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One night Helen Goransson’s husband came home with two geese for the couple to raise on their Eliot farm. Goransson became upset because neither she nor Paul knew how to take care of geese. Both left the room and when they came she clams, an 800-page book was on the kitchen table, opened to a page with two paragraphs on how to raise geese. (Continued below) 

This was when Goransson, an author living on Depot Road, came to believe she was living in a so-called “haunted house.” From there she began to research its history and former residents.  Ultimately she wove the tales into a fictional account called “Views from Rosemary Hill,” published last year.

Goransson will be the guest lecturer at 7:30 pm on Thursday, March 24, at a talk sponsored by the Old Berwick Historical Society at Berwick Academy's Jeppesen Science Center on Academy Street. The public is invited and refreshments will be served by volunteers.

In her lecture, Goransson will describe the personal encounters she believes she has experienced with “spirits” in her home and how they led her to explore and fictionalize stories of the former residents of the house. The history of Eliot and some of its most prominent families will also be woven into the experiences of newcomers in the talk.

“The book is a history, mystery, ghost story and love story all rolled into one,” Goransson said of her book, self-published by the author via Peter E. Randall Publisher of Portsmouth. “There were a number of coincidences from the time we moved into the house. We kept saying ‘no, that’s just the wind blowing, maybe that’s the sound of the shutters.’”

Goransson’s fictional version of her story parallels the life of Ralph Bartlett, an attorney in the early 1800s. It also includes a modern-day fictional couple, Emily and Niel, who move into Bartlett's home and have encounters with Bartlett’s ghost. Ralph was one of four Bartlett children who grew up in the farmhouse where the Goranssons live.

Goransson and her husband, Paul, chose their farmhouse 25 years ago as the ideal place to start a farm and raise a family.  It wasn't long before they started noticing strange things happening.  Eventually they felt there was a "presence" in the house, which led Goransson to research the Bartlett Family. That research led Goransson to Dartmouth College, where Bartlett was educated, as well at the to the Eliot Library.

Goransson, a native of Canton, Massachusetts, was also published in 1990 when she helped her father, George Gerzon, a Holocaust survivor, write his memoirs called "The Hand of Fate.”

More information on the Counting House Museum and all the Old Berwick Historical Society's programs is available online, or by calling (207) 384-0000.