I was told this as a ghost story, but the truth is far more tragic.
In 1965 my parents bought a house that had been built c 1902 (we found a piece of lumber in the attic that said “Built Feb 29 1902”) as the boarding house for the hired hands at Rock Gate Farm, a “gentleman’s” dairy farm owned by the wealthy Darlington family of New York City. Upstairs is a long narrow hallway connecting the bedrooms. To provide light, there are two skylights. On each there is a piece of frosted glass set into the ceiling, and a clear piece of glass set into the roof. A wooden “box”, painted white, connects the two, and contains an electric light. At night the electric light lights the hallway, and during the day the sunshine lights it. At the end of the hallway is a door into the hay loft. High up in the hayloft wall is a door, reachable by ladder, into the attic of the house.
The story we were told was that, in the 1930s, one of the hired hands was “dimwitted”. He had been cruelly teased by one of the other hired hands, such as turning off the bottle washing machine in the middle of the cycle. One day he went into the attic with a hammer, and threw it through the skylight as his tormenter walked underneath, killing him. The murderer was found insane, and was sent to Singsing prison (instead of getting the death penalty) where he later died. His ghost was said to haunt the house, still seeking his tormenter. There was a door to a cedar closet in the hay loft that sometimes creaked when there was no one nearby.
The true story, I later discovered, was that Robert Nixon was born into a religious and academic family in Ohio. He had a PhD from Dennison University. At the outbreak of World War I he volunteered as an ambulance driver. After the war, he was unable to keep a job, working for a while as a school teacher, and then as a banker, before “drifting East” and becoming a dairyman. Far from being “dimwitted”, he was probably suffering from what was then called “shell shock”, and is now called PTSD.
He was frequently tormented by the head dairyman, Peter Steubben, who, according to Robert’s complaint to the local police, was “calling him vile names”, and according to his complaint to the farm superintendent, Mr. Nash, was making Robert do some of Peter’s work, complaining that Robert was not doing his work properly, hindering Robert in his work, and that Peter was trying to oust him from his position.
On December 20, 1931, Robert Nixon attacked Peter Steubben with a hammer, while they were steaming milk cans in the diary. Peter’s skull was fractured in multiple places, ‘his brains were knocked out” and he died immediately.
On Feb 15 1932 Robert Nixon was judicially declared insane. I have not been able to find out where he was committed, but it appears that he died in 1937, when he was buried, with the rest of his family, in Maple Grove Cemetery, Granville, Ohio.
