Seth Anthony House (c. 1740)
Ellen Brady Finn Kelley, daughter of Francis Brady, former Assistant Headmaster of Portsmouth Abbey (then Priory) School, offers us a delightful glimpse into family life in the “haunted house” known to them as Poltergeist Hollow. Her account identifies the place as the Freeborn House, though it historically is identified as the Seth Anthony House of 1740, the Freeborns being early settlers on adjacent property. It lies just downhill from the monastery and is still used for faculty housing. It also was used as a field hospital during the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Rhode Island, situated not far from one of the central engagements at “Bloody Run.” We offer her story as a summer Archives column.
In the first year of the War, our family of seven moved into a farmhouse on the grounds of the small boarding school where my father taught. There were twelve rooms in all, but the oldest part of the house, four rooms and a staircase, were built around a central chimney so large that our father could stand up in the living room fireplace. It had been built in 1720 by a farmer named Gideon Freeborn. Gideon and his wife were buried in a little graveyard on the bank of a nearby pond, where we and the boys and teachers of the school swam in summer and ice skated in winter. The gravestone of the Freeborns was a masterpiece of eighteenth century stonecutting, and it was surrounded by the small uncut stones of little Freeborns who had not survived in that harsh environment. Deep in the adjacent woods were the cellar and stone foundation of another house, surrounded by lilac and rose bushes, stone walls, and paths that we thought had been trodden by the Indians. That house was long gone, and the woods had crept back, spreading to the edge of the foundation.
Our house, however, had survived; and because of the hospitality of our parents, it was a magnet for our neighbors, the boys and their teachers, monks, alumni, and other visitors to the school and monastery. The kitchen was heated by a large black iron coal stove, and the guests who streamed past the berry patch and through the back door would invariably head for the stove and hold their hands over the round iron burners, drawn by their comfortable heat. The stove stood on four legs, so there was a warm space underneath, a haven for the various small creatures who, like our human guests, found their way into our kitchen. In March, during the lambing, Dom Hilary, the monk who ran the Priory Farm, would often bring us an orphan lamb. We would settle it into a blanket-lined box under the stove and feed it baby formula with a lamb bottle. Those lambs really knew how to let us know when they were hungry. Once the farm hands brought us a litter of tiny rabbits who had been turned up by the plough that had cost them their mother. We tucked them into the box where the current mother cat fed her newborn kittens, and all the baby creatures thrived together. When the day came that the kittens could totter out of the box to the saucers of milk in front of the fridge, the bunnies hopped to the kitchen door, and we let them out into the garden. For weeks there after they would turn up at the door at twilight, looking for a handout, which we were happy to provide.
Yearbook dedication, 1955
Even our enormous orange “Maine shag” cat Barney, patriarch of our feline clan, had learned to open that back kitchen door. He would leap up, hook a paw around the door handle, and with the other paw pound on the thumb latch until the door swung open and he flew into the kitchen. Having startled the bystanders around the kitchen table, he would stalk to his place under the stove with an air of offended dignity.
Our friends called the house “Poltergeist Hollow”, and we must indeed have shared the premises with a family of those mischievous ghosts, for there were many manifestations of their presence. There were strange noises, day and night. Things fell from high shelves, windows slammed shut, doors swung open, and there were places in the oldest rooms that were always cold, even when fires blazed in the original four fireplaces.
Every evening our family trooped to the dinner table and stood behind our chairs. My father would take his place at the head of the table, and the door of the closet under the back stairs would swing open. “Good evening, Mr. Freeborn,” we would chorus. “Welcome.” I would close the door of the closet, my father would say grace, and after a great scraping of chairs we would all dig in to my mother’s excellent cooking.
Fortunately, “Mr. Freeborn” had no appetite, for I had a hungry group of siblings. My older sister and I were followed by three little brothers and, after the war, when I was twelve, a little sister. (She grew to be over five feet eight and delighted in flinging her arm over my shoulder and introducing me as her big sister.) Until I went to college, she occupied the little “keeping room” on the other side of the chimney and through a small door from my room, so that she had to go through my room to reach the outside world. For those five years, I was virtually her nanny.
My five siblings were all tall, athletic, blue-eyed and blond. I was the only one to inherit the meager stature and brown eyed coloring of two grandmothers. My mother was of the school of thought that insisted on clean plates; but, uncannily perceptive though she was, she never seemed to notice the circle of pets – our neurotic cocker spaniel Toby of the pleading eyes, and several generations of cats, who gathered silently around my feet each evening. They were especially numerous on Thursday, when the menu featured liver, no bacon or onions, just liver, and Friday, fish night. The rolled down cuffs of knee socks made handy little feeding troughs. Sometimes I wonder if she had simply given up the battle to fatten me up and decided to ignore the nightly gatherings. It was a strategy that saved face for both of us. Mother had spent childhood years in Japan and the Philippines in the care of a beloved amah named Su Ma San, and saving face was important to her.
My bedroom was one of the original four rooms, with two windows of twenty panes each, overlooking Narragansett Bay and the Mount Hope Bridge to the mainland of Rhode Island. On one of the panes of wavy, bubbly glass, there was a signature in a flourishing Spenserian hand, carved by a young woman with a diamond ring, in the nineteenth century. In spite of the steaming, clanking radiator and the nightly fire in my pretty fireplace, the room was never warm in the winter. The chill, however, was the doing not so much of supernatural beings as of the architecture. The fireplace had no damper in its chimney, which became an open window on the frigid New England weather. There were many mornings when I awoke with Toby lying across my feet, one or two cats around my neck, and my little sister tucked in against the small of my back. Thus we had all kept each other warm during those nights when the northeast wind howled like a poltergeist in the big old chimney.
Mrs. Brady presides in this iconic image of Manor House tea