Ghosts, graveyards, witches, crimes and Salem: a recipe for a book launch

Listen up guys and ghouls! Neighborhood View’s Sam Baltrusis, author of the new book “13 Most Haunted Crime Scenes Beyond Boston,” writes about the things that go bump in the night. He assembled a motley crew of the area’s most haunted crime scenes in a show airing on MATV on Fridays at 10 p.m., Saturdays at 3 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. in October. He also penned a book perfect for the Halloween season. The 30 minute Halloween-themed TV show “13 Most Haunted Crime Scenes Beyond Boston” will be available to public access stations across the state by DVD or digital download on October 13. The Sea Witch smells like death. “It’s the paint,” joked one of the volunteers who greeted me as I clumsily stumbled aboard the historic USS Salem in Quincy. “There were hundreds of dead bodies on here during the earthquake in Greece in 1953 and many of them died from burns … so that could explain the peculiar smell as well.” One of the first things I was told when […]

Historical haunts in Malden? It’s a no-brainer. As Halloween creeps around the corner, Neighborhood View coordinator and “Ghosts of Boston: Haunts of the Hub” author Sam Baltrusis left no gravestone unturned in search of Malden’s most haunted. The city boasts a bone-chilling assortment of ghostly hot spots rumored to be stomping grounds for spirits … and not one of those El Diablo concoctions at Ferry Street Food & Drink. Speaking of the new restaurant formerly occupied by watering holes like Jimmy O’Keefe’s, the Shamrock Inn and No 9 Ale House, Ferry Street Food & Drink (118 Ferry St.) made headlines last summer about a resident ghost rumored to still claim his bar stool in the afterlife. According to lore, the left-behind ghost looked like John Candy’s “Uncle Buck” character. The spirit supposedly slipped and died in the basement when the space was Jimmy O’Keefe’s. Shannon Ladd, Ferry Street’s co-owner, claims she recently had a close encounter with the Uncle Buck ghost. “Your timing is impeccable because (not) until last night, we have had that hair […]

As the author of seven historical-based ghost books including “13 Most Haunted Crime Scenes Beyond Boston,” I hear all sorts of stories about alleged hauntings throughout New England. One of my readers, Michael Marciello, reached out to me about a haunting from his childhood home in Malden. As a kid, he called the off-limits haunted bedroom “the bad room.” I got chills as he recounted tales of his father being pinned to the bed by an unseen force and sounds—he later described as evil and potentially demonic—echoing from a room that was unoccupied … at least by the living. His mother ended up putting a lock on the bedroom’s door so he and his siblings would stay away from the paranormally active first-floor room.”It was always so cold,” he said, recalling the inexplicable temperature fluctuations in the bad room. “We thought it was an animal,” he said, claiming that he would smell sulphur which is an indication of an evil entity. When I posted Marciello’s account on social media, sociologist Michelle Willms talked about her […]