The Hauntings (Or Fraidy Cats) Of Connecticut

There’s a bit of culture shock involved whenever you move from one place to another. New England is homogenous enough that it’s easy to adapt if you move from one of the six states to another, much easier than something like relocating from Vermont to Mississippi.

 Still, there are a few things that struck me when I moved from a rural Maine area to a Connecticut coastal city. One of them I was reminded of recently was how Connecticut apparently considers everything to be haunted.

New England in general has something of the haunted reputation. There are plenty of centuries-old buildings around, and authors like Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft have roots here. But the idea of things going bump in the night just seems much more imbued in Connecticut.

I’ve lived in four New England states. The towns where I’ve resided all have their local legends, but they tend to be fairly innocuous. My hometown had a story about hidden redcoat gold during the Revolutionary War and a cave allegedly used by counterfeiters.

Hauntings seemed to be rarer. For most of New England, the "hauntings" catalogued on websites dedicated to the paranormal seem to be from people who got a chill walking through the woods. The only more permanent paranormal entity that comes to mind is a river fort in Maine with dark corridors perfect for a Halloween fright tour…except some workers claim to have seen real ghosts hanging around there.

Perhaps the Connecticut preponderance of the paranormal happened because I arrived just before October, but it soon seemed like every other building in New London had a resident ghost. There were the spirits hanging around the Garde Arts Center, the bride with the broken neck at the Lighthouse Inn, children in the basement of St. Mary’s School, and of course Ernie stuck out on Ledge Light after leaping to his doom from the roof.

There’s the argument that you won’t see or hear ghosts if you don’t believe in them, and I’m probably skeptical enough that I could fall into this category. And I live in an old house free of poltergeists or strange whispers or anything like that.

But there is certainly something about coastal Connecticut that lends itself to an eerie atmosphere at times. Maybe it’s just the fog.

I paid another visit to the Seaside Sanitorium in Waterford this past weekend. It was a bright sunny day even a mile or two inland, but closer to the coast it suddenly got much mistier.

The buildings of the former tuberculosis hospital had been claimed by the clouds. They were perfectly visible up close, but existed as a world of their own. The neighboring houses weren’t visible, and neither were the ocean waves just a stone’s throw away.

Going toward the sea, I walked onto a stone jetty with my back turned to the sanitorium. Turning around, the structure now seemed ethereal, empty windows and towers fading in and out of visibility beneath wisps of vapor.

 I didn’t hear any ghostly children or feel any chilling presence. But it was enough to make me relate more to the hauntings in Connecticut.

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