Post by Tomspy77 on Mar 31, 2015 8:11:30 GMT -6
Living With Ghosts: My Time At Butler Goodrich House
More at above link....thoughts? ghostjockeys111 ghost-17
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Pittsfield's second oldest house, located just north of downtown on Route 7, was built by one of the city's most prominent early citizens and has since accrued a curious history over the centuries.
It is also, according to some, quite haunted ... a reputation which prompted me, in early 2014, to jump at the chance to temporarily take up residence in the storied house.
The architecturally interesting homestead, once used as a model example and historic museum by the Berkshire Historical Society, was owned by the Goodrich family and its descendants for more than 150 years before becoming the historical society's property in 1963.
Its first owner was Maj. Butler Goodrich, whose father Caleb Goodrich came to Pittsfield from Wethersfield just prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution, in which he served as lieutenant under Capt. John Strong, leading a company of 54 Pittsfield men against Gen. Burgoyne and ultimately participating in the British commander's surrender at Saratoga.
Butler was born in 1768, and later served in the local militia, where he acquired his own title rank.
In the late 1700s, he married the wealthy widow Lydia White, and with her went on to have 11 children. Goodrich owned a medium size farm property, 163 acres (of which 60 acres was woodland), but his primary profession was as a skilled carpenter. He gained a reputation for being the go-to craftsman for difficult and somewhat dangerous projects. He was instrumental in the construction of the Bullfinch Church that preceded the current First Church on Park Square, and also in making improvements to that park. A friend and confidante of early local politicians, Butler was also an active member of the Washington Benevolent Society as well as serving on the town's Cemetery Commission, from which he railed against the then-common problem of local grave robbing.
Architect Terry Hallock of Richmond worked from old drawings and photographs provided by the Goodrich family to generate renderings recreating its original appearance as much as possible. In particular, the removal of a Victorian porch added in the 1890s to restore the entryway to its original look posed a challenge.
Ironically, this goal was accomplished with the help of a ghost — in the sense of a term used for a particular architectural phenomenon. While Hallock had been busily redrawing what the original door pediment might have looked like from images of other homes from the period, the contractor working on removal of the porch discovered the "ghost" of its real pediment on the underlying clapboard planks, a shadowy outline it had left on the wood from being there for so many years prior to its removal.
Haunted Habitat
Beyond its noteworthy history, I had become intrigued with the Goodrich House on other levels since I first read an old reference many years ago, just the briefest 1920s footnote in a local paper to its "reputed" haunted-ness.
It was in 2007 that this possibility re-emerged to public attention when, according to the personnel of the Spa Med clinic, things began to get weird.
It started with a contractor who was doing some work on the house. According to owner Raynee Bird, the man was shocked one day when suddenly, he looked up from his work to see a woman in a long dress "float" up the stairs.
A few months later, a customer reported also seeing an unknown woman in the house. She told staff that she had become upset, assuming the woman was an employee, and while she stood at the door knocking, no one let her in. The only problem was, no one from Spa Med had been there at the time.
Strange banging sounds, unexplained feelings of fear, and other sightings of "mysterious figures" were also among the occurrences witnesses reported. One employee claimed to have looked through the window and seen a man standing on the front stoop, "dressed out of place, with a large brimmed hat." At first she had taken him to be the mailman, but then realized it was a holiday. Whether the curious man was some stranger looking in, or something more strange, was never established.
Other accounts involved the sound of something slamming on the second floor when no one was upstairs, and a cabinet door next to the upstairs fireplace opening and closing on its own.
"One of the weirdest things that has happened to me personally was I received a phone call on my cell phone from the spa when I was the only one there," Bird told Advocate Weekly reporter Nichole Davis.
On another occasion, she said, she was walking into the kitchen, located on the second floor, when suddenly "a wine glass flew off the table, hit a sugar bowl and broke it."
As odd occurrences began to pile up, proprietor Raynee Bird put in a call to the Berkshire Paranormal Group, which had formed three years earlier in North Adams. In September 2007, BPG conducted a lengthy evening investigation of the house, armed with an array of popular modern ghost hunting equipment.
In his writeup of the case, team leader Josh Mantello reported that they encountered several curious occurrences, including sightings of a what appeared to be a shadowy figure.
"While performing an initial sweep of the building," Mantello stated, "in the area of the Salon and hair washing room I saw a shadow walk across this very small room. This shadow was pronounced enough to startle me, and I asked if any one was inside."
Upon entering that room to investigate, Mantello said he then saw another shadow move across the hallway outside it.
In another instance, a piece of equipment allegedly went "flying off a table and crashing to the floor — completely on it's own."
They had been recording with audio devices at the time, and a short sound clip archived on the group's website captures a crashing sound of the alleged incident, complete with the shocked, profanity-laced reaction of team members
According to their report, a majority of the electronic activity they found most interesting occurred around the main staircase, where the apparition of the woman had reportedly been seen.
"Being a group who likes to show solid presentable evidence after a case to prove a haunting, we were unable to do so in this case and this was somewhat disappointing after the experience we had in the building," Mantello concluded. "But, I did walk out of the building with a strong sense of another presence inside after performing the EMF Experiment on the stairs. I do feel that some sort of paranormal activity is taking place inside this building and further investigations are needed to either prove me wrong or to gather that solid presentable evidence we seek."
On a personal level, the decision to actually move into the former master bedroom of a house said to have exhibited its fair share of inexplicable activity also represented an interesting intellectual challenge. Over the years, I have often preferred to conduct my work in this area from the "armchair" analyst's position, safely cloaked in the role of amateur folklorist and historian, charting the anthropology of paranormal allegations.
I have never entirely shied away from active field work, however; logging plenty of all-nighters quietly tip-toeing behind ghost-hunting clubs, staking out sites of alleged repeat UFO sightings, and camping forests areas where people have gone missing or suffered unsolved demise.
Still, the prospect of vacating an apartment I'd become rather comfortable in to take up an extended residence in a boarding house full of both practical and esoteric uncertainties was a bit daunting, and I would come to berate myself as a darned fool more than once over the coming months.
I also wondered (mostly jokingly I think) if there was going to be any, well, awkwardness, in my taking up quarters in the bedroom of a man who'd once publicly threatened to burn down the facilities of the early Berkshire Medical Society, an institution in which one of my own Durwin relatives had been a part of the early founding membership.
Though feeling a bit silly as I did so, I even made a point to verbalize aloud upon my arrival that there were certainly no hard feelings about this on my part, even going so far as to point out that Butler Goodrich and Ephraim Durwin had been parishioners of the same church, and emerged on the same side of the schism in said church, when a portion of the congregation fled William Allen's aggressive political preaching at First Congregational to form the Union Parish.
My own amateur examinations of the property, like those of Berkshire Paranormal six years earlier, also yielded little in the way of evidentiary results.
As I have stated repeatedly in articles on this subject matter, I am not, nor have I ever considered myself to be, a "ghost hunter," an undertaking I generally consider to be more or less an example of the social activity folklorists refer to as "legend ostension" or more simply "legend tripping," than the scientific discipline it's sometimes portrayed as. Nonetheless, as I'd moved into the house primarily for the experience of the thing, I was committed to giving it the old college try, and getting my feet thoroughly wet in the legend tripping of my residency.
It is also, according to some, quite haunted ... a reputation which prompted me, in early 2014, to jump at the chance to temporarily take up residence in the storied house.
The architecturally interesting homestead, once used as a model example and historic museum by the Berkshire Historical Society, was owned by the Goodrich family and its descendants for more than 150 years before becoming the historical society's property in 1963.
Its first owner was Maj. Butler Goodrich, whose father Caleb Goodrich came to Pittsfield from Wethersfield just prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution, in which he served as lieutenant under Capt. John Strong, leading a company of 54 Pittsfield men against Gen. Burgoyne and ultimately participating in the British commander's surrender at Saratoga.
Butler was born in 1768, and later served in the local militia, where he acquired his own title rank.
In the late 1700s, he married the wealthy widow Lydia White, and with her went on to have 11 children. Goodrich owned a medium size farm property, 163 acres (of which 60 acres was woodland), but his primary profession was as a skilled carpenter. He gained a reputation for being the go-to craftsman for difficult and somewhat dangerous projects. He was instrumental in the construction of the Bullfinch Church that preceded the current First Church on Park Square, and also in making improvements to that park. A friend and confidante of early local politicians, Butler was also an active member of the Washington Benevolent Society as well as serving on the town's Cemetery Commission, from which he railed against the then-common problem of local grave robbing.
Architect Terry Hallock of Richmond worked from old drawings and photographs provided by the Goodrich family to generate renderings recreating its original appearance as much as possible. In particular, the removal of a Victorian porch added in the 1890s to restore the entryway to its original look posed a challenge.
Ironically, this goal was accomplished with the help of a ghost — in the sense of a term used for a particular architectural phenomenon. While Hallock had been busily redrawing what the original door pediment might have looked like from images of other homes from the period, the contractor working on removal of the porch discovered the "ghost" of its real pediment on the underlying clapboard planks, a shadowy outline it had left on the wood from being there for so many years prior to its removal.
Haunted Habitat
Beyond its noteworthy history, I had become intrigued with the Goodrich House on other levels since I first read an old reference many years ago, just the briefest 1920s footnote in a local paper to its "reputed" haunted-ness.
It was in 2007 that this possibility re-emerged to public attention when, according to the personnel of the Spa Med clinic, things began to get weird.
It started with a contractor who was doing some work on the house. According to owner Raynee Bird, the man was shocked one day when suddenly, he looked up from his work to see a woman in a long dress "float" up the stairs.
A few months later, a customer reported also seeing an unknown woman in the house. She told staff that she had become upset, assuming the woman was an employee, and while she stood at the door knocking, no one let her in. The only problem was, no one from Spa Med had been there at the time.
Strange banging sounds, unexplained feelings of fear, and other sightings of "mysterious figures" were also among the occurrences witnesses reported. One employee claimed to have looked through the window and seen a man standing on the front stoop, "dressed out of place, with a large brimmed hat." At first she had taken him to be the mailman, but then realized it was a holiday. Whether the curious man was some stranger looking in, or something more strange, was never established.
Other accounts involved the sound of something slamming on the second floor when no one was upstairs, and a cabinet door next to the upstairs fireplace opening and closing on its own.
"One of the weirdest things that has happened to me personally was I received a phone call on my cell phone from the spa when I was the only one there," Bird told Advocate Weekly reporter Nichole Davis.
On another occasion, she said, she was walking into the kitchen, located on the second floor, when suddenly "a wine glass flew off the table, hit a sugar bowl and broke it."
As odd occurrences began to pile up, proprietor Raynee Bird put in a call to the Berkshire Paranormal Group, which had formed three years earlier in North Adams. In September 2007, BPG conducted a lengthy evening investigation of the house, armed with an array of popular modern ghost hunting equipment.
In his writeup of the case, team leader Josh Mantello reported that they encountered several curious occurrences, including sightings of a what appeared to be a shadowy figure.
"While performing an initial sweep of the building," Mantello stated, "in the area of the Salon and hair washing room I saw a shadow walk across this very small room. This shadow was pronounced enough to startle me, and I asked if any one was inside."
Upon entering that room to investigate, Mantello said he then saw another shadow move across the hallway outside it.
In another instance, a piece of equipment allegedly went "flying off a table and crashing to the floor — completely on it's own."
They had been recording with audio devices at the time, and a short sound clip archived on the group's website captures a crashing sound of the alleged incident, complete with the shocked, profanity-laced reaction of team members
According to their report, a majority of the electronic activity they found most interesting occurred around the main staircase, where the apparition of the woman had reportedly been seen.
"Being a group who likes to show solid presentable evidence after a case to prove a haunting, we were unable to do so in this case and this was somewhat disappointing after the experience we had in the building," Mantello concluded. "But, I did walk out of the building with a strong sense of another presence inside after performing the EMF Experiment on the stairs. I do feel that some sort of paranormal activity is taking place inside this building and further investigations are needed to either prove me wrong or to gather that solid presentable evidence we seek."
On a personal level, the decision to actually move into the former master bedroom of a house said to have exhibited its fair share of inexplicable activity also represented an interesting intellectual challenge. Over the years, I have often preferred to conduct my work in this area from the "armchair" analyst's position, safely cloaked in the role of amateur folklorist and historian, charting the anthropology of paranormal allegations.
I have never entirely shied away from active field work, however; logging plenty of all-nighters quietly tip-toeing behind ghost-hunting clubs, staking out sites of alleged repeat UFO sightings, and camping forests areas where people have gone missing or suffered unsolved demise.
Still, the prospect of vacating an apartment I'd become rather comfortable in to take up an extended residence in a boarding house full of both practical and esoteric uncertainties was a bit daunting, and I would come to berate myself as a darned fool more than once over the coming months.
I also wondered (mostly jokingly I think) if there was going to be any, well, awkwardness, in my taking up quarters in the bedroom of a man who'd once publicly threatened to burn down the facilities of the early Berkshire Medical Society, an institution in which one of my own Durwin relatives had been a part of the early founding membership.
Though feeling a bit silly as I did so, I even made a point to verbalize aloud upon my arrival that there were certainly no hard feelings about this on my part, even going so far as to point out that Butler Goodrich and Ephraim Durwin had been parishioners of the same church, and emerged on the same side of the schism in said church, when a portion of the congregation fled William Allen's aggressive political preaching at First Congregational to form the Union Parish.
My own amateur examinations of the property, like those of Berkshire Paranormal six years earlier, also yielded little in the way of evidentiary results.
As I have stated repeatedly in articles on this subject matter, I am not, nor have I ever considered myself to be, a "ghost hunter," an undertaking I generally consider to be more or less an example of the social activity folklorists refer to as "legend ostension" or more simply "legend tripping," than the scientific discipline it's sometimes portrayed as. Nonetheless, as I'd moved into the house primarily for the experience of the thing, I was committed to giving it the old college try, and getting my feet thoroughly wet in the legend tripping of my residency.
More at above link....thoughts? ghostjockeys111 ghost-17