SOME OF THE OLDEST GHOSTS OF BAR HARBOR AND HANCOCK COUNTY
Sightings of the dead woman began in 1799 at the Blaisdell house in Sullivan. But before they saw her, they heard her. A strange noise in the cellar.
Then another.
Then another.
As the new century arrived, so too did Nelly (Hooper) Butler’s voice. She spoke to the god-fearing family, pillars of the community. Captain Abner Blaisdell had been a sergeant in the American Revolution. They were respected people—pillars of the community.
And then Nelly began talking to them, just her disembodied voice. The Blaisdells bravely asked who she was.
Nelly Butler, she answered, the three-years dead wife of Captain George Butler. She’d died in childbirth at twenty one. Her father, Dennis Hooper, lived about six miles down the road. George was close, too.
Many claim that Hancock County is the site of the first documented haunted house in the United States.
That claim arises from the writings of a traveling minister, Abraham Cummings, who wrote “Immortality Proved by the Testimony of Sense: in which Is Contemplated the Doctrine of Spectres, and the Existence of a Particular Spectre.” It’s a long-winded title for a somewhat loquacious man and was published by J.L. Lovell back in 1859 and it’s about Nelly Butler.
At 85 pages, the pamphlet is part religious treatise and part submission of testimony, given under oath, of those who interacted with the ghosts.
Nelly would knock on walls. She’d whisper. She’d invite the Blaisdells into their own cellar to chat. And they’d go. Lydia Blaisdell, just fifteen, often heard her the most.
And Nelly, it seems, had a few missions. She wanted her husband to remarry and to have the bride be Lydia. Eventually, during some of these interactions, Nelly’s living sister arrived. The knocking began. And then something whispered.
That something, they believed, might be Nelly.
Or it might have been the devil.
Everyone wasn’t exactly sure—at least not at first.
The ghost was seen by multitudes. Under oath, dozens swore to it. And eventually the ghost convinced Lydia and George to marry, but warned them, that Lydia, too, would die, shortly after she gave birth. She was right. Ten months later, Lydia was dead. Nelly herself stopped showing up. George remarried and this wife survived to have at least four children. The story was over. Or at least it was . . . for now.
