Ghosts in the Barrow
by Derek Gideon

There is a bump in the earth at the top of the hill off Miller Road, about a foot high. Grass and weeds envelop it. It resembles a tomb, a small barrow on the border between my lawn and the surrounding woodlot. A dark blue path cuts around the barrow’s edge, forming grassy green ponds and lakes, interrupted by black walnut, maple, and oak trees. A white farmhouse with green shutters stands in one pond. In another stands a solitary, crumbling stone wall. In two others stand two green barns. By the larger barn, a rickety wooden fence encloses a rectangular, ten-by-five foot vegetable garden, unruly and overgrown.

This is my home, former farmland tucked away in the town of Rhinebeck. My parents, an actor/acting teacher and an actress writer from the city, moved here in 1989. In those days, the name Rhinebeck was more likely to summon images of corn and cows to Manhattanites than sushi and Pilates. It reminded my parents of the West Irish countryside where they’d spent their honeymoon, and where my mother had long dreamt of living on a farm. The walls of the house soon filled with country kitsch, images of chickens, sheep, pigs. The plates we ate from were Buck’s County plates, a pale yellow collection with black etchings of farmers tilling God-knows-what alongside happy, grass-munching cattle.

The house itself was once a tenant farmhouse at the Grove, the home of the son of Revolutionary War general Philip Schuyler, who lived in the mansion next door, now an apartment building. It stands about a five-minute drive away from the village of Rhinebeck down State Route 9G. When I was very young, I knew for sure the house was haunted. It was over 150 years old, so of course someone must have died there and remained. That would explain the silvery balls of light I saw dancing in my room one night, or the mysterious woman in an orange shawl hovering three feet off the ground by my bed.

I wasn’t the only one. My younger sister was often afraid to sleep in her room. My father had to check the window every night. My mother always thought it interesting that that room in particular had always bothered my sister. When my parents first bought the house, the walls of that room were covered with drug-inspired pictures of headless people from the time when the house had been inhabited by a Bard College professor and the old mansion next door had been a Bard dorm. It didn’t seem too wild a leap to think some presence might have remained.

Today, it is mostly children who believe in ghosts. As we grow older, our phantoms fade. But everyone leaves ghosts where they have lived. Nearby Lake Sepasco is named for the Sepasco Indians. The name comes from Sepascot—made up of sepuus, their word for a stream, and cot or coot, their word for a mouth. It refers to the mouth of the Landsman Kill, a stream that empties into the Hudson and runs by the bottom of the hill on which my house stands. I have walked along it many times, listening to the same rush of water the Sepasco did. The name Sepasco is a ghost of the lake’s inhabitants, just as the name kill for a stream is a ghost of New York’s Dutch colonists. Rhinebeck is a phantom of nostalgia from the German Palatines, who first settled the town.

I too will one day be a ghost. When some future inhabitant finds a barrow-like bump in the earth, they see my family’s phantom on the land. The barrow could be an ancient part of the land’s shape, but I’ve lived here, so I know its story. For many years, my family kept a pumpkin patch. We would plant together every year, then use the pumpkins for Halloween. One year, our pumpkins flourished, and a single vine climbed the pine tree nearby. The pumpkin that grew on it developed into an egg-shape, gravid, ready at any moment to fall to earth and spread its seeds. But after that one year, our pumpkin patch was never fruitful again, so we abandoned it altogether, leaving only a barrow that soon became covered in grass.

When I was a toddler, a woman in her seventies pulled up to our house in her car and told my parents she had lived and worked here during World War II, back when it was still a farm. She and her sister and brother-in-law lived in what is now our house. Some other farm hands lived in the white cottage that connects to the larger of the green barns. That barn, she told us, was where they kept goats, pigs, and chickens. In the other they’d kept a tractor and equipment. The crumbling stone wall had once been the largest barn, where the cows lived, but it had burned down in a fire. The things she remembered were gone, but their remnants were ghosts of the farm that once was.

Dutchess County has particularly rocky soil, so farmers tilling their fields over generations have built rough-cut stone walls like the one that separates my house from the old Schuyler mansion. The tradition continues whenever we dig through our vegetable garden’s soil to plant. We always turn up broken stone and brick. But that’s not all we’ve turned up there. My dad gained a student one day when a young man, like the woman before, came to our house because he had once lived there. His family had rented the cottage as their home after it stopped being a working farm. He was a young actor, and when he found out my dad was an acting teacher, came to study with him. When my dad first cleared the brush in that spot and began digging the garden beds, he kept turning up small plastic toys—little plastic soldiers, mostly. He mentioned this to the student, who said the toys were his own that he’d lost there as a child. We kept unearthing more and more, and over the years we returned them to him. We had seen a glimpse of his childhood as surely as though its ghost had appeared playing in the garden before our eyes.

A legend says that when General Schuyler was here visiting his son, he found a walnut on the ground. Since there were no walnut trees nearby, he assumed a squirrel must have dropped it, and nudged it into the ground with his cane. It became the Grove’s famous black walnut tree. By our house, there is another large black walnut where I used to swing, perhaps a child of General Schuyler’s tree. More black walnuts, mere saplings when my parents came, grow around it. They are now a shady grove. They’ve killed what was once grass, changing pasture to moss. By the old storage barn, which we now use as a garage, a cluster of oaks has done the same. Cows could not graze here now.

Meanwhile, we’ve gotten lax about taking care of our garden. The beds are now so choked with weeds that the garden looks like a fenced-off piece of meadow. All over our home, in spring, crocuses and grape hyacinths bloom, planted by my mother the year I was born. Perhaps when humans no longer inhabit this place, when the house is empty and even the perpetual hum of Route 9G has gone silent, the flowers and weeds will establish their dominion. A wild field will stand, where maple, walnut, and oak continue to rush in, shading and killing grass, rebuilding forest around the decaying remains of the house. Even ghosts must fade. To one side of that field might sit a slight bump in the earth, no more significant than a heartbeat. A melting tomb, consumed by wild grasses.