#haunted new england

[skotchkooler]

[my-darling-boy]

Mina— Connecticut, 1970s

[melvolkman]

Just before December’s first snow.

Instagram: @melvolkman

[foxspit]

Me in New Jersey 2018

[ipomoea-batatas]

I absolutely want to hear about the extremely cursed lighthouse 👀

YEAH BABEYYYYY CURSED LIGHTHOUSE HERE WE GOOO

Ok so this lighthouse is called Minot's Ledge Light. Here it is today.

You may notice that unlike most other lighthouses, it's in the MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN.

It's about a mile or so out from the shore, southeast of Boston Harbor (off the coast of what’s called the South Shore) and it's built into a rock ledge that's just under the water (Minot’s Ledge, after which it’s named. “Minot” was a merchant who lost a very valuable shipment there. Seems kinda fuckin rude to name the ledge after him but whatever).

This ledge, and other rocky ledges nearby, made the area SUPER dangerous before the lighthouse was built. FORTY ships were lost there in less than a decade in the 19th century.

Oh, and folks of an ~age~ might recognize this lighthouse from this famous photo from the blizzard of '78:

Just to give you an idea of what the weather conditions can be like in the area. (Is this foreshadowing? PROBABLY)

Anyway, building a lighthouse here was obviously high priority. There was a bit of an exposé on the negligence of the Lighthouse Establishment (the gov. dept that was in charge of lighthouses at the time), and the construction of Minot’s Ledge was part of a push to show that the department was taking things more seriously.

As the lighthouse needed to be built ON the ledge, some cutting-edge, never-before-seen lighthouse design was in order. (More foreshadowing?? MAYBE???)

Isn’t it cute??

(If you notice that it looks nothing like the modern-day lighthouse above...no you don’t. Don’t ruin the story for the rest of the class)

The problem is, Minot’s Ledge itself is only exposed for a few hours at low tide, which obviously presented some problems. No one died building it, but all the equipment was washed away once, and people ALMOST died when they were swept away by currents.

It took years to finish because of the tricky conditions. It was finally finished and lighted on New Year’s in 1850.

It was obvious right away that this design was...not it. The lighthouse would sway violently in rough conditions. (One of the keepers told Henry David Thoreau that bad winds would literally rock their plates off the table.)

The first keeper wrote to the government reporting unsafe conditions, but was ignored. He resigned in October of that year.

The new keeper and his two assistants also reported dangerous conditions. Storms kept weakening the braces, and the structure had to be repaired often. However, every time the authorities came out to inspect the lighthouse it was ALWAYS a calm day, and they were like “idk seems fine?” And continued to ignore safety concerns.

In April of 1851, a storm had kicked up. The keeper had gone to the mainland to restock, but he didn’t make it back before the storm started in earnest. The two assistant lighthouse keepers were left at the light.

This was a BAD storm—nearly a hurricane—that went on for a week. By the fifth day, it looked bleak enough that the assistant keepers released a message in a bottle with their last words.

On day six, the legs of the structure began to fail one at a time. When there were only three legs left, the keepers began to ring the alarm bell continuously for as long as the lighthouse still stood.

By morning, it was completely lost to the ocean.

The two lighthouse keepers’ bodies were later recovered—one had washed ashore nearby, and the other was found on a nearby island a few hundred feet from the mainland. The latter keeper HADN’T died of drowning—he survived and managed to swim to the island, thinking he’d made it to the mainland, only to die of exhaustion and exposure.

Their message in a bottle was found two days later on the North Shore of Boston Harbor. It read: “The beacon cannot last any longer. She is shaking a good three feet each way as I write. God bless you all.”

Here are the ghosty bits:

1) People still say you can hear the bell ringing during bad storms. Once the lighthouse was rebuilt (properly, out of stone this time, which took YEARS—they had to start over at least once when a ship crashed into the structure and took the whole thing out), apparently they had a hard time getting keepers to stay on. They reported hearing the fog bell ringing at odd times, and ghostly figures in the lantern room. Most didn’t make it a year.

2) The lighthouse was automated pretty much as soon as the technology was available, removing the need for lighthouse keepers to live there. But passing ships still reported seeing a man hanging off the side, calling out.

Most people reported that the figure couldn’t be understood, but one Portuguese sailor said that the man was yelling for help in Portuguese. Sure enough, one of the two assistant keepers who perished in the tragedy was Portuguese.

So that’s the story of the cute little “I Love You” lighthouse and the horrible shit that happened there. Sources: This article

This one too

And obviously, Wikipedia. What am I, the pope

[glu3d]

Rockport, MA...taken on 11.21.23 with Fujifilm X-T3

[isleep-ingraves]

Haunted Overload (Lee, NH).

[horror-aesthete]

The Haunted Palace, 1963, dir. Roger Corman

[pwhlboston21]

EMILY CLARK AND JAMIE BOURBONNAIS WERE AT THE SAME ERAS TOUR AS I WAS LAST NIGHT WTF?!?!

I’m actually so fuming because it looks like I was super close the them too, we must have been in the same block… 😩

[malorisaurus]

Same energy

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

On request from @hid3ko​ and a few others, here are some pictures I took a week or two ago in the town in which Shirley Jackson lived and wrote, North Bennington, Vermont.

The Park-McCullough House, a huge Victorian mansion much like Hill House and the Blackwood House (with allowances made for the fact that Jackson was writing in a period when Victorian architecture was in intense disfavor and thus describes those houses in a much more sinister way than we see this house now). The Park-McCullough House’s history is pretty different to the houses in Jackson’s novels, but it’s from the same time period and, like them, is behind several layers of trees and bushes and difficult to see from the road.

Crappy old buildings and lawn/farm equipment much like some of the stuff Merricat has to walk past in order to get to town in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

One of the roads leading away from the village center.

Powers Market, which has been in the middle of North Bennington for at least a century, still has a very old-fashioned layout, and is almost certainly the inspiration for the sinister grocery store where the first chapter of We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes place. In it I bought a cup of black tea, some dried apricots, and some crackers.

The interior of Powers Market, with the face of someone who was looking directly at me obscured for her privacy.

Hangsaman is also fairly obviously set in the Bennington area, but the most obviously distinct setting in it is the college and I didn’t go onto the Bennington College campus the other week.

I hope these pictures help others visualize the setting and ambience for these wonderful novels!

[perdido]

...a sense of dread.

©5/21/24 Eduardo Mueses, All Rights Reserved

(Click on Image to see it bigger)

[roadtripnewengland]

The Gold Brook, or “Emily’s Bridge” in Stowe, Vermont. The bridge was built in 1844, and it’s single lane crosses 50 feet over the Gold Brook to connect a country dirt road with Vermont’s Route 100.

.

Legend has it the bridge is haunted by Emily, a jilted lover- who may scratch a passing car, or who’s ghostly whisper might be heard over the sound of the babbling brook below. #stowevt #coveredbridge #hauntedplaces #ghoststories #EmilysBridge

[melvolkman]

Happy September 🍂

Instagram — @melvolkman

[foxspit]

Essi by @foxspit

[pseudobohemianlosers]

my qualifications for being a shirley jackson heroine:

born and raised in new england

homoerotic tendencies

constant impending sense of doom

familiar with the local haunted houses

penchant for the strange and bizarre