A Magical Mystery Tour: Part IV

We skip Lenox and head straight to Pittsfield. Joe Durwin, investigator of the strange and bizarre and author of a longtime newspaper column, “These Mysterious Hills,” says it himself: “Lenox is too easy—that could be its own tour right there.”

 

Most familiar with our area know that the “cottages” of the Gilded Age offer ghost stories as elaborate as their majestic architecture. The sprawling grounds of Tanglewood and the hillside home of founder Sergei Koussevitzky, Seranak, are well-documented as home to specters; the Whistler’s Inn has a number of haunted rooms (featured on the Travel Channel's "Haunted Hotels"; and who doesn’t know about the reputed ghost of Edith Wharton (featured on SyFy’s Ghost Hunters) at her bucolic estate, The Mount? 

 

Like I said before, our tour of weird places in the Berkshires was not meant to be comprehensive, but obscure.

 

So, on a lark, we stop into the Berkshire Museum, to investigate some rumors Durwin has recently heard. Communications manager Chris Hayden picks us up in the lobby and shows us to camouflaged doorway that leads from one of the walls in a second-floor gallery into an old kitchen.

 

There’s sort of a greenish glow to the space, which seems preserved from a much earlier period, but that's probably due to the coloring of the tiles and countertops. It's also eerily cold--but that's likely due to the frigid outdoor temps and lack of heating in this particular space.

 

 

 

In the central Crane Room, Hayden opens another wall panel. “The attic used to be spookier,"  he says as we navigate a narrow passage and crawl up a series of ladders, “before they put in the HVAC.” Hayden does have a few anectodes of bizarre "lost animal heads in storage spaces," including one especially unsettling bit about a boa constrictor that escaped its tank and was found months later, within the museum’s ceiling panel. (Thankfully, it was dead.)

 

But then we find him: Pahat. The mummy of an Egyptian priest who lived 2300-plus years ago. That counts as creepy, right?

 

Verdict: “Well,” says Durwin, peering at the broken toes of the museum’s famous specimen, “It is a dead body…”