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Things That Go Bump in the Night

Haunted Trails and Ghostly Tales

LOUIS C. JONES

Things That Go Bump in the Night was originally published in 1959 by Hill and Wang, New York.

* * *

From ghosties and ghoulies

And long-legged beasties

And things that go bump in the night,

Good Lord Preserve us!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Preface from an Old Hang Yard 5

One. Introducing the Dead 8

Two. Why They Return 16

Three. Haunted Houses 33

Four. Violence and Sudden Death 45

Five. Haunted History 60

Six. The Ghostly Hitchhiker 79

Notes and Sources 90

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 98

Preface from an Old Hang Yard

It is a great privilege to live in a town which the dead have not deserted. Walk the streets of Cooperstown with me on a moonlight night and I’ll show you a village where the enchantment of death is a warm and friendly quality. We leave my house in the old hang yard, cross the Susquehanna River at its source, and there at River Street and Main under a mammoth pine tree stands Pomeroy Place where old Ann Cooper Pomeroy came back long after her death to tend the house her rich descendants seldom used. Once, a clergyman seeking the Episcopal rectory listened to her directions without the slightest suspicion that she had been in Christ Church yard for many a long decade, but he identified her picture next day without any trouble.

Next door to Pomeroy Place is Greencrest where a dead wife came back to raise Cain every time her successor took down that huge portrait in the stairwell. Across the street on Sheldon Keck’s property there is just a slight depression in the earth that tells where Richard Cooper’s house stood. For years after his departure the Cooper family abstained from using his great leather chair, because Uncle Richard was sitting in it. It was from the Keck’s house, Byberry Cottage, that Susan Fenimore Cooper, the novelist’s daughter, set forth in her wheel chair a few moments after she died, crossed River Street, wheeled into Christ Church and down the aisle during Good Friday service, right through the altar, and disappeared. Susan had always had power and one could have expected little less from her.

In that same block there is an Indian buried behind the stone wall. Once every few years he pushes the wall out onto the sidewalk; I noticed the other night it’s beginning to bulge again.

One reason we in Cooperstown may be luckier than most villages is that forty years ago Judge James Fenimore Cooper, grandson of the novelist, wrote down the stories he had heard and his townsmen keep on repeating them with variations and embroideries. And don’t think these are the only haunts we have. Over at Dr. Goodwin’s house and up Otsego Lake at Hyde Hall the restless dead have long been said to break the peace and quiet of the night and the serenity of their latter-day tenants. At least this is what the people say happened; this is our legendry, our folklore, and all around us here in the heart of upstate New York there are similar legends.

And that’s what this book is about: the stories of ghosts kept alive by the telling and retelling of our people. This is not a scientist’s report on psychic phenomena, it is not a handbook for scaring children at summer camps, it is not history; it is folklore as it was found in New York State about a dozen years ago.

One of the assets of New York State is that from its very beginning people came here from all over Europe—Dutchmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Scots, Irish, Englishmen, Negroes, Portuguese Jews, and Swedes were all here by the eighteenth century, and I think this polyglottery has helped to give us a rich and varied folk tradition. These stories reflect the length and breadth of this cultural patchwork quilt. Most of the tales are of York State ghosts told by York State people, but not all, for I have chosen to include tales brought here from Europe by the latecomers, told now to very American grandchildren as part of their family knapsack of memories. I am reasonably sure that many of the stories now deeply rooted in New York countryside first came to us in this same manner.

It was my privilege to teach from 1934 to 1946 at the New York State College for Teachers in Albany. I say privilege advisedly because there were some exceedingly interesting minds on the faculty and a bright, hard-working student body deriving from every cultural background you could imagine. One of my colleagues and close friend was Professor Harold W. Thompson, who gave a course in American Folklore, the first, I believe, offered to undergraduates. Students not only studied songs, stories, and beliefs of our people, they went into their own family circles and their home towns and collected their own traditions. Thompson’s sending students out to discover their own personal heritage has always seemed to me inspired teaching.

I came to know something of the impact of this experience after he left Albany for Cornell in 1940. I had been interested in folklore from the time I heard Carl Sandburg sing and talk at Hamilton College in 1929, and I had had time to do a certain amount of collecting, writing, and studying, always with Harold Thompson’s encouragement and support. So it was that I inherited the teaching of Eng. 40: American Folklore and taught it in fall, spring, and summer for the next six years. More than a thousand students and I taught each other the legendry and singing tradition of our state. This is the place to make unmistakably clear my indebtedness to them, for they spread a dragnet across New York, bringing in child lore, proverbs, songs, tall tales, short tales, legends, and especially tales of the supernatural. Thompson can sing and play the piano, he knows music thoroughly, and he stressed the musical tradition. I’m tone deaf and lung power is my only musical asset, but I had always been intrigued by ghosts and witches, the Devil and all his followers. Being smart students, they most particularly sought what interested teacher; Thompson’s archive is rich in songs, mine in the supernatural. The two-hundred-odd stories in this volume are only a fifth of the total number of ghost tales these young people garnered from kith and kin. The Archive of New York Folklore, which contains all of their findings, now is available to scholars and students in our library at the New York State Historical Association at Cooperstown, filling two steel filing cabinets to capacity. It always seems sizable until I look at the far greater archive in Harold Thompson’s office at Cornell.

As I have said, this book stems from the work of my students, and I know that neither I nor any other one person could have made a collection of this scope. But there are disadvantages in having someone else do your field work. There wasn’t time to teach thoroughly the techniques of collecting, and the more experienced folklorist looking at the reports often wishes for more of the feel of the situation, the kind of person who told the tale, the overtones and significances which were not reported. Yet old people will talk to the younger members of their own families in ways they never would talk to a stranger, especially a professorial stranger. So, taken all in all, weaknesses and strengths, I think we came up with a clear picture of what our countrymen say about the restless dead, a subject that has been of human concern since the first flame flickered in a cave, since men learned to love and face death.

This book in itself is something of a revenant. It was written under the generous terms of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1946-47 and laid away with the much longer manuscript of which it is a part. It has been buried under the accumulations of a dozen busy years devoted to many other aspects of the folk culture of New York. Now it appears again and I hardly recognize it.

Let me also make perfectly clear my treatment of the material that my students brought to me. I have added nothing (even when the temptation was great) and have tried to keep faith with their findings while offering the reader a book of reasonably consistent tone and style. I wish that I could give you each of these stories in the words of the teller, after describing him and his intimate world. Instead, I offer a sense of the relationship of one story to another, one attitude and belief to the next. I have changed certain personal names (never place names) to avoid possible embarrassment, but the original material and all the information in our archive about collector and informant is at the disposal of the interested scholar. The names of the collectors and informants appear in the back of the book.

Finally, to save some of my readers trouble of mind, let me make it clear that I have tried, in revising this manuscript, not to put on the hat I wear as Director of the New York State Historical Association. For example, in the story of the woman who haunts the octagon house in Walton, one would get the impression that the cemetery is almost across the road. I know that is not so, but here I am concerned only with what the people say happened, and if they have confused geography or dates, I have left it their way. In short, as a folklorist I have tried to stick as closely as possible to my sources; as a historian I have gone fishing.

L. C. J.

Cooperstown, New York

December 31, 1958

One. Introducing the Dead

People talk of the returning dead in differing tones and varying moods. There is the man who has seen a ghost himself and knows what he has seen and would go to court and swear to the truth of his experience. There is that man’s son, who has had no such encounter—but this thing happened to his father, a man who did not lie, so the truth is as he tells it. Then there is the doubter who reports the legend of the neighborhood. He would have you think he is above such superstition, but often, if you press him hard or catch him unaware, you discover that really he is not so sure; a lot of strange things go on in the world and this legend is not the strangest; probably it is not so, but—. Then there is the true doubter who tells his story with a sneer and a chuckle—and frequently tells it badly. Finally, we have the sophisticated teller who is tuned only to the age of science, but for the moment, while he tells his yarn and until he has achieved his effect, would have you think him otherwise. Because he is a literate man, familiar with literary patterns, he often tells the best story of all.

I am sometimes asked what those who think they have seen ghosts have really seen. I cannot answer that with any great assurance; I can only recite an experience which helped my understanding tremendously. It happened at a time when I was not unusually interested in this type of folklore, and it is the only experience of its kind I have ever had. I was not then, as I am not now, convinced that those who die come back to earth in a sensible form, nor was my actual experience unusual at all—it has happened millions of times to others. I recount it merely because I can make this report from first hand and without any question in my own mind as to the validity of the details.

In his later years my father was a devoted gardener; March to November he spent from dawn to dusk among his flowers. His knowledge of botany and floriculture was wide and based on scientific study, which he had been carrying on as an avocation for fifty years. During the last ten years of his life I would drop in on him once or twice a week, and there was a good chance that I would find him on his knees among his flowers or in the barn working over his records or preparing plants or seeds for the ground.

He died in Albany in January, 1941, and in March I persuaded John Witthoft, then one of my students and today Chief Curator of Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State Museum, to take over the care of the garden for my stepmother. On one of those March days when the air has the softness of spring in it but the ground is still covered with snow, John and I went out to the barn to look the situation over, to see what plans had been left, what experiments were under way, what fertilizer and seeds we would need.

This was a typical city barn, divided in two rooms, one a single horse stall and the other what had been a carriage room. It was a place where I had played all through my boyhood; it was always a place closely associated with my father. We entered the small door in front of the horse stall, and I went through into the dark, big carriage room to roll back the sliding door, so we could see what was there.

As the door rolled back the room was lighted by the brilliant morning sun reflected from the snow. When I turned to look at the room, my father was sitting on a crate cutting peony roots. He wore his old work clothes, a faded shirt, and dirty pants; his ancient straw hat was stuck on the back of his head. Beads of sweat covered his brow and his shirt was dark under the arms. He kept right on working. He looked up at me, his beard white and gleaming, but his pale blue eyes were more cold and expressionless than I had ever seen them. There was neither pleasure nor anger in his face—it was merely that he was looking straight at me. And then presently he wasn’t there. John had seen nothing but an upturned crate.

Being a product of the twentieth century I had an explanation. In a room redolent with memories of my recently dead father, I projected from my mind his image. Emotion, fatigue, recollection, all contributed toward the vision. This was a psychological experience—and not a very unusual one at that. With my training and attitudes, that is all that it could have been, but suppose I were not a product of this age but of an earlier and more believing one? Suppose I had been raised in a climate of opinion which assumed as a matter of course that for any one of a million reasons—or for no reason at all—the dead come back. Suppose members of my family, the leaders of my church and community had told me of these visits from the dead as true experiences; suppose the neighborhood in which I lived contained houses from which everyone shied away because they were haunted....What then would I have seen? Then it would have been no projection from my unconscious mind, but my father’s ghost, pure and simple. Not only that, but it would have been perfectly understandable, under those circumstances, for the meeting to have been far more fruitful. He might then have spoken to me, given me messages, warnings, advice which, under the circumstances, would have had tremendous meaning for me.

When one considers in how many lands and for how many centuries this would have been the accepted interpretation of what I saw, one at least pauses long enough to salute the tradition of the past and try to understand it. There is always, I tell myself, the possibility that the explanation of the centuries is right and the psychologists of my own time wrong. They have been wrong on other occasions.

For our purposes we shall, from this point forward, assume that the ages are right and examine the reports of the people concerning the returning dead as though we had never a doubt in our minds that what is said to have happened did happen. This is the folklorist’s path.

When the dead return they adopt a wide variety of guises and forms, some in the vivid likeness of their mortal bodies, others as wraiths or lights, still others in shapes so weird and uncanny that they seem to have stepped out of drunken nightmares.

First of all, there are the living corpses, bodies which