The Haunted Door...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

Texts with my teenage daughter:

Meg: MOM, what was THAT?
Me: It was Alma. She is doomed to live in that dumpster of a room of yours for all eternity.
Meg: Nah, according to Grammy, she is “safely resting in Jesus’ arms.”
Me: Be vigilant! She’s under the bed! I love you.
Meg: Alma loves you too.
Me: Alma loves fire extinguishers. Too soon?
Meg: By several generations.

This exchange, like so many others between my daughter and me, is in extremely poor taste. Dark humor is our love language. I am also a fan of facing your fears, so when Meg was younger, and afraid that the creaking old Poore House was haunted, I made her a list of the people who had died in her room, and exactly how and when they expired. “Then you’ll know who you’re talking to,” I said, catapulting her directly into a lifetime of therapy.

I’ll tell you a secret. Someone died in your house if it was built more than a century ago. Probably many someones. The Museum of Old Newbury can help you figure out who they are, if you are interested, one of many services we offer to our esteemed members. It’s some deed research, a family tree, vital records, and voila. Because, really, there was nowhere else to die until fairly recently in this country.

Hospitals tended to be reserved for special cases and quarantine. In Boston in 1912, nearly 70% of people threw off this mortal coil at home. By the 1970’s, almost everyone expired in a hospital. We are coming down the other side of that wave, thankfully. I intend to die in my bed and spend eternity playing pranks on my descendants.

But poor Alma. Has anyone ever told you that more women died when their clothing caught fire than in childbirth? Something about hoop skirts and fireplace cooking. This one, endlessly repeated, is as complicated as “people were shorter back then.”

In both cases, there is some truth to the statement – studies have found that height correlates roughly with nutrition and population density, so people were about as tall as we are today when they had enough food and space.

As for flammable females? Yep, it happened, but it was unusual, enough so that it was newsworthy, which made it look like it was happening all the time, and around we go. So, when I heard my family story about my great-great-great-grandmother Alma Hall Poore catching fire in the upstairs bedroom, I did not take it very seriously.

We moved back into the Poore House in West Newbury in 2017, two centuries after Alma and her husband, Ebenezer, built the first section of the house, later enlarged by their son Moses in 1856. It never left the family, and since I had the benefit of decades with my older relatives, I put certain stories about my family in a special category, treating them like charming folk tales.

Some of these stories are downright Dickensian – my great-great grandfather interviewing young West Newbury schoolmasters by making them beat him in a fistfight or my great-great aunt, who, as a 4-year-old, was loaned to a wealthy New York family as a companion for their daughter and then unceremoniously returned because she wouldn’t stop crying. Unverifiable, a little humorous, certainly not filled with empathy for what must have been traumatic and frightening events for the people involved.

Alma became a featured character in our lives when Meg moved into the southeast chamber, which had been my bedroom, and before that, my mom’s bedroom, and strange things began to happen.

In particular, the door, secured with an old thumb-latch, would open on its own. The latch, secured deep in a groove in its mortise catch, would pop up inexplicably, and the door creak open, sometimes while Meg was in the room.

This happened on windy days, on days with no wind at all, in all seasons, and at all times of day. Sometimes it would remain closed for weeks and then pop open.

And so, though I remain convinced that there is some reasonable explanation for this, I suggested to Meg, in a moment of teasing, that maybe Alma wanted the door ajar.

The story stuck, and we began to address her in the upstairs hall, apologizing for a belch or a swear or blaming her when something was left in an odd place.

And then, I mentioned Alma to friend and fellow history nerd, Dan Santos, who asked if I had ever checked the newspaper to see if the story was true, and everything changed.

You see, Meg’s room was once called the parlor chamber, and on October 9, 1866, 75-year-old Alma Hall Poore, born in 1790, carried twigs up the stairs in her apron, tossed them into the wood stove, and caught fire. It really happened. The details described in the newspaper are heartbreaking.

Moses, named as M. Hall Poor, was her oldest son, just fifteen when his father Ebenezer died, leaving Alma a widow with five children to raise.

I am haunted (there, I said it) by the image of him running in from the barn to find his mother on the landing engulfed in flames and trying and failing to save her life, “badly burning both hands in doing so.”

How do we live with this heaviness, this inheritance of suffering? For Meg and me, even knowing the truth of this terrible story, we honor Alma by keeping her around, by making her part of our family’s teasing banter.

And I think of her every October when I think about lighting my own fireplace on a crisp fall day. I think of the lines on her weathered face, her dark hair and serious brow. I think of her short stint as a teacher at West Newbury’s Number 6 School, so beloved by her students that they visited her at her (my) house fifty years later.

And how do I know exactly who died in Meg’s room? Because when it was my room, my great-aunt Emily told me, and her father told her, when it was her room. Because death, like life, is part of every family.

Just leave the door open.