The Mast-Head: A Story for Halloween

The Devil House was not haunted. At least my friends and I did not think it was. Still, that did not keep us from being so terrified of it that we teenagers were scared to walk past it on a dark night, and even going by it during the day might bring a shiver down the spine.

I had not thought about the place for years, decades probably, until someone I had just met mentioned it at lunch the other day. The question was whether there were any East Hampton ghost stories, and Lilly Hartley, with whom I was serving as a juror for the Hamptons International Film Festival, spoke up. I had forgotten all about it, but as Lilly reminisced the Devil House came back to me.

She had grown up in a house near the Star office and, like my friends and me when we were coming of age, she spent idle nights wandering around the village. The Devil House, on a quiet street near the Nature Trail, had a powerful attraction. Hidden by a thick wall of trees and shrubs, its mock-Tudor mien was brooding.

A path led from the lawn down toward the swampy end of the property. At its end, there was an opening in the woods, and under a dome-like clearing what seemed to us the very head of the Devil roosted among the cleft branches. Illuminated perhaps by no more than a cigarette lighter, it was terrifying in the extreme, and none of us could stand there for more than a moment before sprinting for the safety of the streetlights.

Many years later, my wife and I would celebrate our wedding with a reception in the Devil House’s great hall. By then the head, a gargoyle, I think, was long gone. Those of us at the reception who had crept onto the grounds on those dark, dark nights in our misspent youth could only glance over at the brushy path and smile at one another.