/
RSS Feed
NOTE: The following story contains description of a suicide and may not be suitable for younger listeners.
Ghosts are old companions. They’ve been with us since the very beginning. Go back as far as the written word will take you and you will find accounts of them, following and haunting the living. Ancient Sumerians wrote about them. So did the Greeks, the Romans. Each and every society and civilization has ghosts. It is the great mystery. It is the idea that we are more than our physical bodies, that our essential self is a form of energy that persists, the electricity that is still there though the machine is no longer working. There’s a longing for life, an urge to continue, that makes us want to believe in ghosts, even if we are convinced that there are no such things.
Ghosts. I saw one once, a story too long for this moment. Maybe later. Suffice it to say, I was not alone when I saw it and I have two people whom I trust who also tell me they saw something that night in that old, abandoned house in northern Maine, which is something to ponder. They saw it too. It couldn’t have been a phantom of my mind. That’s one of the frustrating and compelling aspects of a ghost sighting: you’re usually all alone when it happens and you cannot reconcile what you’ve seen with your current view of the world, so you doubt yourself. If you’re all by yourself when you’ve seen a ghost, you might as well keep it to yourself because there’s nothing on this earth that can back you up. You’re on your own.
I have long wondered if I really saw anything at all that night. If you put the mind in the right situation, under the right conditions, a ghost might appear from the very depths of your own imagination. We can conjure a lot with a good imagination, so isn’t it possible to see something that isn’t there and then insist that it was? Or it might have been? In Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” Ebenezer Scrooge initially tries to rationalize his sighting of Jacob Marley’s ghost by attributing it to indigestion. He says: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” Dickens could teach us a thing or two about ghosts, I think. Real or not, they must be dealt with.
I’m a collector of ghost stories. Most are unremarkable and involve a person in the darkness experiencing something other, something impossible and then, nothing. Sounds, items moved, a cold spot on the stairs, whispers in the dark. These are fine but usually involve people who are highly suggestible, who actually set out to find a ghost. These entertain me.
But every now and then I come upon a ghost story that, like a ghost itself, haunts me. This kind of story doesn’t entertain me. It bothers me. I think about it from time to time and, because it has the ring of truth to it. I sometimes lie in bed and the story visits me and I ask myself, could this one be true? Real or not, the idea of ghosts compels me to tell you a story I encountered many years ago in a book whose author has sadly passed away. Charles Turek Robinson wrote one of the most frightening books on the subjects of ghosts I have ever found and yet very few people seem to know about it. “The New England Ghost Files,” published in 1994, is a collection of stories gleaned from personal interviews he conduicted that were told to Robinson from throughout New England of what are purported to be true encounters with spirits. Each chapter is a report of an interview and begins with the ghost file number, in this case #17, the location: the Green Mountains of Vermont; the number of witnesses, in this case more than three, and the dates the interviews took place, which were in March and June of 1992. The book is written in a journalistic, straight-forward manner. Robinson indicates that he changed the names of the people in the book for their protection so there is no way to determine if these tales are ‘real’ or fabricated, but either way, they serve up many particularly frightening, and in many cases, sad revelations. Many of these stories have the ring of truth to them and I must admit, my copy of the book becoming dog-eared. Robinson entitled this tale, “Terror in the Treetops.”
Dick and Marjorie Dennet are the interview subjects. Their story concerns a farm they bought in Vermont in the early 1970s. What is fairly unique about their story is that it does not concern a haunted house. Their story concerns a haunted oak tree at the edge of their property, near the forest. It was a place on the property that they rarely visited and for most of the time, they didn’t give this tree even a second thought.
Dick describes how things began to happen in the vicinity of the tree. “The first disturbing occurrences took place about twenty years ago when we first bought the farm. One morning, we found both of our cats dead, and they were right by the old oak tree. There were no signs of visible injuries, and we had the cats autopsied by our veterinarian. He found absolutely nothing wrong with them, and he was at a complete loss to explain how they had died. On other occasions, we found dead birds around the same tree – and that tree only. It was very perplexing.”
His wife, Marjorie, describes the next encounter they can recall that made them question the area. “One time, I was taking a walk across the property with my dog, Jasper. As we approached the oak tree, Jasper began to growl at it. Then he just dashed off — which is totally unlike him — as if he wanted to get away from that tree as quickly as possible. Many times after that, if I led Jasper anywhere near the tree, he would become extremely agitated and would growl at it. It was incredible the way the tree affected him. Finally, one afternoon about four months later, I found him lying motionless by the tree. He was dead, like the cats.”
But it wasn’t only animals who experienced something by the old oak. Speaking about a later encounter by the tree, Dick recalls own young daughter’s experience. “She was six or seven at the time, and she came running to the house crying. We asked her what had happened and she said that she had heard a voice by the tree. She said that the voice sounded like a young boy’s…that at first it was a friendly and gentle voice…(telling her) she was pretty and other nice things. But after a while, she said, the voice suddenly changed. It began to get louder and angrier, yelling and cursing at her. This was very hard for us to believe at the time, but it was obvious to us something had frightened her terribly. She never played near that tree again.”
A voice from a lonely, neglected tree in the far end of a field, a voice from nowhere that began with compliments and ended with curses. Was this something only in the mind of a small child with a very large imagination? Because whenever a child tells us anything unbelievable, we can easily discount it as imagination, right? Except it was real to her.
As strange as this must have sounded to the Dennets, something happened in early 1973. Marjorie relates, “ My father visited us in early 1973, and he had a heart attack while taking a walk on the property. Fortunately, he survived, but I find it strange that his heart attack took place right by that old oak tree. I think that something frightened him horribly there, but, to this day, he won’t talk about it. He gets very tense and edgy whenever I ask him about what happened that day; he doesn’t reply and just leaves the room.”
Finally, in July of 1973, while he was mowing the pastures, Dick happened to be driving his tractor by the old oak tree. He states, “I suddenly noticed that there was a young boy – maybe sixteen or seventeen—sitting up in one of the branches, staring down at me. I stopped the tractor next to the tree and called up to the boy to ask him who he was and what he was doing there. He responded by spitting at me and using all sorts of foul language. He looked strange – very thin and pale. I told him to get off my property or I would call the police, but he just began to laugh. I got back on the tractor and started back toward the house. As I began to drive away, I glanced back at the tree for one more look at this strange youngster. When I did, though, I was shocked to see that he was no longer there in the tree. He had simply vanished.”
Vanished. At that moment, the Dick had no idea that he had witnessed anything but a local teenager trespassing on his property. Thinking back at the incident with his daughter, it began to make sense. She had heard the voice of a delinquent hiding out in the tree, though why any teenager would choose a lonely tree in which to linger, a tree rarely visited by humans made no sense to him. But one thing always leads to another and when people experience odd events, they often simply move forward with their lives. Work still needs to be done. One day falls into the next and the Dennets continued without thinking much about the foul-mouthed boy in the tree.
Five months later, the Dennets had a visitor who changed the way they looked at the strange series of events that had occurred on their quiet little farm in the Vermont countryside. Mr. Dennet explains, ““The town tax assessor came out to the farm to re-evaluate the property. He’s an old-timer in town, and he knows a lot about the town’s history. When he came out to the farm, he asked us in passing if we knew about Joshua. We told him we had no idea what he was talking about. He then proceeded to tell us about a boy named Joshua – the son of one of the farm’s previous owners – who had killed himself on the property in 1943. When we asked him how he did it, the tax assessor pointed in the direction of the old oak tree and said that the boy had hanged himself from one of the tree’s branches.”
Ghost stories are incomplete things. They are lonely, wandering tales take you into quiet places and disquieting places, and then stop when they shouldn’t and leave you with a lingering longing -who was that person? What happened to them? Why are they still here? What do they want? What do they need? Some ghost stories seem like recordings, like events being played out again and again on some kind of persistent loop. Others might be slips of time: a ghost is seen by a child in the kitchen in the middle of the night, a ghost who quickly disappears and then years later, a man in his kitchen in the middle of the night sees the ghost of a child looking up at him and he wonders, ‘Did I just see myself as a child seeing myself as an adult?” Other ghost stories talk about unfinished business and a need for some sort of closure. But then there are the stories like this one: a ghost who lingers in madness, in pain, in anger. In 1943, according to the tax assessor, a teenaged boy ended his own life in the tree in the back pasture. Because the author wanted to protect the identity of the Dennets, we have very little to go on. We do have the year, but then we would need to scour the records for a boy possibly named Joshua who committed suicide while on the edge of manhood while the world was at war. The author himself is now dead but assures us in the book via an author’s footnote that “research confirms that a suicide by hanging – involving a teenage boy-did, in fact, occur on the property in December of 1943. We have no way of going any further. If true, the Dennets experienced the spirit of an angry young man who could not move on and for whatever reason lingered to interact with and harass the living.
Mr. Dennet did the thing that most of us would do – involving an ax. He says in the interview: “Needless to say, this information was extremely disturbing to us. This was the same tree where all the weird things had been happening. When I heard that I immediately cut the tree down. I didn’t know if it would help or not but I should have done it a lot sooner. It was obvious that there was something very wrong with that tree, and, as crazy as it sounds, I believe that the boy I saw up in the branches was the ghost of Joshua.”
Mrs. Denning had the final words in the interview. She says, ““Considering all that happened around that tree, it is our belief that Joshua’s suicide – and we have no idea what caused it – remained unresolved. Maybe all of his anger, pain, and guilt were somehow still present at the scene of his death, attached to that oak tree because that’s where he hung himself. Somehow, when that tree was removed, the spirit – at least we think – moved out of the area. Maybe that’s because the tree was no longer there to remind Joshua of his suicide. It seems silly, we realize, but the strange (occurrances) completely stopped after Dick cut down that tree. Still, we mostly avoid the spot where the old tree used to stand…just in case.”
Just in case.
You’ve been listening to Strange New England. I’m Tom Burby, your host and writer of this series. Sound editing was done by Jim Burby. Original opening and closing music was composed and performed by Jim Burby. Other incidental music is my MYUU, that’s M-Y-U-U. Check out his amazing compositions and interpretations on Youtube and Soundcloud. We hope you enjoyed your visit and invite you to return for more tales of the strange and macabre. There are more than fifty episodes in our library available for your enjoyment. Check us out at our website: www.strangenewengland.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
Work Cited
Robinson, Charles Turek. The New England Ghost Files. Covered Bridge Press, 1994.
