The USS Salem does appear to have one friendly ghost. His name was John Schaffer, and he was a native of Quincy, Massachusetts, who served onboard the Salem as a warrant officer while the ship was on active duty. When the Salem was brought back to the Fore River facility, John volunteered to help with the restoration work. He even lived on the ship and had his own cabin. He also died on the ship. Schaffer suffered a heart attack while in the anchor windlass room, which is the most forward area of the ship and contains the machinery for raising and lowering the ship’s anchors. Don told me that he has never encountered John Schaffer himself, but the museum’s director, Michael Condon, has talked with people on the quarter deck as they were leaving the ship who have commented on how helpful John was with answering their questions. Don said, “Mike’s a pretty straight up guy, so I tend to believe what he tells me.”
CHAPTER 5
Stone’s Public House
ASHLAND, MASSACHUSETTS
Stone’s Public House is a splendid place for good food, live music, and ghost stories.
IN 1831 CAPTAIN JOHN STONE obtained insider information that the Boston and Worcester Railroad would be running a line right through his property in the town of Ashland (then, Hopkinton), Massachusetts. John Stone was no fool; he knew there was a profit to be made from the many travelers who would soon be arriving in the town. He began construction of a hotel in 1832 and positioned the building close to where he was told the new train station would stand. The hotel was named the Railroad House, and it was completed just in time for the opening of the railway line on September 20, 1834. More than three hundred people turned out that day for the fanfare. Governor John Davis and former Governor Levi Lincoln, both addressed the crowd. Some accounts say Daniel Webster was also in attendance.
One of the local papers at the time, the Farmers Gazette, reported that there were stagecoaches running from the Railroad House to Worcester and Unionville. The paper also noted that conveyances could be obtained at Stone’s hotel for visitors wanting to travel locally. It seemed that Captain Stone had all his moneymaking angles well thought out. One thing he didn’t plan correctly, however, was the proximity of the Railroad House to the train tracks. Stone started building the hotel without a clear understanding of where the railroad company was going to lay the tracks. This miscalculation on his part placed the hotel so close to the railway line that passing locomotives would nearly rattle the guests out of their beds.
John Stone turned management of the hotel over to his son, Napoleon Bonaparte Stone, only a year after the business opened. There is a legend about why Stone had his son take over the daily operations of the business. The tale claims that Captain Stone had a heated argument with a traveling salesman from New York over a game of cards. Angry words grew into violence, and supposedly Stone killed the man by striking a blow to the head with the butt of a pistol. Stone supposedly buried the salesman’s body in the dirt-floor cellar. Some believe Stone stayed away from the hotel because he was afraid of the murdered man’s ghost. However, no one really knows if the salesman ever did haunt the place.
A man named William A. Scott bought the hotel in 1859 and renamed it W. A. Scott and Sons Livery and Hotel. He owned the hotel and stables until 1904. During Scott’s time as the proprietor, he and his family went through a lot of pain and sorrow. This heartache could be relevant to the haunting at Stone’s Public House, but more on that later.
The ghost stories didn’t become public knowledge until about 1976 when a man named Leonard “Cappy” Fournier bought the property. The building was in a bad state by then and needed much repair and restoration. Anyone familiar with tales of haunted places knows that ghostly activity seems to pick up when an old building undergoes reconstruction. Strange things began to happen shortly after Fournier started the restoration work. He and the contractors would lock the place up at the end of the day and return the next morning to find the doors unlocked and wide open. They would hear footsteps, doors slamming, and faucets would turn on by themselves. A psychic named Raffaele Bibbo visited the restaurant in the mid-1980s and felt the chief spirit haunting the building was John Stone himself, racked with guilt over the murder he had committed those many years before. The ghost most associated with Stone’s is that of a little girl who has been seen and heard many times throughout the building by guests and employees.
There have been a few sightings of this sad little girl in the downstairs dining room, but most witnesses have reported seeing her looking out at them from the second floor and attic windows. In October of 2010, I spoke to the general manager of Stone’s Public House, Ben Stoetzel. Ben started working at Stone’s as a bartender in 2006 and had not heard anything about the ghost until his first night working at the bar.
Appropriately enough, it was Halloween night. Nothing strange occurred that evening, but one afternoon in the winter of 2008 left Ben with little doubt that there was something to the stories he had been told by his fellow employees and regular customers. Stoetzel came in on a Monday to take inventory of the bar’s stock. The business was closed and he had brought along his one-and-a-half year old daughter for company. They were the only two people in the building; all the doors were locked and the place was very still. As Ben stood behind the bar with his clipboard, checking off what was in stock, he kept a close eye on his little girl, who was standing at the front of the bar. Ben said, “She let out a little, high-pitched giggle for no reason and almost instantly I heard a very similar giggle that to my hearing came from the complete opposite side of the room. My head jerked around, I looked back at my daughter and she was as happy as a clam. So I just went check, check, check, check on my clipboard and thought, ‘OK, work’s done for the day,’ and we left.”
This young girl’s apron was found in the attic. Some believe there is a connection between this article of clothing and the ghost of Mary Jane Smith.
Ghost stories at Stone’s are not the topic of conversation in the Stoetzel’s home. When Ben is home he likes to concentrate on his family and leave the job behind. It is because of this that Ben is sure he has never put the notion of phantoms from his workplace in his young daughter’s impressionable mind. But one year after hearing the unexplainable giggle in the bar, his daughter brought up another afternoon she had visited Stone’s with her dad. The business had three big repair jobs being taken care of on a Monday while the place was closed. Ben and an assistant manager, Gregg, had stopped by to make sure that the three work crews were on schedule and everything was going as planned. Both men had brought along their daughters and had left them in the care of one of the employees, Erica. The three of them remained in the bar and out of the way while Ben and the Gregg checked on the progress of the work crews.
A few weeks later, Ben’s daughter brought up that afternoon and when he was sure that they were both referring to the same day, she told him all about “playing with Bella (Gregg’s daughter) and her friends.” When Ben reminded her that it was only Erica and Bella with her that day, she insisted that there were several other children with them in the bar. He asked her to describe the children, but she could only remember one of them in detail. His daughter said there was a girl, a little taller than her, in a black dress with black hair. “It creeped me right out and gave me gooseflesh,” said Ben. A few months later, Stoetzel overheard a ghosthunter give a group of guests the accepted description of the little girl’s ghost. It exactly matched what Ben’s daughter had told him.
On one of my visits to Stone’s Public House, I met with a local researcher, David Francis. David has been investigating the bar and restaurant for more than four years and has done a terrific job piecing together the building’s past. A colleague of his, David Retalic, along with Cliff Wilson