Ghosts of the SouthCoast (13 page)

If you believe these stories, you'd think UMD was the second coming of Dana Barrett's apartment building from
Ghostbusters,
and that the architect was Ivo Shandor. So what is the truth? The campus was designed by Paul Rudolph, a student of the Brutalist movement that features sharply angled concrete structures as part of its general design. Rudolph also designed City
Hall in Boston and the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, D.C., and neither of those places is accused of being the gates of hell.

When I was a student at UMD in the mid- to late 1990s, I was already hearing tales about how the architect had leapt from the campanile. In actuality, Rudolph died of cancer in 1997, after years of exposure to asbestos.

While this book intentionally steers clear of hauntings of private residences, there is one intriguing SouthCoast case that has come to public light in recent years.

In the book
Our Demons, Our Forefathers: Ghostly Encounters in a Sleepy New England Town,
coauthors Thomas DeMello and Thomas Nickerson share their experiences growing up in Westport and as a Native American spirit with bad intentions plagued the DeMello family at two different residences within the town. The stories are so incredible that they may seem unbelievable—until you consider the reputations that both authors are putting on the line in telling their story. Nickerson is an English teacher at New Bedford High School, and DeMello is a police officer for the City of Fall River. As we all learned when we were children, if there are two kinds of people you can trust, they are teachers and police officers.

The icehouse is located along the shores of North Watuppa Pond, which supplies Fall River with its drinking water. North Watuppa Pond drains into South Watuppa Pond, and the two are on the border of Westport and Fall River. The icehouse was built in 1864, and the stone building was used to keep chunks of ice from the frozen pond of the winter in order to provide blocks of ice for residents' iceboxes in the summer.

The rumor is that the icehouse burned in a fire, the result of arson while child laborers toiled inside and were unable to escape, but others say it merely crumbled after years of neglect, and the fires were part of the strange incidents that took place in subsequent years. Either way, it has developed a reputation not only for being haunted but also for being a spot in which rituals and animal mutilations are conducted for nefarious purposes. Reports of bloodstained walls and pentagrams drawn on the floor are also common.

If this type of negative activity is going on, the energy could be easily trapped by the remaining fieldstone within the structure. Perhaps that's why many of the ghost stories surrounding the icehouse feature angry spirits attempting to drive visitors away. There are even reports of large black dogs with red eyes—or hellhounds, as they are known in folklore—chasing people from the site.

In the late 1700s, there was a significant number of blacks living in Dartmouth. Part of the reason was because of its more tolerant Quaker attitude—in stark contrast to the Puritans—but also because of the proximity of Dartmouth and Westport to Newport, Rhode Island, the hub of the northern slave trade.

In 1780, seven of these black residents asked to be granted the right to vote. They were already tax-paying citizens and Revolutionary War veterans, and they felt they deserved the same rights as white men. Their petition was denied by the town; but in 1783, slavery was declared illegal in Massachusetts, and even if they couldn't vote, at least the black residents of Dartmouth were free—or so they thought.

According to legend, one sea captain living in the vicinity of what is now Cornell Road in Westport took exception to the government telling him whether he had the right to own slaves. Slaves were not only an integral part of his crew, but he also viewed them as inferior beings. Instead of allowing his slaves to become freemen, he instead murdered them by drowning each of them in a basin kept in his cellar. Subsequent residents of the property report phantom splashing sounds in the basement and say that any water left down there evaporates at a quickened pace, as if some unseen force wants to be rid of the water as a reminder of something horrible.

Now more than two hundred years later, the spirits of these slaves still roam the property where they died, unable to achieve freedom from the sea captain's grasp, even in death.

Approach any SouthCoast resident and ask them to name a nearby haunted location, and it's a sure thing that a good majority of them will mention, without a moment's hesitation, “the house next to White's.”

What they are referring to is a rather nondescript home that was situated just to the east of White's of Westport, a landmark function facility along Route 6. Visible from the highway that leads from Westport into Fall River, it sat abandoned for many years as its legend continued to grow until it recently burned down.

Located near a cemetery, its haunted legend suggested the house had actually been built over a Native American burial ground that may have already been cursed before it had been desecrated by a white man's dwelling. It seems as though everyone in the area knows someone who used to live there and has a tale to tell about apparitions of Indians parading through the house, unseen hands gripping at them from under the bed or strange noises emitting from the house, even after the home was vacant.

Teenagers and thrill seekers who approached the house in its later years would often report a general heaviness surrounding the property, an oppressive and unwelcoming feeling that would strengthen as you got closer to the front door. Those brave enough to peek in its windows reported seeing macabre sights such as coffins lined up along a far wall.

In actuality, the home was vacant because it was purchased by a nearby funeral parlor as storage for their extra inventory. That may account for the coffins but not for the rest of the activity reported. The legend has grown to such proportions that, for many, it will always be known as the SouthCoast's most infamous haunted house.

Fall River has always had a bit of an identity problem. The city began as part of Ye Freeman's Purchase in 1659, originally a part of Freetown before breaking out on its own in 1803 under the name of Fall River, named for the Quequechan River that runs through it.
Quequechan,
in Wampanoag, means “falling river,” as it has eight falls within its run to Mount Hope Bay.

However, in 1804, the town changed its name to Troy and would remain that way for the next thirty years, before reverting back to the Fall River name in 1834.

Until the textile boom of the early 1800s that would carry the city through almost to the twenty-first century, Fall River always struggled with who it was as a community. Located practically equidistant from both New Bedford
and Providence, Rhode Island, it felt tugs from both sides. It wasn't until August 4, 1892, that the city had its defining moment, and that moment would eventually become known as the Fall River tragedy. Now, the city will be forever linked with Lizzie Borden, the young woman who allegedly took an ax and killed her father and stepmother.

Of course, Fall River is a place rich in history and culture and is a lot more than just a pair of grisly ax murders that still stand unsolved. A prime example of that is the Quequechan Club on North Main Street, within sight of Battleship Cove (a large collective of naval battleships and a maritime museum that remains one of Fall River's top tourist attractions) and just a stone's throw from the house where Lizzie—or someone else—changed the course of city history forever.

The Quequechan Club in Fall River once catered to the city's elite, but did it also have a seedy underbelly?

The Quequechan Club, or Q-Club, was organized by a group of nine men on November 22, 1894, and featured some of the most respected and wealthiest members of Fall River Society. They purchased the mansion on North Main, known then as the William Mason Estate, as their clubhouse. The house itself had been built in 1861. After extensive renovations within the Mason mansion, the club purchased Dr. Hubert Wilbur's adjacent property next door and opened it in 1920 as the Ladies' Annex. A bowling alley was built in the basement of the main clubhouse and is still in use today, home to the longest-existing bowling league on the East Coast.

Although extensive records were kept of members, not much is known about what actually went on at the club during its early days.

Dan Silva was already a longtime club member when he purchased it with two other members in 1999. He's since become the Quequechan's sole owner, and although he had some unusual experiences while conducting his own renovations on the property, he never considered it haunted until a paranormal team uncovered some rather convincing evidence.

Under Dan's ownership, the club has retained its elegance while becoming much more affordable for the average blue-collar citizen of Fall River. He built a casual sports pub in the basement, yet it still offers fine dining (with a tie and jacket required) in the main dining room. An electrician by trade, Dan is a straightforward guy and runs his club in much the same manner. Yet even he started to question his beliefs when sitting at the bar with a friend who claimed to see a woman in a Victorian dress walk by. While Dan didn't see it himself, his trust in his friend's word and the pale expression on his face convinced Dan that his friend had truly seen something.

When Eric LaVoie of DART approached him about possibly conducting a paranormal investigation there (Eric, like me, thinks activity can be found in historic buildings even if it hasn't been reported or experienced), Dan agreed, and Eric began to interview the staff about their experiences there. The kitchen staff spoke of a bell usually used to summon servers to pick up their orders that would often ring when nobody was near it. This is the type of bell a school teacher might have on their desk, which requires the pushing of a button at the top to activate the hammer on the inside of the bell.

Other activity was reported as well, and on a preliminary walk-through, Eric picked up other bits and pieces of activity before returning for a more thorough investigation a short time later. In addition to personal experiences and a few strange orbs of light, he captured EVPs with such claims as “call
the doctor” (perhaps Dr. Wilbur from next door?), “stop it” and “get out of here.” He also asked if a spirit was present that it make a knocking sound. Two distinct knocks were heard, and that was enough to convince Dan to allow further investigation.

Eric invited
Spooky Southcoast,
Luann Joly of Whaling City Ghosts, Andrew Lake of Greenville Paranormal Research and EVP researcher Mike Markowicz to join him in a subsequent investigation, which resulted in even more evidence. In addition to many more intriguing EVPs, we also got some solid evidence from a device known as a Shack Hack.

In the 1990s, an engineer named Frank Sumption began messing around with radios he believed would help him communicate with extraterrestrials and beings of a higher realm. Sumption told me that he didn't know why he built these devices, but he was compelled to do so. He later found out Thomas Edison had been working on a similar device that he called the Telephone to the Dead before he passed away. Although Frank mostly communicated with what he believes are alien beings, ghost researchers began using the device to talk to spirits.

Known as Frank's Boxes, the devices are essentially radios that sweep through all the frequencies without stopping on any particular one. The theory is that the spirit grabs whatever words are out there that it needs to express itself. The Shack Hack is a stripped-down version of a Frank's Box, made by removing the “mute” circuit from a thirty-dollar Radio Shack portable AM/FM radio. By cutting that circuit and pressing “seek,” the radio will continue scanning through the frequencies without stopping when it receives a strong signal.

At the Quequechan Club, we brought the Shack Hack up to the third floor, which Dan was in the process of renovating into either offices or small rooms for lodging. The design of the room made us think that perhaps, at some point, the upper floor of the club had been used to entertain its male membership while the women were next door at the Ladies' Annex. The spirit that came through confirmed that suspicion, claiming to be Marie, a prostitute who was kept at the club for mobsters that came down from Providence.

During the investigation, we tried a few different tactics to draw more responses out of Marie. First, we had Luann, who is sensitive to spirits, stay on the third floor alone and communicate with the spirit in a kind and understanding way. Through both EVP and the Shack Hack, Marie was
very open with Luann and spoke of abuse suffered at the hands of the men who kept her there.