Curioser and curioser. Charles J Adams writes about visiting Bermuda in search of ghosts in this article for The Reading Eagle.
Just as she promised to do, a woman waited in front of her salmon-colored home that overlooks a coral cove on Watford Island, one of the 120 islands that make up what is collectively called Bermuda.
Our group of 30 adventurers essentially commandeered one of the notorious pink buses at the cruise ship terminal at the Dockyards and rode it to the prescribed pole that marks the stop just before the bridge to the next island.
We were about to do what no other group of tourists ever in the long history of Bermuda tourism has done.
The cruise on the Explorer of the Seas was not marketed by Boscov’s Travel as a ghost cruise, but I was recruited to add a paranormal touch to the trip. Our coordinator, Debbie Pasquale, helped lay the logistical groundwork for our morning visit to Roberta Grant’s house.
I “met” Roberta online after an article about our group coming to ghost hunt in Bermuda appeared in a Hamilton newspaper. She contacted me and offered to share her stories and guide us along a shady trail to a 19th century graveyard on a hill next to her property.
The baseline for any hauntings on the 4-acre West End island is strong. Roberta’s house was once part of a small hospital complex that stood next to a now-abandoned church. The pastel-colored homes belie the settlement’s grim past.
There are tales of unmarked graves of slaves, shipwreck and yellow fever victims. Sometimes, their bones have worked their way to the surface of the sandy soil.
And then, there is the story of a worker who was terrified when he was digging in that soil and his pick plunged through an ancient tin coffin that exploded in a hellish hail of putrid dust, gas and ash.
The group seemed to be entranced as Roberta and her next-door neighbor spoke of the unsettling occurrences in their homes. Most fit into familiar motifs for this veteran collector of such stories, but they were strange tales in a strange land.
Scratch away the blue water-pink beaches veneer of now, do a little probing, and you can easily discover the “Devil’s Isle” of then.
That’s what its earliest settlers called it.
As expressed on a plaque in the National Museum of Bermuda, “Bermuda had a fearsome reputation as a place of monsters, ghouls and spirits, where castaways would be devoured and their souls stolen.”
That was a description as inane as the modern day Bermuda Triangle fable. But, there were those who believed all of it then, and some of it now.
Indeed, ghosts do inhabit public and private places throughout Bermuda – never far from those pink beaches and that blue water.
For the original report go to http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=419278
