On Saturday, October 23rd, the Town of Bucksport embraces the Halloween season with a day-long festival full of variety and fun -- Ghostport 2010! Visit http://www.bucksportchamber.org/ghostport.html for more info, a schedule, and contest information.
Activities include:
-- Kids costume parade
-- Brunch with witches
-- Chili Cook Off contest
-- Trebuchet pumpkin chucking into the Penobscot River
-- Jonathan Buck’s coffin race to the grave
-- Pumpkin carving contest
-- Evening Monster Mash Acoustic Bash concert
-- Friends of Fort Knox Fright at the Fort fireworks
-- Screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Alamo Theater
(see schedule below)
Across the river starting at 5:30 PM, Ghostport’s sister event, Fright at the Fort, opens for its second of four nights of scary fun (http://fortknox.maineguide.com/fright/).
This year's Ghostport Festival promises to be bigger then last year. The Event is Saturday the 23rd, with a full moon. Rain date Oct. 30th.
Several contests are featured during Ghostport, and perhaps the most unusual of the contests is the Jonathan Buck’s Race to the Grave coffin race. The coffin race is comprised of teams of four people, plus a coffin rider called a Jonathan, who speed the wheeled coffins down a designated racecourse. The race format is similar to a drag race. For race rules please view the PDF at http://www.bucksportchamber.org/ghostport/Race%20to%20the%20Grave.pdf
Another activity that is sure to cause some excitement is the Seaboard Credit Union’s Trebuchet (similar to a catapult) that will be erected on the Bucksport waterfront.
10:00am – 4:00pm Wahl’s Dairy Port offers fall flavors
10:00am – 4:00pm “BOO”k Sale and Raffle
Help raise funds for Buck’s Memorial Library - Celebrating 123 Spooktacular years!
10:00am Little Goblins Parade - We meet at Town Office and march down Main St.
10:15am - 11:30am PTO Brunch with the witches at the Gazebo on the waterfront
11:30am Bittersweet Gift’s Chili cook off, check in - Located at the Gazebo on the waterfront
12:00pm - 1:00pm Chili cook off judging and eating - Located at the Gazebo on the waterfront
11:30am - 4:00pm Seaboard Federal Credit Union Trebuchet launches pumpkins into the Penobscot! At Flag Point on the waterfront
12:00pm - 1:00pm Jonathan Bucks Race to the Grave, check in - In Bangor Savings parking lot on Main St
1:00pm - 1:45pm Tech Inspection and pre judging
2:00pm Jonathan Buck's Race to the Grave Coffin Races Begin! Located in parking lot behind Chamber offices
4:00pm – 5:00pm Bookstacks host Spooky Story hour
5:00pm – 5:30pm Carved Pumpkin Contest, sponsored by Wahl’s Dairy Port. Check in located behind Rosen’s on the waterfront
7:00pm – 9:00pm Monster Mash Acoustic Bash, brought to you by United Cerebral Palsy of North Eastern Maine. Performance held at the Gazebo on the waterfront
9:15pm – 9:45pm Friends of Fort Knox Fireworks Display, launched from Verona Island
10:00pm The Alamo presents The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Come in your best costume! You may be nabbed by a Ghostport Ghoul and win a cash prize!
In Search of Sarah Ware: Reinvestigating Murder and Conspiracy in a Maine Village by Emeric Spooner has been eagerly awaited by local history fans, as is attested to by his success so far in selling copies of the small self-published first edition. This well-printed volume arrived in my mailbox hot off the press, and over the last couple of weeks I’ve stolen time here and there to read it.
The most compelling element of this book is precisely what drove Spooner to write it – the tragedy of an unsolved murder with an innocent victim. Swept under the judicial rug after a late trial of the primary suspect, who was acquitted, Sarah Ware’s case has continued to call out from the mists of the past to Bucksport residents such as Spooner, who is the assistant librarian at the Buck Memorial Library. When I asked him what the starting point had been for him, he replied, “The place where Sarah lived, and the beginning of [Miles] Lane -- in my backyard, literally. The house lights I see at night are from the house that Sarah lived in, not more then 150 yards across a field and bush.”
The story is a sad one. Sarah Ware, a middle-aged divorcée, disappeared from the route of her evening errands in Bucksport on the night of Saturday, September 17th, 1898. No one seemed much concerned with her disappearance at first. Two weeks after the fact, Deputy Sheriff Genn’s suspicions were aroused enough for him to approach Mrs. Miles, with whom Sarah had been living as a housekeeper, and begin asking questions.
Men in the village turned out for the initial organized search effort on October 1st. On the second day of their search, when their eyes turned to the pastures near Mrs. Miles’ house, they found Sarah’s deteriorating corpse. Found as it was, with terrible damage to the skull, the state of the body was enough to arouse dire opinions about the method of her demise. A few optimistic men tried to put forward theories of what sort of “accident” might cause such a death.
A handful of local men preparing to lift her remains into a coffin at the site discovered, on jostling the body, that she had not only been bludgeoned, but also decapitated, as her head dislodged and rolled away from the corpse. When all was said and done, the inquest jury came back with the judgment that Sarah Ware had “met death at the hands of a person or persons unknown.”
Spooner has transcribed the available documentation of the proceedings, giving us the rare chance to examine what emerged in them for ourselves. What is immediately apparent is that, from the beginning, her death was the cause of conflict and supposition among the townspeople.
The text does not include the questions levied upon witnesses by the examiners, so we are unable to know how much of each person’s statement was volunteered, and how much was steered by questioning. Statements regarding supposed knowledge of Sarah Ware’s habits, morals, personality, mental health, and all manner of details of her personal life are peppered throughout the testimony, leading the careful reader to believe that although a murder may have been committed, in some people’s minds the victim herself was on trial as well.
This is the state of affairs as Spooner launches us into the complicated morass that is the search for Sarah Ware’s murderer. Having spent so much time wading through this material, the author has had time to piece together theories of his own and develop opinions about some of the town characters that people the landscape of this case.
Additional materials are provided here and there to flesh out otherwise unattached names, and to give the reader a feel for how all of the lives in this tiny Maine town intertwined at the turn of the century. Even if there had been no murder, this material would make for a fascinating read, enough to make even Agatha Christie herself inspired.
The accounts of surrounding events vary from witness to witness, and even from one telling to another. People contradict themselves regularly, and some, including William Treworgy, the defendant in the eventual murder trial, avoid explaining themselves entirely. It is no wonder that over a hundred years later the story is still not resolved, if the community was unable to determine the truth of the matter at the trial four years after the killing.
Spooner has been researching the story of Sarah Ware for over two years, and has dug through piles of old newspaper clippings, court documents, and other historical ephemera in his quest for answers. Most recently he was rewarded by finding a photo which includes among its members a woman he thinks can only be Sarah Ware. The resemblance to newspaper portraits of her is indeed startling.
In addition, he interviewed every living descendant of the people mentioned in the newspapers and court documents that he could find, in the hopes of gleaning insight into what the families of the area thought or knew about the murder. “About 80% of the witness list, both defense and prosecution, still have family members who live in town today. It is these people who I interviewed.” A few declined to divulge all the sensitive details they knew, but most were very open with their information.
When I asked Emeric Spooner what his goal was in publishing this book, he replied, “My hope in publishing the book is to set the record straight with the true facts behind the mystery, while making it interesting to read, and spur those families still around to check in their attics for trunks full of photos, diaries, and [examine these] belongings for any piece of evidence that might shed light on the case. That, and slap any of the professionals investigating cold cases, with today’s technology, across the face and say, ‘We have the blood stained cape!’ We have the personal effects and evidence taken from her murdered body. Do DNA testing on it! Check the bloodstains to see if they are all hers.”
Spooner has certainly succeeded in making the subject interesting to read. While some tangents of his arguments and suppositions are at times hard to weave together in the sequence presented by the book, one only has to look at the maze of information to realize that the task was a difficult one at best, and, as Spooner himself says in closing, “The investigation is ongoing.”
The publishing quality is very good, especially impressive considering it was self-published. The restrained design of the front cover features a photo of the area near which key elements of the story take place, while the interior pages are printed on a very pleasant antique white paper stock, which I must say made turning the pages an enjoyable experience.
Readers may have some trouble with Spooner’s syntax and sentence structure, but after a while this seems to blend in with the somewhat archaic tone of the court transcriptions, and the interest of the material itself in many cases makes up for the lack of an editor. Researchers may find themselves frustrated by the lack of citations, leaving this book out of the running as a scholarly historical text, but this could easily be amended with an appendix in a future printing. No doubt Spooner himself will be happy to furnish any necessary information in the meantime, as his meticulous research bespeaks a record-keeping nature.
All in all, the book is well worth the read, and as Spooner sets to work on his next book about another local mystery, the historic Trim family triple homicide of 1876, we can only hope that someone in the publishing world will pick up on this book and, with some careful engineering, set it on the right track for a full-scale printing, so that it reaches a wider audience.
In Search of Sarah Ware: Reinvestigating Murder and Conspiracy in a Maine Village is for sale at BookStacks, at 71 Main Street, and Bittersweet Gift Shop, at 81 Main Street, both in Bucksport, or online at Amazon.com. Readers may also visit http://mysite.verizon.net/espooner/ to purchase the book and find out about other area mysteries.
NOTE: In an effort to expand ourselves into the the wide world of Strange Maine related books, historic and otherwise, this post represents the first of hopefully many book reviews. We hope these will help our readers find even more material that is of interest to them. If you have a book that you think would fit our interests, please feel free to mail review copies for consideration to:
Michelle Souliere, Editor Strange Maine Gazette P.O. Box 8203 Portland, ME 04104
Our readers may also be interested to know that there is a short video clip from the Boston Chronicle’s television segment about the Sarah Ware murder and Spooner’s work on it here:
The Lewiston Sun Journal continues to establish itself as Maine's source for premier investigative journalism about the strange side of Maine and its history with a fascinating article about an 1898 murder and the continuation of it investigation today.
Weird, Wicked Weird: In search of Sarah By Lindsay Tice , Staff Writer Saturday, February 9, 2008
In the fall of 1898, Sarah Ware vanished from the quiet evening streets of Bucksport.
Searchers found her body two weeks later, beheaded and badly decomposed, a raincoat tucked like a pillow under her severed head.
Rumors about her death swirled as town gossips claimed the 52-year-old divorcee had been a drinker, a gambler and worse. Although a local store owner was eventually tried for her murder, neither he nor anyone else was convicted.
A century later: enter Emeric Spooner. A Bucksport librarian and amateur investigator with a penchant for the paranormal and the historical, he was piqued by the gruesome murder, by the fact that no one was ever punished for the horrific crime, by the fact that Ware was all but forgotten in the small town, known only through a bad ghost story and a faded headstone in a pauper's grave.
He's worked for two years to put a face - literally - on her murder.
"She was just a house cleaner heading home," he said. "She was an innocent."
Spooner started a Web site dedicated to Maine's greatest unsolved mysteries a few years ago. He looked into local ghost stories, paranormal events and area murders, posting the information and evidence he'd gathered for anyone to see. Two years ago, he turned to the 1898 Ware case. ... Scouring old documents, court records, news articles and the coroner's inquest, Spooner painstakingly pieced together the life and death of Sarah Ware, spending up to two hours a night on the project. He found she was a mother of four, a divorcee who "caught the eye of the town gossips." She worked as a cleaning woman and lent money to townspeople, including a local store owner she worked for, William Treworgy.
On the evening of Sept. 17, Ware left a friend's house and began walking home. She stopped briefly at a town store. She was never seen alive again.
Two weeks passed before anyone officially reported her missing. Search parties found her badly decomposed body by smell, following the rancid odor to an alder swamp just off Miles Lane, not far from her home. Her skull was broken in several places and had a hammer-sized hole in the temple. She was beheaded.
A Lewiston detective was called to be lead investigator in the case, and a Bangor detective joined him. They soon found a bloody hammer (engraved with the initials W.T.T.) and a bloody tarp in Treworgy's wagon. A man told them Treworgy had paid him to move a body to the swamp.
"They had intent, they had motive and they had Treworgy," Spooner said. "He's the one they finally took to trial."
But the trial took place four years after the murder, and by that time the Bangor detective had lost both the bloody hammer and the tarp, Spooner said. And the man who claimed Treworgy paid him to move a body? He recanted, saying he was forced by a selectman and members of the citizens' committee to lie.
Treworgy was acquitted. ... More than 100 years later, Spooner continues the investigation. He has his own theories.
"There's just too many things involved with Treworgy. If he didn't do it he helped move the body," he said.
Although he hasn't come up with a concrete answer yet, he recently found something almost as good - the only known photograph of Sarah Ware.
He discovered the 1892 black-and-white photo in an old library scrapbook. He compared it to the only other image of Ware he had, a tintype drawing featured in an old newspaper. For the first time, he could put a real face on the victim. ... "I'm just trying to get the facts out there," he said. "She was an innocent."
Photo from Emeric Spooner. The lady in white is believed by him to be Sarah Ware. You can read his explanation of the photo, see the uncropped version of it, and read about his theories here on his website.
