An early 19th-century hospital. A ghostly fire station protector. Vestiges of a 1990s murder.
You might think you know Presque Isle, but you may not know some of the unexplained phenomena in Aroostook County’s largest city.
When the Presque Isle Historical Society, which maintains two museums and offers tours of local landmarks, invited paranormal investigators north a few years ago, no one knew what they’d find. The results spawned surprises the society revisits every year, especially as Halloween rolls around. Come on, jump into a haunted hearse and follow along.
Wait. Haunted hearse?
For many years, the society has held haunted lantern tours, both by car and on foot, where they visit a few places around the city and share “slightly scary, kind of creepy” tales, secretary-treasurer Kim Smith said.
But they wanted to do more. They found inspiration in such places as Bangor, which offers tours of the Mt. Hope Cemetery, and Salem, Massachusetts, which has built a tourism industry around centuries of stories of witches, pirates and more. They invited the South Paris-based Maine Paranormal Investigation Team to visit 20 sites around the city in 2018.
“Presque Isle dates from 1828 and we have a lot of Victorian-era homes,” Smith said. “They’d never been this far north, and they came up two weekends in a row. They had so much fun they came back.”
Their stipulation was that they didn’t want to know anything about the places they were to visit. They wanted to make their own conclusions, which they shared with the society that fall. The results sparked the city’s first Haunted Hearse Tour in 2019, a tradition that’s grown in popularity each year, especially at Halloween.
Yes, it does include an old hearse. Historical society president Craig Green acquired the 1996 Cadillac from the Strong-Hancock Funeral Home in Damariscotta, which was going to discard it.
The tours stop at 13 sites and allow people to follow along in their cars, with their radios tuned so they can hear Smith narrate.
“In my research, I had found no ghost stories from our past,” Smith said.
But the investigators posited there were, indeed, eerie echoes in the city. Here are just a few.
An actual home
The team came equipped with dowsing rods and a pendulum, which are supposed to react with movement, and high-tech gear such as infrared cameras and a 360-degree motion sensor, Smith said.
They also used a spirit box, which scans radio frequencies and creates white noise, according to Amazon.com. Spirits can supposedly communicate audible messages through the noise.
The first place Smith took investigators to was her own home. They described two spirits, whom Smith recognized as her mother and great-grandmother, she said.
A team member told Smith she had an impression of an object with scalloped gold edges and a red stone, which was in an upstairs bedroom. Smith said the description matched a bracelet that had belonged to an ancestor, but told them it was downstairs.
But when she went to her jewelry box, it wasn’t there, she said.
She found it in that upstairs bedroom, hanging behind a closet door.
Historic fire station
The team went next to Presque Isle’s former fire station on Church Street, which the society now owns and uses for tours and storage.
“We had a volunteer for the society who, every time he would walk into the building and use the staircase, would talk to a ghost. He’d say, ‘Hi, Mr. Ghost,’” Smith said.
As they explored inside, the investigators stopped at the same spot on the staircase. Using the spirit box, they suggested the entity’s name was Xavier. He had been in the Army and was there protecting firemen.
Upstairs, Smith watched as an investigator used an infrared camera. An image of a tall, big man moved quickly across the viewer. She speculated it may have been “Big Jim” Cullen, whose handcuffs hang in the old fire station.
Cullen, famously the only person ever lynched in Aroostook County, was accused of stealing a pair of boots in Mapleton and murdered two lawmen before being killed by a lynch mob on April 30, 1873.
The old hospital
Before A.R. Gould Hospital, now part of the Northern Light Health System, opened on Academy Street, Presque Isle started a hospital in a Second Street house and built a new facility next to it in 1920, which is now City Hall.
The adjacent house was converted into a dormitory for nurses, and an underground tunnel connected to the hospital, Smith said.
While touring the building, one investigator received an impression of a young woman being assaulted in a tunnel. Another reported hearing a voice screaming, “My baby, don’t take my baby” when they visited the City Council chambers on the third floor — which was where the maternity ward used to be.
“The assumption they made was that, perhaps, the woman who had been assaulted had a baby and they took it away from her,” Smith said. “That’s an assumption, of course. We have no proof.”
A murder and a mystery
One of the more famous tales involves the A.M. Smith building on the corner of Main and State streets and a mysterious murder.
Smith led the paranormal team around the building’s perimeter. The sunny day should have revealed their reflections in a window, she said.
“But that’s not what came out in the photos. In the photos, you see what appears to be a woman wearing a shroud or hoodie,” Smith said. “At that point, they asked me to tell them what was going on.”
George Jaime of Presque Isle owned a pawn shop in that building. His girlfriend, Starlette Vining, disappeared in 1998. More than a decade later, a firefighter inspecting the building noted a brand-new furnace and an old one discarded in a corner. He opened the old furnace door and saw what he thought were bones, Smith said. That kickstarted the investigation into Vining’s disappearance and suspected death.
The case riveted Presque Isle. Jaime was arrested in 2012. At his 2013 trial, he was accused of murdering Vining, 38, in 1998, then dismembering and burning her body, the Bangor Daily News reported. His son and another man testified Jaime told them he stabbed and dismembered Vining, and they helped Jaime burn the body.
A jury found Jaime guilty in November 2013, and in December he was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Jaime appealed the following year, but Maine’s high court upheld the conviction, the BDN reported.
Jaime died last year at the Maine State Prison.
If you’re in for more eerie stories of Presque Isle’s past, you’ll have a chance on Halloween night, when the historical society will host three haunted hearse tours.
Tours will take place at 6 p.m., 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. and cost $10 per person. Reservations are required by emailing pihistoricalsociety@hotmail.com.
People are flocking to events where they can have adventures or encounters, Smith said.
“Experiential events are the museum and history trend today,” she said. “To be able to offer that is really nice for us.”