People and Places

After my last blog post, I realized I would need to make a correction.

When I moved to Maine three years ago, I went on a walking tour of Freeport hosted by the Freeport Historical Society. It wasn't a ghost tour per se, but we did end up learning about some of the more famous ghost stories involving the structures along and near Main Street.

That's the correction, which probably is more of a clarification.

Anyhoo, there's quite a story about the spot where I dined outside this past weekend with the canine munchkin in tow. As I recall it, in Maine's early days, a family of settlers was attacked by Native Americans. The father was killed, along with some of the family's children. One of the children who died was a toddler who was in his mother's arms when they were shot. The mother survived but lived the rest of her life with a bullet in her chest.

Many years later, as the story goes, one of the Native Americans was at a tavern in Freeport boasting about his role in the attack. Little did he know that the owner of the tavern was a descendant of that family of settlers. The tavern owner got the Native American to go with him up into the monitor -- an enclosed lookout area on the top of buildings and homes that enabled folks to see ships coming in from sea.

Needless to say, the Native American was never seen alive again. But apparently his ghost was frequently seen in the monitor, and the only way the ghost could be purged was to remove the monitor from the building.

That tavern sat on the corner of Main Street and Bow Street. The original building is no longer there. The spot is now occupied by Linda Bean's Maine Lobster, where Cliff and I sat by the fire from my last post.

This is how it all looks today.

Linda Bean's Maine Kitchen is the brick building
on the right

I fully understand the benefit of living in the present moment. Yet history has always intrigued me.

You?