The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [1]
When their child didn’t come home, her parents were at first puzzled. Then a little worried. And slowly, as the sky lightened and the morning quickened, they became frantic. They were out calling for her, hunting down the empty road to the shores of the silent lake. As it became obvious that something was really wrong, their friends and neighbors joined in. By day’s end, the searchers numbered more than a hundred and fifty people, calling ever louder, rattling through empty thickets and fields, more and more of them glancing toward the polished blank of the water.
The dirt road led to an old Shaker bridge, a structure of wooden boards, without railings, offering a simple passage across Mascoma Lake. The lake was longer than wide, clear gold at its edges, darker at its center where the water deepened, shining like an agate set into the burnished hills. Around the bridge though, the water turned opaque, clotted with weeds growing around the wood, dropping to a black depth of eighteen feet. The searchers found no trace of the girl, not in the woods, in the clear shallows, or around the bridge where the water gleamed as a dark mirror, reflecting only the worried faces.
Finally, the mill owner himself sent for a diver from Boston to explore around the Shaker bridge. The diver, suited against the cold of the lake, slid down, disappearing himself like a stone beneath the surface. Again and again he tried, until his leather suit was sodden and his glass bubble helmet filmed with lake water. But he didn’t find the girl either. It was as if Bertha had vanished into the dawn itself. There was nothing—except the nightmare that caused a woman in a nearby town to start screaming in her sleep.
GEORGE AND NELLIE TITUS lived almost five miles away, down lake, in the mill town of Lebanon. Like Bertha, George worked in one of the clothing mills. The workers spread the tale of the lost girl. Everyone knew—and worried—about a missing child. The Tituses talked it over, wondered if they could help.
After supper, Nellie Titus went upstairs and curled into a rocking chair for a nap, pulling a blanket over herself She was asleep when her husband came up the stairs, but she was sitting almost bolt upright, her hands wringing in her lap and her breath coming in gasps. She screamed. Alarmed, he reached over and shook her awake. Her eyes stayed unfocused. But her voice came sharp and unhappy “Oh, George,” she said. “Why did you wake me?” A little deeper into the dream, she insisted, she could have told him where that girl was. He shook his head. It was a nightmare, he said, you were screaming. “Don’t wake me again,” she answered, almost pleading. “No matter what I do in my sleep.”
The dreams haunted them both for another day. Bertha Huse had disappeared on a Monday morning. That Thursday, George Titus gave up on sleep at 1:00 a.m. He lit a lamp and turned toward his wife. She was shivering now, teeth chattering. “Are you cold, Nellie?” he asked as he pulled the quilt up. “Oh, oh, I am awfully cold,” she answered, and then she slid silently down into the bed. When she woke, the dawn was once again breaking against the blackness of the night. We have to go to the Shaker bridge, she told her husband.
He was almost too exhausted to argue. And anyway, she was scaring him. Titus went to the stable where he kept a horse and told the stable master, almost casually, that his wife had dreamed the answer to the missing girl. The man laughed, but George Titus shook his head and recounted what she had told him. That Bertha Huse had first appeared on the bridge, hesitating about which way to go. She balanced on a frost-slick board, looking back toward the village. Her foot slipped, and she went backward into the lake. It was about at this point in the dream, he thought, that his wife had begun shaking with cold.
The Tituses