By Sue M Brander / January 2007

The Morgan Stallion, The Phantom of The Opera was laid to rest on October 29, 2006 at the age of seventeen, of unexplained internal bleeding.

He was by the immortal Elm Hill Charter Oak, out of Saddleback Symphony.  “He was a member of the Class of ’89,” Jeanne Mellin Herrick said. “That’s what we called that foal crop. It was the last year of foals at Saddleback. We showed him in Pleasure Driving and English Pleasure under Saddle. I showed him under saddle and Fred drove him.  He was a very popular horse.”

Then Jeanne told a classic story about great competition.  “One time, my daughter, Nancy, was showing our stallion, Aquarian Supremacy, at a show in New York, and I was showing Phantom. We were in the warm-up area, and I called to Nancy, ‘Nancy! I think I’m going to beat you today.’  Nancy called back, ‘No, Mom.  You can’t possibly beat me.’  I beat her.”  Jeanne Herrick broke into gales of laughter, remembering a day when two great horses met in the hands of two great ladies. 

Holly Butterman remembers seeing the weanling colt at a horse show in 1989. She wanted to buy him right there.  But, she might as well try to buy Long Island.  There was no way she could afford a colt of that caliber.  There was no way she could forget him, either. She followed that colt through his brilliant show career.  He was just a wisp of a dream in the heart of Holly Butterman.

The breeder of record was Thomas Choate, owner of Oriskany Creek Farm.  Mr. Choate was aging and needed to disperse his herd.  Phantom was for sale.  In 1997, when Phantom was eight years old, Charleen McCarthy and John Surprenant were looking for a wedding present for Charleen.  “We went to New York with the Scanlon’s to see him,” Charleen recalled.  It was an unusual sales situation. The owner, Mr. Choate, was hospitalized and terminally ill.  John and Charleen were quite shocked to see this famous stallion pastured in vinyl fencing, right next to mares.  Even more surprising, it didn’t seem to be a problem.  Mr. Choate’s daughter was doing her best to manage an orderly dispersal.  “They had no bridles, so they made a makeshift bridle for him, with a snaffle bit,” Charleen recalled.  “There was a little lesson kid there, an eleven-year-old girl who rode him to show him to us.  She had never even ridden a saddle seat horse.”  The stallion went perfectly for the girl. 

John Surprenant demurred.  “I will not buy him unless you ride him,” he said to Charleen.  She was none too confident about getting on this famous show stallion. But, if an eleven-year-old girl could ride him, she guessed she could give it her best shot.  “I got on him,” she said.  “He was a piece o’ cake. He’s a sweetie.”  She fell in love with him right then and there. John bought the horse and they sent him to Mike Scanlon’s training stable in Charlton, Massachusetts.  

“He was about as easy as they come,” Mike Scanlon declared. “You’d never know he was a stallion. He was a kind, kind horse. He liked to work. He was eager to please, that horse. And very, very pretty, very typey. Nobody would mistake him for anything but a Morgan, that’s for sure. Little kids would go in the stall with him, and you never had to worry about that horse. He was a good, honest horse all the way around.” 

Mary Scanlon remembered most warmly Phantom’s way with her children.  “He was fabulous with my children.  I have two sons who are autistic,” she said.  “Phanny (that is what all his closest New England friends called him) knew they were different.  I could take my boys in the stall with him.  He didn’t act studdy at all.  He could be a therapy horse; he was so tuned in to what was around him. 

“Many autistic children don’t like to touch things,” she continued, “because they’re afraid.  One of my boys was afraid of horses, because of their size. Phantom was smaller, and he just stood back and waited. He was intuitive enough to wait until Michael touched him. When Michael held his hand out, then Phantom smelled his hand and touched him. That incredible patience was there. When Phantom was outside, Michael would go to the fence, and Phantom would come over and look at him. He’d just stand there for a moment. Then he would slowly move forward. Somehow, he knew to wait and move slowly with my boys. 

“One day my youngest child ran underneath his belly,” she recalled. “Quick as a wink! My heart was in my throat.  Phantom just looked at her. There could be a mare in heat right in front of that horse, and if my children were in the stall with him, I never had a second thought about him misbehaving. Of all the horses that have been through our barn, he’s one that stands out. He truly, truly epitomized the Morgan. He was a friend. It’s better to have had that in your life than not to have known a horse like that.”

Charleen McCarthy couldn’t wait to show off her new stallion. They took him to New England Morgan Horse Show that year. “We had only had him a couple of months,” she recalled. “I showed him in the Amateur Stallions Class.  There were twenty-two in the class, and I got a fourth. I remember being so excited, because I beat Suite After. 

“I’m sort of a timid rider,” she continued. “They called for us to turn around, and I made the turn. Suite After didn’t. There he was, right in my face. I was scared to death. Another stallion was head to head with Phantom. I thought, ‘I’m in trouble now.’ But the horses were good. The irony is, I ended up owning Suite After a few years later.” 

At the end of the season, they brought Phantom home to their farm. “We loved him,” she said simply.  “Usually it’s a pain having a stallion around, especially if you have mares. But Phantom was easy. He never had a bad day, and he never intimidated me.”  Phantom had done English Pleasure and Classic Pleasure, and Charlene wanted to do something different with him. She decided to try taking him Western. John Surprenant didn’t think much of her idea, but she tried it anyway.  Charlene never did show Phantom as a Western horse herself, but when she sent him to John Lampropolous, The Phantom of the Opera became a great Western Pleasure horse. 

John Surprenant showed Phantom in Classic Pleasure Driving in the 1998 season. His first show with the horse was an adventure. Like his famous sire, Phantom had a long thick tail. They were the first to enter the ring, and within seconds the stallion’s tail was wrapping around the wheel of the cart. “I’ve never seen Phantom kick,” Charleen declared. “But that day I saw his hoof almost to my husband’s head. And he kept kicking. This is a Classic Pleasure class. They couldn’t have a professional go in. Finally, someone fixed the tail.  They didn’t get a ribbon in that class.”

John Surprenant was pretty upset, because he thought his horse would have pinned if it hadn’t been for the tail incident. He decided to prove it. “I’ll pay the $150 to go in the Championship,” he declared. It was the last class of the night, and a very large class. The Phantom of the Opera was Reserve Champion Classic Pleasure Driving. John Suprenant made his point.

Phantom was the darling of New England and New York.  He had his very own cheering section. John and Charleen decided to sell him to Donna Nolan, a customer in the Lampropolous barn.  He’d stay right there in the barn, and the John and Charleen could watch his continuing career with a new owner. In 2002, Donna Nolan drove Phantom to win the East Coast Invitational Classic Pleasure Driving at New England Morgan. They were Reserve in the Classic Pleasure Saddle Championship, and they won the qualifier. John & Charleen were delighted, as was Phantom’s new owner.

Then a potential disaster started brewing. Donna was getting a divorce, and she would have to sell Phantom. “John and I looked at each other,” Charleen recalled. “What do we do? There was really no question. He would maybe go here. Maybe go there. We couldn’t take the maybe part. So we bought him back.” 

It was February, 2004. John and Charleen vowed, “Phantom will never be for sale again.” That summer, Charleen revisited her dream of showing Phantom herself under Western tack. “Phantom had the patience of Job. I rode him Western at the barn. But I never showed him Western. It was my big dream.” 

There was no shortage of buyers for The Phantom of the Opera. He was a seasoned campaigner, an old trooper, tried and true. People wanted to geld him so he could be a Junior Exhibitor horse.  “That’s not what I wanted for him,” Charleen observed. “How much more could he do, that he hasn’t already done? He did Western. He did English Pleasure.  He did Classic Pleasure. He did in-hand. I think he even did Park, with Jerry Santwire, back in the days at Oriskany Creek. What else do you want from a horse? I wasn’t going to sell him to be gelded.” 

But Phantom was standing in a show barn, and his show career was over. Charleen could no longer bring him home to her farm, because every stall was occupied with mares. She longed for a home where he could go out in his own pasture, beside the mares, and just be a horse.

Holly Butterman, the woman who yearned for him as a weanling colt, surfaced again. She began to negotiate for the horse of her dreams—The Phantom of the Opera. If Holly Butterman bought Phantom, he would go to her sister, Katrina Bennington-Crie, a young trainer in Maine. Charleen had seen Katrina’s way with horses, and she thought Katrina would be perfect for Phantom. He would learn a little dressage. And then he would go home to Holly’s farm in Reno, Nevada.  “Reno!” she thought. “How cool is that! And he’d have his own pasture, next to his mares. He could be a horse.” He wouldn’t be going just anywhere. He’d be going to somebody she knew. Charleen had her work cut out for her, convincing John Surprenant to sell this horse again.  In the end, he went with his wife’s instincts. 

In January 2005, The Phantom of the Opera made the trip to Katrina Benington-Crie’s training barn in Maine. “A more generous horse I never met,” Katrina said. “He was sixteen when he came here. I knew this generous spirit to be true of the bloodline, because I worked with three marvelous offspring of a Charter Oak daughter at Monnington in England. Phantom had the kind of heart they are talking about when they talk about a Morgan with heart. My devotion to that bloodline was very deep.

“He has natural suspension,” she continued, “and you just can’t make that. They either have it or they don’t. Phantom loved his job—whatever his job was. Whether it was going out to collect, a saddleseat lesson for somebody who had only ridden a National Show Horse, or it was Timmy Stearns, the big boy in a Western saddle. He never put a foot wrong. If we put on a full bridle, up went the head. If we put on a western bridle, he’d reach down. 

“Holly and I had the joy of teaching him to learn about lateral work—leg yield, shoulder in, half pass,” she continued.  “He had always been doing show ring gaits. The dressage movement was a whole new world. He also got chiropractic and acupuncture treatments at our spa, and that complemented his dressage work. You can teach an old horse new tricks. He loved learning new things. He was a dream to drive, impeccable manners. And he had all the enthusiastic expression you could possibly want. There were never any questions. He didn’t ask questions. He just went out there and did whatever you asked. And he did it well.”

Holly did not want to ship the stallion across the country in the dead of winter, so she sent him to Katrina’s for the winter, planning to bring him home to Reno in the summer. She readied her barn for the prince of horses. “He arrived at my farm at 5:00 in the morning, right on time. I was lying in bed at 4:30, and I heard the diesel truck turning. They can’t come down this tiny lane, so I have an agreement with neighbors up the road to unload horses. I threw the coffee on. I ran to the barn and grabbed a stud shank and walked up the road.”  The grinning driver was wearing a Red Sox shirt.

“Are you from New England?” he asked.

“Yes, I am, and listen to you!” she answered. 

“Well, this horse just came from Maine. He’s a character. He probably would wear a Red Sox hat. I had him for ten days. You want to see him?” She could hear him inside, already talking to the mares. 

“There he was, with his teeny ears,” she recalled, “talking away.” The ramps were all down. Everything was ready. She led him down the ramp, and all the neighbors came out to see the new horse, lining the lane to Holly’s farm. “Well,” she said, “I had a World Class in-hand horse on the end of that line. After ten days on the van, which included a three-day layover to rest, he was full of himself. He bounced the whole way to the barn, talking to everybody. He was a perfect gentleman.”  She put him in a little turnout, so he could stretch. “He put his head down, sampled the hay and took a drink. Then he heaved a sigh of relief. I turned a mare out to keep him company. He was home. He never missed a beat.”

Life with “Handsome” was peaceful. He came out every morning and checked on his herd, which extended beyond Holly’s small mare herd to the Quarter Horse geldings on one neighbor’s farm, and the hunter jumpers and ponies on the other neighbor’s place. He regarded all of them as his extended herd. Although Holly’s mares were pastured nearby, it was never a problem. “I always come home from work at lunch time and check on everybody,” Holly said. “One day this past spring, I came home and the filly that was born here had figured out how to open the gate. Her mother stayed in the turnout, and the baby went for a walk. Phantom was standing at his gate, with his head over the fence, talking to her. She was standing directly in front of him. He had his mouth on her little ears and was nuzzling her neck. He had absolutely distracted her, keeping her safe. He could not have been kinder or gentler.

“We had been breeding mares,” she continued. “He could have been mean. He could have been a lot of things. But there was not a mean bone in his body.  Through that summer, this filly was just a fence line away from him. I’m sure he had a lot to do with convincing her to stay here. (She was born with some disabilities and has proven to be a survivor) He didn’t go stand by the road. He went and stood by the baby. Often, when they were out in the pastures, she would be standing closer to him than to her mother.”

Life with “Handsome” was also a little like having a celebrity around. People came from far and wide to see The Phantom of the Opera. “People did come to visit him a lot,” she said. “From Canada, California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona. They came from all over the west. They knew the breeding. They knew his name. And they just wanted to see this horse. He was breathtaking. There wasn’t a person that ever walked onto this property that ever even got near him without gasping. We never got to ride in the Rose Bowl Parade – oh how he would have loved that – and we never got to show on the west coast or go to Oklahoma, but we had wonderful days our last couple years together.”

The first winter came, Holly had to have surgery, and she sent the horses to a nearby stable. When her shoulder was better, she began riding him in the indoor arena. He came back to the little farm at the end of the lane in the February of 2006, home again. It was an idyllic summer. Phantom bred one mare that summer, a lovely Funquest bred mare, who is now carrying his only 2007 foal. Holly rode her dream horse this past summer at home on the farm and along the back dirt roads – dressed up in his show bridle – often bareback he was always a joy to spend time with.

Because he was such a fantastic show horse, he spent more time in the show ring than in the breeding shed. He has fewer than twenty get on the ground. They have won from Maine to Oklahoma and his daughters are often kept family members - not for sale.

He was dearly loved by John Surprenant and Charleen McCarthy, and Charleen paid a great tribute to the way he spent his last years. “He’s really Holly’s horse,” she said.  “He belonged with her.” 

Jeanne Mellin Herrick echoed this truth.  “She loved him as I did. He wasn’t just another horse. She really loved him.”

We're proud to present a few of the wonderful get of Phantom. If you have a Phantom foal, please send us photos and we will be happy to include your horse on his page.

(Click on any photo below to see an enlargement)

Sugar Hill's First Run, out of Katharine Serenity (UVM Tennyson x Rum Brook Tiffany), 2004 bay mare owned by Buffy & Michael Tarr of Nelson, NH. "Lilly" won the 2005 Maine Morgan Breeders Cup Yearling Championship. She was Res Jr Classic Saddle Champion at the 2008 New England Regionals with Buffy riding, and won or was reserve each time she was shown in that division in 2008.