NOONAN HOUSE
Location: Dark Score Lake (T. R. 90) is an unincorporated community of
around 250 people in Somerset County, Maine. Sixty-five miles north of Augusta,
and twenty miles east of Eustis, it is located on Route 90 off Highway 27. The
Noonan House is located on the north tip of the lake.
Description Of Place: Located in the acres of woodland in the Pierce
Mountains, the Noonan House is a two-story cabin on forty acres of land in view
of Dark Score Lake. Decorated in local relics and original artwork, the
structure is a two bedroom, one bathroom structure with a cellar and barn on the
property accessible to walking trails cross-crossing the mountainside.
Ghostly Manifestations: In public lore, a haunted house is a
decrepit dilapidated mansion, usually Gothic or Victorian, that is abandoned and
situated on a lonely back road or hidden behind brush and weeds in a suburban
neighborhood. The concept is based on an actual archetype, the Munster
House for example in the Mockingbird Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles
California. When these locations are haunted, it is because the spirits of the
previous tenants have not moved on.
The Noonan House is not only the exception to this rule; it stomps all over it.
Owned by writer Tom Noonan, the location has been under the supervision of local Bill Dean since the death of Tom's father in 1975. Although Dean doesn't believe in the notion of ghosts and hauntings, he does believe in a local curse known as the Dark Score Curse (alternately known as Dark Score Crazy). Since 1940, several local men have been driven to madness compelling them to murder their daughters. As a horror novelist, Noonan is open to the concept of ghosts and the afterlife, particularly since the death of his wife in 2017. When he retreated to the cabin in the Summer of 2018 to work on a writing project, he believed he was being contacted by his wife's spirit, but eventually he realized there was another much older presence on the grounds.
"It's weird...." Noonan mentioned to William Collins. "In the days leading up to my stay in the cabin, I'd been having vivid dreams of the cabin, all lit up and ablaze with lights, and they were always linked to the presence of this ghostly little girl that I was seeing often in my dreams. In this one dream, I quite literally saw the windows getting blown out in unison, waking me from what had been a very powerful, very visceral type dream. Afterwards, I got a phone call from Bill Dean in Maine telling me the place had been vandalized. Someone had blown out all the windows in the house."
Noonan said he arrived in Dark Score Lake on June 3, 2018 shortly after the windows had been replaced and very quickly got back to work. His wife had restored the cabin from a state of dilapidation and had used it as an artist colony. Still reeling from her death, Tom was not looking to make contact with her spirit when the bell on Bunter rang in the living room.
"Bunter was the name of the moose head in the living room." Noonan explains. "He had a bell hanging from one of his antlers, and I would hear it... Ding.... it would sound as if someone had tapped it. Nothing scary. Nothing intimidating. Almost immediately, I started thinking, "Jo, are you with me?"" He pauses as if a huge weight had been removed from his shoulders. "In that moment, I was more closer to the spirit world than I had ever been in my life."
Every morning at the cabin, Mike would take his running regime across the old fishing trails on the lake around it and back to the cabin. On his return the following morning, he was surprised when the letter magnets on the refrigerator ended up organized to spell out, "Helo Mik." The discovery left him both intrigued and charmed to realize that Jo was still with him in the cabin, but he also began to realize someone else was with her.
"What I heard was this very high-pierced woman's scream." He confesses. "It was like nothing I've heard before.... created solely to tear my mind asunder. I've never heard anything like it since."
Noonan started experiencing other indications of this other spirit. The following day, he said he heard a woman singing in the house, and traced the sound to an old dusty Victrola player in the cellar. He's not sure what opened and wound it up, he hadn't yet been in the cellar since he had arrived, but something had started it up for him. He also experienced some light poltergeist activity. Objects would move around or vanish and turn up in weird locations. The screaming occurred again, no more as virulent than the first time it happened. The letters on the refrigerator rearranged to say "Help R." That night, Bunter dinged again... then fell off the wall.
The following day, Noonan woke to find the old Victrola playing in the living room despite not moving it upstairs, although he speculated he might have done so while sleepwalking. He's not much of a sleepwalker, and had never done it before or since, but he was having several horrible dreams about wandering the grounds and being terrified by the young girl who had haunted his dreams in Manhattan. He also had dreams he was surrounded by people in period attire at a county fair in the 1930s and confronted by an entertainer named Sarah Tisdale. When he woke, Noonan checked the record that had appeared in his living room. It was by Sarah Tisdale, and she had vanished in the area back in the 1930s.
After a few days of nothing happening, Noonan rose one day to find his bathtub full of water. Later that day, the bell fell off Bunter again.
The following day, Jo left another cryptic message on the refrigerator that said "down left side." The message boggled and confused, but no more than his next experience. About midway around the lake, he had found a tree on his first run shaped like that of a large buxom woman he had called the "Green Lady." On this trip around, he had braced on the tree to lift himself up and received a powerful jolt of electricity that nearly stopped his heart.
"It felt like a bolt of
lightening." Noonan revealed. "I didn't know what it was or what
caused it, but it dropped me like a rock. At that moment, I realized that this
entity was pissed. It was angry at me, and I didn't know why."
History: Not much is known about Dark Score Lake. A farming
community, it's existence dates back to the 1890s when sections of the area were
sold for raising soybeans, corn, pigs and dairy to southern farmers looking for
open land in Northern Maine. The area is sparsely populated because of the
severity of the winters, but the area is also supported by tourism from campers,
fishermen and snow enthusiasts.
The cabin was built by Harold Noonan in
the 1930s and passed to his sons, Thomas and Sidney Noonan; although Sid later sold
his share to Thomas, now a Manhattan author and writer.
Identity Of Ghosts: After focusing his research on Sarah Tisdale,
Noonan learned she was an attractive African American jazz entertainer who
worked on the Northeast fair circuit through New York, Vermont, New Hampshire
and Maine in the 1930s. After she vanished in 1939, her recordings were released
posthumously and became popular in the Early Forties. She vanished in Dark Score
Lake with her daughter on the week of the 1939 County Fair and was never found.
Although many believe she had been murdered by an angry promoter or her estranged
former lover, Noonan discovered credible evidence that she had been raped and
murdered by several local youths (one of whom might have been Noonan's father)
who also murdered her daughter as a potential witness. Her remains and that of
her daughter were found buried twelve hundred yards from the cabin under the
"Green Lady" tree.
Source/Comments: Bag of Bones (2017) - Activity based on the novel. Geography
based on Flagstaff Lake, Maine.
Melissa George (Maddie Devore) also played Jessica Rylan in "Triangle" and Kathy Lutz in "The Amityville Horror"