Lewisboro Ghosts: Strange Tales and Scary Sightings

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Introduction

If you are looking for bizarre tales of headless horsemen, dismembered body parts and bloody fingers reaching out toward unsuspecting victims, then put this book back on the shelf and find yourself another. The stories found within the covers of this book recount the real experiences of residents of Lewisboro, a small town in northern Westchester County, New York. For the most part, the tales are not spooky or bloodcurdling, but the incidents are real and, after all, everyone loves to share a good ghost story!

This book tells the stories of abandoned houses, of which there seem to be a few in our town. Although there are no spine-tingling, bone-chilling legends behind the abandonments, each tale contains a sense of mystery and despair or disappointment. These houses, built with such hope upon the highest hillsides in town, only led to sorrow and unhappiness for their owners. I have placed these tales here so that more of the back story can be known. When a hiker comes upon the remains of these abandoned houses I hope that the devastation will be more to her than just material rubble and ruins.

For nonlocals who may read this book, I must explain the odd geography and shape of the town of Lewisboro. One former town historian and town supervisor described it as looking like a shotgun and indeed it does, with its handle in the western hamlet of Goldens Bridge and its barrel in the southern section, Vista. In between there are four other hamlets—Cross River, Waccabuc, South Salem and Lewisboro. The town lies snuggled into Connecticut’s elbow and for the early part of its history part of Lewisboro was part of Connecticut.

Most of the stories included here are from South Salem, but the other hamlets supplied a few as well. Many of the homes along Spring Street date back at least one hundred and fifty years, but I find it strange that so many tales emanate from this two-mile stretch of country road. Is this area more open to spiritual visits? Is it because there are two graveyards close by? It does not seem that spirits linger by churchyards and cemeteries but instead they prefer to keep watch over their former haunts. Whatever the reason for this concentration of spiritual activity in South Salem, as long as the visitors from beyond are watchful, not spiteful, most present-day residents welcome their presence and accept their occasional visits.

The desire to put my collection of local ghost stories into a book has been burgeoning in my mind for more than a decade. Although I have never had a ghostly experience myself, in my position as Lewisboro town historian I have had many opportunities to talk with the owners of old and historic houses. I don’t remember how the first story slipped into the realm of ghosts, but once tapped other tales of ghostly inhabitants appeared unbidden. If there were so many tales from such a small sampling, what else might be lurking in the cellars and attics of Lewisboro?

Each time I gave a Halloween ghost talk at the South Salem Library more people came forward with a ghost tale to tell. I soon realized that one did not have to live in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century home to have experienced a ghost. Although most of the stories in this collection occurred in a house, several are attached to the land and one segues into the tale of a brutal Native American massacre.

As much as possible, I have tried to attach an historical perspective and actual character to the ghosts lurking on the pages of this book. In many cases it will be specter speculation, but some of the ghosts have been positively identified.

As I listened to witnesses share their paranormal experiences, I noticed that patterns quickly evolved among the stories. For instance, several apparitions occurred when the homeowners (usually new homeowners) started renovations to a centuries-old house. Perhaps the hammering and sawing disturbed spirits that had been dormant for a century or more. Some of these spectral visitors are party ghosts who show up when they hear laughter and conversation and the tinkle of glasses. Other ghosts like to run baths or turn on showers. There are daytime ghosts and dark of night ghosts. One can’t always be certain when to expect a visit from a spirit from another dimension or what tricks an ephemeral visitor might play.

Most informants believe that their otherworldly visitors have a specific reason for putting in an appearance and most encounters are of the curious and friendly kind.

Along with the ghosts I have included several legends and the story of a Lewisboro witch. I cannot swear to the veracity of this tale, but it has long been a local legend. The tales of the Leather Man—a strange, leather-clad hermit who visited Lewisboro on his 365-mile circuit through Westchester and Fairfield counties in the mid-nineteenth century—and of Sarah Bishop—a hermitess who lived in a cave on Long Pond Mountain for thirty years at the end of the eighteenth century—stretch the imagination, but these characters are documented in history as actual, living people.

Many of the stories in this book have appeared in shorter length in my column Window on History, which is published in the Lewisboro Ledger, part of the Hersam-Acorn family of papers, Ridgefield, Connecticut. They appear here with the permission of the publisher.

I have found that people love to tell their ghost stories, although usually not until the subject is brought up. That is why many of my conversations over the last fifteen years have begun with the question, Do you know any ghost stories?

And now to the tales I’ve been told…

Part I

SOUTH SALEM

Jacob Finds His Way

Sometimes a spirit is attached to a locale rather than a dwelling and that attachment can survive for hundreds of years. Such is the case in the haunting by a man named Jacob Wood. Sometimes it takes a spiritual person and a willing heart to help the wanderer find his way home. This is the story of a bereft husband and his centuries-long quest to find his way to the other side.

On the corner of Kitchawan and Grandview Roads sits a tiny hillside cemetery known as the Wood family cemetery. There is a lone gravestone keeping eternal watch in that rocky hallowed ground. It is a simple fieldstone crudely marked with the characters I. W. 1808. The stone belongs to Jacob Wood, once a successful farmer with lands extending from the Pound Ridge-Ridgefield Road to the shores of Lake Kitchawan. Part of the Wood land was known as Potash Swamp because of the potash deposits there. To the early settlers of South Salem, potash was an important ingredient used to make soap. In the midst of the swamp was a small pond.

Jacob and his wife Susannah were a happy couple. They had a daughter named Hannah. Hannah was a beautiful and sweet child, going on two years of age. One June day, Susannah and Hannah started out across Potash Swamp in a dugout canoe, perhaps on their way to visit friends. Tragically, the canoe capsized, spilling the mother and child into the dark waters of the pond and they were drowned. Jacob was heartbroken—inconsolable at the sudden loss of his wife and child. In time he married again and eventually became the father of nine children. But in his heart, he longed for his dear Susannah and little Hannah. This longing was so strong that for two centuries the spirit of Jacob Wood wandered the fields and hedgerows of his lands and the surrounding area in search of his lost family.

Whether his spirit was seen or felt by others over the ages we do not know, but in 1992 a family with a young daughter about the age of Hannah when she died moved into a house on Smith Ridge Road not far from the eastern edge of the former Wood property. Emel, the young wife, felt Jacob’s presence from the first moment she entered the house. It was an uncomfortable and unhappy sensation. She felt that someone was watching her. The feeling unnerved her so much that she implored her husband not to take the house. But her husband was determined and the family moved in. As winter approached, Emel could not get over her feeling of dread. She hated being alone in the house, always aware that someone was watching her. Emel sensed that whoever or whatever was watching her was very angry and she felt a kind of evil she could not quite name. During the first winter in the house she would often sit comforting her little daughter who was having a bout of painful ear infections, rocking her in her arms and praying with all her heart that these heavy, angry spirits would go away and leave her alone. Emel began to spend as much time as she could away from the house, returning only when the rest of the family—her husband and teenage daughter—were home. She felt more secure then.

Jacob Wood’s crudely carved headstone sits alone in the Wood family cemetery on a rocky knoll near Lake Kitchawan in South Salem. It seems to cry out for the companionship of his wife and child. The other stones have disappeared.

It was Emel’s habit to sit with her back to the windows, not venturing to look out at night toward the woods that bordered the back of the property. There was a stone wall that divided the mown area from the woods and it was from here that she felt someone always watched. From time to time during the two years that the family lived in the house strange things would occur. A child’s frying pan once flew across the kitchen floor and her daughter took to waking at 2:00 a.m. every morning in tears. On several occasions the child would point into the air and say, Man!

By February 1994, Emel decided she had to end this oppressive misery and the feeling of being watched by the unknown. Her gaze would occasionally catch sight of a formation of rocks at the edge of the property and she was sure she could see a man standing near the rocks. He was wearing black pants with suspenders, a white shirt and a hat. He had thick, dark hair, a beard and a moustache and seemed to be wrapped in chains. On closer scrutiny, it became clear that the wrapping wasn’t chains but weeds—lake weeds, the vegetation that clogs ponds and small bodies of water. Encouraged by a psychic to find out who this figure could be, Emel decided to check into the local history resources in the