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Haunted Travels: Salem, Massachussetts

photo of The House of Seven Gables, in Salem, Massachusetts,c. 1915, courtesy of the Detroit Publishing Co.

The House of Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, c. 1915, courtesy of the Detroit Publishing Co. Available through the Library of Congress.

 

Most people who think of Salem, Massachusetts think of the infamous Salem Witch Trials (there’s a museum there, dedicated to the trials) and the city and its residents have definitely capitalized on that. There are additional museums, memorials, and tours of the area, including ghost walks, walking tours, food tours, and harbor cruises devoted to the topic. October includes two major festivals. Salem Haunted Happenings  is a celebration of Halloween that lasts the entire month, and Festival of the Dead focuses on spirits and the “mysteries of death”, witha Salem Witches’ Halloween Ball on October 30. Whether you’re visiting for a more secular celebration or something witchier, Salem has it for you, especially in October.

Salem is also the hometown of Nathaniel Hawthorne, best known for that required reading we all had to do in high school, The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne also wrote The House of Seven Gables, named for a real place, the House of Seven Gables (which actually does not have seven gables, but does have some unique architectural features, according to Duncan Ralston, the author of Ghostland). It has also been a settlement house for immigrants and is now a historic site and community resource. The historic site does have tours, and it’s suggested you book in advance. A look at the website shows that it is not nearly as creepy-looking as you’d expect from a hundreds-year-old haunted house.

There are a couple of ghost tours that visit the house, the Requiem for Salem Walking Ghost Tour , and The Ghosts of Salem Walking Tour.

If you want to see more than the spooky side to Salem, it’s been around long enough that many other historical people and places are associated with it, but October is the time for haunted travels there.

For some books you can take along on your trip, check out this book list.

Posted on October 2, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Liar: Memoir of a Haunting by E.F. Schraeder

cover art for Liar: Memoir of a Haunting

Liar: Memoir of a Haunting by E.F. Schraeder

Omnium Gatherum, 2021

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1949054347

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

 

Alex and Rainey, a lesbian couple ready to escape their home in the hostile Midwest, embark on a long process of visiting Vermont and searching for a house so they can move there. Each house they visit has an ominous feel or dark history… that is, until they visit the Sugar House, a beautiful but isolated property with the primary disadvantage being that it is in a cell phone black hole. Together, they decide to buy the house and move there. Or do they? Told in alternating points of view, piecing together what actually happened is difficult to do. Rainey talks about having misgivings over the house and Alex talking her into it, with the understanding that they’ll live there together. Alex says she never planned to move there and talks about Rainey saying she wanted the peace and quiet of an off-grid life. Rainey finds herself living there alone as Alex travels for work and cares for her mother, who has dementia, in their hometown. It turns out that vacationing in Vermont as a couple is much different than being a lesbian living alone in an insular community and an isolated area, without a reliable way to communicate with the outside world, and gun-toting men frequently knocking on your door to ask if you are home alone and have a working phone. Rainey, who has worked hard to deal with past trauma, finds that it is emerging again. She develops insomnia, becomes obsessed with the trees over the house and local disappearances, and begins to sound more and more paranoid and lost. Despite regular calls, she isn’t getting though to either her therapist or to Alex about how disorienting and disturbing both her exterior and interior lives are becoming.

 

Alex, tied up with work, travel, and caring for her mother, is discovering the Rainey she knew is changing into someone who is exhausting to talk to and deal with. Alex is becoming frustrated– how terrible can it really be to live in peace and quiet with nature all around you? Her weekends in Vermont are no longer relaxing: they’re taken up with chores. When Rainey suddenly goes quiet and Alex receives a phone call from a neighbor, she rushes to the Sugar House to search for Rainey and finds and reads her journal for clues. On Rainey’s mysterious return, they both acknowledge that there is some kind of presence in the Sugar House.

 

You would think that these major miscommunications and red flag behaviors would be a death knell for a relationship. Rainey, a humanities professor, gets meta when Alex suggests writing about the experience as a haunted house story, noting that in haunted house stories it’s practically a trope for the story to document the fracturing of a self or of a relationship. Certainly we do see the cracks into Rainey’s sense of self, but while Rainey and Alex’s relationship struggles, the two of them never talk about breaking things off. Rather than discuss what they’re thinking or feeling with each other, they paper it over. People in relationships do this, but it was so frustrating that nothing was resolved.

 

Schraeder writes with vivid descriptions of the outdoors. I could almost see the snow and hear the aspens shaking. I did feel like the ending got a little confusing, and feel like it could have been fleshed out a little more. Rainey’s thoughts and experiences as she went down the rabbit hole seemed very believable. Liar: Memoir of a Haunting is definitely a different take on the haunted house story.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on July 13, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Echoes of Home: A Ghost Story by M.L. Rayner

Echoes of Home: A Ghost Story by M.L. Rayner

Question Mark Press, 2020

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8553179045

Available:  Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition ( Amazon.com )

 

Les Wills is alone in the world. His brothers aren’t keeping in touch, he’s just buried his mother, and he’s depressed by it all. One night his brother Jonathan unexpectedly turns up, gifts him the deed to a remote cottage in the Scottish Highlands, and tells him that if he wants it he’ll need to be there by the next evening. With nothing keeping him, Les optimistically takes off to his new property. Jonathan’s description of the cottage wasn’t exactly accurate, though, and instead of a sales agent meeting him with the keys to a cozy cottage, he discovers a dark, chilly, isolated residence, luckily with the keys in the door.

 

After an uneasy night in his new home, Elphin Cottage, Les drives into town for supplies and breakfast, where he meets Michael Coull, an elderly resident who warns him that the cottage has a “dark past” and that many locals have seen things on the property “they dare not speak of.” Although he is entranced by the beauty of the area, Les starts to wonder if he is seeing and hearing things: a mysterious figure at the edge of a brook, tapping on the window that has no apparent cause, flickering lights in an abandoned cottage, and voices; he has vivid, unsettling dreams.

 

Proving to have the worst survival skills ever, Les wanders the area on his own despite poor weather, an unfamiliar environment, a house clearly unprepared for winter, and the feeling that he is being watched and his home invaded in his absence by… something. His terror is enough for him to flee Elgin Cottage on foot in a blizzard through several feet of snow and through a wooded area in hopes of reaching the closest inn. While there, he once again encounters Coull, who finally gives him the details of Elphin Cottage’s dark past and how to free it of its hauntings. M.L Rayner took inspiration for the story and names for the characters behind the haunting of Elphin Cottage and the surrounding area from his own family genealogy. Although it takes place at the time of the Irish Potato Blight, the story is set in the Scottish Highlands, which I did not know was also affected.

 

Rayner’s lyrical prose brings the remote environment to life, and draws vivid pictures of the starving families and blighted crops during the crop failures that led to the deaths of the ghosts haunting Elphin Cottage. The cruelty of the landowner towards his tenants and the complicity of his guests is heartwrenching.  Rayner also does a great job of creating creepy and suspenseful situations and making the reader question the mundane: did the door blow open on its own, or was it something supernatural? Les, the narrator, is less compelling, and it’s only through the relationship he builds with Michael Coull that we get any sense of him.

 

The unique backstory and creepy, suspenseful atmosphere make Echoes of Home worth checking out.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on June 11, 2021 by , Reply
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