Vincent-usually called Mr. Vincent-was the co-owner during the restaurant's palmiest day, when it was called Vincent's Steak House. Vincent was Vincent's Steak House. From the establishment of that restaurant in 1951 until his death in 1978, he was the kingpin. "For thirty years," says David Colson, "he was the king of all the restaurants in western Massachusetts. He was a famous restaurateur. Ever since he died no one had been successful here."

Colson, and almost everyone else at the restaurant, is reasonably certain it is Vincent who is creating the most noticeable unorthodox happenings," Colson says, "and such a strong personality that we have the feeling he would not want to give up. He feels it is his restaurant."

The ghostly manifestations are many and varied, but the most unusual is an occasional and very localized odor, usually characterized as vile, although one waitress thought it smelled like perfumed pipe tobacco. However, she was the only person I interviewed who had a good word for the smell. (I interviewed two waitresses who had known Vincent, and neither could recall his smoking a pipe.)

When Colson first bought the restaurant, he was irritated with constant offbeat reports from his employees. "I'd tell them it was their imaginations," he told me, "get back to work. The thing that made me a believer was the odor. I finally had an experience with it. It was a stench, an awful, dead smell. It was like rotten eggs."

Sandy Cormier, dining room manager, told me, "The smell was indescribable. You'd be standing in a four-foot square. You'd step away, and you couldn't smell it, but if you'd step back in it would be there. It was usually in the foyer area, where I'm told Mr. Vincent used to greet the guests."

Mimi Lariviers, a waitress, told me, "Both Sandy and I have had the experience with the smell. The others have smelled a real rot gut smell, but I think it smells like sweet tobacco. One time Sandy called me into the entranceway, the foyer. There was a four-feet square where you could smell this very strongly, but if you stepped out of it you couldn't smell anything. I was stepping back and forth, back and forth. They don't allow pipes or cigars in there, so maybe it's not a pipe smell, but that's what it smells like to me."

Sharon Colson, David's wife, was more downbeat about the odor. "It smells like sewage," she told me.

White writing about hauntings I have many times run across unexplained odors. However, I can't recall their ever being unpleasant. They ranged from flowers to perfume to newly-baked bread to cigars to chocolate. But in all my investigations, this was the first vile smell that I can and medium I know who has written several books on parapsychology. Enid said:

All of us have an essence, and that essence has an odor.

In living people it comes out in perspiration. A fearful person will emit a strong acrid odor. When people die they can die with very strong feelings. The spirit of an evolved-guru emits a beautiful fragrance, but the oppositecan be true. Suicides, or people who died in a state of rage or guilt, can emit a very repellent odor. The mostcommon smell of that sort is a sulfuric smell, like rotten eggs.

Vincent Lanzarotto, from all reports, was a very concentrated man. He had started as a waiter in many restaurants and had worked his way up. There seems no question that he watched his employees intently, that he sometimes worked himself into a state of exhaustion and depression. Some people who knew him characterized him with such words as "different," "difficult," "eccentric," "terse."

I spoke with Colleen Nickerson, who had worked in the restaurant as a teenager. She lasted two weeks. "He was very quiet," she told me. "He sat up in the balcony, watching people as thought he was afraid they were going to steal from him. He never said anything, he was always just there and staring. The place felt so awful I just couldn't work there."