The Paranormal

The Old Manse was built in 1770 for Rev. William Emerson (1743-1776) and his wife Phebe (Bliss) Emerson (1741-1829).  They lived there together with their five children for the next six years and were living there in April 1775 when the battle for independence began in the field behind their house near the North Bridge.  William joined the others at the bridge to defend against the British soldiers that day as Phebe stood at the upstairs windows with their children looking on.  The following year William left to join the army at Fort Ticonderoga in New York and died there of camp fever.  William and Phebe’s children included William Emerson (1769-1811), who was father of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), and Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863), who is remembered as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brilliant and yet eccentric aunt who advised her nephew, as well as his friend, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)).  Mary Moody Emerson was one of the first of many babies who were to be born at The Old Manse.  In 1778, the Rev. Ezra Ripley (1751-1841) was hired to replace William Emerson as the minister in Concord and he moved into The Old Manse as a boarder of Phebe Emerson’s.  Two years later he become her second husband and Phebe then had another three children with Ezra.  The oldest was Samuel Ripley (1783-1847) who in 1841, upon the death of his father, Ezra, became owner of The Old Manse.  Samuel married Sarah (Alden Bradford) Ripley (1793-1867) and together they had nine children, among them a daughter, Sophia Ripley (1833-1914), who married James B. Thayer (1831-1902).  Sophia and James Thayer had four children, including artist, Theodora W. Thayer (1868-1905).  In July 1842, Samuel Ripley rented The Old Manse to newlyweds, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Sophia (Peabody) Hawthorne (1809-1871).  The Hawthornes lived there for the next three years, referring to it as their “Garden of Eden” and they always remembered their time at the Manse as the happiest years of their lives.  Their daughter, Una (1844-1877) was born in The Old Manse. 

The tour began in the gift shop at 6:00 PM on May 19, 2010, just as a light rain was beginning to fall.  The shop was displaying one of a new line of T-shirts that bears Hawthorne’s image along with the statement “Hawthorne was a Hotty” and when Steve saw it he remarked that the image of Hawthorne on that shirt had come into his mind as he drove toward the Manse that night and he said that each time he looked at it he was overcome with a sense of anger and resentment toward Hawthorne.  Steve observed then that at least one of the spirits in the house does not like Hawthorne and resents the way he is being remembered.  This was a theme that was to continue throughout the tour and Steve picked it up again and more intensely as we went on into the house, crossed through the kitchen and went into the dining room where a copy of Charles Osgood’s 1840 portrait of Hawthorne is displayed.  Steve said he could not even look at that portrait of Hawthorne without experiencing a sense of hostility towards him. 

This dislike of Hawthorne came as a surprise to me.  In the stories of Hawthorne in Concord that are often repeated and much loved in town, Hawthorne is portrayed as a handsome, romantic figure who was devoted to his writing and deeply in love with his wife.  The Hawthornes considered the time they lived at the Manse (1842-1845) as the happiest of their lives and visitors to the Manse today are still told the story of the romantic and magical time the Hawthornes experienced there.  Some of the magic of that time is preserved in the house by the etchings that Sophia made on the window glass in both the dining room and the upstairs study.  In the dining room she captured a moment in 1845 when she held her young daughter, Una up to the window glass to look out on the new fallen snow, referring to the ice covered trees as “glass chandeliers”, and in the upstairs study the Hawthornes’ love for each other was captured as they took turns using Sophia’s diamond to write words on the glass.  One of those statements written there is “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes,” likely referring to a miscarriage Sophia had after falling in 1843.  

In spite of this romanticized ideal of Nathaniel and Sophia and their lives at the Manse, according to the spirit that Steve was tuning into, Hawthorne was not as he was being remembered to be.  One issue that appeared to be a source for some of the resentment was that Hawthorne had been a poor tenant.  It is true that Nathaniel and Sophia did many things to the home that most tenants would never consider doing, like leaving etchings on the window glass, and putting a hole in the kitchen wall in order to accommodate a more modern stove.  They were also months behind on rent when they were finally asked to leave the home in 1845.  I would never have imagined there could be resentment over such mundane issues still being felt by the Ripley family all these years later, but Steve confirmed that in fact there was.  In addition, it was noted that this home that had first belonged to Rev. William Emerson and then to the Ripley family until 1939 when it was turned over to the Trustees of Reservations, is often mistakenly identified as the Hawthornes’ home and that appears to be an ongoing source of aggravation for those members of the Ripley family who remain there.  

As we moved on to the third floor attic space, the revelations about Hawthorne continued and they revealed a side of Hawthorne that, if true, will be distressing to anyone who, like myself, is reluctant to let go of the romanticized image of him.  I describe the tour of the attic here, although it is not in the proper sequence of events.  

As we explored around the rugged, unfinished rooms of that third floor attic space, I continued to tell the group what I understood to be true about the Hawthornes’ loving relationship and happy home life but that did not dissuade Steve, or more accurately, the spirits there from continuing to express their dislike of Hawthorne.  Steve asked whether or not Hawthorne was some kind of dandy or cad, and my first reaction was to deny this, but as I tried to reconcile my long held view of Hawthorne with the image of the man that Steve was describing, Steve began to talk about a party that had taken place “at the house with the large porch around it.”  I was not even thinking about the Wayside at that point, or the fact that the Hawthornes’ had also lived there, but I acknowledged that yes, there was such a home and that it was the only home that Hawthorne had ever owned.  I then noted that the porch on the Wayside was not there in Hawthorne’s time, but Steve said that was simply a way of describing the house.  Whoever this spirit was, it was telling him that something had taken place there at the Wayside that had upset this individual greatly and had left someone, either this individual or someone they knew, pregnant and unmarried.  

At one point I began to describe to Steve the theme of Hawthorne’s book, The Scarlet Letter.  It is the story of an affair between an unmarried woman and a minister and their illegitimate daughter, who, it is said, Hawthorne modeled after his daughter, Una.  As we were in the home of many ministers, and picking up on the story of an unmarried woman’s pregnancy, it seemed possible that there could be some correlation, but it was not at all clear what it was.  Steve indicated he was being told that the way that Hawthorne explained the genesis of his story, as his having come upon documentation of such an incident housed among the old files at the Customs House in Salem where he was at one time employed, was false and that in fact the story had come to him in another way.  

As we continued on in the attic, the other team members offered their own impressions of the situation Steve had described.  Michelle said she saw a woman with dark curls as the woman who was pregnant; others seemed to concur with Steve’s description of a woman in a white dress who was carrying a parasol and who kept pointing out her baby bump to him; and there were several exchanges that took place having to do with the women who had lived in the house and all the babies that had been born there.  Phebe Ripley alone had given birth to as many as seven children there.  At one point, Betty began to experience the physical symptoms that a woman might feel who had given birth multiple times.  She described the feeling as if her insides were coming out and said she was experiencing profound physical discomfort.  Both Amy and Michelle experienced what they described as labor pains, and Michelle’s became particularly intense later in the tour.   

When I mentioned Sophia Hawthorne’s miscarriage it brought much speculation around the state of the Hawthorne marriage and his relationship with his children.  Was this illegitimate pregnancy that was mentioned the result of some dalliance of Hawthorne’s?  This just made no sense to me, but if true, I wondered who could the woman have been?  And who was this spirit who was still there at the Manse and still angry about it?  Was it the woman herself, a relative of hers, or just someone who had lived in town and knew about the situation?  There were no definite answers given and delving into all I knew about Hawthorne, I could not come up with any scenario that seemed to fit this speculation.  Still this theme of resentment toward Hawthorne was prominent in the house and it stemmed not just from one individual but from others who lingered there as well.  It seemed they were all equally appalled by the way Hawthorne continued to claim star billing in this house that did not even belong to him and continued to be remembered as an admirable figure when in their eyes he did not deserve such admiration.   

In one of the front rooms of the attic Steve saw an image of a woman standing there looking out and it was as if she had stood there many times.  [The day after this tour I read in an excerpt from a memoir written by Edward Simmons, who was son of Mary (Ripley) Simmons (daughter of Samuel and Sarah Ripley), that his grandmother had used that room as a nursery and it was there that the famous scene of Sarah rocking a baby in a cradle with her foot while she read a book in Sanskrit had taken place.]  

Before we left the attic there was another spirit identified - someone who was described by Bety as being from a more puritan time.  I mentioned that the home was built in 1770 and Steve suggested that it could be a spirit who was attached to the area more than the home, which seemed to make sense, but the issue came up again a few minutes later after we left the attic and were standing in what I refer to as Sarah Ripley’s room on the second floor.  Whether or not it was actually the room where she slept, it is in this room where her portrait is hung over the fireplace and where the cradle that she rocked so many babies in and other personal items of Sarah’s are on display.  In this room Bety began to pick up on a name that sounded to her at first like Rush or Rusha and as she continued to connect she said the name “Jerusha”.  At the time I had no idea who she might be referring to, but the next day I searched through the Emerson/Ripley family tree and I found the name Jerusha there, not once but three times.  The first was a Jerusha (Bradford) Gay (1699-1783) who was a great-great aunt of Sarah (Alden Bradford) Ripley’s; the second was Jerusha’s daughter, Jerusha Gay (1734-1812); and the other was Sarah Ripley’s aunt, Jerusha (Bradford) Weston (1770-1833).  The Jerusha who was still there at the Manse could have been any one of those women but might more likely have been Jerusha (Bradford) Gay whose lifetime stretches back closer to puritan times.   

Also, while standing in Sarah Ripley’s room on the second floor, Michelle mentioned the name Frances.  I could not recall any Frances who lived at the Manse at that time, but later I found a woman named Frances Ames Randall (1866-1968) pictured in an 1882 photograph of the Ripley family that was taken in the yard in front of the Manse.  She is the daughter of James W. Ames, who was son of Margaret (Bradford) Ames, a sister of Sarah (Alden Bradford) Ripley.  There are fourteen members of the Ripley family in that photo, including those with the surnames of Ames, Simmons and Thayer.  When I look at it closely I get the sense that many who are in that photo are still present at the Manse today.  The team seemed to confirm that Frances Randall was one, and I had suspected perhaps Sophia Ripley Thayer or her sister, Elizabeth Ripley, who had lived in the Manse for many years, were also there but neither of their portraits that hang in the Manse elicited a reaction from the group members.  Neither did the portrait of Sarah Ripley herself that hangs on the wall of her room, but the portrait of Theodora Thayer, that hangs in the room adjacent to Sarah Ripley’s room did get their attention.