It’s October, which means everybody wants to talk about ghosts, monsters and supernatural things for the Halloween season. We here at the Bangor Daily News have been doing it all month long. It’s tradition.
For some reason, the Boston Globe decided to glance north for a roundup of ghost stories from Maine published Friday. While it did get a few good ones on the list — the Strand Cinema in Skowhegan and the Seguin Island Light Station off the coast of Phippsburg have long been considered haunted — there are others that don’t pass the spook test.
Namely, the idea that 1930s gangster Al Brady haunts Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor. That’s the first we here at the Bangor Daily News have heard of it. And we’re literally in Bangor.
The Globe article also notes that, while it’s not “haunted,” per se, Bangor’s famous statue of Paul Bunyan is, at the very least, unnerving — mostly because of the fact that the fictional version of the statue features prominently in Stephen King’s “It,” and because it claims that Paul’s smile is creepy.
Is Paul’s smile creepy? We don’t think so. We think he’s handsome. And we certainly don’t find him scary. Admittedly, we’re biased. It’s unclear if the Boston Globe has ever visited Bangor or if its staffers just watched “It”.
As for Al Brady, for those unfamiliar with the history, Brady was an armed robber who in the 1930s was declared a “public enemy” by the FBI. He met his demise in Bangor on Oct. 12, 1937, when the owner of downtown’s Dakin’s Sporting Goods tipped off the FBI that Brady and his “gang” were in town, trying to buy guns. The G-Men ambushed them on Central Street in a spectacular public shootout that saw Brady and one of his accomplices shot dead on the street.
No one claimed Brady’s body, so he was buried in an unmarked grave at Mount Hope Cemetery. In 2007, on the 70th anniversary of the shootout, a group of local residents put a headstone on that grave and held a brief ceremony.
It’s all quite a story. But one thing we, as Bangor residents, have never heard is that Al Brady haunts Mount Hope Cemetery. If anything, he’d haunt the former location of Dakin’s Sporting Goods at 25 Central St., where the eagle-eyed store owner Shep Hurd reported him to the authorities and outside of which he met his bloody end. It’s now the site of The Briar Patch bookshop, and over the years local history enthusiasts have actually reenacted the Brady shootout at that site. That’s enough to make any spirit restless, we’d think.
If anyone’s going to haunt Mount Hope Cemetery, it would probably be the hundreds of Civil War soldiers from the Bangor area who died in battle or from disease and were buried there in two special lots.
The Globe article also points out that Fort Knox State Historic Site in Prospect is well-known by ghost enthusiasts as a haunted site in Maine, despite the fact that the historic 19th century fort never saw a single minute of combat and was only manned by soldiers twice in its 180-year history.
It also mentions the Fright at the Fort, a haunted experience at Fort Knox that for more than 20 years terrified Mainers. Last month, the Friends of Fort Knox group announced the long-running fright fest was canceled. Those ghosts — pretend though they were — won’t be haunting anybody anymore.
