DEBORAH ADAMS
Deborah Adams was discovered by a family who rented Captain Grant’s for a weeklong vacation. I gave them a ghost communication lesson and let them use my rods during the time they stayed at the inn. Only the women used the rods. The men were not interested. Of the five women, the rods responded to four of them. The fifth one declined to try for religious reasons. Every day I saw them out on the deck using the rods. (At that time I had only one pair of rods. Now I have rods for my guests to use and I keep mine for myself.)
On Thursday of that week the women invited me to sit outside and chat with them. They told me all about Deborah Adams. She was five years old when she died and was buried in the old cemetery behind the house. The old cemetery dates back to the mid-1600s. It was the first town cemetery. Currently no one owns it, not even the town. The only care it has received since 1954 is from the Boy Scouts one summer, members of the town cemetery commission, and a woman who comes once in a while on her own to try to clean it out. My husband and I have put a bit of money into the grounds, but it is a losing situation. Graves have sunk into the ground. It is overgrown with underbrush and vines. And now one end of the cemetery is collapsing. It is situated on high ground above a stream but is slowly giving way to nature. This is where Deborah Adams was interred.
I asked the family how they knew her name. One of the women, Barbara, said that they went through the alphabet. “Does your first name start with an A?” and so on until they got her name. What this family wanted to know was if they could try to find Deborah’s grave. I decided to give it a try. I was still somewhat skeptical but thought, what the heck. “Let’s go,” I said.
I rounded up John, our groundskeeper, and asked him to get our large gas-powered weed trimmer and meet us in the field behind the house. The women and I met up with him halfway to the cemetery entrance. Barbara led the procession, with the rods pointing the way. We walked through ankle-high grass and not a word was spoken. It felt as if a sacred mission was being conducted in the middle of a bright, sunny summer afternoon.
After several minutes of walking, we could see the cemetery entrance. It lay between two stone walls that surrounded the plot of land. We stood about three feet in front of the wall opening and looked ahead. The cemetery was nearly impassable. Vines and bushes were everywhere. Bittersweet hung from the tops of fifty-foot trees. Different grasses and weeds were waist-high, and dead branches were scattered throughout. Between reeds of grass we could see headstones. Only two tall headstones stood out in the resting place of the last three hundred years. Both were family obelisks. All was silent but for a gentle breeze. It was truly a solemn gathering of souls.
John went through the entrance first. He cut some of the tall weeds on the ground and then held the larger vines back with his hand while we ducked our heads down to waist level and forged our way through. Once inside we saw that the cemetery was covered with weeds and bramble even worse than what we had first seen. If we weren’t careful, thorns would stick into our arms or our clothing. I had told everyone to wear long pants, so we were somewhat prepared. I hadn’t been out to the cemetery for months and was aghast at the condition it was in.
I checked with officials of the town later that week and discovered that they hadn’t tended to the cemetery since 1954. Large trees grew everywhere. Bittersweet and grape vines climbed the trees, and the area was almost entirely shaded by foliage. We had to be careful not to trip over headstones. Some of them had sunk into the ground so far that we could no longer tell who the person was beneath the stone. All was silent but for the sound of footsteps.
Barbara walked closely behind John. He followed her every instruction and she was following the lead of the rods. “Turn slightly to the left,” Barbara said. We continued to walk in a single file. “Now go ahead. Wait. Stop here.” About twenty-five feet in, we came across a headstone that had “D. A.” on it. Barbara asked Deborah if that was her stone. The rods made a severe cross for no and we moved on.
Not far ahead, as we angled to the left, the rods started spinning. I asked John to whack in a circle around the area. And there it was: a granite stone sunk in the ground so deep that only about eight inches of it was showing. We couldn’t see a name. Barbara asked Deborah, “Is this your grave?” The rods indicated a resounding yes, pointing as far apart as they could. All seven of us stood there looking at the place where her bones lay buried. Prayers were said and then we silently left the cemetery, leaving behind a cleared path to Deborah’s last resting place. I have been out there since that day and can no longer find the grave. It may have sunk below the ground.
Deborah is now the spirit I communicate with the most. She lived in the 1700s, was born in the month of October, and died of an illness when she was five years old. She told me that she never lived in the home, so I’m not certain why she is here now.
Deborah loves to play pranks and have other children around. Perhaps the most dramatic thing that she has done was interfere with a phone call that I had taken. A woman called to make a reservation. I took all the usual information from her and thought that this was a normal booking. Not so. On the date requested, the woman arrived with a child’s tea set. I said to her, “That is very nice of you, but why did you bring this to me?”
She answered, “It was the little girl on the phone with us—Deborah. She asked me to bring her a tea set. I’m sorry that it isn’t new. I just stopped at an antique shop along the road and picked it up.”
I gasped. I told her that Deborah had died in the 1700s but that her spirit stays at Captain Grant’s. The guest didn’t know what to say.
“Didn’t you hear her talking?” she asked. “It was very clear.”
“No,” I said. “The only voice I heard on the phone was yours.” I couldn’t believe it. The woman looked really shaken up. I know that I was!
The little tea set remains at Captain Grant’s in the dining room, available for Deborah to play with whenever she wants. At times it is no longer where I put it but is found in another place in the house.
Deborah also likes to stir up trouble in the Adelaide bathroom. Her first trick was to have the shower curtain rod fly off the wall and hit a maid. Now this maid did have a rather nasty sense of humor, if you could call it humor at all. One morning she came downstairs and told me that the rod had flown off the shower wall and hit her in the head and she couldn’t get the rod back in place. She was a smart woman, so I was a bit irritated to have to show her how to hang the rod back up. She insisted that I see the rod, so up the stairs I went and there was the rod now lying in the bedroom, not the bathroom. It was an old rod from the 1950s and was metal, with threaded adjusters at the ends. Each adjuster would move about an inch. I told her to watch me while I hung the rod. “Damn,” I said. The rod was about a foot too short. The maid smiled at me with that “I told you so” expression.
I called my type-A engineering husband up to the Adelaide room and showed him what had happened. He searched everywhere for a missing piece of rod, even though the rod was not broken. It still had its ends on it. He said, “There has to be a part missing. This rod didn’t just shrink. It is physically impossible.” In the bedroom there is a round hole that a steam pipe once ran through. This hole goes to the first floor and then down to the basement. Well, Tadashi searched all three floors, under furniture and in areas away from the pipe hole. He finally gave up and went to the store and bought a new shower curtain rod.
That rod didn’t last a week and came flying off the wall right in front of me. Then we bought another rod, with the same result. That is when my husband said, “I’m going to glue that thing in place so that it will never come off again.” Ha! Within another month the new shower curtain rod was also found in the bedroom. We’ve gone through about six rods since that time. Deborah really does not like to have a shower curtain in the tub area.
Eventually Tadashi put a round piece of wood under the rod and screwed it to the wall, so now the current rod is glued and screwed to the wall. The old rod was used for years in our fire pit to stir ashes. The other rods were broken and thrown away.
Deborah has materialized to the naked eye only once in the years that Captain Grant’s has been open. We once had a young girl named Amie working for us. Amie was an atheist. She believed that we’re here and then we’re not, so we should have fun while we can. She thought that all of the talk about ghosts was nonsense.
Well, Amie had been cleaning the Adelaide room every day for about a week. Then for three days in a row she found the metal mini blinds separated near the bottom of the window. It was as if someone small or on their knees had been looking out of the window. For two days Amie straightened out the blinds. On the third day Amie once again had her arms outstretched to fix the blinds when a little girl walked right through her arms. We could hear Amie’s screams throughout the house. She came running downstairs, crying and screaming, “I’m going to die! I’m going to die!”
We attempted to calm her down to no avail. Finally we got her to tell us what had happened through ongoing bursts of sobs. She told us how the little girl had walked right through her arms and then disappeared into the bedroom. “She vanished,” Amie said.
We sent her home. She refused to come back to work for three days and said that she would never go into that bedroom again. She did, of course, after a respectable amount of time, and sometime later she became a born-again Christian. So much for living, dying, and then it’s all over!
Deborah has also been caught on camera and several times on an EVP (electronic voice player). She has been heard repeatedly by the human ear. Guests often hear her giggling in the hallway or rolling balls in the attic. No one has gotten words or a sentence from her.
One female guest awoke around 2:00 a.m. one night and had the urge to take a picture. She shot the photo in the direction of the bathroom, and lo and behold there was Deborah peeking around the corner of the doorway. She was quite small and looked to be more like a three-year-old child than a five-year-old.
I could go on for hundreds of pages about Deborah, but that would not be fair to the other spirits that occupy Captain Grant’s. So I have one last story about Deborah to share with you before moving on.
We had a couple reserve the Adelaide room. The man who made the booking knew the room was haunted, but his partner did not. The partner said later that he would not have come if he had known about the spirits. The morning after they arrived, one of the men came downstairs and gave me one of the biggest hugs I have ever had. He was so excited, jabbering and arms flailing around. “What happened?” I asked. He sat down at the dining room table, the other guests listening with rapt attention.
In the middle of the night, the two men were woken by a sound from the bathroom similar to a fork lightly hitting leaded glass. Ting, ting. The one man crawled under the covers and stayed there, scared as all get out. His partner, full of curiosity, got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. He turned on the light and looked at the shower curtain. One by one, the rings had come off the shower curtain rod and were being placed across the remaining part of the rod. This was making the shower curtain face backward.
That man was one of the happiest guests we have ever had. By the way, both gentlemen have returned to stay with us. Their story is in a memory book that I keep in each room for guests to write in.
In order to learn more about the spirit world, I conducted interviews with seven spirits at Captain Grant’s. The following summary is paraphrased from those interviews. The full interviews are found in the Appendix of this book.
Synopsis of My Interview with Deborah
I begin each interview by saying who I am, even though the spirits know who I am at this point. When I contact Deborah, the rods fly around in circles and she gives me a “hug” (that is when one rod touches one of my cheeks and the other rod touches the other cheek). I ask Deborah, as well as all the other spirits that I interview, if it would be okay with them to be written about in this book. All agree.
I ask Deborah about the age of her spirit, and she tells me that the spirit continues to age even though it is eternal. One thing that surprises me is her no answer to the question “Have you ever met anyone in the spirit world that you knew when you were alive?” It is quite common for spirits to be reincarnated surrounded by spirits that they knew in a past lifetime. (To give you an example of this, I recently used the rods to answer some questions from one of my guests. She wanted to know about her husband in her last life. The spirits told me that her husband in that lifetime was English and that the two of them had moved to India. They also said that he was in the military. Well, her current husband is English and is in the military, and they were planning to move to India within a month.)
As it turns out, Deborah saw her parents go to a bright light and has not seen them since. Deborah also says that she is trapped in the house. This does not make sense to the Catholic side of me. According to the Bible, children are supposed to be innocents. She should ascend to heaven and not be reincarnated. I personally believe that Deborah is happy in the house and doesn’t want to go anywhere.
Guests often hear children playing, so I ask Deborah if there is anyone in the house that she plays with. Her playmate turns out to be a young boy who died sometime in the early twentieth century.
Even though Deborah’s spirit acts like a child, she possesses knowledge beyond her years. I wonder aloud if the spirits continue to learn from our world, and she answers in the affirmative. She remains in the house even though I have asked her to go to the light.
The little boy that Deborah plays with has been reported by several guests to be named John. I have never spoken to him. Supposedly he is in the cemetery across the street. This would make sense since he died in the early twentieth century and the old cemetery was no longer used at that time.