In Episode 452, Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger explore the coast of Blue Hill, Maine, searching for the Old Stone House that was once the setting for a profound haunting. In 1906, the details of the chilling encounters first made the paper. The building has had a haunted reputation for over 150 years.
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Produced and hosted by: Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger
Edited by: Ray Auger
Voice Actors: Lisa Strykowski and Michael Legge
Theme Music by: John Judd
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
*A note on the text: Please forgive punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. Like us, the transcripts ain’t perfect.
[OCEAN/BEACH SOUNDS]
RAY: It’s officially summer, Jeff! A great time to be by the ocean here in Maine.
JEFF: Definitely. We’re in the town of Blue Hill right on the coast. We can see Mt. Desert Island across the bay. It’s really a nice spot.
RAY: There are a few beautiful houses along the shore here. I envy the view they have all summer. These folks have it made!
JEFF: Well… maybe not all of them. There’s one shore house in particular you may not envy. They call it the Old Stone House.
RAY: Why would I not envy the folks living there?
JEFF: Because it used to be called the Old Stone Tavern in Blue Hill, Maine… and folks will tell you… it’s haunted.
[INTRO]
JEFF: I’m Jeff Belanger. Welcome to Episode 452 of the New England Legends podcast.
RAY: And I’m Ray Auger, thanks for riding along with us as we chronicle every wicked strange legend in New England one story at a time. We’re always on the hunt for ghosts, monsters, aliens, roadside oddities, eccentrics, and anything else that bumps in the night. So many of our story leads come from you, so please reach out to us anytime through our website with your ideas. We love hearing from you.
JEFF: We’ll explore this old haunted house in Blue Hill, Maine, right after this quick word from our sponsor.
SPONSOR
RAY: Haunted, you say?
JEFF: Haunted with a reputation that goes back at least a century and a half.
RAY: Oooo I can’t wait to hear this. First, a little background on Blue Hill, Maine. Originally called Plantation Number 5, the townsfolks officially changed their name to Blue Hill in 1778, named after Blue Hill Falls in town. With lots of running water, various sawmills and gristmills popped up as the early industry here. But also shipbuilding. Considering so much Maine timber was nearby, it could be cut here, and with the protected harbor and ocean right on the coast, ships could be built. An industrious seaport town. Today the population is about 2,800 people.
JEFF: That population tends to swell in the summer months as tourists and vacationers pop in.
RAY: Like so many other coastal Maine towns. There’s a reason they call Maine Vacationland.
JEFF: So true. And as we know from experience, parts of vacationland are haunted. Like this old stone house in Blue Hill. So let’s travel back to the year 1856 and explore this haunt.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: It’s June of 1856. Franklin Pierce is in the White House in Washington, DC, Samuel Wells is the governor of Maine, and here in Blue Hill, the summer season is heating up, which means the beach, tourists, and parties.
JEFF: Of course! It wouldn’t be summer in Maine without all of those things. Here in Blue Hill, one of those party destinations is the Stone House Tavern.
[OCEAN SOUNDS IN THE DISTANCE]
RAY: The Stone House Tavern has stood by the ocean for many years now. It’s a social center, but also an inn with rooms for rent.
JEFF: And they say the place is haunted…
RAY: Oooo, really?
JEFF: They do. Strange sounds have been reported coming out of the basement for years.
RAY: What’s in the basement?
JEFF: The foundation of the house was built with local granite. It’s a dirt floor basement, like many others in the region, there’s also a freshwater well in the cellar with clear, cold water. But…. Strange sounds echo out of there.
RAY: I heard one former owner said they believe some porcupines had made their way into the basement, and the odd sounds were the sounds of the porcupines mating.
JEFF: The thing is porcupines do make strange sounds, they are nocturnal, which could explain sounds at night, but they only mate in the late fall. Other people have heard those sounds in the middle of the day in the summer while sitting on the veranda steps.
RAY: So the jury is out. Believers will believe, doubters will doubt.
JEFF: That’s fair. That’s how it goes until something happens to make you a believer.
[LIGHT PARTY NOISES FADE IN]
JEFF: Inside the Stone House Tavern, there’s a party going on. Young woman named Margaret is dancing the summer night away.
[LIGHT PARTY NOISE FADES OUT]
JEFF: As the party winds down, Margaret makes her way upstairs to retire for the night.
MARGARET 1: I had gone to bed after the ball, and to sleep. How long I had slept, I know not, but I was suddenly awakened by an unearthly scream in the room where I was sleeping. I awoke to see a young woman standing in the center of the room, all in white, with a wealth of black hair hanging down her back. She appeared to be in her night clothing. Sobbing and crying out, and wringing her hands, she cried: “My child, my child, they are killing her! They are killing her!” and then she started and went from the room and down the stairs.
Instead of fainting from fright, I was brave… or perhaps foolhardy… I jumped out of bed, and followed along, scarcely realizing what I was doing. The woman, or ghost, which ever you call her, went down the stairs to the lower floor, then along to the cellar door and down the cellar stairs to the cellar floor into a corner cand cried: “They have buried my baby there!” She then vanished, and I fainted.
When I came to, I was in my own room and in bed, and the people of the house were standing about me. They said they were awakened by my screams and rushed to the cellar, where they found me in a dead faint on the cellar bottom.
JEFF: Some of the folks gathered snicker at the story, figuring maybe she had too much to drink this past evening, or maybe an overactive imagination. Still others are curious enough.
[WALKING DOWN STAIRS]
JEFF: Some of the men have grabbed some shovels and are going to test the story.
[DIG DIG DIG]
RAY: They’re digging in the corner of the dirt floor basement.
[DIG DIG DIG]
RAY: Is that…
[CLINK]
RAY: No, just an old bottle.
[DIG DIG DIG]
RAY: After digging out the corner of the basement maybe a foot or so deep, they call it quits. They found nothing.
JEFF: Do you think they didn’t dig deep enough?
RAY: I guess that’s possible. But it’s also possible… maybe even probably that there’s nothing here.
JEFF: Margaret is shaken by her ghostly experience in the Old Stone House. She asks around some of the old timers if they’ve ever heard of any stories of a murdered baby at the house, but no one seems to know anything about it.
[SLOW FADE IN OCEAN BEACH WAVES IN DISTANCE]
JEFF: It’s 1858. Two years have passed.
[KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK]
JEFF: That’s when a man stops by to visit Margaret’s father.
MAN: Did you know the Old Stone Tavern is haunted?
RAY: Margaret and her father glance at each other. They tell their guest they have heard that.
MARGARET: What do you know of the haunting?
MAN: Years ago there lived in the house a man and his wife, and his daughter, a beautiful girl who married and with her husband, a sea-faring man, lived with her parents. The husband was lost at sea, and about the same time the baby which had come to the house died. The double bereavement unbalanced the young wife’s mind. She became almost a raving maniac and from that time until the day of her death, she wandered about the house, night and day, raving that her baby had been murdered and buried in the cellar.
MARGARET: (GASP)
MAN: After her death at irregular intervals, her spirit would come back to the room which had been hers, and she would cry out as in life, that the baby, who was dead had been murdered, and she would go from there to the cellar where she believed the little one was buried.
MARGARET: I told him of my experience in the room which I occupied, and from him learned that the room in which I had slept that night, was the one which had been the girl’s in life.
RAY: I just got the chills…
JEFF: Yeah, to get validation of your experience two years later. Yikes. The haunted reputation of the Old Stone Tavern has been cemented. And that brings us back to today.
[TRANSITION]
JEFF: Though the experience took place in the 1850s, the story made it to the Lewiston Sun Journal newspaper April 7, 1906. It’s where we got most of this week’s story.
RAY: The article also mentions that many years went by and the haunted reputation faded. I guess that means the experiences slowed down over time.
JEFF: That happens, then it gets a shot in the arm like this newspaper article, then others recall a memory from long ago and someone else comes forward. These legends ebb and flow. That’s the nature of hauntings. Sometimes the past echoes, but not everyone can hear it. But sometimes we’re in the right place at the right time and we see… a ghost.
[OUTTRO]
RAY: So true. And that takes us to After the Legend where we dig deeper into this week’s story and sometimes veer off course.
JEFF: After the Legend is brought to you by our patreon patrons! These folks are the best. We’re an independent production. We’re not backed by any podcast network, we work for you. So thank you patrons for helping us financially with our hosting and production costs, our travel, our marketing, and all of the others costs it takes to bring you two stories each week. With more patrons we could do even more. It’s just $3 bucks per month and for that you’ll get early ad-free access to new episodes, plus bonus episodes and content that no one else gets to hear. Click on over to patreon.com/newenglandlegends to sign up.
To see a picture of the Old Stone Tavern, click on the link in our episode description, or go to our website and click on Episode 452.
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We’d like to thank Lisa Strykowski and Michael Legge for lending their voice acting talents this week, thank you to our sponsors, thanks to our patreon patrons, and our theme music is by John Judd.
Until next time remember… the bizarre is closer than you think.