Under the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore's famed Edwardian-era clock, spooky strollers gather to follow the high-spirited footsteps of Vineyard Haven's many famous ghosts.

Here on Martha's Vineyard, the ghosts of Edgartown have whaling captains' pedigrees. Down the road, the things that go bump in the Oak Bluffs night are Victorian-era wraithes of saints and sinners. But who or what are the ghosts of the island's third seaport, our "year-round town," Vineyard Haven, a.k.a. Tisbury, formerly known as Holmes Hole? It turns out the spirit world in this neck of the woods is at once richer and more complicated than elsewhere on the island.

Since the early 1990s, I've been writing about the supernatural. In the warm months, I conduct ghostly guided tours. But it wasn't until last summer, when I developed a walk for Vineyard Haven, that I realized that this quaint locale is a veritable basin of the occult. What follows is a synopsis of my hour-long walk. As you follow along, you'll start to see the emerging pattern of a seriously haunted town.

We start outside the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore under the shop's Edwardian-era clock, I with my kerosene lantern, some of my guests bearing flashlights. I prepare the group for the "ghost-busting" ahead of us by sharing quick tips from the professionals about staying safe at haunted sites.

We cross the street to Mardell's, a card and gift shop that has been here for decades. Back in the day, this was a home belonging to a whaling captain's widow, Edwina Norris. The dwelling has long been said to be haunted. Why? Well, on a cloudy afternoon in December, 1851, Mrs. Norris was hosting a tea party for friends gathered around the parlor hearth. All at once, the light dimmed outside. Blackness settled over the town like an eclipse of the sun. Then, for 30 excruciatingly long minutes, a motionless tornado hovered. Bolts of lightning seared rooftops and streets. Following each zap, thunder shook the buildings.

Mrs. Norris and her friends quailed in terror, but they also believed themselves safe inside. And then a rush of static electricity whooshed through the fireplace. A spear of lightning shot out of the chimney, struck Mrs. Norris in the ear, then fired up through her head in a geyser of sparks. Her tea cup and saucer clattered to the floor. She died seated in her chair, her neck scorched black, her face untouched. Across the street at what is now Bowl & Board, another lightning spear struck and killed a man, a painter named Francis Nye Jr.

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The townsfolk who lived said they'd never witnessed anything so terrifying. But a third of a century later, something worse was in the offing . . .

The Old Stone Bank at the northern end of Main Street, is a property that once housed the ugliest building on the Vineyard. It was four stories high, with weathered clapboard walls and prison-sized windows. This was the harness factory, owned by Rudolphus Crocker. If you look in newspaper clippings of the time, you'll find no unkind words about Mr. Crocker. Island reporters have always preferred to write about flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la!, than anything unpleasant like murder or orphan abuse.

Orphan abuse? That's right. When Rudolphus needed extra hands, he would "acquire" male teens from orphanages off-island. He forced them to work 80-hour weeks, and when they misbehaved, he beat them. One day in August of 1883, two orphans escaped, stole a dinghy, and rowed to one of dozens of schooners off-shore. The captain remanded the boys to the harness factory. Rudolphus roundly whipped the escapees. Later that evening, the aggrieved boys set fire to the building.

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A northeast wind surged in from the harbor, sending the blaze down the block. Before the night was over, every last building on Main Street, and all of those fanning half a block in either direction, burned to the ground. If you look at a map showing the perimeter of the fire, you'll also discern an outline for the perimeter of ghosts that has haunted the town for over 125 years.

Over time, people working at the bank have reported tapping sounds. Sometimes employees have been tripped by unseen feet. At night, pedestrians outside have heard a quivering female voice. Others have sighted two boys in old-fashioned garments, clattering up the road as if they're running for their lives.

In short, we are standing on the site of a serious negative vortex; a place where positive souls and guardian angels shy away. This allows the negative entities to flourish.

Subconsciously, the human inhabitants of Vineyard Haven have pushed back with their flower gardens, whimsical shops, street fairs, and strolling minstrels. Some days sweetness and light prevail in the town--other days the legacy of the freak storm of 1851, Rudolphus Crocker, and the Great Fire of 1883 cast a spell of melancholy.

And now, let's see how other ghostly influences have affected the town . . .

At the edge of the Vineyard Haven Harbor, we gaze out at beautiful boats on moorings. If the spirit of a drowned Vineyard sailor is driven to spend a few more moments on earth, this is where he's likely to pop back into consciousness. Commercial fishing is still one of the most dangerous occupations in the world but, in earlier centuries, going to sea was often a death sentence. In the whaling days, four out of five sailors were destined sooner or later to perish in Davy Jones's locker.

Countless times during their years of voyaging, island men would imagine returning safe and sound to this very beach. What we visualize inevitably comes to pass, even postmortem. Moreover, in the afterlife, time has no continuum, so a sailor who went down with his ship in a storm in 1833 could take invisible rebirth right here time and again, before heading up the hill to reunite with his family. And if it's another family--as of course, it will be--he might try to establish some kind of contact with the new inhabitants.

If you have any psychic abilities and you come here late at night when all traffic sounds have ceased, you'll sense these dead sailors surging all around you, heading home.

And now we'll make our way to another locale once dear to ancient sailors . . .

On Cromwell Lane outside the Luce house, next door to Midnight Farm, a dirt road was once a busy thoroughfare, packed with taverns and ships' chandleries. It also was the sight of an unsolved murder. Two days before Christmas in 1863, a grocer named William Cook Luce was closing his store on this spot, preparing to join his family for dinner. He never made it home. Hours later he was found on the shop floor, an ax embedded in his head. The day's cash proceeds were gone. The local constabulary knew that hundreds of sailors poured off the docks nightly and caroused in town, mostly on Cromwell Lane. Any one of them could have killed Luce, and sailed away at daybreak. The case has been cold for lo, these 145 years!

But the spirit world doesn't forget, and as long as justice has yet to be served, this site will remain a negative vortex. A descendant of William Cook Luce named Mark Luce, grew up in this house and told me this story: Mark's family has always encountered ghosts in the dwelling, treading the stairs at night, and making mischief. One night Mark's mother woke to see a woman at the foot of her bed with a flowing white nightgown. She drew closer to Mark's mother, intently bent over her and whispered, "There is something I must tell you." The living woman waited and then--the figure disappeared! Was the ghost about to whisper the name of Luce's killer? We can only hope that one day this oracle will return. For now, we'll journey up the hill in the direction other sailors' ghosts are continuously heading . . .

In the parking lot of Brickman's store, we view the lower end of Main Street, corridor of the infamous fire of 1883. Across the street, the Mansion House Inn is on the site of the hotel that burned down that August night long ago. The structure was rebuilt. Then on a wintry evening in 2001, another fire broke out, and again the inn was destroyed.

In the 1883 fire, each shopkeeper and homeowner was forced to fight the blaze with a pair of buckets. In 2001, smoke detectors were in every room, and the fire station sat directly across the street! So what is the moral of this story? One possible moral is that if the town is having one of its paranormally bad days, anything could happen . . .

And now if you'll follow me, we'll make our way to the hot zone of Vineyard Haven's ghost activity, the ancient cemetery in the heart of town. As we stand outside the Association Hall Cemetery, we discuss how graveyards come to be haunted: For the most part, we have no reason to fear them, as long as we respect burial-ground etiquette, meaning no Ouija boards and no black-magic rites. Since good spirits have little motivation to linger in graveyards, the atmosphere can easily absorb emanations from the dark side. This particular cemetery reveals an active spirit content; each summer, aspiring ghost hunters send me photos of orbs and other anomalies from this site. Consequently, so as not to "raise the dead," I ask my walkers to refrain from speech as we make our way to the oldest grave site, that of Abigail Daggett West, interred in 1770. When we re-emerge, I count heads to make sure every last one of us made it out alive. I bid my guests farewell, wishing them all sweet dreams, and reminding them that ghosts very rarely follow anyone home.

Holly Nadler ran Sun Porch Books in Oaks Bluffs for six years and is now turning her attention to her writing and ghost-hunting.