By Layla Kalinen
Eagle Times Staff
SPRINGFIELD, Vt. — When the Hartness House was built in 1904 for manufacturer and future Vermont governor James Hartness as a landmark of innovation, its underground tunnels served to link the home, workshop and an equatorial telescope he designed and built in the mansion’s front yard.
More than a century later, the home is now an inn, and the workshop no longer turns out inventions, but that doesn’t mean the 240-foot-long, 7-foot-tall tunnel is entirely quiet. Hauntings have been reported in the inn’s tunnels, common areas and even the Lindberg room, named by Hartness after his friend and fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Lindbergh, a great friend to Hartness, came to Springfield as the aviation giant toured the nation following his trans-Atlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis; he stayed as a guest at the house with his son, Charlie, after speaking at what is now Hartness State Airport.
While Springfield Historical Society Director Bunny Putnam notes there is no concrete evidence of any hauntings occurring at the house, others are less skeptical.
Alaura Hewey, founder of Springfield’s Déjà Vu Paranormal team, says she has received reports of hauntings and sightings. She categorizes the sightings, recorded in numerous online comments by guests, as minor and says her team is ready to investigate the inn when it isn’t booked with guests. Hewey, with over 20 years of professional paranormal investigations and five years leading Déjà Vu Paranormal, said guests have reported a chair rocking in a guest room believed to be the Lindbergh Room. The room has also been the source of speculation for many other reports of paranormal sights on travel blogs, including misplaced objects and static on telephones.
In November, Hewey’s group hosted a tour for her friend, Betty DuPont of New England Paranormal Investigators, and there were oddities observed, but nothing concrete enough to prove paranormal activity. She hopes to conduct a private overnight investigation.
“We walked everybody down to the end of the tunnel. … and when we were coming back, M.K. Harrellson, our co-founder, video recorder [and] investigator said she thought somebody got left behind because she heard somebody say, ‘Wait!, from behind her, Hewey recalled, “She went back down the tunnel thinking somebody down there was afraid to move, and she got all the way to the end of the tunnel and found there’s nobody there.”
Hewey says the team took it with a grain of salt, but it was still unusual.
“Then, when she was coming back, there was a skeleton holding a candle that was sitting near an opening that used to be a speakeasy. … She didn’t touch it or anything. After she got past it, they both fell and broke. I think what it was just Halloween decorations that they stored down there,” Hewey said.
There were two more occurrences that night that Hewey found odd, including an incident in the basement laundry room.
“We were using like a spirit box radio. We were getting we were getting a little girl’s voice, and then all of a sudden, there’s like a metal shelf in the middle of the room, with people on the tour all standing around it,” Hewey said, “It just started shaking. Like, you could clearly see everything on it like rattling and shaking, and nobody was touching it.”
For now, the inn’s living guests are taking priority,y and Hewey must wait for the inn to be empty before she can investigate further.
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