Knocks From The Cellar

The first documented haunting in the United States happened in the winter of 1799, in the small coastal town of Sullivan, Maine. The haunting began when Captain Abner Blaisdell and his family started hearing strange noises in their cellar. At first, the noises were faint and indistinct, like a conversation you can overhear but can't quite make out any words.

On January 2, 1800, the voice started being able to talk directly to the inhabitants of the house. Abner Blaisdell was a God-fearing and proud upstanding member of the community who had served as a Sergeant in the American Revolution. He had seen battle and was brave enought to talk to whatever was coming out of the basement. When he asked the disembodied voice who she was, the reply was "I'm the dead wife of Captain George Butler, born Nelly Hooper."

Nelly Butler was a young twenty-one year old wife who had passed away three years earlier in a tragic childbirth where the baby died shortly thereafter.  Blaisdel knew of Nelly because her father, Dennis Hooper, lived a mere six miles down the road, and George, the husband she left behind lived close by as well.

The spirit started communicating with the family, with younger daughter Lydia often hearing the knocks for several minutes before the voices started calling them down to the basement to talk. Much like a classic poltergeist story, it seems that a teenage girl, 15-year old Lydia, was at the root of the phenomena. And also, much like a classic poltergeist, what starts out as just an audio haunting becomes something more intelligent and communicative as time goes on. 

A Spiritual Matchmaker

It seems that Nelly Butler wanted to talk to her father and former husband because she was trying to coordinate the remarriage of George. Not only that, but she was trying to set him up with fifteen year old Lydia! George was twenty-nine at the time and fifteen years old was a little on the young side even if it was back in 1800. Of course, people started thinking that Lydia might be some kind of witch or a demoniac (possessed), because the ghost was inviting people to come down to the basement so that she could prove her existence and Lydia was always there.

The interest of Nelly's sister, Sally Wentworth, was piqued after Hannah Blaisdell, the older sister of the family, came to George Butler's house on that first night in January that Nelly called for her former husband. That first night, they didn't come out of disbelief, but when the Blaisdells returned the next day, Sally went down into the basement with Lydia and a group of other locals:

While I held Lydia by the arm, we heard the sound of knocking. Lydia spoke, and a voice answered, the sound of which brought fresh to my mind that of my sister’s voice, in an instant; but I could not understand it at all; though it was within the compass of my embrace, and, had it been a creature which breathed, it would have breathed in my face, and I had no impedi­ment of hearing. But Lydia told me that it said, “ We must live in peace and be united." Then we came up. But Capt. S----- n with Lydia and others, went down again. I passed through the room which led to the cellar into another room, and there I was much surprised when I plainly under­ stood by the same kind of voice, still speaking in the cellar, these words, "I am the voice of one crying in the wilder­ness" and other sentences, which I cannot remember. This is testified by several others who were with me.

From this time I cleared Lydia as to the voice, and ac­cused the devil.

Sally's opinion changed over time though: 

August 8, I was there again with about thirty others, and heard much conversation. Her voice was still hoarse and thick, like that of my sister on her death bed,f but more hollow. Sometimes it was clear, and always pleasant. A certain person did, in my opinion very unwisely, ask her whether I was a true Christian. The reply was, “ She thinks she is, she thinks she is. She is my sister.”

August 18—14, I heard the same voice in the same place, and did then believe it was that of my sister. She talked much with Capt. S----- n, and exhorted the people. Mr. Sp----- r asked her if I believed that she was my sister. The answer was, “ She believes now.”

Dozens of Witnesses

Nelly's sister's testimony, along with thirty others was collected a couple of decades later by a Reverend Abraham Cummings, a traveling preacher, who wrote a pamphlet titled "Immortality Proved by the Testimony of Sense: In Which Is Considered the Doctrine of Spectres, and the Existence of a Particular Spectre."

Indeed, George Butler became convinced and he is in Cummings' book as well:

When I was called to talk with this voice, I asked, “ who are you ?” It answered, “I was once your wife.” The voice asked me, “ Do you not remember that I told you when I was alive.” I answered, “ I do not really know what you mean.” The voice said, “ Do you not remember I told you 1 did not think I should live long with you. I told you that if you was to leave me I should never wish to change my condition ; but that if I was to leave you, I could not blame you, if you did.”

This passed between me and my first wife, while she was alive, and there was no living person within hearing, but she and myself, and I am sure that this was never revealed to any person, and no living person could have told it to me before the voice did.

The spirit was able to convince enough of the most important players involved, that even with the age difference and Lydia's seeming reluctance, that the marriage was the will of God and the couple got married on Butler Point on May 28, 1800. But according to Abner Blaisdell, they received some ominous news from Nelly the day after:

To Capt. Butler the Spectre said, “ Be kind to your wife : for she will not be with you long. She will have but one child and then die.” 

A Dire Prediction

The specter's augury made many of the townspeople believe that the prophecy was an ominous curse. Between that and the insistence of the ghost trying to get George Butler remarried, many suspected that the apparition was not Nelly Butler, but a demonic entity. Others claimed that the haunting was a trick and accused the Blaisdell family of deceiving George Butler into marrying Lydia. The ghost seemed to realize this reticence of the townsfolk, and in August of 1800, it started manifesting itself to more and more people. It appeared outside the basement and with a more religious intensity than before. According to the testimony of "doubting" Thomas Uran:

In the evening there was a knocking round the house ; but nothing spake. We all concluded there would be nothing said or seen. The next morning about day-break, there seemed to be knockings round the house, and in the chamber, and round my bed. We immediately got up, and going down I took a candle, lighted it, and went into the cellar alone, examining if there was no one there to deceive us. I could not see any body. I came back. Mr. Blaisdel, with all in the house went down cellar—we heard a knocking. Some one spake in the name of God, and asked what she wanted. She asked if we want­ ed to know who she was. We answered, yes. She told us she was once N----- B-------. She then said to me, “ you have often said that I am a devil or a witch.” I then asked her,if she was from the God of heaven or from misery. She answered, “ I am from above, praising God and the Lamb;” she then broke out in praise. She then told us that she had come to warn us from sin, and that if there was not a change before the soul left the body, we should be forever miserable. She then told us the danger a sinner was in, out of Christ, and told us that she should rise in the day of judgment against us. I told her I had a great desire that she should appear. And then she appeared to us all who had a desire to see her.

She appeared like a person who was wrapped in a white sheet, appearing and disappearing several times. It was near sun rise at this time.

She then told us that was the day that Christ rose from the dead, and that it was God’s precious time, and must be kept unto him.

Lydia, (Mrs. Butler) was not in the cellar while the fore­going talk was. The Spirit asked me if I would not clear Lydia; I answered I would, for it was not she who talked.

One of the most dramatic sightings that August comes from Abner Blaisdell himself's testimony:

August 9, 1800. We placed ourselves in order, according to the direction of the Spectre; and a white appearance, at first very small, rose before me and grew to a personal stat­ure and form. It stood directly before Capt. Butler, while he and his wife stood beside each other. I saw him put his hand on the apparition, and I saw his hand pass through it. Then it vanished. There were now about twelve persons here.

George confirms it as well. And what would often happen, the spirit would give some "token", as Cummings called it, that would prove that it truly was Nelly. George was there with Lydia (his new wife) and Nelly must have been pleased because, after awhile, her visual form appeared to him as well. 

There was something ap­peared to my view right before me, like a person in a winding sheet and her arms folded under the winding sheet, and this appearance I did not know possibly but I might be de­ceived. I reached out my left hand to take hold of it. I saw my hand in the middle of it, but could feel nothing. The same evening it appeared and disappeared to me three times.

The last time the ghost manifested was in the middle of the August of 1800. 48 people followed the ghost from the Blaisdell house to a neighbor’s house because the ghost wanted to show the skeptic that it wasn't confined to the basement. Once it proved its presence to the doubter, it appeared to the crowd in a field and vanished for the final time just as mysteriously as it appeared.

A Historic Mystery

While the ghost of Nelly Butler may have disappeared, her tragic prophecy for the fate of Lydia Blaisdell (now Butler) proved heartbreakingly true only 10 months later. Lydia died shortly after childbirth in 1801. Her child didn't survive either. She suffered the same fate as Nelly Butler.

While George Butler eventually remarried again and had four children, the tale of America's first haunting has lived on for over two centuries. What was it? Was it an elaborate hoax by Abner trying to get his youngest daughter married? Was it a poltergeist conjured in the imagination of Lydia that eventually became a thoughtform of its own? Was it really Nelly Butler trying to play matchmaker from Heaven to give her widow a little peace? Or was it the Devil trying to infiltrate a small town by using grief and superstition to destroy the life of a young girl by forcing her into childbirth before her body was ready?

George Butler's gravestone by Joy Fuller Hayward on Findagrave.com 

Many ghost story books and websites have falsely placed this legendary haunting in Machiasport, about 50 miles up the coast from Sullivan, Marcus LiBrizzi, an English professor at the University of Maine at Machias, tracked down Cummings' 1826 book. This was difficult because even the Maine State Archive was unable to find for a long time according to a 1981 newspaper clipping about Sullivan's bicentennial celebration.  LiBrizzi confirmed that the town of Sullivan was the center of the tale. He, along with researcher Dennis Boyd, studied the family histories, found George Butler's gravestone, and put their research into the book The Nelly Butler Hauntings: A Documentary History, published in 2010. You can purchase the book on Amazon here.