Ghosts of Martha’s Vineyard come to life in new book

HAUNTED ISLAND: True Ghost Stories from Martha’s Vineyard, by Holly Mascott Nadler, Down East Books, 141 pages, $10.95.

The veracity of this diverting collection of 20 stories about things that go bump in the night on Martha’s Vineyard is vouched for by the author, an island resident whose passion for this genre earned her the sobriquet of “the ghost lady.”

“Most of the stories told to me I’ve believed, especially when people of obvious sobriety and substance in the community relate them to me,” writes Holly Mascott Nadler. “Some of the ghost stories in this anthology scare me, some make me thoughtful, some even make me laugh.”

Ancient Greeks believed that islands were the abode of dead heroes. Martha’s Vineyard is an island — a pricey summer resort set like a gleaming emerald in the blue waters close to the southern shore of Cape Cod — but its phantom population is strictly run-of-the-mill variety that ranges from merry, mischievous, and melancholy to mean, vindictive, and evil. It is a spirit of this dark stripe that haunts the estate described in “Possession of the Demonic Kind.”

“Suffice it to say that it nestles in one of the island’s numerous seaside colonies of mostly summer homes,” says the circumspect author. An air of grandeur hangs over the gray-shingled, blue-trimmed mansion whose phalanx of windows stares glassily at the sea; and its grounds are well cared for. But the interior of the house is shabby and neglected, and one seems to sense some baleful presence … some sort of dark spirit … waiting to pounce, and if someone who was weak moved in, this `thing’ would just push him over the edge,” shivers the author.

She recalls these words of an island woman: “I was never a fearful child … the dark never bothered me. … But every time I had to walk past that house … the hairs on the back of my neck would stand on end.” Of those that have dwelt there, one went mad, another committed suicide, and yet another attempted murder.

Nadler suggests the theory that perhaps the site is haunted. Centuries ago Indians summer-camped there; later it became the favorite spot for smugglers who connived to wreck ships for their cargo by guiding boats to the treacherous shoals with delusive lighthouse flares. In the middle 1600s, when Gov. Thomas Mayhew purchased Martha’s Vineyard (discovered and named in 1602 by Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold) and the sister islands of Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands, a flood of settlers arrived, displacing the Wampanoag Indians, a tribe of the Algonquins. Edgartown, epicenter of Martha’s Vineyard, became a thriving whaling and merchant trade center.

“All of Edgartown itself, arguably the most paranormally disturbed of all the island villages, was once, according to many Wampanoags, the site of an ancient cemetery with myriad burial mounds grouped along the shore,” reveals the author.

“Today, North and South Water streets, which meander along the harbor front, contain a harrowing amount of haunted houses.” One of these is the Daggett House, a 17th-century inn whose resident ghost scared the daylights out of Daniel O’Connor in 1984 when, as the new manager, he moved into the place. Alone in the hotel on his first night there, he was preparing for bed in this third-floor room when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs and walking down the hall. Pausing at his door, whoever it was knocked three times. Heart beating wildly, O’Connor opened the door. No one was there. The hall was empty.

Can a ghost lure a living person to the Other Side? In “The Return of Desire,” Nadler chronicles the ghostly visitations of the aristocratic Desire Coffin to the house on North Water Street over which she presided after her marriage to Capt. John Osborne. During his absences at sea, she spent long hours playing the piano. Her spectral disturbances began not many years ago when a talented young pianist began practicing daily in Desire’s former home. Within the next year he died an untimely death. As abruptly as his demise, so did Desire’s eerie visits cease.

Aristotle wrote that imagination is the intermediary between perception and thought. Is this the truth that puts ghost stories in the realm of human possibility? “Haunted Island” may not solve the issue but it certainly offers a wealth of entertaining anecdotal material on the subject.