Ghost stories ring true in the telling

Published: Friday, August 17, 2007
By Matt Ryan
Free Press Staff Writer

ESSEX JUNCTION -- A librarian turns off the lights, plunging the audience of a few dozen people into darkness.

Joe Citro, illuminated by a desk lamp, opens his slideshow with a bit of "graveyard pornography" -- an image that could, depending on the viewer's perspective, be either a skull or a nude woman curled up in a ball.

Citro strokes his white beard. The Vermont native and author of five fiction novels and several "books that might be fiction" shows slides and shares a few of his favorite Vermont ghost stories.

There's Emily's Bridge in Stowe, named after a girl who hanged herself from its rafters after being ditched by her boyfriend more than a century ago. She's been reported to attack people, cars and livestock that pass through the covered bridge after dark, where she waits an eternity for her lost lover.

At the Brattleboro Retreat, phantoms fling themselves from a tower in a suicidal cycle begun by the asylum's patients years ago. Spirits sprint through an octagon-shaped house in St. Johnsbury, designed to be a gateway into the netherworld. Other ghosts spook students in dorms, snore in barns and check in guests at hotels.

"I love the stories, it's really immaterial to me if they're true," Citro said. "The drama's in the storytelling."

Citro said he found his calling in the late 1980s when he realized no one had documented Vermont's spiritual residents.

"Suddenly, I found a niche," he said.

Citro's favorite haunted house is an old Colonial salt box. Citro's father and two friends visited the Dutton House, a popular haunt spot in the 1930s, when it stood in Cavendish. As Citro's father and one friend peered through the slats that boarded up a window, another friend went around back to find a way in. He returned and insisted they leave. He never said what it was he saw.

In 1950, the house was moved to the Shelburne Museum. The ghosts followed.

Citro talked to museum security guards who would hear footsteps in the attic after checking to ensure the house was empty. A girl's ghost stared at a guard from an upstairs bedroom. A more "unsavory" ghost growled at a guard named Gladys and chased her outside.

Citro also shared some more personal hauntings, including a specter captured in a family portrait.

The sepia photo of Citro's grandfather, mother and aunt as children contains another girl's face, floating just above Citro's mother.

People in the audience shared stories.

Paul Cucinelli, 61, of Essex said he and his eldest daughter share a connection with the spirit world. A retired state trooper, Cucinelli and his wife, Anne, 49, recently returned from Cheyenne, Wyo., where Cucinelli said he shared ghost stories with Sitting Bull's great-great-grandson, a painter named Billy Sitting Bull.

Cucinelli said he experienced ghosts in the condominium where he lives. Anne Cucinelli believes her husband, though she said she has never seen the ghosts, like a strawberry-blond woman in a 19th-century blue dress. Paul Cucinelli said he felt something brush across his legs just before leaving for Citro's show. Fortunately, the Cucinellis don't scare easily.

"The worst thing is for a cop to admit he's seen a ghost," Cucinelli said with a laugh. "I've never experienced anything that was shocking or offensive."