Ghost Tours at Ventfort Hall

Robert Oakes, author of Ghosts of the Berkshires, knows his spectral history. He will delve into his knowledge of the paranormal past to introduce participants in his Ghost Tours of Ventfort Hall to the building’s unseen residents on Fridays, November 15th and 22nd.

Oakes, an author, teacher, storyteller and singer/songwriter, has written three books, The Ghostly Tales of the Berkshires, Ghosts of Northwestern New Jersey and Ghosts of the Berkshires, and has conducted ghost tours at Edith Wharton’s Lenox home, The Mount, for more than 10 years.

“Ventfort Hall is an impressive brownstone mansion built in 1893 by George Morgan and his wife, Sarah, as a summer residence,” Oakes explained in a video describing his Ventfort tour and his own introduction to the building.

After the deaths of the Morgans the site passed through many hands, eventually becoming derelict. For decades the Ventfort Hall Association has worked to restore the property and all proceeds from ticket sales go towards the preservation and restoration of the site.

Oakes said he became acquainted with the mansion when he joined paranormal investigator David Raby on an investigation. “I felt the presence of something unseen,” he reported. “David used a spirit box and, while he was setting it up, I was sitting in the corner of the room alone. I suddenly had the feeling someone else was sitting there with me. I felt a powerful emotion that wasn’t mine, an emotion of intense sadness.”

Raby, in the same video, said many enter the mansion as skeptics and leave as believers.

“In the great hall, it is easy to see why people experience ghosts, with all the dark wood, commanding passageways and the great fireplace,” Oakes said. “It’s one thing to report on the paranormal experiences of others but when you encounter it yourself, it immerses you much more completely.”

The tours on the November 15th and 22nd will not be an investigation but Oakes will lead visitors through the rooms and halls of this historic estate sharing tales of its hauntings. Participants will stand in the places where the eerie encounters occurred, listen to the first-hand accounts of those who experienced them and maybe even experience something unusual themselves.

The mansion is believed to be haunted by quite a few ghosts and has been featured on an episode of TV's Ghost Hunters. One report tells of a woman's face that hovers as it descends a staircase, a whispering voice, screams and doors that open and close on their own. Some believe the spirits are those of former owners, George and Sarah Morgan.

Oates has immersed himself in the spirit world of the Berkshires for more than a decade. In addition to giving ghost tours at Ventfort and The Mount, he has given talks and readings at Arrowhead, the Pittsfield MA, home of Herman Melville, appeared on Syfy’s Ghost Hunters, Jeff Belanger’s New England Legends series on PBS and has been featured in The Boston Globe and The Berkshire Eagle.

“I began looking for stories of the entire region,” he said. “There are so many of them. I looked for places with something about their presence, a quality of the experiences people had there.”

He recounts the paranormal activity at “the lost cemetery” in Washington MA where he sought out the grave of Anna Pease, a 10-year-old girl who died in 1829. The girl’s final resting place is next to those of her devoted parents, Oliver and Catherine, but the little sprite will not stay at rest.

“She is seen dressed in her white dress, skipping lightly through the broken stones,” Oates reports.

He said the cemetery would not have been so remote at the time the Peases lived there. “At that time, the place would have been closer to the bustle of daily life,” he said. “Now it is very peaceful, very calm and the past seems very near. Do these spirits feel forgotten? Do they want us to come and find them here and sit with them for a while?”

Not all spirits are so benign. He tells the story of a presence felt in the stables at The Mount. A worker was on the second story of the building when he saw a figure crouched in a corner. “The worker couldn’t see its face but he saw its eyes. He was so upset, he went downstairs and leaned against a wall. He had to take the rest of the day off.”

In the case of The Mount, Oates suggests that Edith Wharton’s own fear of ghosts may be manifested in the spirit presences. “Many people don’t know that she penned ghost stories,” he said. “When she was nine she contracted typhoid fever. As she recovered she was given a book that had a ghost story in it that frightened her. After this she suffered a relapse—she recovered but she was changed. She felt a presence dogging her steps, lurking. She seemed to believe her imaginative mind, with her intense Celtic sense of the supernatural, was too susceptible to deal with the dark things lurking in dark tales. She could not sleep if there was a book in the house about ghosts.”

He said she wrote her own ghost stories “to banish her deepest fears.”

He further describes his investigation of another rumored haunting, this one a Hessian soldier, Franz Wagner, who was attached to General Burgoyne’s forces. Wagner apparently died while the captured Hessians were being marched to Boston following the Battle of Saratoga where he had been wounded. He was buried in Egremont.

Oates first read the story in Willard Douglas Coxey’s Ghosts of the Old Berkshires published in 1934. Coxey described the restless spirit who would rise from its grave and float above the river. Some village men decided to investigate and two of them went ahead to the place where the Hessian had been interred.

When they were nearly upon the grave itself, a diaphanous form leaped up from out of the ground. The two men stood paralyzed with fear, watching it as it slowly drew closer. Wagner’s ghostly form appeared to be moving its mouth as if trying to speak to them. They turned and ran, the other men fleeing in front of them.

Oates decided to see if he could find the location described in Coxey’s book and, sure enough, he found a store where the group of men could have gathered and, turning around, he saw Riverside Cemetery through the trees.

“I love this image of a specter floating over the river,” he said but added that it is unclear how much of the story was Coxey’s invention. “Did any of it come from the people who had an interaction with the ghost or all from his imagination?” he asked.

Admission to the Ventfort Mansion Ghost Tour is $30 and the minimum age to attend is 12. Reservations are strongly recommended as tickets are limited. Walk-ins will be accommodated as space allows. For reservations click here or call 413-637-3206. All tickets are non-refundable and non-exchangeable. Payment is required to make a reservation for the event.

The historical mansion is located at 104 Walker Street in Lenox.