Terror Tuesday: The Haunted Inn.

It’s time for another Terror Tuesday—so sharpen the cutlery and keep a sharp eye out for noisy neighbor kids…

As I have said before, Maine is a state haunted by ghosts. Spirits move through the gray morning mists and amongst the bleached-bone colored headstones in cemeteries that date back to Colonial times. The specters of men lost at sea drift in with the salt-scented breeze, entities glazed with moonlight and sorrow, while the shades of their waiting wives fill the night with their plaintive weeping.

Many a captain and crew departed for the depths of Davy Jones’ Locker from Maine seaports in days gone by. Some of them returned to haunt their loved ones and their homes.

One such home resides in the picturesque seaside town of Kennebunkport. The Captain Fairfield Inn is a Federal style mansion that once belonged to Captain James Fairfield, who died in 1820 at the age of 38. He spent time in Dartmoor Prison, captured by the British, during the war of 1812, along with his brother-in-law, with whom he had purchased six acres and built the mansion so that their wives might not be as lonely when their menfolk went to sea. They survived horrendous conditions only to return and die of pneumonia a short time later. Only a few years earlier, he had commissioned a portrait of himself and shipped it to his wife, but it never arrived. The ship transporting it sank, as if it were some eerie portent of the man’s impending demise. In a strange twist, sometime later a Swedish ship rescued a tube from the ocean—a tube containing the very portrait of our fate-doomed captain, and delivered it to his wife in fairly good shape.

Of such things, ghost stories are made. The home is now an Inn and many guests have reported the captain’s ghostly presence. During renovations, workmen glimpsed Fairfield hovering in a dark corner of the basement. Reports of creaking, footsteps and whispers abound.

I stayed a night in this Inn many years ago, hoping to hear a chain rattle or see a misty shape float along a darkened hallway. Like most old houses, floors creak and boards slant, causing doors to swing open if they are not properly latched. The groans and pops of cold-embedded boards and settling foundations fill the silence. Unfortunately I saw no ghosts, Captains or otherwise. Perhaps they were busy haunting elsewhere that night…

Kicking Evil’s ass one demon at a time…
THE CHLOE FILES by Howard Hopkins
In the tradition of Sookie Stackhouse and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer…
In paperback from http://www.bn.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/