The woods behind Damariscotta Montessori School have been many things to many students over the years: a classroom, a chore, a place to get muddy. This October, for two hours, they will also be a place to get scared.
From 7 to 9 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 10, the school's seventh and eighth graders will present the first ever Haunted Folklore Trail, a themed haunted walk staged along the nature trail they have spent months caring for. The event is entirely the students' own doing. It grew out of their volunteer work beautifying the trail, where, as the school puts it, they demonstrated "tremendous stewardship over our school land" and began fantasizing about the ways they might use it. A themed haunted trail was one of the ideas. It is now a public event.
That the idea came from the students rather than the faculty is not incidental at this school. Damariscotta Montessori School, which sits at 93 Center Street in Nobleboro, has built its adolescent program around what Montessori called the Erdkinder, German for "children of the earth." The middle school describes itself as "an innovative land-based educational program" in which adolescents "excel academically, engage in meaningful work, acquire leadership skills, and learn to care for themselves, their peers, the environment, and their community." Students in the program run a farm, deciding in class meetings what to plant and sell, growing produce in hoop houses, harvesting, packaging, and distributing vegetables through a CSA. They are, in other words, already accustomed to the idea that the land around them is theirs to work and to answer for. A haunted trail is a natural extension of that habit: the same trail they cleared and tended, reimagined as something else entirely.
The school's roots run back to 1990, when a local educator named Lou Genova started a small Montessori program in his home. Demand grew, and the program moved into a retail space it shared with a business called Women of Substance at 508 Main Street. For eleven years it operated as a primary program with a small elementary component, giving Midcoast Maine families a Montessori option when there were few. In 2001 the school was purchased by Chip DeLorenzo, who helped steer it toward nonprofit status; by then it served roughly 30 students, and families wanted more. An expanded elementary program followed in 2002. In 2005 the school moved to its current location in Nobleboro, and a 2009 addition made room for a middle school program that launched in 2010. Enrollment has held at just over 100 students in recent years, though federal data cited by Private School Review lists 82 students in grades prekindergarten through eight for 2026-27.
Shawnaly Tabor, who taught in the lower elementary classroom for twelve years, became associate head of school in 2020 and took over as head of school when DeLorenzo retired in 2021. She has worked to rebuild the school's sense of community in the years since COVID-19 and started a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee. Her own son attended the school from pre-K through eighth grade.
The choice of "folklore" in the event's name is a nod to something real in this corner of Maine. The twin villages of Damariscotta and Newcastle have their own ghost stories, and the region's most famous one belongs to a dressmaker named Mary Howe. On a cold night in December 1882, a physician, a county sheriff, and an undertaker went to a house on Hodgdon Street in Damariscotta, placed Howe's still-warm body in a wooden coffin, and carried it off for a secret burial. Howe had been declared dead weeks earlier, but her family insisted she was merely in a trance and would wake. Town officials did not believe them. No record survives of where the men buried her.
Howe was born in 1835 and appears in the 1880 census as an unmarried dressmaker living with her older siblings. She and her brother Edwin practiced spiritualism, the religion built on the belief that the spirit world exists and wants to communicate with the living, and they held seances at their home on Elm Street, then known as the Howe House Inn. Author Greg Latimer, whose book "Haunted Damariscotta: Ghosts of the Twin Villages and Beyond" examines the case, has spent years trying to determine where Howe was buried. "We know for certain she existed," he told the Bangor Daily News. Whether she was buried alive is a question that may never be answered.
It is the kind of story that a middle schooler, given a dark trail and a free evening, could do something with. The students have not said which tales they plan to tell, or whether Mary Howe is among them. What is clear is that the trail is theirs, the idea was theirs, and the work of turning a quiet path through the woods into something that makes visitors' hearts beat faster is theirs too.
The Haunted Folklore Trail runs from 7 to 9 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 10 at Damariscotta Montessori School, 93 Center Street in Nobleboro. It is a first for the school, and by the sound of it, the students have been waiting for the chance.