HAUNTED REALITY
It was in 1999 that it started to get difficult to hide the fact that Captain Grant’s was haunted. There were many questions from guests about hearing people walk up the staircase, but there wasn’t any sound when they hit the upstairs hallway and they didn’t walk back down. There were also questions about children playing outside of the rooms in the middle of the night. They said there were balls rolling in the attic. Then there was the banging on the front door, which was quite frequent in the beginning days of the bed and breakfast. We offered no explanations. Most of the guests just passed it off as the behavior of other rude guests who were staying in the home at the same time.
A New York City detective transformed our silence into a slow acknowledgment of the home’s spirits. He came downstairs before breakfast demanding his money back. When I asked him what had happened, he said that we were the two rudest innkeepers he ever met. I just knew in my heart of hearts that the spirits had done something. Indeed they had. Between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. they had walked in the attic above the guest’s room. The spirits were now exposed. We had to acknowledge their presence or start losing business.
We never advertised the spirits, but we no longer denied them. If a guest asked, “Is the house haunted?” we would say, “Do you want it to be or not?” We lost a few potential guests who were too afraid of spirits to take a chance on staying. Most of our guests were just plain curious about the goings-on. As long as I was able to continue to fill rooms with visitors, I was happy.
The year 2001 was becoming our best ever. Then on 9/11 that all came to a complete stop. All of our guests canceled. I was glued to the television. What was going to happen to our future and the nation’s future? It was difficult to think with a clear head.
I got a call from a group in Paris who planned on coming for a stay in September. They were very gracious. The gentleman said, “We will come as soon as the planes are allowed to fly again.” I also got a call from a party in New Hampshire who said they would never come. They were too afraid that the nuclear power plant in Connecticut would be targeted.
Everyone seemed to know someone who knew someone who had died on 9/11. When guests did visit, that was the main topic of conversation. There was much anguish and strong feelings of helplessness around the breakfast table.
In October we began to get steady reservations again, and by November our bed and breakfast was packed nearly every day. New Yorkers were fleeing the city to get a respite from the devastation. In fact, Connecticut businesses did very well that fall. I felt guilty and other people I talked to also felt guilty. We were experiencing a boom from the tragedy in our neighboring state. We did our best to make our guests feel at home. We listened and then listened some more, over and over. Our Paris guests arrived and shared stories about the reaction of the French to 9/11. As promised, the group from New Hampshire never did visit.
By January 2002 life was beginning to look somewhat more normal. The boom of the fall turned into the bust of the winter. By spring I was looking forward to summer and rooms full of guests. I wasn’t thinking much about the spirits, and most of my praying was for help for others. I was in a personal slump along with my business and the country. I believe that Captain Grant’s spirits knew the agony of our guests and focused on being supportive entities.
What I didn’t know at that time was that the spirits were trying to help me be successful. An invisible group of twelve was hard at work. They liked having guests and they liked to be known.
The summer of 2002 gave me some unexpected publicity. The head of the Norwich Chamber of Commerce recommended Captain Grant’s to HGTV. When HGTV phoned and asked me if I would be interested in having my home on the series If Walls Could Talk, I was stunned. We qualified because of three things: our bed and breakfast was historic, it had been renovated, and we were the people who had done the renovations. Trying to sound nonchalant I said, “I would be delighted.” When I hung up the phone, I immediately called Tadashi. “We’re going to be on national television. We’re going to be on HGTV. Hallelujah! Thank you, God.”
When the film crew showed up, there were just two of them, a camera operator and a reporter. They spent from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. filming and asking me questions. I thought it was a long day. They thought it went remarkably fast.
Once the episode aired, I expected throngs of guests to show up at my door. Well, that didn’t happen. What it did do was give me authenticity. Captain Grant’s had been recognized as a truly historical home by the media. We still weren’t focused on the hauntings.
I received an e-mail from the travel site BedandBreakfast.com in the fall. They were looking for specials that they would send to the New York Times. “What the heck,” I thought. “I’ll give it a try.” I had three areas to choose from: Valentine’s Day, Christmas, or Halloween. I decided on Halloween. I wrote a poem about our Halloween special and asked future guests to join us. I sent it off, and a half hour later I got a call from the site. They loved what I had written and had sent it off to the Times. Again, I was excited. More publicity. But the Times sat on the special and didn’t publish it. “Oh well,” I thought. “Easy come, easy go.”
In 2003 the Times decided to put my special on their website. All of the calls I had expected a year earlier came pouring in. It was phenomenal. The Times had put us on the map. I was on a Montreal radio station as well as numerous other stations in our vicinity. The Boston Globe called. A newspaper from Long Island called. I was getting about three to four calls a day from various newspapers and radio stations. This lasted for about two weeks. It was all because Captain Grant’s is haunted.
In October USA Today did a spread on haunted inns, and there was Captain Grant’s, along with two other bed and breakfasts.
On Halloween, my husband and I were having dinner when the phone rang. It was 6:50 p.m. The woman on the other end of the line said, “Hello. I am calling from CNN Headline News. I want to inform you that we are featuring Captain Grant’s on the news at 7:10 p.m.”
I hung up the phone and called as many relatives as I could. Then my husband and I sat glued to the television. The woman who called had said there would be three haunted bed and breakfasts talked about. The first bed and breakfast was mentioned and pictured, with about fifteen seconds being given to the spot.
Then it was Captain Grant’s turn. We expected a presentation similar to the first one. That didn’t happen. The reporter started talking and just kept on talking. “There are ghosts running all over the place in this house. You go around a corner and you could run right into one.” My husband and I started laughing. We didn’t know if this would scare future guests away or not, but it was downright hilarious. The third bed and breakfast never got aired. There wasn’t enough time after Captain Grant’s was on.
Then we began getting calls from ghost hunters wanting to do paranormal investigations. At first I was in awe of them. That wore off quickly. A typical phone call went somewhat like this: “I am Joe from Dark Ghost Investigators. We would like to do an investigation of your place. We need two rooms and access to the Adelaide room and we will not charge you for that service.”
It was hard not to laugh. My typical response was something like this: “Joe, we would love to have you come and investigate. However, you need to pay for your rooms, and if someone is in Adelaide you can’t go in there. [Adelaide is our most haunted room.]You also can’t turn off all the lights if we have other guests.”
Then I would usually hear something like this: “Uh, we don’t have a lot of money, but I’ll talk to my group and get back to you.”
Most groups who call are young people in their late teens and early twenties and don’t have the funds to spend. Still, many groups did come and continue to come to this day. Most of them don’t have a theory about the phenomena they are witnessing. Some have firm beliefs about what they are witnessing. It is an ongoing process for all of them, as it is for us as well. Some of the groups have psychics, some have sensitives, and some are just curious.
We started getting on ghost Internet sites, Facebook, etc. One group came to stay and put up about an hour-long video of Captain Grant’s and our ancient cemetery behind the home on one of the social media sites. We found out about it a few months later.
In 2010 we got a call from the producer of Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal, a series that aired on the A&E network. Again, we had been chosen for a nationally aired television show. This was quite different from HGTV. I remember that there were about eleven members of the cast and crew. It was very impressive. We were to be episode eight of season two. There were three psychic children and three parents, the producer, the director, and the rest of the A&E crew. Kim Russo was the adult psychic who helped the children. She was awesome and was hired to take the place of Chip Coffey, the original host.
When Kim arrived by limousine, I was told by the producer that nothing had been revealed to her about where she was headed. I met her at the front door and we shook hands. She then said, “I sense a Mercy here and she’s not happy about her name.” I was flabbergasted. Nobody had that information. It wasn’t on our website or in any of our advertising. We have a room called Adelaide. Adelaide is Mercy Adelaide Grant. I didn’t name the room Mercy because I didn’t think it was appropriate.
Kim and I went up the stairs, and one by one she gave me all the names for the rooms. I am still in awe of her.
The psychic children from the show had all experienced different degrees of difficulties in their lives because of their paranormal abilities. The eldest female child was having a difficult time controlling a spirit that followed her wherever she went. While exploring the attic at Captain Grant’s, she had the opportunity to tell the spirit in the attic to go away. It was her first experience at taking control.
All three children were afraid of the “man in the attic.” The youngest female child told me the following morning after their visit, “We told him to go away, and there he went, right through the wall.” The children also told me that this ghost had been mean to children when he was alive. I had been told this about that spirit from someone else who had visited earlier. She was a sensitive.
The only male child from the show was a medical intuitive. While at Captain Grant’s, he told me that I had knee pain. I said no, but that wasn’t true. What I did tell him was that I had pain in my back. He did Reiki on the area where I ached and the pain disappeared for nine months. This exhausted him, as I found out myself later when I experienced exhaustion after a communication session with Adelaide.
To this day I wish that I had some contact with those psychic children. I think of them often. By now they are young adults.