Scary Tales and Spirits of Sag Harbor at Whaling Museum

[caption id="attachment_56916" align="alignnone" width="800"] The graveyard of Sag Harbor's Old Whalers Church on the night of October 23. Michael Heller photo[/caption]

By Michelle Trauring

If there is one thing Annette Hinkle knows how to do, it’s tell a good story.

Combine that talent with a miniature version of her Spirits of Sag Harbor walking tour, and a perfectly average summer night three years ago turned particularly eerie, putting her friends noticeably on edge as they sat down on the steps of the Old Whalers Church to take a breather.

Unable to help herself, Ms. Hinkle launched into a scary tale about what had happened there. And just as she finished, the front door knob rattled and slowly turned, and turned back again.

Without hesitation, the group was up and running away screaming—all except Ms. Hinkle and her friend, Ken Dorph.

“We’re sitting there howling with laughter,” she recalled during a recent telephone interview. “It was just hilarious.”

Mr. Dorph—“who is a total skeptic, but the first one to sign up for a ghost tour,” she said—wasn’t having it. He shook the door, shouting, “Hello? Is anyone there?” as Ms. Hinkle’s daughter, Sophie, wailed, “Don’t touch the door!”

“At this point, no one’s answering,” Ms. Hinkle said. “It’s 10 o’clock on a Saturday night at the Old Whalers Church, you know? Who’s around?”

Determined, he walked around the side of the building. And there he found a man smoking a cigarette.

“Were you just outside by the front door?” Mr. Dorph had asked.

“Oh, yeah. I wanted to have a smoke and people started screaming so I thought I’d better go out the side,” he had responded.

“For the group that ran, that’s a ghost story. The those of us who just sat there and figured it out, it was just a guy who went out the side door instead, after he scared the shit out of everybody,” Ms. Hinkle said with a laugh. “I think ghost stories often depend on how far you go into figuring out what is or isn’t. But I also think there are people who are just more sensitive.

“My theory is this stuff exists, but I don’t think I’m sensitive to it,” she continued. “It feels like, to me, that the people who are sensitive to it have this stuff happen to them all the time—and then they tell me about it.”

The stories that fill the full, two-hour-long Sprits of Sag Harbor walking tour—which she will lead alongside Tony Garro on Friday evening—are first-hand accounts, if not once removed. They range from one-liners about bumps in the night to long, weaving tales that span decades.

Starting at the Sag Harbor Whaling & Historical Museum, the group heads down Main Street—“For some reason, all of the stories take place on the east side of the street. I don’t know what that’s about,” Ms. Hinkle said—and then visits several local haunts, including Bulova Watchcase Factory, the late Spalding Gray’s old house, and the John Jermain Memorial Library.

“I think the whole idea of what lies beyond is a big mystery. That’s why people are fascinated by ghost stories,” Ms. Hinkle said. “And I think the idea of ‘the end of the end’ is distressing for a lot of people. The whole notion of when you lose somebody really close to you, it’s hard to imagine they’re still not connected to you in some way. I think when you have really deep love, you just don’t accept the fact that this person isn’t there in some form.”

Those are the stories that ensnare her, she said. At Murf's Backstreet Tavern, she knows about the restaurant’s famous blender and jukebox that spontaneously switch on and off with a life of their own. She heard about the time a glass practically flew off the overhead bar rack and straight into late owner Tom Murphy’s outstretched hand—he just as surprised as his jaw-dropped patrons.

But it was only when her friend came to her with an exceptionally bizarre experience that the bar captured her attention.

“A friend of mine met a guy at Murf’s who she felt was her father, who had died,” she said. “And he was saying things only her father would have known. That’s a really freaky story—like her father was able to touch her from beyond. That, to me, is a really intense ghost story because it has a really deep personal meaning for this woman. It’s not just footsteps over your head. It’s somebody she was incredibly close to and lost.”

The lighter spooky stories can pack a punch, too, she said. After all, those are what got to her group of friends outside the Old Whalers Church.

One time, a handyman went into a crawl space up in the choir loft and while he was in there, something slammed the door shut and locked him inside the walls of the church. Fortunately, he had a screwdriver and a flashlight, and got the hinges off the door. “Otherwise, he might still be in there,” Ms. Hinkle laughed.

“Another one is about a guy who was playing the organ one night,” she said. “There’s a mirror above the organ because you sit backwards; you’re not facing the pulpit. So this way, you can see what’s going on in the service so you know when to play.

“He said he was playing late one night there and he looked up in the mirror, and he saw these two distorted faces on either side looking back at him. And they just sort of faded away.”

She laughed, making a half-hearted ghost noise before taking a deep breath and diving into her story about the white-bearded man—but that should be saved for Ms. Hinkle to do it justice.

Annette Hinkle and Tony Garro will lead the Spirits of Sag Harbor walking tour on Friday, October 28, starting at 6 p.m. at the Sag Harbor Whaling & Historical Museum. Tickets are $25. For more information, call (631) 725-0770 or visit sagharborwhalingmuseum.org.

The night before, Ms. Hinkle will give a free talk about Sag Harbor ghost stories on Thursday, October 27, from 7 to 8 p.m. at the John Jermain Library in Sag Harbor. For more information, visit johnjermain.org.