In the 1930s there was a man living in the Salem area named John Klein. He was one of four harvesters employed to cut the grain for the Robbins family, who owned Seven Stars Tavern. Nathaniel (“Natty”) Robbins always had difficulty getting help locally because the house had a reputation for being haunted. Finally, Natty was fortunate enough to hire John Klein, who had no fear of ghosts, and three other itinerant workers, named Simon, Sam, and Jim.
It was the custom for farmhands to sleep in the large attic of the house, which was furnished only with some chairs, a bowl and pitcher on top of an old pine washstand, and straw mattresses on the floor. After their first day’s work, the four men were too tired to notice the musty smell of old wood and moldy straw. All went to bed early that night, and their sleep was deep.
On the second day Simon went about his work with a glum silence that irritated his friends Jim and Sam. All four men worked hard and retired early that night, again from exhaustion, but before extinguishing the lamp, Simon asked if anyone had heard anything strange the night before. His friends at once connected this with his long face that day and assured him that he must have been dreaming. This is what he wanted to believe, but Simon was still uneasy, for he could not rid himself of the certainty that he had not been dreaming. His memory of the event was far too vivid.
Simon knew that if he said more, he would be ridiculed; as it was, his friends made jokes about his drinking too much of Natty’s cider. The next day Simon’s spirits were still melancholy. He avoided his friends entirely, and just before dark he made some pretext to slip away and climb up to the attic alone. When the others came up laughing and talking, they found Simon up in the rafters that supported the roof—marking crosses on the timbers with a piece of chalk. They joked about his “getting religion” so suddenly, but Simon said nothing, and as soon as he had swung himself down, he blew out his candle and turned in.
Something awakened Sam during the night, and to his astonishment he saw Simon seated on a chair, staring straight ahead and rigid as a post. At his feet were two lighted candles. The agony of fear on Simon’s face was real.
“What’s wrong?” asked Sam, springing to his feet.
“Shhh!” whispered Simon, holding up a hand to quiet him. His face was white and his eyes wide as he gazed in the direction of the stairway. Sam roused the two other men as quietly as possible, but perhaps he made more noise than he thought, for Simon repeatedly hissed “shhh” at them and motioned agitatedly for them to be quiet. The men could not help being frightened, although they had no idea what had happened. There was a terrifying sense of some imminent peril.
In profound silence they sat and waited. Finally, John Klein whispered, “What is it, Simon?”
“Shhh! Ghosts!” Simon whispered back. “I heard ’em again. They may come back up here. They’re downstairs.”
Klein was not afraid of ghosts, but Simon had shaken his confidence. It was not what Simon had said or even the conviction with which he had said it that upset Klein as much as the fact that, now and then, Simon would whisper a few stuttering words and then give a startled jump.
The story, as Klein was able to put it together, was that Simon had actually heard ghosts the night when the men said he had only been dreaming. At first, Simon said, the ghosts were far away. Then they came nearer. Finally, there had been a terrible scuffle on the stairway, with much shouting and swearing. A group of brawling spirits had come thronging up the ladder into the attic and headed for the window near Simon’s mattress. “They pushed and shoved right up to my window and went out through it as if they were smoke! Twice now I’ve seen them and heard them.”
“How do you know they’re ghosts?” asked John Klein.
“If they were human, they would all be dead. That window is sixty feet above the ground, but they’re not dead. I heard them clatter back in again. Shhh! They’re downstairs now.”
All was darkness except for the shadows of the men moving as the candles flickered. Simon made them lock the door at the foot of the stairway. Klein and Sam did so. Next Simon ordered that all the attic windows be closed and wedged, too, and they did that also. In silence they sat and waited, hearing only the beating of their own hearts. Simon would not let them set their chairs over any crack in the floor because, as he told them, “When the ghosts find the door barred, they’ll come up through the cracks in the floor.”
Not a sound. They were all apprehensive, yet there was nothing but a prolonged stillness. After some time had passed, Jim broke the silence and told the others they were all “blank fools” and that he was going back to bed. The rest followed sheepishly.
How long they had been asleep is uncertain, but they were brought to their feet by the most hellish screams of terror. Simon was nowhere to be seen. By the light of a candle that someone lit, they found him, almost hidden, down in the angle where the floor met the sloping roof, his face to the corner and his hands clasping his head. He was screaming and sobbing, praying and writhing, all the while kicking as if to get away from somebody or something.
Simon’s screams brought up Natty Robbins and the women of the house. It was the women, more than the men, who finally succeeded in calming Simon down. This is the account he gave of what had happened after the four men had gone back
