Why a Still-House Cellar Door Bangs Open at Midnight: Ghost, Debt or Draft?

A Door That Kept Its Own Hours

For four nights the bulkhead door beneath my still-house cost me my sleep. It also cost me one good tin lantern and whatever was left of my name as a man who fears nothing on God's earth. I dug that cellar in the spring of '58 with two Barnstead boys who worked for cider and quit the day the cider ran out, which was a Tuesday. It has dry-laid granite walls and a packed clay floor, and on the north side there is a bulkhead. For my friends across the line in Vermont, a bulkhead is what a Yankee calls the slanted outside door that opens down into a cellar. Mine is two-inch oak plank. It hangs on strap hinges I forged myself, and it fastens with an iron hasp and a white-oak peg as thick as a deacon's thumb.

The first of those four nights, at midnight, there came a BANG. I took the lantern down the inside stair and found the bulkhead flung wide. The peg was lying on the clay and snow was blowing in over my cider barrels like flour off a miller's apron. I shut the door and pegged it. At one o'clock it banged again. I wedged a stick of rock maple cordwood against it, and in the morning the cordwood lay on the floor while the door swung in the wind like a tavern sign. Barnaby, my bear, sat staring at it through the window with his ears laid flat. I had never seen that bear do such a thing for any sheriff alive.

Pittsfield had three opinions on the matter, and Pittsfield has never agreed on anything but the price of rum. The ladies at the store said it was a haunting, and they named the ghost: Hosea Drake, the tin peddler. Every fall Hosea came up the turnpike with a cart full of dippers and nutmeg graters. In the autumn of '59 I pulled four of his rotten teeth and made him an upper plate of carved hippopotamus ivory. He walked off owing me three dollars and forty cents and the plate besides. That March his hat blew off and he tried to cut across the ice on Berry Pond after it. March ice does to a man with a full cart and an empty head just what you would expect. They found him in April with the hat still in his fist, which proves a peddler will hang on to anything he didn't pay for. The pickerel had been at him all winter. I will only say that his face had more holes in it than his accounts, and that I got my plate back.

The old men at the gristmill held the second opinion. They say a cellar door won't stay shut on a house that owes money, because the debt wants out. The third opinion was my own good sense, and it said the trouble was a draft.

Cider, Cellars and Apple Palsy

To understand the cellar you must first understand why a Yankee digs one, and the answer is cider. Pittsfield was incorporated in 1782, and since before that day, and before the mills went up along the Suncook, the New England farmer has drunk cider the way a fish drinks pond. He drank it at breakfast, at noon and at haying, and his babies were weaned on it. Old John Adams wrote of taking a tankard of hard cider of a morning, and he became President and stayed cross as a wet cat every day of his life. Every October each farm on the turnpike ran its press and put barrels down cellar by the dozen. The earth around a dug cellar keeps it cool and steady all year. It never bakes and seldom freezes, so cider ferments slow and sweet there, and apples and turnips keep till April.

A farmer with forty barrels of hard cider and a long winter ahead starts to think, and a thinking farmer is a dangerous animal. The diligent sort carried his cider to a copper pot still and ran it into cider brandy. The lazier sort, which is most of Merrimack County, jacked it instead. He set a barrel out on a January night at twenty below, and by morning it had a crust of ice that was mostly water. He pulled the ice off, did the same again the next night, and what was left at the heart of the barrel was a dark, strong, apple-smelling liquor that would take paint off a hearse.

Every experimenter should mark this well: freezing takes nothing bad out. At the still a man can throw away his foreshots and heads. A frozen barrel keeps every drop the cider made, methanol and fusel oils included, and only squeezes them closer together. That is why the old-timers called the after-effect apple palsy. Men have come into my dentist's chair for a molar and confessed to a jug of jacked cider the night before, and their hands shook so badly I had them sit on them. One fellow's head ached so fiercely that he asked me to pull the whole skull and leave the teeth.

Debts That Follow a Man Downstairs

A man who is blacksmith, dentist and distiller has three sets of creditors, and I have outrun or outlived most of mine. In the summer of '61 a Concord lumber merchant swore I owed him twelve dollars for the hemlock in this fort. I swore the hemlock was so full of knots that paying for the holes would be robbery. He sent a collector named Crabb up the turnpike, a man in a stovepipe hat and long black coat with a ledger under his arm and a face like a pickled beet. Crabb did not knock. He walked around back to look in the still-house window, hoping to catch me at something taxable, and he stepped over Barnaby's chain. Barnaby was asleep, and a sleeping bear wakes the way a powder keg does. Crabb's coattails, and a good part of what they covered, went into the bear's mouth. He came down with his trousers in two flags and a bite the size of a pie plate, and Barnaby chewed the ledger to pulp. I watched the page with my name on it go down that black throat. It was the only time a debt of mine was ever settled by digestion. I stitched Crabb up on the chopping block with a darning needle and charged him nothing. The merchant now says the hemlock was a gift.

That was not the debt the gristmill men meant. In the hard winter of '64 a young runner who carried jugs over the Gilmanton hills for me came pounding on my bulkhead at three in the morning with two county deputies half a mile behind him. I will not give his name, because his mother still lives. I hid him among the cider barrels and pegged the door. The deputies sniffed my worm tub and left with nothing but a cold. The boy swore he would repay the seven dollars in jugs he had dropped in a snowbank, then went west to the Nevada silver, and I never saw him again. So my cellar has held a ghost who owed me and a runner who owed me.

Junior Vance, the hardest-driving runner the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina ever turned loose, sat at my fire and told me of a root cellar below Moravian Falls whose slanted plank door flopped open every night. His cousin Dewey swore it was a haint, an old woman wanting her sugar back. Junior sat up with a lantern and a shotgun. At midnight the door lifted an inch, and out came a pink nose. A mother possum and seven babies had got into a fifty-pound sugar sack, and she shoved the door up with her snout every night to go hunting. Junior also had a smokehouse trapdoor slam shut on him in a gust. He spent the night in the dark with a five-foot blacksnake wrapped round his shin, and in the morning his cousin Lonnie would not lift the door until Junior pushed two dollars up through the floorboards to pay an old poker debt. There was a Charlotte man who paid sixty dollars owed with a mahogany church pew, which Junior's mama named the Pew of Unpaid Accounts. And there was the ghostly Brushy Light, which turned out to be an old man of about ninety in his long johns hunting a lost red cow. The runners passed the hat and bought him one. "Best money I ever spent," said Junior, "and the only time I ever paid a debt I didn't owe."

The Answer Lay in the Firebox

Junior said the wind sucked his trapdoor shut, and he was right that air moves in closed places with a will of its own. That week I had fired my still each night at about ten o'clock. By midnight the still-house was hot as a Baptist hell, and the hot air went roaring up the chimney and out the roof cracks. Air must come from somewhere to take its place, and it came up out of the cool cellar through every crack, the biggest of which was my bulkhead. My peg had worn loose in its hole, and the draft worked it free each night the way a tongue works a loose tooth. Barnaby was never afraid of a ghost. He was annoyed by the noise, as any sensible creature is with wind. A ghost that only walks when the still is fired is no ghost. It is a drunk with good timing.

So I oiled the hinges, planed the bulkhead true and drove a new white-oak peg. I also cut a small vent hole high in the still-house wall, so the fire draws its air from there and not from my cellar.

Turning Cider into Apple Brandy

First, the law: making spirit to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is history and learning. Apple brandy wants more care than corn. Press sound apples, never rotten ones, and let the juice ferment out cool and clean for some weeks until it is dry and still. Keep your barrels clean and your bungs tight against fruit flies, because cider that has gone to vinegar makes a brandy that smells like a pickle works. Fill your copper pot no more than about three parts full. A pot filled to the brim will puke wash up the cap arm and foul the worm.

The fire is the heart of the craft. Bring the still up slowly, and once she runs, turn the fire down to a gentle, steady heat. Methanol boils at around 148 degrees Fahrenheit, good spirit near 173 and water at 212. A slow fire keeps them apart so you can tell one from the next. A hot fire flings them all together like a barroom brawl.

Catch the run in a long row of small jars, never one big crock. With cider you must throw away more foreshots than you would like, because the pectin in the skins and pulp breaks down in fermenting and lets methanol loose. Foreshots go in the dirt and never in a mouth, not even as a liniment for a toothache. The heads smell sharp, like nail varnish or a green apple with a grudge, so set them aside. The hearts come sweet and round, smelling of a baked apple in a good woman's oven, and those you keep. When the run turns oily, flat and like wet cardboard, you have reached the tails. Many a careful man runs the tails again with the next charge.

Alcohol vapour burns. A leaking joint, or a warm worm sending out vapour instead of liquid, will meet an open flame sooner or later. Keep your joints tight and your worm tub cold, never leave a running still alone, and keep a pail of water and a sack of sand by the door. I once saw a Barnstead still-house go up in nine minutes flat. All of this is why I work in copper. It carries heat evenly and gently, it takes shape under a hammer, and a clean copper pot gives a sweeter spirit than iron or tin ever did.

Ashes, Oak, Blue Flames and Beads

Word came to me from Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, called Rabbit, whose uncle swears the old-timers threw "hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." The uncle is half right. Wood ash is lye and potash, and when a mash tub went sour some distillers threw in ash or a little lime to cut the acid. That is a real practice, but it belongs in the mash tub at the start. Oak shavings give colour, pucker and a woody taste, a poor man's barrel-aging, but they clean nothing. Putting them in a thump keg to cure bad heads is like putting a Sunday hat on a corpse. Bad heads come mostly from a dirty or soured fermentation. You cure them at the beginning with clean barrels and sound fruit or grain, and at the end with small jars and honest cuts.

Two more myths deserve the anvil. The first holds that a blue flame proves liquor pure. In fact methanol itself burns with a pale blue flame, so the flame proves only that the liquor burns. The second is the bead, which will give you a rough guess at proof but cannot smell methanol or see lead. A jar of poison can bead as handsome as a bride's necklace.

As for the ghost, on the gristmill men's advice I nailed a large cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. to the inside of the bulkhead. I declared the accounts of Hosea Drake and the young fellow in Nevada paid in full. The door has not banged since. I cannot swear in court whether the vent hole did it or the coin, and I have sworn in that court twice already. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.