Gull's Haven

Augustus Albee stood in front of the full-length mirror in his apartment above the antique shop, adjusting his tricorn hat to precisely the right angle. The blue wool coat with its brass buttons glinted under the overhead light. The white breeches were freshly pressed, and the buckled shoes, though uncomfortable, completed the ensemble perfectly. He looked exactly like a town crier from 1744.

He was, after all, the Town Crier. Self-appointed, perhaps, but the role suited him. Someone had to maintain proper historical standards in Gull’s Haven, and who better than a classically trained actor who had performed in actual theaters in New York City? Off-off-Broadway, certainly, but still. New York City theaters.

Augustus checked his pocket watch, an authentic antique he’d acquired shortly after moving to Gull’s Haven five years ago. Three forty-five. The tour began at four, which meant he needed to be at the cemetery by three fifty-five. Punctuality was the mark of a professional.

He gathered his battery-powered lantern, tested it twice, and tucked his leather-bound script under his arm. He had the tour memorized, naturally, every word and every dramatic pause, but the script added authenticity. And on the rare occasion his mind wandered, thinking about his performance as Konstantin in The Seagull at that little theater in Brooklyn, it was good to have a reference.

He descended the narrow stairs and emerged onto Main Street.

Gull’s Haven was always at its best when October arrived. The leaves were at peak color, the harbor glistened in the distance, and the afternoon light made everything look like a postcard of coastal New England.

His buckled shoes clicked on the sidewalk. Miss Hildreth waved from across the street. Tom, a local fisherman, nodded as he passed, bringing with him the earthy smell of the harbor at low tide. Augustus tipped his hat to each of them with theatrical flourish and walked on, coat swaying, entirely in his element.

The cemetery beside the Main Street Church was already gathering tourists when he arrived. He could spot them easily—the bright windbreakers, the expensive cameras, the walking shoes that had never once touched the harbor mud. They milled around the old headstones, reading the historical marker and photographing the carved names of people who had been gone for centuries.

There were more locals than usual. Several of them stood in period attire, already mingling comfortably among the tourists. The tours were clearly gaining recognition. Ever since the Maine Tourism Board feature, word had spread.

What Augustus could not have known was how far that word had traveled. Over the past week, news of the tour had moved through Gull’s Haven by channels that appeared on no map and traveled no road.

He checked his watch. Three fifty-seven. Close enough.

He strode to the center of the group, raised his lantern high despite the broad afternoon light, and called out in his best stage voice: “I am Augustus Albee, Town Crier of Gull’s Haven. Welcome to the Historic Ghost Tour!”

Several tourists startled. A few laughed. Most reached immediately for their cameras.

Augustus warmed to the crowd, using his practiced voice to paint a picture of shadowed history and lingering spirits. He spoke of tragedies that echoed through the centuries; of souls that were kind, some restless, and some—he paused—best left undisturbed.

An elderly woman in a purple fleece jacket raised her hand. “Was it scary?” she asked.

Augustus softened and assured her that their ghosts were of the historical variety. More melancholy than menacing. Though he couldn’t promise she wouldn’t feel a chill or two.

What Augustus did not see, standing as he was with his back to the cemetery, was the quiet way the group had grown.

A tall older gentleman in a captain’s coat from the 1840s had settled near the back, hands folded behind him, listening with interest. A young woman in a simple colonial dress stood near him. A weathered man in clothes that looked as though they had absorbed thirty years of salt spray leaned against the iron cemetery fence as though he’d been there all afternoon, possibly longer.

Augustus opened his script with a flourish. He explained that their tour began here, in this hallowed ground, where many of Gull’s Haven’s earliest settlers rested. Or did they?

He let the question hang.

He would begin with Patience Thornwood, who died in 1783 and was said to haunt the church itself, her ghostly figure seen in the windows late at night, searching for her husband who was lost at sea.

A voice from the back said, pleasantly, that this wasn’t quite right.

Augustus looked up. A woman he didn’t recognize, perhaps in her sixties, wearing a dress that looked far too well-made and far too old to be a reproduction, was watching him with a polite, corrective smile.

She explained that Patience Thornwood hadn’t haunted the church at all. She’d moved on properly once they found her husband’s body and buried him in his rightful place. Gave her peace, she said. It was Margaret Ashford who lingered in the church. She wasn’t haunting it so much as attending services. She liked the hymns.

Several tourists laughed, assuming this was part of the show. Augustus frowned. He didn’t recall arranging for actors, but the dress was impressive and the delivery was committed. A historical society volunteer, perhaps. He decided to absorb the interruption gracefully.

He acknowledged that local lore did vary from source to source, and that his research into the historical record—

She interrupted again, still cheerfully, to note that she’d been there when it happened. Patience was ever so relieved when they found Thomas. Cried for days, she did, but then she was able to rest.

The tourists loved this. Cameras swung toward the woman. Augustus realized this was actually enhancing the tour, even if it was historically inaccurate. He made a mental note to speak with the historical society about coordinating these things in advance.

He led the group out of the cemetery and down Elm Street, where several historic homes stood behind white picket fences. The afternoon had softened into early evening, and the light through the maples fell in long, amber slants across the clapboard houses. The tourists followed eagerly.

Augustus stopped in front of a handsome colonial home, painted yellow with black shutters. He described the legend of the Wickham House, built in 1762.

During the Revolutionary War, a British officer was hidden here by the Wickham family, who took pity on the young man despite his allegiance to the Crown. When revolutionary forces discovered him, they hanged him from that very oak tree. Augustus pointed dramatically at the large tree in the front yard. His ghost was said to walk the property still, forever grateful to the Wickhams for their kindness, even as he mourned his own untimely death.

The tall man in the captain’s coat said, from the back, that this was completely made up.

Augustus blinked.

The man continued, not unkindly. The Wickhams were fierce patriots. They wouldn’t have sheltered a British officer under any circumstances.

The real history was that the Wickhams hid a French deserter from the Continental Army. He’d gotten tired of the war and wanted to go home. They fed him and gave him money for passage back to France. Not as dramatic, but true.

Augustus asked, with diminishing patience, how he could possibly know this.

The man said matter-of-factly that he’d helped him get to the ship. He straightened slightly and tipped his hat. “Captain Elwood. Pleasure to be on the tour.”

A tourist wearing a Red Sox cap leaned toward his wife and murmured admiringly about the commitment to the bit. That coat must have cost a fortune.

Augustus reasserted control with the grace of a man who had once salvaged a performance after a fellow actor walked into the wrong scene. He thanked Captain Elwood for the colorful addition. They should move on.

They moved through Elm Street to Oak Street and back toward Main, stopping at various locations. At each one, some quietly authoritative figure offered gentle corrections.

The ship’s cook who supposedly haunted The Alleyway Restaurant? She just liked their buttered biscuits and the pan-seared scallops on Wednesdays.

The murdered sailor who walked throughout the town? He died peacefully in his sleep at eighty-seven, thank you very much, and took offense at being called murdered.

Augustus stopped in front of the fire station, a handsome brick building with two large bay doors. He explained, consulting his script with some relief, surely no one could dispute this one, that this structure was raised from the very ashes of the Great Fire of 1887. The blaze had leveled much of Main Street, claiming seven lives, and the spirits of the fallen were said to return to this ground each year to mourn their tragic fate.

This prompted a young man to step forward with the look of someone who had been waiting patiently for this particular moment.

Eight people, the young man said.

Augustus consulted his script.

The young man explained that history simply had it wrong. A clerical error, most likely. The real count was eight. They got the blacksmith’s apprentice wrong in the records, listed him as escaped, but he’d actually died of smoke inhalation two days later.

Augustus demanded to know how he could possibly know that.

The young man shrugged, his voice carrying a slight, raspy catch as he spoke. “Old family history. Some things you just don’t forget.”

Augustus took a deep breath. His carefully constructed narrative was crumbling, but the tourists were having a magnificent time. He had largely abandoned the pretense of historical authority, settling instead into something close to hosting. The show must go on. He turned and led the group slowly down Main Street.

In front of the old bakery, now a pizza place, he told the story of the baker’s ghost, who still kneaded invisible dough. A woman in a flour-dusted apron materialized from somewhere near the entrance and good-naturedly corrected him, it wasn’t invisible dough, she simply enjoyed remembering. There was a difference.

At the inn, he described the ghostly woman in white on the second floor, her solitary figure steeped in endless sorrow. From the edge of the crowd, an elegant woman in a white dress raised her hand with more enthusiasm than sorrow. “Oh, that’s me,” she said, bright with recognition. She let everyone know that she wasn’t sad. She simply liked the view from up there. And the inn kept that particular room exactly as she remembered it. Very thoughtful of them.

The sun was setting behind the stores on Main Street as they reached the Town Dock, casting long shadows across the waterfront. The harbor spread out before them in the early dusk; lobster boats rocked gently at their moorings, their hulls dark against the water.

In the distance, Bull Point Lighthouse turned steadily. The smell of low tide drifted in off the water, salt and mud and something older beneath it.

Augustus positioned himself at the end of the pier, his back to the harbor, the lantern finally earning its keep in the dimming light. His audience, even larger now, gathered close. The scene was perfect, exactly as Augustus had envisioned it when he first conceived the tour.

He lowered his voice to a stage whisper that carried easily across the pier. He would tell them the most famous ghost story of Gull’s Haven. The tale of the Bull Island Ranger.

A murmur went through the crowd.

Augustus told them that in the 1950s and 60s, a man named Robert Finch had served as ranger on Bull Island. He maintained the lighthouse, preserved the buildings, and watched over that isolated place as if it were his own child. A quiet man, dedicated to his duty.

When the lighthouse was automated in 1967, his position was eliminated, but he continued to visit the island, unable to let it go. In 1969, while making one of these unofficial visits, he suffered a heart attack at the base of the lighthouse. He died alone, as he had lived, with only the gulls for company.

Augustus paused, letting the harbor sounds fill the silence: the creak of lines, the knock of a hull against a mooring.

But Robert Finch could not leave his island behind. To this day, fifty-six years after his death, people still reported seeing him on Bull Island. A figure in a ranger’s uniform, checking the buildings, walking the shore, forever maintaining the place he loved. Some had even claimed to meet him in town, to speak with him, to shake his hand, never realizing until later what they had encountered.

Several phones were out, recording. One woman had tears in her eyes.

Augustus raised his arm and pointed across the darkening water. If they looked now, he said, just there, moving east, they might see his boat making for the island.

As if on cue, a small motorboat appeared from behind a nearby point, its running light catching the dusk, heading steadily toward Bull Island. The figure at the helm was too distant to read clearly, just a shape, a silhouette.

The tourists held their breath.

“Is that him?” someone asked quietly.

A voice from the back of the group confirmed that it was.

Everyone stared across the harbor, watching the boat grow smaller.

The tourists were entranced, and among the ghosts gathered on the pier, nods of appreciation passed between them for a story well told.

Augustus’s eyes shifted slowly back to his audience. They were almost as shocked as he was, and in that moment he knew. This was his moment. The scene, the water, the lighthouse, the boat still barely visible against the darkening horizon, and no corrections. He turned and raised both hands with dramatic flair, lantern still in hand. “And that, my friends, is the story of Bob Finch—the Bull Island Ranger.”

He took a sweeping bow.

The applause started slow and built; someone cheered. Augustus Albee, classically trained, off-off-Broadway, had finally found his audience.

The group lingered on the pier, waiting their turn to shake his hand. Several swore it was the finest ghost tour they’d ever experienced.

Augustus announced that their tour concluded at The Rusty Anchor, just across the lot, light already spilling warm from its windows. He had arranged with the proprietor for a special post-tour gathering, discounted appetizers, and he would be available to sign tour programs and share additional stories over a drink.

The group moved as one toward The Rusty Anchor. The anchor out front caught the glow from the windows, its chain disappearing into the gravel. Roy was behind the bar, resigned to the chaos but not unhappy about the business. Linda was already working the room with her particular brand of efficiency and charm. Slim had abandoned his stool at the end of the bar and disappeared into the kitchen without comment, which was as much announcement as he ever gave.

The tourists scattered to tables. The figures who had drifted through the tour all evening came in too, settling into the bar with the ease of regulars.

Captain Elwood found a seat near Little Pete’s table; within minutes they were deep in something that involved a good deal of laughter.

Abigail, apparently deciding the evening was still young, had somehow acquired a tray and was helping Linda deliver drinks with the practiced air of someone who had done this before in some previous century—which, as it happened, she had.

Roy set a whiskey neat on the bar before Augustus had fully settled onto the stool, and asked how the tour went.

“A triumph,” Augustus said, taking an appreciative sip. “Though the crowd work did require some... improvisation.”

Roy nodded, wiping down the counter with an expression that gave away nothing. “Glad to hear it.”

Augustus spent the next twenty minutes posing for photos with tourists, adjusting his tricorn hat between shots, and holding court on the subject of other haunted locations along the Maine coast.

He was just explaining the nuance of a dramatic pause to an admiring couple when Linda tapped his elbow.

“Would now be a good time for the special effects?” she asked.

Augustus replied that he hadn’t arranged for special effects.

“Abigail mentioned it,” Linda said. “A contribution, she called it. A thank-you for including the real stories.”

Augustus hesitated only briefly. “I suppose that would be acceptable. What sort of special effects?”

But Linda was already gone.

He turned back to his audience and announced, with the confidence of a man improvising in real time, that they had a special treat this evening. A local historian named Abigail had prepared a small demonstration.

Abigail stepped into the cleared space in the middle of the room, where Linda and Little Pete had moved the tables without anyone quite noticing.

She thanked Mr. Albee for the tour. She wanted, she said, to show everyone something. Not a trick, exactly. More of a demonstration of what the ghosts of Gull’s Haven were actually like.

A few tourists laughed uncertainly.

Abigail said the thing most people got wrong about ghosts was the clothes. Clothes were tricky. You had to concentrate.

Her jeans and blouse flickered. For just a moment she wore a long colonial dress, plain linen, the kind that had been practical rather than decorative. Then a sundress, something from the 1970s, by the look of it. Then the jeans and blouse again.

The room went very quiet, and then erupted.

Augustus stood with his whiskey halfway to his lips, his theatrical training cataloguing the possibilities—hidden projector, trick of the light, some technology he wasn’t familiar with—and coming up empty.

There was no seam to find. No mechanism. Just a woman standing in the middle of a bar in Gull’s Haven, Maine, wearing clothes that changed.

Before the stunned crowd could even begin to whisper, Abigail wasn’t just changing her clothes—she was changing her substance. She leaned into the circle, her smile widening, and said, “The other thing about being a ghost? Visibility is purely optional.”

She faded. It happened the way fog moves—gradually and then completely.

The space where she had been standing was simply empty.

The bar erupted again, louder this time. Someone shouted about holograms. Two tourists were on their knees examining the floorboards. A man near the back was turning slow circles, looking at the ceiling.

Then, directly behind Augustus, close enough that he felt the slight displacement of air, her voice came, bright and effortless: “The real trick is reappearing somewhere unexpected.”

He turned. She was there—entirely solid, entirely present, grinning at him with the easy pleasure of someone who had just done something she enjoyed.

The room went wild. Roy watched from behind the bar with the expression of a man who had seen this before and had decided long ago that it wasn’t his business to explain it. Little Pete was laughing the way large men sometimes laugh, with his whole frame. Captain Elwood raised his glass.

Augustus drained his whiskey.

The evening wound down the way good evenings do, slowly, and with reluctance. Tourists filtered out in twos and threes, still debating the mechanics of what they’d seen.

The Rusty Anchor settled back toward its usual Thursday-night gravity; the regulars reclaimed their usual territories. Slim emerged from the kitchen, hung his apron, and resumed his position at the end of the bar with his cowboy hat tipped low, the evening apparently filed away and forgotten.

Augustus stood to leave, gathering his tricorn hat and lantern. Abigail looked up from her corner table.

“See you next week, Mr. Albee.”

He assured her he’d be there, same time, same place, perhaps with even more tourists given tonight’s success.

Her grin didn’t waver. “Counting on it.”

He stepped out into the October night. The street was quiet; most of the tourists had drifted back toward their cars or their rented rooms. Up the hill, the church sat dark and still against the sky. Across the water, Bull Point Lighthouse swept its patient arc over the black harbor. Augustus found himself looking at it longer than usual.

He walked up Main Street toward his apartment, his mind pleasantly occupied with plans for next week, better promotional materials, perhaps a mention of the special effects, though he’d need to understand the technology better before he could describe it accurately. He climbed the stairs.

He hung his costume with care, the tricorn hat on its stand, and placed the lantern back on the shelf.

He fell asleep thinking about the tour, and about the figure in the boat, and about a captain who knew too much, and about the way a woman’s clothes had changed in a bar in a way that had no explanation he could locate—

But the thought never quite finished itself. It dissolved at the edges, the way thoughts do just before sleep; and Augustus Albee rested easy, as he always did, in the comfortable certainty of a performance well given.

Outside, the lighthouse kept its watch. The harbor settled into its nighttime quiet. And in Gull’s Haven, as in all things, the past and the present went on sharing the same streets and the same bars—the way they always had, long before anyone thought to give it a name.