Sixteen Ghosts
One ghost is bad enough, but when you have sixteen of them parading through your bedroom at quarter to five in the morning that is more nonsense then you need any day of the week let alone on April Fools Day. Something woke me up out of a sound sleep, and I could see a strange greenish-yellow glow in the hallway outside my bedroom door. As I lay in bed contemplating this strange glow a man dressed like an 18th century seaman walked into my bedroom without saying a word. He proceeded to walk past the foot of my bed, rounded the corner and walked up the right side of the bed all the time smiling at me. When he came up to where my head was he gave a kind of a salute, and went out the door into a front hall behind my head. He wasn't the only one before the parade stopped there were sixteen of them that paraded one by one through my bedroom. They all smiled and waved at me in passing.
I may have been dreaming all of this, but I was able to move about in my bed throughout this spectacle at my own will. One of the things that I couldn't seem to do though was to cover my head with the blankets to block the view or reach up to turn the lights on either. So, I just laid there and took in the whole show.
This needs some explanation, the house was built in 1772 and at different times was a station on the Underground Railroad. After the Civil War it had been bought by a retired sea captain. Business was good; he retired at the age of 31. He was a Connecticut River captain, one of the River Gods, involved in the slave trade when it was illegal just before the Civil War. During the Civil War he sailed under Letters of Marquee provided to him by Abraham Lincoln. He was supposed to prey on southern shipping. Instead he went to the South Pacific where there were no southerners, and promptly set himself up in the "Blackbirding" business.
What the Blackbirding business was literally the same thing almost as the slave trade except the customers were Australians and the slaves were Pacific Islanders. They were lured aboard ship, and transported to Australia where they were put to labor in northern Queensland clearing land or working on sugar plantations. If the natives were lucky enough to outlive their period of servitude they were sent back to their island. The usual period of servitude was five years.
Cap's ship was a schooner that usually had a crew of sixteen men. This is who I suspect visited me that night so many years ago. The visitation happened on the anniversary of his death in 1902. It also happened at the same time in the morning. At the time I was sleeping in an antique black walnut bed, as it turned out it was the bed he died in.
The house was bought by my father from the heirs of Cap's estate the day before the New England Hurricane of 1938. The only conclusion I can reach is that that morning I was visited by the ghosts of Cap's crew. Up until this event happened I never knew when Cap died or under what circumstances except when my father was a young boy he lived up the street from Cap. He used to see him sitting on the front porch playing stack them up and knock them down with English Gold Sovereigns he had received for selling his ship after the Civil War.