The Haunted House of Bacon Brook: A look at the land beneath Natick Community Organic Farm.
Cindy Tripp, Natick Historical Society Volunteer Researcher
Long before seedlings, sap lines, and field trips, the hills beside Bacon Brook held a string of homes—and a legend. Fresh research traces a clear timeline of who lived here and how the place earned its eerie nickname, “the Haunted House,” a tale that later echoed through Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fiction.
The story begins in 1721–1753, when a sturdy parsonage rose on the site for the Rev. Oliver Peabody, minister of the Eliot Church. After Peabody, the property passed briefly to Captain Brown, and then into the hands of the Bacon family, who amassed hundreds of acres on both sides of the Charles River. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, John Bacon and his son had settled the place; afterward, Ira Bacon lived there before moving next door to his brother Willard. The old Peabody House—solidly built but weathered—stood empty, under intermittent repair, gathering rumors.
Ida H. Morse (1856-1932), Curator Natick Historical Society
According to Ida H. Morse (1856–1932)—Natick historian and first female curator of the Natick Historical Society—the “haunted” reputation started with a noisy prank. As the story goes, a lively Sherborn wedding band—on its way home and in high spirits—ducked into the deserted house to play one more raucous set. A passing farmer, late at night and none too steady himself, heard the clamor, bolted, and spread the word: the place was bewitched. The joke stuck, and the nickname did too.
Morse preserved another episode: two Natick boys, returning from a gunning trip, decided to “kill the old ghost” by firing into a door. Out rushed Ira Bacon. He chased them down, confiscated a “bull’s-eye” watch, and years later—after Ira’s death—the chastened family quietly returned it. Recorded by Morse in 1903, these incidents kept the legend alive for a new generation of readers and walkers along the brook.
Morse’s contribution to local history was more than anecdote. She served as curator for the Natick Historical Society for thirty years, shaping the organization's early collecting efforts. After she died in 1932, Mabel Parmenter succeeded her and continued in the curator role for more than three decades, maintaining and expanding the Society’s care of collections and community memory.
By 1867, while repairs were underway, the derelict structure burned. Yet the legend had one more life to give. That same era, Harriet Beecher Stowe—in Sam Lawson’s Fireside Stories, successor to Oldtown Folks—retold a version as “The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House.” Stowe’s Cap’n Brown was no invention: Captain Brown appears in the chain of owners, and her tale cemented the site’s gothic reputation across New England parlors.
After the fire, the land changed hands again. In 1874, the old Peabody/Bacon farm was sold at auction; by 1880, it belonged to Albert Mead. In the twentieth century, it became Elmbrook, a 24-acre farm owned by Miss Jane Patten, who built a tall white dwelling in 1905. That house, too, was lost to arson in the 1960s. In time, fields and stone walls welcomed a new chapter: the Natick Community Organic Farm.
Today, visitors stroll where ministers preached, farmers labored, musicians caroused, and—thanks to curators like Ida Morse and Mabel Parmenter—stories were preserved. The Haunted House may be gone, but its history endures—part mischief, part cautionary tale, and wholly Natick.
Want to learn more? Explore Ida Morse’s accounts and Stowe’s “The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House,” and visit the Natick Historical Society and the Natick Community Organic Farm to walk the ground where history—and folklore—took root.