Who's buried in Longfellow's tomb

And other mysteries beyond the grave

By Noah Bruce

Even if you don’t believe in ghosts, you probably like a good ghost story. It’s strange but true: there’s something enjoyable about being a little bit afraid, feeling just a bit spooked. If you live in Maine, chances are you don’t have to travel far to encounter, if not an actual ghost, then a place that is rumored to be haunted, or find someone who’ll spin you a ghostly yarn.

The late South Portland psychic, Alex Tanous, attributed the unusual amount of paranormal activity in Maine to geography. He believed much of the state lies in a triangular area of specific energy that acts as a polar opposite to the Bermuda Triangle.

Or maybe there’s just a lot of old buildings in the area. Either way, spooks abound in Maine, and there’s not a better time than Halloween — a modern version of the old Celtic pagan holiday of Samhain when people used to ward off spirits by dressing up in ghoulish costumes and perhaps burning a few folks they believed were possessed — to tell a few ghost stories.

A Canceled Wedding

Patrick Oncale, manager of the Inn by the Sea in Cape Elizabeth, says he is not the sort of person who believes in ghosts. But, over the years, some things have occurred at the Inn that he can’t explain away.

“A few years back we had heat complaints in three or four suites,” he says. “In order to turn off the heating valves, which are in the attic, you would have to go through the library and the kitchen. It’s a maze up there. You would have to know how to get in.”

Not only is the attic hard to find, it’s separated by a locked door, and only three people have the key — Oncale, the head manager, and the owner — and none of them, says Oncale, messed with the heat. If for some reason, someone actually broke into the attic,

they would still be hard pressed to locate the heating valves, which are hidden in a hard-to-find nook of the room.

Oncale went so far as to call the manufacturer of the valves “to see if there was a possibility of them closing by themselves. They said it doesn’t happen.”

“A half dozen episodes like this,” have made Oncale believe the Inn By the Sea just might be haunted. But Oncale has never seen the ghost.

Jack Coggeshall has. One summer night a few years back, Coggeshall was going “pool hopping” with some friends at the Inn by the Sea. That is, the group wasn’t actually staying at the Inn, but they decided to take advantage of its nice pool anyways. Though they weren’t caught by the Inn’s management, they did have an encounter with the ghost who haunts the Inn and the Crescent State Beach.

While swimming in the pool, Coggeshall looked up and saw “maybe 50 yards away, a woman wearing a light gown flowing in the wind,” he says. “It had a funny glow to it. She was watching us, and we stared back. Then I turned away, and when I looked back again, she was gone.” The entire group saw the woman, and no one knew what to make of her.

It was not until several months later that Coggeshall heard the story of Lydia Carver.

Returning from a trip to Boston — where the ill-fated woman had purchased her wedding gown — Carver perished along with 16 other passengers and crew when the schooner Charles wrecked on the rocks off Richmond’s Island, off Cape Elizabeth, on the night of July 12, 1807.

According to a July 12, 1987 Portland Press Herald article written by local historian Herb Adams, the Charles was making a routine run between Boston and Portland on a calm night when she hit unexpected rough seas. “The ship struck Watt’s Ledge stern on,” writes Adams, “spun broadside to the booing sea, and fell over on its beam ends, its bottom torn asunder.”

“Sixteen of the passengers clutched the wreck in the darkness . . . Almost 10 hours the sea tore at them, and one by one they slipped away.” Rescue ships did not arrive until 9 a.m. the next day, and, all told, only six people survived.

According to literature provided by the Inn by the Sea, a Boston man, Mark Hardee, had an encounter with the shipwreck while staying at the inn. Hardee was on the beach on July 12, the anniversary of the wreck of the Charles.

In the middle of a misty night, Hardee was walking the beach when he heard “a sharp crack followed by the wrench of shattering spars and timbers,” reads the Inn by the Sea’s literature. “Then the night was shattered by a woman’s screams. They came from across the water not far from shore. Loud shrieks floated toward him — of women and children — their voices full of terror, and the hoarse shouts of men. Mark strained his eyes staring out to sea and thought he could pick out a dark mass silhouetted dimly between billows of mist.”

Hardee thought it was a real shipwreck until his wife, ominously named Lydia Carver Hardee, arrived and the cries faded away. After learning of the story of the Charles, he figured out that the screams he had heard had come from a shipwreck that happened 180 years previously.

Of all 16 who died that night, only Lydia is said to haunt the Inn and the beach nearby, perhaps looking for her fiancé, and it is her gravestone that stands in a small cemetery adjacent to the Inn.

The Ghostly Staircase

Eric Jensen, the manager of Wolfe’s Neck Farm doesn’t believe in ghosts, but two friends that came for a visit on the farm now do. The friends were staying in an upstairs bedroom of the farmhouse when they awoke to the sight of a woman at the foot of their bed. The friends said the woman moved from the foot of the bed to the closet and then down a set of stairs. When the frightened guests got out of bed to investigate, they discovered that the stairs, along with the woman, had disappeared.

Jensen says he doesn’t know how to locate his guests and, as far as he knows, they are the only ones who have experienced the ghost.

“The strange part,” says Jensen, “is that a few weeks later, an old couple showed up at the farm. They had lived here about 50 or 60 years ago and they wanted to look around. When they went into the bedroom where my friends had stayed they said ‘That’s where the stairway was that led down into the kitchen.’ ” The house had since been remodeled and the stairway removed.

The identity of the female ghost that may be haunting the Wolfe’s Neck Farmhouse remains a mystery.

The Banging Door Ghost of Brunswick High

On December 10, 1987, Brunswick High English teacher Hugh Dwyer’s wife gave birth to a boy. That night Dwyer, who was planning on taking a few days off from work, drove with his dog to the old school (Brunswick High has since moved into a new facility) to leave a note for the substitute teacher. He was in a hallway underneath the entrance to the auditorium when he heard the distinct noise of a door slam. Then he heard the sound again.

“I thought it was likely that a group of kids were in the school,” says Dwyer. “My dog went up the stairs, and I followed. When I got up the stairs, he was sitting in the hall motionless. I quickly ascertained that nobody had been in the hall.”

The door that had seemingly produced the sound was locked. “I unlocked the door, and it was the same noise. It was a newer door,” says Dwyer, and the other auditorium doors were made of wood and had a different sound.

Dwyer searched the auditorium and surrounding halls and found no one. He went outside the school and checked the freshly fallen snow for tracks. There were none.

As for whether it was an apparition, Dwyer says he doesn’t “accept what I can’t prove.” Yet, he says “in this case I am certain there was no living being there, and I know I experienced what I experienced. Plus, the dog acknowledged it.”

So Dwyer set about trying to figure out who or what had slammed that door. His investigation led him to the school’s janitors who told him he had an encounter with Mimi. Mimi was the name they had given to the ghost of a female student who had died years before. One story he heard, that the ghost was a girl who had fallen to her death from the balcony of the auditorium, proved false. Save an elderly janitor who died of a heart attack, no one has ever died inside Brunswick High, says Dwyer.

Yet Dwyer received a small shock when he stumbled upon the story of a young sophomore at the school who died in 1957 with her boyfriend. The girl is most likely Lynda Anne Estes, to whom the 1958 Brunswick High yearbook is dedicated. She and Brunswick-grad David Manson backed into a snow bank and somehow exhaust filled the car. They died of asphyxiation. The date of the fatal accident: December 10 — 31 years before Dwyer was in the building that night. Like Mark Hardee, Dwyer’s experience occurred on the anniversary of an untimely death.

Kay George was a registrar at Brunswick High’s guidance office for over 30 years. In fact, she graduated with Manson, in 1956. She believes the ghost haunting the building is Estes, and she has had an experience similar to Dwyer’s.

Together with friend and classmate Ersel Perault, George organized the 35-year reunion of the class of 1956. The festivities ended and George and her friend were making sure all the lights were out and the doors were locked. “Ersel and I went through the building and as we walked by the auditorium the door opened and closed,” says George. “We both saw that.” She explains that it could not have been a draft because the door is in the building’s interior.

“So we went into the gym to see if someone was there. We went into the auditorium and saw no one. So we just shrugged our shoulders and said it was Mimi.”

The next day, a teacher asked George if she had forgotten to turn out the lights. He had gone to the school to do some work after George left and found the lights on. “And I know I turned out those lights,” she says.

Is anybody home in the Longfellow tomb?

Portland’s most famous son, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (sorry Judd Nelson) was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A goodly amount of his family — his mum, his dad, two of his brothers, his grand-niece, and his aunt — however, were interred in a tomb in Portland’s Western Cemetery. Like most tombs, it’s a creepy looking affair. Wrought of grey stone with the Longfellow name atop the archway, the tomb seems to lead directly into a hillside like the entrance to an old mine. Creepier still is the fact that the tomb is empty, and no one knows what became of the bodies.

In the July 24, 1986 edition of the Portland Press Herald, William B. Jordan, Jr., then a Westbrook College Historian, explains that he was with a group of restoration workers replacing bricks that sealed the tomb’s entrance. Then they discovered that the bodies were missing.

Jordan says he was looking for the remains of Anne Longfellow Pierce, the last occupant of the Longfellow House on Congress Street. She wasn’t in the tomb, but, to his surprise, neither were the rest of the Longfellows.

Pierce’s remains were later located in Baldwin, Maine, but the Longfellows were not. Neither were they found in the Evergreen Cemetery on Stevens Avenue where some wealthy Portland families transferred their relatives’ remains in the late 1800s. “There’s no documentary evidence” they are there, says Jordan to this day. “They’re not in Evergreen. They’re not in Mt. Albans in Cambridge. They’re not in Duxbury, Massachusetts where the Wadsworths are from.”

Jordan believes that the missing members are actually still in the Longfellow tomb, hidden behind a brick wall in the tomb’s interior. His “educated guess” is that Pierce had the bodies moved to protect them from vandalism, apparently a common threat to tombs at the time. “I suspect [Pierce] had the mortal remains repackaged and then had that part [of the tomb] bricked up . . . She didn’t want anybody breaking into the tomb and disturbing the remains.”

Strangely, Jordan gave a different account to the Press Herald in ’86. “I think the simple answer is going to be that they are lost over at Evergreen,” he said at the time, explaining that old cemetery records “are in many cases, deplorable.”

Today, Jordan insists that he never believed the remains were in Evergreen and blames the Press Herald reporter for getting the story “ass-backward”.

So, where are Longfellow’s kin? If anyone knows, it would be Jordan, who remains cagey. For the rest of us, the empty Longfellow tomb remains a mystery.

Noah Bruce can be reached, when he’s not cowering under his desk, at nbruce@phx.com.