The Nelly Butler Haunting

In the last winter of the 18th century, the Blaisdel (also spelled Blaisdell) family of Sullivan, a small settlement on Taunton Bay in what was then the District of Maine, began to hear sounds from beneath their house. According to the account later published by a local minister, the noises gave way in January 1800 to a voice that spoke to the family and said it belonged to Nelly Hooper Butler, the first wife of Captain George Butler. Nelly was a real woman: she is reported to have died in childbirth in about 1797, in her early twenties, and the baby died with her.

The voice, and then a pale figure, became the talk of the district. Family members, neighbours and visitors came to the cellar; some heard the voice, some said they saw a shape, and some saw nothing. The spirit was said to press a startling demand: that her widower marry the Blaisdels’ teenage daughter Lydia. George and Lydia married in the spring of 1800, and, according to the story, the spirit then foretold that Lydia would die after giving birth. Lydia did die in 1801, and her child died too. George later remarried and raised a family.

The case is known because of the Reverend Abraham Cummings, a Harvard-educated minister who lived in the area. He said he began as a doubter, attended the gatherings, took sworn statements from witnesses on both sides and described seeing the figure himself. His pamphlet, titled Immortality Proved by the Testimony of Sense, presents the events as evidence that the dead survive; an 1859 Portland edition is on Project Gutenberg, and sources differ on whether it first appeared in 1826. The scholar Marcus LiBrizzi, with researcher Dennis Boyd, later collected the family records and testimony in The Nelly Butler Hauntings: A Documentary History (2010) and showed that the events belong to Sullivan, not Machiasport, as many older retellings say.

The community was not united. Local accounts describe a long feud between Blaisdel and Butler, and the affair is said to have contributed to a split in the Sullivan Baptist congregation. Some contemporaries called the whole thing a trick by the Blaisdels to marry off a daughter. Today the story is one of the oldest documented ghost reports in American history, remembered in Maine as a ghost whose predictions came true, and as a reminder that real families, a young bride and a dead mother stood at its centre.

Reported knocking from a cellar, then a voice claiming to be a dead woman, then a luminous or white-clad figure seen by groups of people. Witnesses included family members, neighbours, doubters and the Rev. Abraham Cummings, who published their testimony.

The Blaisdel family’s home on Taunton Bay in Sullivan, Maine, and nearby fields and a road where large groups gathered; the main events fall between autumn 1799 and August 1800.

Nelly’s story is the subject of the scholarly book The Nelly Butler Hauntings, local history pages in Sullivan and Sorrento, Maine ghost anthologies and the historical novel The Gathering Room.