The Haunted Hessian Cellar of Epsom, New Hampshire: A Moonshine Ghost Hoax

The Hessians Who Stayed

In October of 1777, General Burgoyne surrendered his whole army at Saratoga. He was a British gentleman who wrote plays and lost wars with equal flair. Thousands of the men under him were no Englishmen at all. They were German soldiers, hired out by their princes the way you would hire out a team of oxen. We call them all Hessians, though plenty were Brunswickers. They were marched off as prisoners in what was called the Convention Army, and a good many of them took one look at New England, with its free land and its widows, slipped the line, and never went home.

Think on it. A man crosses three thousand miles of heaving ocean to fight for a king he never met. He is captured, walks off into the New Hampshire woods, and marries a girl named Thankful who can split more wood than he can. He came for a king he never met and stayed for a woman he never should have met, and I call that the poorer bargain. Her family said the same of him.

Epsom sits next door to Pittsfield. It was chartered in 1727, is older than we are, and is touchy about it. It is the town of Major Andrew McClary, who stood at Bunker Hill in 1775 and was killed by a cannonball at the end of the fight. A town that gave a hero's blood against the King's men does not warm to one of the King's hired Germans settling on its hill. The story goes that a Hessian deserter farmed a rocky Epsom ridge, kept to himself, spoke English like a man chewing gravel, and one winter simply was not there anymore. The house fell in. The cellar stayed.

Every wood lot in the Suncook Valley has a cellar hole like it: a square pit lined with fieldstone, a lilac gone wild, an apple tree nobody prunes, and a stone wall left over from the merino sheep craze that began around 1810. The young men have gone west or down to the mills in Manchester and Lowell, and the old places are sinking into the ground like a bad tooth into a gum. A cellar like that is lonesome, but it is also useful. It is dug into the ground, it keeps cool, nobody owns it but the bank and the crows, and nobody goes near it if they think somebody died there.

Green Lights on Nutting Hill

In the fall of last year, Deacon Jethro Haines of Epsom came to Fort Wilkins with a molar so rotten I could smell it from the anvil. With my forceps on it, he told me about green lights rising out of the old Hessian cellar on Nutting Hill, voices speaking Dutch, and a horn blowing at midnight like Gabriel with a head cold. Then I pulled. The tooth came out with a sound like a boot leaving a mud hole, and the Deacon fainted dead away. As he lay there I considered the matter. Lights, voices and a horn, in a cellar half a day from any sheriff, sounded less like a ghost to me and more like a business with a fine reputation.

The next night I loaded a dark lantern, a hickory club and a ham bone, unchained Barnaby, my black bear, and we walked to Epsom. Barnaby ate a dead woodchuck whole and twenty minutes later returned most of it onto my boots. About a furlong from the cellar he stopped dead. The hair stood up along his back and he began to drool great ropes of it, because he had smelled sour mash, warm and yeasty. That cellar was breathing like a brewery.

Then the lights came up, a greenish glow the colour of a drowned man's cheek. A voice moaned, "Ach, mein Gott, mein Kopf," which means "Oh my God, my head" and is what every man in Pittsfield says on a Sunday morning. Then a cow horn sounded, blown by a man who had never played anything but cards. Barnaby could not abide the horn. He tore the lead from my hand, went over the stone wall and dropped straight into the hole.

The Ghost Unmasked

When I opened my lantern, there was the whole apparatus of the haunting. A neat copper pot still sat on a stone firebox, its smoke run out through a crack in the old chimney base. Rotten birch logs glowing with foxfire were stacked along the walls, and a cow horn lay on the floor. Lemuel Pike had painted his face with glowing paste scraped from the heads of a hundred friction matches. His brother-in-law, Ozias Foss, was screaming in two octaves at once, because Barnaby had him by the seat of the britches. The bear backed off shaking his head, and away came the trousers, the drawers and a fair strip of Ozias, who went up the cellar wall on his fingernails, his bare backside shining like a second moon.

Lemuel's paste had been sweetened with molasses to hold it together, so Barnaby licked his face from chin to hairline while Lemuel whistled like a teakettle. That bear's tongue glowed green for a week. I could find him at midnight by his yawn.

As a tooth-puller I must warn you that the phosphorus is wicked stuff. Girls in the match factories across the ocean breathe its fumes until their jawbones rot. The doctors call it phossy jaw: the bone goes soft and stinking, glows in a dark room, and has to be sawn off. Lemuel now paints himself with flour and soot instead.

Then I made them a neighbourly offer. A ghost is the only watchman who works for free, never sleeps and never testifies before a grand jury. The haunting would go on, with improvements and with a partner, which was me. My casks would rest in the north corner, and I would keep my bear and my mouth out of Epsom.

Haints of the Blue Ridge

Miss Clara Higgins, a mountain herbalist from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, visited the Fort this season and told me that the trick is well known in her hollows. "A good haint is worth ten shotguns," said she. Her great-uncle Asa ran his still below the family burying ground and put it about that Raw Head and Bloody Bones had taken up residence there. He then hung a real hog skull where the wind would knock it against a tin pan. One night a screech owl and that clanking skull sent a county deputy straight through a rail fence, and the piece of his coattail left on the third rail hung there like a flag of surrender.

Her cousin Mattie tied a punched-tin lantern to the horns of a billy goat named Absalom and turned him loose on the Hogback ridge. She ran whiskey under the "Hogback light" for two years, until Absalom ate the lit wick, set his beard afire and ran smoking into a camp meeting. A bookish surveyor once slept in their haint hollow to prove there was no such thing. He woke with his boots full of sour mash and his beard braided with bluebells, moved his line a quarter mile east, and wrote "ground unsuitable" in his book. Near Winchester, where German prisoners were kept in barracks during the Revolution, one family guarded its peach brandy with the ghost of grandpap drilling in the orchard. In truth it was the grandmother, ninety-one years old, in her nightgown, practising old-country cussing. In Clara's family, liquor kept back from the revenue man is "haint water," and the still-house is "the cold house."

Schooling the Ghosts at Their Apparatus

Making spirits for drinking without the government's permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is for history and instruction. Lemuel and Ozias were good liars and middling distillers, so I spent that winter correcting them. A cellar is a fine place to hide and a deadly place to breathe, because fermenting mash breathes out bad air that settles in a pit like water in a cistern. Before a man climbs down, do as the old well-diggers do and lower a lit candle on a string. If the flame shrinks or dies, he stays topside. I showed Ozias the candle going out at knee height in his own corner.

Their mash was the old Suncook kind. Cook a good bushel of cracked corn in about twenty-five gallons of water, stirring against scorching, until it is thick as porridge. Cool it until you can hold your hand in it, then stir in half a bushel of ground rye and a peck of malted barley, whose malt turns the starch to sugar. At near blood-warm, pitch your yeast, cover the vat with a cloth and keep it in a warm corner. In three or four days it goes sour and thin. That is your wash, a weak beer of a few percent.

Wood spirit boils at about 148 degrees by Fahrenheit's scale, good spirit near 173 and water at 212. But in a boiling wash they travel together like drunks leaving a tavern, so no fire can be set to pour off the poison like cream off milk. Keep the fire low and catch the run in many small numbered jars. The foreshots go into the dirt or the lamp. The heads smell of varnish and glue and are thrown out as well. The hearts are sweet and clean, and you keep them. The tails, oily and smelling of wet dog and boiled cabbage, are saved to run again. Judge each jar by your nose and by its smell as it dries on your palm, and when in doubt throw out more of the early jars. A man who saves a cup of heads to save a dime will spend a dollar on a coffin.

Ozias's still was copper below with a tin cap and a pewter worm, which is a fine silk hat on a hog. Copper cleans out the sulphur stink wherever the hot vapour touches it: in the helmet, in the arm, and above all in the worm. I put copper up top, and the next run came off so clean that Lemuel wept. Scrub your copper while it is cool with vinegar and salt until it blushes pink, then rinse it, rinse it again and dry it. Last, a stone box full of vapour with a fire in it is a cannon, not a still. Keep your joints tight and the flame away from any place where vapour gathers. I had Ozias rebuild his firebox outside the vapour's path and give the hole a proper draft.

Ashes, Oak and Blue Flames

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Wood ash is mostly potash, potassium carbonate, which farms here once leached for lye to sell for soap and glass-making. It is alkaline. It can make the charge foam and scorch and give the spirit a soapy, lye-bitten taste, and it does nothing about the wood spirit. The only cure for that is the cut. Red oak is porous and weeps water through its grain. White oak's pores are stopped by natural plugs the cabinetmakers call tyloses, which is why honest coopers use it. Red oak shavings give tannin and colour, so the liquor looks aged and tastes like a chewed fence rail, and they clean it no more than paint cleans a privy.

Nor trust the man who lights a spoonful and says, "Burns blue, so it is safe." Wood spirit burns a pale blue too, so faint you can hardly see it by daylight. The bead tells you roughly how strong the liquor is, and nothing more. Strength is not purity, and only honest cuts give you that.

What Lay Beneath the Hearthstone

I have saved the strangest part for last. That first night, Barnaby dug after the scent of Ozias and tipped the old hearthstone over. Beneath it, in rotted oilcloth, lay a brass-mounted canteen green with age, a leather pouch of foreign silver, and a human jawbone. The teeth were worn flat from hard bread, and the lower left molar held a plug of hammered gold foil, finer than any work done in Concord. I confess I am professionally jealous of a dead German. Whether his wife or a neighbour with an old score from the war put him there, I cannot say. We returned the bones with a jar of my best, and Lemuel said the Lord's Prayer while Ozias said it standing, being unable to sit.

I set one of those worn coins on my anvil, with its German prince who looks as if he never chewed his own food, and struck it: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. It goes back under the stone come spring. The ghost paid me rent for six years, and every bit of it was a hoax. Yet last month I sat alone on that cellar wall at midnight. Barnaby stood up on his hind legs and whined like a pup, and from the empty dark below, a slow, tired voice said, "Danke." A man who believes in ghosts will believe in a tax refund, but I know what I heard, and so does the bear.