Woodburn Governor's Mansion of Dover, Delaware The story of Woodburn Mansion has been told to residents of Dover, Delaware for many years. A 19-year-old Caucasian male student at the University of Maryland told this particular version of the ghosts of Woodburn Mansion. Now a sophomore architecture major, he grew up in a small town just outside of Dover, where the story of Woodburn is known all too well. The story was first told to him as a young teenager while actually visiting the mansion with his parents. The telling of a ghost story entails more than the text itself. Lighting, environment, tone of voice, and many other factors affect how well a ghost story is told. As one can see by reading the following story, simply reading …show more content…
The mansion where the story takes place is called Woodburn Mansion in Dover, Delaware. Charles Hillyard, III built the house in about 1798 and passed away in 1814, leaving the house to his daughter Mary and her husband Senator Martin W. Bates. Mary Bates recorded the very first haunting of the house in 1815, which is the story of the visitor seeing the family’s father on the stairs (as told above). The father in this story was Charles Hillyard, III (Mary’s father) and was seen by a Mr. Lorenzo Dow. In his description of the ghost, Dow says that he saw a man "dressed in the fashion of the preceding generation, complete with queued hair, knee breeches, [and a] ruffled blouse" (HauntedHouses.com). In this version Dow saw the ghost prior to breakfast, not dinner. Another ‘sighting’ of Hillyard’s ghost was reported in about 1870 when a woman was revived from a fainting spell to see a man in a white wig in front of the fireplace. In other versions of this story, the ghost of Hillyard is known to drink wine that gets left out over night, not just any liquor. Governor Charles Terry Jr. (resident from 1965 to 1969) states that he saw a man in a white wig help himself to wine from the dining room. The ghost of the slave as told in the above story has different versions as well. One version tells that the man hiding up in the tree was not a slave, but rather a slave raider. A group of these slave raiders came to the mansion in search of escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad, but were chased off by the owner at the time, Daniel Cowgill. One of these raiders decided to hide in the tree to catch the slaves, but he fell and got his head stuck in a hole in the tree where he was hung to death
When one usually thinks of a hearing a ghost story, the setting is dark with flickering light (such as around a campfire or in a basement with bad lighting) and, of course, it is nighttime. Needless to say, when I heard this story during the middle of the day on a Friday, I was a little taken aback. When prompted for any urban legends or ghost stories a white, female friend of mine immediately responded with, “Have you ever heard of de Sales Academy?” With my negative response, the nineteen year old student jumped into her story:
My first attempt at finding information was by typing in “Jamesport Manor Inn + ghosts” at the search engine Google. I found an article from The Suffolk Times, a local newspaper about the rebirth of the Jamesport Manor. It included a picture of the mansion with its owners, and there was a brief paragraph on the suspicion of ghosts roaming the area. “As for tales about ghosts and later use as a house of ill repute, Mr. Whines laughed and said, ‘I’m a trained historian, so I can’t tell you about that.
Come with me as I take you inside one of the most haunted locations in the United States today. It is a journey down dark hallways and into rooms painted by both shadow and light where spirits talk and phantoms walk. St. Albans Sanatorium is a destination known by serious paranormal investigators as a place where they can seek answers to the mysteries of what lies beyond death. Some of these investigators were able to find resolutions for themselves to a number of these age old riddles through their experiences at the sanatorium. The frightening and true stories found within the pages of this book are about these inquisitive investigators’ encounters with The Ghosts of St. Albans Sanatorium.
Since I come from the Eastern Shore of this state, I was surprised to hear a ghost story I was previously unaware of. The story takes place in a park in Salisbury. The person who told me the story is a 19-year-old sophomore at the University, and we spoke about it one evening after dinner. He believes it to be true, because one of his friend’s siblings has apparently experienced the ghost firsthand. I tape-recorded his narrative:
The setting for this ghost story was at Sturdivant Hall, in Selma, Alabama in the 1860’s.
"New Mexico: Ghost Stories and Haunted Places." Haunted New Mexico. Retrieved 5 Apr 2005 http://hauntednewmexico.tripod.com/id1.html.
Ghosts and goblins are lurking around every corner. Mysterious creatures are waiting to jump out of every shadow. The boogieman and his accomplices are posted under the bed and in the closet, counting the minutes until children go to sleep so that that can attack and scare the life out of them. We all grew up with these fears in the back of out heads. There is always at least one person and one building in every town, whether it be small or large, with a story... a history of mysterious, paranormal behavior. The little town of Canton, Missouri is no different.
All houses are haunted; all persons are haunted; throngs of spirits follow us everywhere, we are never alone. Every county has they own haunted places some more known than others. I know this very personally because I live less than 100 yards from one of those haunted places, Marsh Road. I will take you on an adventure though Wisconsin’s past and present gulls and goblins that will sure give you a new look on Wisconsin. The haunted places in Wisconsin are worth learning about.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James continues to stir up an immense amount of controversy for such a short novel. Making a definite, educated decision on the actual truth considering the countless inquiries that develop while reading this story proves more difficult than winning a presidential election. That being understood, taking one particular side on any argument from a close reading of the story seems impossible, because the counter argument appears just as conceivable. Any side of the controversy remains equally disputable considerably supported by textual evidence from the novel. One issue which, like the rest, can be answered in more than one ways is why Mrs. Grose believes the Governess when she tells her about her ghost encounters. Usually one would second-guess such outlandish stories as the ones that the governess shares throughout the story, yet Mrs. Grose is very quick to believe our borderline-insane narrator. One of the explanations for such behavior could be the underlying fact that Mrs. Grose and the governess have a similar socio-economic background, therefore making them somewhat equals even if the governess does not always seem to think that way. This fact makes them susceptible to trusting and believing each other, and to believing that the ghosts are there, for the people that the ghosts are presenting used to be servants and therefore from a similar socio-economic background. To add on to that, Bruce Robbins proposes in his Marxist criticism of The Turn of the Screw that the idea of a ghost is synonymous to that of a servant, subconsciously making the two lower-class workers of Bly more vulnerable to believe that the ghosts were real; in other words, servants we...
A 19-year old female from Harford County, Maryland, narrated the story of Black Aggie, the urban legend of an overnight stay in a cemetery. She grew up Christian, and still lives in one of the more rural areas of Maryland with her younger sister and parents, who own and work at an electrical contracting business. Accustomed to hearing many ghost stories and urban legends, she first heard the story of Black Aggie during a middle school slumber party. Late one Saturday night over pizza in our Hagerstown dorm, she was more than willing to share her favorite urban legend with me.
chambers in the mansion (p. 11)," the atmosphere of the room lingers an ominous and creepy
One of the most critically discussed works in twentieth-century American literature, The Turn of the Screw has inspired a variety of critical interpretations since its publication in 1898. Until 1934, the book was considered a traditional ghost story. Edmund Wilson, however, soon challenged that view with his assertions that The Turn of the Screw is a psychological study of the unstable governess whose visions of ghosts are merely delusions. Wilson’s essay initiated a critical debate concerning the interpretation of the novel, which continues even today (Poupard 313). Speculation considering the truth of the events occurring in The Turn of the Screw depends greatly on the reader’s assessment of the reliability of the governess as a narrator. According to the “apparitionist” reader, the ghosts are real, the governess is reliable and of sound mind, and the children are corrupted by the ghosts. The “hallucinationist”, on the other hand, would claim the ghosts are illusions of the governess, who is an unreliable narrator, and possibly insane, and the children are not debased by the ghosts (Poupard 314). The purpose of this essay is to explore the “hallucinationist” view in order to support the assertion that the governess is an unreliable narrator. By examining the manner in which she guesses the unseen from the seen, traces the implication of things, and judges the whole piece by the pattern and so arrives at her conclusions, I will demonstrate that the governess is an unreliable narrator. From the beginning of The Turn of the Screw, the reader quickly becomes aware that the governess has an active imagination. Her very first night at Bly, for example, “[t]here had been a moment when [she] believed [she] recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been another when [she] found [herself] just consciously starting as at the passage, before [her] door, of a light footstep.” The governess herself acknowledges her active imagination in an early conversation with Mrs. Grose, when she discloses “how rather easily carried away” she is. Her need for visions and fantasies soon lead her to believe that apparitions are appearing to her. It is from this point on that she begins to guess the unseen from the seen, trace the implication of things, and judge the whole piece by the pattern. After the first appearance of Peter Quint, the governess begins to make infe...
Dunne, Patrick. "Ghost Stories Haunt Landon House." The Frederick Newspost 27 Oct. 2005. 6 Apr. 2008 http://www.gazette.net/stories/102705/newmnew200912_31894.shtml.
This particular ghost story was told to me by one of the members of my gymnastics troupe. We had become friends over the course of the season, and she was telling me this story in an informal setting in my dorm room on a Friday night. She is twenty years old and grew up in a very conservative Catholic family in New Jersey. Later on, as I attempted to find more people who would have heard a similar story, I ran into another friend who had heard a variation of the same plot. This was a Jewish Caucasian male, nineteen years old, who grew up in North Carolina. He told me this story as we were eating lunch at a sandwich place in College Park:
The story describes the house as being old and tended by an old man. The house is barely described other than it just being dark (paragraph 4). This adds to the creepy