When Hawthorne returned to his home city of Salem, the property was passed to Samuel Ripley (son of the aforementioned Ezra) and his wife Sarah, who lived there for twenty years after her husband’s sudden death. Three generations of their descendants—the notable Emerson-Ripley family—then lived there until the property was set aside as a landmark.
Well-regarded mural painter Edward Simmons, Sarah Ripley’s grandson, wrote of his memories of the Manse in his 1922 autobiography. In an ode that endures ninety-five years later, he summed up its legacy: “The Concord literati are gone, the town has completely changed, but the Old Manse is still there, holding many secrets.” Might those secrets include its numerous residents and visitors of the phantom variety?
Hawthorne was the first to write of their presence.
“Houses of any antiquity, in New England, are so invariably possessed with spirits, that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to,” he remarked in his 1854 Mosses of an Old Manse, a tribute to his years living on the property.
“Our ghost,” as he described, would “heave deep sighs” in the parlor, rifle through paper “as if he were turning over a sermon” in the upper entry, but was nevertheless invisible, “in spite of the bright moonshine that fell through the eastern window.” Hawthorne also described him as sweeping through the midst of a discoursing company one evening at twilight, “so closely as almost to brush against the chairs.” Yet despite that, it was still covert, identified only by the distinct rustle of a silk minister’s gown.
After visiting the attic, an area the novelist described as beset with “nooks, or rather caverns of deep obscurity, the secrets of which I never learned, being too reverent of their dust and cobwebs,” he surmised that the ghost was a pastor of the Concord parish more than a century before, a contemporary of Anglican preacher George Whitefield. (He was most likely referring to the reverend Daniel Bliss, according to the records of the First Parish in Concord, who held outdoor mass meetings and was, as Hawthorne noted, of “fervid eloquence.”) He came upon Bliss’s visage, in a wig, band and gown, holding a Bible, on a roll of canvas in the “saints’ chamber.”
But Bliss wasn’t alone; there was apparently also the boisterous ghost of a servant maid who would clank and bang around in the kitchen “at deepest midnight,” cooking, ironing, grinding coffee—although there would be no evidence of these tasks having been done the following morning, according to Hawthorne.
“Some neglected duty of her servitude...disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, and kept her at work without any wages,” he wrote.
Over the years, it has been said, Hawthorne’s ghosts have been joined by an assembly of others. Notably, many tourists, staff and passers-by have reported a woman in Victorian dress sitting in one of the Manse’s many front windows.
In other instances, shadowy figures have floated upstairs or into the downstairs parlor, just as inexplicably disappearing—such a distressing experience for some interpreters that they purportedly refuse to go inside the structure after dark to this day.
Numerous eerie raps and taps have been heard throughout the building, as well, and books have alighted from shelves and flown across rooms. In the attic where Hawthorne came upon the painted likeness of his benevolent ghost, meanwhile, one frequent visitor recalled a vintage baby carriage creakily rolling several feet across the floor.
During the recent investigation by the paranormal team on a late-summer night, there were several other reported encounters. Members of the group of about two dozen that gathered to explore the eighteenth-century property also claimed to interact with the apparition of a fourteen-year-old boy who had suffered head trauma; someone also had the sensation, while standing in the front parlor, of their arm being touched by unseen hands.
A little before midnight, the group walked single-file through a washroom and kitchen, and then down a narrow hallway lined with portraits and bookcases, and decorated with cream-colored French tromp l’oeil wallpaper. Then they climbed an equally confining staircase—with a coincidentally (or not?) spooky thirteen steps—into a room at the end of the second floor hall.
In the small corner room, a frilly, wedding-white dress drapes the bed, as if awaiting its wearer. (Maybe it belongs to the Victorian lady witnessed by so many in the window?) Fertile minds can only imagine it billowing with life.
With their pendulums swaying, dowsing rods rotating, and the illumination of the various instruments casting exaggerated shadows, the group members asked a series of questions of the dark space.
“Is there more than one spirit energy with us?”
“Do you want to communicate with us?”
The answers, according to the movement of the devices, are all “yes.” One member of the group with avowed acuteness of the unknown claims to sense them, and describes them as “pacing around, checking everyone out.”
Soon, the researchers depart the room and its phantoms, offering the pleas-antries “we appreciate it very much,” and “nice meeting you.”
The night’s final destination: Old North Bridge. Amid the croaking of frogs and the chirping of crickets, the crew makes the short walk down to the river just around midnight, traversing a dewy field beset by fruit trees and a giant boulder where Thoreau was said to sit and ruminate.
Once they reach an obelisk monument beside the grave of British soldiers, at least two in the group pick up on a lingering sense of agony.
“I feel death and fear and transition,” one remarks. Another, breathing heavily, bent over, declares, “No one’s happy here. No one’s happy right now.”
On the arched wooden footbridge—a replica erected in 1956 and restored in 2005, according to the Park Service, the fifth built on-site over the last 240 years since the original was taken down in 1788—the spirit box is again employed. Its bluster of static and feedback clashes with the river’s placid sounds.
“Can you say hello?”
The entreaty is met with crackles and squeals.
Another question: “How many British soldiers are here with us now?”
After a pause, the faint,
