– June 2007 –
The cottage in Solomon’s Island, Maryland, was surrounded by state land on one side and the Chesapeake Bay on the other, and it wasn’t at all the vacation that the kids had hoped for. But something, or someone—namely Poe—was pulling me into his world. There wasn’t any way for me to explain it to Chuck or the kids that it was because, “Edgar Allan Poe, you know the dead poet, well he told me that we had to drive eight-plus hours to Maryland so that I could walk where he walked, visit his grave and home, and get answers to his death.” That wasn’t happening.
I needed the vacation, though. I was working a corporate job at the time, knowing that wasn’t my future course and that a crystal ball, or a Magic 8 Ball even, would validate the same. So even though we weren’t next to an amusement park or in a four-star hotel, this vacation felt right to me.
The cottage, although unappealing to look at from the outside, was quite the quaint designer’s dream on the inside. With an open concept, there were two small bedrooms on the first floor, with a second-floor attic as a third bedroom. Chuck and I took the master bedroom, while Micaela and Connor were going to share the bedroom off of the kitchen. Chuck’s kids, Cora and Molly, would take the top floor, as I figured their late-night calls to their boyfriends and friends would be less likely to keep us awake if they were up there. But that didn’t last a night.
We decided that since the drive was so long, we would get groceries and then just hang around the cottage and rest until morning. We ate dinner, which consisted of grilled hamburgers, and finished cleaning up the dishes. The sun was beginning to set. Chuck was sitting on the red couch watching baseball while I was sitting in a large, cotton pinstriped chair reading when the girls all but flew down the narrow stairway, squealing.
Chuck, like most men, isn’t thrilled when his television viewing is interrupted, and this was no exception, as it was the All-Star baseball game.
“I’m pretty sure there is a ghost here,” Cora shrieked.
“And why do you say that?” I asked, glancing over at the stairwell to see Poe standing there, grinning from ear to ear.
Molly’s eyes were bright and alert. “We heard a whisper and then something moved along the back wall, a shadow. Can you go check?”
Chuck, although frustrated at the moment from being tired from the long drive and just wanting to watch the game, was normally very low-key and laid-back. Nothing much fazed him, including ghosts and spirits. With four kids, he was fine with catching spiders and letting them outside, checking on potential burglars or ghosts, and overall being the family hero. But as Chuck got up to check out the potential spirit, I shooed him back down, as I already knew who the prankster was.
“I’ll look. You girls just stay here.”
Connor popped out of his room, holding his handheld electronic game. “I’ll go with you, Mom.”
Both Micaela and Connor had a deeper understanding of the paranormal life, and although I never told them that there wasn’t any such thing as ghosts, I didn’t make it an everyday conversation or experience.
“It’s okay, Con. I’ll be just a second. I bet it was just a squirrel on the roof or something.”
Connor nodded, but he looked a bit disappointed. He had been the man, little man that is, of the house for so many years before Chuck came on the scene, and sometimes I thought maybe I needed to allow him to be a hero during innocent times. Although I knew this was one of those times, I needed a few minutes alone to talk to Poe.
I climbed the steep staircase into the attic. With each step the maple floors creaked, and my heart began to beat faster and faster. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was something other than Poe. Maybe it was a trap. What if a ghost, or worse, a great big spider or a bat jumped out at me? But no, when I got to the top of the stairwell I saw Poe sitting on the full-size bed looking out the window toward the seashore.
“Well, here we are, Edgar. Maryland. I know it isn’t your treasured Virginia or Philly, but … ”
He turned around and looked at me. “You have a nice family, Kristy.”
“Thanks?”
“No, I mean it. Your life is going to change soon. Look for the signs because they will be all around you. Just don’t take for granted this quiet time this week.”
I sat down next to him on the bed. “So now what, Poe? Why am I here other than to enjoy the quiet?”
“Go to Baltimore. Don’t look for anything, just go. You will find it.”
He was probably the most enigmatic guide I had, which drove me insane, but I trusted him and it made me wonder if I was either naïve or just insane myself.
“Mom!” Connor called, halfway up the stairway.
“Coming,” I got up off the bed and called down the stairway. “I think maybe it was just the wind.”
I turned back to Poe. “Don’t scare the kids anymore, okay?”
He didn’t answer; he just grinned his crooked smile.
Even with my reassurances, the girls decided that they weren’t going to stay upstairs, so they lugged their belongings
into the spare room and the four kids bunked together. None of them seemed to have a problem with it, so both Chuck and I left it alone.
“What’s the plan for tomorrow?” Chuck asked, using the remote to turn the television off.
“Baltimore.”
My dreams that night were restless and disjointed, but filled with dark shadows—groups of figures that resembled men all dressed in trench coats and short black hats hid in alleyways and in door stoops, watching me as I walked alone along a narrow cobblestone street. The shadows of the buildings did nothing to protect me and the aura from the streetlights seemed to only leave me feeling exposed. It was only a matter of time before I was taken. There was no escape.
June 1848
I looked down at my clothing to see a blue wool dress and sturdy shoes. A wedding band decorated my left hand, and in my right hand I held a handkerchief with the initials S. B. embroidered on it. I wondered if I had children, yet my soul said I had several.
I could hear footsteps behind me, getting closer, but I feared looking behind me. Instead I carried myself quickly forward. But before I could even attempt a detour, a calming melodic voice whispered in my ear, “Just keep walking, Sara. With me by your side, you will get home safely.”
I briefly glanced over my shoulder to see familiar gray eyes meet mine.
“Who are they?” I quietly whimpered.
“They are your government. They are your law enforcers. They are your farmers. And your shop keepers, your politicians, your doctors. They are your ministers. They are … ”
I gasped awake and, with my arms flailing, knocked over my eyeglasses I had sitting on the nightstand next to me. While trying to catch them, my glass of water tumbled, pouring onto the wooden floor.
Disturbed by the nightmare and disgusted at making a menace of myself first thing in the morning, I looked over at Chuck to see that my bumbling hadn’t stirred him from his sleep.
I wiped down the water with a beach towel that I had packed and quietly made my way into the living room to watch the sunrise. With a blue cotton blanket drawn over my shoulders, I attempted to revisit the vision in a waking, meditative state. But nothing happened. I felt a bit like Samantha in Bewitched trying to wiggle my nose in hopes that some magic would happen, but no matter what I did—sat up, laid down, got into a yoga pose—I couldn’t capture the vision again. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched and feeling as if I was a lamb going to slaughter, to be sacrificed in order to teach another a lesson.
But why? And by who? I needed a revelation of sorts. I looked around for Alto or Poe, or maybe even Tallie, although she tended to stay away from the drama. There wasn’t anybody there but me and the sunshine. Oh, and a cute, little, brown field mouse that had found its way into the house the night before and was camping out in the kitchen. I made a note to myself to see if Chuck could help find it a new home outside.
“I have never been so hot in my entire life,” Cora complained, tying her long, brown hair into a ponytail and wiping the back of her neck.
She was right. The six of us were standing in the middle of Baltimore, looking over the harbor, roasting in what had to be low hundred degree temperatures. We grabbed some waters to begin our walking tour.
“First we find Edgar Allan Poe’s gravesite,” I said to everyone’s moans. “Hey, it’s history,” I reasoned.
“How far?” Micaela asked in a whiny voice, drawing out the two words to sound more like a hundred.
I looked at Chuck to see if he knew, but he only shrugged. “Let’s go this way,” I said, pointing away from the water. “And I will ask someone if we can’t find it,” I tried to reassure the group.
We walked and walked and walked, while I began singing the Sesame Street theme song, only changing the lyrics to “Can you tell me how to get, how to get to
Westminster Hall?” And yes, I realized it didn’t flow quite as well. A man dressed in a suit and looking very professor-like and dignified laughed at my silliness and pointed the way, but he offered a warning that the neighborhood could be rough and to go in quickly and get out quickly. I turned to the kids, who were mortified all the way around, but I impressed upon them how my singing got us directions.
Westminster Hall is a beautiful historic building. It is located at the intersection of Fayette and Greene Streets in downtown Baltimore. The graveyard was established in 1786 by the First Presbyterian Church. Over the next sixty years, the grounds became the final resting place for the important and the who’s-who residents of early Baltimore. Of course, one of the most famous residents was writer Edgar Allan Poe, who was buried there in October 1849 following his sudden and mysterious death. In 1852, a church was erected overtop the graveyard, straddling gravestones and burial vaults to create what is now referred to as the catacombs.
No search had to be conducted to find Poe’s grave as the monument stood tall near the gate with a stone etching of a raven atop it. Various gifts laid on top and around it to honor the gothic writer. Poe wasn’t originally buried there, but was instead buried around the corner in a family plot. In 1875, a local schoolteacher started a “Pennies for Poe” campaign to raise money for a more appropriate monument. Poe was reburied there along with his aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, and his wife, Virginia. It is there that visitors continue to leave pennies, flowers, and even alcohol.
Beginning in the 1930s, on Poe’s birthday, January 19, an unidentified man known as the Poe Toaster visited the burying ground to make an annual tribute to Poe. Dressed in black with a wide-brimmed hat and white scarf, the shadowy figure would pour himself a glass of cognac and raise a toast to Poe’s memory. He would then vanish into the night, leaving three roses in a distinctive arrangement and the unfinished bottle of cognac. The tradition sadly ended in 2009.
Chuck held out pennies to each of the kids. “We should honor him.”
I looked at the family gathered around Poe’s grave, tempted to make my confession, but I caught a black shadow out of the corner of my eye in the back of the graveyard. Forgetting about the forewarning to be careful, I walked away from the group to see if the shadow was human or spirit. A hand on my back caught me off-guard and I squealed and spun around. Connor’s gray eyes looked back at me.
“I saw something, Mom.”
“Me too. Let’s go see.”
We walked through the narrow passage, through various graves. There weren’t trees to protect us from the smoldering heat, so we kept dabbing our sweating foreheads. Neither of us saw the shadow again, and there didn’t appear to be another human visiting the cemetery. I figured that even ghosts were dying in the heat (pun intended), so we rejoined the family.
The kids whined of hunger, so we made the decision to make our way back toward the harbor. I couldn’t get over the fact that I felt a presence watching me, but each time I turned around, I was met with nobody.
“A hitchhiker?” Chuck asked me, after my sixth time turning and looking behind us.
Sometimes when I went to haunted locations, or even just cemeteries, I would pick up a spirit attachment that we lovingly referred to as a hitchhiker. No matter if the cemetery was historic or newer, upon leaving the gates I would always tell the spirits that they must remain and not follow me. And Westminster Hall was no different. The spirits, however, didn’t always listen to me.
I shook my head and bit my bottom lip, perplexed. “I’m not quite sure what it is. Connor felt it, too, but I don’t see anything.”
Chuck took my gift all in stride (for the most part). And so far so good, as he hadn’t called on the men with the white coats to come and get me.
“Now where?”
“Let’s take the water taxi to Fell’s Point,” I said. “But let’s eat first.”
I had hoped the kids would be in a better mood after having some food in them, but it seemed to have the opposite effect and the temperatures were only rising. Thankfully the boat ride to Fell’s Point offered some relief, as there was a shaded canopy.
Purchased in 1726 and founded in 1763 by William Fell, Fell’s Point, a neighborhood in Baltimore, became a shipbuilding and commercial hub. In the late 1700s and early 1800s the harbor area was often riddled with crime and pirates. Today, its cobblestone streets, historic buildings, row houses, and eclectic boutiques were quaint. Once we got off the boat it seemed we all fell in love with the place. It also helped that the temperatures seemed to drop several degrees, making it a bit more bearable.
“What is here, Mom?” Micaela asked me, looking worn from the heat and all the walking.
“Well, there are some cute shops and restaurants. And,” I hesitated for a moment, “so is the last place Edgar Allan Poe was ever seen alive.”
“Where are you?” I asked Poe in my head. The kids and Chuck had wandered into a souvenir shop and I was trying to take a moment to connect with him in hopes of figuring out why we were even here. A clue, any clue, would be nice about now, Poe.
“There, that was the last place I was seen coherent.” Poe popped up and pointed to a small bar just down from a historic hotel and a block away from the water.
I gave him a sideways look.
“Everybody I ever loved died. Everybody. From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.”
“Don’t get all doom and gloom on me now, Edgar. You might have lost your family, but you were a ladies’ man if there ever was one. We call that a player today.”
Poe rolled his eyes, but underneath them his usually stern, closed-lip mouth was a grin. He knew that I was right.
“So, can you start at the beginning? Why were you here in Baltimore to begin with? Many say that you got on the wrong train,” I egged him on.
“I knew my trains and I knew my directions,” Poe huffed, then he shook his head in despair. “I want to see what you get first, before I share anything else with you.”
Great. I didn’t care for stump-the-psychic games with real people and now even spirits were going to play.
Seeing that he wasn’t going to help me, I glowered at him and then closed my eyes. Trying to take myself back to October 3, 1849, I wished there was an easier way rather than remote viewing or astral travel, if only someone had invented time travel of some kind.
But the energy around me seemed to cooperate. The first thing I was shown was Poe slithering through a back alleyway. He looked around him, jittery. Wearing a stained and faded coat, ratty pantaloons, a pair of worn-out shoes, and an old straw hat—all of which was out of character—he stood with his back against the stone wall. Actually, I thought he looked ridiculous.
A man, dressed in a long black coat and black hat, strolled up to Poe from the opposite way that Poe had entered the alleyway.
“This is a bad idea,” the man whispered, his eyes darting right and left. “I think I was followed.”
Poe began to walk toward a building across from the alleyway.
“Where are you taking me?” the man whispered to Poe.
“Shhh … ,” Poe responded.
“This isn’t how I operate, Poe. Pinkerton was very clear,” he chided with a thick Scottish accent.
“You will understand soon enough. We have a deal.”
Shrouded only by their coats, the two men slipped into a back door of a large, gray stone building that looked familiar to me, but not in this time.
Pinkerton, I thought. The name sounded familiar. Could it be that he was referring to Allan Pinkerton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, I wondered?
In 1844, Pinkerton worked for Chicago Abolitionist leaders, and his home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. A few years later, he became the very first detective in Chicago. A year later, he met his partner in a Masonic Temple and formed the Pinkerton Detective Agency. It is still in existence today, but known as Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations. I was trying to think back if I remembered Pinkerton visiting Baltimore, but then the history books didn’t have everything in them.
It wasn’t long afterward that the two men stepped out and slithered through the alleyway.
Poe looked exasperated and shook his head in disgust. “Meet me by the harbor at dusk,” he said and walked off toward the local tavern.
“Hey, Mom, look, there’s a palm reader. Cora wants to go,” Connor said, pulling gently at my purse, waking me from my trance.
“Yes, of course,” I smiled, shaking my head of the vision.
For the remainder of our time in Baltimore, I felt exhausted. I wasn’t sure what to make of the glimpse from the past that I had been given. The heat certainly wasn’t helping anything either. I kept looking around to see if Poe reappeared, but to no avail. He wasn’t anywhere in the physical world, or at least around me.
Our trip back to the cottage didn’t seem to take long at all. We were all eager to take a shower and curl up in our pajamas. Just as we all got settled in to play a game of cards at the dining room table, we all heard a strange noise. It sounded like typing.
The house had an oak armoire with doors and within it was a computer free for our usage. Internet was dicey, as was the phone signal at the remote location, but I was using it to check in with work every morning. That morning, since we got an early start, I hadn’t even bothered. But we had certainly heard the sound of typing.
Molly slowly opened up the armoire doors. “I can hear keys being typed, but I don’t see them being typed. No words on the screen either.”
“Let’s do a séance!” Cora chimed in.
“No!” Micaela cried.
Micaela hated anything to do with the paranormal world. Since I was the ghost magnet, I sometimes think that she hated me, too.
Chuck began clearing off the dining room table. “A séance sounds like fun.”
“Yeah, to you,” I mumbled under my breath. “This is like work to me. Why don’t we just keep playing Uno?”
But despite Micaela’s and my own uneasiness with the activity, I reluctantly gave in to my family’s peer pressure.
It was already dark outside, so we turned off the lights within the house and lit a couple candles. I said a prayer of protection and we began to call on anyone in the spirit world who wanted to talk to us. Immediately we could hear footsteps in the attic. They started off sounding like one person walking, but as it continued it sounded like several people were.
Micaela put her hands over her head. “I told you this was a bad idea!”
And just as the footsteps stopped upstairs, the typing once again started at the desktop computer.
“Edgar, is that you?” I asked in my mind. I couldn’t feel him or any of my other guides and thought maybe Micaela was more psychic than she let on because this was beginning to be a very bad idea.
The energy swirled around us, much like that before a severe lightning storm. Something fell in the kitchen and we all jumped. The footsteps quieted, as did the typing.
I got up out of my chair and everyone looked at me curiously. “I’m checking the computer,” I whispered. Tiptoeing over to the armoire, which was only a few feet away, I looked at the screen. There on the screen was a word. Just one.
Brotherhood.
“Anything there?” Cora asked, getting up from her seat.
I hit the button for another screen. “Nope. Nothing. Just like before.”
Chuck looked disbelievingly at me. I was a really bad liar.
“Let’s just shut this down and go to bed. It has been a long day.”
“What are we doing tomorrow?” Connor asked.
“I’m thinking after this exciting and tiring day that we should just chill tomorrow. Let’s just go to the beach and then go into town for some ice cream.”
When did vacations get to be so exhausting? I thought. Oh, that’s right, when you become an adult with kids.
As soon as the kids were tucked in, I kissed Chuck good night and crawled into bed with a notebook and pen and poured out the day onto paper. Writing down not only the visions, but also what happened that day and the emotions that I felt. Feeling satisfied that I remembered everything, I again called on Poe to see if he would come through and give me more, but the phone line to the dead was coming up a busy signal.
It stayed off the hook for almost six months, leaving me to research anything to do with Edgar Allan Poe and what the Brotherhood connection was. When he finally came through, he told me that I would eventually need to go to Asheville, North Carolina. I was beginning to think that he was part of some tourist division and just wanted me to travel.