Dark tales cast shadow on home

An old house on Leighton Point Road in Pembroke, at the corner of the middle crossroad, is dark and brooding. Perhaps that's so because of the "witch's hat" dormers, common enough in eastern Maine but which to eyes from away seem vaguely sinister. I pass the house often, and even before I heard the story about some former occupants, I never looked at it without the hint of a shudder, a figurative chill.

The house faces Pennamaquan Bay, the outlet to Cobscook, Passamaquoddy and Fundy bays, to the open Atlantic and thence to the ports of call a schooner would have visited in the last half of the 19th century. Its location would have been perfect for a sea captain, who could keep a weather eye out from his parlor window, and even watch over his vessel, safely moored in the deep water less than a quarter mile away. And indeed it was a sea captain who built and lived in the house and even operated a ship's chandlery there in the ell, serving the needs of the many other mariners who left homes and families in Pembroke to ply foreign waters.

Captain Will Wilbur was born in 1812 at Young's Cove, a son of Benjamin Wilbur, an early settler from New Brunswick said to be "of Royalist descent." When young Will married Lucy Leighton in 1836, he built their house on the other side of Leighton's Neck from his birthplace. He and his wife had six children, and prospered. Lucy, a few years older than her husband, died in 1876, and Capt. Will was remarried the same year, at age 64, to Mary Jane Ross. She apparently came from elsewhere, and nothing is known of her except that she was a good deal younger than Will. The children of the captain's first marriage were grown and had their own homes and families by the time of their father's second marriage.

The captain was a man of consequence in Pembroke, a selectman for 24 of the years between 1840 and 1876 and the town's tax collector as well. He must have been a man of substance too: old records show he paid local taxes of $174 in 1876, and $113 in 1886 C significant sums for the time. He was also a "rum-seller," a profitable enterprise, especially for a vessel master who regularly visited Caribbean ports.

Captain Will was an exotic bird fancier. From some of his voyages, he returned with colorful peacocks, parrots and other species not seen before on Pembroke lawns or in parlor cages.

Will and Mary Jane had two daughters, Clytie and Ruby, less than a year apart in age. When they were still young children, their father died. He was in his 70s, a long life for the 19th century. It was said his corpse was chalk-white, the stomach as hard as a rock.

Clytie and Ruby and their mother continued to live in the house that Captain Will had built, even after Mary Jane was married again C to a man nobody knew, Irven Bennett. In due course, a son was born to the couple. But alas, tragedy struck again. First Clytie, age 18, died. Next Ruby, age 17, died. Then Irven. And then their small son. Five people, Mary Jane's whole family, wiped out in but a few years. And the odd thing was, the bodies all had the same peculiar chalk-white faces and rock-hard stomachs.

Twice widowed, and bereft of all her children, the sorrowing Mary Jane lived on alone and reclusively in the Wilbur homestead until one day she moved on to no one knew where. She was never heard from again.

But she was well remembered by her neighbors, and the subject of much talk and speculation. It was said she had murdered all the members of her family by serving them food she had cooked that was laced with finely ground glass. The story gained such credence that it was repeated by those careful local historians, Gerald and Sidney Wilder, in their "Genealogies of Pembroke Families."

When I first came to Pembroke to live year round in 1991, I met Harold Lusk, who was then living alone in the Wilbur house. Harold was in his early 80s and had bought the house when he had retired some 20 years earlier. His wife was severely disabled and living in a nursing home by the time I met him. He visited her faithfully every day.

Harold was a man of many parts, a lover of the outdoors, an intellectual, a former engineer and owner of his own small manufacturing firm. He was shrewd, down-to-earth, scientific in temperament, hardly the sort to be taken in by old wives' tales. One time, he told me he was regularly visited by ghosts, young girls dressed in white and pure white themselves, almost transparent. He told the story matter-of-factly, as he would if he were sharing his recipe for the corn soufflé he always baked and brought as his contribution to potluck suppers.

On late evenings, when he sat reading in his parlor, they would announce themselves with soft, tinkling, teenage giggles. The sounds always came from the upstairs hall, and then the two spectral images, one after the other, would float down the stairs, their fine white lawn dresses billowing, pass Harold's chair, and disappear. The vision was always the same, he said, and there was nothing at all frightening about it. In fact, he said, he looked forward to their visit.

It was sometime after I heard Harold's story that I first happened upon a reference to the mysterious deaths that had occurred in Harold's house. It was in Doris Bridges' account of her mother's childhood, a manuscript that I found in an old trailer that was on my property. It was later published by the Pembroke Historical Society as Growing Up Way Downeast. I did some more research, learned what I've recounted here, and then spoke to Harold.

"Of course, you've heard this story before," I said, after telling him what I'd learned. "No," he said. "It's all news to me."