Byline: JENNIFER LYNN IVAN Staff writer
Some of the attractions at the Old Fort House Museum in Fort Edward are material: An expense slip written out by George Washington himself, a tavern bar as it was in the 18th century, the hardwood timbers from what was once the third-largest war fort in North America.
Others are a little less concrete. Namely, whoever or whatever opened a door in the museum's Central Hall, whacked electric candles to the floor in an upstairs room, and spooked Kathleen McCarty.
``There was no noise, I just looked and there he was,'' McCarty said recently, bouncing a little on the balls of her feet as she eyed a patch of red rug at the bottom of the attic stairs the very spot she said a ghost of an old bearded man stood across from her eye to eye in the hush of an evening 10 years ago.
Fort Edward Historical Association board members and people who say they are experts in the paranormal aren't surprised.
``If ghosts are attached to objects, there is no shortage in a museum,'' said Paul McCarty, Kathleen's husband and director of the museum. ``The house has played a part in all these (United States, British and Native American) histories.''
Historical objects
In the almost 200 years before The Red House, as it was called, became the yellow and green-shuttered museum, the building on Broadway in the Washington County village of Fort Edward served as a house, an inn and tavern and the command headquarters for both the British and Americans during the Revolutionary War. (The mansion's foundation was actually constructed in 1772 with some maple wood timbers from abandoned Fort Edward, home to the largest British military installation in the American Colonies during the French and Indian War.)
Its past residents have included Patrick Smyth, an agent of the King of England, who was also a member of the local militia during the Revolutionary War. He …
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