Interview date: 1991-01-15. At her Oak Hill Road home.
Time | Topic |
0:00 | Her former house was where the Griffings lived (presumably, last house on the left heading west on Route 130 before Bohannon Bridge Road). She has researched to 1875, but could not go back further. The family of Roy Taylor lived there for over 50 years. In 1900, they built the barn. |
1:00 | Roy Taylor sold it to Brown who sold it to Dougherty. The place was known as the Asparagus House because it had a large asparagus field down below during the time that the Taylors owned it. The used to use the proceeds to pay the real estate taxes |
2:00 | The Doughertys moved in on 11/19/60. The first child was Owen, born on 10/10/61. There had been no unusual noises noticed before, but after they brought Owen home, when she would put him down for a nap, she would hear a baby crying |
3:00 | The bedroom was about 50 feet away from her. She would go up and see the baby sound asleep, walk back again and hear the crying again. She would go back again to find the baby fast sleep. This continued for many months. She decided it was a ghost. After a year and a half, it stopped. Timothy was born in 1963 and the baby crying noise began again |
4:00 | She mentioned this to a friend who said that she had on several occasions at a cellar hole near Cider Mill Pond heard a child crying that the house was on fire. The child was barefoot and running. The story was that a house had burned in that location and a child had died. In 1965 or 1966, the Doughertys decided to expand the house into the “carriage shed” |
5:00 | This was done to make an apartment for Margaret’s mother. Margaret’s mother would frequently wake up and the closets which she knew she had closed were open in the morning |
6:00 | Her daughter sat there and would also ask why she, Margaret, would keep coming up to check on her. There apparently was the sound of someone climbing up the stairs, never reaching the top of the stairs, and was suspected to be peeking between the threshold and the door |
7:00 | When her nephew slept up there, he had the same experience and asked the same question. That continued until the Doughertys left the home |
8:00 | Her daughter, Roseanna, one day walked into her mother’s bedroom and came screaming back that there was an old lady wearing a white hat in the rocking chair in the room |
9:00 | Margaret went and saw a shadow, but turned on the light and nothing was there. Roseanna said that she had seen the old lady a number of times |
11:00 | Roy Taylor’s parents apparently died in the Dougherty house. They were the ones who kept the asparagus garden |
12:30 | Someone slashed his hand the ice house and went home to his wife who sewed it up with a needle and thread and he returned to work |
13:00 | She understands that teams of horses fell through the ice and were at the bottom of the lake. While erecting the Infant Jesus shrine, it proved to be too heavy until someone asked out loud for the Lord’s help to get it up. It then became as light as a feather and they were able to lift it |
14:00 | Pat Burke was unhappy because the meetinghouse was built directly behind the Infant Jesus Shrine and impacted the window |
15:00 | Florence Barnaby worked at a private school in Groton. She had a Roosevelt child’s copy book. She had bear skin mittens her father used while driving teams through Brookline |