Say You'll Haunt Me: A Ghost Story About Ed

 I don't usually write about personal things on this blog, but I'm  trying something different this month. Here's a ghost story about my friend Ed. Although I consider myself something of a skeptic, he believed firmly in life after death. Ed, this one's for you!

I met Ed on March 25, 1991. We were both volunteers at the AIDS Action Committee's Oscars Party, which was held at one of the big hotels in Boston's Copley Square. I was relatively new to the city and looking for community. One of Ed's friends had recently died from AIDS and he was looking to meet new people. I don't remember much about that party, but we decided to hang out later. 

Edward J. Martin, 1964 - 2017

We quickly became good friends. We would have boozy lunches at Whiskey's on Boylston Street, wander aimlessly through stores on Newbury Street, and see puzzling arthouse movies at the queer film festival. Ed also took my partner Tony and me to some very memorable parties.  

Ed was wilder than I was, so I played more of a supporting role in our youthful misadventures. Ed was always the star. Sometimes when we did bar outreach for AIDS Action Committee, older, dangerous-looking men flirted with Ed. "That mobster thought he could buy my affections for a pack of cigarettes," Ed said to me one night as we packed up our educational materials. "But I'm worth more than that!"

Late one rainy Halloween night, Ed and I wound up in Bay Village at Napoleon's, a gay piano bar. It was almost closing time, and we looked like drowned rats. Ed's vampire makeup was running down his face onto his costume. His wig was wet and matted. Despite this, a stone-faced man invited Ed (and me) back to his apartment in Allston to do some drugs. 

"I think he wants to kill us and eat us," Ed whispered to me, only half-joking. Wisely, he declined the invitation. Cannibalistic serial-killer Jeffrey Dahmer had only been caught the year before, and Ed wasn't taking any chances. 

In retrospect, I can see that Ed had a very bright spirit. All types of people - even potentially dangerous ones - were drawn to him because they could see that he loved life. Here are just a few things he loved: his family and friends, the playwright Tennessee Williams, Versace, hot weather, Provincetown and Cape Cod, good-looking men, and the Stoneholm. 

The Stoneholm, if you don't know it, is a large, historic apartment building on Beacon Street in Brookline. Built in a French Baroque style from granite, the Stoneholm is beautiful, impressive, and a little ominous. Ed used to live near it, and pointed it out to me once as we drove by. Eventually, I moved to that neighborhood and began passing it on my daily commute to the office. 

I always thought about Ed whenever I went by the Stoneholm. 

Ed developed cancer around 2004. The cancer was definitely hard for him, but he remained passionate about life, and got married and eventually moved to Florida. He hated winter and wanted to spend the rest of his life someplace warm. 

After living with cancer for 13 years, Ed died on October 26, 2017. His husband Bill called me from Florida that morning to tell me the news. I cried, and then I went to work.

My team was organizing a big conference that day so I had to work late. I took an Uber home, and the old Lionel Ritchie song "Say You, Say Me" was playing as we drove by the Stoneholm. I thought of Ed, and my eyes drifted to the car's dashboard. 

I glanced at the sound system's display panel. It read, "Say You'll Haunt Me." 

I looked again to make sure I wasn't misreading it. No, it still read "Say You'll Haunt Me," even though that wasn't the name of the song. My hair stood up on my head. Was this some kind of message from Ed? As I said earlier, I consider myself a skeptic, but if this was just a coincidence it was an uncanny one. 

I suppose it could have just been a technical glitch in Sirius or whatever music service the Uber driver was using. I did a Google search when I got home, and found that "Say You'll Haunt Me" is a song by the band Stone Sour. It includes these lyrics:

Say you want to stay you want me too

Say you'll never die, you'll always haunt me

I want to know I belong to you

Say you'll haunt me

A couple nights later, I dreamt about Ed. I was in some kind of underground shopping mall, and he was walking down the stairs into it from the outside. He was youthful, and radiated wild energy. There was something fiery about him, as if all his mortal parts and physical limitations had been burned away. 

It was very intense, and I woke up abruptly. Later, I called his husband Bill to tell him about the weird experience in the Uber and my dream. He was happy to hear these things had happened. 

"It was definitely Ed trying to talk to you," he said. "I've had some things happening here in Florida, too. Before he died, Ed told me he'd make the Christmas lights flash on this tree we have in our living room if he could. When I came home after he died at the hospital, the lights began to flash." 

*****

Well, that's my ghost story about Ed. I still miss him. Some folklorists and historians say ghost stories are a way for communities to remember past events. When we tell ghost stories, we recount events that happened so future generations to remember them. His husband Bill passed away this summer, so I'm writing this as a way of remembering both of them. 

This ghost story also shows that weird things often happen when people die, even to skeptics who don't necessarily believe in ghosts. 

Bigfoot Stories Told by a UFO Abductee

Some of the strangest Massachusetts Bigfoot stories I’ve read appear in Jack Lapseritis’s 1998 book The Psychic Sasquatch: and their UFO Connection. These stories were told to the author by Betty Hill. Her name may be familiar to you because she and her husband Barney were allegedly among the first people ever abducted by a UFO. 

On the night of September 19, 1961, the Hills were driving south through New Hampshire’s White Mountains on their way home to Portsmouth when they noticed a strange light in the sky. Thinking at first that it might be an airplane or a meteor, they were quite surprised when the light turned out to be an enormous, disc-shaped spacecraft manned by small alien beings. The ship landed in front of their car, forcing them to a stop. The Hills then lost consciousness. When they awoke, they were once again driving but were now 35 miles farther south than they had been – with no memory of how they got there. 

Betty and Barney Hill and their dog (photo by John Fuller)

They were understandably troubled by this incident and sought help from a Boston-area psychologist. Under hypnosis, they both said they had been taken into the spacecraft, where they were examined by small, humanoid aliens. Their psychologist didn’t believe in UFOs and was unsure of how to interpret their story. The Hill’s weren’t entirely sure how to understand it, either. 

Betty and Barney didn’t talk widely about their experience, but in 1965 The Boston Traveler newspaper ran a five-article series about their alleged abduction. (The reporter who wrote it had obtained a recording of a talk the Hills had given, along with notes from UFO investigators they had spoken with.) The Hills’ story was soon picked up by the national press and they became minor celebrities. A book about their experience, The Interrupted Journey, appeared in 1966 and a TV movie, The UFO Incident, aired in 1975.  

Barney Hill died in 1969 at the age of 46, but Betty lived until 2007, when she passed away at the age of 85. She was a well-known figure in the UFO and paranormal communities during her life, and people often told her stories about strange things they’d seen. They knew she’d be sympathetic since she’d experienced something very strange herself. 

Although many stories she heard were about UFOs and aliens, others were about strange phenomena like Bigfoot. Sometimes they were about both, like the following. 

A woman only identified as ‘Kelly’ told Betty Hill that she was sitting at home in Longmeadow when she saw a UFO land near the Connecticut River. Understandably curious, Kelly went to the landing area to see if she could locate the craft. 

She did not, but did fined a large circle of flattened grass where the saucer had landed. Next to it she saw one enormous humanoid footprint in the sand. She thought it looked as if Bigfoot had been inside the UFO and tentatively placed just one foot outside of it before deciding not to go any further. 

After consulting with Betty Hill, Kelly and a neighbor decided to make a plaster cast of the footprint. They went back to the circle of crushed grass, but as they made the cast a black helicopter appeared in the sky above them. The helicopter flew low towards Kelly and her neighbor and they ran home, bringing the cast with them. According to Betty Hill, the cast of the footprint was 14 inches long. 

A few days later, Kelly and another friend drove to the landing area to better document the footprint, this time with paraffin wax and a camera. Once again, a black helicopter appeared as they began to make the wax cast. Kelly panicked and drove back home with her friend. Betty Hill claims that Kelly called the police to report the menacing helicopter, but she does not say how the situation was resolved. 

My copy of The Psychic Sasquatch!

The area where the UFO supposedly landed in Longmeadow is officially called the Silvio O. Conte National Wildlife Refuge, but it’s known colloquially as the Meadows. According to Betty Hill, it was a hotspot for Bigfoot sightings in the 1970s, and the police reported finding the bodies of several crushed animals there. They never learned what had killed them, but a local man Hill identifies only as ‘Joe’ suspected the culprit was not human. 

Joe knew a thing or two about crushing, because he once owned a car-crushing business in the Meadows near the river. That was where he saw Bigfoot. One hot summer night, he and some friends were drinking beer outside the trailer that served as the company’s office. As they sat talking, they heard something large move through the trees and bushes on the river bank. All the men went silent when they saw an enormous, hairy, eight-foot-tall humanoid emerge into the clearing. Joe later said that although the creature was unnaturally large, it had a human face with a long beard. 

The Bigfoot was unaware that it was being watched and began to examine the piles of crushed cars. The men stared in amazement as it effortlessly picked up one of the crushed cars – which weighed at least 1,500 pounds – and began to saunter off with it. 

Joe or one of his friends must have gasped, because the Bigfoot suddenly realized it was being watched. It put down the car, look quizzically at the men, and then walked down to the river and swam away. Joe told Betty Hill that he called the police, who made plaster casts of the footprints. Soon after seeing the Bigfoot, he closed his car-crushing business and opened a gas station in the center of town, far from the Meadows and anything strange that might live there. 

Sasquatch (image from Wikipedia)

Luckily, the Bigfoot that Joe and his friends encountered was peaceful, but a woman named Lorraine told Betty Hill that she once saw a different, more violent side of the creatures. Lorraine lived on a back road in a house that was adjacent to the Meadows, and had a large garden in her yard. One night, she was awakened by what sounded like two large animals fighting near her house. Without turning on the light, she peered out the bathroom window to see what was causing the ruckus. 

She was shocked to see two huge, manlike creatures rolling around in her vegetable garden, snarling and clawing at each other. She described them as “two very tall, massive, hairy creatures with rather long faces which were hairless, except for beards like human men, definitely not like an ape!” Eventually, one of the Bigfoots ran off in defeat, and the other one sauntered away a short time later. 

When she finally dared to leave the house in the morning, Lorraine saw that her vegetable garden was totally ruined. She soon moved to a house further away from the Meadows, where both she and a new vegetable garden could thrive without the threat of battling Bigfoots. 

Betty Hill said that these encounters all occurred between 1975 and 1978, but the stories are hard to verify. She doesn’t provide dates or last names, which makes them very hard to trace. Some elements in these stories, like the black helicopters or the Bigfoot strong enough to carry a car, might seem particularly unbelievable, but perhaps we aren’t really qualified to judge until we’ve seen the interior of a UFO like Betty Hill did. 

NecronomiCon 2026: Colonial Witches, Aleister Crowley, and H.P. Lovecraft

A couple weeks ago I attended NecronomicCon 2026, the biennial convention celebrating Rhode Island author H.P. Lovecraft and other artists and writers who created weird fiction. This was my fourth time attending and, as always, I had a great time meeting interesting people and learning strange and unusual things. I thought I'd share a few highlights here on the blog. 

First, I attended a session about colonial-era witches on film. The horror writers who were on the panel mentioned some of my favorite New England witch movies, like Robert Eggers' The Witch (2015) and that creepy, made-for-TV classic Crowhaven Farm (1970). They also mentioned a couple films that I'm adding to my watch list. One of them, The Sudbury Devil (2023) was filmed in Massachusetts with local actors. The plot focuses on two Puritan soldiers who are sent into the forest to investigate reports of witchcraft. Bad things happen, including some supernatural sex, so perhaps don't watch this one with the kids. The other is The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), which I didn't even know was about witchcraft in Colonial New England. Spoiler alert: it is!

A scene from Crowhaven Farm. 

Speaking of witches, I gave a brief talk titled "Unwholesome Nocturnal Meetings: H.P. Lovecraft, Margaret Murray, and the Witches' Sabbath." Lovecraft read Margaret Murray's seminal book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in the early 1920s and, like many readers, accepted its claims that the people accused of witchcraft were actually members of a secret pagan cult . More importantly, though, the book stirred his imagination as an author. Before reading The Witch-Cult, Lovecraft mentioned witches just twice in his fiction. After reading it, he mentioned witches, witchcraft, or the “witch-cult” in 31 additional stories, and even mentioned Murray’s book directly several times.

Lovecraft was particularly intrigued by the idea of the witches' sabbaths, those midnight, orgiastic gatherings where infants were allegedly sacrificed and the Devil was supposedly worshipped by his followers. He included witches' sabbaths in 19 stories, beginning with 1923’s “The Rats in the Walls” and ending with 1935’s “The Haunter of the Dark,” one of his final pieces of fiction. For Murray, the Sabbath was a purely human, non-supernatural event, but Lovecraft transformed it into a celebration of the non-human, a barrier-breaking festival demonstrating humanity’s insignificance in a cosmos controlled by inimical and uncaring forces. 

The cover slide from my talk!

I think my talk was well-received, and hopefully it will be published at some point. 

The last thing I want to mention is Strange Magick, a documentary from local director Bill Darmon. The film examines possible connections between Lovecraft, a New Hampshire writer named Myrta Little, and Aleister Crowley, the famous British occultist. Did Lovecraft visit America's Stonehenge in Salem, New Hampshire? Did Aleister Crowley plot to kill a Harvard professor while vacationing in New England? Did Myrta Little secretly meet Crowley and accept an assignment from him? 

A still from Strange Magick.

Strange Magick asks these questions and more. You may or may not accept the answers it provides, but I enjoyed seeing the filmmakers try to connect the dots between various strange, local topics. A couple people I know appear as talking heads, and the movie has good production values for what is obviously a labor of love. It also has great re-enactments, including Crowley performing some magickal feats and scenes from a few Lovecraft tales. 

The 90-minute version shown at NecronomiCon was compiled from four separate films Darmon and his colleagues made. It's not publicly available yet, but you can watch the four separate films on YouTube. I highly recommend them for anyone who likes weird New England lore!

Celebrating America's Birthday with a Sasquatch Sighting

It was America's 250th birthday this past July 4th - how did you celebrate? I visited friends and ate pizza they made in their outdoor pizza oven. So delicious! I know lots of people who went to barbecues, to the beach, and, of course, to watch fireworks. 

There are many fun ways to celebrate Independence Day, but no matter how you hard you celebrated, I think a Rhode Island man has us all beat: he saw Bigfoot on the Fourth of July.  

An exhibit at the International Cryptozoology Museum 

Okay, technically it was 1:44 am on July 5th, but I think that still counts as Independence Day. Kevin Klimas was driving home after visiting a friend at Beach Pond in Voluntown, Connecticut. It was late at night and the road was illuminated only by his car's headlights. As he approached an intersection, he saw something emerge from the woods:

"I had to hit my brakes to avoid a collision with this thing. Upon doing so I witnessed a bipedal,8-8½ foot tall creature swiftly crossing the road. It had coarse, matted, and greasy looking long brown hair covering every part of its body I could see. Its legs were shorter than its torso and its arms literally hung down to right around knee height. Must have had an 8 - 9ft "wing span" if it fully outstretched its arms. Extremely broad in the shoulders (4+feet easy) Thick with what I can only assume is muscle, and moving like on a mission. It never stopped nor did it turn to look at me. I was only able to see a side profile of its head and face. 



The top of its head seemed to cone up slightly and it had a jawline any pugilist would kill for. Minimal hair on its face. It stepped onto the road, took another step, then a third step which put it back into the woods on the opposite side of the road. Walked more like a human than any other animal. I was (and remain) dumbstruck. Took me a minimum of 60-90 seconds to regain control of my faculties and get my car moving again"(from the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) website).

You can also see Kevin Klimas talk about the sighting in this YouTube video. You may be skeptical about Bigfoot, but Klimas certainly seems sincere about whatever he saw on that Connecticut road. 

The BFRO investigators assigned to this case commented that the area has a history of Bigfoot sightings. Like much of New England, it's very woodsy, providing lots of cover where something large and hairy could lurk. The organization even hosted an expedition in the area a few years ago, but sadly didn't find anything.

An exhibit at the International Cryptozoology Museum

One of the investigators also hypothesized that the Bigfoot seen by Klimas may have been attracted by the sound of fireworks. He notes that there have been a few cases from other parts of the country where people shooting off fireworks in the woods have wound up attracting a Bigfoot. 

Why would this be? The investigator thinks Bigoot may misidentify the sound of fireworks as gun shots: 

"It may sound like hunters shooting. During deer season the sound of gunfire will sometimes indicate where a deer has been shot and eventually gutted. It is the gut piles (and particularly the liver) that a sasquatch want from a killed deer" (from the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) website). 

I hadn't heard that Bigfoot likes liver to eat before, but apparently that's one theory drifting around the internet. Since no one has ever captured a Bigfoot, I'm not going to speculate about what they may or may not eat. Instead, I'll suggest that maybe Bigfoot was attracted to the fireworks because he wanted to celebrate the Fourth of July? He is, after all, the quintessentially American. Nothing says "U!S!A!" more than a giant, hairy hominid. 

Sadly, I didn't get to see any Bigfoots during the holiday, but we did see lots of Bigfoot memorabilia the following weekend at the International Cryptozoology Museum. The museum has relocated from its old home in Portland to a new, much larger building at 490 Broadway in Bangor, Maine. 

Exhibits at the International Cryptozoology Museum

I was excited to participate in the grand opening celebration, and was even more excited to look at all the exhibits. Plaster casts of footprints, creepy mermaids, and a replica of Mothman were just a few of the weird and wonderful things at the museum. There was even a taxidermied coyote with three heads, which reminded me of Cerberus, the dog who guards the underworld, but New England-style. I highly recommend visiting if you like cryptids or just want to spend some time at a really unique museum.

I hope you enjoy these last few weeks of summer!

A Case of Spontaneous Combustion in Ipswich?

I have a confession to make: summer is not my favorite season. 

I like summer, but not as much as I did when I was a kid. Back then, I spent summer sitting in front of a fan reading the trashy horror paperbacks my aunt gave us. Now, I have to work and be productive, no matter how humid or hot it might be. Sometimes as I trudge to work, depending on the temperature, I feel like I might spontaneously combust. 

Spontaneous human combustion is the belief that people sometimes burst into flames without any external source of ignition. The part about "no external source of ignition" is important. Catching your clothes on fire while using the stove is not spontaneous human combustion. Suddenly and mysteriously burning to death while just reading a horror novel is spontaneous human combustion. 

I first read about spontaneous human combustion when I was a kid, probably in Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe, which my brother owned, but the concept dates back to 1746. That was when the term was first coined by the Italian poet Paolo (Paul) Rolli, a member of the British Royal Society, to explain the mysterious death of Countess Cornelia Zangari Bandi.

On the evening of March 15, 1731, Countess Bandi retired to her bed chamber. After talking and praying with her maid for several hours, she sent the maid away and went to sleep. When the maid returned in the morning, she saw a terrible sight in the middle of the floor: the charred remains of the countess. And there weren't even a lot of remains. According to Rolli, 

Four Feet Distance from the Bed there was a Heap of Ashes, two Legs untouched, from the Foot to the Knee, with their Stockings on; between them was the Lady's head; whose Brains, Half of the Backpart of the Scull, and the whole Chin, were burnt to Ashes; amongst which were found three Fingers blacken'd. All the rest was Ashes, which had this particular Quality, that they left in the Hand, when taken up, a greasy and stinking Moisture (from Wikipedia).

There was a lot of grease and soot in the room, but otherwise not much else was left of poor Countess Bandi, except for her lower legs, part of her skull, and three fingers. It was as if her body had been consumed quickly and suddenly by incredibly high heat. Oddly, the furniture and bed linens had not been damaged by the fire, although they were covered in grease and soot. The fire had cremated Countess Bandi but not touched anything else. 

Because it had only burned the countess, and because its source was never determined, Rolli hypothesized the fire had started inside Countess Bandi. He believed she had been consumed by a fire within her own body, a process he called "spontaneous human combustion." 

Of course, she probably caught fire from either the oil lamp or the candles in the room, but the idea of spontaneous human combustion was more exciting, and the concept quickly spread through the academic world and the general public. As more cases were 'discovered,' certain common traits were seen among the victims. They tended to be female, were often alcoholics, and were also often overweight. It seemed like the alcohol inside of them was spontaneously igniting and then burning the fat inside their bodies like a grisly, greasy, giant candle.

Image from The Irish Sun.

NONE OF THIS IS TRUE. Researchers who've reviewed cases of alleged spontaneous human combustion have always found possible outside sources of ignition, like candles, oil lamps, cigarettes, or space heaters. There is no such thing as spontaneous human combustion. The concept persisted, though, because it's fun (and scary) to think about someone suddenly bursting into flames, and because it also gave people an opportunity to pass moral judgment on their neighbors for being alcoholic and overweight, even after death.  

This blog is about New England folklore, so what does any of this have to with New England? Well, I became intrigued with the idea of spontaneous combustion last year while I was preparing to speak at an event in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Joseph Felt's 1834 book History of Ipswich, Essex, and Hamilton has a chapter titled  "Remarkable Events," which includes a subsection called "Individuals Drowned and Killed." Among those individuals was Betsy Telock, who died at the age of 49 in a mysterious fire:

1814,  Jan.  5th.  Betsey  Telock,  M.  49,  is  burnt  to  death. 

It  has  been  commonly  reported,  that  she  came  to  her  end  by spontaneous  combustion  from  the  inordinate  use  of  ardent spirits.  But  it  is  the  opinion  of  the  gentleman,  who  first  discovered her  body,  soon  after  the  flames  in  her  room  were extinguished,  that  she  caught  her  bed-clothes  on  fire  with  a candle, and  thus  lost  her  life. 

This account, even though brief, encapsulates the entire concept of spontaneous human combustion. Betsey's neighbors seemed to think that she burst into flames because she drank too much ("inordinate use of ardent spirits"), but she probably caught on fire because she got too close to a candle. Even in 1814 people were skeptical about the idea of spontaneous combustion, and kudos to Joseph Felt for being skeptical, too.

I hope you stay cool this summer and get to spend it reading trashy paperbacks in front of a fan.