A historic tour was held at the High Street Cemetery in Bridgton on Halloween to honor the various historical figures buried within. Rory Sweeting / Lakes Region Weekly

The Bridgton Historical Society celebrated Halloween by hosting its second annual historical graveyard tour. The tour took place at High Street Cemetery, which is the oldest in Bridgton, laid out in 1791. Although 939 burials are recorded to have taken place, the true number of dead lying in the cemetery likely far exceeds 1,000, due to the amount of broken tombstones and other unmarked graves, according to Bridgton Historical Society.

The tour guide, Mike Davis, is the assistant director and outreach coordinator of the historical society, and has a strong personal connection to both Bridgton’s written history and its haunted lore. He has been involved with the historical society since he was 12, and saw the graveyard tour as a way to make a childhood dream of his, hearing the dead of Bridgton’s cemeteries tell their stories, come to life. Speaking to the Lakes Region Weekly, he said that he looked at over a dozen graves with pictures to find where the dead could “tell their stories through him.”

“It is an honor to present the history of our town to the people of our town, because Bridgton is a special place,” said Davis, noting that Bridgton has a large repertoire of historical records compared to other Lakes Region towns.

Davis’ other main connection to the graveyard comes from living in an allegedly haunted home. Previous residents reported sightings such as levitating teacups and strange apparitions, while Davis himself recalled seeing a door unlocking and opening by itself just a few days prior to the tour. In fact, at one point, when the house was serving as a bed and breakfast, some visited explicitly seeking a haunted experience.

One of the graves visited on the tour was that of Dr. John H. Kimball, whose ghost is said to be the one haunting Davis’ house. A descendant of the town’s first settlers, Kimball served as a field doctor during the Civil War. After briefly being sent home due to catching malaria in Florida, he returned to service, even serving at Appomattox during Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender. In later decades, he was a personal physician to the Hawaiian royal family, where he helped determine the cause of leprosy. When the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown, Kimball returned to Bridgton, where he became a pioneer in the world of skin grafting, helped save many of the library’s books, tossed out a solid silver baseball for local youth teams, and served as “the very portrait of an active country doctor.”

However, there was a darker side to Kimball’s genius. Kimball strove to give each apprenticed doctor serving under him a skeleton for their offices. All of these skeletons were taken from robbed graves. In September 1869, this came to an end when Kimball attempted to harvest a recently dead man, but was discovered and forced to flee. This led to rumors of Kimball performing dark experiments on the dead. Eventually, an angry mob came to Kimball’s house, and he lured them away, allowing his associates to dispose of the dead.

Other spirits buried at High Street Cemetery include Dr. Nathaniel Pease, a devoted abolitionist. Together with Parson Joseph Fessenden, whose grave was part of the previous tour, he worked as part of the Underground Railroad, the two of them facing down violent threats to support the abolitionist cause. Serving as a state representative under the Whig and Republican parties, he wrote fiery letters against slavery, and even wrote to former President John Quincy Adams, encouraging him to do more against slavery. Although he died at just 64, Pease lived long enough to see the 13th Amendment end the institution of slavery.

Opposing Pease and Fessenden was the “honorable” Nathaniel S. Littlefield Esq., who was at one time one of the most powerful men in Maine. Former president of the Maine Senate, and having served in the U.S. House of Representatives, Littlefield was a deep supporter of slavery, to the point where Davis was befuddled and horrified by the way that a Maine Yankee fought for it harder than many southerners.

Littlefield led armed mobs against Pease and Fessenden, built his house to resemble a plantation, and while in the Maine Senate voted down resolutions to make Maine a refuge for runaway slaves.

His pro-slavery efforts culminated in 1850, when he described his vote in favor of the Fugitive Slave Act as the vote he was most proud of. During the Civil War, he was a proud Copperhead, a northerner loyal to the South, openly trying to sabotage the Union war effort, and even telling the grieving mother of a dead soldier that it was good her son had died. When Littlefield died, the townsfolk said “the devil had come to claim an account long overdue.”

One of the more tragic figures mentioned on the tour was John Sharron. The son of a Scottish mother and an absent French father, Sharron volunteered to fight in the Civil War at just 14 years old. A decade later, he went west to fight in the Indian Wars, and was one of the soldiers who discovered the gruesome remains of Custer’s cavalry at Little Bighorn. From there, he went out into the Black Hills, killing any Native American he could find, and being forced to shoot and eat his own horse for survival. His final turning point was the massacre of a Native American village, after which he left the army and turned to alcoholism.

Sharron returned to Bridgton a broken man, running into trouble with the law and abusing an old man in his care. Since his abuse could not be proven, he was awarded the man’s farm, leaving the old man homeless. He then drank himself into an early grave, his family was unable to afford a tombstone, and a wooden marker was replaced by a marble tombstone last year thanks to the efforts of Davis and the historical society. Davis said Sharron’s story is a tragic one, of a man who could easily have gotten help had he been born a century or more later.

Another notable person buried at the cemetery is Major Henry A. Shorey, a veteran of the Civil War’s Louisiana campaign, holds a legendary status in Bridgton’s history. After the war, he arrived in Bridgton to find a town in need of a newspaper, and founded the Bridgton News, one of the oldest weekly publications in Maine, which Davis writes a weekly column for. Shorey was a patriarch of the community, and always strove to set a good example for local children, even going to church long after he went deaf.

In his later years, Shorey would don his major’s hat to greet children leaving school, leading flag-carrying children to the park, showing old cannons and Gatling guns, and sharing wartime stories. The picture at his grave, rather than showing a young soldier or an intrepid journalist, shows him as the respected grandfatherly figure he wanted to be remembered as.

One of Shorey’s most famous quotes regarding local journalism goes as follows: “Newspapers, by enhancing the value of property in the neighborhood, and giving the localities in which they are published a reputation abroad, benefit all … A good-looking, lively, thriving sheet helps property, gives a character to locality, and is in many respects a (desirable) public convenience. If from any cause the matter in the local or editorial columns should not be up to your standard, do not cast it aside and pronounce it good for nothing, until satisfied that there has been no more labor bestowed upon it than is paid for. If you want a good readable sheet, it must be supported. The local paper is the power that moves the people.”