Hammond Castle

 

On Saturday morning the girls, Luke and I drove up to Gloucester and visited a castle.  It was astounding.

The castle was built in 1926 by John Hays Hammond Jr., who was a scientist, inventor and avid collector of Medieval and early Renaissance artifacts. He wrote in a letter:

For the last three years I motored many miles through Europe.  After traveling all day, I would arrive at my destination to see a church, a cathedral, a town hall, a scrap of Roman wall or viaduct, a colosseum or an ancient theatre.  It was always a piece of architecture that suddenly dissipated the obscurity of time and brought the living presence back of all ages.  It is in the stones and wood that the personal record of man comes down to us.  We call it atmosphere, this indescribable something that still haunts old monuments.  You can read history, you can visit a hundred museums containing their handiwork, but nothing can reincarnate their spirit except to walk through rooms in which they have lived and through the scenes that were the background of their lives.  It is a marvelous thing, this expression of human ideals in walls and windows. (Unpublished letter, 1929)

He built the castle as a wedding gift to his wife Irene Fenton Hammond. The couple lived in the castle all of their lives.

       

The castle sits on a cliff at the edge of the sea. When we arrived in the morning, the view was veiled by mist.

John Hammond Jr. was an interesting man. He invented the remote control and over 800 other inventions. He held 400 patents--the most next to Thomas Edison. He had a fascination with the occult and conducted telepathic experiments. "He tried to mix science and magic as the key to immortality. He is said to have built a contraption to trap ghosts, and kept his father's corpse in his basement laboratory for years, attempting to reanimate it." (Weird Massachusetts, by Jeff Belanger 2008, article by Mike Carey).

Hammond Jr. was an animal lover and had many pet Siamese cats. When he died, his instructions were to place his body in a crypt with his mummified cats. He ordered that the crypt be planted over with poison ivy to ward off ghouls (grave robbers). Even so, his crypt was broken into and his skull stolen (ibid).

He left the property to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, who later sold it. It is now a museum. Several live-in caretakers have claimed that the castle is haunted (from the website: History of Massachusetts). It is notable that author H.P. Lovecraft visited the castle and went on to write horror stories about a mad scientist living north of Salem, Massachusetts, who tried to raise the dead (Belanger/Carey).

How I loved this library! I would have liked to take more interior photos, because the rooms were so gorgeous and creepy--filled with 1,000 year old artifacts from Medieval Europe--, but I wasn't sure if it was allowed. I found out later that only commercial photography is prohibited.

  

 This gargoyle gives you the shivers as you pass through the stone archway.

It was a wonderful place, full of wonder, mystery and the magic of ancient things.