Alexandersmap

    Tag: Harvard

    • Friday the 13th and Ghost Stories

      Here we are again, at a point where the days and numbers on the calendar align and give us another Friday the 13th.  In general good things have come my way on a day many people associate with bad luck.  My son was born on a Friday the 13th, making it a very lucky day indeed.  More often than not you get what you expect in life, and if you’re primed to look for the negative it’ll find you.  I’ll stick with the opposite point of view, thank you.  Optimism with a healthy dose of stoicism seems to work for me.

      I’ve written before about dancing with ghosts.  For me ghosts aren’t the creepy spirits that get annoyed that you’re in their space, they’re the people who lived in the past who’s story is all around us.  Historical figures and anonymous lives alike, all lived before we were here.  The stone wall standing alone in the woods, the old foundation on Isle of Skye left from the Clearances, the soot on the ceiling of a cave from fires long ago, and the groove worn into a stair tread; These are my ghosts. I love uncovering the stories of some person from centuries ago and visiting the place they did something memorable, and maybe their grave to remind them they aren’t forgotten.  We all want to be remembered, don’t we?  At least for a few generations.  Make the ripple last as long as possible, hopefully in a positive way.

      I’ve been bumping into the other kind of ghost stories lately.  People who encounter poltergeists.  A poltergeist wants attention, making its presence known by messing with things in “our” world, crossing some border between death and life.  Frankly I never think about the poltergeist kind of ghost.  Maybe I’m closed-minded about it, or maybe they see me dancing with other ghosts and leave me alone.  But I’ve got this stack of stories people tell me about poltergeists they’ve encountered, and after a while you have to wonder what’s real and what’s imagined.  I see good things on Friday the 13th, others see bad things; who’s right?

      Yesterday I was speaking with a Town Clerk in Connecticut.  I’d stopped to pick up a death certificate for an ancestor as a favor for my mother.  We noticed on the death certificate that this relative had died from a fall down the stairs, breaking his neck.  I joked about that house being haunted and the clerk, not missing a beat, told me about Antonio, pointing to the vault and saying he died right in there and still haunts the place. I looked in the vault and asked if he preferred Antonio or Tony.  We finished our transaction and I was on my way, with one more ghost story added to the list. I don’t know if Antonio is a poltergeist haunting the vault at Town Hall, but I do know that he tragically died in the vault at some point in history.  And people are still talking about him to this day.

      I’ve heard similar stories from separate friends about encounters at hotels in Boston and Nashville, and some good friends that insist there’s a ghost in a family home on Cape Cod.  What do I know?  I’m not in the poltergeist business.  I have no desire to stay in Lizzy Borden’s house for a night trying to bait unseen ghosts to come out and play.  No, I’m trying to bring their stories alive without all the mischief.  But now and then I do hear a whisper in the wind, feel a spirit in the air, and I give a nod to acknowledge.  Walking alone in the woods at Holy Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts in Autumn once had me thinking of Shaker ghosts.  Visiting King Philip’s Seat in Bristol, Rhode Island and spooking a hawk into flight had me hearing whispers of Metacom and the lost Pokanoket tribe as I explored the woods.  And visiting the Winter Street graveyard in Exeter, New Hampshire looking for the grave of Major General Nathaniel Folsom felt like I was being directed around to look at every other Revolutionary War hero’s grave before finding his.  I felt it that day too.

      So here we are on another Friday the 13th.  We generally get what we look for in life, and I hope today brings you good fortune.  If you happen to run into any ghosts, I hope they aren’t poltergeists – those buggers are nothing but mischief.

    • Stumbling Upon Buried Treasure

      While waiting for a taxi to the airport I scanned the wonderful old books lining the shelves at the London hotel I’d been staying in. I do this often when I have moments like this, it’s where the buried treasure is after all. I saw two books on a shelf at eye level that drew my attention; Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana Jr. and an old collection of English poems. I’d read Two Years Before The Mast several years ago at the recommendation of a friend who’s doing exactly that at the moment. I flipped through it quickly, saw the old stamps indicating it was a library book and smiled. Libraries were where I found most of my buried treasure before the Google and Amazon changed everything.

      To this day my favorite discovery was an old copy of Typee by Hermin Melville pulled at random from a university library shelf in the fall of 1984. I was a freshman then, figuring out this college thing, and fascinated with the vast rows of books I could walk through. I picked up Typee and brought it to a reading nook and read the first couple of chapters, quickly falling in love with this other world. I’d return the book and come back again and again to it in the same fashion until I finished it, never checking it out (sadly not including my name on the stamp), but finishing it nonetheless. That friend who loaned me Two Years Before The Mast in turn took my recommendation to read Typee and now has a boat named Fayaway, a compelling character in the story.

      That other book, the one on poetry? I opened to a completely random page in a completely random book in an old library book stuck on a hotel shelf in London….. so you know; random. And I read this:

      Care-Charming Sleep, thou easer of all woes,

      Brother to Death, sweetly thyself dispose

      On this afflicted prince; fall, like a cloud,

      In gentle showers; give nothing that is loud

      Or painful to his slumbers; easy, light,

      And as a purling stream, thou son of Night,

      Pass by his troubled senses; sing his pain,

      Like hollow murmuring wind or silver rain;

      Into this prince gently, oh, gently slide,

      And kiss him into slumbers like a bride! – John Fletcher

      Fletcher died in 1625. Analogies between sleep and dying are common, and Fletcher dabbling with the concept in this poem/song from 400 years ago illustrates that. We all want to gently fall asleep, and given the choice we’d likely all wish the same for our final sleep. Poetry either grabs you or it doesn’t. I haven’t made up my mind on this one, which means it’s the latter. Not everything you pick up in a book is going to be buried treasure. If it were what would be the value anyway? But there’s something to chew on here anyway.

      Two Years Before The Mast was written by a man named Richard Henry Dana Jr. after he left Harvard to regain his health after contracting measles. It’s a fascinating book that illustrates life onboard a merchant ship on a two year journey as they rounded Cape Horn to pick up cattle hides in California to haul back to Massachusetts. Seeing the book again prompted me to read a bit more about Dana, and I was struck by one part of his legacy. Dana Point, California is named after him. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Dana Point, but never made the connection to the book until today. It seems I found some buried treasure after all.