Not Just A Bump In The Night: A Sag Harbor Haunting

There have been nights when Kristina Gale knew she wasn’t home alone.

The first time was 15 years ago, soon after she moved into her historic Sag Harbor home, which dates back to 1840, on Eastville Avenue. It was 1 a.m., and the photographer was sitting in her living room working on her computer, editing pictures from a recent shoot.

She heard a stirring upstairs.

It was one set of footsteps, she recalled during an interview at her home last week. Then a door slammed. She assumed her mind was just playing tricks on her. Until a few days later, when it happened again.

“It was clear as day,” she said

of the event. “It kept going on, all through the night. I didn’t know what to do, so I called my ex-boyfriend and he came over with a baseball bat. He went upstairs, walked around and called me up there.”

She cautiously followed him, ascending the stairs and scanning the floor. No open windows, no breeze. No reason to believe anyone had been there, she said.

Since that night, for more than a decade, Ms. Gale and her 19-year-old daughter, Julia Campeau, have written off most of the strange occurrences they’ve witnessed in their home. The phrase, “Well, that was weird,” is commonplace and habitual, Ms. Gale said. The home’s animal residents—two dogs and two cats—usually receive the brunt of the blame.

But a recent event—one that the two women could not trace back to their pets—propelled Ms. Gale to elicit the help of the not-for-profit group Long Island Paranormal Investigators to inspect her home on July 22.

Just prior, Ms. Gale was sipping her coffee in her living room when she noticed two old framed photographs pressed together, almost as if sitting upright, against the back of an armchair under the mantle, where they had previously been displayed.

“I didn’t have an explanation for that,” Ms. Gale recalled.

“The first thing is, ‘Oh, it’s the cats,’” Ms. Campeau added. “Things fall over. But then when you thought about this one, the chances ...”

She trailed off, shaking her head in disbelief.

Four investigators staked out the home from almost 10 p.m. to approximately 1 a.m., according to their final report. Of the four video cameras and three digital audio recorders used, and 219 photos taken, none picked up any unusual activity, the report read.

“Overall, there is not enough evidence to call this location haunted,” the report concluded.

According to Ms. Gale, there haven’t been any paranormal happenings since the investigation. While the mother and daughter said they are unsure what they believe in, the women said that their experiences contradict the investigators’ findings.

“It doesn’t freak me out and it’s not something I would ever hype up in my head,” Ms. Campeau said of the unusual events. “I think it’s interesting. I’m not going to sit here and be like, ‘Oh, we have ghosts,’ because I don’t know how I feel about any of it. It’s not like I believe in ghosts. I don’t. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something.”

The duration of the unusual episodes range from a few days to a couple of weeks, Ms. Gale said. And when each episode strikes, the creepy happenings play out every night. Just this year alone, there have been at least five different episodes, she said.

“It kind of gets to the point where I’m just about to say, ‘You know what, this is ridiculous,’ and then it will just peter out,” Ms. Gale said. “Everything will stop, and it will be quiet for months.”

During each night of every episode, Ms. Gale will hear the walking upstairs, she said. Glasses from the kitchen cabinet will be out across the floor in the morning, sitting upright, she said. Sometimes, the cups are filled with a foul-smelling brown liquid, she said.

“This was something, too, I blamed on the cats,” Ms. Gale said. “It smells something like pee but also like rot. It’s really disgusting. I put paper towels down in the cabinet. I thought if a cat was somehow fitting itself into this space and peeing, it’s going to be on the paper towels. The paper towels are totally clean when it happens. There are no drips.”

Ms. Gale walked over to her kitchen table and adjusted her elephant-shaped salt and pepper shakers.

“I’ll put them sometimes kissing, I play with them,” she said of the set. “And we’ll get up in the morning, and they’ll be in the same exact position, under the table. Exactly under the table.”

“It looks like they fell through the table,” Ms. Campeau said.

“That’s when my, ‘Oh, the cats did that,’ starts to ...’” Ms. Gale sighed and laughed. “Everybody looks at me and says, ‘No, the cats did not do that.’”

Ms. Campeau said that she had her share of unusual experiences in the house when she was younger. One of them involved the very same salt and pepper shakers.

In front of at least eight others at the dinner table, the then 6-year-old girl reached for the shakers and suddenly pulled her hand back, she said.

“I felt like I got scratched,” Ms. Campeau recalled. “But there was nothing there to scratch me. I watched the scratch show up on my hand. You know how you get a little scratch and it starts turning red? It just started turning red.”

“Everybody was just like, ‘Well, that was weird,’” Ms. Gale said.

The same year, Ms. Campeau was playing in the house’s old living room, which has since been renovated into her bedroom, she said.

“I remember running from there to the yard, screaming, freaking out,” Ms. Campeau said.

“She was hysterical,” Ms. Gale recalled. “Hysterical.”

“A boy had yelled at me, ‘Get out of my room!’” Ms. Campeau said. “That was the only time I’d ever heard something like that. Plain and simple, but loud.”

The deadbolt locks on the front and back doors are also hot spots for unusual activity, the women said, which are only ever locked from the inside when they’re both home. But at least 10 times when Ms. Gale and Ms. Campeau returned to the house, the dead bolts have been locked from the inside, they reported.

“The first time it happened, I actually called the police because I thought somebody was in the house,” Ms. Gale said. “They came and got us in, and there was nobody in the house. But then it kept happening. The most recent was two months ago. We’d go to the back door and check, but they’re always both locked.”

The Long Island Paranormal Investigators plan to return for more analyses, Ms. Gale said. Despite their conclusion that the house isn’t haunted, during their stay, the investigators recorded a temperature jump from 76 degrees to 95.5 degrees in one spot over a three-second stretch, the report reads. Then the temperature returned to normal.

Anything more than a five-degree jump is reason for excitement, Ms. Gale explained.

“There is something here,” she said, motioning around the room, which smelled of incense. “I don’t know what or what it wants. I haven’t been afraid. I’m not a believer in death being the end, the absolute end. But I think that we just don’t know. I think it would be really wrong to say that there is no way that spirits or energy or something is here.”

And as long as the paranormal activity doesn’t take a turn for the worse, the women are staying put, they said.

“It really seems more like pranky-type stuff than scary,” Ms. Gale said. “Like Casper.”