The Voice in the Cellar

Hush now. I've saved you one ghost for the way down. At the head of Frenchman Bay is the town of Sullivan, and she belongs to that town. Nelly Butler died in childbirth in seventeen ninety-seven. George Butler buried his wife, and that should have been the end of it. Two years later, the story goes, a voice started up in the cellar of Abner Blaisdell's house in Sullivan. A woman's voice. It said it was Nelly. Abner did what you'd do, and he didn't believe it, not at first. Months later, long after he'd come around, he heard his father was sick, two hundred miles away, and he asked the voice what it knew. Your father is in heaven, it said. He found out afterward that the old man had died seven days before. After that they came from all around to stand in that cellar. The Reverend Abraham Cummings, a Harvard man who didn't believe a word, set it all down, and his book prints thirty-one eyewitness accounts. Some saw her and heard nothing. Some heard her and saw nothing. And don't go thinking this was all midnight business. She came almost as often by day as by night. She was as white as the light, he wrote, as clear in a dark cellar as in the open field. She came to two or three, and then to twenty, and once to more than forty people at one time. She went nearly two miles with Abner and his daughter, moving up off the ground and talking as she went. One day she appeared in a downstairs room and the whole family ran out of the house. After that she mostly kept to the cellar, Cummings says, out of tenderness, so they'd have somewhere to go. George Butler came. They say she told him things that nobody else alive could have known. He went back up those stairs a believer. And she told George what she wanted. She wanted him married again. And she had picked the girl. It was Abner's young daughter, Lydia, the girl he had kept from George for years. Both families were against it. One retelling has Lydia saying she would not marry a man who'd been scared into proposing by a ghost. They say she tried to leave town, and the voice warned her, in front of witnesses, that it was no use running. They married in eighteen hundred. Within thirty hours of the wedding, Cummings wrote, the voice said she would have one child and then die. Marrying him didn't stop the talk. Folks said it was Lydia doing the voice. What have I done, that I must suffer all this, she said. And out of the empty air of that room a voice answered. Nothing, dear, you have done nothing. It sent her upstairs to sit on the kitchen hearth, so the company in the cellar could see it wasn't her. That same night, with George and Lydia side by side, a small light grew into the shape of a person, and it came so close that he put out his hand, and his hand passed down through it as through a body of light. There were thirteen people present, and all but two saw her, but only six or seven saw the hand. Soon after, she gave orders. A child was dug up and buried in another grave because she said so, with eighty people from four towns gathered to pray. That child, she told them, would rise at her right hand at the last day. Ten months after that wedding Lydia's child was born, and Lydia died the next day. They say in Sullivan that George took all of her clothes and piled them in a rowboat. He set them on fire, and he pushed that boat out on the outgoing tide, and the tide carried it burning down the water, right past her father's house. Abner Blaisdell stood and saw it go by. Those two men fought for the rest of their lives, and their feud broke up the Baptist church in Sullivan. Now remember that Harvard man who didn't believe a word. He met her himself in the end, or he said he did. In July of eighteen hundred and six, two people told him they'd just seen her in the field. He went out and saw a white rock, or took it for one. Three minutes later that white rock was up in the air, a globe, and it came at him and became a woman. He was afraid, he wrote, but his fear was connected with what he called ineffable pleasure. He put it all in a book, to prove the soul goes on. I've got no proof for you, one way or the other. What I've got is that bay, and a tide that goes out of it twice a day whether there's a boat on it or not. Some evenings, from the top of this mountain, the tide carries the sunset down from Sullivan, and you'd swear something out there was on fire. That was my last one, friend. If these tales kept you good company, we'd sure love a review. At the bottom, follow the signs for Hulls Cove and Bar Harbor, and I'm obliged to you for coming along.