11 minute read
The Ghost Did It Strange goings-on at the Fair View Mansion
DiscoverMaineMagazine.com
The Ghost Did It
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Strange goings-on at the Fair View Mansion
by Margo Cobb
Long 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, 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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(cont. from page 9) she checked the door it was unlocked. She continually heard dishes and books crash to the floors in other rooms, but, when checking, found nothing broken or out-of-order. Then Mrs. Rineheart began to find dead birds and bats in the hallways and closets. Her bull terrier took to snarling viciously as if “some unseen thing had advanced upon him.” The dog’s hair on his neck would bristle as he leaped frantically into the writer’s lap. Mrs. Rinehart swore to her closet friends that all these inexplicable events were actually happening to her.
Then the tragedy! Mrs. Rinehart’s mother had been living with them as she had previously suffered a stroke and was paralyzed. So helpless was the woman that she had to be carried to her bath. The Rinehart maid was preparing the old woman’s bath one night when she heard the doorbell ring. Turning on the bathwater, the maid went to answer the door. No one was there. The bathwater, meanwhile, had become searing hot. When the maid returned to the bathroom she looked at the tub and then went screaming hysterically into the night. Mrs. Roberts was in the tub, dead, scalding hot water swirling about her. She died from the shock.
Mary Roberts Rinehart always pointed out the fact that her mother was completely helpless and could not have gotten into the tub from the bedroom by herself. But the writer had an answer to the mystery — the ghost did it.
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