From Maine, With Love - An Allagash Brewing Podcast

S3 Episode 9: Real Spooky Stories

• Allagash Brewing Company • Season 3 • Episode 9

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Thrills. Laughs. And spine-tingling tales. In honor of Haunted House, our seasonal-favorite dark hoppy ale, we're recounting some real spooky stories to pair with the beer's haunting notes of cocoa, coffee, and devilish hint of hops. Sit back in your creakiest chair, crack open a Haunted House, and enjoy these personal spooky stories from Allagash staff, as well as historically creepy tales from all over Maine.

Brett:

This is for Maine with Love, an Allagash Brewing podcast where we talk about beer, our community here in Maine, ghosts, and things that generally make us happy. And that extra one in here was not a mistake. We're talking about ghost stories today in honor of Haunted House. are Dark Hoppy Ale. With me today, first time podcast, this first, second, oh, we did the warehouse one. I pulled, I just, come on. It was literally two years ago, actually, at this point. That's pretty amazing. Years and years ago. Well, welcome back, Tom. Hi. So, so happy to have you back because this is, I'm excited for this one. This is going to be fun. The purpose of this podcast is really, if you have a haunted house or you just want to hear some ghost stories, you just want to kick back, hear some creepy, spooky stuff. Not creepy, more spooky, a little more supernatural. This is the time. This will be fun. So, Tom, to start, I have a secret question for you. What is the most satisfying recyclable material to crush in a baler?

Tom:

Ooh. Actually, I have a good story. For some reason, at the warehouse, we had a cardboard cutout of a horse. Yeah. We had it for a long time. I think it went to GABF a few times back and forth. And it moved around the warehouse for a long, long time. Yeah. And then it... was falling apart. So we were like, it's cardboard time to go in the Baylor. Yeah. It kind of got, stuck in the back of the baler. So it just looked like there was a horse living in the baler for a long time, which was awkward yet also hilarious. Every time the door would open, there'd just be a horse sitting back there. That's amazing.

Brett:

So for reference, a baler is just a giant compactor that you stick a bunch of like materials in. It compacts it, then you kind of wrap it in whatever, like what metal? Bailing wire. Yeah, bailing wire. And then we could ship it off to be properly recycled because Tom managed our recycling call. up for quite some time do you still manage it

Tom:

uh no it's kind of manages itself

Brett:

at this point it's a smooth

Tom:

running

Brett:

machine um i didn't even mention so tom is our merchandise inventory manager if you've ever bought something from the allagash web store tom and keith are both responsible for sending it your way so much appreciated tom

Tom:

no problem

Brett:

uh so to start this wonderful journey. This is all in honor of Haunted House. This is our dark, hoppy ale that has come out every single fall for... 10 like it's like nine years at this point it's like 2015 I think was maybe so do you remember what

Tom:

its first name was first

Brett:

beer was house beer in parentheses haunted so silly yeah it's great because we have a house beer and then this was the idea of Sean Diffley our engineering director and yeah it's kind of a mashup in in the original orientation it was a mashup of our house beer with so Sean's from Ireland with a beer near and dear to his heart that is a wide enjoyed in Ireland, a dark beer, and we kind of put those two concepts together and got this, uh, got haunted house. And so it's nothing like, you know, that beer. It's very, what do we, what would you say? It's its own. It's totally, it's definitely its own thing. It's very much its own thing.

Tom:

I get very excited every time I see it every

Brett:

year though. It's so good. Is it? So it is actually one of my favorite Allagash beers year in and year out. I think it's gotta be in the top three for me.

Tom:

You know, now it's just even more enjoyable.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, I think I have a personal feeling that this packaging is where it's going to land for a long time. This feels like we really nailed it on. So Todd, our graphic designer, drew, illustrated this entire thing. So if you see a haunted house can, you see the haunted house package, that's Todd. He did a killer job, added a lot of fun little whimsical elements, still retained the haunted house sort of core look, but it just screams Halloween. I'm sorry. All right. Well, let's get into why we're here. We're here because we want to talk about ghost stories. And I feel like there's no better start to this than a ghost story from our very own Rob Todd, founder of the brewery. We put out a call to staff to– pass along their ghost stories, and Rob was the first one to respond. So we recorded him with his ghost story, and we're going to play it for you right now.

Rob:

So you want to hear the story? So my wife Betsy and I bought our house in 1998. Very old house at the time. It was 200 years old. It's now 225 years old. So I'm sure there's a lot of history in that house. A lot of families have lived there. I've done a ton of the work on that house. I love working with my hands. It's one of the reasons I got into the beer business. So one day I was doing this plumbing job, in the basement and I needed a fitting. And I was kind of in a groove. I didn't want to have to drop everything and go to the hardware store. So I walked over to the barn, which is right near the house, which is also 200 years old. And I figured maybe I could find this plumbing fitting that I needed in the barn somewhere to finish the job. And I started by looking at the workbench. There's nothing on the workbench. And I went through every box, went all through the barn, went back to the workbench, nothing. looked through a few more boxes and I just kind of gave up and I was ready to just like up in the car and head over to the hardware store to get this fitting and like no sooner did I think that then I looked back for some reason at the workbench and the fitting I needed was sitting right in the middle of the workbench I literally I got a I got a pretty major chill down my spine you know I'm convinced that barn is haunted but I really believe it like haunted in a good way. Something wanted me to have that fitting. So I was able to go right back to work.

Brett:

So

Rob:

helpful.

Brett:

It's the helpful ghost. It's the friendly ghost. It's a good, it's a good ghost story. That's such a good story. Yeah. I mean the helpful pipe fitting ghost. Uh, I, I wish that was my ghost story. My ghost story is different. I got it. I've got a legit one. Uh, that is my own experience. But Tom, you said you had a ghost story.

Tom:

I do. This is a story I haven't thought about for a while, and then it popped into my head when we were talking about spooky stories. Nice. It takes place way back in the day of the mid-'90s, so no cell phones. It's very scary. Already. It's the late 1900s. 1990. It also takes place in a very scary location, high school. Oh, man. Even scarier. But one day, it was a Saturday, I was at the high school to watch my older cousin play basketball. My younger cousin, who's a year older than me, freshman that year, we were kind of bored. Basketball game wasn't very exciting. He was like, hey, let's go wander around the school. So I was like, sure, let's do it. Start wandering around the hallways, just seeing what's up. Not many people around. Saturday, why would there be? Mm-hmm. And then we came upon his classroom. He's like, hey, this is my classroom. I made that project on the wall. So we were looking at the wall, standing outside the classroom door because it was locked. Typical high school hallway, lockers on both sides, double doors on the end. We're just standing there for maybe a minute. All of a sudden, one of the lockers popped open. On its own, obviously. Basketball came out, bounced down the hallway towards us, and we were like, that was weird, but not really spooky. It's like basketball, mind of its own, whatever.

Brett:

It's just your average basketball with mind of its

Tom:

own. Maybe it was trying to make its way to the gymnasium. I don't know. It was late for the game. It was

Brett:

very late for the game.

Tom:

So we were like, that was weird. We just ignored the basketball, left it in the hallway. We were just chit-chatting about school and stuff, and then... All of a sudden, we both kind of felt this weird vibe, I guess you would call it. And then we kind of both were like looking at each other because we sensed something else weird was going to happen. And then out of nowhere, and I still like, I'm not sure if this was real, a prank, a ghost, whatever. But we just heard this voice that goes...

Brett:

Get out of the building.

Tom:

So we both turned and ran as fast as we could. My cousin was an avid runner, did track and field. So he was about six miles ahead of me. By the time we got out of the school, we ran like through the gym, just like blasted past our parents. We were like, we'll be outside. And they're outside and didn't go back in. Didn't really tell anyone about it because they were both like, was that something that actually happened? I also was kind of like, we weren't supposed to be in the hallway It was a teacher that smokes a lot and is real mad at us or something. But every once in a while, I think of that story, and it still kind of gives me the creeps. It was the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me. That's

Brett:

amazing. And the part I like about it, too, is that you're both of a significantly advanced age. You're not like, I was three, and I saw a door close. You're almost in high school at that point.

Tom:

It was very weird. If the... Two things happened separately, like the weird voice and the basketball thing. I would have been like, I don't know, just the fact that they happened together. Something was just in the hallway looking to have a fun time and mess with some kids.

Brett:

And you both concurred. You heard the exact same thing.

Tom:

Oh, yeah. I think we probably kind of, after we got outside, talked about it for a minute, and then I don't think we ever discussed it again. That's amazing. We're like, it didn't happen. Nope. I refuse. Yeah. That's good. Denial. That's a good one.

Brett:

Yeah, ghost denial. All right, I got a quick one. uh, of my own, I grew up in a house that was built in 1717. So it was a very, very old house in Connecticut. And like, it was, it's always, all my friends are like, it's pretty haunted. There's some haunted stuff going on. There's always some weird like creeks and whatever. And it's like, you know, Oh, is the house settling? Is it mice in the walls or what? I don't know. So like there was always that element to it, but there was one summer. And I think it was the year after I graduated college. We're just, It was– stuff was going down all the time. It was like literally every single night I was there, some door would open up. I'd hear some like voice in a far hallway when I was the only one there. Just like– just stuff that was going on where I was like more annoyed because I was like, I just want to sleep. I don't want to have like all this weird haunting stuff happening. Keep it down, ghost. The most striking one happened though where I was sleeping– I woke up and like, you know, when you wake up, you like stuff, you see something, something's there. And then you kind of like, Oh, just like kind of brushing off the sleep. So I woke up and in my room, there was a woman in a like floral dress over towards the corner of the room. Couldn't really see her face. And so I was just kind of like, ah, I just woke up like, I don't know. You know? So I was just like, okay, maybe, I don't know. So I, I, I closed my eyes, did a little like, you know, gather myself and I opened it back up and the woman is still there and she leans down a little bit and waves as like a little like, and I was like, oh no. And so I like sat up and I was like, holy goodness. And then it just disappeared. But that was definitely the... It was creepy as hell. It was really creepy. And that was, I think, where I started just sleeping over at my friend's house. I was like, I'm just not going to sleep there for a while. And then it stopped. And I've never seen a ghostly thing.

Tom:

I was really worried you were going to say you closed your eyes and then opened them and the face was right

Brett:

next to you. That was super creepy. Still creepy. No, I still didn't see no face or anything, but I can picture the dress. It's crazy. It's wild. Kind of like flowy, yeah.

Tom:

You're going to see someone walking down the street in that dress, and you're going to be like, ah,

Brett:

she's back. Yeah, yeah. Well, good. Those are two good ghost stories setting us off on the right foot. I hope you who are listening either have already cracked your haunted house or are inspired to crack your haunted house. Go out and buy a haunted house. Pause the episode because we got some more ghost stories coming. I can't tell you they're going to be better than those because those were really, I think those were pretty

Tom:

good. When you mean go out and buy a haunted house, do you mean the beer or an actual haunted abode? Talk to your

Brett:

realtor. Talk to your realtor. Go way far out there up in Maine. Find the most cursed house. Speaking of curses. Maine ghost stories. So Tom, I've got some ghost stories that we've pulled together here from Maine. These are Maine-centric ones. And so I'm going to kind of synopsize them and we'll react. Love it. So the first one is actually the ghost story that you mentioned when we mentioned this very podcast. And it's Colonel Buck's Cursed Monument in Bucksport, Maine, a town named for Colonel Buck. So he's a revolutionary war hero, did a lot of great stuff, apparently a very well-beloved person, except in 1795 uh, he was sentenced, he sentenced a woman to death for witchcraft. And before her execution, she cursed him and said she would dance on his grave, uh, or something like that, or step on his grave, or there's a lot of different, like in one telling he did this in another, but basically that's the broad strokes. And if you go to his, uh, grave there is a pointy foot on the monument that like kind of can't be washed off can't be erased it's like this foot shaped silhouette at the top of the the grave

Tom:

it definitely looks like a foot it does unmistakable it could not be any other thing

Brett:

and like somehow a witchy foot like it's like pointy in the right ways that it's kind of witchy.

Tom:

I will say I've driven past it many times and it's always like, Oh, there it is. You know? And it started out as like, Oh, it's so spooky. And now it's like, Oh, it's next to the McDonald's.

Brett:

There's the little paved walkway with the ropes, the people taking the picture,

Tom:

but you can look it up online. There's a lot of photos and stuff. So you can judge for yourself.

Brett:

So the thing actually, cause you told me about the trying to wash it off and it coming back. Is that you like, is that a thing? Like that's, that's actual that they

Tom:

try to wash it off. I've heard that. that they've tried to buff it off, done different things. One time I heard from someone that they replaced the monument and it came back. Whoa. But all of this is just ghost stories that I don't want to delve too much into figuring out if they're real or not because it's more fun.

Brett:

Yeah,

Tom:

it is more fun.

Brett:

To believe. Yeah, just believe. All right. Next one is the East Wind Inn. So it changed hands many times over the years. Now it's an inn. And guests arriving at the East Wind Inn in Tennant's Harbor are advised to stay clear of rooms 12 and 14. Visitors in those rooms have frequently reported an odd feeling of being held down in their beds by unseen hands. And on the main floor, a gray figure has been seen climbing the main stairway and looking out an ocean-facing window. Throughout the building, there are reports of strange noises, such as eerie wailing and crying, and physical abnormalities like windows and doors opening and closing on their own. I mean, it's an inn. Of course there are strange noises. I was going to

Tom:

say, if you could drop any... random inn name in any Maine town that's down east and tell that exact same story and people are like, oh, I've been there. There's a lot of haunted inns along the coast of Maine. I went to

Brett:

Haunted Room

Tom:

12. It's funny. It's 12 and 14, not in between.

Brett:

Right? Oh, yeah. It's right around 13. Maybe they didn't. Sorry. Right around that number. Maybe they didn't. Who knows?

Tom:

They skipped it, like elevators. Yeah, intentionally

Brett:

skipped it, and then the ghosts were like, no way, now we're going to haunt two

Tom:

rooms, you jerks. Right in between. Now we have to live in the wall. We're just going

Brett:

to haunt one room, and now we're haunting two. There is, I will say... I, from my own experiences and stuff, there is something about a place being haunted. There's something about a confined space being like, this is the haunted place where there's got to be something, the consistency with that of the experience among so many people, not saying something paranormal, but just like something we truly have not detected, don't understand, that makes it why it would be in a certain place. That's my Joe Rogan experience.

Tom:

It's all about the energies that live within the building, right? Something that's been there for a long time and many people have come and gone. Right. Especially, I mean, you have a lot of older buildings that Back in the day, there wasn't a hospital, so it's like a lot of people probably died here and still are here.

Brett:

Actually, my childhood home originally had what's called a coffin door in one of the rooms where it's literally like you have the showing of the body there and then this is the door where you're supposed to take the coffin out. And your parents bought this house.

Tom:

Yeah, they

Brett:

bought it.

Tom:

They went to their realtor and said, what is the most haunted house? They were

Brett:

sorting by extra haunted, so it's one of the choices. I will also say I do love that, like, because most ghosts appear in, in so many stories, like they're a revolutionary wall figure. Like they have their old cap on, but like thinking about in the future, it's going to be like a hipster or like a Gen Z-er appeared to me in my head. He's wearing his flannel shirt and his five panel hat. Exactly. He was riding a fixie. All right. The next one, Fort Knox in Prospect, Maine, which I literally, I thought Fort Knox was like the one with all the gold, but apparently not.

Tom:

I've been there a few times. Oh, really? Bring the kids. You can tell the

Brett:

story. So apparently, according to my sources, my source, one of the best preserved military fortifications on the eastern seacoast... Sure. So, despite a lack of reported deaths in military action, the fort is said to be haunted. Visitors to the fort have reported a sundry of paranormal experiences, such as feeling cold spots, being touched by unseen hands, seeing ghostly apparitions and strange lights, and hearing voices, laughter, and footsteps. It's actually been featured on a couple of the ghostly shows, you know, ghost hunters, that sort of thing. This is why I really like this story. Investigators reported recording strange lights, unexplained thermal readings, and even a few EVPs. Does anyone know what an EVP means? No, not at all. Electronic voice phenomenon. Oh. I love how technical that is for like, we heard a spooky whisper on the, on the, we recorded the spooky whisper.

Tom:

I picture them using like old fashioned tape deck or something, not electronics. That's wild. I, have you watched those go, the ghost shows? I've seen

Brett:

a

Tom:

few.

Brett:

Yeah. I took, I had a fair stint in my life watching the ghost shows. And my favorite part was them like decoding the EVPs where they're like, there's something that's like,

Tom:

and

Brett:

they're like, he said, if you take, go into the basement and walk around the corner, I'm very angry. Like, like,

Tom:

Maybe that's what it said, but also it might have been like, eat candy. It's Halloween.

Brett:

Moisturize every day.

Tom:

Where's my fixie bike?

Brett:

Another ghost stole my fixie

Tom:

bike. I will say I've been there a few times and I have had none of those experiences. You haven't experienced a cold spot? I haven't. I mean, you go down a... stone hallway with no sunlight it's gonna get cold

Brett:

so the sun was gone when i was inside in the middle of the day i didn't mean for this to be us and slash me just dunking on all these stories but i've it's just these are funny that's the point it's the point you know ghost stories are fun to joke about because they're like essentially unable to be like You can't validate it. It's a person's experience where it's like, that's super freaking creepy, but I can't go back.

Tom:

If I'm not laughing, I'm crying. Might as well laugh about it.

Brett:

I'd need a t-shirt of that. If I'm not laughing, I'm crying. So just deal with it. All right, Goose River Bridge. I love this one. Rockport, Maine. This is, in parentheses, the pitcher man. The

Tom:

pitcher man. I have not heard this

Brett:

one. He had a mean sinker. No, William Richardson is a tavern keeper celebrating the end of the war in 1783 and carries around a pitcher of ale for all other celebrants. After a long night, he either falls into the river at Goose River Bridge or is accosted by English sympathizers and left for dead. So we're talking about the war. We're talking about Revolutionary War. So visitors claim to see a man with a pitcher in hand. hence the name Pitcher Man, wandering the bridge, offering ale to startled passersby before disappearing into thin air.

Tom:

I really want to try this ale now. Like, it might be amazing. It might be, like, the most delicious thing. Like, you're like, ooh, is this Haunted House? Yeah, ooh, this is

Brett:

very spectral. Yeah, he... I like that he offers it and then disappears.

Tom:

Yeah. He's like, just kidding.

Brett:

Have some ale, boo-hoo, see you later. Not... Yeah, all right, if you're... So if you're driving, he may even thrust his ghostly pitcher of ale through your car window. This sounds like a little authorial. I think you get pulled over to that open container. It

Tom:

was a ghost. It wasn't me. It was the ghost of the pitcher. Some ghost dude stuck this pitcher of beer through my window. I also, like... It was a ghost! It was a pitcher man! I didn't even know! When you first said pitcher man, I was kind of like, ooh, that's spooky. And now the more you say it, you're like, oh, there's pitcher man. Like, that's maybe not the best ghost nickname. He's still wandering.

Brett:

Oh, pitcher man, get better beer. Do you have any N.A., pitcher man? All right, that's awesome. Okay, now we have Nellie Butler. She's the... Nellie Butler represents the first documented haunting ever. in America, I think. And this is in Sullivan, Maine. So Reverend Abraham Cummings, a traveling preacher who believed the apparition was a spirit sent from heaven. So Cummings collected 31 eyewitness testimonies from town residents, which he included in a book titled Immortality Proved by the Testimony of Sense, in which is considered the doctrine of specters and the existence of a particular... That's a very old title. That would get cut down these days. So this is basically what happened. She appeared multiple times to multiple people, and the reason she appeared is that she wanted her living husband, George Butler, to marry Lydia Blaisdell.

Tom:

I'm like remembering hearing this story as you're telling it. I'm like piecing it together.

Brett:

Yeah. So she just like appeared to a ton of people being like, marry my husband, my former husband to this person. And then they actually got married. The two people who she wanted to get married actually got married. And then the ghost appeared again and said that Lydia would bear one child and die soon after, which actually happened. But

Tom:

the... It's like, is this a helpful ghost or is this a meddling, like I am bored in the afterlife and I need something to do? It's a

Brett:

very prescriptive ghost.

Tom:

There's no reality television, so I'll make my own.

Brett:

I'll make them do what I want them to do. But then there's all sorts of stuff about like the families being angry where it's like, you actually tricked my family into marrying into your family with this ghost story. And so... Yeah. At just 31, eyewitness testimonies me like, yeah, she really wanted him to marry that girl. I guess that's what she wanted. All right. Old narrow gauge volunteer trail in Randolph, Maine. This is like kind of recent. So according to the Bangor Daily News, Lawrence Larry Farrell disappeared in fall of 2004 at the age of 55. Today, it's believed that the trail is haunted by the ghost of Bicycle Larry, so-called because he was so often seen riding his bike around town.

Tom:

Was it a fixie?

Brett:

It's all coming back around. Fixie Larry. Yeah. I just love also like all of these ghosts are the most like it's the most literal stuff. It's like it's Hatted George because he wore his hat. It's Ghost Bob because he's not from the day. It's Ghost Bob because he's a ghost and his name was Bob. So visitors of the trail report seeing orbs and spirits along with hearing the sounds of bicycle wheels and screams of get out.

Tom:

Ooh.

Brett:

Bringing it back to your story, Tom. That's interesting. So anyway, this is the last one. I don't know. The York Witch. That's where I'm from. Oh, really? You might know about

Tom:

this one. That's where

Brett:

my haunting happened. All right, so this is at the old burying yard, which I believe is also called a graveyard.

Tom:

We call it a cemetery.

Brett:

Yeah, a cemetery. So Mary Nasson. her grave has a stone on it and it's said to keep the white witch in her grave. She was actually a well-respected herbalist and also did exorcisms. And also... Turns out these sorts of stones are called wolf stones, meant to keep animals from digging anything up. So perhaps not so scary. This is the part why I kept it in here. So if the stone was placed in an attempt to keep the witch from rising, it was unsuccessful. According to Joseph Citro's book, Weird New England, your guide to New England's local legends and best-kept secrets, Mary's ghost has reportedly been seen at a park close to the old burying yard, pushing local children on swings and giving them wildflowers. So nice.

Tom:

It's really nice. Why were they trying to keep her in

Brett:

there? They really had it out for Mary Nasson. Like, that's the thing where I think this is one of those, like, she helped everyone, so they hated her.

Tom:

She was nice to me once. That's it.

Brett:

She healed me with mugwort, and then I was very angry. She charged me twice for that mugwort. Not nice. Here's a wolf stone. So, yeah. Those are the stories. So I want to give a big shout out to Gardner Public Library for these. Yeah. So this is basically all from this Gardner Public Library, The Spooky Side of Maine, Hauntings and Urban Legends from the Pine Tree State. So Jessica Bennett, thank you for chronicling all of these so that we could talk about them and you give us a reason to enjoy a nice haunted house. talk about some spooky stories. It was a pleasure. It was a pleasure, Tom. Thank you for being on here with me.

Tom:

I thought it was going to be spooky, and I spent more time laughing.

Brett:

Really? Yeah. Oh, man. Pitcher. Pitcher Larry. What's his name? The Pitcher Man. The Pitcher Man. The Pitcher Man. The Pitcher Man's going to get you. Oh, man. If you see Pitcher Man, Old Ale, or whatever. This has been an Allagash Brewing production. If you have something you'd like us to talk about or a question for our team, just send us an email at podcastallagash.com. And as always, thanks for listening. Thank you, Tom, for

Tom:

stopping

Brett:

by.