Investigating the paranormal: Ghost hunter shares haunted tales of Cape Cod

BARNSTABLE — Latches lifting, knobs turning, and doors opening and closing by themselves. Footsteps on creaking floors polished smooth from centuries of use. Unseen fingers teasing your hair, tugging at your clothes, brushing the nape of your neck. Misty apparitions drifting across a road, or congealing from the fog on a beach. Shifting patches of darkness within the dark of night, and disembodied voices whispering, calling out, issuing warnings.

If you ask Derek Bartlett, he'll tell you he's heard tales about all of these phenomenon happening in the time-worn homes, businesses and institutions of Cape Cod, in its crooked cemeteries where lichens have begun to fill in the carved crevices of letters and figures on centuries-old tombstones, in its tangled woods and on its storm-combed beaches that have been silent, indifferent witnesses to countless shipwrecks.

He's experienced many of them himself. And at least one of them made him wonder if he should re-evaluate his pursuit of mysterious, unexplained events. But he can't help himself, as if he is drawn by the unseen to the task of eliminating all of the possible alternative explanations until all that remains is one thing: Belief.

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Bartlett is the founder of the Cape and Islands Paranormal Research Society, and the owner operator of Cape Cod's Haunted and History Tours. When he's not at his day job as a sales manager, he's busy much of the year, from mid April to mid November, leading nighttime tours of places in Barnstable said to be haunted, and sharing tales of ghostly encounters blended with local history. He's also kept busy outside of his tours looking into reports of lingering energies and unexplained happenings.

What happens during a paranormal investigation?

"I've been ghost hunting on Cape Cod for 23 years now," said Bartlett, a former Marine who started his ghost tours business in 2005.

Technically, he said, he's a paranormal investigator. And he begins all of his investigations as a skeptic. The word "alleged" in front of "haunting" is his starting point, always. Many things can be explained by playing of light and shadow through the leaves of a tree or the rippled glass of an old house. They call also be affected by the typical sounds of a structure full of activity and reacting to the environment: wood swelling and shrinking with fluctuations in temperature, air pockets popping in the pipes, birds and small animals shifting between the walls, curtains ruffling from the flow of air in a window not securely closed.

"What I do is I look for evidence of spirits, of what we call 'alleged hauntings.' We try to rule out everything that's humanly possible, and what's left over we investigate," Bartlett said.

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Once the explainable is eliminated, Bartlett is ready to consider paranormal causes. How often has this happened in his experience?

"I'd say 80 percent of the time there was something there I couldn't explain," he revealed.

Paranormal research, Bartlett said, is a pseudo science, but he and his team − Wendy Patterson of Falmouth, and Nancy Jenkins, currently of Florida, but originally from Barnstable Village − use scientific instruments in investigations, like electromagnetic field detectors and digital sound recording devices.

"There's no such thing as ghost detectors," he said. "But we use detectors to look for fluctuations in the environment, and our own eyes. And we use digital recorders to look for electronic voice phenomenon."

How Bartlett became a paranormal researcher

When he started out, Bartlett used analog recorders with microphones, but the digital recorders are far superior. While he said he has heard some phantom voices whispering his name before, typically it takes a recording device to pick up ghostly words. Questions are asked "to get answers from the dead, like who they might be, what era they might be from," and the devices are used in hopes of picking up answers. Bartlett said he usually hands a couple of recorders out during his tours for people to try detecting voice phenomenon at the Cobb's Hill Cemetery.

Bartlett recounted a recording captured once by a team member at the "Old Jail" on the grounds of the U.S. Coast Guard Heritage Museum in Barnstable − known as the oldest wooden jail in the country, it was built in 1690 and served as a jail until 1820; it was moved to its current location from elsewhere in Barnstable in 1972.

The team member, Bartlett said, was with a mother and daughter in the jail and had politely asked if they were bothering the energies there and if they should leave. "You hear an old man's voice from the other room say 'yes,'" he said.

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Bartlett's interest in the paranormal began when he was a kid. "I grew up with ghost stories and old TV shows about the paranormal," he explained.

But it took a photographic abnormality to take him from simply being fascinated with the paranormal to actively investigating it.

"Twenty-three years ago I took a photo I couldn't explain," he said.

He described attempting to take a photo of a woman sitting on a bed. His flash failed, yet when he developed the film, there was a streak of light in it. Since there had been no light source around when he snapped the image, he could only surmise he had captured a normally invisible energy. A spirit.

"That's how I got involved in this field. And I started educating myself about it, reading about other people's work," Bartlett said.

Many stories of unexplained events on Cape Cod

Before long, he was actively investigating reports of apparitions and strange occurrences. He's looked into ghostly stories at many places on the Cape: Barnstable County Courthouse, the Barnstable House, the Orleans Inn, and numerous residential homes, to name a few.

"I enjoy educating people about the types of hauntings," said Bartlett, who categorizes hauntings as "residual hauntings" that are more like echoes of the past that play like repeating loops in a film, and "intelligent hauntings," which are characterized by energetic interactions and seeming attempts to communicate.

There are plenty of both on the Cape, according to Bartlett − impressions of past lives, past tragedies, and lingering, centuries-long episodes of ghostly grief. The Cape has a fair number of tales of "ladies in gray" wandering some of its beaches, watching for the return of husbands and lovers lost at sea, said Bartlett. One of them, as the story goes, is allegedly Maria "Goody" Hallett, wandering the outer beach in search of her love, the pirate Black Sam Bellamy − the slave galley he and his men took in the West Indies, the Whydah, was lost in a storm on the shoals about 500 feet off the shores of Wellfleet on April 26, 1717, taking Bellamy with her.

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"Down in Barnstable Harbor I've heard of a woman wandering the beaches," Bartlett said. "Now and then a woman's voice can be heard saying 'help me.'"

There is also a tale of a mysterious dory that appears to have three men sitting in it, one of them slumped over. It comes and goes. While he has not seen these apparitions himself, stories told by many people over time with the same kinds of details are definitely attention grabbers.

At Cobb's Hill Cemetery, there have been many tales about a "tall, dark, shadowy figure" that wanders through, and Bartlett said he and others have seen "things" move throughout. He said he has also seen vague white forms, and impressions of faces, like bridges of noses, the crests of eyebrows and sweep of cheekbones, but never full-on faces with eyes and lips.

"I have never seen, yet, a full-body apparition," he said.

What a paranormal experience may feel like

But Bartlett claims he has felt things. The most frightening, and the one that made him consider whether he should continue doing paranormal work, was during an investigation off Cape, in Granville, Massachusetts, a town near Springfield that was settled in 1736.

"I was punched in the shoulder blade, grabbed by the back of neck and forced down into the shape of a 'L,'" Bartlett said.

But that's not the only episode that has sent some serious shivers down his spine. Another frightening incident happened on the Cape, at the place Bartlett said is his No. 1, top haunted place here: The Barnstable House.

Built about 1713 in Scituate and moved to Barnstable in 1716, the house − now law offices − is nicknamed "the House of 11 Ghosts." It has been featured in A&E's Holzer Files, in an episode titled "Bloodline," as well as on SyFy's Ghost Hunters, and the New England Society of Paranormal Investigations has gathered evidence of several entities in recordings and on video.

Bartlett said he was conducting an investigation in the house in 2005 when he went into a break room for a breather. He shut the door behind him, but it didn't stay shut. As he tells it, both the door of the room and a closet door opened at the same time, and then he felt a very ominous presence.

"They call it pure negative energy," he said, recounting how he kept his eyes tightly closed during the encounter.

The Barnstable House's most notorious haunt is said to be a young girl, Lucy, who may have drowned in the well under the house while playing with a ball. There are stories of the girl going up to people when the house was a restaurant, asking if they wanted to play.

"Then there's Captain Graves, a sea captain he used to live there, and his manservant," said Bartlett, who has not seen them himself. "There are stories of false fires seen burning inside thefireplace. A woman has been seen in the building, sitting in a rocking chair."

According to local lore, this apparition is Lucy's mother. Stories on the Barnstable House website, tell, too, of another woman in a high-collared white dress. She was reportedly seen behind one of the windows on the third floor by members of the Barnstable Fire Department when they answered a call there in the 1970s, and they went in to rescue her, but couldn't find her.

Bartlett said the presence of another past owner, Edmond Hawes, has been observed there as well − he hanged himself in the yard after his riches were rendered worthless when continental currency was converted to another monetary system.

"People have so many tales of Barnstable House," Bartlett said.

Here are some of Bartlett's other top Cape Cod haunts:

Yarmouth Ancient Cemetery

The Yarmouth Ancient Cemetery on Center Street in Yarmouth Port dates to about 1676.

"Numerous ghosts have been seen throughout, off and on," Bartlett said. "People have seen a figure crossing the road, but when they look again there's nobody there. I get calls about it all the time."

The Old Jail

The Old Jail, already mentioned, is said to be haunted by five entities.

"I've seen a smaller figure, looks like a little boy, move throughout the building," said Bartlett, who starts his ghost tours at the site.

But others have reported two figures that appear to be men.

"When they show up they tend to play with women's hair," he said. "And we have the old man. We think he's the one that likes to poke people when they are in the building."

The last apparition some have reported appears to be legless man dragging himself across the floor.

"The last one I've never seen, but some people are seeing it on different tour. Especially in the summer people in open toed sandals have said they feel something going over their feet," Bartlett said.

Highfield Hall

Highfield Hall, an historic site in Falmouth, features a restored Victorian house, built in 1878. Bartlett said there are reports of a little girl apparition, supposedly run over by a carriage, in the parking area. A pair of women are sometimes observed inside the house, locked arm in arm.

Bartlett leads ghost tours from spring to fall. The last tour for 2022 is Nov. 14. For more information, or to make reservations, call 508-241-1151.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: This Cape Cod ghost hunter knows Barnstable's spookiest spots