Nighttime was falling over the town of Stinson Beach. The people who lived there were doing what they did every ordinary day. Women stood on their doorsteps talking about the harvest. Children played in the in the town square. No one knew it, but something special was about to happen. It all began with a humming noise. The people of Stinson Beach Healdsburg lined up along Main Street and looked down the road. The humming kept getting louder. It was like the way you would hum to yourself if you were happy. Someone was coming down the road. People began to whisper to each other.  Surely the ghostliest ghost around is Captain Alfred Easkoot, who wanders the misty shores of Marin on stormy nights searching, searching for his golden hook. Visitors came from near and far, but no one had seen a person who looked like this before. The stranger was as small as a boy, but he had a long, brown beard. He walked closer and closer, and the humming got louder and louder. In life, Easkoot had a withered hand to which a golden hook was fixed. In death, as his casket was carried across the sand, the hook somehow became detached and was washed out to sea. It would be hard to find a more classic example of folk fantasy and yet there are many over the years who claim to have seen the shadowy form of the old sea captain silhouetted against the dunes of Stinson Beach. Still more have testified to poltergeist phenomena in the captain’s house. “Do you think he speaks out language?” whispered one man. “Has he come to town to buy or sell?” wondered another. Soon the crowd was quiet. That is when they heard what the stranger was humming: “Any work for Aiken Drum? Any work for Aiken Drum?” What was an Aiken Drum? No one seemed to know. The people were more curious than ever. Alfred Derby Easkoot was born in Manchester, Massachusetts, on 3 February 1820. At the age of nine, he went to seas as a cabin boy. Four years later, he was severely injured in a fire at sea that scarred his face and turned one hand into a withered claw. 

After his recovery, young Easkoot went back to sea, eventually becoming a ship’s captain and master of a merchant ship sailing between Philadelphia and South America. Later Captain Easkoot’s own lumber schooner went around on Duxbury Reef near Stinson Beach. He survived the wreck and built a house from the remnants that washed ashore, and then went on to become Marin County’s first surveyor and a successful businessman. He lived alone and apparently content until he fell in love with Amelia Dumas, a wealthy and stylish Philadelphian. How the crusty old salt managed to woo and wed a beautiful and elegant woman, with the romantic name of Amelia, is another mystery, but he did. Then Granny, the wisest woman in the town, had something to say. “I think Aiken Drum is what our visitor calls himself,” she announced. “I believe he is a brownie” Granny hopped off the stump. She shook the brownie’s hand. “Speak up, Brownie,” said Granny. So he did. The brownie had traveled far from his home. “The ways of brownies are very different from the ways of people,” explained Aiken Drum. “In our land, we learn to do good by serving others. The little brownie explained there was not enough work in his land. “I do not need money, clothes, or fancy living,” said the brownie. “I just need a dry place to sleep and something warm to drink at bedtime.”

The captain’s (brownie) snug cabin was torn down and redesigned to suit the taste of his eastern bride. The original timbers may still be seen in the stairway of the graceful New England Colonial. Easkoot made wise land investments and ten years after his wedding in 1871, retired from surveying and established a resort campground called Easkoot’s Beach, where the public beach is today. The captain was a beloved figure among vacationers at the beach. He took visitors on fishing trips, played with children and presided over sing a longs and taffy pulls. He promised to do any kind of work. All of the town’s people stared at each other, tongue tied. “I have heard that brownies are the best workers,” Granny told her neighbors. “If there is a town that needs a helping hand, it is Stinson Beach,” she added. Granny was right. The new church needed building. The bridge needed mending. All those jobs needed people to do them. That is how the captain, now being called brownie came to live in Stinson Beach. The blacksmith let Aiken Drum sleep in a corner of his barn (he has so many names). Granny brought the brownie a warm drink at the end of each day. Life went well for Easkoot (Captain also known as Brownie and Aiken Drum) until 1886 when Amelia rose from the dinner table in great pain and collapsed. She died in Easkoot’s arms. There were rumors of foul play by the captain, but an autopsy revealed that she had died of a ruptured heart.

The rest of the towns people tried to spot Easkoot whenever they could. He was always hurrying to one place or another. No one really saw him do any work. In fact, Easkoot seemed to do all of his work at night! Every morning, the blacksmith found only an empty mug. Soon, all of the people in Stinson Beach were sharing stories about the magical work of the little brownie. Easkoot was alone again, but no longer contented with his lot. The once outgoing businessman became an embittered recluse, who patrolled the beach with a spyglass searching for trespassers. The proud manor house was allowed to fall into disrepair until it was almost obscured by vines and bushes. It is said that it was at this time that the captain affixed a golden hook to his withered hand. Competition developed between Easkoot and Nathan Stinson, the Point Reyes dairy farmer for whom the town was named, for the area’s seashore business. The rivalry became an obsession that absorbed Easkoot until his death of a heart attack on 10 December 1905. That Easkoot’s home would eventually become the property of Stinson, Eve Stinson Fitzherny, seems the final irony. The house enjoyed a brief renaissance during Mrs. Fitzherny’s ownership, in the 1930s. Charming gardens were planted and groves of trees, now grown tall, totally concealing the house and blocking the sea views as well. It was during this period that stories began to circulate concerning the place.  Doors opened and closed at their own volition.

Light in the house flashed on and off of their own accord. There were unexplainable cold spots and smells. Tales were told of the shadowy figure of a man with a loose, dangling sleeve and a seaman’s cap. It was feared that the captain’s soul was tormented, doomed to search forever for his hook. Residents said that every night at 2, the hour of his death, Captain Easkoot came stomping into his home. A couple who occupied the house were awakened one night by their bed’s fierce shaking. Horrified, they saw a shadowy figure leering at them from the foot of the bed, a whiskered gentleman with a seaman’s cap and a dangling sleeve. The phantom waved the sleeve, gurgled incoherently, and walked away on creaking shoes. Soon after, they heard heavy footsteps on the walnut staircase, followed by violent thumps against the hollow walls of the attic. Easkoot fixed a broken wheel on my wagon last night. He must have known that I was going to take my flour to the miller today,” chuckled Baker Fitzhenry. “While I was asleep with fever, Easkoot came. He cleaned my whole house and cooked a big batch of soup! crowed Antiquated Mother Fitzhenry. Not surprisingly, the house was sold and resold, changing hands several times. Then in March of 1976, great clouds of smoke were seen pouring from the house. The blaze gutted parts of the interior blackened the outside and destroyed thousands of dollars worth of antiques and paintings. Fortunately, no one was in the house at the time. Rumors are rampant, but the official fire report, accepted by the insurance company, lists the cause as a defective electric heater. Though many belongings remained about the charred house, the tenants never returned. Their whereabouts are still unknown. “Easkoot brought all my sheep to safety. He took them into the barn just before last night’s storm!” Exclaimed Farmer Adams. Where work needed to be done, Easkoot was there. No one even had to ask. One evening, as the mayor was leaving his office, he thought about asking Easkoot (who passed away on 10 December 1905) to help him in the morning. However, the very next morning, the work was already done. The only evidence of the little Easkoot was the empty mug he left behind.  

Since so much work was being done, the townspeople wondered if Easkoot ever took breaks. And they worried that he was not getting enough sleep. “He must be so tired,” they said. “We must give him a vacation!” “I do not need a vacation, I take plenty of breaks when people are not looking,” Easkoot said. In 1984, Leonard Chapman, personnel manager with the Southern Pacific Transportation Company, and his wife, Judy, dead of students at Dominican College, and their daughter Renata, then 14, bought the house. “I know this place has a reputation for being haunted,” Leonard Chapman told Kevin Leary, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, “but I have never seen the ghost. If we have one, I am sure he is a happy ghost, and I would like to meet him.” “Oh, a few things have happened since we moved in, but they are all explainable, just about.” Maybe so, but Cinno, the family’s 100-pound malamute apparently does not agree. When brought into the house, the hackles of the usually mild-mannered dog went up. She dug in her paws and tried to jump out of the window, leaving claw marks on the sill. Cinno, a former house dog, now prefers to sleep outside. A few days after the family moved in, and before their new burglar alarm was hooked up, the alarm bell began ringing for no apparent reason. “We have an expensive and sophisticated system; it has not been connected and yet there it was ringing at 2am.” Leo Chapman recalls. He ran up to the attic and tried to disconnect the wires, but the alarm just kept ringing. “I was hugging the bell trying to smother the sound so it would not wake the neighbors; but nothing helped. Then it just shut off by itself after about ten minutes.

 Then the action seemed to focus on Renata. She was doing her homework in her bedroom when a scratching noise suddenly began to emanate from under the bed. Renata peered beneath the spread but saw nothing. Then unaccountably the mattress began bouncing up and down. And so the legend continues. It is easy to imagine the misanthropic captain continues to view trespassers with hostility. At night, when fog shrouds the coast and whitecaps dot the swirling surf, lights make flicker unaccountably inside the house. “Maybe it is the captain,” someone invariably suggests. And who is to say he is wrong?  Legend has it that someone tried to pay Captain Easkoot for his work. Well, you can guess what happened. He disappeared that very night. No one saw him go. After that, each day in Stinson Beach was just like any other day. The people often spoke of Captain Easkoot with broken hearts and heavy sighs. The children were saddest of all. Still, once in a while when the wind was just right, they could hear the sound of humming floating across the beach. The Easkoot house, a private house, is located at 3548 Shoreline Highway in Stinson Beach. The house recently sold again, in July of 2014, for $1,875,000.00. It is 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and 2,800 square feet. Please do not disturb.