Ghostly Tails From Favorite Village Haunts

[caption id="attachment_73988" align="alignnone" width="800"] Murf's Tavern on Division Street in Sag Harbor, where ghost sightings have occurred in the past, according to guide Annette Hinkle.[/caption]

By Michelle Trauring

Most of Annette Hinkle’s friends do not believe in ghosts, and they have no problem telling her so.

Hinkle, herself, does not claim to be some kind of ghost hunter, either. She is an East End journalist and the author behind “Sag Harbor: 100 Years of Film in the Village.”

At her core, she is a storyteller.

When done right, ghost stories are made just for that — which is likely why Hinkle’s non-believing friends are partly responsible for selling out her haunted walking tour, “Spirits of Sag Harbor” on Friday, which meets in front of the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum.

“When people think of ghost stories, I guess they expect me to maybe show up with an EMF reader and all these gadgets. But my whole approach is more like folklore,” she explained. “The stories that get the best reaction are not just singular episodes. That’s the big difference. What makes a good ghost story is the actual story part.”

What started as a collection of near-urban legends has grown into a repertoire of local tales, as told by locals to Hinkle. They come to her by chance, or she seeks them out, as she did one day at the bar of The American Hotel — a place with as many ghost stories as there are bricks.

“There are a lot of American Hotel rumors of ghosts,” Hinkle said. “I was asking Vinnie Rom, the bartender there, if he had any. And he said, ‘Yeah, I have a weird thing that happened.’”

On one particular wintery night, there wasn’t much of a bar scene. Rom poured himself a drink and kicked back with the staff, until he heard a knocking on the fireplace.

They quieted down as Rom walked to the back of the dining room to investigate. Nothing to report, he said.

And then they heard it again.

[caption id="attachment_74126" align="alignright" width="225"] Writer and ghost story collector Annette Hinkle at The American Hotel. (Brenda Siemer photo).[/caption]

“He’s like, ‘What the hell?’ He goes back over there and knocks back, thinking it was a squirrel caught in the fireplace. But, again, nothing,” Hinkle recalled. “So they lock up, finish the night at Murf’s, and go home.”

The next morning, at 6 a.m., Rom’s phone rings.

“It’s a call from the woman that manages the office at The American Hotel and she’s like, ‘Vinnie, do you want to tell me what happened here last night?’ And he’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Hinkle said. “She goes, ‘Were you guys drinking here?’ And he said, ‘I had a beer and then we left. Why, what happened?’”

The bar was still intact, the bottles just as he had left them. But there, in the fireplace, burned a perfect three-log fire, as if it had just been set, Hinkle said, a giddiness in her voice lacing the punch line.

Yet, the story she always cannot wait to tell is set at the aforementioned Murf’s Backstreet Tavern — another popular haunt, she said — and stars a friend of hers, who first told the story on a “Spirits of Sag Harbor” tour, right outside the bar.

It starts when the woman is just a young girl, growing up in Sag Harbor, grieving the death of her father. They were close, and the loss crushed her.

Fast-forward to when she is a parent herself, in the full throes of motherhood, and thinking often of her father — “she was in a funk because she regretted that he wasn’t alive to see her daughter be born,” Hinkle said.

Desperately in need of a night out, she and her husband left their 3-month-old daughter at home with her mother, and headed toward Main Street.

But before she left the house, she slipped a picture of her little girl in her back pocket.

“They go to Corner Bar first and then move over to Murf’s. They grab a beer and they’re sitting at the front corner table, and at the end of the bar, there was this guy sitting there who she’d never seen before, drinking his beer,” Hinkle said. “Every couple seconds, he would turn his head and look at them. He did this for 10 minutes.”

The couple found this a bit strange — but wouldn’t know the half of it until he finally got up and sat down across from them.

“He looked right into her eyes and he blinked several times, and she said that they turned from brown to blue, which was the color of her father’s eyes,” Hinkle said. “He said to her, ‘Show me what’s in your back pocket.’ So she reaches in her back pocket and pulls out the picture of her daughter and hands it to the guy. And he studies it for a few minutes and then he looks up and hands it back to her, and says, ‘Thank you. He needed to see that.’ And he got up and went back to his bar stool.”

Tears streamed down her cheeks as she tried to rein in her emotions, fighting a full-fledged breakdown as she tried to wrap her mind around what just happened, Hinkle said.

“She worked up the nerve to go over and talk to the guy, and she said, ‘I don’t know who you are. How did you know? Who are you?’” Hinkle said. “And he goes, ‘Just call me Al Green.’ And he got up and left the bar, and as soon as he left, an Al Green song came on the jukebox.”

Hinkle laughed, giddy once again.

“That is a story,” she said. “It remains, to this day, my favorite one.”