Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

MEDDLINGS WITH THE OCCULT 165
usual miscellaneous stock of wares, including valuables
like jewelry and laces and silks as well as choice brandies
and cigars-an itinerant merchant of the class to which
Jim Fisk belonged when he began business —after a thriving trade at Springvale started out at night in the rain
toward Oxford county. By a Springvale lad returning
from a squirrel hunt he was seen to turn in at Mrs. York's
and take down the bars; the inference being that he sought
hostelry for himself and stabling for his team. The peddler
was never found afterward. The mystery of his disappearance was heightened by that of Mrs. York herself.
Later, it was reported that some frontiersmen near the
Canada line had glimpsed a painted wagon, drawn by four
calico horses and carrying an old woman and "two dark,
Frenchified looking men," driven rapidly toward the
boundary. Beyond this, the law made futile efforts to
trace the crime.
The story or legend is ordinary enough and unimportant
enough except as the origin of a conviction widely entertained in that part of Maine and the adjoining section of
New Hampshire that there had been murder in the Garvin
place and that this was truly a haunted house. Every
recent occupant, as far as I could ascertain, was firmly of
that belief. The rent was merely nominal, yet most of
the tenants moved out almost as fast as they moved in.
A Baptist clergyman had lived there with his family, a
Mr. Lord, a Mr. Bodwell, who held out for several years,
a Mr. Phillips, and a number of others. With the single
exception of the Phillips family, none of these people believed in spiritualism; none had conceivable reason to lie

about occurrences in an otherwise comfortable home;
yet no one of the dozen or twenty persons who had slept
and eaten there varied from the standard tale of supernatural sights and sounds. I interviewed several of them
before I spent a night in an attic room under the Garvin
roof. Some professed to have seen and heard more than