Ghosts on the Coast of Maine (8 page)

As we turned toward the store items, a bowler hat sitting atop a metal safe camouflaged as a desk moved and landed on top of an antique cash register. The kids left immediately, but I had to get the name on the store display: Hefflin. Mr. Hefflin meant no harm. He was just saying “hello” (tipping his hat?). I moved to a book in the center of the shop to find out the story behind the elusive presence.

Lucas Hefflin came to Bath, then called Long Reach, in 1792 at the age of nineteen. After marrying Harriet Rowe, he produced five sons, all of whom helped their father sustain the family businesses. From a general merchandise store selling ladies' and children's shoes, Lucas graduated to the big-time merchant business and became an importer.

Spurred on by success, he took shares in several Kennebec-built vessels. By 1815 he reigned over his own shipyard, from which were launched four brigs, three barks, and seventeen ships. In 1825 Lucas expanded his waterfront holdings to include a third wharf and a store. Ten years later he purchased more property, and more in 1846 and 1854. In 1854 he also added another wharf and a brick store that became his oakum and paint shop.

Hefflin gained popularity as a man who gave employment to many men and kept the town going with his generosity. One day in 1857 the ship
Hefflin
, coming into port after an overseas journey, seemed to sense that this well-loved leader had passed away the night before. She breezed in silently, waving her flags at half mast for the man who had watched her progress from the laying of her keel to her complete construction and worthiness at sea.

Today, it seemed, Mr. Hefflin was sticking around to watch over the growth and development of the fifth generation of his family in the shipbuilding business. Was it one of the fellows who had talked to me at the shipyard down the street? As I pondered this, I felt a pressure like a footprint start at the back of my left ankle. I could feel it slowly work its way up my back till it got to my hair. It either pulled my hair or caused static electricity. Time for me to split.

As we drove by the boat workers on the way back, they asked if we'd had any luck finding ghosts. “One of you guys named Hefflin by any chance?” I asked. They pointed to a fellow about thirty feet away. I said, “Tell him to visit the Paint and Treenail Shop sometime,” and we drove off.

T
here are no accidents. This theory does not rule out free will; it merely states that everything that happens comes from within us. Subsequently, it was no surprise to us when two women and I met at a meeting in Northport. They were being bothered by a ghost, and I was researching stories for this book. Thus began the chapter of the most twisted, entangled mass of information I had encountered so far.

Terry and Amanda, residents of Bucksport, are mother and daughter. Mandy is a fresh-faced girl with dark blond hair, her large ocean eyes framed by strong bones leading down to a healthy jaw. A full mouth expands into a smile that would not go unnoticed by any teenage lad I know.

She has been having horrible dreams about a faceless woman crying for help underwater. In the dreams Mandy, with her boyfriend in scuba gear behind her, reaches out to help the woman, but to no avail. She describes the woman as fiftyish with dirty blond hair and an old-fashioned dress with buttons open at the bosom. The recurrent nightmare persisted to such a degree that the girl asked her mother for help. “Mom, I have to find out who this woman is.”

Terry, a bright little energetic hairdresser, took on the case. Together mother and daughter dug into historical records and asked a lot of questions around town. Through an old newspaper article that included a picture, they determined that Sally Weir was the woman. The description of her burial place was so confusing, however, that no one could tell them where to look for it. Her place of burial was not the only confusing issue. The manner of her death was as bizarre as it was bewildering. At our meeting they asked me to join the search. I agreed, and the following is what we learned.

Sally Weir, divorcee and hard-working woman of the late 1800s, found that her only means of support in the town of Bucksport was employment as a domestic. Mrs. Milo and the Bolder brothers were her chief employers. Sally, who bore a striking resemblance to Amanda, especially about the jaw, had talents above and beyond the role of chambermaid, and here the resemblance ends. Her mind encompassed the man's world of politics, legal matters, and illegal matters such as bootlegging and prostitution. She gave advice on all of these subjects, usually with a sense of humor and a thin cigar stuck in her mouth.

Sally was the life of the party September 17, 1898, the night of a poker game held at Mrs. Milo's house. After much drinking and guffawing by the four male players, she laughingly acknowledged herself as the “stakes” of the game. Then this fifty-two-year-old good-looker went about her business. She would soon be the death of the party.

Let's take a look at the partygoers. Terry found out that they included two lawyers, the Bolder brothers; Tom Treelee, a store owner; and Ed Finn, a town selectman. These men formed a cardplaying club that met every Saturday. They also formed part of a group of men engaged in the bootlegging and possible prostitution trade of a local tavern.

Tom Bolder was the more vibrant of the brothers. You wouldn't want to go against him in a courtroom; his brilliant oratory would beat you every time. He was also a bit of a rogue, especially since he'd been widowed, and when he got drunk he could out-talk and out-punch any of the lot. George was older, and protective of his brother. It was his self-appointed task to cover up whenever Tom messed up. Ed Finn was a merchant and family man; Treelee was a good man, not very bright.

There are three versions to the next part of the story. One is that after the poker game, Sally left Mrs. Milo's house with sixty-five dollars that she had just been paid. She then purchased a two-cent cheroot at Bogg's Store and went across the street to the Bolders', where she did some light housework for them. Again she was paid. While on her way back through the brush to Mrs. Milo's (for she did not want to leave the old lady alone that night), either one of two things happened. She was accosted by an unknown attacker who killed her for the money, or she committed suicide.

The second version is that Sally was killed at Mrs. Milo's house, the night of the poker game, and dragged through the overgrowth to the spot where she was located eighteen days later.

Our version states that Sally had aroused the angry and/or sexual passions of Tom Bolder, winner of the poker game. She left Mrs. Milo's to replenish the supply of her favorite smokes, and Tom followed. They may have stopped at Tom's house for small talk or the pillow talk that was supposedly the prize at the end of the game. In any case, they left there and walked through the brush in continuance of whatever they had started in the house. Tom's anger got the better of him and he murdered Sally not for money, because he had plenty of that. He killed her because she knew enough about his underhanded dealings in town to have him arraigned, should she desire revenge. Maybe he got too rough with her sexually, and she threatened to spill the beans.

This version is the one we cling to, because of the undisputed state of her body. The authorities found the left ear (everything she heard) totally severed, as well as her mouth (whatever she could tell). No doubt as to a crime of passion. The bones in front of the left ear were gone, and a portion of her upper and lower jaws and cheekbone were not only broken, but broken off and missing.

Also, circulation of the first version enforces a robbery motive, while the second version puts at least four people under equal suspicion. We believe that these tales were concocted as part of a giant coverup to protect a prominent community citizen.

When Sally's body was lifted to be put on the morgue cart, her head fell off and had to be boxed separately. The skull, badly fractured and sharply nicked in four places, was used at the trial as evidence of murder. After the trial it was placed in the Ellsworth Courthouse safe, where it remained untouched by human hands. No one had opened that box since 1898. We were the first to investigate the small piece of mutilated head.

The clerk of the court told us who took the rap for the crime: simple-minded Tom Treelee. He was paid a tidy sum for his services. No one could tell us what became of Mr. Treelee. It is ironic that his surname is engraved on the cornerstone of the courthouse, this monument to the pursuit of justice.

When I turned over the skull to check out the back of it, Terry choked with fear. There on a seam going down the back was wedged a brown hair. Underneath it were about eleven short blond hairs, sticking straight out of the skull. Terry, having studied cosmetology, told us that hair needs living tissue to subsist. She could not believe that we were witnessing healthy human hair on a ninety-year-old skull. Maybe this was Sally's way of telling us that in some sense she was still “alive.” The whole DA's office came down for a look.

This incident was an impetus for discovering the truth about the rest of her body. Was it buried alongside her Weir in-laws in the town cemetery? There is a gravestone bearing her name, but we think not. Was it buried in a crypt by the lake? It seemed a likely location, since townspeople have always spoken of a female ghost wisping about Silver Lake on foggy evenings.

We all walked down to the lake and were immediately drawn to it. There was an old crypt lodged in a small incline, but we disregarded it because we were drawn to the lake itself. Terry said that when she was a kid, she was always afraid to skate on a certain part of the lake—not because of thin ice, but because that area creeped her. Amanda had come here twice before, in search of Sally.

My attention focused on an area of the lake right in front of us, about fifty yards out. Every time I looked at that spot, thunder rolled. It was not cloudy, nor did it ever storm the rest of the day. Mandy drew agitated breaths. We threw a stick in the water. It pointed directly to the spot.

Why would Sally be underwater? Convinced of our intuitions, we went back to the Historical Museum in town. On one of the old brown walls hung a map that described a cemetery where Silver Lake now stands. In 1930 the new Bucksport factory needed that tract of land for water supply. The plant hastily dug up whatever bodies it could, and placed them ashore in various crypts, before making its man-made reservoir. In the process, it must have overlooked Mrs. Weir.

Today she cries out to have her body reunited with her imprisoned skull. Only a judge's decision can release it. While driving past Silver Lake for the last time that day, we spied the most dominant gravestone in the cemetery on the hill overlooking the lake. It was inscribed with the name “Tom Bolder.” Perhaps and rightly so, it is also his fate to be witness to the haunting figure of Sally Weir stalking Silver Lake.

I
t is scary enough for a human being to witness a forest fire racing down a mountain towards his home. Imagine a poor animal in this circumstance, its sharp instincts smelling nothing but smoke, fear, and confusion all about her. Such was the case of Willie Cunningham's cat in the 1947 fire that devastated Bar Harbor.

Bar Harbor, a summer resort of affluent rusticators since the 1890s, awoke the morning of October 21 to a column of smoke that had turned into a major conflagration. Having started in the area of the dump, it had jumped outside the fire line, its flames lapping the over-dry trees of the autumn drought. It snapped and crackled out of control to such an extent that the Parisian newspapers picked up the story.

By the twenty-first, five fire departments and two hundred soldiers from the Bangor army base were working to stop the disaster. A crew of native residents added its strength to the effort. When they saw some stray sparks land on a barn roof, burst it into flames and shoot embers into the parched woods beyond, they felt grim. In that instant the fire had begun to move uphill, away from the sea.