacherous Pemaquid Point farther out on the ocean. During English occupancy, they were forced to use Pemaquid Point, today a beautiful spot graced by a grand lighthouse. Back
then, however, the mass of rocks and spirited seas surrounding the Point were not marked by any sort of warning.

  The French, who most of the time convinced the Indians to team up with them, wanted the fort because the English had it. And the English wanted it because they thought they deserved any spot of ground that they landed on.

  Being a man grounded in English philosophy, Captain Crabb was not about to let an opportunity for domination go by. In the midst of the treaty negotiations, the captain and his men attacked the Indians, killing Egremet, Abenaquid, and two others. Toxus and a few followers escaped, while Taukolexis was taken prisoner at the garrison.

  Many months passed. It was a terrible winter for the captive Indian. He was not used to being chained to a wall, in a dark space with not much food. He was a child of the forest, a wanderer of the land. No man had ever captured him like an unsuspecting animal in a trap. His soul longed for clean air and warmth of the sunshine. He could hear the soothing roll of the ocean waves, but he could not bathe his body or taste the healing salt of the sea.

  Once in a while in early spring, the soldiers led him out on a rope and tied him to a huge tree next to the fort. While wrapped together with this living thing, Taukolexis poured out his sorrow to the tree. He found relief in joining his spirit with that of the tree; it was his only consolation before death.

  Taukolexis grew emaciated with malnutrition and torture; and with no support or hope of liberation, he died. If he could have held out a few hours longer, his story would have changed.

  On July 14, 1696, just after Taukolexis died, a man named D’Iberville, with three armed ships and two battalions of French soldiers, anchored at Pemaquid. With the help of two hundred Tarratines in canoes led by the French officer Castin, he posed a massive threat to the fifty or so English fighters at the fort.

  The attackers brought heavy guns and ammunition ashore, and batteries raised, projected many bombshells into the fort. Crabb quickly surrendered, and the opposition scrambled up the hill to the garrison. The Frenchmen strutted valiantly, but the Indians, upon finding dead Taukolexis in such a deplorable condition, raised their weapons in fearsome anger. Fortunately for the English, they had already abandoned the fort.

  The Tarratines removed the fellow member of their race from his chains, and brought his body to Tappan Island. There they buried him in a fashion befitting an Indian brave, with knees drawn up and head facing east. Someone threw in a knife and hunting pouch so that he would be happy in the next Hunting Grounds.

  Taukolexis may be happy there, but he visits his old “hunting grounds” every once in a while. After the tourists have trampled, the picnickers have lunched, and the fort keeper has locked up for the night, the spirit of the captured Indian appears. A white wisp of light has been seen coming out the restored fort’s door, moving towards the big tree nearby, according to a retired engineer.

  One gate tender, upon closing shop for the night, noticed a man coming towards him in haste. In the split second of realization, there was a sense of deep sadness about the person. He was also walking a foot above the ground. The gate tender did not stop to question why; he got to his car as quickly as possible and took off.

  A young woman, taking a nightly stroll last summer, ended up at the fort towering above the sea. It was a windless night, the air felt calm. Suddenly a cold wind brushed her; it stopped. It happened again. She reached up to her head and her hair was standing straight on end. Bewildered, she left the scene totally freaked out.

  Just before the fort is a sign that reads Makooshan Tribe #4—Everybody Welcome! The people who made that sign are not afraid of the ghostly visitor. They communicate with him, no qualms. As Willie Nelson would say, they’ve “been down that road before.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ROSES FOR A QUEEN

  It has long been a mystery why, in certain old homesteads of the Boothbay region, one would find a Sevres vase or delicately painted snuff box or graceful-legged Louis Quinze chair amid the lusterware, the willow plates, and the sturdy captain’s tables. Even more astounding is the discovery of fleshy, voluptuous females in paint, prancing around with bewigged men and chubby cupids. Surely such a picture hanging in a puritanical nineteenth-century home would have been cause for eternal damnation for the whole household.

  There’s an old saying that if you live in a place long enough, you will hear the end of every story. Such is the case with the late eighteenth-century French antiques. It revolves around one large but unpretentious white frame house with green shutters, in the town of Edgecomb. It was, in 1793, a house prepared for a woman of very high breeding and meticulous taste.

  The episode must be prefaced by a portrayal of the man involved. Arthur Clark was a tough-minded, independent Yankee, one of the elite “first family” members of Boothbay. The town of Boothbay was so commercial with its ship chandleries, shipping offices, warehouses and taverns, that people like the Clarks chose for their homes quiet little places like Edgecomb.

  Arthur was a versatile fellow, as most captains were, in those days. He not only commanded his vessels, he also owned them and the shipyard where they were built. Such a position of responsibility fostered the strict, practical side of his personality. Thus, the events that took place on his ship in the fall of 1793 came as quite a surprise to his crew.

  Captain Clark was docked just outside of Paris at the time, with his ship Sarah. Any persons in the vicinity of this city of revolution had to be touched in some way by the social upheaval going on around them. Angry Parisian mobs, going hungry while their rulers glutted themselves with pleasure, thronged the streets and shouted their grievances. The fire of their nightly torches matched the fire in their eyes.

  It was the fourth year of captivity for the reigning monarch, Marie Antoinette. Her husband Louis XVI had lost his head during the winter, and the memory of her recently deceased son still lingered. All attempts to procure aid from her Austrian family had failed. The French people were labeling her with treason, because it was believed that during the previous year’s war she had passed on military secrets to the enemy. She could no longer take advantage of her luxurious palace at Versailles, but she was able to take comfort in what was left of her elaborate clothes, sculptured furniture, expensive wallpaper, and priceless wall hangings. Albeit a set of inanimate objects, it was all she had left.

  This was the story told by the delicate and forlorn queen to the hardy sailor from Maine, who had somehow managed to meet her. Captain Clark was so taken by this damsel in distress that he quickly formulated a plot by which she could escape. Little by little, her belongings were stowed away on his ship by his loyal crew. Clark’s sailors must have given him quite a ribbing about this romantic adventure, but they were smart enough to realize the stakes involved. For all practical purposes, Marie Antoinette was under house arrest, and anyone found tampering with the situation would have been in danger of his life.

  Clark, being a man of the sea, was used to taking chances, but he was not used to sympathizing with royalty. During the American Revolution he had been a staunch patriot and a loud condemner of the British ruler’s atrocities. One can imagine the shock when Mrs. Clark learned that her husband planned to rescue the French queen and give her refuge in his own home in Edgecomb. I’ll bet she slammed a few pots and pans around the kitchen whenever she thought of the sentimental scheme. How would a lady used to fancy French cooking look upon fish chowder and johnnycakes? How would she feel at home in a plain two-story dwelling? How far would she look down her nose at a Maine sea captain’s wife? Most of all, was it worth the terrible risk?

  Mrs. Clark’s concerns and all of Edgecomb’s female society’s preparations were for naught. Just as the captain’s plan was living out its final stages, whereby the queen would go to the ship in disguise, violence broke out. Marie Antoinette was seized and beheaded on October 16. Sarah had to leave port immediately, with no time to unload her cargo of French treasures.

  The captain stored them for a time in on
e room of his house, awaiting word from French authorities. When none came, he distributed them about the house, I suspect, in spite of his wife’s protests. Then in a final tribute to the woman he loved in some way, he planted a trellis of roses facing the morning sun.

  Herbie, the present gardener of the house, was the one so willing to relate information about the lovely roses and the story behind them. Most of the antiques have been sold or distributed as far as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but evidence of his tale still remains. He first experienced it ten years ago, at one of the many auctions held at the home.

  He had always heard stories of how Marie Antoinette was still looking for her lover, but he’d never seen anything. Then one hot and windless summer afternoon during that auction, on the side of the house where there was no activity, he was passing by the roses. He took great care of those roses. Anyway, he was walking by when he caught sight of a miniature whirlwind that traveled twice around the foot of the trellis and then went right up it. He never saw anything like it in his life.

  Herbie said that Morris, the gardener before him, had told him a story about his sleeve being tugged while working on the roses. When Morris looked up to see no one, he dropped his tools and went for a long walk.

  Morris said that the French queen never got to see those roses while she was alive, but she certainly seems to know that they’re hers now.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MUSICAL MYSTERY HOUSE

  In the prim and proper, neatly windowed town of Wiscasset lies a Georgian manor that seems to fit in with all the other 1850s vintage homes. The brick sidewalk by the old Congregational Church leads the way to a double-doored immensity that signals a definite “welcome” to the passersby. Candlelight softens the entrance to the house, and one step inside tells you that this is no ordinary place.