It’s that time of year again… Another original tale of ghosts and spirits.
1925:
Dick Henry and Walter Nesbitt began working together on the Easton Lake project in early 1924. The two young engineers soon became fast friends, and Dick became a regular dinner guest of Walter and his wife Madeline. Prohibition was in full swing, but the trio enjoyed partaking in their bootlegged liquor on a regular basis. Walter drank more than the others and would often fall asleep before Dick said goodnight to Madeline and returned to his one-room apartment in Bridgeport.
In early 1925, Madeline and Dick began an illicit affair, as an increasingly inebriated Walter would usually pass out on the couch shortly after dinner. By May, Madeline was complaining to Dick that Walter would sometimes become abusive when they were alone together and that she was then seriously considering leaving him.
As the summer wore on, the two lovers began discussing a future together without Walter. It was a hot and humid evening in July when Madeline first suggested to Dick that she would be better off if Walter was dead – it seemed that he had recently purchased a rather hefty life insurance policy and if he were to suddenly pass away, Madeline would receive a check for $50,000, a hefty sum of money in 1925.
Madeline was a beautiful woman, and Dick was willing to do just about anything to please her. By the first week in August, the pair was discussing how to eliminate Madeline’s husband and making his demise look like an unfortunate accident. As the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company was then beginning to pour the concrete that would become the new dam at Easton Lake, Dick came up with a plan to have Walter struck and killed by one of the large hoppers that delivered loads of concrete to the central core of the new dam. Large derricks and multiple cables carried the hoppers several hundred feet to their intended destination, and it was Dick Henry who oversaw their operation, while Walter managed the crew on the dam’s superstructure as the concrete was poured from above. Dick was absolutely certain that he could direct one of those hoppers so that it would strike Walter and knock him into the mix as it was poured into one of the forms. If the weight of the hopper striking him didn’t kill him, falling into several feet of heavy wet concrete certainly would.
On Wednesday, September 9th, the first load of the day containing six cubic yards of wet concrete left the mixing plant on the western side of the new dam. Dick knew that Walter had too much to drink on Tuesday evening and that he probably wouldn’t have been quite as vigilant as he should have been on Wednesday morning. The hopper, carrying over twelve tons of concrete should have slowed just before it reached the form where the pour was to take place, but Dick made certain it was going faster than it should have. The left leading edge caught Walter just as he turned to see it coming and he was thrown into the form just as the hopper opened and dumped its load.
Walter Nesbitt never had a chance.
The coroner’s inquest deemed Walter’s death an unfortunate accident. Madeline and Dick wisely stayed at arm’s length for the better part of a year before they began see each other in the open. They dated for about a year and finally married in June of 1928.
1970:
Dick Henry was about to retire as the Vice President of Construction at the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company. He’d been with the company for just over forty-six years. He and Madeline were living on Old Oak Road in Easton. Madeline never talked about Walter’s death; it was as if he had never existed. Dick, on the other hand, had never been able to get the image of Walter being swept off that scaffolding and into the wet concrete out of his mind.
Over the years, Dick had often felt Walter’s presence whenever he was near the dam at Easton Lake. Early on, he had discussed his feelings with Madeline, but she had dismissed them as simple pangs of guilt from Dick’s over-active conscience.
“You need to stop feeling guilty. He deserved what he got. If you hadn’t handled the situation, he might have beaten me to death in one of his drunken fits of rage. Just get over it, Dick. I don’t want to hear about Walter anymore!”
It wasn’t that easy for Dick. On several occasions, he saw an apparition that appeared to be Walter. He sometimes heard a voice in the darkness when he was alone. He was all but certain that Walter’s spirit was out there somewhere, and that spirit knew that Walter’s death had been no ordinary industrial accident.
It was Thursday, August 27th; Dick’s final day with the BHC. Jeanne Collins, his executive assistant of the past eleven years, was going over the details of retirement requirements just before noon.
“You still need to see Louise in Personnel and finalize your pension paperwork, Mister Henry.”
“I’m retiring today, what else do they need to know?” he asked.
“Evidently you have a choice of taking a larger amount until you pass away, or take less but then have your wife continue to collect after your death…”
“Isn’t Madeline the beneficiary of my life insurance policy?”
“Yes, but your present policy is paid for by the company and terminates upon your retirement. If you want coverage after today, you’d need to contact your own insurance agent.”
“Can’t this all be done sometime tomorrow? Some of the guys want to take me to lunch at the Algonquin Club today. I’m guessing we probably won’t return to the office before closing.”
“Your pension payments won’t begin until next month, so as long as you select which option you want before September 1st there won’t be a problem.”
Dick Henry left his office that day around noon; he fully expected to return the following day to complete his pension paperwork, but that would never occur.
Lunch at the Algonquin turned into cocktails and then dinner. It was nearly midnight by the time Dick had been toasted multiple times and many stories of his past exploits at the BHC had been told.
Dick would usually avoid taking Park Avenue all the way home to Easton, but that night, he was feeling tipsy and driving past the dam at Easton Lake was the shortest and least heavily traveled route.
Walter Nesbitt had been on his mind since earlier in the evening when one of his colleagues at the club had mentioned that unfortunate incident back in ’25.
“Not only did Dick knock off his best pal, but he also ended up marrying poor Walt’s widow,” recalled old Doc Burrows the head chemist for the water company. The comment had been offered in jest, but Dick knew just how true those words had been.
At one point during his twenty-minute ride to Easton, Dick thought he heard Walter’s voice on one of those Texaco commercials on the radio, “Trust the man who wears the star.”
“Leave me alone, Walter!” he yelled as he pounded the dash and switched stations.
As Dick approached the dam that night, he felt a sudden chill in the late summer air. Suddenly, a whispery white apparition appeared in the middle of the roadway ahead. Instead of hitting the brake, Dick pressed down on the accelerator and sped through the misty image. It had been nearly 45 years since he had murdered Walter. But if that image was Walter’s ghost, he wanted to wipe it off the face of the earth for good.
Dick never saw the disabled Texaco tanker truck that was blocking the right lane ahead. The explosion could be heard at the police station on Morehouse Road and the ensuing fire lit up the sky as far away as Monroe.
Dick had no idea of what day it was when he finally was able to open his left eye. He felt no pain, but he was unable to move. The room was dark, but there appeared to be a hazy apparition standing by the window. When he was finally able to focus on the image before him, he was certain it was Walter. Dick tried to talk but couldn’t – there were tubes down his throat so that he could breathe.
“Don’t bother trying to talk, Dickie boy. You’re a bit beyond that. Death by fire is almost as bad as drowning. I did drown, you know. That hopper knocked me into the concrete, but I was still conscious. Just before I went in, I looked up at you and saw it in your eyes. You meant for that to happen. You and Madeline wanted me dead.
“You were out as soon as your head hit that windshield a couple of weeks ago. Too bad you weren’t wearing your seatbelt; you could have felt your flesh being ravaged by that fire. That would have been a more fitting end for you. Instead, you’re lying here in the burn unit at Yale, wrapped up like a mummy. Second and third degree burns over about ninety percent of your body. The doctors here give you about a fifty percent chance of surviving… but they don’t know what I know; and they can’t control what will happen to you like I can.
“But as it turns out, you staying alive long enough to know that Madeline is going to be an indigent widow will give my poor soul even more satisfaction than simply being the catalyst of your demise.
“You were in such a rush to celebrate your retirement, that you neglected to choose how your pension would be paid. Too bad for poor Madeline that she won’t get a dime since you never opted to have her receive the payments after your death. By not making that choice, the pension defaults to payments for only as long as you live – which as you can probably guess by now, isn’t going to be for much longer. Upon your death, that pension ends. You also neglected to take out a new life insurance policy. Since you officially retired at the end of the day on the 27th, your company life insurance policy ended at midnight. I don’t know who coined the phrase, ‘Never put off until tomorrow, what you can do today,’ but in your case, truer words were never said.
“The cost of your care here has already eclipsed the value of your house and what little you’ve been able to put into savings. Madeline always was quite the spender; but you know that now. It was just one of the reasons I drank too much when I was still breathing.
“I doubt you know what day today is… It’s 2:30 in the morning now, but the day is Wednesday, September the 9th. You do recall what happened on the 9th day of September back in 1925, don’t you? I’m sure that you do.
“Well, I can move on now. I have had the satisfaction of exacting my revenge. I can now rest in peace for the rest of eternity… eternity is a very long time, Dickie. You, on the other hand, will be headed to purgatory in a few hours – also for eternity. Your death won’t come until after Madeline arrives to visit you today. She’ll see that you’ve come out of your coma…it will give her just a little hope for your survival and recovery. But that hope will be fleeting. She’ll be both devastated and broke. You may have killed me, but it was her idea. “Just deserts” as they say. Perhaps you two will meet up again in your miserable afterlives. You certainly deserve each other.
“Goodbye and good riddance, Dickie.”
With that, Walter’s apparition suddenly disappeared. Had Dick imagined his presence, or had Walter’s spirit just paid him a final visit?
It was a little past 9 AM when Madeline arrived, and she was most pleased to see that Dick had finally regained consciousness. Perhaps he would survive after all.
Richard Henry’s heart stopped beating exactly twenty minutes later. Exactly forty-five years to the minute that he murdered Walter Nesbitt.
“Just deserts,” indeed.
Happy Halloween Easton Ghost Hunters!
