A Magical Mystery Tour: Part II

We pull up to an unassuming white house on the corner of a residential neighborhood in Lee, Mass. “Is that it?” I ask. I don't know what I was expecting.

 

Joe Durwin, my trusty tour guide on a mission to see some of the quirkier haunted spots in the Berkshires, checks the file folder stuffed with newspaper clippings—from the Berkshire Eagle to the National Enquirer—and nods.

 

 

We park a few hundred yards away and across the street, so that Durwin can debrief me on the Passetto House. I feel like we’re on a stakeout. And I guess, in a way, we are.

 

“Dale and Lui Passetto moved into this house and started encountering this evil spirit, as they called it, a short little imp thing—”

 

I cut him off. “An imp thing?”

“Yeah,” Durwin continues, “a creepy three-foot tall thing in a hood with claws. Mrs. Passetto said she had scratches on her body,” and the couple related other tales of overturned furniture, ominous signs, and general chaos.

 

 

“The Passettos had recently converted from Judaism to Catholicism,” Durwin explains. “In Christian belief, you’re most susceptible [to demon attention] when you first convert.”

 

Good to know.

 

“One reason it got so much press is because Ed and Lorraine Warren, famous ghost-hunter demonologists from Connecticut, who helped to popularize the Amityville Horror house in Long Island, for decades were on top of any demonic encounters. The [Passetto] family called the police, and the police did vouch for the fact that there was a steel bookcase that looked like it had been bent in half. So they fled the house.”

 

 

But not before inviting an unnamed "renegade priest" to perform an exorcism on the house in 1981. “Less than a year later they put the house on the market,” Durwin says. He reads from an Eagle clipping in his folder: “Saturday, June 6, 1982, Haunted House in Lee on the Market for $75,000.”

 

In two decades since, the house seems to have been occupied for short periods of time. There haven’t been any publicly recorded complaints of suspicious white specters to Durwin’s knowledge, but, he says, “Poltergeist was being made very shortly after this story first broke, so there may have been a few little touches that influenced the movie.”

 

 

We cross the street. The driveway is empty, but belongings scattered about—a hammock on the porch, pumpkins on the stairs—suggest that the house would be considered “occupied.”

 

 

Five minutes later, nothing still…except some suspiciously creaky floorboards overhead. I realize I'm holding my breath. Maybe the resident(s) doesn’t want to answer the door? It definitely sounds like someone, or something, is pitter-pattering around up there.

 

Defeated, we saunter away.

 

Verdict: Any house that has nabbed a special appearance on Geraldo is worth a visit, even just to stand outside. Still, what a buzzkill.

 

So we continue east, into Becket, Mass….