Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf Read Online Free PDF Page A

all the workers who discovered it to relive battles from the King Philip’s War; a couple who took a memento from another disturbed site were troubled when a ghost dressed like a Native American kept visiting them at night. Time after time, witnesses within the Triangle report running into spirits who they identify as Wampanoag. Some are brief encounters, while others last years.
    A news article in 2004 reported that an unidentified Wampanoag spiritualist said the murder and violence in the Freetown State Forest, which has made it infamous on a national scale, would continue until the belt was returned. It was the first time anyone made such a claim on the record. In the years that followed, others have made the connection between the violence and the paranormal activity there. The tribe now uses the forest as a reservation, so it would make sense that any curse would be concentrated in the place they now call home.
    Violence and the supernatural made the forest their home long before the tribe officially made it their center. It does not end with rumors, either. So many of the ghosts in that forest—and there are many that walk among the trees—are those of Native Americans who have died. Those souls might be trapped by the belt or its agents, but one thing is certain: The hauntings show little sign of stopping.
    Mediums and people who talk to the dead tell a similar story. The Triangle will continue to be a source of unexplained paranormal activity, as well as a magnet for darker elements, until a balance is restored. Even some who do not know the history cite the belt specifically as the weight that can tip the scales back. Officials within the tribe keep quiet about their views of the paranormal significance of the belt. They support the efforts to return the belt as a means of restoring their history, not to make the ghosts go away. Either way, the spirits stay and make themselves known.

    Profile Rock, the haunted location where the belt was thought to exchange hands.
    Both sides are looking for something different. People in the paranormal field are looking for a way to understand their relationship with the paranormal. For them, it is about the life they have now, as well as the life they may have later.
    For the Wampanoag, the need is more basic. They know their past only through the eyes of the people who turned their backs on the old way. They spend time trying to retranslate a history they feel they only partly know, like trying to unravel a hand-knitted sweater stitch by stitch to make another one that looks almost the same. They do it through words now, not quite sure how to tell their tale in shells, and maybe even a bit scared that a record so fragile could once again be taken away.



Moving Moments
    T he din of the graduation dinner fades away, as the father chimes on his wine glass. He says a few proud words about his son and takes out a shiny pocket watch and hands it to him. Both are beaming as he tells how he received it from his father, who inherited it from his father, as if most of the people in the crowd don’t already to know the story. He comments on how the graduate is now a man, and the people erupt in applause. The watch will live for another generation.
    If any items hold the soul of a person, even of a generation, they would be family heirlooms. They are automatic histories, not bought in a store or a pawn shop, but passed down through the family and teeming with the stories of that person’s life—and often with the weight of several lives. It is not just about the age of the item. The object is meant to be a link to the past, often a trigger for stories about the dead, and it is the act of passing it down that may actually attach the spirit to it. When that heirloom is lost or abused, or the person owning it somehow needs to hear about his or her heritage, something is triggered.
    There is the story of a man who was known to crush rattlesnakes with his favorite pair of boots. One day