{"id":11616,"date":"2016-01-27T03:00:33","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T11:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/monkeymind\/?p=11616"},"modified":"2016-01-27T04:12:02","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T12:12:02","slug":"hanging-with-the-ghost-at-longfellows-wayside-inn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/monkeymind\/2016\/01\/hanging-with-the-ghost-at-longfellows-wayside-inn.html","title":{"rendered":"Jerusha Howe: Hanging With the Ghost at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Wayside<\/a>
\nThe other day as I walked out of the bathroom in room 9 at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and saw a cat dash past a chair into the far corner of the room. My second thought was \u201cI don\u2019t ever recall seeing a cat here at the Inn. However, we\u2019re in a rural area, and that might not be a cat.\u201d I walked over to the corner, and saw there was actually no way for an animal to enter or leave there. \u201cHmm,\u201d thought I, and moved on to the next thing. Actually, over the years I\u2019ve had several occasions of sensing something out of the corner of my eye, then looking more closely, but finding nothing. I tended to put all this down to the less than twenty-first century lighting in the room.<\/p>\n

Then in a chance conversation the next morning I learned that the room I have shared with my colleague and old friend Walter Wieder<\/a> and on occasion one or two other Unitarian Universalist clergy, during the annual gatherings of the Fraters of the Wayside Inn<\/a>, is haunted.<\/p>\n

The Inn, made famous through Longellow\u2019s Tales of the Wayside Inn<\/a>, appears today to be the oldest Inn in operation in the country. The oldest parts of the main building date to the earliest part of the eighteenth century. The first Universalist and now Unitarian Universalist clergy study group the Fraters of the Wayside Inn have been meeting there for one hundred and fourteen years. Me, despite what some of my friends say, only for a dozen years now, two as a guest and now a decade as a frater. During these years I\u2019ve been mostly housed in room nine, and for all of those years sharing the room with Walt, and on occasion one, and once two others. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve come to think of this room as \u201cmine.\u201d Or, with Walt, \u201cours.\u201d I suspect if I were assigned another I\u2019d be a bit annoyed.<\/p>\n

And. Now I learn of the ghost. It turns out we also share this room with the ghost of Jerusha Howe<\/a> whose hauntings have given the room the nickname \u201cthe Hobgoblin Room.\u201d You would have thought someone might have mentioned that. Sometime over the past dozen years.<\/p>\n

But no\u2026<\/p>\n

Apparently Jerusha has a fondness for snuggling up to men who stay in this room. Not in my experience. Nor, Walt claims, in his.<\/p>\n

While there are mentions of her playing a piano, I can\u2019t find any reference to a cat. So, I\u2019m glad to add my own little twist to the tale.<\/p>\n

As it were, of the haunted room at the Wayside Inn.<\/p>\n

My occasional home\u2026<\/p>\n