Ghost Stories

Burned House

An itinerantmusician tends to keep odd hours and make strange friends. In myteens and early twenties, I used to play in backwatercoffeehouses around suburban and rural Massachusetts. I lived inthe historic town of Sudbury only a brisk walk from Longfellow'sWayside Inn and a Grist Mill, schoolhouse, and chapel of the samevintage. Just over the line in Marlboro was an old fashionedcountry store that catered to the tourist trade generated bythese sites. My friend Lee Swanson was the proprieter.

Lee was also acollector and purveyer of antiques. His private collection (likehis private life) tended to center on the occult. Lee wassomething of a scholar of local history as well. It was he, forinstance, who told me that an ancient tree that I discovered inthe woods had once been the object of considerable spiritualsignificance to the local Indians in colonial times.

The tree was alive,but just barely. Standing in the center of a large circularclearing near the crest of a small hill, it had been supportedwith cables and its immense cavities filled with cement, but noeffort will keep a tree whole beyond a certain point, and thatpoint had been reached many years ago. It had made me sad to seethe tree in such a state. I had a feeling that much else hadperished along with this ancient thing: generations of peoplewhose lives did not include intruders from across the bigwateers; their ways, practices, beliefs.

So it was the Leeand I made a nocturnal pilgrimage to the tree. The night wasmoonless, but we carried no torches. Lee is one of the few peopleI know who see as well as I do at night and has no fear the woodsat night. We went on foot as was fitting.

What had been aplace of sorrow by day became a site of power by night. The veryair tingled even when still, and when it moved, it danced andsang as if in an ancient ritual. We both stood very still, awedby the majesty of the tree by starlight.

Our spirits soaredas we headed back to the store for tea and talk. Lee told me astory of a stagecoach that had disappeared on the road we tookback at the beginning of the eighteenth century along with itsgoods and passengers, never to be seen again. As he spoke, I sawdim lights through the trees and when I turned to look closer, Icould make out the outline of windows in the distance lit only bya flickery light, probably from a fireplace, I supposed. Ithought it odd that no lights were on, and commented on it to Lee.

He looked at mewith astonishment. "You can really see that?" he asked.The next week he showed me what remained of the foundation of thehouse that had stood there but had burned to the ground in theaftermath of an Indian massacre.