A Magical Mystery Tour: Part V

Submitted by Amanda Rae Busch on October 30, 2009 - 12:13pm

[This is the sixth entry in a special series. Read the previous entry, here.]

Energized by finding a dead body at the Berkshire Museum, we head to New Ashford, Mass. “There’s not a lot of terribly interesting things in New Ashford’s history,” Durwin says. “Mallery Homestead is the only reputedly haunted spot.” We find it just north of that seemingly cursed restaurant (formerly the Springs, then the Mallery Steakhouse) off Route 7.

Circa 1860, the third-generation Mallery family hires servants Henry and Eunice Pratt from Poughkeepsie, New York, to tend their home. Though they are ages 21 and 17, respectively, Henry is Eunice’s uncle, so Eunice’s father (Henry’s older brother?) eventually tracks down the couple to demand that their recent marriage be annulled.

The back of the Mallery Homestead ruins.

Devastated, Eunice requests a few minutes alone with her incestual groom. “They went upstairs,” says Durwin, “and it got really quiet.” After breaking down a locked bedroom door, the family finds Eunice dead, her throat slashed.

But Henry also has a sliced neck. Rather than be torn apart, the couple had made suicide pact, but even with a self-inflicted six-inch gash across his neck, Henry survives (FAIL). He's convicted of murder at the Lenox [Mass.] Courthouse (now home to the Lenox Library).

“Nobody really lived there after that, and it fell into ruin,” Durwin says, adding that passersby reported seeing “ghosts and faces and skeletons moving in the windows—people even avoided that side of the road.” Schoolchildren were sure to stay away. In 1930 the house, which had been vacant for fifty or so years, burned to the ground, leaving just the Mallerys' massive, five-hearth flagstone chimney.

At the site, it appears that someone is in the process of reorganizing the stone foundation, of a decent size for a single-family home back then. The chimney is an impressive jigsaw of hearths. We find some old rusty artifacts and bottle glass. But skeletal apparitions? Not so much.