Haunted with History
Alive with arts and crafts
BY MARLI GUZZETTA
At 7:45 p.m., I stood on the threshold of the 1800 House, located at 4 Mill Street. All lights were off, save for a soft green glow given off by the newly installed emergency exit light, which illuminated the blonde hair of my guide, Betsy Braun. I had asked her to keep the lights off.

The 1800 House at 4 Mill St.

A retired non-profit executive, Braun runs the rich curriculum of traditional American arts and crafts classes - including sailor's valentines, country painting, scrimshaw and miniature keeping room construction - offered at the historical home, owned by the Nantucket Historical Association.

Inside the darkened house, tables were still, with art supplies and halffinished projects on them. But I was not there after nightfall with the lights off to see arts and crafts (at least not initially). I was there to see a ghost.

In Blue Balliett's 1984 book, "The Ghosts of Nantucket: 23 True Accounts," Balliett relates a tale told to her by electrician Parker Gray who, in 1972, was hired to install an alarm system in the building in the dead of winter. The system consisted of "infrared and ultrasonic rays, backed up with magnetic contacts fastened onto all of the doors and windows," according to the book. After its installation, the alarm would go off every night between 7 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. - initiating a call to the police, who would report to the house only to find it "undisturbed...with the exception of the ground-floor latch door connecting the west parlor and the keeping room," Balliett writes. "This door, which was wired with magnetic contacts, would be found open."

After five weeks of this, Gray was duty-bound to fix the problem, and so he and an assistant hid themselves, between 6:30 p.m. and 6:45 p.m. on a Tuesday night in a storage closet. The closet door was ajar, facing the door that swung open with peculiar regularity and despite being fastened by a latch. On that night, after waiting for about 30 minutes, the two men heard the latch click; Gray's assistant ran. Gray stayed, peered around the door and saw, floating across the room, something that looked like "a shimmering soap bubble the size of a basketball" and then he felt "'an extraordinary and really horrible coldness.'"

Rebecca Bunker (above) and her husband James Bunker (below) lived in the 1800 House for 38 years, until James Bunker's death. According to the Eliza Starbuck Barney Genealogical Record, they had "no chn that lived."

This allegedly occurred on the first floor, through a door near where Braun and I stood chatting for a moment, before she showed me the house.

So, I wanted to see a bubble. And having done some research on the home and its previous owners, I had my theory on who seemed like the most likely candidate for ghosthood.

Understandably unsure of what, exactly, I needed from my visit, Braun lead me up the stairs from the 1800 House's main entrance (once a side door to the summer kitchen). Valerie and Rick Norton renovated the house for the NHA only one and one-half years ago and preserved the original floorboards. Because of this, every step on the staircase cradled my foot, having been worn by over 200 years of use since its construction by housewright Richard Coleman in 1801. The stairs led to a small office, with a wall of exposed planks. When the Nortons began work on the house, this particular room was in an extreme state of disrepair; the roof had been almost completely ruined by leaks, and the joint between the wall and floor was open. They reinforced the wall and floor with cables into a strong and sturdy perpendicular and they re-roofed, but left one of the room's walls stripped down to its original layers of paint, in order to show the history of its use. Today, the room is dry and smells of new wood. Its paint is clean, and matches the slate green hue used in the earliest years of the house.

Up a short set of stairs from the office is a floor of bedrooms. If any kind of magic were to happen anywhere in the house, I thought, it was sure to happen there, amongst the five bedrooms that had seen no more than seven owners before the NHA received the house as a donation in 1951.

Coleman bought the tract of land from the Gardner family around the beginning of the 19th century, and built the house almost immediately thereafter. In 1807, he sold the home to Nantucket Sheriff Jeremiah Lawrence, who had "an easy stroll to the Old Gaol (Jail) on Vestal Street," according to the NHA, which added that Sheriff Lawrence (b. 1768) also worked as a hat retailer, a financial investor and a merchant - even operating a dry goods store out of the house.

He lived at 4 Mill Street with his wife, Eunice (b. 1770), and their four children - Rueben (b. 1795), Charles (b. 1798), William (b. 1801) and Elisa (b. 1803). Nothing bad seemed to have passed to any inhabitant of the home until 1812, when son Reuben, age 17, "fell over [a] cliff at Gallipagos[sic] Island" and died, according to the Eliza Starbuck Barney Genealogical Record. The next major year for the family was 1821; Charles married on August 30 - twenty-five days after his sister, Elisa, died at age 17. According to the Barney record, Sheriff Lawrence died six years later.

When William married in 1856, Eunice sold the house (mostly likely moving in with her son for the remaining three years of her life) to a 71 year-old, single woman named Love Calder, who lived in the house until she sold it in 1865 to James Monroe Bunker and his second wife, Rebecca.

According to Balliett, Bunker was a schoolteacher, notary public and civil engineer. In 1949, he also went with his two brothers, Paul and William, to California for the gold rush; while his brothers stayed in San Francisco, James returned.

It's unsure when he married his first wife, nee Sarah Folger, but she died in 1858.

James married Rebecca Hussey in 1864, and the two moved into 4 Mill Street - where they would live for 38 years.

The NHA photo archive holds an image of the Bunkers outside the ell-shaped summer kitchen, where Braun and I entered. In the old picture, dated 1893, Bunker sits at a flake rack drying cod, while Rebecca stands at an old water pump.

While Braun turned on floor lamps for me on the second floor (the only lighting on the floor), I asked if the pump still existed. She wasn't sure at the time, but the truth was right above our heads - in the attic, wood beams still exposed. When the Nortons renovated the home, they found the pump in the attic and left it there - in case the NHA ever chose to restore it. What marks its place in the front yard is a flagstone, covering a hole to a series of aqueducts which led to a cistern in the basement, according to Rick Norton.

I didn't go in the attic. Save for a single red light attached to a smoke detector high on the roof beams, the attic was pitch black. Never a Girl Scout, I hadn't brought a flashlight. And crawling around in a dark attic floorplan of which I had never seen before seemed like a fine way to become a victim of not ghosts but my own clod-footed stupidity.

Besides, I was already feeling ... not haunted, but intrusive. Maybe it was the period furniture that furnished some of the second floor bedrooms, but I felt at that point like I was walking around in someone else's house. When Braun tilted a floor lamp towards "the baby's room" in the corner of the second floor, I stuck my head in and took note of the antique children's furniture - including a wooden baby walker - but could not bring myself to go in. It felt disrespectful, awkward. I imagined Rebecca Bunker's glowering face, as depicted in a portrait held by the NHA archives.

It didn't help knowing that Barney's Genealogical Record indicated that the Bunkers had "no chn that lived." Or that Rebecca's year of death and cause of death were not recorded.

What is known is that Baker died in 1902, and the house went to Leonora James in 1903. Balliett writes that James was "a peppery and outspoken member of the community" who "lived in the house for 48 years, many of them spent with her husband and children" before selling the house to Louise Anderson Mehlado in 1951. Mehlado then promptly flipped the house to the NHA, which offered tours until hiring the Nortons to give the house a thorough renovation.

Back downstairs, Braun gave me a more thorough walk-through of the arts and crafts workstations. During their yearlong renovation, the Nortons (who, it should be noted, experienced no paranormal activity) left one wall of the main workroom exposed to its old layers of paint and plaster. On the other side, a frame marks the original, hand-sawn lathing which the Nortons left exposed in the wall.

Now that the arts and crafts program has gone through a few semesters, projects from previous classes have stuck around. An impressively detailed miniature keeping room model sits on a pedestal in a corner. Apainted canvas floorcloth and a stenciled stool decorate one of the workrooms, where things have been left half-woven, half-sketched, half-finished. They are the signs of creation in progress. Of life and the people living in it.

So, I didn't see a bubble. And though I do believe it's possible that paranormal things exist, I believe it's also possible that what I was feeling upstairs was not a haunting, but the weight of a persistent history, reiterated through antiques and old stories. And now that the 1800 House classes have begun, and students and teachers are using the building - opening the windows on sunny days and letting their hearts and minds express themselves - it seems that people are finishing the project that the Nortons began, tipping the scales in the 1800 House from the favor of the past to the present.

For more information on the 1800 House Arts and Craft Classes, go www.nha.org. The next class, Building Gingerbread Houses, is scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 18th from 9 a.m. - noon. Bring your favorite child friend, or relative to make a holiday classic. The NHA supplies the house and all the fixings for decoration. All you need is your creativity. Children 4 years old and up are welcome. For more information, call 228-1794.