The other day as I walked out of the bathroom in room 9 at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and saw a cat dash past a chair into the far corner of the room. My second thought was “I don’t ever recall seeing a cat here at the Inn. However, we’re in a rural area, and that might not be a cat.” I walked over to the corner, and saw there was actually no way for an animal to enter or leave there. “Hmm,” thought I, and moved on to the next thing. Actually, over the years I’ve had several occasions of sensing something out of the corner of my eye, then looking more closely, but finding nothing. I tended to put all this down to the less than twenty-first century lighting in the room.
Then in a chance conversation the next morning I learned that the room I have shared with my colleague and old friend Walter Wieder and on occasion one or two other Unitarian Universalist clergy, during the annual gatherings of the Fraters of the Wayside Inn, is haunted.
The Inn, made famous through Longellow’s Tales of the Wayside Inn, appears today to be the oldest Inn in operation in the country. The oldest parts of the main building date to the earliest part of the eighteenth century. The first Universalist and now Unitarian Universalist clergy study group the Fraters of the Wayside Inn have been meeting there for one hundred and fourteen years. Me, despite what some of my friends say, only for a dozen years now, two as a guest and now a decade as a frater. During these years I’ve been mostly housed in room nine, and for all of those years sharing the room with Walt, and on occasion one, and once two others.
I’ve come to think of this room as “mine.” Or, with Walt, “ours.” I suspect if I were assigned another I’d be a bit annoyed.
And. Now I learn of the ghost. It turns out we also share this room with the ghost of Jerusha Howe whose hauntings have given the room the nickname “the Hobgoblin Room.” You would have thought someone might have mentioned that. Sometime over the past dozen years.
But no…
Apparently Jerusha has a fondness for snuggling up to men who stay in this room. Not in my experience. Nor, Walt claims, in his.
While there are mentions of her playing a piano, I can’t find any reference to a cat. So, I’m glad to add my own little twist to the tale.
As it were, of the haunted room at the Wayside Inn.
My occasional home…
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