The Mount’s haunted halls
Sam Tomashek works in the stables Monday at The Mount in Lenox. Ghost stories are a common thing in the estate.Author Edith Wharton’s estate is the talk of the town. With TAPS going in to investigate this place, more and more people are curious to find out about the ghost stories that abound in this place.
Not that I care much for the work of TAPS ever since the recent discovery of fraud in their show, but it would be interesting to watch for the historical side of the estate.
LENOX — Edith Wharton was an avid collector of ghost stories. Now, 100 years after her death, the late novelist is embroiled in a ghost story of her own.
Is The Mount, Wharton’s Plunkett Street estate, truly haunted?
On March 25, the Sci Fi Channel show “Ghost Hunters” will broadcast its investigation with The Atlantic Paranormal Society, or TAPS, into the phenomenon at The Mount.
Now a museum and center of all things Edith Wharton, it was also once a hub for Shakespeare & Company, the theater troupe. Shakespeare & Company folks often perceived ghostly happenings.
“I’ve heard from a few people that they’ve seen Edith Wharton there reading,” said Kevin Coleman, Shakespeare & Company’s director of education. “They’ve also seen (her husband) Teddy Wharton, and what we think was a servant girl who lived in one of the rooms on the top floor who is pretty active in the house.”
According to an e-mail sent out by Shakespeare & Company, Wharton and her husband initially moved to the
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mansion in 1902 as a writing retreat. The marriage soon shattered, as Edith pursued a love affair in France, and Teddy languished in despair and mental instability.The spooky happenings have certainly opened some doors for the venerable institution, with the attention from Ghost Hunters leading the estate to hold special “Ghost Tours” later this year. “This is, I confess, new territory for us,” said the Mount’s executive director, Susan Wissler. “But we see it as an opportunity to diversify for a younger audience.”
Facilities and grounds director Ross Jolly, who feels confident investigators will find something in the mansion and its surrounding buildings, agreed, even though he added the Ghost Hunters crew were as secretive as they were friendly. “We didn’t ask a lot of questions out of them and they didn’t offer a lot of answers,” he said. “They pretty much had free reign of the estate.”
Yet some at Shakespeare & Company feel that the hostile energies from the Wharton’s lives have kept a permanent place in the estate.
After Shakespeare & Company moved into the mansion in the early 1980s, “one of the actresses had a friend who came from England who was a psychic,” recalled Coleman. “She was on the top floor — that’s where all our offices were — she stopped and backed out of the room and said, ‘Don’t anybody go in this room.’ ”
According to Coleman, that was the troupe’s first encounter with a servant girl who had lived in that very room.
Jeremy Goodwin of Shakespeare & Company, meanwhile, related an eerier encounter during the 2001 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” involving the group’s director of publicity, Elizabeth Aspenlieder. While Aspenlieder was backstage, Goodwin said, she was surprised to see “an old-fashioned gentleman standing there in a tuxedo with a pocket watch staring at her.”
“She said she was sort of transfixed by this and she heard a voice in her head that said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ ” Goodwin said. He said that Aspenleider eventually identified the man as Edith Wharton’s lover, who briefly lived on the premises.
While the Ghost Hunters crew — despite using cameras, vibration sensors, and electromagnetic scanning equipment — have kept their results tightly hidden until the show airs, Coleman said he had had enough close encounters while the group was in residence to be wary.
“I was staying up reading one night, and I heard someone walking down the hall and stopping in front of my door,” he said. “It was so blatant and obvious I said, ‘Come in,’ before they could knock. When I opened the door, no one was there it was unmistakable.”
Full source: BerksShire Eagle
Listen to some of the ghost stories that have happened around The Mount:
Written by Javier Ortega - javier@ghosttheory.com
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The Mount is a beautiful, historic building and the Wharton foundation is in danger of losing it for financial reasons. I, for once, don’t even care if something questionable gets treated as evidence if it means more people will visit. If being “possibly haunted” can save a piece of our literary history from falling to neglect or development, go for it.
Marie,
I don’t think we would want financially strapped buildings/museums to start announcing that they might be haunted in order to get more people to visit them.
That would be a travesty for both paranormal investigators and to ethical implications I would assume.
Hopefully things don’t go that way.
Usually I feel this way ,too. And I really hate it when hotels use the possibility of a haunting to fill guest rooms. But, at a time when foundations like this one have seen the money left by the family for the upkeep of the property sucked down the rabbit hole that is the market – most trusts are managed like your retirement accounts- AND people have stopped visiting, they have to do something. Historic sights all over the world boost attendence by playing-up the “spooky”.Ancient castle in Europe, Victorian mansion in Boston – what’s the dif? Come for the ghosts, stay for the literature!
Sorry, I know I’m ranting a little. It ticks me off that people will line up by the thousands to visit Graceland but ignore places like the Mount. It truly is a beautiful place. Watch the episode just to get a look at the architecture.
Marie,
I understand your frustration.
People would rather read up on Britney Spears than the latest on the wars going on.
Or like Loren Coleman’s attempt at saving the International Cryptozoology Museum. People do not care enough to donate unless it’s some celebrity charity event.