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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com
The Ghost Did It
Strange goings-on at the Fair View Mansion by Margo Cobb
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The Bat, with Avery Hopwood, which became a success in 1920. Mrs. Rinehart was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she studied nursing. She used this training as material for several of her books. She married Dr. Stanley Marshall Rinehart and the two lived half of each year in Washington. D.C. and the other half in Bar Harbor. Despite luxurious living at the mansion on Eden Street, she was a practical woman with a hard-headed business sense that brought her great wealth. But she began to succumb to her own overactive imagination shortly after World War I. During those years her own chef once tried to kill her. Yet, whether at Bar Harbor or in
Washington, D.C. she was the toast of the town, having won the Pershing Medal for bravery for her exploits as a war correspondent. She was successful, wealthy, and content. And then she began to hear and see things that she attributed to an actual haunting. Mrs. Rinehart insisted that her “personal ghost” vexed and terrified her. Her maid came to her room at odd hours, bringing her coffee and food when she had not been summoned. There were knocks at the door, and when answered, no one was there. Curtains fluttered, drapes closed across windows without being touched, and cold drafts swept through the rooms. The author kept locking her door, but every time (cont. on page 10)
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ong before Martha Stewart became the talk of Mount Desert Island, another woman caused tongues to wag. It began when a cottage was built on Eden Street in 1909 for Commodore Philip Livingston. It had several owners over the years, however. One of the last owners of Fair View was Mary Roberts Rinehart, whose cleverly plotted books often dealt with murder and horror, but are leavened with humor and wit. Mrs. Rinehart’s Bar Harbor cottage was burned down in the 1947 fire, but before that disaster she wrote many of the popular mysteries of the early 1900s. Her works included The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Man in Lower Ten (1909). She also wrote a play,
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