HOLLY NADLER

508-687-9239

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

This is going to sound conceited, but this week on Martha’s Vineyard, I’m the person to know. The rest of the year I’m Joe Blow as far as anyone’s concerned, but in the run up to Halloween, the strange little niche that I’ve carved for myself with local (and true!) ghost stories gets me invited to all the best let’s-throw-some-popcorn-in-the-micro parties where we turn off the lights and hear scary tales.

So in this week’s town column, I’m not going to disappoint. I wracked my brain for the creepiest, crawliest story I’ve heard in recent memory, so recent that it had no chance to make it into any publication deadline, and then I recalled a hair-raising account, related to me after one of my ghost walks this past August in Oak Bluffs, that made it hard for me to bid the teller adieu and return home alone along the dark western flanks of Ocean Park.

All I can attest to regarding the veracity of this story is that the summer person relating it was someone whose face is familiar to me but who expressed a wish to remain anonymous should I choose to write about her. This is easily effected with a writer in my age bracket because the last time I remembered a name it was my mother’s and I needed it for a government form. In any event, after this woman told me her ghost story, I sincerely hoped it wasn’t true, but I’ll let you, all you penetrating readers out there, be the judge of that:

Let’s call her Fran. She’s a woman in her seventies who back in the 1950s used to spend summers with her grandparents, who resided in a modest ranch house on one of those leafy lanes off Alpine avenue: “I liked romping with the other kids in the neighborhood and riding my bicycle into town but, I have to tell you, my grandparents were no fun to be around.” We’ve all known aged relatives like Fran’s: the wife was bitter and bossy, the husband gloomy and testy. “Bickering was the only way they communicated. Clearly they hated each other, but I just figured that was what a long-term marriage looked like. My grandpa used to tell my grandma, without a trace of humor, that if he died before her, he was going to come back and haunt her.”

Fran was in college in western Massachusetts when she got word that her grandfather had died from complications with a gallstone. Fran’s grandmother asked if she could come down to the Island to help her with arrangements. When Fran arrived, the first thing her grandmother asked her to do was to open up her deceased husband’s closet and take out his suit to bring to the undertaker’s. “Oh, and shoes,” said the grandmother, “his Sunday shoes — they’re the only dress-up pair he has, brown patent leather.” Fran found the shiny loafers among a collection of boots and sneakers, and she delivered them herself to the people responsible for the burial.

By the following summer, Fran’s entire family was aware of the widowed grandmother’s complaints that her husband had in fact returned to haunt her. Apparently he tramped around the house throughout the wee hours of the night, every night. The poor woman had taken to sleeping during the daytime, and staying up at night with the television blaring to drown out the noise of the constant footsteps. Fran had a summer job that kept her away, but she heard from her 11-year-old niece, who spent a few weeks in the Oak Bluffs cottage, that she was repeatedly awakened at night by the sounds of someone clomping around the house. This went on for several years until Fran’s grandmother also passed away (perhaps from sleep deprivation?).

Once again Fran was enlisted, this time by her own mother, to help with funeral arrangements, and to start the process of clearing out the house preparatory to selling it.

Fran had already filled up a good half dozen heavy-duty plastic trash bags, when her chores led her to her grandparents’ bedroom. She opened the closet that had been the exclusive province of her grandfather, and was brought up short to see that all his hanging shirts, jackets and dungarees remained. It astonished her that her grandmother had never gone through the customary process of giving away her deceased husband’s clothes. Fran’s eyes slid down to the collection of boots and sneakers ranged along the bottom of the closet, and then her heart gave a lurch.

Grandpa’s Sunday patent leather brown loafers were back. Fran bent down for a closer look. The once pristine shoes had been worn like a set of cowboy boots after three years on the trail. Mud had caked into myriad cracks, and the insoles were worn away to the bare nubs of the heels. The worst part of the shoes’ condition was that they were sopping wet. Fran recalled with a sense of sinking dread that the night before it had rained heavily. It seemed that her grandfather had made once last trek — perhaps from the cemetery through the mud-sloshed woods — to his late wife’s house. Fran could only hope he’d left his shoes behind to take up a nice, dry, comfy pair of slippers in a Better Place.

Okay, you satisfied? I know I won’t hear from most of you until Halloween of 2009.

Attention music patrons: the Minnesingers hold their annual auction tomorrow — that’s Saturday, Nov. 1 — at 7 p.m. at the P.A. Club. Tickets will cost $15 at the door.

Everyone but everyone will want to show up for this: on Thursday, Nov. 13, 6:30 p.m. at the Oak Bluffs library, energy consultant, Chris Fried will give a free lecture, How To Keep Energy Bills Affordable. Don’t forget to turn out the lights before you leave the house for the lecture.