Susannah Sudborough
The Enterprise

EAST BRIDGEWATER – Imagine moving your business into a new location and quickly finding lots of what you might call “strange occurrences” happening.

Think flickering lights, unexplainable sounds, and objects that move on their own – the type of things that might make some believe a place is haunted.

That’s exactly what happened to 74-year-old Lorrie Parker when she moved her antique shop – Mrs. Swift’s and Moore Antique Shop – into its current location at 16 West Union St. in East Bridgewater.

But what might come as a surprise to some is that these occurrences aren’t scary or even a nuisance to Parker – she actually looks forward to it.

“I’m always anticipating what’s going to happen next. I probably wouldn’t feel this way if it was negative, but it isn’t,” she said.

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Parker said she’s always believed in the paranormal, having had paranormal experiences herself, though she doesn’t claim to know exactly what it is she experiences.

She said she prefers to use the term “energies,” instead of ghosts, for what she experiences in her shop.

Parker started her antique shop years before moving into the building on West Union Street, but when she found out it was vacant, she knew she wanted to move in.

“I liked the idea of an antique shop being in an old building,” she said.

The building is a former Masonic lodge that was known by the name Satucket Lodge and was chartered in 1882. It also had a stint as a funeral parlor called Prophett & Flynn in the early 1900s.

Lorrie Parker, the owner of Mrs. Swift’s & Moore Antiques in East Bridgewater, on Friday, Sept. 10, 2021.

Now, the building is owned by the Ideal Club – a Cape Verdean social club in East Bridgewater. They still hold events on the second and third floors, while Parker rents the retail space on the bottom.

“It’s just got so much character and so much history, and people feel it when they come in,” she said.

Parker said strange things started happening the moment she moved into the building 13 years ago.

The first occurrence she remembers was an incident when she was cleaning the bathroom toilet. She said she had just finished when the bell rang and someone came into the shop to see what kind of business had opened. She spoke to them for a moment before returning to clean the rest of the bathroom.

There, in the toilet, was a quarter. No one else had been in the building while she was gone.

Parker also said that right after she moved in, she painted the bathroom every morning for about two weeks. And every morning – despite no one else going in besides her that she saw – the toilet seat was up.

She called her landlord to check to see if someone else might be using it, but he reminded her that she had just changed the locks, so no one else could get in.

“I think it was the Masons, because they’re all men. I think they wanted to let me know, ‘Hey, this is a guy’s place,'” she said jokingly.

Since the beginning, Parker said, the bell above her door that lets her know someone entered the shop regularly rings when no one has come into the shop and there is no one nearby on the street. Sometimes, she said, it even rings violently.

There’s also an old Fisher Price toy radio that will play bits and pieces of its songs on its own, she said. One time, when she and her organization, the Massachusetts Area Paranormal Society, were doing an investigation, it played an entire song on its own.

Parker said customers will often feel compelled to come into the shop not really knowing why, and sometimes when they don’t even like antiques.

Oftentimes, she said, these customers will have strange coincidences happen to them, such as a woman who found an old photo of her husband’s first communion in the shop, or people with the same name meeting one another.

“It’s the little things that are weird and wonderful,” she said.

But Parker has also had some more exciting experiences as well. She said one time a woman came in and picked up an empty perfume bottle, only to have both her and the woman smell the strong scent of floral perfume waft by with a cold burst of air.

Another time, Parker said, an older man at her annual Christmas party warned her about a little boy in the back of her shop. When she looked, the boy wasn’t there, but after she turned around, the bonnet she was wearing, which was tied to her head, was yanked off.

She turned around, but there was no one behind her, and the bonnet hadn’t caught on anything. Instead, she said, the older man was laughing across the room, and he yelled “I told you!” to her.

More recently, Massachusetts Area Paranormal Society – which was known for its historic ghost tours of East Bridgewater up until last year, when a new cemetery commission prevented it from entering the local cemetery – was able to do a paranormal investigation of the building.

Mrs. Swift’s & Moore Antiques in East Bridgewater on Friday, Sept. 10, 2021.

Videos taken by the organization during the investigation show orbs of light flying in front of the camera over and over again.

What’s going on at Mrs. Swift’s and Moore Antique Shop? Parker said she isn’t sure, but she suspects it has to do with leftover energy from the Masons, the funeral parlor and other former tenants of the building and their guests.

But you don’t have to believe in the paranormal to enjoy the unique history of the building, all the strange happenings you might encounter at the shop or the antiques on display inside.

“It’s just a shop that has things happen,” she said.

Enterprise staff writer Susannah Sudborough can be reached by email at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter at @k_sudborough. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Enterprise today.