The Ghost of Benton, Maine, Resurrected

After 50 years, the story of the Benton ghost has been resurrected “The Footless Ghost of Benton Falls,” first made infamous in 1970, is still alive – or dead – and well, according to the owner of the haunted house, and is of several central Maine stories in a reissue of Thomas Verde’s Maine Ghosts and Legends.

It was 1970. The Beatles had just disbanded, Richard Nixon was president, phones still rang in their cradles and the Internet was a distant dream. And one spring night, in a second-floor bedroom in a creaky old house at 136 Falls Road in Benton, 18-year-old Alan Linnell lay terrified in bed as he felt a “presence” sit down on his bed. Then something cold touched his arm. The experience was one of dozens of strange events Linnell, his seven siblings, his parents and visiting relatives, said they witnessed over a 13-year period beginning in 1964, a year after the family bought the home. The children’s stories would likely have been dismissed as nothing more than imagination were it not for a grisly discovery made August 15, 1970, when, while renovating the dining room, the Linnells found a shriveled and mummified human foot, along with some bones and a few corn cobs, in the wall. The discovery was front page news throughout the state and even covered in The National Enquirer. The family’s previously private tales were suddenly transformed into a legend.

Benton is one of 25 communities featured in Maine Ghosts and Legends, a 1998 collection of paranormal tales updated and re-released this year. Other central Maine communities featured in the book include “The Haunted Hair Salon” in Fairfield; the University of Maine at Farmington is covered in “The Ghostly Campus”; and Skowhegan is the site of “The Ghost in the Aisles.” According to Verde, “Maine is kind of like the nation’s attic. Everything just ends up there. What better place to find a ghost than in the attic?” Maine’s geography, he added, is “full of dark forests, the mist-shrouded coast, isolated old houses and old mill towns make it an ideal habitat for haunts.” Maine is the site of what he said is the oldest ghost story in the country, from 1799, when a recurring phantom presence in Machiasport was reported by the Rev. Abraham Cummings, a Baptist minister from Bath who traveled in a sailboat to coastal communities. The ghost, which engaged in conversations with people as it floated in the air, eventually said she was the spirit of a woman named Nelly Butler who had died in nearby Sullivan.

Verde, a freelance writer and former Portland resident, was introduced to ghosts while compiling a series of scary radio stories for Maine Public Broadcasting Network. The book’s new edition has a chapter on vampires, which he said have a long tradition in Maine. “There was a particular time in the 1800s when victims of tuberculosis were suspected of being vampires,” he said. “They coughed up blood, they were drawn and haggard.”

The Footless Ghost of Benton Falls

Few stories in the book are as compelling as “The Footless Ghost of Benton Falls,” in which the names of Linnell family members were changed at their request. Most of the experiences were of the type typical to haunted house stories. Footsteps were heard walking up and down the stairs. The tinkling melody of a music box could be heard, although there was no music box in the home. Odd scents, sometimes of carnations and at other times of cigar smoke, wafted through a room. A shadowy figure was seen at the top of the stairs (1970 photo above). Dozens of times, the Linnells said, their family dog, Baby, a collie-St. Bernard mix, barked outside, apparently at an intruder no one else could see. Once, in January 1967, a visiting cousin, Joseph McMullen, 3, was taking a nap and his sisters, who were sewing in the next room, rushed in when they heard him screaming. “I don’t like that man, Mummy” the boy yelled. “I don’t like that man in there.” During the same visit, one of the sisters, 12-year-old Mary McMullen, walked into the room and heard what she later described as “an exasperated sigh” come from the direction of a wicker chair, which squeaked as if someone was sitting in it. Then she heard footsteps as though an invisible presence got up and walked out of the room dragging one foot. In 1969, the children claimed they found a bare footprint, larger than that of anyone living in the house, in the dust beneath a trunk.

Carroll Linnell Sr., head of the household, was skeptical of his children’s accounts, though he did eventually have two experiences himself, one in which he heard glass breaking and another when he was awakened by a rhythmic thumping coming from the second floor.

When the foot was discovered between two beams in the dining room wall, Maine state pathologist Irving Goodoff of Waterville sent it to a Boston lab for analysis. According to the newspaper accounts, the results indicated it was amputated from a 5-month-old child in a surgical procedure around 1900. The small bones found in the wall with the foot belonged to some sort of animal, according to the report. The newspaper indicated that a doctor lived in the house around the time the foot was amputated. “In those times, it was not uncommon for people to preserve amputated limbs so they could later be buried together with the bodies,” Verde wrote. “Was the ghostly inhabitant of their home a poor crippled child in search of its lost limb?”

State Trooper Lyndon Abbott, who lived in Clinton at the time, told reporters the foot could have been stolen from the doctor’s surgery and taken into the wall by a rat. He also told reporters at the time that in March 1883, a man shot himself in the Linnell home when his daughter and her husband quarreled over the custody of a child.

Psychics, séances and spirits. Some of the events surrounding the Linnell home took on a circus-like atmosphere as family members, psychics and séance attendees reported making contact with specific spirits with gruesome tales to tell. In 1970, The National Enquirer reported a visit to the home by Alex Tanous, a Van Buren-born psychic. Tanous concluded that a woman had murdered her illegitimate son in the Linnell house and hid his body in the walls. Tanous taught Alan Linnell to perform automatic writing, in which a spirit reputedly communicates through the writings of a living person. After using the technique, Linnell said he had made contact with the spirit of the woman identified by Tanous, whom he named Sally Flagg. Newspaper accounts at the time said the last name matched that of Gershom Flagg, the man who built the house around 1767. In 1974, the Linnells tried to sell the house, but it was on the market for at least three years.

On Halloween night in 1977, Bernice Damon, pastor of the Waterville Spiritualist Church, conducted a séance at the home with about a dozen in attendance. During the séance, Damon and a few of the others said they made contact with the spirit of a man who, in life, had thrown a baby down the stairs while drinking. When they called the spirit a drunkard, they said a candle would flicker. In a Morning Sentinel article, Alan and his mother, Cecilia, cited a host of other experiences, including faint, unintelligible human voices, lights that went on and off, doors that opened and closed and pictures that flew off the wall.

Haunting research. Ghost stories abound, both in legend and popular culture, where they are told for entertainment or truth. A 2005 Gallup poll showed 37 percent of Americans believe houses can be haunted, and 73 percent believe in astrology, reincarnation, telepathy or other supernatural phenomena. The number who believe in hauntings has fluctuated over time, from 29 percent in 1990 to a high of 42 percent in 2001. “Anything’s possible,” Verde insisted. “I myself have never had an encounter that I know of, unless I dismissed it as the wind or whatever.”

One of the most extensive haunted house studies was conducted by a team of British researchers from the universities of Hertfordshire and Edinburgh. Their results, published in the British Journal of Psychology in 2003, were based on experiments in which they asked hundreds of people to walk through two notoriously haunted locations – England’s Hampton Court Palace and Scotland’s South Bridge Vaults. The researchers found that, while walking through different rooms of the huge properties, about 45 percent of people reported experiencing something unusual, such as temperature changes, a strong sense of being watched, a burning sensation, odd odors or strange sounds. The experiences were clustered in specific rooms and hallways within the haunted properties. In their report, the researchers came up with an earthly reason for the clusters – many correlated with naturally occurring magnetic fields, light levels and room size. “People consistently report unusual experiences in ‘haunted’ areas because of environmental factors, which may differ across locations,” they wrote. The report found people are susceptible to mild hallucinations or real, physical reactions to these environmental changes.

But according to Verde, as he tracked down dozens of ghost stories in Maine, he saw a different pattern than that of the researchers. He said the presence of a ghost is more dependent on the person than the place. “There are some people that tend to have these kinds of experiences, and then there are other people who don’t. Why that is, I can’t explain.”