Nathaniel Cobb by obiwan [Reviews - 1] 
Subject: WWW Form Submission
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:05:04 -0800 (PST)
To: obiwan@ghosts.org
Name: Elizabeth
Email: econnell@penbayhealthcare.org
Location: Union, Maine
This isn't really my story, but my step-daughter's. This would have started back in 1994, when she was just turned six. I had met her father (now my ex-husband), and moved in with them within a period of just a few months. He was in the midst of a very nasty divorce, and when the divorce was final we moved from the farm which was part of his ex wife's settlement, and went to live in another home he owned, which was in the town of Union. The house in Union was a 6,000 square foot 200 year old teamser stop/tavern. It had been built in 1797 as a hip roof center chimney federal, then remodeled in 1836 into a three story gable end. The main house contained 19 rooms, and the two story ell connecting the house and barn contained six more, including a "great room" that was some 38 feet long by 16 feet wide. The barn was a huge three story affair. When my ex acquired the house, it was completely derelict. It had not only been badly neglected, it had been badly abused. The last residents had been of an extremely unpleasant quality, and had apparently lived in a room until it filled up with garbage, then closed the door on it and moved to another room. The only rooms not filled hip-deep in garbage were on the third floor, presumably because they hadn't wanted to climb the steep narrow stair.
>From the very first time I entered the house, I knew there was something there. I've been "sensitive" ever since I can remember, and have on several occasions actually seen what can only be termed "ghosts". But I got no feeling of ill will from the house. Just the sense that there was something there beyond the normal. I didn't say anything to either my ex or Kat, not wanting him to think I was nuts, and not wanting to make her nervous.
My ex had remodeled the ell into a spacious two-story apartment, and it was rented out at the time we needed to move, so we made shift to make a couple rooms of the main house at least livable - ripping down paper, painting over peeling paint and plaster. The only room that we seriously restored was the second floor one that Kat wanted as a bedroom. My ex and I chose a first floor room that wasn't in too bad a shape as ours.
Now please understand, the rest of the house was like a stage set for a ghost story. Paper was peeling from the walls, plaster was falling, floors dipped and sagged, stair and balcony railings were missing or unstable, broken and cobweb festooned light fixtures dangled from rotted cables in the ceilings, critters scurried in the ceilings and walls, some doors were shattered, others either wouldn't close or wouldn't stay open, and most rooms were fairly filled with bits and pieces of antiques/junk that nobody had yet had time to sort through. But despite all this, Kat was not afraid of the house, the dark, or the fact that she was the only one on the second floor at night.
It couldn't have been more than just a few days after we moved in, because Kat was still sleeping on a mattress on the floor because her bunkbeds hadn't arrived yet. It was probably about 10:00 pm, Kat was upstairs and had been asleep when last checked, my ex and I were watching TV. I heard a sound from the stair hallway. It was a lound wooden RAP!, followed by the sound of something rolling down the wooden hallway floor (upstair hallway), then the creak of one of the upstairs doors. I immediately thought that Kat must have gotten out of bed for some reason, and went to the foot of the stairs to listen, but heard nothing more. I went back to the couch. Shortly, I heard the sound repeated. RAP! Followed by the rolling noise on the floor. My ex and I looked at each other, then went to investigate. There being no light in the hall, I grabbed the flashlight we kept on a table by the door for just this purpose.
>From the top of the stairs, we could hear Kat's voice whispering from her room. As she sometimes talked in her sleep, we were not concerned. I shone my light down the hall toward her door, and caught just the briefest glimpse of movement at the edge of the light toward the left hand turn in the hall way (Kat's door was to the right), and the whispering stopped. Then I noticed what was lying on the floor at the end of the hall - two wooden croquette balls, and a mallet. My ex and I just looked at each other, because we were thinking the same thing - "How did that get in here from the barn?"
Not knowing what to think, but assuming that Kat was awake, we went down the hall and pushed open her door. The light was off, but there she was sitting up cross-legged in a nest of blankets. I flipped the bedroom light on, and saw that she had an angry scowl on her face (we used to call her "Katie-Thunder-Cloud"). When her dad asked what was going on, she looked him right in the eye and said "I told him he had to go away and let me sleep. I said I'd get in trouble. He was making so much noise."
"Who?" my ex asked.
Kat pointed out the bedroom door. "Him. He's keeps waking me up, and then I can't get back to sleep."
My ex glanced out the door, then assured her that there was nobody there, and she must have been dreaming. But I looked too, and just for a second I could have sworn I saw the form of a young boy outlined in the light from the window in the tiny room at the end of the hall, not as young as Kat, maybe around 9 or 10 by the height. I didn't say anything, and we tucked Kat back into bed. When questioned at breakfast, she stubbornly maintained that she had nothing to do with the croquette pieces in the hall that night. After my ex left for work Kat looked at me and said "'Lizbeth, you saw him too, didn't you?" I admitted that I did. We had a long talk about the fact that her dad couldn't see him, that he was probably a spirit, but that she shouldn't be afraid. As the very young often do, she took it in stride. I told her that there were probably other "spirit people" in the house, but that they wouldn't hurt her. Kat continued to encounter the boy until she began to enter puberty, but as far as I know nobody else ever saw him besides us and one friend of hers that demanded to be taken home in the middle of the night after the sighting. Kat still remembers him, and will occasionally bring the subject up.
Research later showed that the boy was probably Nathaniel Cobb, who had died at not quite 10 years of age in the Spanish Flu epidemic. A very elderly lady who lived across the street actually remembered him from her own early childhood. She was very helpful on the history of the house, and the family that had owned it for most of its existence (not the most recent owners before us). She confirmed that Nathaniel and his infant sister both died of the flu while his father was away at sea, and that his mother was never quite right afterward. Upon Nathaniel's parents deaths, the house passed to a side branch of the family, and then was sold in the early 70's, which was when it fell upon hard times.
I had many further "interactions" with the spirits in that house, but those are stories for another time.