It happened one evening, after the congregation had gone home. A sexton named Fuddy Van Arsdale was cleaning the meeting house on Orange Street alone when she heard someone heavy cross the floor toward her—and saw no one at all. She began to whisper a hymn. The steps stopped where they were, and she never heard them leave. From then on, she greeted the Rev. Seth Swift by name every time she came through the door, and he let her work in peace.
An island that has spent centuries refusing to tear anything down was always going to keep a few residents past their lease. For Halloween, Little ACK Book walks the short list: the places where the stories come from people who were there, and where most of the doors are still open.
THE UNITARIAN MEETING HOUSE
South Church, as longtime islanders still call it, went up at 11 Orange Street in 1809, its gold-domed tower rising more than 100 feet over town. Swift was its first minister, from 1810 to 1833. A few years after his ministry ended, the congregation turned Unitarian, and by most accounts he has never made peace with it. His portrait hangs inside—long face, auburn hair—which is how witnesses know whom they’ve met. Sextons working late have heard someone walking around upstairs in a building they knew was empty. A group of boys making trouble near the sanctuary on a snowbound morning once fled out into the cold, insisting a man had sprung from behind the pulpit to run them off. And a music director rehearsing at the 1831 Goodrich organ before a Sunday service watched two soldiers in Revolutionary War uniform march in. She kept practicing. Eventually, they left.
SHIPS INN
Whaling captain Obed Starbuck built the house at 13 Fair Street in 1831, on the lot where abolitionist Lucretia Coffin Mott was born in 1793; a plaque on the side of the inn still marks it. Each guest room takes its name from a ship in Starbuck’s fleet, and the captain, the story goes, still makes his rounds—pacing the halls after dark, pausing at the front window to look out toward the water. Actress Ellie Cornell—Rachel Carruthers in Halloween 4 and Halloween 5, and longtime co-owner of the inn with chef Mark Gottwald—has said she saw him herself, late one night while painting upstairs.
“He went through one closed door, then right through the wall to the next room.”
— Ellie Cornell, owner of Ships Inn on Nantucket, and star of Halloween 4 and 5
JARED COFFIN HOUSE
Built in 1845, the three-story brick house at 29 Broad Street was the first mansion on the island and came through the Great Fire of 1846 untouched. Coffin’s wife preferred Boston, and within two years the family had sold it to the Nantucket Steamboat Company, which reopened it as the Ocean House hotel—where Herman Melville stayed in 1852. Coffin, by most accounts, found his way back anyway. A rocking chair near the hearth is said to start moving on its own once a fire is going, and guests have described an old man settled into it; upstairs, he keeps to Room 223. The house’s other resident has stricter views. A Puritan woman, whom one former employee called Phoebe, is said to strip the blankets from unmarried couples and then plant herself at the foot of the bed, glaring.
SHERBURNE INN
The Greek Revival building at 10 Gay Street opened in 1835 as the Atlantic Silk Company, which ran only the second power silk loom ever put into operation. Islanders planted mulberries to feed the silkworms, but the trees never took to the cool, damp climate, and the factory shut in 1844. The Gay Street half has housed lodgers since 1870. When Susan Gasparich and Dale Hamilton bought the inn in 1994, the outgoing owner left them with a warning: a woman with long red hair, in a white Victorian gown. Since then, one guest woke at 2 a.m. to a cloudlike shape drifting across her room and assumed she’d dreamed it—until her husband said he had woken at the same moment and seen it too. Another couple, in Room 5, spent a night listening to something scrape slowly down the wall behind the headboard, like fingernails, then start again from the top.
HADWEN HOUSE
The Nantucket Historical Association keeps the Hadwens’ own china and silver on display at the 1846 Greek Revival mansion at 96 Main Street, and by one account the family still entertains. Interns bunking on the upper floor have described the sound of a dinner party in full swing below—glassware, scraping chairs, laughter, conversation. Downstairs, they find dark rooms and no one in them.
THE OLD MILL
Tradition credits a sailor named Nathan Wilbur with building the windmill at 50 Prospect Street in 1746, from oak timbers salvaged off wrecked ships. Ed Dougan, who ran it from 1977 to 1980, learned that it had opinions about where he stood: whenever he wandered from his post toward the more dangerous parts of the works, the mill picked up speed and began to shudder, settling only when he returned—a pattern he demonstrated for onlookers. Islanders used to donate candle ends to be melted into a gap in the machinery. One night Dougan packed in a fresh batch and locked up. By morning, every wick had been drawn out of its stub, and the lot sorted into two tidy piles. No one else had a key. Islanders tend to credit Timothy Swain, who inherited a share of the mill and who, in local telling, died inside it. The NHA has spent the past two years on the most extensive restoration in the mill’s history.
THE WAUWINET
At the head of the harbor, the hotel at 120 Wauwinet Road has taken guests since 1875, and an old rumor holds that it sits on a burial ground. What people report there is quieter than most: a breath of roses or gardenias in a room without a single bloom, and the sound of water running somewhere in a lobby with no fountain to explain it.
FOR THE BRAVE: AFTER DARK ON THE 31ST
Spooky Walk-Through and Trick-or-Treating, Nantucket Whaling Museum—Saturday, Oct. 31, 4:30–6 p.m. Free; enter through the Discovery Center at Broad and South Beach streets, 13 Broad Street. Not a haunted house—fine for all ages.
The Nantucket Ghost Walk, Town Route—Saturday, Oct. 31, 8 p.m. Meet at the top of Main Street, in front of the steps of the Pacific National Bank at Centre and Main streets; arrive by 7:50 p.m. About 80 minutes. Cash only, no reservations; $25 adults, $20 seniors, $15 teens, $10 ages 6–12. 774-325-8972. *This list leaves out Mary Abby Swain—the island’s most famous ghost, by the tour’s account—and saves her for the Ghost Walk, where the guide tells her story in full.