Wellfleet, Massachusetts - The season started on Memorial Day for Bob Morrill and Judy Pihl, owners of the Inn at Duck Creeke. They’ve been so busy opening up the rooms and taking reservations that they haven’t seen any of the usual unusuals yet.

But it’s just a matter of time, they say, before they or one of their guests see something extraordinary.

Morrill and Pihl say they’ve both seen ghosts since they bought the property in 1980. The inn includes the Captain’s House, the Carriage House, Sweet Seasons Restaurant and the Duck Creeke Tavern Room.

Judy saw her first ghost, a small diminutive woman in white, in the entry way to Sweet Seasons. Bob still recalls the night he went into the kitchen in the basement of Sweet Seasons’ kitchen, and watched as an aluminum cup was hurled across the wooden floor with great force. It was not shaken down from the storage shelf, but thrown from it, and it moved in a gravity-defying way across the floor, he says.

The couple doesn’t tend to tell guests a lot about the ghosts. But if you ask them, they will talk about it.

Two guests in adjoining rooms in the Captain’s House told them they saw a woman’s face at the window. One woman told them she saw two little girls in her room, and then went down to the desk to ask if any little girls had been looking for anything.

Apparently, Pihl said, the captain who owned the house had two little girls, and they died of smallpox.

One guest, who worked for an airline, had booked to stay for several days. But that guest left after one day with no explanation.

“We were wondering what we did wrong,” Pihl says. “But she came back that afternoon and explained that in the middle of the night she had seen a woman by the window and the woman came over to her and said ‘Sleep well,’ and she went to sleep. She said she had the best sleep in her life, but when she woke up and remembered what had happened, she checked out.”

They both think the woman in white that Pihl sees is the ghost of Eulalia Price, who owned the property with her husband, Joe Price, when it was the Holiday House. Eulalia, who had her husband committed when he ran after her with a machete, “was a very powerful woman,” Pihl says. “I was not at all frightened the first time I saw her. I thought I saw something in the corner of my eye, but nothing was there. Then I took three steps backwards, and I looked again, and she was there, in a long white dress in what was like dense cigar smoke, and she kept moving and then she was gone.”

Morrill said Sweet Seasons “was Eulalia’s kingdom. She ruled it, and she would count the peas on the dinner plates” that were sent from the kitchen to guests in the restaurant at the Holiday House. Three people died while performing in the Tavern Room, and musicians performing there have seen or experienced spirits.

“I’ve been told that when people die away from home, that possibly their spirits are trapped where they died,” Morrill says. “They don’t know that they’ve died so they keep trying to do the last thing they were doing.”

One room has a strong scent of a turkey dinner in it, another a strong smell of flowers. In one room Pihl several times has heard the sound of walking and beads falling to the floor, as if from a broken necklace.

One pianist heard a flute accompanying him as he played, although no one else heard the flutist.

Ten years ago, Pihl and Morrill held a séance with four men and four women. A sensitive Irish boy who worked for them stood watch as they opened the séance to invite the spirits to talk with them. “We didn’t know that we should have invoked God’s name if we were going to talk to the dead,” says Morrill. - Marilyn Miller