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Nathaniel Hawthorne

A Multitude of Salem Witch Trials Descendants

If someone asked if you knew of any famous Salem witch trials descendants, you might come up with Nathaniel Hawthorne. The 19^th-century author you studied in high school famously changed his name from Hathorne. He wanted to distance himself from his great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, who helped sentence 20 innocent people to die.

But did you know that Hawthorne had neighbors in Concord, Mass., who were also Salem witch trials descendants? Louisa May Alcott and her sisters Anna, Elizabeth and May were the great, great granddaughters of Judge Samuel Sewall. Sewall later apologized for his role in the witch trials, though it didn’t help him get a date.

Samuel Sewall

In fact, plenty of Salem witch trials descendants achieved fame and fortune. If you throw in cousins and nephews, more than half the U.S. presidents had a blood connection to someone involved in the events of 1692-93.

The sheer numbers of people involved explains the abundance of famous Salem witch trials descendants. Gov. William Phips appointed a Court of Oyer and Terminer to deal with the witchcraft accusations in February 1692. Nineteen were hanged on Proctor’s Ledge, one was pressed to death and five died in jail. By May of 1693, hundreds of accused witches filled Massachusetts jails. Then the colony finally came to its senses.

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William Towne

William was probably lucky to have died before three of his daughters were accused of witchcraft. He and his wife Joanna arrived in Salem with their six children in 1637 and then had two more. Mary Towne Eastey and Rebecca Towne Nurse died on Proctor’s Ledge, while Sarah either escaped or got released. Sarah later won restitution – three gold crowns – for her sister’s deaths.

The William Towne descendants include baseball Hall of Famer Ty Cobb, Mary’s sixth great grandson. Vincent Price was Rebecca’s seventh great grandson and Mitt Romney the eighth.

Clara Barton was a third great-granddaughter of Sarah.

Lucille Ball, one of the Salem witch trials descendants, and Desi Arnaz, who was not.

Lucille Ball was a direct descendant of their brother Joseph, and of another accused witch: Rachel Vinson, who survived the trials. So did Lucy’s eighth-great aunt, Mary Perkiins Bradbury, who escaped after her conviction and imprisonment..

Grace Coolidge was the seventh great-granddaughter of another Towne brother, Edmund, as well as convicted (and hanged) witch George Jacobs. Jacobs’ sixth great-grandson – William Howard Taft — also made it to the White House.

Grace Coolidge, official White House portrait. Both she and her husband were Salem witch trials descendants.

One Witch, Many Salem Witch Trials Descendants

Probably no witch trials judge or victim had more famous relatives than George Burroughs. The only minister executed for witchcraft, he was smart, athletic, good-looking and catnip to the ladies. Cotton Mather hated him.

Drawing of the execution of George Burroughs, ca. 1900.

Before the unpleasantness of 1692-93, Burroughs preached in Salem. But then he left for a congregation in Falmouth (now Portland) because of a salary dispute (he didn’t get paid). In April of 1693, Massachusetts officials arrested him in Maine as he ate dinner with his family. The court swiftly convicted him.

As he stood on a ladder at Proctor’s Ledge, George Burroughs recited the Lord’s Prayer—something witches supposedly couldn’t do. But the hangman launched him into eternity anyway. The crowd that came to see the show then grew uneasy about the next four hangings scheduled that day.

Cotton Mather

Sitting above them on horseback, Cotton Mather told them Burroughs had received a fair trial. Besides, said Mather, he wasn’t really a minister but the devil transformed into an angel of light. The crowd calmed down and watched four others die.

Burroughs, who had nine children, had a famous descendant. His sixth great grandson, Walt Disney, invented Mickey Mouse along with Maleficent, the witch in Sleeping Beauty. Burroughs also had a mess of distant cousins, including 21 presidents. (If you care: both Adams, Bushes, Roosevelts and Harrisons; Washington; Jefferson; Taylor; Nixon; Ford; Carter; Taft; Coolidge; Harding; Hayes; Hoover; Cleveland.)

George H.W. Bush

He also had a distant relationship to a presidential assassin. Burroughs was the 11th cousin nine times removed from Lee Harvey Oswald. Other of his hundreds of famous relatives include Marilyn Monroe, Benedict Arnold, James Taylor, Princess Diana and Bill Belichick.

Alexander McQueen

When British fashion designer Alexander McQueen learned that his ancestor, Elizabeth Howe, had been hanged for witchcraft, he did what fashion designers naturally do: designed a line of clothing inspired by the Salem witch trials. He called his Autumn–Winter 2007 ready-to-wear collection, “In memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem, 1692.”

Alexander McQueen

McQueen unveiled his collection on a runway with a blood-red pentagram in a pitch-dark room. Critics called his shimmering gowns over the top and theatrical. Some of them, though, now belong to museum collections, including the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem.

Art Imitates Life

Several other creative people have used their connections to the Salem witch trials in their work. Author Eve La Plante, for example, wrote a biography of her ancestor, Samuel Sewall.

And Sarah Jessica Parker played a ditzy witch in the Walt Disney film Hocus Pocus. Her 10^th great-grandmother, Esther Dutch Elwell, stood accused of ‘wickedly and feloniously sundry acts of witchcraft upon the body of Mrs. Mary Fiche.’ Esther got off, though. She had another famous descendant, Norman Rockwell.

Sarah Jessica Parker

More Salem Witch Trials Descendants

Susannah North Martin died on Proctor’s Ledge because the court thought it found a witch’s tit on her body. She had several descendants in high places: her fifth great-grandson, Chester A. Arthur, served as the 21st U.S. president, and her eighth great-grandson served as the 46th vice president — Dick Cheney. Susannah’s descendants also include Burl Ives and Mickey Rourke

Lucille Ball’s ancestor Rachel Vinson spent months in the Ipswich jail, cold, sick and weak, after her arrest for witchcraft. She survived and won her release. Rachel also had a famous fourth great-grandson, Millard Fillmore, elected as president of the United States. Another descendant succeeded in entertainment: Richard Gere.

Humphrey Bogart’s sixth great-grandmother Ann Pudeator, stood accused of forcing a girl to sign the Devil’s Book, causing a man to fall out of a tree and turning herself into a bird. For those crimes, she hanged.

Humphrey Bogart in 1940

Ernest Hemingway was a distant cousin of Samuel Wardwell, an eccentric carpenter hanged for the pact he’d made with the devil 20 years earlier.

Kyra Sedgwick, related to practically every famous English-speaking person in history, had a distant relationship to William Stoughton, chief judge of the Court of Oyer and Terminer.

Many thinks to www.famouskin.com. Image of Sarah Jessica Parker By Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72675978. Alexander McQueen By Ed Kavishe / fashionwirepress.com – E-mail to [email protected] by Ed Kavishe,https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9682401. This story last updated in 2023.

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Six New England Places To Learn About Irish History

Outside of Ireland, New England may be one of the best places to explore Irish history. After all, many people of Irish ancestry live here – and we do love our history.

Massachusetts and New Hampshire have special claims on Irish history. More than one in five residents of each state claims Irish ancestry. And about 18 percent of people living in Rhode Island, Maine and Vermont have Irish ancestors. Connecticut may be the least Irish state in New England, with only 16.6 percent of its people claiming Irish ancestors. But still, it’s in the top ten, with only Delaware claiming slightly more.

We have already brought you six Irish landmarks in New England, but many of them are closed in the winter. So in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we bring you six more places where you can learn about Irish history. Even if it’s cold outside.

Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum

Learn about the most tragic chapter in Irish history at the Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum

Between 1845-52, half of all immigrants to the United States came from Ireland. A potato blight and English oppression caused mass starvation, disease and death.

The Irish came to the U.S. in vessels called famine ships. If they didn’t die of disease or hunger aboard the ships, they crowded into slums when they arrived. At Quinnipiac University, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum in Hamden claims the largest collection of visual art, artifacts and printed materials about that tragic episode in Irish history.

The exhibit “Making America: The Irish in the Civil War Era” ends on March 17. The work of Irish immigrant John Mulvany, a sketch artist during the Civil War, accompanies the exhibit.

3011 Whitney Ave, Hamden, Conn.

Burnham Tavern

Both Revolutionary and Irish history can be found at the Burnham Tavern.

During the American Revolution, some of the most notable fighters on both sides had Irish ancestry. Two – Henry Knox and John Sullivan — served as Washington’s generals. Another, Jeremiah O’Brien, fought the first naval battle of the American Revolution.

On June 12, 1775, Jeremiah O’Brien led a group of Machias men – some armed only with pitchforks — in capturing a British schooner called the Margaretta. They planned the maneuver at the Burnham Tavern, today a National Historic Site. Visitors can learn the history of the battle and see some of the O’Brien family’s belongings.

Should you decide to explore Irish history in Machias, you’ll find a classic, picturesque Downeast town. And you can get the best blueberry pie in Maine and therefore the world at Helen’s.

Main Street, Machias, Maine

James Michael Curley House

The James Michael Curley house.

James Michael Curley, Boston’s ‘Rascal King,’ personified the big city political boss for the first half of the 20th century. He spent lavishly on parks and hospitals, which not only served his immigrant constituents but created jobs for them.

Curley first won election as mayor in 1914, and went on to win three more times. He also won as Massachusetts governor and congressman. But he went to prison twice, once for sitting in for a friend on a civil service exam and once for mail fraud. Curley embarrassed the Democratic Party, and he couldn’t get elected as a Democratic delegate to the 1932 convention. Somehow he went as a delegate from Puerto Rico.

Curley built a mansion in Jamaica Plain with shamrocks cut out of the shutters at 350 The Jamaicaway. He never quite explained how he managed to build it on a mayor’s salary. Today there are plans to open the house to the public on a regular basis. Until then, you can embrace Irish history by visiting James Michael Curley Park near Faneuil Hall.

1 Union Street, Boston, Mass.

First Parish Church, East Derry

The First Parish Church, where potato and Irish history were made.

The Scots-Irish arrived in New England at the invitation of the Massachusetts Puritans, who viewed them as a persecuted Protestant minority like themselves.

The Puritans didn’t exactly embrace the poor Scots-Irish who first arrived in five ships in 1718. They strongly encouraged them to push on toward the frontier (Maine and New Hampshire). The Scots-Irish settlers provided a convenient barrier to unfriendly French and Indians.

In 1719, a group of Scots-Irish settled Nutfield, which evolved into the towns of Derry, Londonderry, Windham, and part of Manchester. When they arrived, they planted the first white potato in North America.

A historic marker in front of the First Parish Church in historic East Derry notes the historic planting of the spud:

The marker reads, “In April 1719, sixteen Presbyterian Scotch-Irish families settled here in two rows of cabins along West Running Brook easterly of Beaver Brook. Initially known as Nutfield, the settlement became Londonderry in 1723. The first year, a field was planted, known as the Common Field, where the potato was first grown in North America.”

On April 12, Nutfield kicks off its 300th anniversary celebration, including a strawberry festival, a founders weekend and an old home day.

47 E Derry Rd, East Derry, N.H.

Governor William Sprague Mansion

Not just a Yankee monument, the Gov. William Sprague house also played a role in Irish history.

On New Year’s Eve 1843, Rhode Island textile baron Amasa Sprague went for a walk. His servant later found his body, shot and bludgeoned.

The rich and powerful Sprague owned several textile mills, including the Cranston Print Works and the Slater Mill. he had had a dispute with three Irish brothers who ran a saloon. One of those brothers, John Gordon, was convicted of his murder.

John Gordon’s real crime was to be Irish at a time when hatred of the Irish ran rampant. The judge had actually told the jury to pay more attention to Yankee witnesses than Irish witnesses.

Even though circumstantial evidence showed John Gordon hadn’t committed the crime, the state hanged him. After Gordon’s execution, Rhode Island banned capital punishment. Then in 2011, Gov. Lincoln Chafee pardoned him.

To trace the events in this sad chapter of Irish history, you can visit Cranston to see where Sprague and Gordon lived. Sprague lived in what is now known as the Governor William Sprague Mansion. The house, now a museum, was named for his son who also lived there.

Sprague died on the grounds of St. Mary’s Church in Cranston, a 100-year old building. His Slater Mill is now on the National Register of Historic Places. You can see a video at the mill in March.

And John Gordon lived above a general store and saloon that is now St. George Maronite Catholic Church.

Governor William Sprague Mansion, 1351 Cranston St, Cranston, R.I.

Battery Street Historic District

Burlington, Vt., has a lot of Irish history, especially along the waterfront.

Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Burlington in 1832 and published a sketch of the young city. He noted “the great number of Irish emigrants” to be found there. They were everywhere: “lounging” around the wharves,” “swarming in huts and mean dwellings near the lake,” and “elbow[ing] the native citizens” out of work. (You can read the whole sketch here.)

Burlington had lots of Irish immigrants – 30 percent in the mid-19th century. They first sailed from Ireland to Canada, then came down Lake Champlain on steamboats. Most settled near the steamboat wharf.

Irish laborers lived and worked along the industrial waterfront. Today, a section of that waterfront is known as the Battery Street Historic District.

You can join Burlington’s celebration of its Irish history on St. Patrick’s Day with an annual Irish Heritage Festival.

Battery Street Historic District: rough boundaries are Main, St. Paul, and Maple Streets, and Lake Champlain.

Irish History End Notes

Images: Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, By Jllm06 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50748374; Burnham Tavern By Unknown photographer – Reproduced from an original postcard published by G. W. Morris, Portland, Maine, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19769449; First Parish Church of East Derry By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24513489; Gov. William Sprague Mansion By Swampyank – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23861004; Battery Street Historic District By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8672750.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Buildings With a Clerestory

The clerestory window makes a lot of sense in New England because of the short, short days during the long, long winter. The clerestory brings in much (and much-appreciated) light.

Technically, a clerestory is a high section of wall that contains windows above eye level to bring in fresh air as well as light. Sometimes people confuse them with widows walks, at least from outside.

One can find a clerestory window in all kinds of buildings. Here are six historic buildings with a clerestory.

General Henry Knox Museum, Thomaston, Maine

The Henry Knox house in Thomaston, Maine, has a clerestory.

The General Henry Knox Museum is a replica of the mansion the revolutionary leader built in 1794 — but a good replica. By 1871, his house had gotten run down and the Thomaston Railroad backers wanted it for a right of way. So it fell to the wrecking ball.

After the turn of the 20th century, community members raised money to rebuild the house on a different site but according to the original designs. Those designs include a large clerestory that fills the house with light down to the first floor.

30 High Street, Thomaston

West End Library, Farmington, Conn.

This mini-version of the Boston Public Library has something the BPL doesn’t: clerestory windows.

The National Park Service calls the old West End Library in the village of Unionville in Farmington, Conn., ‘an unusually intact example’ of the nearly 2,000 libraries Andrew Carnegie gave away. Today it looks much as it did when built in 1917: Even the toilet room in the basement is original.

Back around the turn of the century, cities and towns rarely supported public libraries with tax dollars (few, by the way, still do). Local library organizations had a hard time finding a place to store their books. So Andrew Carnegie, the steel tycoon, gave away all of his fortune, mostly to libraries. He singlehandedly doubled the number of public libraries in the United States, giving away 1,689. Of those, 95 were in New England. All but three are still standing, including the West End Library in Farmington.

A nationally renowned architect, Edward Lippincott Tilton, designed the old West End Library, finished in 1917. Like many Carnegie libraries, the West End Library is a miniature version of a famous large library: in this case, the Boston Public Library. But unlike the Boston Public Library the West End Library has clerestory windows directly above the main arched windows in the front and back.

The building operated as library until 1968, when it became a senior center. Then in 1984 the town leased it to the nonprofit Unionville Museum.

The National Park Service called the library ‘a testament to small-town civic achievement.’ It has significance not just as a historic building but as a contributor to the character of the surrounding village of Unionville, a historic district since 1978.

15 School St, Unionville, Conn.

Tate House, Portland, Maine

clerestory-tate-houseclerestory-tate-house

This house has a gambrel clerestory, once popular in New England. Now only two remain.

Capt. George Tate served as Maine’s last mast agent, overseeing the cutting and shipping of white pine trees to England for the Royal Navy’s masts. Tate may have thought the plum job set him up for life, but things began to go south for him.

Tate, born in 1700, moved with his family to the colonies around 1750s. He built himself a fine house in 1755 in what is now the Stroudwater Historic District, a section of Portland cut off from the rest of the city and containing many 18^th and 19^th-century homes.

The king’s first mast agent in Maine, Col. Thomas Westbrook, settled Stroudwater. He built some of the roads, a dam, a bridge, and sawmills and gristmills — in short, an early industrial village that thrived on the processing of white pine trees.

Tate brought paneling and wainscoating from England; the unpainted clapboard exterior disguises the lavish interior. The Tate House has a clerestory gambrel roof, once a common form of colonial architecture. Only one other survives in New England, in the Burnham Tavern in Machias, Maine.

But then in 1770 his wife Mary died at age 60. According to an entry on the findagrave website,

Mary Tate was killed by a booby trap set by her son William to catch thieves. William was convicted of her murder but was later pardoned by George III.

Then, of course, revolution broke out, in part due to resentment of the king appropriating the colonies’ white pine trees.

George Tate lived to be 94, dying in 1794. The house opens to the public in the warmer months.

1270 Westbrook Street, Stroudwater neighborhood, Portland, Maine.

Shaker Barn, Hancock, Mass.

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The clerestory in this barn let in light for milking cows and fresh air for preventing hay from combusting.

Shakers established Hancock Shaker Village in 1791, the third of 19 started between 1783 and 1836 Closed in 1960.

Built in 1820, the barn at the Hancock Shaker Village was probably the first round barn in the United States.

A model of efficiency and clever design, the barn has three levels, each with a specific use. The Shakers designed the big fieldstone barn for 52 cows, but it can hold 70. Once constructed, it attracted visitors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, who raced each other on foot inside the building.

After a fire, the Shakers replaced the conical roof with a clerestory that let in light and fresh air, which prevented the spontaneous combustion of wet hay.

A ramp takes wagons filled with hay to the third level; because the barn is round, the wagons never have to back up, they simple circumnavigate the barn and exit through the same door they entered.

From the third level, Shakers could pitch hay to the cows on the second level, where they were milked.

The cows’ heads fit into stanchions so they could feed while they were milked. At the cows’ rear ends, the Shakers built trap doors so they could easily shovel manure into the first level. They let it accumulate until they spread it on fields for fertilizer.

34 Lebanon Mountain Rd., Hancock, Mass.

Samuel Tenney House, Exeter, N.H.

The clerestory in this Georgian house came from an English pattern book.

The Samuel Tenney house at one time or another involved five well-known New Hampshire figures: Dr. Samuel Tenney, who tended wounded soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill; his wife Tabitha, the first best-selling author in America; Tristan Shaw, U.S. congressman; Ebenezer Clifford, inventive master carpenter; and Bradbury Johnson, builder-architect.

Samuel Tenney built the house around 1800 where the courthouse now stands. Born in 1748, he served as a surgeon to the army to the end of the American Revolution. George Washington appointed him acting surgeon general at Valley Forge. After the war he had a long and distinguished career as a judge, U.S. congressman, author and scientist.

Tabitha Tenney was the best-selling novelist in the country for the first half of the 19^th century. Her novel, Female Quixotism, poked fun at the illusions of romance. Published in 1799, the book was still in print when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Ebenezer Clifford and Bradbury Johnson together built several landmark buildings in Exeter, including the First Parish Church, the second Phillips Exeter Academy building and the Atknson Academy building. The two men creatively adapted designs from English pattern books as the gabled clerestory in the Tenney house shows. Clifford, by the way, built and designed a diving bell that he used in the Exeter River.

Finally, U.S. Rep. Tristran Shaw lived in the Tenney house in the early 19^th century. The house was moved to its current location on High Street to make way for the courthouse.

65 High St., Exeter, N.H.

Upper Rockville Mill, Hopkinton, R.I.

The clerestory in this Rhode Island textile mill let more workers work longer.

The Upper Rockville Mill, built in 1844, typifies the granite mill buildings that dotted Hopkinton, R.I., in the 19^th century. What’s different about the Upper Rockville Mill: It used water power well into the 20^th century, and didn’t stop making textiles until the late 1980s or early 1990s.

The Rockville Manufacturing Company built the big granite mill on a hill in 1844, and ever since it has served as the town’s most prominent architectural feature. Like many Rhode Island cotton mills, it had clerestory windows that allowed more natural light and usable work space in the mill’s attic.

Two years later the Seventh Day Baptists built a church, and from then on village life revolved around the mill and the church. Seventh Day Baptists owned the mill, and everyone who worked there belonged to the church. As many as half the workforce were women and children.

The mill made cotton yarn, cloth, fishing line, twine and cord. Since it relied on water power, it could never expand too much, but it could survive for more than a century.

Today the National Register of Historic Places lists the Upper Rockville for two reasons: It demonstrates the rise of the textile industry in New England, and how that industry created many mill villages in rural towns. In 1850, Hopkinton alone had more than a dozen mill villages.

332 Canonchet Rd., Hopkinton, R.I.

Christ Episcopal Church, Montpelier, Vt.

Christ Episcopal Church features a large round clerestory window ‘to the glory of Almighty God.’

The neo-Gothic Christ Episcopal Church reflects Montpelier’s growth and prosperity after the Civil War. The parish in 1868 replaced an old frame church built 30 years earlier with a substantial stone building. It had both a 100-foot tower and spire and a stained-glass clerestory window, a key feature in Gothic churches.

The building, though, suffered repeated damage. In 1903, a fire ruined the roof and the interior. Then in 1927 the flood that devastated Vermont also devastated the church, undermining its structural integrity. Though the parish repaired the church, it had to remove the spire in 1963. Then in 2015, a crane collapsed and crashed through the roof. Once again, the church required repair.

Today Christ Episcopal Church stands as one of five historic churches built in Montpelier between 1865 and 1873. All survive and belong to the Montpelier Historic District.

64 State St., Montpelier, Vt.

Images: West End Library By Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States – Unionville, Connecticut Uploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29970923; Round barn at Hancock Shaker Village: By Bestbudbrian – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51387903; Samuel Tenney House, By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25270039; Christ Episcopal Church By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18509487; Tate House By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28918831.; Upper Rockville Mill By Tmac02892 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6897440. This story was updated in 2022.

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A Haunted Murder Scene in Each New England State

If you’re looking for a haunted murder scene, New England has plenty of them. The region is awash in old taverns where the ghosts of murder victims move furniture at night or cemeteries where they float above gravestones.

New England has always embraced tales of the supernatural. New England ghosts, witches, devils and monsters in human shape populate the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. There’s even a name for the region’s special brand of horror: Gothic New England.

Here then is a haunted murder scene in each New England state.

The Murder Scene at Union Cemetery

The White Lady’s murder scene? Union Cemetery at night.

One autumn night a man knelt by his wife’s grave in 400-year-old Union Cemetery in Easton, Conn. He missed her, and it comforted him to talk to her.

After a short while he looked up from the grave and saw a ghostly figure watching him. She had long dark hair and wore a diaphanous white veil and an old-fashioned white dress or nightgown.

“I wish my husband would have loved me as much as you love your wife,” she said, and then she vanished.

Some people believe the White Lady was murdered. Her body, they think, was dumped behind the Easton Baptist Church next to the cemetery. Others believe she murdered her husband. Whatever the case, the White Lady is one of Connecticut’s most famous ghosts. People have seen her walking among the gravestones and floating above them. She also appears to motorists on Route 59.

Whether it’s because it abuts a murder scene or because it’s so old, Union Cemetery has been called the most haunted cemetery in Connecticut. The cemetery attracts so many ghost hunters the Easton police have closed it off to traffic at night.

Johnny Winter and Harry Reasoner are also buried in Union Cemetery, but so far as we know they do not haunt the place.

Easton, Conn.

Wood Island Lighthouse

A lighthouse and a haunted murder scene: Wood Island Light.

In 1896, local sheriff Fred Milliken rented his chicken coop on Wood Island to Howard Hobbs, a drifter, to sleep in. The two men argued, and Hobbs shot the sheriff. He then went to the lighthouse keeper’s house and shot himself there.

Hobbs’ spirit haunts the murder scene at the Wood Island lighthouse, located off Biddeford Pool in Maine. People have heard moans and strange voices, seen dark shadows and found locked doors mysteriously opened.

The story doesn’t end there. One lighthouse keeper was so spooked by the haunting that he left the lamp unlit and rowed to the mainland. He found a room in a boardinghouse and jumped to his death the next morning.

20 Yates St., Biddeford, ME

The Lizzie Borden House

The Fall River hatchet murder scene is now a popular bed and breakfast.

Lizzie Borden, a 31-year-old single woman, famously took an axe and killed her father and stepmother at their home in Fall River, Mass. Or did she? The debate continues since the couple was found murdered on Aug. 4, 1891.

A jury acquitted Lizzie of murder nearly a year later. Many thought she got away with the crime. Others think the maid did it, or perhaps Lizzie’s uncle, who provided an absurdly overdetailed alibi.

Whatever the case, Lizzie continued to live in Fall River, ostracized by the community, until her death at age 66. The murder scene was turned into a popular bed and breakfast in 1996. Guests most often request the room where Lizzie’s stepmother met her end.

Ghost hunters sometimes stay in the house to investigate paranormal activity. A floor will creak in an empty room, or doors will open and close mysteriously. Sometimes the proprietor smells a faint flowery scent, and once the hallway chandelier suddenly turned off and a shadow climbed the stairs.

Today, a popular rhyme persists about the murders:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

92 Second St., Fall River, Mass.

The Country Tavern

The Country Tavern in Nashua, a murder scene long ago.

In 1741, a sea captain named Ford built a house in what is now Nashua, N.H. He brought his much younger wife Elizabeth to live there while he went to sea.

Once, after a 10-month absence at sea, he returned to find Elizabeth and her new baby. In a fit of rage he locked Elizabeth in a closet and killed the infant. When Elizabeth emerged to find out what he’d done, she attacked her husband. Capt. Ford then stabbed her with a knife and threw her body down a well.

In the 1980s, Elizabeth Ford’s farmhouse became a popular eatery, the Country Tavern. Her ghost supposedly haunts the murder scene, but in a playful way. She moves salt and pepper shakers, tosses dishes off shelves and runs her fingers through patrons’ hair. Sometimes she makes an appearance in a window on the second floor, gazing out over the property.

452 Amherst St., Nashua, N.H.

The Biltmore Hotel Murder Scene

The lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, scene of murders and suicides during Prohibition.

In 1918, a rumored Satanist named Johan Leisse Weisskopf financed construction of the Biltmore Hotel (now known as Graduate Providence). He supposedly installed chicken coops on the roof to supply birds for ritual sacrifices and dug hot springs in the basement for purification rites.

During Prohibition, the Biltmore became a speakeasy frequented by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. The hotel hosted raucous parties that supposedly resulted in the murders of several guests. Today, Biltmore guests say they hear laughing and dancing from an empty room, once, perhaps, a murder scene.

The most famous ghost, though, belongs to a wealthy guest who threw himself off the 14^th floor of the Biltmore when the stock market crashed in 1929. Hotel guests say they’ve seen a man plummet past their windows, only to look down and see no body on the sidewalk.

11 Dorrance St., Providence, R.I.

College Hall, Vermont College of Fine Arts

The ghost of Anna Wheeler haunts College Hall.

College Hall at the Vermont College of Fine Arts was built near an 1897 murder scene involving a jealous lover.

On a Saturday morning, 17-year-old Anna planned to meet her fiance, Jack Wheeler, a handsome 22-year-old stonecutter. They would take the train to Barre that day to watch the Decoration Day celebration. She lived on East Liberty Street where her cousins, the Bugbees, had hired her to do domestic work.

Mildred Brewster, 20, went to the Bugbee house and waited on the porch for 20 minutes before knocking on the door. The two women talked inside for 45 minutes, and a witness later testified to overhearing the conversation. Mildred said, “Jack Wheeler can’t be engaged to us both; we will have to let him decide.”

Mildred and Anna then walked past the Montpelier Seminary, now College Hall, toward Jack Wheeler’s house. Then Mildred took out a .32 caliber revolver and shot Anna, then herself. Anna died that afternoon, but Mildred lived to be charged with murder. A jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she spent the rest of her life in and out of sanitariums.

Anna’s ghost now haunts College Hall near the murder scene, closing doors, moving objects, breaking glass and throwing pictures off walls. Once she supposedly moved furniture to block the door of a locked office.

36 College St., Montpelier, Vt.

If you enjoyed this story about haunted murder scenes, you may want to read our story about haunted houses in New England here.

Haunted murder scene images: Union Cemetery By Karl Thomas Moore – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46789828; Biltmore Lobby By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21843548. This story last updated in 2021.

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Frederick Tuckerman, the Man Who Would Be Emily Dickinson

If Frederick Tuckerman had been born a woman, you might think he was Emily Dickinson’s twin.

Frederick Tuckerman

Like Emily, Frederick Tuckerman came from a well-to-do, public-spirited, intellectual family. He became a recluse in western Massachusetts, as did Emily. Frederick attended college (Harvard) only briefly, as did she (Mount Holyoke), and he wrote poetry. Like Emily, he published only a few of his many poems during his lifetime.

Unlike Emily, he didn’t have an adulterous neighbor who published his poetry posthumously and made him famous.

Frederick Tuckerman

He was born Feb. 4, 1821 in Boston (Emily, Dec. 10, 1830) into the illustrious Tuckerman family. His brother Samuel Parkman Tuckerman composed sacred music for the Episcopal Church. His cousin Henry Theodore Tuckerman was a well-known critic and essayist.

Another brother, Edward Tuckerman, taught botany at Amherst College. He spent decades collecting lichens in the White Mountains, and Tuckerman Ravine is named for him. He and his wife also befriended the Dickinson family, and letters from Emily to Edward’s wife Sarah survive.

Frederick Tuckerman went to Harvard in 1841, but eye problems sent him home. He then returned to Harvard Law, graduated and gained entry to the Suffolk Bar. He found the law distasteful, though, and spent the rest of his time studying literature, botany and astronomy.

Bird’s-eye view of Greenfield, 1917

In 1847, then only in his mid-twenties, Frederick Tuckerman moved to Greenfield, Mass., just 20 miles north of Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst. He married the gentle Hannah Lucinda Jones that same year.

Frederick Tuckerman spent his days walking the countryside around Greenfield and nights gazing at stars through a telescope. He made herbariums and read English literature, which he loved.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Unlike Emily Dickinson, though, he traveled. In 1851 he went to England and met and befriended Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Tennyson invited him to come back and stay with him, which he did three years later.

Final Retreat

In 1857, Hannah died while giving birth to their third child. Frederick deeply mourned her loss and turned further inward. He wrote poem after poem to work out his guilt and his grief. One sonnet begins,

I leave the town; I climb the mountain-side, / Striving from stumps and stones to wring relief; / And in the senseless anger of my grief, / I rave and weep; I roar to the unmoved skies; / But the wild tempest carries away my cries!

Hawthorne

Three years after his wife died, Frederick Tuckerman self-published his one and only book of poetry, called Poems. He then sent copies to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They replied politely. Only Hawthorne seemed to appreciate his work.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

(Emily Dickinson, too, had poems published during her lifetime, though probably without her authorization.)

Frederick Tuckerman spent the rest of his life in dignified privacy, dying at the age of 52 on May 9, 1873.

Emily died May 15, 1886 at age 56. Her late brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, published her poems to wide acclaim.

Higginson, by the way, had attended Harvard with Frederick Tuckerman. As an old man, Higginson recalled Tuckerman, ‘as a refined and gentlemanly fellow, but I did not then know him as a poet.’

Rediscovery

Poets Seat Tower

It would take decades for Frederick Tuckerman to win acclaim for his poetry.

In 1909, a wealthy poet named Louis How put together an anthology of American poems that included two sonnets by Tuckerman. Though the anthology never went to press, an article about it caught the attention of the poet and scholar Witter Bynner. He got in touch with Tuckerman’s grandchild, obtained a cache of his poems and published a new anthology of them in 1931. Another critic, N. Scott Momaday, brought out an edition of Tuckerman’s poetry in 1965.

Poets Seat Tower plaque

However, a different kind of homage to Frederick Tuckerman took shape in 1912. Then, a sandstone observation tower called Poets Seat Tower was built in Greenfield to commemorate the spot loved by poets, especially Tuckerman.

Tuckerman’s biographer Eugene England noted another similarity between Frederick Tuckerman and Emily Dickinson:

Allen Tate’s comment on Emily Dickinson can be adapted to Tuckerman. All pity for his starved life is misdirected; his life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent.

Images: Plaque By Jerry Dougherty – http://public.fotki.com/GCDOUGHERTY/miscellaneous/massachusetts/greenfield-ma/greenfieldpoetsseat-1.html, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7119511. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Willey Family Tragedy Starts White Mountain Tourism

When the Samuel Willey family moved to Crawford Notch in 1825, they unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that turned the White Mountains into a tourist attraction.

The mountains were a desolate wilderness in the decades after the American Revolution. Nonetheless, Willey took his wife, five children and two hired men to live in a small, remote house in the mountains. Called the Old Notch House, it had been built in 1793.

During his first year, Samuel Willey and his two hired hands expanded the house. It stood in the shadow of a mountain now called Mt. Willey.

The men turned it into an inn for travelers along the deserted notch road.

Willey Family Tragedy

In June 1826 a heavy rain terrified the Willey family when it caused a landslide across the Saco River. Sam Willey decided to build a stone shelter above the house. He thought the family could find safety there in case of another landslide.

On Aug. 28, 1826, a violent rainstorm caused a mudslide on the mountainside. The Willey family and the two hired men took refuge in the stone shelter. The landslide killed all nine of them, but it missed the house they’d fled. A ledge above the house spared it from destruction.

The Willey Family House

Rescuers found unmade beds, clothes strewn about and an open Bible on a table in the house, and they concluded the family had left in a panic. They found the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Willey, two of their daughters and the two hired hands. But they never found the bodies of the other three children.

News of the Willey family tragedy spread through newspapers and Theodore Dwight’s guidebook, The Northern Traveler. The intact Willey family house began to attract tourists. Then it began to attract artists and writers. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story about the Willey family tragedy, called The Ambitious Guest.

White Mountain Tourism

Others exploited the tragedy as well. A mountain guide named Ethan Crawford, who grew up in the notch, built an inn. He called it the Notch House, and his brother Thomas ran it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster and Henry David Thoreau stayed at the inn.

Eventually the Crawford family gave their name to the mountain pass, previously called the White Mountain Notch.

Samuel Willey’s brother, the Rev. Benjamin Willey, charged for guided tours of the Willey family house. In 1845, a tourism entrepreneur named Horace Fabyan turned the Willey house into a 50-room hotel.

John Frederick Kensett

Thomas Cole, member of the Hudson River School of painting, found inspiration in the Willey family tragedy. He painted a landscape called Distant View of the Slide that Destroyed the Willey Family. Other painters followed, and prints and paintings of the White Mountains drew more tourists to the region.

No painting did more for White Mountain tourism, though, than John Frederick Kensett’s Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway in 1851.

willey-family-kensett-painting-mount-washington

Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway

Kensett’s image became the single most effective mid-nineteenth-century advertisement for the scenic charms of the White Mountains and of North Conway in particular, wrote Barbara J. MacAdam as the Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of America Art at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College.

An engraver made a copy of the painting, which was sold to 13,000 subscribers of the American Art Union. Artists copied the painting, and Currier & Ives turned the engraving into a lithograph in 1860. It surpassed images of the Willey family house as the best known landscape view of the era.

Kensett’s other landscape paintings achieved great popularity, partly because he painted newly fashionable resorts like Newport, R.I.

Another Tragedy

Born in Cheshire, Conn., Kensett followed his father into the engraving trade, but tired of it and turned to painting. He bought land on an island off Darien, Conn., and called it Contentment. In 1872 his own life ended in tragedy, when he jumped into the Long Island Sound to save the life of a friend’s wife. Not only did he fail to save her, he caught pneumonia and died a month later.

The Willey family house is now an interpretive center within Crawford Notch State Park.

This story about the Willey family was updated in 2023.

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