All information is courtesy of the article “Still Among the Living” by former English Teacher Sarah L. Williams in the Spring 1993 issue of Deerfield (the alumni magazine).

In the 19th century, the large yellow house on the south end of Main Street once housed the Allen family and maybe still does.

Julia A. Allen, born in 1837, lived a life marked by a series of disappointments and tragedies. At the age of 19, her first husband, Howland Cowing, died in a New York City hotel room. Her second husband, George A. Allen, known to be “very mysterious,” did not fare much better. Perhaps he was too mysterious, so mysterious that he disappeared with no explanation. After her father’s death in 1871, she returned home to the yellow house on Main Street with no one else. In the following years, Allen spent her days isolated and burdened with her aging mother’s illnesses. Eventually, when their fortune dwindled, the Allen family was forced to sell their home.

Julia Allen spent all her unfulfilling final years constrained to the house, and in her death, she remains there still. She haunts creaking floors and peeled walls as a spirit. In the summer of 1973, college students boarded in the house, then owned by Donald Friary. After one student’s inexplicable encounter of feeling “touched” by someone while alone, the group decided to hold a seance. With playful seriousness and lighthearted curiosity, they attempted to summon the ghost.

Gathered around the dining room table, the group noticed an eerie, hovering spot of light beginning to form into a moving shadow. They followed it from the dining room, down the front hall, and to the door. Friary recounted in the article, “Finally, the person whose back was immediately to the door realized that everyone was looking beyond him. He turned around and screamed.” The student’s scream launched the whole room into pandemonium and the ghost disappeared. Later, when some students mustered the courage to reenter the room, the ghost materialized on a panel adjacent to the fireplace. In the midst of the confusion, the dining room table was suddenly turned over completely, though no one admitted to moving it.

While the apparition’s motivations remains a mystery, Friary acknowledged that after two decades of haunting, Julia was “as much a part of their existence as any living resident.” However, Friary does not belive Julia is solely benign: “Ghosts cannot hurt you, I always tell people, but Julia is the most unfriendly ghost. She is always looking the other way, but she is there.”

Although she may be the most active, Julia Allen is only one of many spirits that haunt Main Street. Arthur Hoyt’s ghost, eternally attached to his grand masterpiece, still wanders Chapin house. Mysterious voices and crashes are heard during silent nights in the John Williams dormitory. Cora Carslile, the owner of the Deerfield Inn in the 1900s, still roams its halls. Through the walls of the Pocumtuck Dormitory echoe the cries of Sarah Smith’s children, hidden away during the 1704 massacre.

Deerfield’s ghosts, or the stories of its ghosts, are more than spirits. They serve as enduring remnants and reminders of the town’s history–literal echoes of the past.