WHIPSTAFF
Location: Whipstaff is a small estate located on a small bluff, adjacent by a worn wagon path up to a wooded hilltop north of Friendship, Maine where it overlooks the Atlantic coast. It is easily seen from Route 131 winding along the coast, but it is only reached by Pullman Lane on the north side of town.
Description of Place: Friendship is a picturesque New England fishing village and tourist town with numerous two-hundred year old structures; among them, Whipstaff is an interesting eclectic and artistic architectural structure with round windows, curved corners, turrets and circular pitched roofs. In fact, there are few straight lines or square shapes in the house, which was said to have been built by shipbuilders. The interior has the appearance of melted wax frozen in place with whorled ceilings and arched hallways with elliptical ceilings, giving the sensation of living underwater. Fishlike faces exude from odd places, like banisters and furnishings. The structure is vaguely Romanesque with numerous statuaries and concrete sculptures of birds and fish on the front veranda around a circular stone gazebo, now choked with weeds and brush. The front foyer enters into a grand hall beneath a grand balcony and two staircases beneath a crystal chandelier. There are reportedly twenty bedrooms in varying condition in the mansion and a secret passageway deep into a cavern under the house. The décor is Old English while some parts of the house have fallen into disrepair.
Ghostly Manifestations: Whipstaff is one of those spooky houses which one often barely notices while zooming down the freeway interstate. When one does notice it, many wonder of the house is deserted or even perhaps haunted. Since the Forties, everyone in the tiny fishing village of Friendship believed the house was haunted and as a matter of fact, many people have shared stories of things they claimed have heard or seen. For several generations, there hasn’t been a father or mother who didn’t claim on venturing out to the old house on a dare.
Halloween newspapers going back to 1949 have described a paranormal textbook’s worth of material with new stories being created or adapted at least once every few months. Individuals have seen flitting shapes of white objects passing in the darkened windows. Several witnesses ranging from eight to nineteen have described seeing a ghostly young boy sitting forlornly on the front steps who vanishes when people approach. Several college students in 1958 trespassing in the house heard raucous screams of laughter from the upstairs. These howls have been heard as far away as town where even the most skeptical believe it’s just the wind passing through the empty edifice.
“It’s haunted.” One local figure testifies. Preferring to keep his identity secret, he has kept his story to himself for several years. “I was driving past the house up towards Rockport when I saw this young boy dart out in front of my truck and I swerved to miss him. I was all over the road and ended up blowing my tire in the process. I jumped out to yell at him, but he was gone. Could have been a normal boy, I reckon. He could have taken off while I was getting my bearings. Anyhow, I was crouching down like this pulling off the spare when I heard a sound like someone slapping their hands down on the hood of the car. I heard someone say as clear as I’m talking to you, ‘Need help with that, Mac?’ I looked up, and there was no one there. Well, night was rolling in and I was all alone so I jumped in the car and drove a few miles up the road. I was about as far as the crossroads up there when I had to stop and tighten my lug nuts.”
Other motorists have seen the boy darting across the road. One local officer saw a boy locked up in side the gate surrounding the property. He stopped, parked and walked up to help him out, but watched in stunned and nervous silence as the boy just vanished before him.
“It wasn’t like he ran away.” The officer said in a newspaper article. “He just sort of turned transparent until he was gone altogether like those guys beaming up on Star Trek.”
The Friendship Historical Society has kept an unofficial journal on the Whipstaff’s history and encourages anyone with ghost stories to share them. Appearances of the boy go back several years. Several of the stories run nearly the same. The young boy always looks desperately forlorn until someone tries to help him. The shrieks and laughter always erupt as someone gets too far near or even inside the house. One enterprising would-be ghost-hunter down from Collinsport up north was actually escorted inside on a tour of the house by a person who claimed to be the caretaker. They went through the house talking about the house’s history and the possible existence of life after death and he left. He then realized he’d left his camera in an upstairs bedroom and came back to get it. The camera was still where he’d left it, but the so-called caretaker was no where in sight. In fact, for over thirty years, there never has been a caretaker.
Former psychologist, Dr. James Harvey now owns Whipstaff and runs the Harvey Paranormal Research Society from within the house. His daughter, Kat (short for Kathleen), has seen the young boy running through the house, but now he’s happy and smiling. He’s moved things, laughed from empty rooms and generally made his presence known.
“Sometimes I’ll be doing my homework and I’ll hear this knocking sound or watch something in the room move across a shelf.” She replies. “I’ll say, ‘No, Casper.’ and he’ll behave himself.”
“He’s happy now to have guests.” She continues.
Since then, Kat has blossomed into a beautiful young woman and a talented aspiring interior decorator, having imparted her creativity to restoring as much of Whipstaff as possible. She believes Casper's ghost is still in the house, shadowing her like an infatuated young boy staying to the shadows. In June 2002, she recalls passing through the upstairs hall past one of the unused bedrooms and having an experience. There are twelve bedrooms in the mansion and three are not used, considered sacred out of respect to the ghosts here. One of these bedrooms has a window that always stays open, no matter how often they close it.
"The room is kept locked, sometimes blocked with a piece of furniture." Kat adds. "I was passing the threshold of that room and felt a burst of cold energy pass through me and out of my body. It knocked the breath out of me and I felt slightly levitated for the moment. There are cold drafts in Whipstaff, but not like this one. It felt like someone had passed through my body."
“There are four other ghosts here.” Dr. Harvey admits. “Three of them are three very raucous gentlemen who like to play games and get into mischief doing poltergeist phenomenon. One of them gets very upset when we try closing that one bedroom window in the back hall and keeps opening it back up. I think it’s because one of them emits a very noxious odor.” He jokes. “A few hours after I moved in I smelled a horrible stench as if there was a body in the wall. Scents always occur when someone has died on the property.”
"The fourth is an ethereal blonde woman in a dark dress.” He continues. “She’s very beautiful, but she seems confused. The first time I saw her, I was coming down the steps and she was staring at me from near the front door. She looked as if she was angry I was in her house. I have to admit; I’m a bit more afraid of her than I am of the others."
History: Whipstaff was built somewhere between 1810 and 1840 on the base of a former lighthouse lost in a storm in 1808 which explains part of the circular lay-out of the structure. The identity of her architect is unknown, but it is believed a member of the McFadden family was responsible for the strict and elliptical design of the house. His family lived in the house until 1846 when it passed out of their hands. In the Forties, Jeremiah Theodore (J. T.) McFadden was a rather eccentric inventor who became a recluse when his wife died. After his son, Casper, died, he became even more eccentric and started conducting experiments with Ouija boards and tarot cards to try and contact the spirits of the dead.
After his death, the house sat empty until it fell into the lap of relatives of McFadden’s wife. Living in England, the Crittendons never bothered to live in the house or even acknowledge it. It was during this long period of time that the house became a local haunted house. Colonel Archibald Crittendon reportedly visited the house after World War Two planning on making it a retreat, but nothing came out of those plans. Rumors are the ghosts influenced his change of heart, but the family claims he just lost interest. In the 1950s, the cartoon, “Casper The Friendly Ghost” was reputedly based on the boy’s ghost. A niece of the Colonel, Carrigan Crittendon, inherited Whipstaff in 1995 on her father’s death, suggesting that Whipstaff was a white elephant passed from family member to family member. She tried selling it, but first she had to get rid of the ghosts to make it sellable. She hired Dr. James Harvey to disprove the hauntings, but when she died in a car accident without any heirs or paying him legal fees, the house was awarded to him through the Crittendon attorneys in lieu of payment.
Harvey lives in the mansion to the present, using it as a base for the Harvey Paranormal Research Society.
Identity of Ghosts: No one knows who first connected Casper McFadden as the boy haunting the house, but it was Kat who first starting using it. The ghost’s response to the name seems to be proof of his identity. The three men are believed to be Casper's great-uncles who died while in an inebriated state as a cigarette burned down a now non-existent room. The female specter could be Carrigan herself considering her interest in the house when she died in her car accident.
Investigations: Dr. Harvey has been revealing a lot of the private files of J.T. McFadden stored in the recesses of the house. Known locally as an inventor, McFadden seems to have also been fixated on finding proof of life after death following the loss of his son, according to the files and creations in the bowels of the house. He dabbled in lenses to detect ghosts and tried exploring the connections between paranormal energy and the electro-magnetic spectrum, some of his secrets possibly shared or better adapted by Plato Zorba. According to McFadden, the human body resonated with a certain energy level that departed the body after it stopped functioning or had died, and that this energy continued to exist as an field of energy retaining human memories long after death but was prone to remain attracted to similar energy levels imbedded by it in the environment ("place memories") around it. This human energy retained thought and memories and could assimilate into a human shape but was actually gaseous in form. Furthermore, he reasoned, this energy possibly retained a sort of DNA signature to its former body, and with enough of the right cellular make-up, it could be restored to life. None of these claims have been treated as rational in light of McFadden's eventual psychiatric breakdown. Harvey, however, has kept a journal of the Whipstaff hauntings, gauging them on frequency and location, and realizing they were more active during the winter months. Still working at some level as a psychologist, he has traveled to over twenty locations and given lectures on supporting research into parapsychology.
Source/Comments: Casper (1995) - Hauntings and architecture based the Hampton Plantation in Towson, Maryland and on varied sources, such as the St. James Hotel in Cimarron, New Mexico and the Whaley House in San Diego, California.
Colonel Archibald Crittendon from "Hogan's Heroes"(1963-1968)