In Brief
A drowned sea captain was said to walk a Plymouth mansion in 1733 — moaning, rapping a cane, opening doors. The tenants fled. Then the owner, a magistrate who scorned ghosts, took them to court over the haunting and lost.
The Full Story
In January 1733, the family renting Captain Thompson Phillips's mansion in Plymouth, Massachusetts began hearing a dying man in the walls. Not a person — a sound. The death-moans of someone in his last hour, and underneath it the tap of a cane striking the plaster, working its way along the rooms no one was in.
The tenants knew whose cane it was. Thompson Phillips, the wealthy captain who'd built the house around 1725, had drowned in a storm sailing to Jamaica. His widow died of smallpox not long after, and the empty mansion passed to Josiah Cotton, a Harvard man, a magistrate, and a missionary who rented it out as a landlord. The renters said the drowned captain had come back to the house he built.
It got worse before they left. Doors swung open on their own. Cabinet drawers slid out. And a neighbor named Mary Little stood outside one night and watched "a pale blewish light" hang in an upstairs window for nearly half an hour before it went dark. This was the strange part: the haunting wasn't a private thing whispered inside the family. The whole neighborhood could see it from the road.
By that October the tenants were gone, swearing the house couldn't be lived in, and Cotton couldn't find a soul willing to take their place. By some accounts one of them, a joiner named John Clarke, had quarreled with Cotton weeks earlier, and the bad blood ran deeper than the rent.
And Cotton was a Calvinist who did not believe in ghosts. He believed the talk was killing his property's value, so he sued his former tenants for slander, and on March 5, 1734, the case went before the Plymouth County Inferior Court of Common Pleas. It's often called the first haunted-house lawsuit in American history.
He lost. The jury sided with the tenants, and on appeal Cotton was ordered to pay their court costs. A man taken to court by a ghost he refused to believe in, and made to pay for the privilege of doubting it. He spent his later years on an unfinished essay he titled "Some Observations Concerning Witches, Spirits, & Apparitions."
The whole quarrel is still readable. The depositions survive. Cotton's diary survives. A historian built a peer-reviewed article around it in 1998, which makes a colonial ghost story one of the best-documented hauntings in New England. And the man who wrote the most of it down was Cotton: the skeptic, the one who took a ghost to court and lost.
