Elmont Ghosts

by Brendyn Schneider

Think about the “gotta know” nature of ghost stories. Remember watching Poltergeist through your fingers? Better yet, remember watching Nightmare on Elm Street with a finger on the channel changer? At the first sight of blood, you were gone, riding shotgun with Michael Landon in a red pick-up, down the Highway to Heaven. You’d teleport back though. Splash of blood, girl shrieks. Landon squinting in the sun. Freddy laughs, stabs some guy in the thigh. Landon pulling into the town diner. Well, wait. Did Freddy get that guy? Did he get away? You have to know. Cover your eyes then…peek at the monster! You don’t want to be scared then…yes you do! It’s an habanero pepper for the mind: Tasty? Yes. Disturbing? YES! But you’ll be back for more and probably with your friends. This “gotta know” habanero is the ghost story’s signature trait. Without it, the tale has no burn.

The bowling alley in my dad’s hometown comes to mind. The stories about Elmont Bowlaire are three-alarm habaneros and I open wide every time.

Many of these tales, like the one about the shrieking head in the vent, took place around alleys 13 and 14. According to my father, they were the highest scoring pair in the house, though their surface conditions were no different than the other lanes.

Then there was the stain on the pair’s settee. Some said it was the result of an abrasive cleanser once used to remove a still-earlier blemish. Others said that it was blood. No one knew for sure. The mark’s one certainty was its resilience; nothing could get it out.

The PA system was known to wiggle around logic too. On one occasion, “Ball return on alley 14” came through the speakers. Dad said that it had been a man’s voice, but not a familiar one. John, the desk attendant, was in the snack bar at the time. When the announcement was made, the front desk was empty.

My parents actually met in Bowlaire. My mother worked in the snack bar for a while so she had her fair share of stories too. She once told me the one about Stanley, the mechanic.

“He was a southern gentleman, always looking at the girls. He’s working late one night and sees a man standing out on the alleys. Stanley yells, ‘Hey! Get offa there!’ Well, the man starts running and Stanley chases after him. He’s running hunched over and has brown hair but Stanley can’t make out his face. He runs all the way down the length of the house and just as Stanley’s about to grab him – they’re inches apart – the man pushes through the door into the back area. Stanley follows him but the man’s gone. Now, he couldn’t have gotten to the door that led out to the parking lot. There wasn’t enough time. Stanley was right behind him. The man just vanished.

“Y’know, a lot of people joked around about that place but NO ONE wanted to be there late at night.”

Bowlaire was haunted. There’s no doubt there. It doesn’t matter if the haunting was done by actual ghosts or just a collective fear of them. Something did happen at 1445 Hempstead Turnpike that caused grown men to chase after shadows, but what? What was the origin, the root, the very starting point of the legend? When did it happen? “One night, years ago…” never cut it for me.

My parents have talked about Charley, an old man who hung around the snack bar. He claimed to have been a butler in a mansion that occupied the property before the bowling alley had been built. The story goes that alleys 13 and 14 stood where the mansion’s master bedroom was. There, the owner of the mansion and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Covert, were viciously murdered while they slept. Though the Covert Mansion was gone, with a bowling alley erected in its place, Charley claimed that the victims of the double homicide were there still, haunting the grounds, trapped in their own terror.

For years, my curiosity was off the charts! Had this guy really been a butler in an old Elmont mansion? Had the Coverts really been killed in bed?

Last year, I began researching the incident but there wasn’t a lot to go on. To start with, what was Mr. Covert’s given name? Some I spoke with remembered the mansion but no one knew the name of the owner. This made the investigation far too broad. Google “Covert” without a first name and you’ll see what I mean. You may as well be googling “peanut.” If I wanted to step inside a mansion that no longer existed, I would have to expand the investigation.

This past summer, my girlfriend Kelly and I traveled to the Nassau County Registry of Deeds to look up the history of the property. The deed would have the owner’s full name. Would I also find a death certificate? Bowlaire’s “gotta know” habanero was going full blast!

Registries are like post offices. There’s something 1950s, Americana about them – gun metal filing cabinets, green marble floors, long, hanging ceiling lights. We felt like we’d turn a corner at any moment and find a pool of secretaries all wearing identical cat eye glasses.
After a cursory scan of the property card, the disgruntled clerk pointed us to a stack of hard bound, dusty ledgers. Ordered by town and street, they were heavy and no-nonsense. The pages were weathered and yellow, half-sunk in the past.

Handwriting changes as you travel through the 20th century. There was a lot of calligraphy in the thirties as though property purchases were true red-letter occasions. There was less emphasis on penmanship in the fifties but we spotted the name right away:

Covert, George W.

We had found the owner of the Covert Mansion. According to the record, the property changed hands due to Mr. Covert’s death on June 29, 1957. I felt the blood rush from my face.

“Kelly, 1957 – just three years before they finished the bowling alley.”

“But how did he die?”

“I don’t know. There’s no death certificate here.”

Then a voice came from behind us: “You doing research on a murder?”

We turned to find a woman, staring at us, grinning. Neither one of us had mentioned why we were at the registry.

“Lots of people come here to research murders,” she continued. “Go over to Surrogates. It’s in the next building over. You’ll find more there.”

She slipped through a doorway and Kelly turned to me and said, “Creepy.”

Surrogates was a little more modern. Eisenhower was gone. Now Reagan was president. The computers were big and clunky with pea soup, all-caps font on the monitors. On screen were spaces for a name and a date of death. After entering the data, a long gestation period began (no hour glass, just wait). According to the instructions on the wall, a message would appear, stating whether or not Surrogates had anything in the archives, namely a will. Of course, the earlier the death, the less likely it was that Surrogates had something on file. For us, they had to check the basement. Great. I wondered who the president was down there.

Fifteen minutes later, a records clerk deposited a stuffed folder in front of us with “Covert, George W.” written down the side. Inside was his Last Will and Testament.

Maneuvering through the legalese, we first found that Mrs. Covert had passed in the early fifties. We also found that Mr. Covert did in fact die in bed but not in the Covert Mansion. Though he owned the estate, he was residing in another house, down the road at the time of his death. It went on to state that he had been incapacitated when he died but maddeningly, the cause of death eluded us. That would be on the death certificate, which, in the state of New York, is available only to family members.

I now had proof that a large part of the back story was wrong and if the back story was wrong, how much more of the legend would this bland packet discredit?

The next section of the will stipulated that upon Mr. Covert’s death, $25,000 a year would be given to his employee, Charles Jackson. Charley had been the butler! Mr. Covert was obviously satisfied with Mr. Jackson’s work. $25,000 was a pretty hefty sum in the fifties, certainly enough for Charley to continue living across the street.

So, if Charley was set, why would he tell such a story about his former employers? Perhaps he didn’t. Maybe a couple actually had been killed in the Covert Mansion. A whispered “have you heard?” was born, resulting in a game of telephone which has lasted for decades. Through countless recitations, a murdered couple in a mansion owned by the Coverts became the Coverts themselves.

As we drove back to Boston, I began to see the Legend of Bowlaire as a campfire story told in classic oral tradition. I realized that what really happened isn’t as important as the mystery that shrouds it. It’s the story, itself – not necessarily the facts – that guarantees the habanero burn. Story keeps the fire going. Without it, there’s no reason to return.

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Read more about Elmont Bowlaire by clicking:
The Phantoms of Bowlaire
But no one was there

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Read more stories by Brendyn Schneider at www.brendynschneider.com

© 2008-2012, Brendyn Schneider, reprinted by Dadity.com with permission. Use or reprint not authorized without permission of the author.

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