Upcoming Ghost Hunts in Bath, Maine

Hi everyone! Well, if it hasn't already tied you up in knots, the cabin fever season is getting ready to shift to SPRING FEVER season! I know, it's still really cold out, but the birds are getting wound up every morning, and I saw a flock of robins the other day -- and I trust the birds to know what's going on with the weather.

If your mind has been turning from hibernation to re-emerging into the world as the sun stays out longer each day, sometimes it helps to have something to plan ahead and look forward to.

With that in mind, the folks at Mysterious Destinations have been cooking up a schedule for 2014, and instead of waiting for the warm weather, they're going to kick it off later this month -- because there's no time like the present!

From March through October, they will be hosting one Midnight Explore a month at the Winter Street Center in Bath. The sessions will also be a fundraiser for maintenance and improvements at the Winter Street Center, which is part of Sagadahoc Preservation.

More information can be found here: http://www.mysteriousdestinations.com

Exploration dates include:
March 22, April 25, May 17, June 6, July 12, August 9, September 27, October 24 and 31 (Halloween!)

Join the Mysterious Destinations team for a Midnight Explore at the haunted Winter Street Center in Bath. From 9:00pm to 12:00 midnight, two floors of documented paranormal activity will offer plenty of chances for new evidence to be found by YOU, after a brief training session about paranormal detection equipment, how to use it, and the history of the building.

MysteriousDestinations will provide a variety of equipment for guests, though participants are also encouraged to bring their own gear, with cameras and flashlights recommended. The price for the Midnight Explore is only $35 per person with a portion of the proceeds benefiting the Winter Street Center. Hot coffee, bottled water and light refreshments will be provided. For necessary pre-registration, please call (207)380-4677 or email mysteriousdestinations@gmail.com for information.

Black Widows in Bath

The Portland Press Herald confirmed stories of an incursion of toxic black widow spiders in Maine. I've been hearing stories about these buggly uglies in recent years from friends working in local kitchens, but usually they are rumored to arrive in tomato shipments, not vertical launch system components!

BIW unpacks a load of black widow spiders
The Associated Press

BATH — Bath Iron Works says it had to fumigate a warehouse and part of a warship because a shipment of parts from California contained about two-dozen venomous black widow spiders.

Bath Iron Works employees discovered the arachnids in a crate containing vertical launch system components.
[...]
DeMartini said the spiders were discovered earlier this month. The shipyard is confident that exterminators eliminated any spiders that weren't stomped.
[...]

Full article: http://www.pressherald.com/news/BIW-gets-a-load-of-black-widow-spiders.html

Oddly enough, the black widow spider showed up in an informational 1984 article in the Biddeford Journal (pg 9, 8/13/84), appropriately enough in the Science section, although Maine is not mentioned once in the article. The article did, however, describe the occasions in which one might be bitten, and the ensuing symptoms. In other words, do not go unwary into dry, dimly lit, secluded places, do not dangle your hand in their webs, and if you are a child, do not play with them! Even more oddly, another Maine mention of black widows occurred in... you guessed it!... the Biddeford Journal, this time way back on September 24, 1955 (pg 2). Again, no mention of Maine, and again an informational article. Maybe it was a slow news week? "Hey Marty! If ya got nothin' else to run, throw in a bit about poisonous spiders, will ya? That always gets 'em hoppin'." A random tiny paragraph telling of black widow bite symptoms appears in the midst of local news on page 2 of the Biddeford Journal in its 7/3/64 issue, too.

In the March 25, 1977 issue of the Biddeford Journal, the urban legend of black widow spiders in Bubble Yum bubblegum is recounted, including the fact that the company felt compelled to run full-page ads in 30 New York City metropolitan area newspapers telling parents "someone is telling your kids very bad lies about a very good gum." Apparently the company also went so far as to mail copies of the ads to school principals and PTAs (pg 5).

But the black widow has made actual forays into Maine before. Twenty years ago, in a 7/10/91 article in the Chicago Daily Herald (pg 40), picked up from the Reuters news feed from Portland, Maine, is a story about grocery chain Hannaford Bros. refusing further shipments of red seedless grapes from Southern California'a Coachella Valley "after two of the deadly spiders were discovered Monday in packing crates at its South Portland distribution center," and "a woman also reported a spider in grapes purchased at a store in Gorham two weeks ago," according to the 1991 article.

Anyone with their own Maine-related urban legends of black widow spiders is welcome to share them in the comments!

Photo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latrodectus

TONIGHT: Ghost hunting tour in Bath

Investigators from the Maine Ghost Hunters Society will join “The Lady in the Red Cloak” for a special Haunted History Tour in Bath on Tues., Aug. 24.

The special Haunted History Tour with the Maine Ghost Hunters Society investigators will be on Tues, Aug. 24. The tour is by reservation only by calling (207)380-9912 or redcloaktours@gmail.com. Once a reservation is made, the starting time and location will be given out. “We do this so that we’re able to control the number of our guests so that everyone will have a fun and comfortable experience,” Lobkowicz said. The cost of the tour is $17.50 per person, a portion of which is donated to the Maine Ghost Hunters Society.

The ghost hunters will come equipped with specialized equipment used to test areas on the tour for the possible presence of paranormal activity.

“We’ve had plenty of unusual things show up in photographs taken by guests on our Haunted History Tours over the past 4 years that we’ve been in business,” said Sally Lobkowicz, Director of Haunted History Tours. “These include ‘orbs’, bolts of light, strange mists and more, but all that we’re really able to say about them is that we can’t explain why they appear in the photos. We’re researchers and story tellers – not paranormal experts.”

That’s where the investigators from the Maine Ghost Hunters Society come in. “This is a great group of people with a solid background in paranormal research dating back to 2007, and the ability to use equipment to enhance their investigation,” Lobkowicz said. “They have just completed an in-depth investigation of the former AMHI mental hospital, and their work has been widely published and televised. They have just started their own show, Maine Paranormal Radio on Maine Public Radio.”

The Bath special tour will be the first time that Haunted History Tours has conducted a collaborative effort with the Maine Ghost Hunters Society, which Lobkowicz feels is appropriate since 2010 is the first season for Haunted History Tours in Bath. “What better way to introduce something new than on our newest tour?” Lobkowicz asked. Haunted History Tours with “The Lady in the Red Cloak” already have venues in Camden, Damariscotta, Boothbay Harbor and Wiscasset. Special tours with the Maine Ghost Hunters Society will also be scheduled in those areas in the coming weeks, according to Lobkowicz.

Both the Maine Ghost Hunters Society and Haunted History Tours are hoping that the special tours will provide guests with an educational experience. “Watching the investigators use their equipment and explain how it all works will just be the first part of the experience,” Lobkowicz said. “Following the special tour, they will post the results of their investigation regarding that tour area on www.maineghosts.org.”

Julie Velez, co-founder of the Maine Ghost Hunters Society agrees. “Education is a primary part of our mission,” Velez said. “We look forward to introducing people to our investigation methods, and perhaps better understand what we do.

To help accomplish this, the Maine Ghost Hunters Society will provide a two-person team for the special tour comprised of a Lead Investigator and an Investigator equipped with devices that help see the unseen, whether by image, sound, or even electromagnetic activity.

First on the equipment list are two items that are sensitive to electromagnetic activity, which is associated with things both seen and unseen. In the everyday world, most living things generate an electromagnetic signature, as do (of course) electronic devices and wires that carry electricity.

What’s unusual is when the devices pick-up electromagnetic activity where it shouldn’t be. To observe this, the investigators from Maine Ghost Hunters Society will carry a K2 Electromagnetic Field (EMF) device that registers the activity on an LED meter. According to Velez, this device is particularly noteworthy in that it can instantly record changes in the EMF, which sometimes appear to be responsive to spoken questions and other input.

A second EMF device, the Electromagnetic Field Detector, will provide investigators and tour guests with a much more sensitive device for recording EMF signals. However, this instrument has a read out with a needle, making the K2 EMF device a more immediate and visual instrument.

Use of both these devices at once literally provides the “best of both worlds” to record any potential paranormal activities, according to Velez. The two devices, working simultaneously, tend to corroborate each other’s EMF observations.

The Maine Ghost Hunters Society will also carry two pieces of equipment well known to most of the public – a digital camera and a digital sound recorder. The digital camera will be used to record scenes for later examination, as sometimes things will appear in the images that were unseen by the human eye at the time that the image was recorded. Likewise, the digital voice recorder has the ability to pick up on sounds that cannot be heard by the human ear.

For more information on Haunted History Tours (and photos taken by guests of unusual phenomenon) check www.RedCloakHauntedHistoryTours.com (there is also a page on the website discussing orbs under “Ghostly Sightings”). For more information on the Maine Ghost Hunters Society check www.maineghosts.org.

Baffling reappearance of diaries

The name Carroll A. Deering will prick up the ears of any ghost ship enthusiast worth their salt, the account ranked by some among the Top Ten Modern Mysteries. However, the name originated in the life of a young boy who grew to be an old man with little interest in launching himself on the seven seas, though his father had been a shipmaker of great repute.

Now Carroll A. Deering himself may be taking a step on the road to the stardom of the mysterious with the recent inexplicable discovery of some of his missing journals, found by students in Bath while working on an unrelated assignment. Seth Koenig of the Times Record lays it on the deck for us:

Morse High students uncover a new Carroll A. Deering mystery
Missing for 41 years, 3 journals of a famous 'ghost ship' namesake are found by students.
by Seth_Koenig@TimesRecord.Com
09/23/2008

BATH — Even decades after his death, mysteries still cling to former Bath resident Carroll A. Deering.

More than 87 years after his namesake schooner became one of the most famous ghost ships in American history, some of Deering's long-lost journals unexpectedly appeared beneath a bush outside Morse High School.

In the months after Deering's March 15, 1967 death, his house was broken into and logbooks from as far back as the early 1900s were stolen. Other mostly sentimentally valuable items also disappeared, including a complete set of books by Edward Rose Snow and a box full of old campaign buttons — as well as Deering's collection of antique muskets and a silver sword from the local Masonic Lodge.

Two weeks ago, Deering journals from 1932, 1962 and 1964 turned up in the proximity of Morse High School. Science teacher Eric Varney sent his students outside to find everyday objects in nature and write descriptions of those objects as part of a lesson on scientific research. What students discovered was a lesson on maritime history and, perhaps, the unexplained.

Freshmen Zach Fone and Wyatt Brackett each found one of the journals near a bush by the school's front entrance, and classmate Chris Fox discovered a third journal across the street near his house.

The students managed to track down Carroll "Pat" Moffatt, the grandson of Deering who resides in Florida but, by coincidence, is currently back in Maine for a brief vacation. Moffatt was fighting in Vietnam in 1967 when his grandfather's home was robbed, and according to Varney, "he never heard anything more about (the stolen journals) until now."

"My first impression when they called me was, 'No, they couldn't have,'" said Moffatt Friday, after he addressed the class to share memories of his grandfather. "I thought, 'Forty-one years later, it couldn't be them.' But when I saw them, I realized it was true — these are his journals.

"Obviously, they couldn't have been under a bush for 40 years," he continued. "That's what's got everybody confused. They couldn't have been outside all that time, they'd have been destroyed. But how did they get there? Nobody knows. Or somebody must know, but they aren't telling. Another mystery of Carroll Deering."

The first mystery of Carroll Deering surrounded the commercial schooner with his name. Deering's father, Gardiner G. Deering, ran one of Bath's prominent shipyards early in the 20th century and named a five-masted cargo ship after Carroll.

Less than two years after its 1919 launch, the schooner Carroll A. Deering was sighted aground on Diamond Shoals, an area off the coast of Cape Hatteras, N.C. There was no sign of the 11-person crew, and then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover — who would later become U.S. President — launched an aggressive investigation into the disappearances.

"What happened to the Carroll A. Deering? We'd all like to know," pondered Moffatt on Friday. "The crew aboard would like to know. The people were all gone. Nobody ever saw them again."
...
No answers to the mystery of the Carroll A. Deering ghost ship can be found in the man's recently discovered journals, however. Deering himself didn't serve on the boat bearing his name.

"The journals were just a day-to-day record of his life," explained Moffatt. "A list of people that came in and out of his house every day, or the events of the time, like when old sea captains died — stuff like that."

The details scribbled down by Deering in the browned pages may be routine, but their reappearance after 41 years is just as perplexing as what happened to the ship in his name.

Read the full story here: [Source]

Purely baffling.

Those who are interested in learning a little more about Carroll A. Deering, the man, may be interested to know that his great-grandson, Pat Davis, has a website where a few articles and photos about him have been gathered. It can be found at http://www.thetopsider.net/cad/. The photo of Mr. Carroll shown here is from that website.

Special thanks to Tracy for pointing this great story out!