The Ghost Of Scuttlehole Road

A Ghost Story for the Children of the Hamptons

By Dan Rattiner

Ever wonder how Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton got its name? Is there something that scuttles in a hole? Well, there sure is. Spiders as big as dinner plates. And from time to time, when the ghost of Agnes Hatch haunts the old abandoned house up on Scuttlehole Road on Halloween night, they come out. People stay away from Scuttlehole Road during those times. And you should too.

The Presbyterian Church where Agnes Gardiner and Thomas Hatch were married in a festive ceremony. Photos courtesy of Francis Hudson Archive.

The ghost of Agnes Hatch, appearing on a rainy Halloween in the 1930s.

A scuttlehole spider, captured on film found in a camera on Scuttlehole Road, 1958.

Agnes Gardiner Hatch lived on that road for 50 years, from 1850 to 1900. It was not called Scuttlehole Road when she first moved there. And that was because during the early years, no one had ever seen any spiders there. The road was originally built as the Mecox to Sag Harbor Highway, because in the early days, the farmers needed to have a road to get their crops from Mecox to Sag Harbor. There were freighters in Sag Harbor then. And the farmers would send their crops - potatoes, corn and cabbages - to Sag Harbor by horse and wagon.

In the early 1840s, there was a modest young man named Thomas Hatch living in Mecox, making saddles for the local horsemen. At first he made them himself at his shop down in Mecox. They were of such a fine quality, however, that everybody wanted one. Soon, he had workmen making them under his supervision. He became rich.

When he was 30, he fell in love with the most beautiful young girl in the Hamptons. Her name was Agnes Gardiner and she had blond hair and blue eyes and was the daughter of one of the members of the Gardiner family, a wealthy landowner in Wainscott. She was 19 when she married Thomas. The wedding, held at the big white Presbyterian Church in Bridgehampton, was the most widely attended wedding of that era.

After the wedding, Thomas began building a magnificent Victorian home for his bride right there on the Mecox to Sag Harbor Highway, on the north side, so it could overlook all the farmland that swept down to the ocean. Soon, it was completed. From an upper window, he could see not only the surf, but also his factory where his saddles were still being made, the church where he got married, and, down the long driveway in the front of the house, the Mecox to Sag Harbor Highway where, occasionally, he could see the wagons hauling the Hatch saddles to the freighters at Sag Harbor.

They were living there for less than two months, however, when Thomas fell off a horse and died from his injuries. Some say it was because the saddle he was on came loose because it was badly made, slid sideways and dumped him right into the dirt. But others say that was just a rumor bandied about by a less successful saddlemaker of that era, John J. Wayne, whose own saddles were of a lesser quality than Hatch's, but were cheaper. If you couldn't afford a Hatch, buy a Wayne, is what people said.

Others said it had nothing to do with the saddle. The horse had bolted at the sight of something, and in the resulting panic, well, the results were inevitable.

Hatch lingered for nearly three weeks before passing on. People visited. Doctors dithered, trying leeches and other medicines. The minister came by at the end.

Through it all, Agnes Hatch smiled and laughed when she was around her young injured husband, but wept bitterly when she was alone.

After Thomas died, he was placed in the ground under a tall obelisk in a pasture near to where he died.

After the funeral, Agnes, still only 19 years old, vowed that she would spend the rest of her days alone in the mansion where she was married. Only her servants would ever see her, as they went back and forth to town to get food, clothing or supplies.

Agnes did go out for daily walks, however, mostly to the great obelisk out in the pasture to talk to her husband. And on one of these trips, she came across what surely was the thing that had frightened the horse that had led to the death of her husband.

It was a giant purple spider, the size of a dinner plate. It had long hairy legs, round yellow eyes on stalks and tiny teeth and fangs.

She stooped down to get a better look. And the spider rolled over on its back. So she scratched its stomach. It made a pleasant hissing noise that Agnes believed was a noise of pleasure. Then it turned back over, bowed its head slightly, and scuttled off.

In the weeks that followed, Agnes befriended this spider, and soon found that down in a scuttlehole it had a mate and several dozen tiny baby giant spiders. She decided to raise them.

She kept them in pens out back at first. The spiders were friendly to her, but hissed angrily at the approach of anyone else. When one farmhand disappeared one day and all the spiders seemed just a little bit fatter, people did wonder. Agnes moved all the spiders indoors after that. And she locked the doors to the house, only accepting deliveries through a trap door that she built in the front door.

It was the workmen that renamed the road Scuttlehole Road. It was such a mouthful before, Mecox to Sag Harbor Highway. The workmen put up a sign. Nobody objected.

She remained in the house, raising and enjoying the company of her spiders - no one ever knew how many she had in there - for the rest of her days.

After her passing, the workmen left, taking the other animals with them. The farmland turned into weeds and the house began to fall into ruin. There was money to be spent to fix it up, but nobody ever was willing to go back in there to do it. Eventually, as the trustees of the Hatch estate paid themselves their fees to watch over the money - there were no heirs to leave it to - it ran out. Now there was no one who could go in the house.

It took a longer time for the dinner plate spiders to figure out that Agnes had left. They stayed there awhile, waiting for her return. But then, when they finished eating the furniture and the electric wiring and all the other bits of things that could keep them healthy, they too left and went down into the scuttlehole in the backyard and down into other scuttleholes that they dug elsewhere to live.

They seemed to enjoy being underground. On stormy nights, with lightning and thunder and downpours, they did come up to the surface to bathe themselves, and police officers with sticks sometimes observed them there, just sort of lolling around, their backs exposed to the sky.

Occasionally, police officers went out there and did not come back, but not often. There's a backlog of people wishing to join the force. It's not a problem.

On Halloween nights, however, particularly on dark, rainy nights, people say they see the ghost of Agnes Hatch around the ruin of her former home. She wanders around, calling for her husband. After awhile, the spiders appear. They are hungry and angry. They can be seen around the house, confused and dazed, wandering around near the scuttleholes that still exist in the farm fields along Scuttlehole Road. These spiders, the descendants of the original spiders, are even larger than their ancestors. Some are as big as roasting pans. The very biggest of them are as big as coffee tables.

If you see any up there, run. But don't bother telling the authorities about it. After more than 100 years of trying, nobody has been able to do anything about the spiders. By the first or second day of November, they're all gone again.

And everyone breathes a sigh of relief. They will not come back again until Agnes Hatch appears, and Agnes Hatch will appear only when there is a rainstorm on Halloween.

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