College students are well known for their recklessness, and occasionally that recklessness ends in tragedy. Imagine a group of young women. Frolicking together outside on their college campus. One of them trips and falls into a pillar outside a building under construction and is killed. The girl is buried, the tragedy contended with. The years pass. Sometimes, even still, scratching and moaning are heard from the pillar, the trapped girl bemoaning the sudden end to her short life. This is just one of many ghost stories featured on the Northampton version of Valley Ghost Tours, the only ghost tour available in the area.
Annie Keithline, a recent UMass graduate, is originally from Rhode Island. She was inspired to start ghost tours in the Pioneer Valley after seeing so many in other areas and realizing that, despite a wealth of local lore, there was no such tour available in Northampton or Amherst. She dove into research, both in libraries and in the community, and began her own.
When she first started out, in addition to her library research, she spent a lot of time walking up and down Main Street, asking business owners and store clerks whether their premises were haunted. She got a variety of responses, she says, ranging from being kicked out to eager tales from people who seemed to have been waiting for someone to ask. She also gleaned stories from locals and former students. Once she heard the same basic story repeated multiple times by people who didn’t know each other, she considered it verified as a part of local legend.
For instance, there’s the banker who haunts his former workplace, now an Urban Outfitters — an apparition that has startled several employees. There’s also an auditory phenomenon that occurs where Main Street diverges into Elm Street and West Street — the occasional rumble of a horse cart — the explanation of which has caused many locals on the tour to exclaim “Oh, that’s what that is!”
The dates of ghost stories on the tour range from the Revolutionary War to as recently as 2006. Many are at least a century old, but others are more recent, and just as active. None of them, however, has ever seemed to threaten anyone on the tours, even those who have reported intense encounters.
In addition to researching the ghost stories themselves — which you’ll have to take the tour to hear — Keithline has made it a point to become well-versed in what she calls “ghost theory.”
“So many fascinating things have happened here other than it being haunted,” she says, and proceeds to deliver an incredibly compelling monologue on the biography of Johnny Burgoyne, whose ghost allegedly haunts Sessions House at Smith. Burgoyne is one of the most famous ghosts on the tour, and a part of the area’s culture going back centuries, but many of the stories on the tour are far more recent. Keithline’s repertoire is constantly evolving, based in part on the stories visitors and locals tell her, and the responses they have to the sites and haunts they see on the tour.
She now has two other tour guides helping her run the tours, which are every Wednesday through Sunday night from 7:30-9 in both Northampton and Amherst, from the summer through November 1st. Though the tours are only an hour and a half long, they are packed with stories, and Keithline says even groups of strangers often bond quickly, sharing personal stories and experiences as the night goes on.
Sometimes, those experiences stem from the tours themselves. Once, two women called her after a tour to report that one of them had been “semi-possessed” by a ghost, who wanted to use her vocal cords to communicate. Keithline doesn’t know if it was a real possession, but says the women regarded it as a positive experience, in which they were able to help the ghost move on, and, she says, she now uses it to add a note of hope to that part of the tour. She says that the tours often bond people together very quickly, making them feel comfortable enough to recount their own, often very emotional, ghost stories — and that she’s often sad to see a group go at the end of an evening.
Passageway to the past
Keithline says she thinks people are drawn to ghost stories. Part of it, she says, is the natural human tendency to gossip— who was this person? What terrible thing happened to them? Sometimes, she says, it’s schadenfreude; other times, it’s empathy. “Think about the number of ghost stories about young women in love,” she says. “Love makes them endure past death,” she adds. “It’s a way of dignifying human emotion.” Lost or thwarted love is one of the most common themes of ghost stories in general, as is sudden, tragic death, especially of a young person or child. With several colleges in the area, there is no shortage of those tales, verified or invented as warnings or ways of processing the new threats of adulthood. Conversely, many of the ghosts on the tour seem tied to the places they haunt by years of routine, such as the banker in Urban Outfitters, still devoted to his work.
Ghost stories also supply a direct link to the past. People are fascinated by history, Keithline says, but it often feels impersonal. “Ghosts embody history,” she says, and ghost stories allow people to feel a personal connection to the past absent from more formal and conventional descriptions. She mentions how, centuries ago, the Mill River was moved from the center of town to its current location due to the flooding it caused and the deaths that ensued. She says people still report apparitions of flood victims that follow the river’s former path, so that it is as though the river itself has a ghost. Ghosts, whether imagined or real, allow us to feel an immediate access to the past, as though we are being taken into confidence— and that is a difficult story to resist.
Not all legends are as simple as their stories, though. Taking the example of the British general Johnny Burgoyne and Lucy Hunt, the star-crossed Revolutionary War lovers whose spirits are supposed to haunt Sessions House, once the Hunt family home in which Burgoyne was quartered as a prisoner. Keithline carefully presents a number of complications to the predominant narrative. “Well, first of all, she was 17 and he was 55,” she says. Another point to consider is that the “secret staircase” where the lovers allegedly met couldn’t have been very secret, given that Lucy’s father had grown up in the house, and that the walls were very thin. Keithline suggests that the Hunts might have believed Lucy and Johnny’s relationship to be politically advantageous in the event that the British won the Revolutionary War. Finally, she adds this tragic coda to the story. “People talk about it like the ghosts appear together, but they never do,” she says. “And the age difference has been reversed.” Johnny was sent back to England when he was in his fifties, but Lucy married another man and lived in that house until she was an old woman. Johnny almost certainly died first. Now, sightings of the two ghosts seemed to be reported in two year rotations, Johnny and then Lucy, never together. A sadder story? Certainly. But also, perhaps, a more interesting one.•
Contact Emily Atkinson at emilyatkinson32@gmail.com.
The Northampton ghost tour meets between Thornes and the E. John Gare parking garage, and the Amherst tour (which I’m told also has aliens) meets by the fountain in Sweetser Park, across from the Black Sheep restaurant. Both tours run through Nov. 1, Wednesday-Sunday, 7:30-9:00 p.m. Adults, $17; students, seniors, and children over 5, $12. www.valleyghosttours.com.
