There’s no reason the pandemic has to limit Halloween chills and thrills this year and you don’t need to brave the Salem crowds for a night of otherworldly delight.
Venture up Fays Avenue or walk down Edgemere Road or Lynnmere Avenue and listen for the clatter of horse hooves and carriage wheels as Catherine Sanders’ ghost escorted by phantasmagoric coachmen races along in an open carriage pulled by two spectral steeds.
Sanders was the wife of Richard Sullivan Fay, a Harvard graduate with influential friends who purchased the 500 acres that would bear his name in 1847.
The land’s original owner, John Clifford, is buried in the West Lynn burial ground, and the Van Crowninshield family were later owners preceding Fay.
The Fays lived in the opulence that surrounded the wealthiest Americans in the 19th and early 20th century. The main house had 23 rooms and it was flanked by cattle barns, servants’ quarters, a carriage house and boat house.
The Fays traveled extensively, favoring Great Britain, where the family lived for five years. Richard Fay brought a small forest back to Lynn with a variety of rare tree species as well as sheep.
The mansion’s doors were imported from England and the nursery wallpaper came from France.
Like other rich people, Fay contributed a home-grown militia contingent to the Union Army with the “Fay Guards” attached to the 38th Massachusetts Regiment.
Old Daily Evening Item articles, including ones by historian scribe John J. Quigley, describe Catherine Sanders as a “woman of brilliant intellect and social grace,” who cut a memorable swath through what is now East Lynn.
One hand holding a small parasol and dressed in black, she embarked in her carriage with two coachmen dressed in white pants and stockings, black shoes with silver buckles, red coats and tall hats topped by cockades.
The coachmen sat in the carriage’s front seat. Sanders sat in the back in front of two other footmen.
“Often she would wave her hand to small boys fishing on the shores of Floating Bridge Pond,” writes Quigley.
Sanders outlived her husband by almost 40 years, dying in 1904. The estate land was sold in 1914 to create the first house lots that now define the neighborhood. A 1916 reporter’s visit to the estate found the mansion and outbuildings still standing, tulip vine slinking in and out of the big house’ broken roof.
Quigley in 1949 wrote a curious footnote to the Fay estate history, claiming that a plan to run a railroad line from Peabody to Boston through East Lynn and the Fay estate literally sunk when the main financial backers for the rail project died aboard the Titanic in 1912.
Venture off Fays Avenue this Halloween and tune an ear to the tinkle of ghostly champagne glasses and horse whinnies — if you dare.
