An old ghost story grows stranger when the records reveal two men who shared the same name.
For generations, people in Cavendish have told of a Wheelock farmhouse where objects shifted on their own, household items dropped from shelves, and a shadowy figure was seen at the windows. The ghost, the story goes, was Jonathan Wheelock. The trouble is that Cavendish had two Jonathan Wheelocks, father and son, and the legend seems to have blended them into one.
The Haunting
The accounts are short on specifics. They name no witnesses, give no year, and leave unclear when the stories first circulated. What survives is a tradition: a Wheelock house in Cavendish where things moved without explanation and a human-shaped shadow appeared inside the rooms or near the windows. Whether those reports began as genuine experiences or as ordinary events given a supernatural reading, they became part of the town’s folklore. As with many New England legends, the more interesting question turns out to be who the ghost was supposed to be.
The Deacon
Deacon Jonathan Wheelock was born in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, on September 18, 1727, the son of Gershom Wheelock and Abigail Flagg Wheelock. In 1753 he married Anna Drury, and they raised seven children. During the Revolutionary era the family lived for a time in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where Jonathan served on the local Committee of Safety, one of the town bodies that managed political and military affairs during the war.
He later settled in Cavendish and became a substantial landowner. His will, written in December 1797, less than a year before his death, shows how that property was divided. His wife, Anna, received the use of half of “the dwelling house I now live in,” along with the cellar and the well, for the rest of her life. His son Jonathan received 55 acres. Another son, John Gleason Wheelock, inherited half of the dwelling house. The will also left a bequest to the Congregational Church of Christ in Cavendish.
For the ghost story, the will matters because it shows that more than one Wheelock had a claim to a house and land in Cavendish.
Two Jonathan Wheelocks
Deacon Jonathan Wheelock died on October 21, 1798, at the age of seventy-one. Later versions of the haunting, however, give the deacon’s death as August 13, 1842, the date his son died. Somewhere in the retelling, father and son became one man.
The younger Jonathan was born in 1754 and lived to eighty-eight. A record of his grave in the small Wheelock family cemetery in Cavendish notes that he served as a soldier in the American Revolution from 1775 to 1780 and fought at Quebec and Saratoga. His wife, Eunice, died in February 1838, four years before him.
Probate notices published in 1844 add another piece. They refer to the estate of Jonathan Wheelock, late of Cavendish, and describe his “Homestead Farm,” bordered by property belonging to John Adams and by land associated with the “Jotham Wheelock Farm.” The younger Jonathan, in other words, had a homestead of his own.
That leaves at least three candidates for the haunted house: the deacon’s dwelling, the son’s homestead farm, or another property held by the extended Wheelock family. The surviving accounts don’t say which one they mean.
History and Legend
It helps to keep the two kinds of evidence apart. The moving objects and shadowy figures belong to the ghost story, and nothing independent confirms them. The lives of the two Jonathan Wheelocks are documented in family histories, a will, probate notices, and a grave record. Somewhere between the two, a father and son with the same name became a single ghost, perhaps because a teller mixed up the dates, perhaps because two houses were remembered as one. An early newspaper account or a family letter might someday show how it happened.
Until then, which house the legend first belonged to may never be settled. What the records do show is a real family, two men who shared a name, and a ghost story that never quite decided which of them it was about.
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