(Editor’s note: Looking Back is a new weekly column including news items reported 10 years ago in The Current, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.)

Issue of Oct. 25, 2001

Scarborough’s police and fire departments have dealt with several suspicious packages in town, and though they have not yet encountered anthrax spores, they are ready.

In the past two weeks, as anthrax scares have occurred in Westbrook and Portland, four suspicious packages or envelopes have arrived in the mail at Scarborough addresses, including Town Hall. None of them actually contained hazardous material, said Police Chief Robert Moulton.

Cape Elizabeth Police Chief Neil Williams said only one suspicious letter has been reported to his department. It turned out to be a thank-you note from a local resident. Another situation in which a postal carrier was concerned about a skin condition turned out to be a damp magazine cover that rubbed against his arm and shredded, Williams said.

A development company has reached an agreement with the corporation that owns Scarborough Downs, potentially laying the groundwork for one of the largest commercial developments in the state.

EDF Scarborough, LLC, has reached an agreement with Davric Maine Corp., the company that owns Scarborough Downs, to lease approximately 400 acres surrounding the harness racing track.

The Cape Elizabeth High School student government has recommended against a student petition which called for saying the Pledge of Allegiance over the loudspeaker system every day, instead of just Mondays, which now is the practice.

School principal Jeff Shedd said the student government thought the saying of the pledge would be more meaningful if it were not read every day.

Students had submitted a petition to the school’s student advisory council requesting daily reading of the pledge, as an expression of their patriotism.

Reading of the pledge in schools has been in the national news of late after the Madison, Wis., Board of Education voted to ban it. They believed the phrase “one nation under God” violated the separation of church and state. The outcry from the community and the nation was swift, and business conventions threatened to boycott Madison if the vote was not reversed.

Two classes of Scarborough third graders invaded the Scarborough Historical Society Oct. 22 to get a lesson in the real-life history of their town. In groups of five, the students passed through each teaching station.

One group learned about the native foods that were available to early settlers; another group learned about the history of Route 1 in Dunstan; one group learned about applecoring games and weaving; and another learned about tools and other household items used in various eras of the past. These items included a wire basket popcorn popper, an early bathtub and one of the first vacuum cleaners, which operated by pushing a pump up and down to create suction.

Scarborough’s Black Point Inn plays host not only to visitors from out of state, but from the realm of the paranormal, employees say.

The hotel, the last of close to a dozen of the original inns in Prouts Neck, has a lot of ghost stories surrounding it, according to housekeeping supervisor Angel Bechtold.

One recounts that a kitchen worker lived in the employees’dormitory above the barn, now the garage.

When the man’s fiance?e broke up with him, he hanged himself. Now his spirit, Bechtold said, haunts the room he lived in.

“I have lived in that dorm and have felt things in the dorm, right beneath the widow’s walk,” she said.