THE BELIEVERS
“It was like some dark undefinable menace, forever dogging my steps, lurking, and threatening.”
—EDITH WHARTON, THE GHOST STORIES OF EDITH WHARTON
GHOST PROFILE: ROBERT OAKES
“Wharton saw a creative opportunity in exploring her own fear of ghosts, which, apparently, she felt from the time she was a girl.”
—Robert Oakes, The Mount Tour Guide
Robert Oakes, tour guide at Edith Wharton’s The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, lit up when I mentioned I was an author on assignment for a paranormal-themed travel book. “You should definitely go on one of my ghost tours,” he said after guiding me through the history and mystery behind Wharton’s breathtakingly picturesque Berkshires estate. “I’m also working on a book about the hauntings in the area.”
When I’m not writing my historical-based ghost books, I give tours at historic house museums such as the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion named after Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic novel, The House of the Seven Gables. I identified with Oakes’s enthusiasm. There’s something magical about giving tours at a place as architecturally significant as The Mount … bonus points if the location is paranormally active.
Wharton’s estate is extremely haunted.
PHOTO COURTESY ROBERT OAKES
“I once had that ‘tingles-on-the-neck’ sensation of something unseen following close behind me during a tour,” Oakes told me. “I also once heard what sounded like a voice speaking my name close to my ear. But when I looked around, I saw no one else with me on the floor.”
According to him, Wharton’s former home is teeming with spirits from the mansion’s gilded-age past. He signed on as a house guide in 2009 and soon started giving night tours to accommodate the growing interest in the ghost lore associated with Wharton’s country estate thanks to two investigations featured on Syfy’s Ghost Hunters in 2009 and 2015.
Oakes said the team from The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) definitely stirred the pot of both interest and paranormal activity. “I would say their visits certainly helped stir up interest in our ghosts,” he said. “Their first investigation took place the same year The Mount began offering the ghost tour, and there was a great deal of enthusiasm right from the start, partly fueled by the interest of the Ghost Hunters. The tours themselves then began to yield new stories, as people began reporting things they said happened to them while on a ghost tour, and our ghostly reputation grew and grew.”
When Ghost Hunters investigated The Mount in 2015, Oakes was featured in the historic house museum’s press release. “It was fantastic to welcome Jason, Steve, Tango and the rest of the Ghost Hunters team back to The Mount for a second investigation,” he said in the release. “There have been so many reports of strange activity at the estate since their last visit, it isn’t surprising they wanted to return.”
In 2015, Oakes was the only staff member at The Mount allowed to work directly with the TAPS team. “I was there during the second investigation with the Ghost Hunters and I do remember a kind of electric feeling in the air, particularly on the bedroom floor of the main house, immediately after they wrapped for the night,” he recalled. “It felt to me like the ghosts were a bit agitated.”
In the release, Oakes identified the paranormal hot spots at The Mount including “the second floor of the historic stable, Wharton’s bathroom on the second floor of the main house and Teddy Wharton’s den on the first floor. Footsteps, strange sensations, the distinct scents of floral perfume and cigar smoke have all been reported by guests.”
When I asked if the locations he cited in the press release are still the estate’s most haunted, Oakes nodded. “The most active location is the second floor of the stable,” he told me. “It’s one of the few remaining unrestored areas of the estate, so that certainly helps to give it the right feel. But more than that, there is a strong sense that spirits linger there. At the very top of the building, you can dimly see a storage area through a darkened doorway in the hayloft. One of our scariest encounters is said to have happened in there. There’s a hallway that opens to a number of rooms where people have reported seeing strange shadows moving around.”
Oakes said that Wharton penned several ghost stories during her career, and pulled from her personal experiences with the paranormal. When she was a girl, Wharton claimed to be “haunted by formless horrors” and was terrified of shadow figures until her late twenties. Oakes said the Age of Innocence writer became more comfortable with the spooky subject matter while living at The Mount and would pen a collection of her own ghost stories later in life.
“Wharton wrote in her autobiography of a ‘dark undefinable menace’ that she felt was ‘forever dogging [her] footsteps.’ Over the years, there have been many reports at The Mount of a dark, featureless shadow figure seen in hallways, in rooms, even on walls,” Oakes explained. “It’s possible these phenomena are connected, but who can say for sure?”
When asked why he thought the author was so haunted by the ghosts of her childhood, Oakes said it could be related to Wharton’s bout with typhoid fever when she was only nine years old. She contracted the illness during a family vacation in the Black Forest of Germany.
“There may be a connection between a near-fatal illness that she experienced as a child and the onset of these paranormal fears,” he said. “I don’t know for sure whether the illness inspired the fears, but it did seem to affect her deeply.”
Oakes believes that the ghost stories were the Ethan Frome author’s way of facing her fears. “Wharton saw a creative opportunity in exploring her own fear of ghosts, which, apparently, she felt from the time she was a girl,” he told me. “I imagine she felt her own visceral reactions were fertile ground for good writing.”
In addition to the shadow figure spotted throughout The Mount, Oakes said he has seen photos of what looks like a ghostly woman with sad, sunken eyes peering from the third-floor bathroom window. “It’s hard to say who that might be, though I was told by the woman who sent us the photograph [that she] had an intuition that the spirit’s name was Anna, which was the name of Wharton’s governess,” Oakes said.
As far as other locations at The Mount that give Oakes the creeps, he said Wharton’s pet cemetery has a spooky aesthetic that serves as the perfect backdrop to his evening ghost tours. “While I don’t know of any encounters in the pet cemetery, I will say that the wind can sometimes whip up very suddenly as we stand out there during the tour,” he said. “And there was one night when we heard the sound of wolves howling in the distance. That certainly helped set the mood.”
Oakes, currently working on his first collection of ghost stories for the History Press, said there are several hot spots in the Lenox area that are popular among paranormal investigators. “There are many reportedly haunted places in the Berkshires,” he continued. “One of the most well-known is the Hoosac Tunnel, also known as ‘the bloody pit,’ which has inspired ghost stories since it was first built in the 1800s.”
The Mount is a country estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, and was the home of noted American author Edith Wharton. PHOTO COURTESY DEPOSIT PHOTOS.
Michael Norman and Beth Scott wrote about the ghost lore associated with the so-called “bloody pit” in Historic Haunted America. “The digging of this railroad tunnel is a saga of blood, sweat and tears. Begun in 1851, it wasn’t finished until 1875. During those twenty-four years, hundreds of miners, using mostly crude black powder and pick and shovel, chipped away at the unyielding rock of Hoosac Mountain,” Norman and Scott wrote. “By the time the tunnel was finished, two hundred men had lost their lives in what came to be known as ‘the bloody pit.’ Most died in explosions, fires, and drownings, but one death may not have been accidental.”
Two men, Ned Brinkman and Billy Nash, were killed during a nitroglycerin-induced explosion on March 20, 1865. The man who prematurely set off the explosion, Ringo Kelley, managed to escape the wrath of “the bloody pit” that afternoon, but one year later he mysteriously disappeared. Kelley’s body was found two miles inside the Hoosac Tunnel, at the exact spot where Brinkman and Nash had died. He’d been strangled to death. There were no suspects … at least among the living.
How did Kelley die? Ghost lore enthusiasts claimed that he was murdered by the vengeful spirits of Brinkman and Nash. Over the years, multiple sources who were brave enough to venture inside the Hoosac Tunnel claimed to see phantom miners and hear mysterious groans.
One man, Frank Webster, said he was summoned inside “the bloody pit” in 1874 by a voice in the darkness. Webster then said he saw floating apparitions. One of the apparitions supposedly grabbed Webster’s rifle and hit him over the head with it. He was missing for three days and later told authorities about his close encounter in the tunnel. According to the police report, when Webster showed up, his rifle was missing and he looked like he’d seen a ghost.
While the extremely haunted Houghton Mansion in North Adams was recently purchased and closed to paranormal investigators, Oakes recommended Ventfort Hall, also in Lenox, which has been investigated by the Ghost Hunters and other paranormal teams.
Oakes said he enjoys turning people on to Wharton’s legacy as well as the house she designed and loved on his tours. “Many people don’t know that Wharton, herself, was a writer of ghost stories and loved a good, scary tale,”, he told The Berkshire Eagle on November 17, 2015. “In sharing our own stories, as we appeal to the imagination and a sense of mystery, I feel we are honoring her work and passion.”