Jesus always tops the list. Shakespeare and Albert Einstein are also frequently mentioned, along with Mother Teresa and even Billy the Kid! Great choices although I'ld watch my wallet if Billy was sitting on the next stool.
But there's a variant of the question that might give some pause:
"Whose ghost would you care to meet in a dark room?"
For me that's an easy one. It would have to be David Pitkin.
Pitkin was well known locally. He was born in Corinth in 1939, lived in Washington County for a time and died in Chestertown in 2013. He was a teacher for thirty-six years finishing his career in Saratoga Springs. After retirement he moved on to writing and publishing books, with something like ten titles to his credit. By any reckoning his was a full life well-lived. Yet it was a life obsessed with death, or more precisely, with what follows death.
David Pitkin - web image
While ghost stories are a popular genre, Pitkin brought a singular thoughtfulness and sensitivity to the realm.
His motto was"enlighten, don't frighten". He saw ghosts as former humans with unfinished business on earth and treated them with dignity and respect. It's a more nuanced approach than the typical Halloween fare we're inundated with and in its gravitas, it's more affecting. To him death was best seen as the world that follows what we call 'life'. He has been called a philosopher of death and its aftermath.
After publishing his first book, Saratoga County Ghosts, in 1998 he was frequently contacted by people eager to tell their own haunted stories to a sympathetic listener. By the end of his life he had interviewed close to two thousand people, doing extensive research and often visiting the sites where ghosts had been seen.
Washington Academy in Salem - Haunt of the 'Grey Man' ?
Sites like Salem's Washington Academy where he tells of the 'Grey Man' sometimes seen wandering the school's halls and of his own home in Salem which also had a ghost that he convinced to leave. These, as well as stories set in Greenwich, Hartford and Hudson Falls will have special appeal to those interested in Washington County. It is history writ small, down to the level of the all but forgotten individual "with unfinished business on earth". And it bears mentioning that Pitkin died leaving an incomplete manuscript he had been working on.
TRICK OR TREAT...
Working somewhat the same vein but in a different style is Vermont's Joesph Citro. He too has many books to his credit and while I don't have it in front of me right now, in one of them I remember reading the story of how Ghost Hollow got its name. The woods and swamps across the Poultney River from Whitehall have always had a spookiness about them and Citro's tale only adds to the eery feel.
Goggle Earth looks down at Ghost Hollow from a safe distance
Joe scaring himself silly
One of his many books
Some stories are just better told live and Whispering Bones has become a Halloween storytelling tradition in Cambridge. Kelvin Keraga, Siri Allison and others will scare you on Wednesday, October 30 at 7:30 pm. This years event takes place at Argyle Brewing's Cambridge Depot tap room. Who knows? maybe the ghost of Billy the Kid will stop by for a beer.
Would you buy medicine from this man?
Whispering Bones master of ceremonies - Dr. Erastus
A CHILL IN THE AIR...
The scariest place in Washington County? You get there by turning off Rt. 22 onto Quarry Road in Comstock. The hulking fortress on your right is the Great Meadow Correctional Facility, aka the Comstock maximum security prison. A little ways down the dirt road you'll see a small enclosed cemetery on the right. This is where some of the founding families of the area are buried. If you keep going a little farther you'll come to a second graveyard with a rough stone wall around it and gorgeous views across the valley to the Adirondack foothills. Some of the stones date to the 1700's but towards the back is a grassy area surrounded by a hedge of Northern White Cedar. Here the markers seem to be little more than small, eroding squares of cement with numbers and dates but no names. I believe this to be the final resting place of inmates who died in the prison and presumably didn't have any family to claim their bodies. If ever there were souls with "unfinished business", it must be those lying here. In some ways, it is one of the most beautiful spots I know. But when you think about the cruel, wasted lives of those buried under little chunks of cement, the place can chill you to the bone.
Quarry Road and the first cemetery
The second cemetery on Quarry Road
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