MY GRANDFATHER WAS A GRAVEDIGGER. My Granny Bert kept a garden and used techniques which a couple centuries earlier would have had her burnt as a witch. I grew up in a haunted house and find myself living there again, forty years later. The first time I saw a ghost I was so young I didn’t even know to be afraid. Keeping me company here is the love of my life, my wife, and her roots stretch back to Salem and the witch trials. And of course along with whoever makes those footsteps in the blue room, and leaves little presents around the house.
I come to this shit naturally.
THESE ARE MY STORIES. It’s not scholarship. They’re folk tales, and folk tales change based on who is telling them. I like to start with facts, which makes me different. Just don’t mistake me for a historian.
Folk tales – stories of haunted houses, woods and graveyards – have more of an effect on history than we realize. They are beliefs that are shared by a community, passed down from generation to generation. Does it really matter if the Blood Stone was the site of human sacrifices, when for two thousand years people have believed it so? That’s history itself.
AM I A PARANORMAL INVESTIGATOR? Not a chance. There’s only one way you’ll ever believe in the paranormal. If you see something with your own eyes, or hear a story that makes you believe. If EVPs were going to prove the existence of a great beyond, Zack Bagans would have the Nobel Prize by now.
I go to haunted places, and I love a haunted inn, pub or hotel where I can sit and soak up the atmosphere. There are places where you can feel that something might happen at any moment. And that my friends, is the best you can hope for. That and a good single malt scotch to pass the time while you wait on spooks. Or a shot of absinthe, depending on what type of spooks you’re looking for.
As I said, it’s personal experience that will make you a believer, and having a nip or two won’t dissuade you from believing if something happens.
Occasionally it does. I heard the giggle of Washington Irving’s niece at Sunnyside, his home. I saw the white lady in The George and Pilgrim Inn in Glastonbury, England. I’ve lowered my camera to see colonial era soldiers watching me, and nearly had the shit knocked out of me in the old Talbot Inn, in Bardstown, Kentucky. Weird shit happens and you can’t predict it, and spirits don’t appear on cue or with any regularity.
T
NOTE: If you really must reach me, you can do so by writing to todd@greenmandesignstudio.com.
Professional stuff …
I’M A PHOTOGRAPHER and my works can be found in here and in The Witchery Archives, featuring prints and gifts. Stock photography and digital downloads are of course available as well.
I’ve been featured in depth by SmugMug, that fine family company which hosts websites for photographers. You can read that here …
My photography and some of what you read on this site has been featured in a startling variety of places. The fucking Smithsonian links to this site. I seem to field a lot of questions from school children who want to know about the murderess Lavinia Fisher, who was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina in 1820. Charleston kids also want to know about pirates as well.
I recently found myself telling Lavinia’s story in the book Haunted Charleston: Scary Sites, Eerie Encounters, and Tall Tales. I’ve been credited in Footloose Pilgrims: A Journal of Moped Travels Through Europe by Dick Lynam and Bill Lynam, The Secret Life of Sleep by Kat Duff and The Economic Survival of America’s Isolated Small Towns, Gerald L. Gordon. I list those here because they didn’t ask permission, and thus deserved shamed for having trusted such a notorious source.
In addition to gracing the walls of swanky homes and offices throughout the country, my photography has shown up on the covers and inside pages of History and Lore of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson Valley, by Jonathan Kruk, and Haunted Long Island II, by Lynda Lee Macken, as well as Gap Creek by Robert Morgan.
You can also find me credited in the following fine publications and websites: The World History Encyclopedia, The New York Times, The Boston Herald, Chicago Reader, BBC, The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Broadway World, Indianapolis Post, NY Daily News, Fodors, Country Living Magazine, Town and Country, House Beautiful, Good Housekeeping and Feast Magazine. Clients include: The Daughters of the American Revolution, a.k.a. the D.A.R, The Civil War Trust, Plimoth Plantation, History Press, Algonquin Press, Black Cat Press, Historic Hudson Valley, Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, Philipsburg Manor, Horseman’s Hollow, Sunnyside, SmugMug, The Stony Brook Environmental Conservancy.
So very different, so very talented
Just came across your essay and enjoyed it. I am wondering , however, how you managed to get your hands on Mount’s diary? I own the Frankenstein book on the painter but I have never been able to get a look at Mount’s own diary. Would be curious to know how. Thanks. Susan
Hello Mr Todd
How do you know that there were bootleggers functioning at V
Coindre hall during prohibition?Is there any historic evidence of this?
I was curious if you ever studied the Three Village area in Long Island , NY?
I had the privilege of growing up in Stony Brook , NY . I grew up in one of the first homes supposedly built there.
My Grandparents owned the first village grocery store . Edward and Bertha Kearns. So many ghost stories came out of my town. The Hadaway House is now a restaurant that hold the spirit of a young girl hanging in the rafters.
The Church high on a hill near town that holds secret tunnels below that connect a network of select homes of the first families there.
I learned this when after my grandparents passed away my mother attempted to make renovations only to be told 2 things . One when they removed the very old oil burner to install a new one they found a slab under it . Upon prying the slab they found a tunnel.
Also they were told no existing walls could be removed as the entire house was held together with wooden pegs.
My mother decided it would cost too much to make adequate changes.
So she contacted the historical society about the tunnels and they made a deal and she moved us far away from our beloved home.
Our home scared her . Always had even as a child. Myself I loved it. Not even the old black slave cemetery on the property scared me.
Myself , my cousin, and four of our close friends had many adventures in those woods behind our home.
Many nights we would go to the cellar and tell ghost stories.
We would travel through town on our bikes and visit all the places that scared people. The old amphitheater that was built before I was born hidden in the woods behind the town.
You could hear voices if you listened.
The old boat house down by sand street beach where children had drown.
We would sit by the big Hercules statue near town and play for hours.
Ride our bikes through head of the harbor and lay flowers by Mary’s grave.
So many old creepy houses up there.
Then as we grew we would ride to Setauket, and old field, port Jefferson.
It’s all part of The Three Village area.
You can find home after home there that have been preserved because of some paranormal type of event.
Actually I have several articles on the Three Villages area and the Setaukets. You can find them by going through this section right about here. I’d love to hear more of your stories!
I greatly enjoyed reading the entry regarding Light’s End Lights and the Chapel of Ease on St. Helena Island. So very well researched and crafted.
My compliments — Kelley
I was doing a bit of research on Walpurgishnacht, and happened upon your site. Kudos for an honest, quite amazing page. Reading the posts, has kept me nodding my head for hours, and sharing the link with my pagan friends. Thank you for digging up the facts, history, and folklore about some rather amazing things.
I grew up in the 3 Village as well…love your stories! It’s true, the area is swarming with spirits…must be a convergence point for such things.
RE: recently published Journal entry to wit “My Death Pts. I + II”
Dear Mr. Todd
Please forgive the intrusion , I am not one who would usually interject or interfere in the affairs of others , especially those whith whom I have have barely if any aquaintance
I have been reading and re reading your journal for what seems like a long time, in particular your accounts of the time you spent in England in places I too know very well, perhaps even too well at times.
I was indeed privelleged enough to read these tales of travel and the tribulations in their former version before “The Great Expungement” where they were edited and as you put it ‘de personalised’ .. although when I revisited them subsequently they were just as touching and as poignant as I remembered them on reading them the first time.
The reason they struck such a chord with me was not just that although I now find myself very far from home and in failing health I too have been to many of the same places you have visited on your journey travelled the same roads and had many quite similar experiences.
I don’t think I had been truly able to assimilate them until I read of them repeated in Your Jorurnal.
Anyway I dont want to hang you up with a long missive about all this but moreover I would like to thank you for sharing such as you have these stories and pictures .
It is a great gift to me as I now find myself in a foreign land and in failing health , far from my home and those very places I can recall thanks to you in perfect and vivid detail if i just close my eyes.
Hang on in there Sir. I would like to think of you returning one day in Glorious Victory to Churchyard cottages and the Red Lion in Avebury Perhaps even to Glastonbury {where I once lived albeit briefly}
thinking about it now, looking back ,I am reminded of this poem by A. E. Housman;
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
…
As I stated before I am not one who makes a habit of communicating in this way
It is quite possible that we might not correspond again so I hope you will forgive me if shall permit myself such informality.
Thanks once again Mr. Todd
I wish you many more years of good health.
Yours sincerely
R
GREAT STUFF, and right up my alley! A beautiful site that will keep me reading… pretty much forever. Sign me up for updates. THANKS.
–JS
Mr. Todd,
I haven’t been on your site for awhile. Debbie just told me of your new book, that I just ordered.
Looking forward to a fun read.
your pal, Bill Mesa
P.S. do you like Tom Waits? My wife hates him,Debbie hates him, I love him,
There is another haunted site in Plymouth. Just a bit north of Cold Spring, across from Holmes Reservation, stands a grand Victorian house on a hill. Eary in the 1900s, a Wild West Show was held on the park, and “Show Indians” camped on the hill and told my mother that it was a sacred site. True enough, a skeleton in an ancient pot was found, but that is not the strange part – one of the Indians told my mother that he knew her twin in Colorado. Years later, I learned about our cousin William Wells Bent. Look him up.