The tale of Nelly Butler comes full circle

SULLIVAN, Maine (WABI) - ”To be able to experience my imagination in real life I mean it just doesn’t get any better than that,” said Michelle Shores, author of “The Gathering Room: A Tale of Nelly Butler.”

“It’s funny because I really didn’t know about Nelly, until my kids came home from school saying it we just had a ghost story told to us Nelly Butler of Sullivan. I go, “Wait a minute! Nelly Butler? She’s my ancestry!” said Bud Means, descendant of Nelly Butler’s husband, George Butler.

Maine’s history is filled with ghost stories, but there’s one story that has come full circle.

Earlier this year, we introduced you to Michelle Shores, author of the book, “The Gathering Room: A Tale of Nelly Butler.”

“I actually came across Marcus LiBrizzi’s nonfiction book, ‘The Documentary History of the Nelly Butler Hauntings,’ and as an amateur historian, found the story incredibly fascinating. But, history is dry,” Shores said.

Michelle continued her search into Sullivan’s history, and on her quest to complete Nelly’s story.

“It’s been really thrilling to bring new life to something. Just delving into the history and seeing the records with your own eyes, and plotting out on the map where the hauntings took place, and to see the areas, it’s, it’s taken on a life of its own. And I’m gonna say it’s almost supernatural to see the influence and the connection to today, the descendants, the places, everything is still very much connected,” said Tobey Connor, Sullivan-Sorrento Historical Society vice president. “the hauntings began in 1799. [George Butler’s] first wife, he was very much in love with, she perished in childbirth, the birth of their first child, in 1797.”

After her deep dive into the past, Shores found that there were still some gaps in the tale.

“I literally woke up in the middle of the night one night and said, ‘well, I’ll just write what I think happened,’” Shores said.

After the book’s release, she found that the truth is stranger than fiction.

“That’s been the most incredible piece, you know, almost kind of spooky. How, you know, I wrote this for my imagination and yet my imagination is proving to be quite accurate, right down to, you know, modern day descendants of George Butler actually looking the way that I imagined George Butler to look in my own mind,” Shores said.

“It was it was amazing because she was coming into play with a lot of things that were real right up to George being blonde haired six-foot-plus guy, and a lot of us Butlers were six foot, blonde hair,” Means said.

Now with over 1,000 copies of her book sold and downloaded all over the world, folks are learning more about Nelly’s story, and the town of Sullivan.

“It’s been crazy because I’ve been looking at different it makes me look at different areas all the time when I come through town. I mean, I’ve been looking anyways being chair of the Select Board, but now it’s making me look even more for the history,” Means said.

So the question remains: did Nelly share her story through Michelle?

“So, several people have mentioned that to me, you know, is channeling a real thing and do I feel that I have channeled this entire story from the Butler’s from Nellie from Lydia? All I can say to that is that my life has completely changed in a year. And that doesn’t happen by accident,” Shores said.

Whether purely from her imagination or from beyond the grave, this is one Maine story that still lives on.