Spooky Roommates The quirks and pitfalls of living with ghosts B Y CH E L SEA ED GAR
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ichard Bailey is an event compliance coordinator for the City of Burlington who, from 1991 to 2002, fronted a rap-rock band called Dysfunkshun. He has a generous sprinkling of tattoos on his upper right arm, and he does not immediately register as someone who’s seen a lot of ghosts. Yet he has spent much of his life in houses where paranormal activity is as routine as flossing. “Demographically, as an old punk rocker, I’m probably sort of an unusual person to have these kinds of things happen to me,” Bailey admitted. He has one possible explanation. When he was 9 or 10, Bailey had a severe allergic reaction to an iodine injection given during an X-ray and went into shock. His heart stopped; for a minute, he was functionally dead. He wonders whether his brief sojourn to the other side might explain his magnetism for the supernatural, but he’s wary of pop theories. “I just think it’s something we don’t understand, like the Neanderthals didn’t understand the dark,” he said. As the pandemic has confined us to our domiciles and the horror show that is 2020 grinds on outside, our malaise seems to have crept indoors. Across the country, paranormal investigators have reported a spike in inquiries; in May, the New York Times dedicated more than a thousand words to the phenomenon of quarantining with spirits. Thea Lewis, founder of Queen City Ghostwalk, a tour of haunted historic sites in Burlington, believes that in chaotic times we gravitate toward spookiness as a means of coping with anxiety. “Ghost stories provide a structure for our fears,” she said. For Bailey, the pandemic has marked a symbolic return to the way people lived centuries ago — at least in terms of the amount of time we spend puttering around our homes, filling the yawning void with the preparation and consumption of food. “Back then, people didn’t travel anywhere. Their homes were the center of their worlds,” he said. “I think that that intense pattern of life is why farmhouses, in particular, 44
are so active.” (By “active,” he means Spiritville.) Bailey grew up in an early 19th-century farmhouse in West Brookfield. He remembers feeling distinctly ill at ease there, as if he were an intruder. Occasionally, the piano in the living room would play on its own — sometimes melodically, sometimes just one or two repeating, insistent notes. After Bailey’s father died in a tractor accident, some of the strange happenings seemed to bear his imprint. A notebook, opened to a page of his handwriting, once appeared on the kitchen table out of the blue. Bailey’s father had collected salvaged doors and shutters and arranged them neatly on racks inside the barn, which he used as his
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SEVEN DAYS OCTOBER 28-NOVEMBER 4, 2020
work space. On several occasions, Bailey went into the barn and found the doors and shutters in complete disarray, busted and scattered erratically on the floor, as if they had been hurled in a rage. (His father’s 1932 Studebaker, meanwhile, was unscathed.) The barn door was always padlocked; after his father’s death, said Bailey, he was the only one who ever went inside.
Bailey; his wife Paula Haskell; their 13-year-old daughter, Gracie; and their goldendoodle, Sir Chuck Dingleberry, currently live in a 1800 farmhouse in Hinesburg. When they first moved in, in the spring of 2009, Bailey found bundles of burned sage and bottles of sacramental wine on the floor of the den. A few months later, Bailey attended the 50th wedding anniversary celebration of the elderly couple from whom they’d bought the house. Their priest was also at the party, and Bailey asked him if it was unusual to have a house blessed upon leaving it. “Not this house,” the priest told him. From the first night, said Bailey, he would see shadows moving across the walls and hear muffled voices and footsteps at all hours of the day. About a week after they moved in, Bailey was sitting in the living room with Haskell when he noticed the silhouettes of people against the wall, walking back and forth. “I feel like I’m crazy,” he recalled saying to Haskell, “but I think I just saw moving shadows.” “Oh, g o o d ,” Haskell replied. “I’ve been seeing them, too.” More unsettling things have happened. Once, about five years ago, Bailey and Gracie were in the library, playing chess by candlelight. (Bailey, who has furnished every room with American Federal-style antiques, enjoys getting into the vibe of the house.) Suddenly, a lit candle in one of the wall