The Bloody Pit

There’s a gaping maw in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts that’s achieved a legendary degree for well over a century now due to its preternatural tales, mysteries, and tandem extraordinary and sinister creation that earned it the nickname “The Bloody Pit” (even though it’s a horizontal shaft) for killing hundreds of people who built it.

Its real name is The Hoosac Tunnel – an almost 5-mile long railroad tube that cuts underneath the Hoosac Range – a mountain chain that makes up the eastern rim of the jointed hill chains that make up the Berkshires region.

Skewed folklore tells that the name “Hoosac” roughly translates to “forbidden” in the language of the area’s first inhabitants – the Mohawks. But the actual meaning is akin to “stony place”, which is a pretty accurate description of the region. It’s also one of the many phonetic spellings of the word, which explains why New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts have the Hoosic River, the state of New York has the town of Hoosick Falls, and Vermont and Massachusetts share the Hoosac Mountain Range.

Every time I’ve stood in front of this imposing orifice that descends deep into the dark inscrutable heart of these hills, though, kinda brings the more ominous definition of its name right on home, and the vibes back up its designation as a damned place. It feels like you’re staring into an endless, ambiguous, and intimidating abyss that occasionally gurgles lonesome sounds and belches blasts of cold, acrid air in your face.

When this passageway was completed in 1873, it became a man-made leviathan turned celebrity – the longest tunnel of its kind in the world, a tangible example of an idea that had previously been thought to be impossible and foolhardy, and future-facing inspiration for other designs of engineering.

But it took lavish amounts of blood, tragedy, and time to make it happen. In its birth throes, the tunnel would devour an estimated 200 people, and for that reason, it became considered one of the most haunted places in all of New England, and that accolade is still very much stuck in the adhesive of the contemporaneous.

Why does something of this magnitude exist? Besides the fact that there’s something naturally settled within the psychological framework of humankind that makes us want to push anything that we consider a “boundary”, those pesky Berkshire Hills simply happened to be in the way.

Before the tunnel was built, you couldn’t really “get there from here” as us Vermonters like to say. Not at least without some substantial inconvenience.

As New England and New York’s Hudson Valley were beginning to enter the throes of the escalating industrialization in the mid-1800s – this huge disconnection was beginning to be felt.

A new railroad seemed like just the solution to intrepid self-made paper mill owner Alvah Crocker of Fitchburg, to extend the not completely altruistic gesture of financing the construction of a new railroad (not coincidentally, the railroad would also benefit his mills) – then cajoled groups of investors, engineers, and design firms to make it happen.

At the time, Massachusetts only had one railroad that accessed the western part of the state, and that ran through the southern part of the state, which left the north kinda isolated – both by the mountains and the fact that the railroad was cumbersome to access, and spur lines were billed exorbitant prices if they wanted to build a connection. Mr. Crocker wisely knew that a new, northern railroad would be incredibly serendipitous for him, and the rest of upper Massachusetts and Southern Vermont.

After survey work, the legend-crowded Deerfield River valley was chosen as the most practical route to veer westward on, until eventually having to puncture through what surveyors dubbed as the “thinnest” part of the unyielding slopes of the Hoosac Range – a chain of hills in the 2,000-foot elevations – to continue pursuing the trajectory all the way to Troy, New York – officially linking New York’s capital region and all their connections with Boston and inner New England.

To do that, they just needed to create a direct route through terra firma.

In 1842, Crocker and his cronies charted the Fitchburg Railroad that ran from Boston to Fitchburg, and then began to expand by acquiring smaller railroads and building new tracks to form a continuous link westward bound, the gestalt of which formed the Troy and Greenfield Railroad in 1848 as a connection – with the idea of the conceptualized Hoosac Tunnel being the cynosure of the project that would officially open up “the west” (or, anything west of the Berkshires).

The scheme was to have 2 crews of laborers start digging at different ends of the mountains between North Adams in the west, and (the town of) Florida in the east, and eventually meet up in the middle.

In January of 1851, ground was broken for the tunnel’s west portal on the mill town of North Adams’ side of the mountains, thus inaugurating Massachusetts’s original “big dig”.

But, such a colossal project couldn’t avoid being clingy to the sinister and was disturbed by bad luck from the very start.

In the summer of 1852, an innovative boring machine that was supposed to begin gouging out the tunnel’s eastern portal in Florida, got stuck in the Berkshire bedrock and nobody could extract it – so the crew had to start over in a new spot, with a new drill. If you know where to look, the original borehole that’s sometimes called “the false start” can still be detected in the woods today.

The tunnel’s clumsy start and continual ensuing setbacks ultimately became too expensive for Mr. Crocker, who eventually, begrudgingly had to declare bankruptcy. Other investors and engineers attempted to pick it up, but all would ultimately fail, and the project would stammer until the state of Massachusetts – who saw its prosperous potential – took it over in August of 1862.

In addition to the state declaring that most of the botched work done by private investors would ultimately have to be redone, including widening the tunnel and reinforcing it with bricks, some practicalities also had to be employed, or there was a sure chance that both burrowing crews wouldn’t link up!

To make sure the tunnel-in-progress would turn into a tunnel-that-functions, 6 alignment towers were built over the planned path of the tunnel – 4 of them on the summits between the 2 digs and 2 at the entrances themselves.

The survey towers were simple constructions with stone foundations and a single-slant wooden roof. Each one was equipped with a transit scope (a device like a telescope) to make sure each tower aligned properly, and each had a red and white pole that protruded 25 feet up. Back then, the mountains had been cleared for farmland, so you would have been able to see one tower from another very clearly. Of the six that were built, the ruins of four can still be cooly detected in the mountains today!

Inside the tunnel, plumb bobs were driven into wooden plugs on the roof and hung from piano wire at intervals along the line that was sighted from the towers, and surveyors told the blasting crews which way to proceed.

And speaking of blasting crews, the Hoosac Tunnel was the first construction project to use nitroglycerin, but nobody was having a blast, because it directly accounted for a lot of the lives the tunnel would eat.

The endeavor would need so much nitroglycerin that a factory was built near the west portal to produce it. Over the years, I’ve heard intriguing but uncorroborated local hearsay that, though the factory is long gone, there are still several barrels of nitro that are lost somewhere in the Berkshire woods – and though I’m dubious, that delights me that the Berkshires still have wilds that things can still be hopelessly lost in, waiting to be found.

Because nitroglycerin was so new, most of the miners didn’t really know the dos and don’ts of working with the stuff, so a lot of accidental premature explosions happened, which either blew apart anyone in the vicinity, or pulverized them underneath mountain debris. Ironically, John Velsor, the new foreman at the nitroglycerin factory, was “blown to atoms”, as newspapers at the time put it – when around 800 pounds of the killer soup erupted in December of 1870. Not a single trace of the man’s body was ever found.

That certainly didn’t help anyone’s spirit, as the work had already been grueling from the very start. Crews were basically progressing a mere 2 feet a day. In the beginning, especially for the west portal activity, preliminary geological “surveys” saying that the rock was solid and sturdy were quickly proven wrong. What they were actually dealing with was what was called “porridge stone,” rock layers buckled into each other for thousands of years that were so saturated with water that they crumbled into something resembling quicksand. Miners complained that carving out the tunnel (especially the western portal) was like “building a sandcastle in the mud”. The highly unstable porous stone forced the builders to line a lengthy distance inwards from both portals with brick walls so that it wouldn’t collapse.   

The west portal was so wet and unstable that a 264-foot tunnel had to be built around the portion of the western tunnel that had been completed to drain all the water that was flooding the worksite. Now known as The Haupt Tunnel, after the project’s first engineer – it still exists for those intrepid enough to search for it, and is pretty sketchy – with a few spelunkers running into spiders and narrowly avoiding a few collapses over the years.

Brinkman, Nash, and Kelley

On March 20th, 1865, explosives authority Ringo Kelley prematurely set off a blast that crushed his two companions, Ned Brinkman and Billy Nash, under untold tons of rock. Oddly, Mr. Kelley disappeared not long afterward without a trace. Did he run away? Had the guilt of killing two men become too much to bear? Or maybe it was because other workers started to report that they saw the angry ghosts of Misters Brinkman and Nash walking around within the pit? All anybody knew for sure, was that Mr. Kelley was gone.

Exactly one year later to the day, Ringo Kelley reappeared. Well, his corpse did. His body curiously turned up within the tunnel, precisely at the spot where Brinkman and Nash died, and he’d been strangled. Deputy Sheriff Charles E. Gibson investigated and determined that Kelley’s death had occurred between midnight and 3 a.m. of the day that he was discovered. But no clues were ever found, and no suspect was ever identified.

I can’t even imagine the vigor that those guys must have had to muster and keep stoked just to face a day at work. Most of them needed the work too badly to quit, but, some of them couldn’t take it and walked off the job – either because of the dreadful conditions, or now, because there were whispers of the tunnel being haunted and people seeing strange specters within the dark passage that they thought to be the shades of their fellow deceased miners.

Soon, the Hoosac Tunnel project was being christened as “The Bloody Pit”, a nickname that the tunnel has never been able to get rid of. And its nickname-legitimacy-card would be pushed when the project’s worst calamity took place while digging its central shaft.

The Central Shaft

With a tunnel almost 5 miles long, ventilation was needed, or there’d be plenty of unfavorable predicaments, and the resolution was as astonishing as the tunnel itself.

The Central Shaft is a 1,028-foot vertical conduit through Hoosac Mountain – essentially a giant hole that would be dug from the top of the mountain all the way to the tunnel below. The shaft would mark the tunnel’s close-enough halfway point (the actual mid-point was too close to the Cold River for a safe dig), and once it was completed, provide it with ventilation. The opening would also become the fastest way to introduce laborers into the tunnel – by dropping them down in a giant bucket instead of them having to walk about two and a half miles.

On October 17th, 1867, crews had completed boring about half of the central shaft.

Thirteen men had been dropped in the pit and working away, when sneaky escaping fumes from a naphtha fueled lamp in the hoist house above, somehow ignited, obliterating the structure. A deadly rain of freshly sharpened drill bits and tools fell down upon the trapped men, followed by the winching machinery, and finally, the flaming debris of the hoist house itself. If that wasn’t bad enough for the hapless crew, the air and water pumps stopped working almost immediately, leaving them stranded without oxygen as the shaft started to fill with water.

Helpless onlookers realized that nothing could be done, except for speculating whether the men who survived the falling debris would either die of suffocation or drowning.

When the smoke had finally cleared a little after 3 A.M., a miner by the name of Mallory volunteered to be lowered down on a rope to investigate and was given 3 oil lanterns for perceptibility. He was eventually pulled back up when 2 out of the 3 lanterns were snuffed out by lingering noxious gasses. Once above, he barely gasped out the words “no hope”, and then fell unconscious.

The flooded shaft was covered up and left untouched for about a year. Maybe it was partially because people in the vicinity claimed that they started seeing indistinct, fleeting shapes that’d be lurking one moment, and fading into the Berkshire inclines the next. Muffled disembodied groans and cries could also disturbingly be heard, almost like they were spooling out from within the earth itself.

But, the central shaft needed to be completed, so a year later, it was finally drained of water, and the bodies of those that perished down there were finally exhumed. That was when a chilling discovery was made; a raft was found.

Those that survived the initial ordeal had crudely taken a futile stab at survival – eventually dying of asphyxiation or starvation as the world above deemed them as already dead. Interestingly enough, those strange visitations and visions that haunted the domain prior, seemed to vanish afterward.

On August, 13th, 1870, the Central Shaft was ready to start central shafting, when it finally broke through the mountain and connected with the tunnel below.

Hoosac’s Horrors

But by now, the Hoosac Tunnel project morphed into the well-tread beat of other arcane phantoms that seemed to treat the tunnel as a manifesting mecca, and the formula seemed to be when one group of shades decides to split, others get ready to turn up the tomfoolery.  And as early as the 1870s, the gristly phenomena was starting to attract early ghostbusters – an allure that has never faded.

One of the first was a Dr. Clifford J. Owens, who on the night of June 25, 1872, took an expedition into the tunnel accompanied by drilling superintendent James McKinstrey. What the two men witnessed was reported in detail in Carl R. Bryon’s book A Pinprick of Light: 

“We had traveled about two miles into the shaft when we halted to rest. Except for the dim, smoky light cast by our lamps, the place was as cold and dark as a tomb… Suddenly I heard a strange mournful sound. The next thing I saw was a dim light coming from… a westerly direction. At first, I believed it was a workman with a lantern. Yet, as the light drew closer, it took on a strange blue color and… the form of a human being without a head. The light seemed to be floating along about a foot or two above the tunnel floor… The headless form came so close that I could have reached out and touched it, but I was too terrified to move.”

The apparition remained motionless in front of them as if it was looking at them just as they were of it, before floating toward the west end of the tunnel and vanished.

In October 1874, Frank Webster went missing when hunting near the tunnel. When searchers found him in the woods days later, he was in shock. He confessed that he had heard weird voices – their macabre siren song had coaxed him to enter the tunnel. He went in, and saw ghostly figures milling about that took his hunting rifle and beat him with it! He had the scars to prove it, but no rifle.

The next year, Harlan Mulvaney, an employee of the Boston & Maine Railroad, was supposed to deliver a cartload of wood nearby, but instead, fled in an unexplained panic and was never heard from again.

Despite all of these sinister happenings, eventually, both digging crews eventually met up in the middle of the mountain, and were less than an inch off! The plan had worked!

A New Marvel

It’s hard to imagine that simultaneously digging at both ends of a mountain over two thousand feet in elevation for twenty-two years and meeting in the middle using only plumb bobs and piano wire as a compass, would create what became America’s longest tunnel, a landmark in hard rock tunneling, and a new world wonder. The Hoosac Tunnel also laid down the rules of construction for practically all subsequent tunnels, and that’s still true today. I wonder if Mr. Crocker ever imagined that his hubris and attempted resolve would wind up being that impactful?

At almost five miles long, twenty-four feet wide, and twenty feet tall, using twenty million bricks to keep it together, it cost over $21 million, which was about ten times the initial price estimate. It would also cost an estimated 200 lives, with some saying that number is as high as 300.

The tunnel’s headings (both respective routes from each side) were purposely inclined by 26 feet per mile – with both slopes meeting up at an elevated mid-point so all the water that puddles inside (there’s a lot) is drained out through both portals, but it also prevents you from seeing one end from the other end, making the passage seem endless – peering in, you only see blackness.

On February 9th, 1875, the remarkable Hoosac Tunnel was ready for its first train, and it became a big deal basically from the get-go, becoming both a cog in the regional economic engine, a tourist attraction, and a memento for some patriotic flexing.

Original Hoosac Tunnel promotional advertisement, circa 1888/1889 – via The Library of Congress
Historic photo of the Hoosac Tunnel’s East Portal, Florida, Massachusetts. Circa 1900-1910. Via The Library of Congress
Neat vintage Infographic: Profile of the Hoosac Range showing the tunnel underneath – 1877. It’s really interesting to see exactly how it’s laid out! Via The Library of Congress
Historic photo of the Hoosac Tunnel’s West Portal, North Adams, Massachusetts. This view has changed quite a bit nowadays! Most notably, the introduction of the “Snow Door” in the 1950s. Photo taken circa 1900-1910. Via The Library of Congress

The Tunnel Today

In the coming years, more improvements and features would be added. The tunnel originally had a double set of tracks running through it, because of the enormous amount of trains that were utilizing the American rail network in its prime. And all of those locomotives were powered by coal – which belched an awful lot of noxious smog as a tradeoff, which was making the tunnel a pretty hazardous environment, regardless of the central shaft’s existence. Seriously. Some people were actually succumbing to asphyxiation on trips through the tunnel. So in 1911, electricity was brought in to power a fan atop the central shaft to help pull the fumes out. But even that wasn’t completely eliminating the problem, so briefly, the tunnel went electric, and trains had to stop before entering and then be pulled through via electric cables. In 1946, a double fan system was installed at the top of the central shaft, which are the same ones in use today.

Directly below the central shaft, a room was blasted out of the mountain rock and became a shanty for trackwalkers and work crews, and inadvertently, it also became a frequent haunt for hobos – which earned the chamber the affectionate nickname “The Hoosac Hotel”, or sometimes “The Hoosac Hilton” – both of them still enthusiastically used in tunnel-talk today. I’ve also heard the possibility of there being some of the now-iconic “hobo graffiti” – a pictorial-based clandestine communication system invented by savvy recalcitrant turn of the last century train hoppers and vagabonds, scrawled somewhere within the room, but so far I haven’t seen the evidence.

The Hoosac Hotel has a real creepy vibe to it, and that might be influenced by the fact it’s in the same spot that a large section of tunnel collapsed and killed a bunch of workers, and some say it’s also where misters Brinkman and Nash were discombobulated by an explosion. Nearby is said to be the legendary secret room(s), walled up to contain some awesome horrors.

It’s also the physical characteristics that alter the mood. The room is separated by the tracks with a wall of sordid century-old bricks that have a dark patina with age and all the pollutants that used to hang around within the tunnel – the ceilings are the natural mountain rock that constantly dribbles with water. Even with flashlights, the darkness practically ruins the light, but you can still make out the forsaken relics within; an old wooden desk, chair, and dented archaic communication and control equipment – all slimy and glistening because of the dampness. Modern relics like Twisted Tea cans and Slim Jim wrappers strewn on the ground alert you that you’re not the first one to venture this far into the tunnel, even though you really start to inwardly feel that you’re a whole world away once you’re that far in. I’m sad to say that my photos of this room that I took back in 2012 have been lost since then, so I’m gonna have to make another trip in to get some more photos up on this blog.

More sinister urban legends told of bodies wrapped in black trash bags found in the creepy room. Other yarns tell of other secret rooms built both somewhere in the tunnel and up in the central shaft that had been curiously bricked up. Some people say these spaces contain some unspeakable horrors that are best left undisturbed… (Check out this cool video below. These badasses not only explore the Hoosac Hotel, but they actually repel up the central shaft from inside the tunnel!)

The incredible Moffat Tunnel in Colorado took the accolade of the longest manmade tunnel in the western hemisphere in 1916 – at 6.2 miles underneath the Rockies! Then Washington’s 7.8 mile Cascade Tunnel became the longest in 1929, and currently, the Rogers Pass tunnel in British Columbia at 9.1 miles holds the record. But the Hoosac Tunnel basically wrote the manual on modern-day tunnel building, and all of these latter construction projects were successful because of what was learned while building it.

The American Society of Civil Engineers made the tunnel a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1975, and it remains the longest in-use railroad tunnel east of the Rocky Mountains, and though it’s basically more of a curiosity nowadays, us New Englanders still love/fear the Hoosac pretty affectionately, and dark tales are still told…

In 1973, Bernard Hastaba was in the mood for an adventure and decided to walk the entire tunnel. He entered via the North Adams side, and never re-emerged. He wasn’t found inside, he wasn’t found at all. He had, apparently, vanished entirely.

In 1984, a professor and hobbyist ghost hunter named Ali Allmaker was gripped with the uncomfortable sensation of someone, or something, standing next to her. She described whatever it was as walking right behind her, and feared that it would try to grab her and pull her into some unknown, awful horror. Maybe Mr. Hastaba encountered the same situation on his walk through the tunnel, but wasn’t as fortunate…

There are still modern-day accounts of weirdness, mayhem, and paranormal pandemonium in and around the tunnel today, and that’ll probably continue to be the trend.

Strange winds, wily apparitions, disembodied voices both caught on tape recorders and heard in real-time, and odd illuminations like balls of blue-ish lights, and a more railroad-centric phenomenon that’s also spotted around the country; spook lights. Given the Hoosac’s pedigree, I’d honestly be pretty disappointed if spook lights didn’t give an appearance here. “Ghost hands” have also been known to both push people in front of moving trains and pull them back out of harm’s way. It just depends on the day I guess?

As for its mortal caretakers, Pan Am Railways owns the passageway now, and it looks like they do a kinda lousy job at maintaining it, which is tragic. The West Portal’s snow door was added in 1954 – which is basically a big steel garage door installed after a locomotive derailed due to ice on the rails inside, that help keep snow and other nasty weather out of the structure and has become a defining feature of the west portal.

Originally 2 sets of tracks ran through the tunnel, but it’s been down to a single track since 1957 when tractor-trailers and the interstates became the leading mode to move. The last passenger train went through in 1958.

Around 8 freight trains a day are now all that run through its lonely void – and some of them are called “truck trains”, which can be as up to three miles in length and help reduce some of the traffic on the bay state’s byways. Structural engineers have been analyzing the tunnel since the end of the 20th century to see about renovating it so double-stacked container freight trains could pass through it – the track grade elevations were even dropped in 1997 to allow more clearance and taller railcars, but ultimately, the cost was deemed too high, and not imperative enough because there’s already a suitable route through southern Massachusetts, which I suppose is a bit ironic.

It’s kinda sad that it isn’t used more, given just how much effort went into creating it, and realizing that there was a time when a few National Guard soldiers would actually be stationed at both entrances during times of war to prevent potential terrorist attacks on it.

In early 2020, there was a substantial collapse about 300 feet into the more vulnerable western heading that shut the tunnel down for a few months, caused by both general wear and tear, and water flowing in from above the tunnel that was being trapped in blocked drainage tunnels that were supposed to be being maintained, which created a sinkhole that dropped about a 150 feet of mountain onto the tracks and opened up a cavity in the slope above. A structure this old, and this “constantly getting fisticuffs from the environment” is practically guaranteed to need some fixin’ up as the years pass by, but I really hope the Hoosac Tunnel doesn’t become the Hoosuck Tunnel. I really outdid myself with that last sentence.

But seriously, though, it’s such a special and uniquely New England landmark that’s left an epic indelible impression on our rhapsodized region. It would be a huge shame for it to diminish. Oh, and a literal topographical catastrophe.

Berkshire ODDysey 

It was the week of Halloween, and I and a few friends took a jaunt down to the Berkshires to see some oddity and see some foliage, and were listening to the podcast Lore to rev up the creepy vibe. It was also one of the loveliest fall days I’ve ever encountered!

The Berkshires are actually an extension of Vermont’s Green Mountains that have a reputation of their own, so I figured I oughta do more exploring around their nooks and crannies seeing how I live so close. Usually, we’d hit up the old racetrack in Pownal if we were heading down that way.

It’s pretty amazing how much the landscape changes once you cross the Massachusetts state line – It basically immediately gets kinda suburban-y and billboard-y, and this is supposed to be one of Massachusett’s most “rural” areas. Even a good chunk of Berkshire backroads are paved and feel like you’re really in a suburban fringe community than actually in the mountains. But then again, Vermont is a bizarre bubble, and it’s only until Vermonters begin to venture outside our state lines that we recognize this.

We drove through the neat historic mill turned liberal arts burb of North Adams, a town that the Hoosac Tunnel fundamentally ensured would thrive. The tunnel is even on their town seal that declaratorily exclaims “we hold the great western gateway”, which as far as civic iconography goes, is pretty rad.

3,489 foot Mount Greylock – the tallest height in Massachusetts and named after a legendary Abenaki chief – loomed over the wobbly rows of old mill tenement houses that bracketed the main drag. Greylock is a mountain with some cool footnotes hidden up its non-existent sleeve. The only taiga-boreal forest in the state survives upon its slopes, and a unique natural feature called “The Hopper”, a glacial cirque (a natural amphitheater-shaped valley) has been declared a National Natural Landmark. An asphalted scenic seasonal road curves its way up to the summit, and it always reminds me of an inactive blog post I read years ago about some young guys who decided to literally race the sun. They embarked in the dark at the top of Mount Greylock and tried to see if they could hightail it to Cadillac Mountain in Maine’s Acadia National Park – the first place the sun rises in the United States – to catch it happen. Sounds fun to me!

We linked onto the famous Mohawk Trail in North Adams, which in itself was an adventure! The Mohawk Trail is the affectionate and designated byway name for MA State Route 2. The name came from the fact that the road tar you’re driving on top of was put over what used to be a literal Mohawk Trail – a vital path that connected The Hudson River to the Connecticut River via going up and down the Berkshire Hills that was originally used by the local Mohawks and other area First Nation clans like the Mahicans, for trade, hunting, travel, and warring their enemies.

The Mohawk Trail basically invented and then literally paved the way for the idea of the American road trip, long before iconoclasts like Route 66. It got its start in 1914 when the state dished out money to improve the road around the dawn of the automobile craze. Early strategizing automobile clubs started to peddle the road as a tourist attraction to bring some cash into western Massachusetts, and it worked so well that it planted the seeds for Americans seeking out particular roads to drive for pleasure.  It’s still on my bucket list to drive the whole thing!

But, this scenic route wouldn’t be very scenic anymore with over-development, so foresighted conservationists before there were really conservationists started zoning and limiting development along the roadside, to keep one of the wildest parts of Massachusetts wild. The commonwealth acquired 5,000 acres of mountain slopes and created the Mohawk Trail State Forest in the 1920s, and during the Great Depression, the CCC came to the area and spruced it up by building roads, primitive campgrounds, and cabins up along miles of serpentine hill climbs. The tallest tree in all of New England – a 168-foot white pine named Jake Swamp – as well as about 700 acres of extremely rare old-growth forest with some trees over 400 years old – are somewhere within the state forest.

The Hoosac Range rises above the Mohawk Trail just east of North Adams. This is part of the mountain that the Hoosac Tunnel runs under!
The iconic hairpin turn on the Mohawk Trail – the hills of southern Vermont can be seen in the distance

And then there’s the wicked hairy hairpin turn on the side of a mountain on the Clarksburg/North Adams town line, one of the more distinguished and (in)famous sections of the trail.

At the top of the Hoosac Range, you’ll enter the town of Florida, marked by one of Massachusetts’s iconic book-shaped town line signs, and is the total opposite of what we think of when we hear the word Florida. It’s the highest town in elevation in the commonwealth, and allegedly gets more snowfall and colder temperatures than any other town in Massachusetts. The name, too, is kind of a mystery. Even the town’s website gets shoulder shruggy at how the name was chosen. It is possible that the name was an invented one, bandwagoning on a trend in New England around the 1800s where remote, mountainous towns with poor farmland were given ‘exotic’ or pleasant names to lure settlers there.

Florida is also the gateway to the Hoosac Tunnel’s eastern portal, which is the easiest of the two to see. From the Mohawk Trail, we went from the top of the Hoosac Range to the bottom and drove through an uncanny valley where New England’s perennial death was some of the most glorious I’ve ever seen – before we saw the giant hole in the mountain that told us we were there.

“The great bore” was everything but a bore! Standing at the foot of its wickedness was awe-inspiring and intimidating.

Cold, sour air belched from the murk and cryptic sounds echoed and cursed from within. Icy groundwater salivated from the ceiling and pooled along the tracks. Pieces of century-and-a-half-year-old brickwork occasionally crashed down with lethal strikes.

On a white-hot summer day back in 2012, I explored about half the length of the tunnel with a good college buddy of mine. I remember measuring that trip as such a big deal for me, because it was my first oddity expedition outside of Vermont, around the time when I was really struggling to find my identity and my beat out in the universe, and just beginning to try my prowess at blogging.

The tunnel was a tourist attraction even then, which was evident when an assembly of Hell’s Angels rumbled up next to us and decided to join us on our foray into the transport tube’s east portal. Well, at least that’s who they proclaimed to be. Some of those guys looked like they could do some casual origami with a parking meter, so I didn’t feel up for fact-checking them.

Leaving the Berkshire heat, the clammy darkness swallowed us and gave us a lot to stumble on. Endlessly falling water formed rivulets along both sides of the tracks, clogged with silt, gravel, brick shards, and sporadic live electrical cables. The tracks faired no better for a less accident-prone passage – the wooden railroad ties were warped, in various stages of deterioration and glistened with wetness, and made anything that wasn’t a slow and steady walk not such a great idea, unless a rolled ankle won’t throw off your mojo. I’m not in that camp of people.

We were about five minutes into the tunnel and the wife of one of the bikers had some kind of a happening. She immediately stopped in her tracks on the tracks, and explained she had the ability to detect when ‘spirits’ were in proximity. Not only were there apparently hoards of them in the tunnel, but according to her, they wanted us out. So she and the rest of the Hells’ Angels vamoosed, and me and my friend decided to continue onwards to the Hoosac Hotel.

I was far more concerned about running into a freight train than a ghost, and the fact that, even if I press myself up against the grimy tunnel walls, I barely have a few inches of space between me and the whizzing side of the locomotive to prevent me from being smashed. They pass through at random hours, spew potentially lethal amounts of diesel fuel, and the racket is enough to potentially cause some hearing damage, if not complete deafness.

Water was everywhere, seeping out of the ceiling and raining down our necks and soaking our boots. Bricks crashed down to the earth erratically. We were far enough in the tunnel where the daylight coming in from the east portal could no longer be seen – it was just a sullen lacuna, and the silence was so intense, my tinnitus buzzed through the strange isolation like crazy. It was gritty, dirty, and cold.

Then, I saw something far ahead in the distance, that today I’m still uncertain was paranormal or not. Within the ghastly illumination of a lone crimson tunnel light affixed to the natural rock wall, I saw a startling silhouette of what appeared to be a man. I abruptly stopped my progress forward, motioned to my friend, and uttered something along the lines of “Fuck, we’re busted”.

I wasn’t thinking it was one of the tunnel’s many shades, I thought it was an actual railroad employee that was gonna bring the law down on our trespassing butts. Motionless, we stood in place, and I stared at this figure, trying to understand what I was seeing. Its outline appeared to be dressed up in clothes that I regarded as “official-looking”, like an old-fashioned uniform, which further backed up my fear that it was some kind of authority figure that was making haste towards us. But that was when I noticed, that no matter how long we were watching it, and despite the fact that the strange man looked like it was practically power walking in our direction with determination, it strangely never seemed to gain any ground – it just kept on walking but never making any progress.

Then, we saw another light and another figure. This new sight, however, was definitely making progress in coming our way. It was a train. My friend and I booked it and clumsily sprinted back towards the safety of the east portal as fast as we could, as we stumbled and slipped over slippery tracks and adjacent inundated burms. We made it out just in time as a lengthy locomotive came barreling out behind us – grimmy, wet, and desperately trying to chase a little breath. To this day, I’m not sure exactly what was hustling towards us in that tunnel. Maybe we should have listened to biker wife lady?

In the fall of 2020, me and some other friends decided to take a jaunt down to the Berkshires to revisit the tunnel, and to get a little relief from the stresses of the pandemic, and we had a lot of fun. It was around the close of the evening by the time we had arrived, and the tunnel was crowded with obnoxious social media influencers and TikTokers, but it was engaging to see it again – you never really tire with a site like this one.

Next time I head back, I’d like to finally make it to the Hoosac Hotel and get some pictures to share with y’all on this blog post!

Taken on a humid mid-summer evening in 2018. Cascade Brook runs to the right of the tracks and was contained within a stone sluiceway – most likely to prevent the tracks from potentially washing out when the brook decides to get floody. Railroad ties were installed and spaced along the top of the structure, which I thought was kinda neat. If you bushwhack along Cascade Brook up into the mountains, you’ll be rewarded with the sight of the Twin Cascades – two waterfalls plunging as high as 80 feet that most visitors to the Hoosac miss out on!
While I was lazily trying to see if I could find the cavity from the “false start”, I instead found this curious little storage pocket – a tiny brick space built into the cliffside that’s long been filling in with earth and dead leaves.
Took a quick peek inside and found some old machinery bits!
The east portal of the mighty Hoosac Tunnel, October 2020

Before we headed back to Vermont, we took a quick drive down aptly named Central Shaft Road, to the top of the central shaft to check out the fan units, and to see a relatively new memorial that’s been dedicated to all the lives that the tunnel has reaped – a squat and prostrate rectangular block of granite laid down near some old apple trees across from the fan. Unbeknownst to us, we actually wound up visiting on the same day of the central shaft catastrophe.

Here’s an older video of the fans in action – to get an idea of just how noisy they are!

I also haven’t had an opportunity to visit the west portal yet, so that’s still on my Hoosac-centric agenda. The last time I was down that way, it was a bit after the collapse. While the east portal is easy to access off a paved road, the west portal is obscured from a relatively well-traveled throughway – at the end of a dirt access road, which was gated and decked out with a few new looking “no trespassing” signs, and I totally I didn’t want to run into disgruntled railroad employees who were doing some collapse-cleanup.

This was a real fun explore, and even more fun to research and unpack everything I was gleaning about this place. The most fascinating thing about a place like the Hoosac Tunnel, is that it dutifully keeps spawning new tales, tall or true, and most likely will for posterity.

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Do you have a spooky story from your trip to the tunnel that you’d like to share, or maybe have appear on this blog entry? Or perhaps you wanna make me hip to another Berkshire oddity or abandonment? Email me please!

Links

The closest thing the tunnel has to an ‘official’ website, which goes into amazing detail on all portions of the tunnel: HoosacTunnel.net

http://paulwmarino.org/hoosac-tunnel.html – a fantastically researched resource, with tons of historical imagery!

https://mysterious-hills.blogspot.com/ – my favorite Berkshires blog! Joe puts a lot of thought into his entries and is a great storyteller!

Here’s a video that actually films a modern-day train ride through the entire tunnel – it’s a neat watch and a good dose of perspective!


Since 2012, I’ve been seeking out venerable examples of Vermont weirdness, whether that be traveling around the state or taking to my internet connection and digging up forsaken places, oddities, esoterica, and unique natural features. And along the way, I’ve been sharing it with you on my website, Obscure Vermont. This is what keeps my spirit inspired.

I never expected Obscure Vermont to get as much appreciation and fanfare as it’s getting, and I’m truly grateful and humbled. Especially in recent years, where I’ve gained the opportunity to interact with and befriend more oddity lovers and outside the box thinkers around Vermont and New England. As Obscure Vermont has grown, I’ve been growing with it, and the developing attention is keeping me earnest and pushing me harder to be more introspective and going further into seeking out the strange.

I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to keep this blog going. Obscure Vermont is funded almost entirely by generous donations. Expenses range from hosting fees to keep the blog live, investing in research materials, travel expenses and the required planning, and updating/maintaining vital tools such as my camera and my computer. I really pride and push myself to try to put out the best of what I’m able to create, and I gauge it by only posting stuff that I personally would want to see on the glow of my computer screen.

I want to continuously diversify how I write and the odd things I write about. Your patronage would greatly help me continue bringing you cool and unusual content and keep me doing what I love!

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A Day At The Races: The Old Green Mountain Racetrack (and Pownal Peculiarities)

I remember first passing this ugly hulking blight as a young kid on a trip to Connecticut, and never forgot it. It took me until the past few years to really investigate it, though, because I assumed it was just going to be a boring empty building enclosing rows of old stadium seats. But damn, I really under-estimated the interest factor here.

This place is so incongruous and inconspicuous in contemporary Vermont, that many people are pretty surprised to find it actually ever existed at all. And though it was never a huge success, it was a standout place for this compartment of American culture and ran for most of the latter half of the 20th century.

In the spring of 1965, a horse racing track started up in the hardscrabble town of Pownal – where three fascinating mountain ranges, the Green Mountains, Taconics, and Berkshire Hills, collide.

Its three creators’ idea was to duplicate the success of Saratoga, New York, and then compete with it by creating another track in a charming rural area – and the Pownal Valley, which has been literally viewed as one of America’s most photogenic, was chosen.

But it was also a very practical decision. Pownal is the extreme southwestern corner of Vermont – bordered to the west by New York State, and Massachusetts and their weird Berkshire Hills to the south. Pownal, being a primary portal into Vermont, is closer to the more urban burbs of southern New England and New York State than the rest of Vermont is, so the track effortlessly racked up a lot of visitors from the “flatlands”. 

Pownal’s history is a small magnum opus for yarn spinners and history nerds like me because so much has seemingly happened there, while parts of town look like so much hasn’t happened there, and I’m sure even more tales molder away in the town’s backroad hovels and neat antiquated farms. (Seriously, some environs look like they have been untouched by modern headways –  like you’ve stumbled into a deep southern Appalachia, or as my friend calls it; “Pennsyltucky”.)

Perhaps that’s because there’s just something, well, weird about the town, something endemic and enigmatic that might be as old as its mountains, and that draws me in like a torch in search of a flame. The town definitely has a different kind of vibe to it than the rest of Vermont. I really like Pownal – it’s seriously one of the coolest towns in the state! When I sat down to put together my blog post from this explore, I couldn’t think of this old racetrack without thinking about all of the other amazing things that I’ve gleaned about this town over the years.

Originally, the area was inhabited by Mahicans, whose savage fate may have been foretold by prophetic rocks on a Pownal mountainside.

Its realm was the only part of what is now Vermont that was ever trodden on by Dutch colonizers from New York in the 1600s (The Albany/Hudson Valley region of New York has a really cool lingering trace of Dutch-inspired architecture, toponyms, and seemingly ancient muniments as a result! I’d love to do far more exploring/researching there)

What might be the oldest home in Vermont is in Pownal village – The Mooar-Wright House – which was constructed around 1750.

Vermont’s only witch “trial” happened here in the early days of Pownal, where some folks victimized a Dutch widow named Mrs. Krieger for “possessing extraordinary powers,” whatever that meant. The obscure account was originally (and fortunately) recorded by lawyer and historian T.E. Brownell, and has managed to survive into the 21st century, though still pretty obscure.

I’ve read about a few Vermont women who were said to be witches, and usually, the accusations and “evidence” were in the camps of “consorting with the devil” or using “magic”, which lead to mischief like making cows stop producing milk, crop failures, townsfolk suddenly being inflicted by mysterious maladies, and innocuous stuff like predicting the weather before it happens. Other more sinister tales include the conjectured witch conjuring up a vast spectrum of malicious acts towards others she didn’t like.

I’ve been told that my great grandmother could predict the weather, held seances in her parlor, told fortunes she read in tea leaves, and once unwittingly shared a barn dance with the devil himself, but she seemed pretty well-liked and esteemed.

Unfortunately, widows were sometimes the prey of discrimination back then, because they were seen as not only a “burden” to the community, but they were easy targets because they had no family to defend them. Human beings are the real monsters.

Whatever it was that the widow Krieger was doing was seen as diabolical enough to condemn her, and a “safety committee” was organized to deal with it.

The Hoosac Valley: Its Legends And Its History by Pownal-ite Grace “Greylock” Niles tells that the committee sentenced widow Krieger (spelled “Kreigger” in her pages) to trial by ordeal, and gave her two choices. The first choice was she could climb a tree and wait for a group of men to chop it down. If she wasn’t killed outright, she was innocent. Or, she could face “trial by water” – which meant that a group of townsfolk cut a hole through the ice of the Hoosic River, bound her, and then tossed the poor woman into the frigid current. This surefire method stemmed from an old belief that water was sacred, and would undoubtedly sort these provoking preternatural things out. If she sunk, she was innocent, but if she floated, then that meant that she was in allegiance with the devil or some other variety of evil, and would have absolutely nothing to do with science/physics. I also noticed the confirming circumstances of the two methods contradict one another (if she wasn’t killed, she was innocent, versus if she was killed, she was innocent. What).

The widow Krieger chose the latter, thinking it was the safer choice, and sank like a stone. That was apparently good enough for those Pownal-ites who gathered for the show. Unlike neighboring Bay State witch hunters, though, these Vermonters seemed to be a bit more philanthropic, and a group of men suddenly panicked and scrambled down the riverbank to fetch her. Not only did she live through the ordeal, but I’m assuming things were really awkward afterward. As the committee resolutely said afterward; “If the widow Kreigger had been a witch, the powers infernal would have supported her”

Today, there’s a standout cliff near North Pownal that local parlance still knows as “Krieger Rocks” – both a homage to early Dutch influence and an informal parable of a hapless woman.

I also found this occurrence even more uncanny, because while the epoch of the infamous witch hysteria of Salem and southern New England occurred in the 1690s, Vermont’s lone delirium happened sometime in the 1760s, probably after 1761 when the town was charted. (Actually, Yankee witch based superstitions, though weakened, remained alive into the 19th century!)

Perhaps Pownal just needed to install a few witch windows? 

In October of 1874, Thomas Paddock, a well-respected farmer with an amicable character, suddenly found his property under a maelstrom from poltergeist-like activity.

Stones – varying in size from pebbles to a 20-pound boulder (!) rained down on his house and outbuildings, but neighboring properties were completely unaffected. The stones were found to be hot when handled, even on chilly nights, and a few of them reportedly defied gravity, and rolled uphill, or even up and over the peak of the roof after landing, almost as if they were propelled. Mr. Paddock dubbed whatever it was “the stone-throwing devil”, word got out, and for a brief time, it caused a sensation.

He even offered a reward of one dollar for anyone who could solve these shenanigans, but shortly after, the cache of tourists and newsmen cleared out when the odd activity finally stopped. Nobody was any wiser at what exactly happened at the Paddock farm, not even today (though cursory blame was attempted on a hired farm boy named Jerry, who coincidentally was in the vicinity of the falling rocks more often than not…) Interestingly enough, the farm just happened to be near-ish the Krieger Rocks part of town…

Local girl Addie Card, who once labored at the now-demolished and superfunded Pownal Tannery (a site I’m sorry I missed out on), was photographed by the now-famous documentarian Lewis Hines and the image became a barometer in his efforts to stoke public objection about turn of the last century child labor in America. A collection of dilapidated shacks off state route 346 on a dented dirt drive known as “French Hill” are original tenement houses of the old tannery and one of the last reminders that the place actually existed in North Pownal.  

There’s still an existing and forgotten granite tri-point state marker erected by surveyors in the 1800s that’s now lost in the thick forests of the hills – some of those slopes still cooly contain colonial-era scrawlings on glacial deposited boulders of predecessing hikers and explorers – just some of the many relics I’m sure these hills contain. I know some people that hit a jackpot with their metal detectors around it. Who knows what else can still be found within the southern Green Mountains?

Another notable person with alleged wild talents was Clara Jepson, Pownal’s official seer – a profession that you don’t hear that much of in contemporary times (except maybe advertised on television at 3 AM). But until she died at 87 in 1948, she was the best-known clairvoyant in Vermont and created a pretty venerable reputation to back up her accumulated character.

Among her professed talents, she could allegedly hunt the location of lost or hidden objects, and was consulted on several cases, including one of the terrifying disappearances in the nearby mountains that would later become an area known as the “Bennington Triangle” (one of my favorite Vermont stories). According to witnesses, her answers would manifest themselves in a cryptic language within the folds of a lacy white handkerchief she would fondle during her sessions. (If anyone is old enough to recall ‘seeing’ her in real-time, or has any kind of story related to, I’d love to hear from you!)

It seems like Pownal’s always done things a bit differently, in ways that seem to almost be a few shades deeper into the mystic that’s masqueraded by a rough enchanting landscape, and maybe that’s augmented because of the town’s historically independent spirit, mountain isolation, and influenced by its border state surroundings. I honestly don’t think that this racetrack project could have happened in any other spot in Vermont.

And speaking of the racetrack, it also seems to be the last big spike in Pownal’s histogram, for the time being anyway. The track opened in May of 1965 at a cost of six million dollars in a former cornfield along the Hoosic River.

But from the start, Vermont’s only pari-mutuel racetrack failed to draw in the crowds that its investors were anticipating – the actual attendees were half that. But it kept on keeping on, despite quite a few subsequent telltale ownership changes, and oddly became kind of significant for east coast horse racing, ironically because of the efforts made just to keep the place buoyant. It was one of the earliest to do gimmicky nighttime races, and the first to do Sunday matches anywhere east of the Mississippi during the days of yore when the rest of the country still adhered to the blue laws. It created a sort of niche fanbase and wound up employing a lot of locals, which was a boon in a region with an economy that was becoming pretty hard-up. Casual tourists enjoyed the racetrack, too, and I was told it was a popular stop for folks who’d take Sunday drives through the mountains of Southern Vermont.

Old postcard of the Green Mountain Racetrack via CardCow.com
Old postcard of the Green Mountain Racetrack, with Route 7 in the foreground – via CardCow.com
Old postcard view from inside the grandstands.

A packed parking lot at the Pownal Track – sometime in the sixties.

Twelve years later, horses were dropped from the itinerary, and Greyhound racing was the only thing occupying the oval (which I guess is the bottom echelon of these kinds of places, according to some nostalgia sites I browsed) until 1992, when the track closed for good – in part to animal rights activists, waning income, and the state making the activity illegal. A resurrection was attempted around the turn of the millennium but ultimately failed. It was strange seeing moldy flyers and banners ambitiously announcing its “grand re-opening” stored in soggy piles in the dank basement levels. I’d love there to be more economic prosperity for Pownal and Bennington County, but not in the form of animal exploitation.

Today, the 144-acre property is abandoned, despite multiple failed attempts to do something with it, and it’s a real shame that nothing has happened yet. Further damage was done when the nearby Hoosic River, a perimeter defining watercourse that wears the Indian appointed name of many local toponyms that variate between “Hoosic” and “Hoosac” – and has a history steeped in local lore – flooded its banks significantly a while back and seeped into the lower levels of the building.

The site has so much potential – especially being off the most traveled road in Vermont. Lollapalooza held their festivities on the expansive grounds in 1996, and a few antique car shows also took advantage of the space between 2005 and 2008, which fits right in seeing as the iconic Hemmings Motor News is located up the road in Bennington in a rad, restored Sunoco station.

Williams College, a few miles south of the old track, even did a study about the property in 2011 and suggested everything from affordable housing, light manufacturing, or bringing back some agriculture.

Until any of that happens, you can’t miss the place. It’s an intriguing, conspicuous eyesore at one of the main entry points into the state – dominating a portion of the view as Route 7 begins to climb the mountains towards Bennington.

One of the biggest curiosities about this property to me was the name of its access road. The unassuming road is named after a cemetery, but I’ve walked around the grounds and I couldn’t spot any boneyards. It made me wonder – back in the day, moving an old cemetery wasn’t as big of a deal as it would be nowadays. Could there have been an old family plot from an old farm that was erased? Are there still corpses trapped underneath the sea of weedy asphalt that encircles the grandstands, or maybe underneath the earth of the old track?

Well, according to Google, the cemetery still exists in a far-flung corner of the property, and it’s the oldest in town – with a gathering of faded and broken 19th-century headstones placed in the woods (Interestingly, Pownal has a lot of cool old cemeteries – and many of them are old farm family plots, which might seem kind of an odd concept in today’s world). I’ll have to give it a visit the next time I stop by.

Many of the glum-looking crumbling cinderblock stables were razed for a solar farm, which is awesome, but the gigantic grandstands building still stood at the times of my visits, and was a spooky but really fascinating time capsule of the late sixties and early seventies, with its cold cement blocks and hideous fake vinyl wooden wall paneling – an architectural design element I hate. I especially admired the extinct fonts on all the office doors; “bookkeeper”, “telegraph”, “photographers suite” etc – that was pretty neat to see. One unifying theme to the property was the use of a particular dark green – thematic of its location in the Green Mountains, which was used on everything from the exterior paint job to the color of its graphic design marketing. The appeal, though, was a little curious. Everything about the place felt cheap and kinda sleazy.

The building was an unassuming labyrinth of smelly and squalid offices and catacombs of dark and drippy maintenance and miscellany areas all filled with relics, gross puddles of goopy chemicals on the floors, and wandering birds.  The roof had long failed, and nature has been metamorphosing the structure in gross ways for over a decade.  One of the coolest things I found was the former track photographers suite, which was still filled with heaps of developed and undeveloped film of the old races. The basement had such a foul odor that, eventually, we had to dip back outside for some fresh air revitalization.

Upstairs, the former venue, snack bars, and grandstands are all cavernous spaces that have been trashed, smashed to smithereens, graffitied, succumbing to water and decay, and turning into terrariums, as moss and young plants have begun to take habitat on the floors and the rooftop. A whole colony of what was probably hundreds of pigeons had taken up residence on (and within the cavities of) the defective roof and constantly circled the large, mid-century structure.

It was a creepy explore, with lots of eerie sounds that croaked and carried through the wide spaces and dark crevices. The smell of rancid decay permeated everywhere.

Overall I thought this was a real bummer of a place – an attitude formed by the dated and ugly ruins, and the fact I’ve never enjoyed or supported the kinds of revelry that once went on here.

The real reason I chose to make multiple explores here was simply because of the fact that it exists, and my sense of wonder seduces me to explore as much of Vermont as possible – especially the abandoned stuff. And admittedly, a few visits had me appreciating it in a totally different light and discovered that it was a treasure trove of an explore and architecturally evocative of its time. But I found it a real shame that other people who’ve stopped by have decided to completely decimate this place and use it as a law-free zone.

The amount of destruction in the past few years was astonishing – I noticed a humongous difference between my visit in July of 2019 and March 2020, and towards the last months of its life, the bad road tar of the old parking lot and access road almost always had multiple cars – many with out of state plates, parked around.

The people that come here are quite a circus show of other amiable explorers, curiosity seekers, locals, and shady characters – it seems like many out of staters or area hooligans are using the old track as a law-free zone. A few people we ran into definitely made us uncomfortable.

Dusk was humming up, and as we were getting ready to leave, three boys on ATVs zoomed through the parking lot, and a Nissan Altima full of teenagers parked in the weeds in front of the building and had an “oh shit!” moment as we pulled out and all locked eyes as they were removing copious packs of Twisted Tea out of their trunk, while nearby, a young twenty-something couple was awkwardly trying to wedge a sign they had taken into the backseat of their Ford Focus.

I had this post sitting in my WordPress drafts for a while. Because I’m a perfectionist, I wanted to get the feeling right and make this post interesting and fun, but I was also concerned about posting the location. I realize that in the past few years, a larger amount of people have been using my blog to add places to their exploration checklists, and I’ve been really re-evaluating my responsibilities as a preservationist and a local weird worker, what I post, and how I write about it.

I already saw the racetrack morphing into a weird beacon for trouble, and I guess I didn’t want to add to it. Thanks to the internet, nothing is a secret anymore, and I’ve seen an alarming increase in the momentum of special places, in general, being over-touristed and ruined by unlikely people.

Unfortunately, at some point on the night of September 16th, 2020, a “suspicious fire” was started in the grandstands that used the wooden seats for fuel, and the entire building was cooked and even more destroyed than it already was. The fire fueled a local outcry of folks who are fed up with all the fools turned sightseers. This is one of the many reasons why I never give out locations. Practically everything you’ll see in my photos has been reduced to ashes, but the mangled and blackened shell sadly still looms beyond Route 7 looking pretty haunted. If you’re interested, the Berkshire Eagle has some illuminating drone photography of the damage.

I’m so grateful I had the chance to enjoy a few explores and make some fun memories here when I did, and am saddened by the loss of what oddly was such an uncommon wreck. There was so much more that I wanted to see, that now I never will.

I think that the Green Mountain Racetrack was uniquely special. Because of its smooth accessibility, its literal open-door policy intrigued all kinds of souls who decided to let their curiosities lead them here. I was scanning loads of posts on Instagram and was a bit startled to see just how many people not only have snooped around here, but were genuinely fond of this place in their own ways, and had fun making multiple trips here to satisfy the natural human urge of investigation. Abandoned places inspire that kind of magic that encourages us to forget about the chains of society and our inhibitions. When the news hit that this place burned down, people started commiserating.

This was a continued lesson for me not to take places for granted. I was just speaking to a good friend a few weeks ago about planning yet another return here because of all the fun we had last time – but we took this old track for granted, and now it’s gone. Everything is finite.

So here you go; a whole bunch of photos of the old Green Mountain Racetrack!

The Green Mountain Racetrack when I visited back in Spring 2011. 

The Green Mountain Racetrack June 2019/March 2020

The old track oval, now a field growing wild. Looking at this image, I still remember this summer evening; the humidity dripping down my skin and shallow breathes in heavy air, with the gentle sound of rustling long grasses and a nocturne of peepers. The end of the Green Mountain range can be seen in the distance.

Green Mountain Racetrack June 2020

Photos from my last sojourn here. It was a sultry early summer day as mists slid of new green slopes vibrant against gloomy ashen skies and uncomfortable humidity that drenched us in sweat. The entire place reeked of something sodden and foul. It had started to rain, and the roof, which had long failed, was letting fetid water in which dripped down and baptized us and made the upper carpets like stepping on a wet sponge.

“You’ve been baptized – your soul belongs to the race track now” I joked as a trickle of mystery water dribbled down upon my friend’s head and shoulders. She involuntarily cringed at the sensation and shot me a glare.

Man oh man, I really miss this place.

I realize the noun “Paddock” means a field/enclosed area where horses are kept and exercised (duh, because it’s an old horse track), but I personally can’t help always think of the aforementionedly bedeviled Pownal farmer Thomas Paddock when I’ve passed under this sign, and all the inexplicable weirdness that went down (literally) on his local farm. Personally, I think that would have been a way cooler restaurant name reference.
A groovy old conference room in the basement

I’d really love to do more shunpiking and exploring around the Pownal area – it really is a gem of a town, with far-stretching vistas, old farms, backroads that convert into gnarly class D forest roads, and hidden swimming holes under mountain cascades.

When I was curiously searching for other people’s media from their explores here, I found quite a few talented folks who bring some great stuff to the table. Here’s one of my favorites; a great urbex video by explorer “Dark Exploration” (who, in my opinion, got wayyy better shots than I did!)

Check out this cool drone footage shot by Youtuber Dagaz FPV! It gives you a scope of just how big the property was and some rad POVs that I couldn’t capture. Maybe I should invest in one of these…

 

Are you from Pownal or the surrounding environs of Southern Vermont/The Berkshires/New York State? Or are you a Vermonter in general? I’m looking for weird and wild stories, wonderous places, incredible people, and especially abandoned locales! So if there’s something you’d like to share with me, I’d love to hear from you!

I’d also really love to grow this blog and present unique, meaningful, and extraordinary content that’s a departure from the same regurgitated stuff you find everywhere else online, and your help would be hugely appreciated! I have bad social anxiety, so I’m not always on social media as often as I probably should be.

Feel free to drop me a line at chad.abramovich@gmail.com

Also – if you appreciate me and this blog, perhaps consider making a donation at my PayPal below? The pandemic has hit my finances and my mental health pretty hard, so any amount is humbly appreciated. I’m also on Venmo if that works better.


Since 2012, I’ve been seeking out venerable examples of Vermont weirdness, whether that be traveling around the state or taking to my internet connection and digging up forsaken places, oddities, esoterica, and unique natural features. And along the way, I’ve been sharing it with you on my website, Obscure Vermont. This is what keeps my spirit inspired.

I never expected Obscure Vermont to get as much appreciation and fanfare as it’s getting, and I’m truly grateful and humbled. Especially in recent years, where I’ve gained the opportunity to interact with and befriend more oddity lovers and outside the box thinkers around Vermont and New England. As Obscure Vermont has grown, I’ve been growing with it, and the developing attention is keeping me earnest and pushing me harder to be more introspective and going further into seeking out the strange.

I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to keep this blog going. Obscure Vermont is funded almost entirely by generous donations. Expenses range from hosting fees to keep the blog live, investing in research materials, travel expenses and the required planning, and updating/maintaining vital tools such as my camera and my computer. I really pride and push myself to try to put out the best of what I’m able to create, and I gauge it by only posting stuff that I personally would want to see on the glow of my computer screen.

I want to continuously diversify how I write and the odd things I write about. Your patronage would greatly help me continue bringing you cool and unusual content and keep me doing what I love!

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The Drowned Forest

I recently had a lot of fun voyaging around the tiny angle that is New Hampshire’s 18 miles of seacoast! I haven’t been down towards the Granite State’s coast since I was 10 years old, so the nostalgia was stimulating and the sunburn was painful!

A few friends were tandem on this seacoast excursion, and one of the few goals I had for this trip was doing a bit of oddity hunting – and I was pleased with the few curios that I had eagerly put on my list. Beyond that, we just had a blast shunpiking around random coastal towns in both New Hampshire and Maine.

The environment is a bit exotic to me, in a sense that serpentine salt marshes and beaches on a waterbody you can’t see the other side of aren’t found up in Vermont (but we do have lighthouses!). This part of New England also has redolent history and mystery that have been fermenting far longer than Vermont has existed! I was definitely imbued with some unabashed excitement the whole time.

After all these years I’d never forgotten just how great of a drive New Hampshire State Route 1A was.

Before we checked into our hotel in Portsmouth, I suggested we took the requisite tour up Route 1A (known as Ocean Boulevard for most of New Hampshire’s seaboard) and the shore with the windows down and the breezy salt air coming in (and our music blasting out).

Starting in the brashy and tawdry beach burb of Hampton Beach and its famed 3-mile titular stretch of sand that are both long-established New England summer destinations, we then ventured northwards around a few rocky points with squinty views of the faraway rocks that are the Isle of Shoals – a group of forlornly not-quite-barren islands split between Maine and New Hampshire that are famed for their isolation, and grim and mysterious folklore – the spectrums of which include murder, shipwreck, ghosts, and a treasure – all suitable footnotes of any northern New England ocean island. I’d like to take a ferry ride out there next time I’m in the area.

We then passed through scenic Rye, with numerous state beaches, tidal wetlands, and ostentatious money enclaves that line Ocean Boulevard, and then ended up in Portsmouth.

*iPhone photo. The rad shield for New Hampshire State Route 1A – the numbers represented within the silhouette of the “Old Man of The Mountain” – which was formerly a naturally anthropomorphic rock outcropping above Franconia Notch said to look like its name implies, which has since crumbled ironically due to its old age, and is now kind of an awkward state marketing icon. I had fun explaining this to one of my friends who is from the Midwest.

Portsmouth, New Hampshire is a rad little city. As its name implies, it started out as a colonial shipbuilding hub and morphed into a rowdy naval port town where the Piscataqua River junctions with the Atlantic around the island town of New Castle.

The Pisaquata River also has a pretty great Google review!

The name was minted by the local Abenaki people and might mean something close to; “a river with a strong current”, which I’d say is pretty dead-on, but the details are a bit hard to parse, and because of that, there is a lot of speculative lore behind its name! It’s also the third fastest-flowing navigable river in the world. Though the city has long declined from being an employed port, the oldest naval shipyard in the new world is still active here on an island in the Piscataqua – which once launched some of the most important American warships and the first nuclear submarines. Now the shipyard is kinda moribund, but still functioning.

And speaking of submarines – there’s one in a hole right off the Route 1 Bypass! It had me and my friend exclaim: “Hold up… that’s a motherfuckin’ submarine!” when we passed it.

It’s the new home of the USS Albacore! Lauded as “the forerunner of the future” in its heyday, this vessel was built by the skillful laborers at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in 1953 and was intended to essentially be a paramount experiment of both its physical design and technological wizardry – one that the Navy was really depending on. Its teardrop-shaped body became the standard design for all subsequent submarines – and proved that submarines could actually sustain themselves and function while being submerged!

It became the world’s fastest submarine in 1966 when it set an underwater speed record of 40 miles per hour, and, it was used to innovate sonar equipment!

Now, it’s a neat roadside oddity and museum that we didn’t expect to see. Though it was closed when we pulled up as dusk hummed in, it was worth getting a few mediocre iPhone shots of!

One of the most memorable features of the navy’s island lair – and the region itself – is a notorious abandoned naval prison designed as a dismal gothic nightmare – intentionally, I’m sure.

I guess it’s an unwritten cultural rule that if a prison is built on an island, it’s gonna eventually be known as “the rock”.

Like Alcatraz, the intimidating Portsmouth Naval dungeon also shares the same tag, even though it’s technically across the state line in Kittery, Maine – and when in operation, was one of the nation’s most feared military lockups that could hold a surprising 86,000 inmates. The guards, too, had something to fear, because according to folklore, if they let a prisoner escape, they would be finishing out the rest of the escapee’s sentence. And you’ll have something to fear if you decide to try and explore it, because you’ll most likely wind up being locked up (though probably at another facility). I have no doubt that there are other gristly tales of this “the rock” – and most likely, those are forever classified.

I’m a bit bummed that I didn’t get a shot of it while in Portsmouth, but it wasn’t until afterward that I discovered that there was actually a pretty good vantage point from a bridge that leads into New Castle. Oh well, I’ll have to get my shot next time I’m in town!

Via Wikimedia Commons

Nowadays, Portsmouth is a hip tourist town with loads of charm that front squiggly roads and brick sidewalks – part of that charm comes in the form of loads of colonial architecture that was the result of the burb being one of the most successful port cities in early America. It also comes from the fact that after the city was being gradually consumed by a multi-decade period of decline, a whole bunch of Portsmouthians found their civic pride in the 1950s, when the “urban renewal” contagion was spreading around America – which meant a proposal to bulldoze half of the city’s historic neighborhoods so they could put modern stuff in its place. Thanks to locals loathing that idea – the city has a fantastic array of impressively preserved old buildings from the city’s various stages of life that couldn’t be more archetypal New England, and lacks the antiseptic, banal, and cheap architecture that plague so many other American city centers today.

It also gives Portsmouth a wicked creepy vibe after dark when things get shadowy behind old houses, arboreal-tunneled streets, and replica historic gaslights. You definitely start to wonder what sort of fiendish monstrosities lurk in the black voids and eerie stillness that slides over the city from ocean mists.

And speaking of creepy things at night – this is a good time to transition into my first oddity excursion…

Grave With A Glow?

Back at the hotel room, I was doing some research a few hundred years deep into local cemetery records, trying to track down a particular corpse. Well – actually – her gravestone. You see, Portsmouthians have a mystery among them – an inexplicable phenomenon that might be solely unique to their city. As far as I know, anyways.

According to the vague legend – there’s a light coming from within Portsmouth’s sprawling south street cemetery at night – the result of 5 old rotyards eventually colliding into one over the centuries that Portsmouth has existed.

This is a radiance that might be preternatural, for it’s said to come from a tombstone.

Yup, I was trying to find a grave that glows, which was a bit of a task. There wasn’t a lot of chitter-chatter about this curious claim. I first discovered a brief snippet of it within Curious New England: The Unconventional Traveler’s Guide to Eccentric Destinations by Joseph A. Citro and Diane E. Foulds and was finally able to dig up a bit more sustenance on a blog entry I found, that now seems to have vanished.

What I found so intriguing about the claim is that the reason for the luminosity seems to be a mystery. There are no specter stories and it can’t be blamed on floating orbs or a reflective surface that mirrors nearby shine. I guess it’s an intrinsic feature.

The grave’s occupant, too, seems to be a rather unremarkable person, in a sense that she doesn’t seem to have any disquieting history to support her grave’s peculiar behavior. The usual plot twists to New England cemetery supernatural shenanigans don’t apply here. She wasn’t accused of being a witch, and she wasn’t done some sort of great injustice that made her utter a posthumous curse (though making her headstone glow for eternity seems like a pretty silly way to achieve retribution if you had that sort of power).

Though some morphed local lore takes a stab at answers and proposes that the stone glows because; it’s the grave of a murderer, a murder victim, or even that the gravestone itself has uranium (!) or a luminescent particle in its mix. Uranium in a gravestone is still amusingly easier to believe than this story is.

It just does its thing, apparently, and it has been for some time.

That’s another interesting detail – I haven’t been able to find any information on exactly when this marvel started to happen, or how long it’s been doing its thing for, or even any accounts of people who’ve seen it. Even a few locals I mustered up the courage to ask about it had no idea what I was talking about. It’s just been acting in that fashion for a while it would seem…

The naysayers who are aware of this tale scapegoat sources like the light of the moon, streetlights along Sagamore Avenue and South Street, the traffic light at the intersection of Miller, Sagamore, and South, or reflections from the sizable pond within the cemetery grounds, that for some reason, leap a considerable distance and hit just the one headstone. But if this is all to be believed, then even skeptics have to concede that it can’t be the moon, for the stone is said to glow perpetually, even on moonless nights.

With such a mysterious sensation allegedly happening within a few minutes of our hotel, how could I miss out on witnessing it for myself?!

One of my friends decided to humor me and come along, while the other one raised an unimpressed eyebrow at me and opted to stay at the hotel.

My skepticism was as thick as the summer humidity outside that night and I felt a little guilty, so to appease my friend for joining me on my midnight legend-chase that would most likely have no payoff, I told him we could get some night shots of the city afterward, which he was pleased to agree to.

Navigating Portsmouth’s gridless grid, the old-fashioned wood frame houses ominously glowing with jaundiced light from the streetlamps soon ended and the vast graveyard thick with indifferent shadows extended beside us behind its low delineating stone wall. It was really dark in there.

Despite how nearsighted I know I am, a greenish/white glow within an otherwise dark cemetery should have been easy to spot – but as far as first impressions went, we didn’t see anything except for the waning rectangular shapes of rows of headstones coupling with panoramic umbrae that seemed to be extra nebulous for some reason. It was actually pretty creepy.

From within the cemetery, we could discern the distance-weakened streetlights and an occasional flash of passing headlights, but there was nothing I could see that I’d mistake for an unceasingly glowing gravestone. It was a good thing that I did the research beforehand, too, because finding a grave in that cemetery at night would have been an unlikely task. Unless it glowed.

“What’s the name on the grave?” my friend asked as we walked around in the dark.

“Burns”

“Wait… seriously?”

“Yup, we’re gonna see if Mrs. Burns, burns”.

“Oh god, Chad…”

Our experience in the cemetery can be summarized succinctly; there were no glowing tombstones. Or tombstones doing anything that could be considered eccentric. We then drifted over to the Portsmouth waterfront, reveled in glorious summer weather as the water bells tolled distantly, and called it a night.

We did return the next day en route to another oddity I’m going to get into below, so I could get some documentation shots of the headstones for this blog post.

There, in broad daylight, were a set of 3 tombstones with the surname Burns on them joined at their base – 2 of them bonded by older looking stones and a third and unevenly distanced one on a newer concrete foundation. They were more or less unremarkable and dimmed by age and weather. In the middle was the anomaly – the grave of Eunice Burns, who died in 1884. The epitaph “mother we miss thee” engraved below her lifespan was actually kind of sad and made me wonder how she turned into a local folkloric figure.

We also had a brief wander around the cemetery – a sprawling yard of little grave capped hills and a long pond, and observed a fantastic array of weathered old headstones and their memento mori and stories – dating all the way back to the 1600s, when Portsmouth was spelled as “Portsmuth”.

“So, it didn’t glow last night?” asked my other friend facetiously as I was putting my camera gear back in my bag.

“Nope. But who knows, it might be glowing right now and we just can’t tell because it’s sunny out”.

These are just a few shots of some headstones that I found to be interesting as I was leaving!

The Drowned Forest & The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

More often than not, some of the most interesting things come to me completely by accident.

This is one such case, while traveling the fantastic New Hampshire State Route 1A through the town of Rye years ago.

My obsessive observational habits mean that I try to take in everything around me at once when I travel. Studying the landscape and reading every sign I see.

As we came across a small marshy area along Route 1A, I noticed a standard New Hampshire state historical marker standing a ways back from the road in the yellowed tall grasses. I’m a huge fan of those state historic/points of interest markers installed on roadsides and usually try to glance at them if I see them.

But this wasn’t the typical sign denoting a battle or historical event. Instead, it had two words that seemed to jump out at me; “Sunken Forest“.

I wasn’t expecting that, and almost immediately, my mind began to percolate.

After all, the term “sunken forest” does provide a lot for the imagination – conjuring up eerie images of giant pines and cedars submerged in a viscous, murky world of diffused light, their branches sullenly and slowly swaying with the mercy of the tides, fish encircling places where only birds could once perch and ship keels making their way over their crowns. 

Did something like that exist in New Hampshire?!  

Well, sort of.

After doing some internet research,  I soon discovered that the reality was a little less phantasmagoric, but still pretty awe-inspiring!

Rye’s sunken forest is the extant remains of a living forest of Hemlocks, Cedars, and Pines – reduced to a range of slimy tree stumps and contorted roots in thick peat mud, many of them barely noticeable and almost always obscured by high tides most of the year.

The traces of former forests and other things that the oceans have adopted into their secretive world can be found along the northeastern coast from Massachusetts as far up as Nova Scotia – and sometimes, a particularly low low tide can reveal these things, or give them back.

This fossilized forest is from a time when the New England coastline extended approximately 75 miles outward, thousands of years ago! When the giant ice sheets that covered North America began to melt, sea levels increased and changed the coastal signature of the area, and eventually, the once-great softwood forest found itself unable to adapt to its new environment; underneath the ocean.

New Hampshire’s inundated forest is one of the easiest to view of all the still-surviving ones, which makes it all the more unique and tantalizing to track down.

But, “easiest” still means little here. The visibility entirely depends on the tides, which means actually seeing them is a rarity. And if the conditions are more ideal, the arrangement of nudged sediments, stones, and mud might also work for or against your efforts.

This oddity is bisected into 2 parts, which are either collectively known as “The Sunken Forest”, or isn’t. The one I tracked down, is the more frequently surfaced depending on the season and the tides, and is known to some as “The Drowned Forest” – which is mostly submerged in a rocky cove near the storied Odiorne Point. I like how graphic and violent sounding that name is, so I usually just go with that one. It also makes more sense logically to me, because the whole reason this oddity exists was because it was literally drowned.

Spring and summer are the best times to detect it, because in the latter part of the year, the low tides are only at night. Also, luck and persistence will help a lot too. Seriously. This was my third attempt at trying to see this – and not being from an area that has ocean frontage, this was also a required opportunity to teach myself about the tides.

The more of a chore-to-view is called “The Sunken Forest”, and is southwards down at the northern end of broad Jenness Beach – which mostly Houdinis itself except for once every few decades if conditions are just right. But, the Jenness Beach portion is also the best-preserved – with the stumps actually looking more like stumps, as opposed to up at Odiorne where centuries of ocean movement have grounded down the stumps almost level with the earth.

But when they are exposed, they have been carbon-dated to around 3,600-4,000 years old – and using dendrochronology, some of the tree stumps were shown to reach around 100 years old before they met their fate!

Finding this patch of remarkable flora was the main persuasion for me going to the New Hampshire shore – and it also was the thing that managed to twist my arm towards a beach. Not that I don’t like pretty places, but I’ve never been much of a beach person, mostly because I don’t really dig crowds or heatstroke.

By the time we arrived at Odiorne Point to meet low tide, though, it was already on the cusp of 100 degrees, and that heat just sucked the life outta me.

But I couldn’t contain my excitement as I made my way out into a rocky cove that wreaked of the fragrances that come with low tide. This was a special kind of ocean controlled oddity, sort of like when old shipwrecks will surface every now and then off, or on, New England beaches, so being able to actually behold it for myself was pretty rewarding – even more so knowing that within an hour or so, it would all be submerged again.

Scores of parents and even more kids were roving around the stony banks bracketed by seagrass stands and splashing around in the tide pools – most of them having no idea that they were in proximity to 2 very cool curiosities. But me – I was roaming around with my camera and prattling about seaweed-covered mounds that I was trying to differentiate from either being the oddity I was looking for, or just a regular sodden lump.

Some of the stumps and exposed contorted roots were almost inconspicuous in muddy sediments and other remains were found but sort of veiled below ankle-deep water with surface sun glimmer in the shifting tide pools.

Odiorne Point unassumingly has quite the history – many of the ruins that mark the point’s fluctuating timeline can still be detected – scattered through the state park that now occupies the land around the point.

The Abenaki and the Penacook gathered here for the copious resources like muscles and clams found in the tide pools, and It became the first spot in New Hampshire that seafaring Anglos set foot on a few centuries ago.

While century-old gravel pitting operations obliterated any traces of those original settlements (besides the oldest known cemetery in the state!), the brawny vestiges of a vital World War 2 coastal defense fort still exist within the park’s woods, as well as a conspicuously curious watchtower that can be seen 83 feet above the shingled homes of a small neighborhood off Route 1A that once was a satellite of the fort and was used for intelligence.

It’s the lone extant survivor of New Hampshire’s original 14 coastal World War 2 watchtowers, and is, for the most part, closed to the public. The tower is named after a neighboring natural landmark – Pulpit Rock – a jutting flat-ish topped rock formation that thrusts into a bouldery range of shoreline.

We had originally wanted to go check out the old gun mounts and batteries (and investigate rumors of secret tunnels), but by the time we were done with the Drowned Forest, I guess the heat had gotten to us and our enthusiasm, and we opted for the air conditioner in the car instead. I’ll be sure to put them on my itinerary the next time I’m in the area. Just look at these photos!

This turned out to be a conjoined oddity – the second item on my agenda happened to have been coincidentally laid down right through the Drowned Forest, and was much more obvious to detect!

You’re looking at the rusted umbilical of one of the first transatlantic telegraph cables – the first one to be installed on United States soil!

Landing of the Direct United States Cable at Rye Beach, right through The Drowned Forest – circa 1889. Notice how much more girth those stumps had then! | Via Atlantic-Cable.com

The 19th century was the sparking point for a wondrous period of advancement and invention for America. Communication – being one of the seminals of the human existence – was naturally pulled into the gravity of the changing methodology.

The telegraph could cut delivery of information from weeks to a matter of hours, or even minutes, by transferring a pattern of electrical signals called Morse Code between 2 receiving stations via a special wire, which would then have to be deciphered.

American businessman Cyrus West Field knew absolutely nothing about telegraph cables, but he had a lot of faith in their prospect, bellwethered that the telegraph was going to grow in importance, and wanted to capitalize on it in a way that nobody else was doing.

By the 1850s, underwater telegraph cables were beginning to run in small dimensions, like from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, and across the English Channel.

Field utilized this information and thought bigger, literally. He wanted to establish a telegraph cable across the Atlantic – linking North America and Europe.

The idea also became a good way of international flexing, and the governments of America and The United Kingdom jumped on the bandwagon and helped fund the endeavor.

Because the cable was too large/heavy to load on a single ship, 2 appointed ships would sail from opposite ends of the ocean; Southern Ireland and Newfoundland, Canada, and meet in the middle to splice the cables together.

But, so many calamities bedeviled the journey that both governments and investors began to feel like fools after 3 failed attempts in 8 years.

Eventually, though, the first transatlantic cable finally happened in 1866, and it was a moving affair – with both governments lauding it as a paramount shift in human accomplishment. But, it took upwards of 2 minutes to send a single character because of the length, and then the cable was debased early on because of the voltage sent down it was too high. But, eventually, they got the kinks worked out, which pushed the project’s legitimacy card.

But – any messages destined for America still had to be sent down from the boonies of Newfoundland, which was often a slow or clumsy process. So, the Direct United States Cable Company was formed in 1873 by the Siemens Brothers, which routed another underwater telegraph cable down from Nova Scotia to Rye Beach, New Hampshire on July 15, 1874.

Because this was the first such cable to terminate on American soil – it was a big deal, and a huge crowd gathered at the beach the day of its installation – and garnished up some pretty dramatic Victorian newspaper illustrations in Harper’s Weekly with symbolistic ethereal light beams parting dark clouds onto the spot where the cable met the beach.

An official cable house was built that winter, which closed in 1921 when the cable’s usage significantly slowed down after its zenith during WW1 when it was kept busy practically 24 hours a day.

The cable house still cooly exists and is nowadays a nicely preserved private residence. It’s also why “Cable Road” has its curious name – something I wondered about when I read its name on Rye’s signature white and black street signs when I was a kid.

I tell everyone who feels like lending their ears that New England really is a special and strange place, maybe a few shades more so than the rest of this country’s iconic regions because of the comprehensive spectrum of spectacles that make themselves at home here, and these treasures are just a small representation of this. I was talking to a friend that lives in New Hampshire about The Drowned forest in particular, and he was delighted that something like that existed in his own backyard, and for years, wasn’t aware of it.

As I grow older, those are the types of discoveries that really fire me up more and more. Adventuring can really open up your mind. You don’t always need to go poke around a behemoth of an over-Instagrammed ruin to have a “real adventure”. The magic is kinda what you make of it.

The rusted remains of Rye’s transatlantic telegraph cable can still be spotted at low tide!

Here are a few links:

There’s a pretty fascinating documentary on the design and installation of the first transatlantic telegraph cable that I’ll link you below for your pleasure!

ALSO – if this kind of thing strikes your fancy – then definitely make sure to check out the website atlantic-cable.com – which was an integral part in my research on this curiosity!

The blog “Cow Hampshire” also has a good and more succinct blog post on it.

And – there’s another neat article on Hackaday

The Rye, New Hampshire Historical Society has some neat photos of the Drowned Forest from the 1800s.


Are you from New Hampshire or a fellow Vermonter? I’m looking for weird, wild, or hilarious stories, wonderous and odd places, incredible people, and especially abandoned locales! So if there’s something you’d like to share with me, I’d love to hear from you!

I’d also really love to grow this blog and present unique, meaningful, and extraordinary content that’s a departure from the same regurgitated stuff you find everywhere else online, and your help would be hugely appreciated!

Feel free to drop me a line at chad.abramovich@gmail.com

Also – if you appreciate me and this blog, perhaps consider making a donation at my PayPal below? The pandemic has hit my finances and my mental health pretty hard, so any amount is humbly appreciated. I’m also on Venmo if that works better.


Since 2012, I’ve been seeking out venerable examples of Vermont weirdness, whether that be traveling around the state or taking to my internet connection and digging up forsaken places, oddities, esoterica, and unique natural features. And along the way, I’ve been sharing it with you on my website, Obscure Vermont. This is what keeps my spirit inspired.

I never expected Obscure Vermont to get as much appreciation and fanfare as it’s getting, and I’m truly grateful and humbled. Especially in recent years, where I’ve gained the opportunity to interact with and befriend more oddity lovers and outside the box thinkers around Vermont and New England. As Obscure Vermont has grown, I’ve been growing with it, and the developing attention is keeping me earnest and pushing me harder to be more introspective and going further into seeking out the strange.

I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to keep this blog going. Obscure Vermont is funded almost entirely by generous donations. Expenses range from hosting fees to keep the blog live, investing in research materials, travel expenses and the required planning, and updating/maintaining vital tools such as my camera and my computer. I really pride and push myself to try to put out the best of what I’m able to create, and I gauge it by only posting stuff that I personally would want to see on the glow of my computer screen.

I want to continuously diversify how I write and the odd things I write about. Your patronage would greatly help me continue bringing you cool and unusual content and keep me doing what I love!

 

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The Mysteries Of The Brunswick Springs

It felt great to be outside last weekend without my Carhartt and winter gear! 64 degrees on a February Saturday meant me and an exploring compadre set out for an off the beaten path oddity hunt – one that had tantalizing fragments of being a unique natural wonder saturated in mystery, history and allegedly once the site of some sort of spitefully destructive curse. 

Well, we were on our way. For this trip, we headed up towards one of the most remote areas of the most remote area of Vermont.   

Vermonters refer to the northeastern most part of their state as The Northeast Kingdom. Its regional moniker was said to be inspired by a 1949 speech by US Senator George Aiken, who purportedly said something like; “Man, this is such beautiful country up here, it should be called the Northeast Kingdom”. But, according to an edition of LIFE from 1977, Aiken, from the kingdom town of Irasburg, used the term facetiously when he referred to the state’s most wretchedly poor corner with exorbitant heating prices and mangy looking forests as “my Northeast Kingdom”.

Only one of those two anecdotes is better for tourism.

The region has even been recognized by National Geographic as one of the first geotourism destinations, which coincidentally is kinda relevant to this blog entry.

I love the NEK. I have good memories up that way. I remember my dad taking me fly fishing on the Barton and Willoughby rivers as a young kid and handing down his wisdom, pointing out small towns from the driver’s seat and sharing old stories. Later in my years, I’d attend Lyndon State College in Lyndonville and go out backroading on weekends.

The kingdom might be Vermont’s most fabled and mythicized realm, and that’s largely due to it being so extraordinarily wild. It’s certainly always had a different feel to it than the rest of the state. Driving up Route 2,  it was almost a 3-hour trip to a part of the state with no direct routes and lots of bad road tar crossing the area.

But the journey, to me anyways, is always half the fun. We began to pass towns with increasingly thinning populations, before turning north onto deserted state route 102, which serpentines along the mighty Connecticut River and brings us deep into unpopulated timberlands and destitute little towns that are now smaller than their census counts a century ago.

There was the Essex County seat of Guildhall, which was sparsely more than a collection of old wood-framed buildings around the town green. Their town hall was actually named “The Guild Hall”, and I appreciated the cleverness. Further north, there was tinier Maidstone, where the most remote state park in Vermont is. Beyond that was our destination town of Brunswick, which was little more than a vacant one room school house, a town office building and 2 houses before returning back to ugly sand-banked woodlands and acres that dragged together.

Those woods are where one of Vermont’s earliest oddity tales came out of a few centuries ago – when early settlers began uttering stories of a strange critter, that began reputedly terrorizing a broad area stretching from Morgan at the border, down to Brunswick, Lemington, Maidstone and westwards towards Victory sometime in the early 1800s.

This canny inhabitant is in the elusive category of Vermont’s endemics and left folks baffled to know that they were sharing the state with it.

It was said to be some sort of awesome bear with abnormal intelligence and human-like behaviors. The Indians knew of this smart bear too, and called it Wejuk, which translated to ‘Wet Skin’. Samuel de Champlain might have even seen one of its kin as it threw pine cones at his crew while sailing near Missisquoi Bay.

White settlers took to similarly calling it “Old Slipperyskin”, due to the thing’s uncanny ability to avoid being captured. It could literally ‘slip’ out of any trap set for it.

Other defining characteristics were It was said to walk upright like a man, had a mean disposition, and would even seek out revenge on those it had a grudge against. It could rip out fences, frighten livestock, flatten cornfields with trees, or use stones to throw at machinery and fill up sap buckets. Most impressively, some guessed the wily creature had a way of backtracking in its own prints, confusing trackers with a trail that abruptly ended. A few hunting parties were put together around the region, and all failed at shooting the underestimated antagonist.

It was prevalent enough in kingdom culture where the bear would enter local historical records, such as the History of Lemington written by Marion M. Daley, was mentioned in quite a few local newspapers through the 19th century, and later re-discovered by Vermont author and folklorist Joseph Citro in his book Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls, and Unsolved Mysteries and given a mention in The Northland Journal. The Norwich Inn also named one of their IPA’s after it, which I haven’t tried but would like to.

Even former Vermont governor Jonas Galusha attempted to hunt it down in 1815, when himself and a hunting party entered the Maidstone woods where it was last sighted. But instead, they were fearfully chased out of the woods by the enigmatic monster when the governor finally encountered it.

Though we really have no idea what Old Slipperyskin actually was, the story has enormous charm and is a fun one to tell, even if it might be nothing more than historical deformity.

But the fundamental truths remain; it resembled a bear but walked like a human, it seemed to be highly intelli­gent, and it appeared to be hostile. Maybe it was provoked because people were starting to intrude on what for centuries had been its own dominion, making it vindictive and hostile when encountered?

Where the bear came from, what it actually was, and where it ultimately vanished too afterward still all remain in the realm of enigma and largely forgotten about. I wonder if people still spot something comparable nowadays?

Brunswick Springs

Believe it or not, Robert Ripley once addressed the Brunswick Springs as “the eighth wonder of the world“, which only adds to its mystique, because they’re mostly in the haze of esoterica and are largely unremembered by folks today.

But it’s easy to understand the curiosity about this place because it’s a true geographical anomaly. Here, 6 springs with completely different mineral contents, all bubble forth from a single knoll as close together as the spigots on a soda fountain.  They flow under the crest of a steep hill before all merging together in an – at the time of my visit –  orange, gunky, iron oxidized spillway draining all together down into the Connecticut River below.

An old, helpfully labeled photograph of the springs lists their individual mineral contents from left to right; Iron, Calcium, Magnesium, White Sulfer, Bromide, and if you’re really intrepid, Arsenic.

The deterioration of the 19th century attempts to exploit the springs was also very evident. The modern “facelift” they were given consisted of channeling them through convenient pipes and building a concrete landing above for easy access. But when I visited, only 4 of the 6 springs were still encased through now rusted pipes, the infrastructure of the two most leftward ones seemed to have completely deteriorated, once again returning them to somewhat more of a natural environment.

Medicine Waters

To the Native Americans, the springs were, and still are, considered magical healing waters on sacred, legend crowded terrain.

The Abenaki used to make long-distance treks here to benefit from the “medicine waters of the great spirit”. But, they only visited during the hours of daylight.

Not only was this seen as a spiritual place, it also had a metaphorical dark side after the literal dark would crawl up over the north country. Part of the land’s divine designation meant the Abenaki believed there was a supernatural balance here, an arrangement of light and dark forces – perhaps symbiotic. Something was said to reside and lurk on those Connecticut River banks, both respected and wisely avoided.

Near the springs is a tranquil waterbody that’s called Silver Lake. You won’t find it labeled on any atlases though. Abenaki lore says that it’s bottomless and that Indian spirits can be seen around the shore.

Other, more wishful lore suggests that the doomed Roger’s Rangers party – while fleeing from their horrific raid/massacre on a Saint Francis Indian village in Quebec – might have stashed some of their plundered treasure near the vicinity, and never made their anticipated return to grab it because they eventually lost their way and forsakenly perished in the frozen wilderness.

Who knows, there may still be a priceless silver statue of the Madonna somewhere in the wilderness of the northeast kingdom or the White Mountains, waiting to be discovered…

A few troubled souls used the forests near the springs as a place to kill themselves in more recent years, and an infant was once found strangled to death close by.

A more gloomy account documented by VPR was described to them by an Abenaki descendant from Swanton, who found the body of an old logger who just got sick of living, tied a rope both around a tree limb and his neck, and sat down.

No doubt the Brunswick Springs can be a spooky place, but what about the real draw here?

The springs and their supposed natural healing powers were revered for centuries, but their first documented account in the public sphere happened in  1748, when Abenakis allegedly lead an injured British soldier to the springs all the way from Lake Memphremagog. The soldier had a badly wounded arm that was almost lifeless, and he worried about having to get it amputated or losing it to infection – both outcomes would most likely involve the dreadful medical procedure of removing the appendage with a surgeon’s saw without anesthesia.

Somehow, through an undocumented ritual, a shaman worked those magic springs over his arm, and miraculously, life returned to the injured limb!  As far as I know, this seems to be the best-documented case of the waters and their vigors.

The Abenaki avow that you can treat just about anything here – these 6 springs are all the prescriptions you’ll ever need. It just depends on how you mix them. That arcane wisdom, however, seems to be covert hum.

There isn’t exactly tons of factual evidence that claims the validity of this place though. Apparently, a state geologist from New Jersey once tested the spring waters and observed that the mineral contents weren’t all that different from one another, just a lot of sulfur dioxide. But, former Vermont state geologist Dr. H. A. Cuttings had a different opinion and likened them to the chalybeate waters in Germany, which were sought after to combat skin diseases.

Even today, some denizens from local towns still make trips to the property and argue that it’s partially responsible for their longevity. They don’t need scientific confirmation. As is often the case with legends and mythology,  not everything relies on evidence.

Brunswick resident Bill Boudle told Bill Alexander of Vermonter.com, that he’s been drinking the waters there since 1945. After he injured his back working on the railroad, no doctors or chiropractors were able to give him any relief, until he started consuming the medicine waters. “I’m telling you that stuff will heal. A lot of people use it,” Boudle told Mr. Alexander.

Beverly Kettle from across the river in North Strafford, New Hampshire, recalled an old man living in a cabin near the springs when she was a child. The man would regularly drink the waters and lived to the old age of 90 – and said that his ‘secret’ was those trips down to them.

So is there truth to any of this? What about that British soldier and his personal wondrous phenomenon here? If these waters are so miraculous, why are they so obscure today?

Curses!

We’ll have to take a look at some vague and bewildering history that progressed over the intervening centuries to get anything that may come close to being an answer here.

Ironically, the troubles started when that soldier came back to what is now Brunswick after the French and Indian war. He was so taken by his experience that he wanted to bottle and enterprise from the waters. The Abenaki weren’t having it, firmly objecting to the preposterous sale of something the great spirit gives for free. But the word was already out and would take off like a contagion shotgun blast.

Brunswick was charted in 1761 and as it is now, has never been very populated. But settlers did eventually trickle up into Vermont’s last frontier, just very slowly.

Anglo and Abenaki began to find themselves in a conflicted relationship over the local wonder.  At first, everyone took freely of the waters. But soon, that notion of free sharing began to corrode when early American entrepreneurs began to eye them as agents of free enterprise.

Businessmen made a variety of offers and bargains, but the Native Americans held firm to their decision not to sell. Because being covetous brings out the worst in people, attempted negotiations became hostile, and two Indians would somehow be killed as a result.

The grief-stricken mother of one of the dead, who also happened to be a shaman or sorceress depending on the storyteller, retaliated by architecting a curse that would prove to be long remembered; “Any use of the waters of the great spirit for profit will never prosper

Maybe the great spirit did spray a curse on those pine banks that day. Strangely enough, though it was slow coming, that’s exactly what happened.

Fire Water & Changing Times

White settlers began replacing Native Americans, who subsequently began to vanish from the land, and the springs’ reputation continued to grow.

In 1790, the first boarding house to offer accommodations and easy (uncharged) access to those marvelous waters was built nearby by a Major French. That number grew to 12 operating on both sides of the Connecticut River by 1820.

By 1845, people from as far away as coastal Maine were making the arduous journey to sample Vermont’s now celebrated healing springs – which among other things, were advertised as being able to treat a murderers row of maladies that included; inanimate limbs, vitality, kidney problems, consumption, and rheumatism.

The railroads soon followed, which would change Vermont’s economics and landscape forever, and make trips to the springs practically effortless. A train would deposit health seekers off at a depot in North Strafford, New Hampshire, where they would board a carriage that would bring them across the Connecticut River over to Brunswick.

Charles Bailey would erect the first hotel near the springs in 1860, which he then sold shortly after to local dentist D.C. Rowell. Mr. Rowell named his new endeavor the Brunswick Springs House, and would also be the first person in the history of the springs to sell them when he later opened a bottling plant. If there was a curse, maybe this was its first preternatural warning shot, when In 1894, The Brunswick Springs House burned to the ground.

Not to be deterred, the dentist rebuilt somewhere on the bluff between the lake and the river, this time as The Pine Crest Lodge. After that, history seems to have lost track of him until his death in 1910. The lodge would later collapse into the river after the foundation finally gave way due to erosion and changing water patterns and the springs were put back on the market and were ogled with temptation.

John Hutchins from across the river in North Strafford saw the springs as a sure economic victory. And why not? Hutchins was already a financially well off man, and that was partially ensured by a characteristic quality of early twentieth century businessmen; avarice.

His appetite for vanity and profit lead to a multifarious portfolio of accolades. He was a successful druggist, real estate agent, mortician, and expanded upon all that by buying up huge tracts of north country woodland and establishing himself as a lumber baron. But none of that seemed to be enough. To his vexation, Mr. Hutchins was never able to make any headway in politics, so he might have figured that the Brunswick Springs would be a jackpot of an investment to at least heighten his celebrity.

The watery emanates and their innate constituents would be a logical move. They’d merge together and extend two of his businesses; pharmaceuticals, and real estate. All over the world, grand resorts were emerging and profiting from their peculiar tasting waters, and he planned to make Vermont the next development.

If there was any talk of a “curse” at all, he didn’t let that deter his purchase, because his ambitions were far more significant than a mere spook story. Being able to sell “nature’s magic elixir” would surely set him apart from anyone he’d be competing with – especially now after no less of an authority than charismatic huckster Robert Ripley supplying national awareness.

It seemed he had a real skill of turning what he could see into business, and what a sight the Brunswick Springs were, and still are.

From the springs themselves, the view descends down towards the Connecticut River, and beyond that, the rugged White Mountains. Up the hill, a placid and tiny lake that backed up against the abraded granite hills of the kingdom. It was an entrepreneurial dream come true. So, Hutchins bought the place and chose a new spot to build a brand new resort hotel, with the waters as part of the levied package. On September 19th, 1929, the hotel burned down – gone before it even had its grand opening.

But Hutchins wasn’t the superstitious type, and he surely wasn’t going to give up something that had the potential to be so profitable, so he rebuilt. Only this time, he went all out.

Stereoscopic view of the Brunswick Springs Hotel, Brunswick Springs, VT. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The view of the Connecticut River from the mineral springs hotel at Brunswick. Via Wikimedia Commons.

He hired a Bloomfield contractor sort of ironically named Harry Savage, who drove his crew all through the long winter months to re-build. Savage was a man of his word, and the hotel was completed and ready to open its doors by the spring.

At the time, Hutchin’s new hotel would have been a remarkable rarity in northern Vermont. It was a dignified four and a half story construction with 60 rooms featuring plate glass windows with springs water piped into 30 of them.

Reservations poured in and anticipation for opening day was mounting.

But, on May 15th, 1930 – just a month before the hotel was set to open for business, the night watchman spotted smoke billowing from a storage room. By then it was too late. The phone lines were already superheated and snapped – cutting off communication while the building went down in fiery wreck.

I’m not sure just how much talk of the curse actually circulated (if any), and if John did know about it, how much he paid it any mind.

If he acknowledged of it, he certainly didn’t heed its ruinous insurance, despite losing two hotels in two years. Again, the willful Mr. Hutchins hired contractor Savage, and his crews worked through the winter to build another retreat. By spring of 1931, the new hotel was ready for business – advertised as a “modern city hotel nestling between the White and Green Mountains”

A colorful brochure was printed up (see scans 1,2 & 3) and widely distributed, advertising the “Medicine Waters of The Great Spirit” and their Native American mystique, which was bolstered by a thematic design scheme of woven patterns and a kneeling brave partaking in the magic fountain, which Hutchins still planned on charging for.

It was larger than its predecessor, featuring 100 rooms with Brunswick Springs water pumped into every one of them. Two brand new Packard limousines were also purchased to transport guests to and from the railroad depot.

On April 23rd, 1931, John C. Hutchin’s third and final hotel was struck down by inexplicable inferno. Maybe by now, he became a believer, because this time, he never tried to rebuild, and in the years that followed, neither has anyone else.

It seems the great spirit could finally stop counting up the days of vultures driving for temptations and their lust for glory. In Brunswick, anyways.

What really happened here? Historical records are full of fires murdering hotels. Surely this was just an odd chain of freak accidents, right? Well, one of Hutchin’s blazes was ultimately linked to the combustion of paint fumes in a storage room, but the other two still remain undiscovered.

It’s plausible that because of Hutchin’s hubris, those higher powers might not have been quite finished with the already stricken gentleman. Not long after the demise of his last hotel, his health rapidly declined until he passed away on March 22, 1938, at age 74.

Scouting

The acrid smell of sulfur told us we were close. That was a huge boon, actually, because I had no idea exactly where the springs were. Just that they were on an embankment above the Connecticut.

They and the surrounding lands have since returned back under Abenaki ownership, who formed a non-profit organization about a decade ago to purchase it with the help of the Vermont Land Trust. Now, they legally prevent any sort of development near the springs.

The springs were really the only reason to ever recognize Brunswick, and because of that, there’s an almost unnoticeable cartographical weirdness here. Old maps label the area as ‘Brunswick Springs’ instead of Brunswick, and even today, Google maps still tags the ‘village center’ as Brunswick Springs, regardless of the real-time aluminum road signs reading as just Brunswick.

Via Google Maps

We finally found the old logging road we’d have to walk, and parked our car along the side of a completely deserted Route 102 – which I think is a contender for Vermont’s quietest highway.

We actually spent a few moments just sitting in the car, lazily getting our gear together and listening to the almost startling silence of no cars or humans for a good ten minutes or so, before climbing out of my friend’s Subaru and preparing ourselves for getting our boots soaked. I was told by someone who had managed to track them down that the location isn’t easy for a non-local to find. That was a pretty accurate statement.

We followed the path into the woods, our feet continuously stumbling through snowdrifts with a flimsy layer of ice glazing the surface. It was an unseasonable (and as I’d find out later, record-breaking) 64 degrees, and bright noonday sun was filtering through trees in hibernation.

Then, we saw something on the trail ahead of us. Curiously, we trudged forward to get a better look at the cryptic artifact in the snow, which turned out to be a decoratively stitched handmade bag filled with rose petals. It was an offering of some sort. That was a good sign. The Abenaki still revere the area as a sacred one, and often come here and leave gifts to honor the springs and the spirits that twist and turn through the trees, so I hoped that meant we were at least on the right path, in a literal sense of that metaphor.

The trail to the springs in the beginnings of fall.

My hunch seemed to be correct when our path brought us skirting along Silver Lake. And then, to our right, I saw an unmissable worn concrete staircase leading down to the lakeshore. It was a fragment of the old hotel. We were close!

Silver Lake, which is said to be bottomless and a haunt for Indian spirits.

We walked a bit further, both of our spirits elevated at the discovery of the staircase. Then, we found more ancient ruins of the former business operations here. Another staircase plunging down a steeper pitch that the years had chipped away at, the ice-chunked waters of the Connecticut moving steadily southbound through the trees below. The smell of sulfur immediately overtook the formerly thin and sweet country air.  We had made it!

The crumbling foundations of Hutchins’ hotel can still be traced near the springs.

I stood at the crest of the drop for a few minutes observing my surroundings, before joking that the real adventure would be descending the stairs. Though it was in the 60s, it was still February, which meant the steps were slick with treacherous ice that could easily send you to the hospital after sending you down into the river. The hillside beside the stairs didn’t seem like a much better way to travel down.

Death gripping onto lead pipe hand railings, we scrambled down to a cement landing at the bottom. There, rusted pipes running horizontally underneath the walkway channeled water from a green dyed pool sunken into the hillside, filled with white stringy forms that looked like hair that swayed in the currents.

A huge block the size of a dishwasher from some part of the rubble detached itself and fell down the embankment, coming to rest when its weight buried a corner into the earth. Other visitors left several offerings and totems here, from candles, rose peddles (which may have come from the discarded bag we found earlier), dream catchers and miscellaneous trinkets such as beads, glass bottles, seashells and colorful ribbons ornamented around tree branches.

As you can see from the obvious difference in my photos, I’ve made a few trips here. On my sophomore trip, It was nearing dusk as I set out for a walk in the woods. The wonderful smell of dead leaves followed me down what was left of an old logging road into a forest that was so quiet and still, it was starting to creep under my skin.

Then, I saw the unmistakable ruins of an early 20th-century mineral springs hotel, now only a few foundations and stairs leading to nowhere. I had missed the cellar hole of Hutchin’s hotel on my first sojourn and wanted to scout those out.

I wandered around before the night hummed in, hoping I’d find some old glass bottles or buttons or maybe even a pocket watch – something long dropped by a guest now long turned into dust. Then I scrambled back down the banks to the springs and their sulfuric perfume.

But did I sample the waters? No, just to be safe. While it’s understandable to get inspired by the parables, the code of conduct here is definitely caveat emptor.

The silence was deep and unseen specters probably skulked amongst the trees – and all of the stories I harkened about this place being a stomping ground for continuing life of the supernatural kind and other possible unsettling encounters, came to life.

I hastened my pace and headed back to the car.

 

So, what can be said about all this? Who can say for sure? Can a specific string of words actually belabor unfortunate victims?

All I can reckon is that the magical springs at Brunswick continue to flow freely.

And just as the sorceress predicted; no one has had any luck in profiting from them.


Since 2012, I’ve been seeking out venerable examples of Vermont weirdness, whether that be traveling around the state or taking to my internet connection and digging up forsaken places, oddities, esoterica, and unique natural features. And along the way, I’ve been sharing it with you on my website, Obscure Vermont. This is what keeps my spirit inspired.

I never expected Obscure Vermont to get as much appreciation and fanfare as it’s getting, and I’m truly grateful and humbled. Especially in recent years, where I’ve gained the opportunity to interact with and befriend more oddity lovers and outside the box thinkers around Vermont and New England. As Obscure Vermont has grown, I’ve been growing with it, and the developing attention is keeping me earnest and pushing me harder to be more introspective and going further into seeking out the strange.

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The Milton Co-operative Dairy Corporation

Being a storyteller is somewhere in my framework. I’d like to think that’s the crux of this blog, to tell stories. This blog has lots of long-winded stories. It’s just one of those things that you’re gonna have to live with for giving an emotionally unstable person a keyboard and a WiFi connection. (That’s me) And whatever it is that I have to tell wouldn’t be complete without the mention of this place.

When I first started this blog, I made sure this was one of the first subjects I posted about, because it was, and still is such a big deal to me, following me around like a phantom through different stages of my life.

The chiseled granite block along the disintegrating roof line reads “Milton Co-operative Dairy Corporation”. Most folks in town call it “the creamery” unless you’re one of the few who are unaware of what the corroding property used to be. I’ve heard people speculate plenty of things, including a train station, a munitions factory or an armory.

The rambling building made of patchwork additions is off a side street in town, and the years run down its crumbling facade. Its forsakenness is obvious. Young trees have grown around and inside the building, disfiguring the structure. If you catch a glimpse through any of the broken windows or an open doorway, you witness a dark world made of peeling lead paint, reservoired floors and piles of fallen bricks, all cast in various shadows in the places the shine of the sun penetrates its way inside. In a state as non-industrial as Vermont, this location is truly a magnificent way to get your senses drunk. And it was this dangerous, virulent location that changed my life around age 12.

Around 1835, Milton’s agriculture scene shifted fads, from sheep based farming, to more profitable dairy. The town saw an increase in farming in the intervening years which began to put a strain on Milton’s original creamery, The Whiting Creamery, located off Main Street near where Oliver Seed is today. By 1919, many Milton farmers got together to form a dairy co-op. They built their headquarters on Railroad Street, a side street off Main Street, which today is one of the village’s primary thoroughfares. At the time, Main Street was actually the Main Street in town, and because titular Railroad Street paralleled the tracks, it was practical real estate.

The Whiting Creamery in Milton, circa 1905 | UVM Landscape Change Program
The Whiting Creamery in Milton, circa 1905 | UVM Landscape Change Program

The building was done unconventionally, with a steel I-beam construction and stucco facade installed over bricks, which according to the late owner of the ruins, was a design unique for anywhere in Vermont at the time. Miltoner John McGrath would become the first president of the co-op. Over time, the creamery’s business ignited, as more farmers from Milton, and rural parts of northern Chittenden County and Southern Franklin County were sending their milk to be processed there – and shipped out. A lot of the revenue made by the creamery actually came from exotic foreign locations they shipped the milk to, like Boston and New York, via the aforementioned railroad that runs inches from behind the building.

In 1935, the creamery would expand for the first time at the height of the great depression in a conspicuous brick addition that today is the worst part of the complex. While most money-making things in the United States were prostrate in defeat, the railroads and the dairy industry seemed to be staying steady. Over the years, several more additions came along, and when cars became common, garages and a scale room were built, until the current uniquely shaped structure that exists today was finished. Those who can remember the creamery when it was functioning said that it was one of the largest creameries in western Vermont. During its most prosperous years, it would do over $5 million worth of business in a year, and employed 50 people. According to a homeless fella I accidentally met that briefly lived in a tent near the tracks behind the building, he recalled his father working there. “I remember how bad the milk lab used to smell” he said in fervent disgust at the memory. “Used to stink so bad, you could smell it down Railroad Street!”

During the cold war, the basement area was also designated as a fallout shelter, an appointed place to seek safety in case of nuclear destruction. Though, a practical observation at the grimy basement now days tells the visitor that the apocalyptic urgency so many people in the 50s were subscribing to would have easily vaporized anyone who decided to wait it out down there. Until recently, a badly warped caution-yellow sign that read “Fallout Shelter” in black lettering could be seen crookedly hanging from a concrete wall. Some local kid most likely stole it for a memento and hung it in their bedroom.

However, as time flowed, business practices changed, and the creamery soon found itself cutting its teeth on the stone of the changing times. McGrath would resign as president in 1953, and Ray Rowley, from another long-standing dairy family in town, would take control. But the Co-Op was already shaking hands with its mortality.

By the 1960s, the creamery’s fate seemed poised to continue percolating in some downward lament. A decline in dairy farming led to a decline in dairy – the stuff that created the business in the first place. It was around this time when bigger monopolies began to appear on the scene, a trend which has only intensified since then. Larger and more resourced operations like HP Hood in Burlington were hard to compete with, and the growing struggle of irrelevancy disarmed many smaller businesses. Sort of ironic is that HP Hood is also long gone, the old plant on the corner of King and South Winooski has been modernly renovated into condos and mixed commercial space, as is the cool trend with defunct industrial properties.

The last 2 decades of the creamery’s life were slow death. Fluctuating milk prices and the cost of refining didn’t show up in the farmers’ paychecks, which irritated some of them. I can’t say I blame them, farming is hard work. A crude barn shaped structure was built next door, and was ran as “The Milton General Store” for a while – an appendage of the creamery. Those who still remember it, say that it was the kind of place where you could literally buy anything – from nails to maple syrup, and had a distinct “dusty workshop smell” inside. But that attempt at savior failed as well, and by 1974, the creamery became a ghost.

The building was put up for sale, and shortly afterward, was purchased by a local gentleman who used it as storage space for his many antiques and the miscellany he either collected or hoarded. That line was a blurry one. But it was clear that this guy was of his own sort. Sadly, mental instability and his own demons got the best of him, and one of the consequences was that he neglected the place. His paraphernalia became either stolen by characters who have no moral issues with thievery, or what was left behind rotted away when the building began to progressively weaken, and rats began to nest inside.

I had struck up a few conversations with the owner before in my teenage years. I used to work at a local gas station then, which was a crash course on social skills for this young Aspergian and his seemingly incompetent switchboards, but the struggles also brought some worthy experiences. Like getting to know him a little better whenever he’d stop in. I knew who he was, but our getting acquainted was a bit coincidental. He’d see me working and just start chatting with me if he was in my proximity, but he seemed a bit lonely and he’d chat with anyone willing to lend an ear. Over time, he began to recognize me as a regular working stiff and always made a point to have some sort of small talk with me, on his own terms anyways. I found out that he was a pundit on Milton history, or really the old in general. I’d risk getting reprimanded by my shift manager and have conversations with him about local history and things I found to be fascinating – information that I didn’t have access to anywhere else. But due to his schizophrenic-esque behaviors, I had to try to be mindful of how I engaged with him.

I found out about his death in the summer of 2016, which saddened me a little. I’m sure he had so many stories and secrets that he took to his grave with him that we’ll just never know. I always contemplated taking the time to contact him and ask for an interview, but anxiety got the best of me. The creamery was hastily and quietly sold, and condos were spoken of. I suppose the momentum didn’t surprise me. Milton-ites have wanted to get rid of the scorned property for decades. Which is also why I’m re-submitting this blog post. The creamery wasn’t just the first place I had ever explored, it was a huge part of my adolescence. I’ve never dealt with change that well, so when I got word of a change coming up in the form of the creamery’s possible demolition, I decided I needed a fond farewell.

I’m going to borrow a quote from the late Leonard Cohen, when he said; “I’m interested in things that contribute to my survival”. The creamery (and Mr. Cohen) has contributed greatly and artfully to my survival and I’m forever grateful. It’s weird to think about as I’m reminiscing and drinking a beer right now – how different would my life have been if I didn’t grow up in walking distance of this place? Did any of you folks have an abandoned building in your hometown, or a place that was a local rite of passage to visit as a kid? Do you have any stories of your first adventure?

Over the years, I struck up a friendship with the great folks at the Milton Historical Society, and one of my first research topics was the creamery. Sadly, not a great deal of information about it really carried over the turn of the most recent century. For the most part, I compiled all the usable information I could in the paragraphs above this one. But that’s not all. Museum curator Lorinda Henry was kind enough to scan for me some historical photographs of the business in operation, and portraits of its employees.

Folklore

I think one of the most memorable things about the creamery, and my childhood affixion to it, were the ghastly urban legends and ghost stories that the older kids told me, a ritual I continued when I aged. Stories that created an inseparable impression about the place.

Murder

I still remember the first story I was told, which I think is also the most popular one in some variation or another. The story of the murdered janitor. Essentially, two custodians were working graveyard shift, and a known rivalry was between them. That particular night, one of them would let all of his animosity towards the other cut loose like a pressure valve. Somehow, one of them fell off of a two story catwalk which is suspended above the scale room, broke his neck when he hit the concrete, and died in the building. The motive, whether it was preempted murder or a moment of unchecked anger isn’t translated into this tale. But the aftermath is. The other employee realized the gravity of what just happened, and he was frightened. He’d be blamed. He’d go to prison! No, he couldn’t let that happen. So, he decided to make his co-worker’s death look like a suicide.

Transporting the body upstairs, he hung him from a meat hook in one of the coolers, hoping when the corpse was discovered the next day, that’s exactly what the shocked observers would believe. Only, they didn’t, and apparently, according to an increasingly vague story line, the assaulting janitor was accused of the crime. The story splits into a few endings from here. One says he was arrested, acquitted and sentenced to prison. Another version tells that he skipped town, and successfully vanished from those who wished to prosecute him. As the older kids told me, the residue of the departed janitor still skulks around the building, which seems to be his tomb in the afterlife. Though not much is known about his apparent haunting, people have admitted to feeling uncomfortable inside, like they were being watched by some unknown specter, especially by the room where his body was hung. Phantom chills and disembodied noises have also been reported, but whoever was the one coming forth with these claims remain a mystery. The historical society couldn’t give me any hard evidence of a murder at the creamery, or even a death, so this spook tale remains in the realm of urban legend.

Broiled Alive 

I remember another, far more ghastly story. I was shown a large rusted vat inside one of the many dark rooms of the basement, leprous with peeling paint, dankness and dripping water trickling down overhead. A dim mag light beam illuminated the robust fixture, and it was filled with some sort of unidentifiable glish. As the story goes, sometime in the 30s or 40s, a young man was tasked with making powdered milk, and somehow, fell into a vat of product heated to boiling temperatures. His skin was filleted from his body and was unable to be saved. A more macabre version of the story was that crooked business practices just distributed the milk afterward because losing money was a more grim thought than their customers drinking liquefied employee.

Well, I couldn’t find any validation on that story either – but the historical society did help me dig up a very brief newspaper snippet from the 1940s, about a boy who did die in the creamery in those days before child work regulations, but the cause of his death wasn’t specified. But one look at the gross vat today does make a good totem for a story like this one, and the basement is a creepy place. Not surprisingly, there have been quite a few reports of feelings of unease down there.

The Homeless Man

Another notable story did happen, and is documented. Sort of. In the 1980s, recently after the building had been abandoned, a homeless man got inside and planned on spending the night. But nothing stays warm in the wintery cold, and he decided to get a fire started. The details here vary on what happened, but somehow, him and the old couch he was sleeping on, became engulfed in flame. The man died on site. Speculations vary on how he died, whether some flying cinders landed on his sleeping form and ignited his clothes, he was drunk and knocked over or fell into the barrel he used to put the fire in, or some hoodlum kids decided to harass the guy, and wound up setting him on fire. Either way, a dead vagabond was the result. Today, there is a pancaked and charred couch on the ground floor, which I was told was the very same one he died on. Though that too is unverifiable. Some ghost enthusiasts like to think that the homeless man adds to the creamery’s fabled layers of ghosts.

That may account for a claim I heard around 2009, when someone told me of a strange experience of theirs. As he was walking by the creamery at night, he saw a ‘black cloaked figure – almost like a robed monk’, moving in the same direction as him as he walked by the building down the railroad tracks on his way home. He could easily distinguish the thing thanks to the dirty yellow glow of the street lights coming through the second-floor windows, giving the figure a distinct outline from the shadows. His claim wouldn’t have been as weird if it weren’t for the fact that he saw it walking in a part of the second story that didn’t have a floor.

The Tunnel

My favorite hearsay was of the old tunnel. In my teenage years, when I began to become more intimate with the building, I was acquainted with a piece of Milton lore; about a tunnel, which supposedly led from the creamery, all the way down Main Street underneath several of the old houses before dumping out near the Lamoille River. My teenage mind sort of just took that in as fact, and I began making trips down to the basement trying to find the opening, or a trace of a sealed up door. I did find something, a door below ground level, that had been cinderblocked off. Most likely, that was the old tunnel, and years later, parts of the blockade were sledgehammered through, giving me a glimpse. The tunnel was there all right, but didn’t run all that far. I could see the collapsed section yards from my position. It actually ran to the brick building next door. Today, its apartments, but it was originally built as another part of the creamery, which is why the tunnel was there, and which is why it was sealed off. I spoke to a few Milton old timers, who smirked and recalled breaking into the tunnel when they were younger, and sneaking beer and cigarettes down there. But was there ever a passageway that ran all the way under Main Street? Well, I wrote about that, if you’re curious.

As for me? Well, I’ll admit that my experiences being a tourist to this old building haven’t been all that paranormal. I generally don’t concern myself with hauntings or ghosts anyways, unless one of them walks right up to me and says hi. It’s not that I don’t believe in those things (I write about weird stuff after all!), I just try to take an agnostic approach first. I do have one strange personal account though. In 2011, I was walking up to take some photos, and found a very strangely placed mannequin inside one of the old coolers upstairs, propped right in the doorway so whoever walks by would notice it. This one was particularly creepy. It looked old and decayed and yellowed, and dressed in a patchwork of old clothes. There was also a pentagram carved into its neck. I went to other parts of the building and doubled back about 40 minutes later, and the thing was gone. I never heard or saw anyone come for it. To this day, I still don’t have much of an explanation for that weird event.

I still recall one person writing to me when my old post was live, and told me how they found old co-op milk jugs that had been found underneath their old concrete front steps. They had apparently been used to help build the framework for them, which wasn’t an unusual practice for old Vermonters, who used their ingenuity to use whatever materials they could for their benefits. Milton’s Main and Railroad Streets are old. It makes me wonder what else is found within these old homes.

Painkillers and a Purpose.

This is the section where I get emotional and hash out my scars. If you don’t dig personal backstories or revelations, skip down to the pictures. There’s lots.

Growing up in Milton, I was a shy, creatively maladjusted boy. As the years and my youth passed on, not much changed, apart from my curiosity, and me never feeling like I was comfortable in my own skin. I was always thinking there was something wrong with me. Being diagnosed with Aspergers at a young age, I quickly found out that I was a pundit on certain things, but hopelessly inept with others, like social skills. It was an unhappy balance, and that led to a coming of age where I was bullied and timid.

I suppose it’s fitting that I began to take interest in what we perceive as oddities, or things that don’t fit our conception of the illusion of normal – and their captivating stories.  Abandoned places fell into that category for me. The creamery was the first. And better yet, it was easily accessible.

I first dared to cross that threshold into a world that conventional wisdom told me was dangerous and forbidden. And that’s partially why I wanted to venture inside, and why I decided to repeat that ritual for years to come, because people frowned on those sort of behaviors, and I wanted answers for myself.

The thing is, I’ve never been like everyone else or satisfied with the pre-prescribed banalities of everyday life, things that are all too generic and sanitized. Whether it had to do with growing up Aspergian, or be it something in my framework, I never fit in. So I decided to put myself in haunted waters, and see what happened. Turns out, bending the rules, thinking for myself and daring to go against what I was taught was one of the best things I ever turned into a habit – and is some of the best advice I can give to anyone, assuming I’m asked for my opinion on these things.

Everything is a language, everything is constantly trying to tell us something or express itself in its own way. The trick was learning how to discern the signals from the din of chaos. It was the first abandoned building I ever explored that fired the engines of desire and curiosity in my mind. It was in those precious hours inside where I heard an obsession being born amidst the damp cold and watchful eye of wild shadows that would haunt me for years to come. Treading over the debris littered floors, slowly opening crumbling doors, peering into a vast basement filled with water and intimidation, the dark becomes your hunting grounds, in the foreground of endlessly dripping water.

I spent most of my 20s in dislocation and learning about the blues while slowly murdered by my anxiety. I was depressed, lonely, still trying to figure out my autism diagnosis, and going through the trials and tribulations of several different antidepressants or booze. Sometime in between all of that, I lost myself trying to please everyone. In those years of learning what heartache brings, I waltzed between things that I did that brought regret and just trying to get by. By age 25, I had given up on myself. I spent years running from nothing but those vicious, self-depreciating thoughts in my mind and not only did I feel inferior to everyone in the world, but I lost faith in people, and hoping that anyone would understand. I even attempted suicide. They say that you grow up believing the narrative we’re told by society, and how people treat you. Either you had it or you didn’t, I guess. I couldn’t be the only one who felt there had to be something better than the imposed adult lifestyle that was bounded by convention. I knew I wanted more.

My tendencies to escape from the pressures of a judgemental society raging over me and all my failures brought me to these forsaken locations. When things got too rough outside, my earnest self climbed inside. My time hanging out in them not only became like therapy for me, but it also picked me up like a drug as unacquainted fires lit sparks in me that took me years just to understand their ways. Urban exploration helped me confront social and emotional turmoil, as I’d disappear into a sea of rebirth, or at least a change of scenery.

It was here where I could try on my heart, and let my walls down. Over time, I didn’t really mind that I was lonely because it felt like home. Whatever things ran through my mind I could keep for myself. I could learn about myself and my environment and observe both and how they changed with the weather. I could study these ruins and what was left behind, getting an extraordinary and authentic look at a sort of museum of humankind than I could ever learn elsewhere as I picked at the bones. Building materials, architecture, electrical and plumbing, amateur archeology, hazardous side effects, irrelevant culture – all things that would give me a better understanding of the world around me, and conjure more questions and a desire to learn. I could learn to gauge my anxiety and problem solve in different ways.

Little did I know that while I spent so much time in the edges between self-awareness and self-loathing, I grew as a person.

Photography was something I picked up in relation to urban exploration, as I pushed myself to learn the mechanics and how to capture this world that I saw. I really digged the feelings I was receiving, that excitement, that push to keep trying, to keep dreaming. I wanted to get lost because I couldn’t be found. When we’re presented with things that we don’t see in our routine days, we get curious and we look. Social norms often tend to discourage looking closer in real life, and that’s why I love photography. It allows us to do so freely.

I still remember the satisfied grin on my face when I first bought my own camera with money that I had worked so long to save. And the creamery was where I honed those skills. Exploring enhanced and enlightened by appreciation for the landscape around me, and matured a sense of wonder in these everyday spaces. Being a photographer really enhanced my self-esteem and gave me a distraction from everything that was bringing me down. Every photo tells a story. Every photo was taken by someone who had to be at that place, who did the planning, who had an experience to share.

In college, I majored in graphic design, which, despite me falling out of love with it after I became wise to how the industry works and how that didn’t fit me, has greatly influenced and improved my imagery and my hobby. I could further my creativity with all that was still stuck in my head.

Writing has something that always came sort of naturally to me I guess, but it’s still something I’m pretty self-conscious about and always trying to develop. Twisting the night away in front of the comforting glow of a computer screen as I listened to those records that almost hit harder than my pain, I tried to translate and find a meaning in my thoughts and experiences and explores. Especially as I grew older, I wanted to spin a thread from my past into my present and try to find a meaning to my suffering, to these forsaken locations, and how being a human is one complicated gig.

I definitely wore my heart on my sleeve, and I remember all the things I felt discovering my favorite albums, the heroes I would worship, fascinating local weirdness and just about anything else that made me shiver. Part of me wanted to contribute, to create, to make sense of everything I could. What do I do with all these feelings and experiences, these things that are crawling up inside my head in my 20 something-year-old wasteland?

I’m not sure what it is about the creamery, or these temples that are a relief to me, but they make great atmospheres to drain my mind, all the more so when my cup is full.

Exploring ironically became some sort of a social endeavor for me in my young adult years when I was searching for friendships and other libertines. I’d often accidentally meet these amiable, intelligent people with the same interests, and I’d take the chance and meet them in person and go on adventures, and I’ve been lucky to form a few strong bonds because of it.

Before I had this blog, I had a Flickr account. In those days, Flickr was really a niche audience. But somehow, my Vermont-based photographs made their rounds, and over time, others started to reach out to me. We would bond over the places we’d shoot and our stories, and sometimes, if we really hit it off, we’d meet up in person and find new exploratory joys (but to be honest, the biggest thrill for me was to finding new places myself). I think any other explorers can vouch for this – that the conversations you have while adventuring are often the best, and the weirdest. I’ve had plenty of amusing chats underneath the creamery’s arched tin ceilings. That’s how I met my friends and role models Rusty and Christina who run Antiquity Echoes and Dan from Environmental Imagery, to name a few.

The internet introduced me to the “urban exploration” community, which was still emerging at the time and pretty underground, and I remember being curiously thrilled that there were other people out there who did what I did. The explorers (“urbexers”) who were creating websites and putting their photography online, I found, had scars, philosophies, and interests similar to mine. And their work was good, it was venerable, and it gave me a direction. I love people who add personality to their work.

That was also where I was introduced to the term “urbex”,  something that attempted to categorize what I was doing. Way different than the modern day urbex explosion that has crawled all over the internet, and alongside the greats, an oversaturation of various disrespectful types who are more into their own vanity and bravado and taking pictures of them smoking vapor cigarettes than the tourism, which often brought drama and something pathetically similar to high school cliques in the social media groups I used to be apart of (another attempt at trying to fit in), so these things turned back into a private affair for me.

I don’t want to be a trite person because that’s unfulfilling and there is no point in following this blog if I sound like everyone else. I’m me, and my thing is to be upfront and honest about where I come from, and often, I talk too much. That may not be everyone’s scene, but I’m okay with it – it’s all I got. It took me years to find my words and a beat, and I’ve learned a murderers row of personal lessons from it.

I’ve been searching all my life for a purpose, some sort of connection to this “humanhood” we’re all supposedly a part of – but I never really found it until I started learning how to live in the present tense and brave through the pain and uncertainties. You have to be vulnerable to grow, and sometimes, letting down my guard was a significant and valuable thing. Proving the static in my head wrong, that I wasn’t too far gone to have a talent.

Exploring, photography, writing, they all sort of united together, and as I chased them, I fell for them. I wasn’t wasting away my soul anymore, and I learned to stand on my own and begin again as my purpose worked its way to the surface. I wanted my life to matter, and for my time to have a positive impact and not to simply pass me by, even if it costs me. I don’t want to just survive, I want to do the best that I can to create a wonderful life. Especially now as my youth and years are passing me by.

Nothing will ever be handed to you. You gotta work hard, or it will never happen. If you want to be an artist or wield a talent, you have to study that art. Get the books, the role models, the media that has to do with what sort of person or thing that you feel you want to become. Study it all the time. Practice, learn, stumble, keep practicing, go. Decide, who are you trying to be? And what’s the motive? Do you want to be an artist that cares about your art, or famous? Those are 2 completely different things. I’d rather be trying to be the best I can be at whatever I’m doing, even if I only have a few other people that happen to like it.

For someone who didn’t believe he had much of a future after he had left college and feels like he’s spent his whole life less up than his downs, this has turned my whole life around. It’s the long haul, but it’s worth it. I try not to put anything out there that I don’t believe is good. Even if that means a lot of time in between my newer posts. Quality is more important to me than success. And I’m still finding my beat and my voice (and still cringing at my earlier posts haha).

I learned that I can succeed even when I’m failing miserably. I learned not to be as negative as I used to be, and indulgence can be a good thing in moderation. Enjoying a little danger now and then is fun and beneficial, and remembering where I came from doesn’t have to be a condemnation. Being willfully ignorant will get me nowhere, and is counter-productive to the life I want to live, or the people that help me shine.

Others are imbued by my weather, and I flourish in the presence of love. Fear gets me nowhere. Anger and indignation can be useful and rejection can make you resilient. In pain there is wisdom. Waiting out my life to hold onto anything never worked.

I re-wrote this blog entry and re-photographed this place for myself, the people I know now, and those who became ghosts, because I think there is a great story being told here. Our beginnings and ends are all written in the choices we make, and they all lead us in a direction.

In this struggle, something can be found, and it shouldn’t be measured by what conventional wisdom has imposed or implied. It’s the experience that means everything. In some ways, I’d like to hope my story can be several of us. And after all I’ve said here, I’m still shaking as I consider hitting the publish button. If you don’t say anything, you’re not vulnerable.

It took me 28 years to stop playing my old records, to get beyond that point where I couldn’t seem to move on yet knew I couldn’t stay the same. Now, I’m writing this up in an apartment 24 miles away from where I grew up, and where I spent my youth in imagination or hopelessly devoted to misery. Life moves on and our stories are always more connected than distance implies.

Requiem Revisited

The town I grew up in left a long time ago, and we lost touch as I shed my skin. Now, with the creamery’s uncertain future and Hyde Manor’s weight taking over and speeding its collapse, I felt like two of the most influential figures of my past lives, things that really shaped the person that’s writing this right now, are vanishing. And they’re dying breeds – venerable buildings built with a motivation and with dignity, things that our new disposable and tawdry society shamefully doesn’t value. That’s more or less evident with all the pop-up cardboard condos appearing in town. It’s a shame that future generations of curious kids or explorers will loose these mysteries and interactions that are kept inside these constructions that they don’t build anymore.

Because I taught myself the basics of photography here, I thought it was ironic that all the photos I had of this place didn’t really reflect how much I feel I’ve progressed over the intervening years – and I definitely felt like out of all the locations I’ve documented, this deserved good representation. So I was on a bittersweet mission of reverence; to record every corner of the building and do a good job at doing so.

My friend Josh and I got together and decided to spend as many days as we could stomping around the creamery with camera equipment, our footsteps the only things haunting its rooms.

I wonder if I would have even gotten into exploring to the extent that I am now, if it wasn’t for my time spent here and the spell I was under. Would I have ever gone to Hyde Manor? Would this blog be existing? I can’t say if this place that has driven me crazy will fall and fade or not, but I’m glad we let our distress push us back to this old haunt and all my forgotten ghosts. But if I never see it again, well, I’m damn appreciative of my time here.

Thank you for the indulgence here. Part of me was almost against posting this last section, but my feelings that it was somehow meaningful and cathartic overpowered the fears of showing my scars.

I think the Lawrence Arms said it best; the time is never right, the words are never right. I hope it’s helpful. I hope it fires you up.

Historical Images

The newly constructed Milton Creamery. The ground still muddied and rutted from building it. 1919. Via UVM Landscape Change Program
The newly constructed Milton Creamery. The ground still muddied and rutted from building it. 1919. Via UVM Landscape Change Program
Circa 1930. Via UVM Landscape Change Program
Circa 1930. Via UVM Landscape Change Program
Circa 1930. Via UVM Landscape Change Program
Collection trucks in front of the creamery – Circa 1930. Via UVM Landscape Change Program
Weighing and Receiving Room.
Weighing and Receiving Room. Courtsey of Milton Historical Society.
Employees, Circa 1920. Courtesy of Milton Historical Society
Employees, Circa 1920. Courtesy of Milton Historical Society
The original Creamery, before the brick edition and the front garages. Courtesy of Milton Historical Society
The original Creamery, before the brick edition and the front garages. Courtesy of Milton Historical Society
Railroad view, Notice the massive water tower and the absence of the brick edition. Courtesy of Milton Historical Society
Railroad view, Notice the massive water tower and the absence of the brick edition. Courtesy of Milton Historical Society
Courtesy of Milton Historical Society
Courtesy of Milton Historical Society
43 Creamery Employees, in it's later years. Courtesy of Milton Historical Society
43 Creamery Employees, in its later years. Courtesy of Milton Historical Society

The Creamery Today 

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Because this is an old creamery, I think this is the best graffiti in the entire building. Get it?!
Because this is an old creamery, I think this is the best graffiti in the entire building. Get it?!
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According to local lore, this is all that remains of the couch that the homeless man burned alive on years ago.

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According to local lore, this is all that remains of the couch that the homeless man burned alive on years ago.
According to local lore, this is all that remains of the couch that the homeless man burned alive on years ago.

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We found several animal bone fragments in the basement. According to my friend, years ago, people used to have illegal cock fights down here. Over the years, the decayed corpses of dead cats and skunks would also appear. Once, some folks, probably teenagers, stole road flares and had what we guess was a road flare fight down there as well.
We found several animal bone fragments in the basement. According to my friend, years ago, people used to have illegal cock fights down here. Over the years, the decayed corpses of dead cats and skunks would also appear. Once, some folks, probably teenagers, stole road flares and had what we guess was a road flare fight down there as well.

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A reality of abandoned places. They're very commonly breeding grounds for stuff that hates us. Stuff like mold in a Pantone book of colors.
A reality of abandoned places. They’re very commonly breeding grounds for stuff that hates us. Stuff like mold in a Pantone book of colors.
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Always a good reminder to look down, you might be surprised at what your feet crunch over. Like shards of old china plates.

 

The sections of the basement area that ran alongside the railroad tracks were chopped up into several smaller rooms and passageways. In one of them, we found a crooked, rusted ladder that scaled up alongside what appeared to be a giant vat. So, up we climbed to check it out.
The sections of the basement area that ran alongside the railroad tracks were chopped up into several smaller rooms and passageways. In one of them, we found a crooked, rusted ladder that scaled up alongside what appeared to be a giant vat. So, up we climbed to check it out.
Here's a shot of the former tunnel entrance, from the basement. If you notice the indented cinder blocks back against the wall below where the light is working its way through the boards, that's it. The eerie and dank basement levels here were dug down two and a half stories deep, with slate ceilings to insulate and keep in the chill. The foresight in its design worked. Even in the most sultry summer months as a kid, I remember it always being chilly down here in the dark. For half the year, the subterranean areas are a reservoir of stagnant water and the waste of the decaying building.
Here’s a shot of the former tunnel entrance, from the basement. If you notice the indented cinder blocks with holes sledged into them back against the wall – below where the light is working its way through the boards, that’s it. The eerie and dank basement levels here were dug down two and a half stories deep, with slate ceilings to insulate and keep in the chill. The foresight in its design worked. Even in the most sultry summer months as a kid, I remember it always being chilly down here in the dark. For half the year, the subterranean areas are a reservoir of stagnant water and the waste of the decaying building.
The Creamery Tunnel, sealed off at it's other end.
The Creamery tunnel, sealed off at its other end.

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A little DIY reading was found in the dark and the damp of the basement area. It was a moldering manual on how to properly run a creamery. It's fragile pages pretty much covered how to properly clean and sterilize both the machines and the milk, and how to pasteurize it so people won't get sick.
A little DIY reading was found in the dark and the damp of the basement area. It was a moldering manual on how to properly run a creamery. It’s fragile pages pretty much covered how to properly clean and sterilize both the machines and the milk, and how to pasteurize it so people won’t get sick.

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Howe scales came from Rutland, and besides Saint Johnsbury's Fairbanks factory, was one of the domineering weighing apparatuses found around Vermont. The Howe factory went defunct years ago, and it's great building was converted into mix commercial and office space.
Howe scales came from Rutland, and besides Saint Johnsbury’s Fairbanks factory, was one of the domineering weighing apparatuses found around Vermont. The Howe factory went defunct years ago, and it’s great building was converted into mix commercial and office space.

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As you all know I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made. Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly!

If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my new Gofundme account or Paypal. Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you!

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Off The Beaten Path in Southern Vermont

I woke up at 5 AM, was reminded that I wasn’t a morning person, and stumbled out my back door at 6. My friend was waiting for me in his parked car as the headlights cast a dull amber pallor onto quiet streets that were under the cold gray dawn. It was 41 degrees and I was all shiver bones in the new coming chill.

I stopped for a few gas station coffees and was rewarded with my early rise by wicked fog that obscured the landscape off route 7 in a glorious visceral veil that turned everything into mutated shadows. I caught some of it on my cell phone hanging around Dorset Peak, before it burned off.  

The weather lately has been prime for adventuring, and I’ve been aching to get out. This trip would give me that spark in my brains I was looking for. Feeding off my desire to visit as many obscure places as I can, I figured that two ghost towns in southern Vermont would be a great way to spend my day. These vanished places are probably some of the most obscure in the state. But everyone pays the price to feed, and I arrived back home exhausted and practically limping, so I suppose that can be gauged as one hell of an adventure. But I’m also someone who’d willingly drive 8 hours just to find an oddity, so a follow-up day of sluggish exhaustion was easily worth it for me.

Somerset

I’m willing to assume that plenty of Vermonters haven’t heard of Somerset. If you take a gander at a state atlas, it’s a narrow rectangle at the western edge of Windham County that nudges into eastern Bennington County – giving the latter county its block lettered “C” shape.

The entire burg is filled by the Green Mountain National Forest. It has a year-round population of 2 people and is only accessible by a forest service road that is all too easy to miss because of its small, squint-to-read street sign. But out of the two destinations I was planning on scouting, Somerset was the only one that was somewhat accessible by vehicle, so we started out with that one. I was still sipping my coffee which was getting unsatisfyingly cold, trying to shake off a road trip thematic Tom Waits song beating around in my head.

Somerset Road sort of plunges immediately down an embankment right off The Molly Stark Byway in woodsy Searsburg, and almost as quickly, turns to washboarded gravel after passing a few houses with scores of signs telling you that they’re not into people trespassing on their land. The increasingly destitute road now follows the Deerfield River and is thick with trees. We noticed that some older power lines had still been strung up along the road, and ran the length of the Searsburg portion. But it was evident these lines were archaic predecessors of modern day utility infrastructure. Some of the poles were leaning pretty horizontally as we got further down the road, and that’s when we noticed that they had glass insulators still on their lower rungs, now defunct as the power company had long clipped those wires and modernized things a bit a few feet higher up. Glass insulators were developed in the 1850s originally for telegraph wires, but were later utilized for initiative telephone wires and electric power lines, until the 1960s when they began to be phased out and simultaneously became a feature of interest.

I thought it was pretty cool to see them, and that there are still more or less untouched Vermont back roads that still exist. Older relics like these are becoming increasingly hard to find nowadays. And, apparently, there is a collectors market, clubs and even shows dedicated to them. Anything can have fanfare it seems.

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The Somerset Road as it winds through Searsburg.
The blue glass insulators are on the bottom rung, while the modernized installation sits on top.

As soon as we hit the Somerset town line, which was marked by an omnipresently strange country icon of a bullet-perforated speed limit sign and an abrupt transition of bad gravel road to worse gravel road. The power lines stopped, and for the next several miles, we were deep in the type of woods where you really couldn’t see the forest through the trees, and they were all in the throes of their glorious descent into their perennial death.

There are really no places in Vermont like Somerset. Though there are 2 census documented year-round denizens, the amount of people gets to about 24-ish during the summer months – they’re all people who have camps there. In a 2011 interview done by WCAX, one of two Somersetians, Don Gero, explained that people don’t stick around here. Both residents are bachelors, and he quipped that because Somerset has no electricity or phones, women don’t want to live there. “They can’t use their hair dryers or wash their clothes” he said. He’s also not happy about the summer camping population, who are “two dozen too many” for his tastes, and paeaned for the good ol’ days when I guess none of them were there. Often, the current culture of these odd places is more interesting than the past events that created them.

Charted by Benning Wentworth back when Vermont wasn’t Vermont and its land was quarreled over by New York and New Hampshire, the New Hampshire governor and businessman (in no particular order) just drew a whole bunch of lines on a map and granted towns without knowing anything of the area’s geography. The most important thing was that New York couldn’t get their hands on any of the land, so he didn’t concern himself with pesky things like that. Vermonters decided they preferred anarchy, and would later orgonize an independent republic in 1777 with our own currency and postal service, and then, the 14th state in 1791 when we tried on our current name. 

Somerset is all mountains, far away from anything and hard to get to. Despite that it wasn’t great real estate to early settlers, 321 people tried to live here in the town’s 1880s apex. Logging was the only way to make a few bucks, so they deforested all of the area mountains. They attempted to have log drives down the Deerfield River, except for when it was low, which it was, a lot. 

The demand for timber was ravenous, and that convinced a railroad line to lay tracks up to the mills, which were a huge boon to the town, but also helped speed up its death. A town depending on a finite resource comes and goes like fads always do, and most of the trees in the area were hacked down, the inevitable consequence was that both the logging industry and the town became a literal washout. 

The town’s last hurrah was when the Deerfield River valley was eyed for a future facing wonder like hydropower and the cash it could bring. In 1911, the Somerset Dam began to take form. The dam was built by massive work crews of about 100 men in shifts, doing everything by hand and took about 3 years to complete. The reservoir did what reservoirs do best and collected the desired water, which submerged what was left of town and the railroad and the mills. 

At some point, there was an airfield in Somerset, which has also vanished. Today it’s a free and minimal amenitied national forest campground under the same name. According to campers who post reviews online, it’s either wonderfully remote or a place where amateur outdoors folk or “Massholes” go to belt loud music and litter. Given my experience at campgrounds, I’d say it’s probably both.

I also found out, which isn’t detrimental to your life if you don’t know, that you can take class D forest roads from Somerset all the way north to the Kelly Stand Road – a west-east oriented forest road that’s also one of Southern Vermont’s most scenic. If you enjoy shunpiking, finding more of these back road byways to explore is usually not a bad thing.

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The Somerset Road in Somerset.
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A small and mowed cemetery surprisingly pops out of miles of wilderness as you travel up the forest road. Many of the weathered and matching headstones were kids. One sad entombment was uniquely chiseled with a sheep on top, and quickly caught my wondering eyes. Lancelot was 3 years old. Life up here was tough, especially for kids.

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The further away from civilization we drove, the more apple trees started to distinguish appear from the northern forests. These apples trees appeared somewhat old, some of them were haunted by the thick woods and lack of sunlight needed to grow. Others still carried apple crops of various qualities, apple strands that are heirloom seeds, and are not commercially available anymore in an increasingly controlled GMO market, leaving these trees to one by one drift away or die off.
The further away from civilization we drove, the more apple trees started to distinguishly appear from the northern forests. I’m not sure how old some of these trees were, and if they were original to former Somerset residents, or planted after the national forest took over. These apple trees appeared somewhat haunted by the thick woods and lack of sunlight needed to grow. Others still carried apple crops which varied in how rotten they were. These apple strands that are heirloom seeds, and are not commercially available anymore in an increasingly lack of choice based GMO market, leaving these trees to one by one die off.
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A brown and white national forest sign explained at the trees that were still able to produce apples were part of an “apples for wildlife program”,which is pretty self-explanatory.
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I could have hung out in Somerset all day, it was just so beautiful and almost intimidatingly wild. All I’d need is a few Vermont microbrews to accompany me. This little brook paralleled the forest road, but I wouldn’t have found it if I didn’t stop to spark my interest in an old apple orchard.
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Only 3 things remain of Somerset’s days as a town – one of them being its restored but locked one-room schoolhouse, also found a ways up the forest road. I heard it was a private camp, but not positive about those details. I’d love to see the inside. Or to live in a restored one-room schoolhouse.
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The forests of Somerset. Are any of my blog followers into Geocaching like me? Somerset may be remote, but the area is loaded with caches!

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The Somerset Reservoir is where the Somerset Road comes to an end, and in my humble opinion, one of the more stunning places in Vermont. The sinuous and currently blustery cold water body is about 5-6 miles long and undeveloped. The dam's roadside appearance is really just a high grassy wall with a nearby unmanned rickety tin shack that has a TransCanada logo sign plate on it. But atop the dam is this awesome view of one of Vermont's largest wilderness areas. I really wish I had brought a kayak or something. Seriously, places like this are therapy to me. I couldn't contain my approval and swore a few times to prove it.
The Somerset Reservoir is where the Somerset Road comes to an end, and in my humble opinion, one of the more stunning places in Vermont. The sinuous and currently blustery cold water body is about 5-6 miles long and undeveloped. The long form of Stratton’s rounded mountain top could be seen in the distance . The dam’s roadside appearance is really just a high grassy wall with a nearby unmanned rickety tin shack that has a TransCanada logo sign plate on it. But atop the dam is this awesome view of one of Vermont’s largest wilderness areas. I really wish I had brought a kayak or something. Seriously, places like this are therapy to me. I couldn’t contain my approval and swore a few times to prove it.

Glastenbury

Vermont author Joseph Citro introduced Connecticut’s faded hamlet of Duddleytown (which was really only a place name in the town of Cornwall named after the trio of brothers who bought land there) as “the granddaddy of all New England window areas” in his book Passing Strange, which to me made a pretty good lead-in to that chapter (it was actually the last sentence in his chapter on Glastenbury). I’d like to term swipe that to introduce Glastenbury on a more localized level, as the granddaddy of Vermont’s lost areas, for multifarious justifications.

Getting to the ill-fated town is nothing short of a challenge today, and was for the people who tried to make a life for themselves up there over a century ago. It’s isolation, stubbornly built up in an area of 12 peaks over 3,000 feet with no convenient access, makes it one of the most unique places in the Green Mountain State, then and now.

If you’ve been following my blog, you might know that I’ve been very interested in Glastenbury since I was a kid, and wrote about it extensively, my long winded self trying to pack as much detail as I could into a blog post. This entry expands on that.

To summarize things; the vanished town of Glastenbury was charted in 1761, and reflected the circumstances of its neighbor Somerset when it was naively plotted over some of the worst topography in the state. As a consequence, it wasn’t really until the 1850s when anyone paid interest to the town, when people figured out they had an entire mountain of wood to deforest for profit, and a logging/charcoal duality became Glastenbury’s only industry.

About 12 brick kilns for charcoal production were built in southern Glastenbury at an area known as “the forks”, because it was a distinguishable location where Bolles Brook split in two in a V-shaped parting of ways. A small and rough, lawless village designated as South Glastenbury grew up around these kilns, including a one-room schoolhouse, loggers boardinghouse and company store.

The steepest railroad ever built in the U.S. was developed to get up into South Glastenbury. The electric trolly line was the only element that made the town a pragmatic place; bringing down money making lumber and charcoal, and later, bringing up tourists. Many have no idea that aforementioned rail bed still exists, and if you follow it, will bring you deep into indistinguishable wilderness to the grave of the old town. Our adventure started well before we got out of the car when we navigated our way to the portal into the forest. 

Funny enough, Glastenbury is still technically a town, at least in the haze of Vermont law. A gaze at a state atlas, or a Google map search, will show you a dotted lined square that represents a town boundary, only, there is nothing within the square. It’s considered an unincorporated town – or, one of 5 Vermont communities with a population so low, that instead of a town government handling its affairs, those things are managed by a county or the state. Or the national forest service I guess. There are a few people who still do live in Glastenbury – populated by just 6 people ( their properties are pretty much clustered near the borders of either Shaftsbury or Woodford), who also have achieved somewhat of a level of intrigue beyond the strange phenomena that describes the town.

I’m going to stay quiet on the access road we took, because it’s pretty evident that the people who have their addresses there don’t want the crowds. (Like the folks in Somerset, they live in the boonies for a reason, only, these folks express their discontent via threatening scrawl) When we drove up the gravel roadway, we immediately began to pass some shabby looking properties, all of them with handwritten and somewhat threatening signs warning nonlocals not to park their cars there, or else.

Fearing our car would be cannibalized for its wheels in an uncomfortable back woods “we warned you!” sort of situation, we decided to find what we designated as the safest parking space on the road, far away from any discernable houses and no parking signs. Hoping that we didn’t make a stupid mistake, we trekked up the road on foot, found the forest road, and began our hike into one of the most fabled places in state mythology.

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This is a shot of the trail slash old rail bed, miles into our hike. Unexpectedly to me, this might be the most grueling of Vermont hikes I’ve endured. The amount of rocks ravished my feet to a point where I was literally limping down the trail, silently no longer caring if I was there and begging to rest my weary bones in the car.
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Further up the trail, we started to find original rail spikes from when the railroad was built over a century ago!
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This was a sign that got me revved up. We began to notice chunks of Slag along the trail. Slag is a stony waste matter separated from metals during the smelting or refining of ore, and since Glastenbury was built around charcoal furnaces, there is plenty of the stuff in the woods today. We were even to find some rare green and blue slag. I’m not very savvy about the jewelry culture, but I guess you can polish and buffer up slag chunks pretty attractively and make accented miscellany from them. I dig them in their natural form, and grabbed a few chunks of the green for my collection of oddities.
The Bennington-Woodford Railroad ran electric trolleys up to South Glastenbury

We hushed our sound as we heard another one that was all too familiar to me. We heard an approaching 4 wheeler. Because of my suspicious nature and not knowing what sort of people were this deep up in the woods, I decided to relocate myself as far to the side of the trail as I could, give a friendly nod and let them pass. As they got closer, I saw it was a younger couple, a man and a woman, and they slowed down as they saw us. I decided to take the mutual encounter and get past my social anxiety and spark up a conversation with them.

Actually, I wanted directions, because we were beginning to second guess ourselves as to where we were, and if we could find any of the ruins, and I really didn’t want to leave disappointed.

The front handbrakes were pulled and their 4 wheeler slowed down to a stop. The gentleman, who was wearing a camo baseball cap and sunglasses smiled at us and wished us a good afternoon, his wife sat behind him silently observing us with a friendly expression. I returned the greeting and asked him if he could direct us to South Glastenbury.

“Oh, the forks?” he asked. That casual nickname drop meant that they were aware of it, and I nodded my head, my excitement immediately betrayed my casual expression I was trying to keep. I also thought it was pretty rad that locals today still use the place’s old handle.

“Yes, the forks. Are we close? Would it even be traceable in all this?” I gestured to the thick woods around me to make a point. “Well, yeah you can find it. But this is sort of the wrong time of year to be looking for that sort of stuff. Also, it’s bear season up here you know. Uhh, how’d you guys know about Glastenbury, just curious?” he asked us with a backdrop set to his tone.

I wasn’t quite sure if my candor had triggered a nerve, or how to give him a cropped statement of how Glastenbury found itself sticking to the flypaper of New England mythology, but I had a feeling he already knew that. “So, you know about Middie Rivers?” his wife spoke up. “Yeah, I do” I stated. There was no need to be superfluous there. But for those of you who are unfamiliar with Glastenbury and it’s monsters;

Local lore includes a froth of big hairy monsters, a cursed Indian stone that swallows humans, UFOs, mysterious lights, sounds and odors detected by colonial settlers, and numerous hikers walking off the face of the earth here between 1945 to 1950 – earning it the nickname; “The Bennington Triangle” in 1992, which has adhered itself to the flypaper of popular culture.

Fortean researchers like John A. Keel conjured up the term “Window Area”, which I had referenced at the beginning of this section, as a place where some sort of interdimensional trapdoor can be found. Well, that’s one theory anyways. New England is loaded with so-called “Window Areas”. Cryptozoologist and researcher Loren Coleman identified Massachusetts’ “Bridgewater Triangle”, using the term “triangle” to designate any odd geographical area. Joseph Citro followed up by coining “The Bennington Triangle” – both are said to be “window areas” It’s also one of my favorite terms to use when talking about this caliber of local weirdness.

Who knows where the flickers of truth are in all this. And that’s what makes everything so damn fascinating, because there is truth in these tales tall and true.

It’s also the mountain’s paranormal and controversial tales that attract modern day professed ghost hunting clubs and social media sensationalists, whose meddling are an affront to both locals and reasonable judgment, which really seemed to have damned the wilderness area.

Don’t get me wrong, these haunting stories are partially why I found myself hiking up the mountain, because of how impressionable they were and still are to me, but I find that there is also a line between being a civilized researcher, and becoming one of the monsters you’re chasing and exploiting it on a tawdry clickbait website with a headline that reads something like “{insert subject} will give you NIGHTMARES!”

Middie Rivers

The elderly Middie Rivers was the first of a handful of people who reputedly disappeared in the mountains in or near Glastenbury. Anyone who tells the story of southern Vermont’s Shangri-La recants that Rivers was an experienced woodsman who, while leading other hunters on the mountain, got a bit ahead on the trail, and was never seen again.

“None of that is true”, his wife said declaredly. “Rivers wasn’t a hunter or an experienced woodsman at all! He was actually from Massachusetts, and he had borrowed a rifle from his brother-in-law, who he was hunting with. He’d probably never even hunted before, and certainly never guided other hunters up here. The only thing that’s true about that story, is that he did disappear.”

“One theory is that he might have fallen down an old well. That seems pretty plausible to me”, I added. She nodded her head. “Yup, that’s what we think too. I mean, there are plenty of them up in the hills. But vanishing without a trace…people love to say that, because it backs up the mystic or, I don’t know, the ghostly impression about this place. They’d rather believe that than the facts, because it’s more interesting” she furrowed her brows and cut herself off in annoyed contemplation – like she knew what she wanted to say but couldn’t get it out. I was loving this conversation. “I know a bit about Middie Rivers” she continued after a moment. “I know a lot of stories and legends, passed down by relations to him. The Loziers – that’s the family who is related to him – we knew/know them, they passed down all sorts of stuff to us growing up. They have a camp up in Glastenbury still, like us. I even have a picture of Middie Rivers”.

“Ah, that explains the 4 wheeler then. I was a little surprised to see you folks! I assumed this was just a hiking trail or forest road”.

“Yup, we’re one of two camps in Glastenbury on this trail. My wife’s father built it years ago. We were grandfathered in. After the national forest took over, no one else was allowed to build up here or drive up this trail anymore. As it is, we need a special permit to have 4 wheelers so we can ride up here” – the husband cut in. “Did you see all of the gates?” I nodded in confirmation. We had to crawl underneath a few of them just to advance our hike. He continued; “We used to have friends up all the time, they used to come up in huge parties on ATVs up the trail. Now you can’t do that. It’s ridiculous, but hell, we’re not going to fucking lug all of our shit up to the camp on foot” – he then gestured to a cooler on the back rack of his 4 wheeler to emphasize his point. I got it. My friend and I had been walking for over an hour now, and I was already exhausted. “Our camps have been here for a long time – they started out as plywood cabins with dirt floors, and over the years as they were passed down, we’ve improved them a bit. No one else can build up here now.”

“I mean, it’s really probable that Middie could have fallen down a sink hole”, his wife interjected herself back into the already broadening conversation. “Sinkholes?” I asked, hoping I delivered a cue to get any sort of further information. “Ayuh, it happens more often than you think. Sinkholes swallow hunters all the time! There’s tons of them up here. People have hunted this mountain all their lives and still report getting turned around in the woods and intimidated here.”

“Because of the cross winds that meet on Glastenbury Mountain?” I prodded, a showing a little pride in my research. She nodded her head.

“I’d love to hear more about Middie Rivers, or any stories you guys have, if you’d be interested in chatting? I can give you my email or something?” I attempted. I couldn’t help it, I live for stuff like this. There is just something underneath my skin, a desire to make sense of everything. I’m definitely the type to overload myself with information.

At this point, his wife broke out in a lopsided grin and told me that she wasn’t interested in speaking any further about Glastenbury, without actually telling me she didn’t want to speak anymore about Glastenbury. “Well, we’ll be on our way now” said her husband, his thumb pushing the ignition and the engine promptly firing up. He gave us directions that were incredibly vague, but given the lack of wayfinding points, were the best he could do with people who’ve never been in those woods before. I thanked the both of them, tipped my hat in gesture, and both groups parted our opposite ways down the trail.

The Forks

It didn’t take long before we were unclear of the given directions and insecure about how much we remembered. It didn’t help that there were plenty of brook forks along the trail, tripping my thoughts up to think that any of them could be the forks.

As we continued our trek up the trail, we sighted something that sort of sketched us out. I’m laughing to myself as I type this sentence, but it was a cozy looking, nicely upkept log cabin which was probably one of the camps the baseball capped guy was talking about. There was an open lawn area out front that was mindfully mowed and solar panels on the roof, with an outhouse in back.  It’s hard to explain what it is about off grid living, or seeing a home way out in the boonies, that sends odd reactions that crawl up your spine. I suppose that so many of us are just accustomed to being hooked up to utility poles (in some more repressive states, it’s actually against the law to be off the grid), that this sort of makes us subconsciously weary, like there is something “weird” about the arrangement, and easy to stereotype the people that chose to live like that and how they’re of their own sort. But then I remember that I’d live like that too if I could.

But still, I picked up my pace a bit, wanting to get out of sight of the cabin and back into the woods. Then, we ran into another fellow on a 4 wheeler. This time, our approaching character was an older gentleman. We side-stepped off the trail again, nodded our heads, and went through the same rounds of introductions as last time.

“The forks, huh? Well, I mean….you can’t make out much of the old hotel foundation anymore, but it’s right off this trail. Nothing much left of the kilns. Might be some iron bands, maybe bricks.” Then he pointed to an offshoot 4 wheeler trail that ran through an area thick with prickers and berry bushes. “There’s more kilns up that knoll there” he said, his wisdom rolled confidently off his tongue wrapped up in his heavy Vermont accent. “Oh, uh, that trail looks like it goes behind the camp we just passed,” I said uncomfortably. Though my hobby of exploration often involves trespassing, I wasn’t about to skulk around someone’s land up in those hills, especially inhabited land. People in the boondocks have guns. “They aren’t home are they?!” He said, a little wonderment in his inotation.

“No, we didn’t see anyone when we walked by”, I returned, grinning at his unexpected humorous reaction.

“Oh, good!” he said, his enthusiasm almost made me crack up. I wondered if they got along or not. “But yeah – there’s more of em’ down that trail. Well, I’ve never seen them, but I know they’re there!” This time, I didn’t contain my mirth. I liked this guy. I asked him to clarify our misdirections a bit, and he gave us some of the most Vermont directions I’ve ever gotten – far superior to the ones I got when searching for some of our state’s mysterious stone chambers.

“Well, when you get to the forks, take a right instead of the left crossing over the brook, then go up the mountain a ways but still make sure to parallel the river – look down and you’ll eventually see the kilns. Or what’s left of ’em anyways. ” Just then, a Glastenbury traffic jam formed behind the old timer on his 4 wheeler, as three teenage rednecks on dirtbikes pulled up and sort of just looked at my friend and I stoically, the last one in line revved his engine impatiently while refusing to make eye contact and tried to flaunt his, I don’t know, machismo? Or maybe he was just impatient. I shook his hand and wished him a good afternoon, and we were on our way.

More walking down the trail later, and we approached a very standout fork in Bolles Brook and the rail bed portion of the trail we were on ended and transitioned into a slender path beyond a wooden bridge that crossed the brook. We had found the forks.

The village of South Glastenbury circa 1897. Bolles Brook is in the middle of the photo. The hotel (former logger's boardinghouse) is to the left, with the double story porch, and the casino (former company store), is up the hill a ways to the right. You can also see the electric trolly on the lower right hand corner of the photo - the same tracks we hiked to get up into town.
The village of South Glastenbury circa 1897. Bolles Brook is in the middle of the photo. The hotel is to the left, with the double story porch, and the casino is up the hill a ways to the right. You can also see the electric trolly on the lower right corner of the photo – the same tracks we hiked to get up into town. This is my favorite picture of Glastenbury.
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This is “the forks” or Bolles Brook today. The village of South Glastenbury is practically intractable.
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Taken on the forest road bridge that crosses Bolles Brook. Someone cryptically carved either “The Kilns” or “The Kill” on the railings.
The Glastenbury casino, 1897. I really like the architecture on this old building, like the multi-story porches and the clocktower. You still get a good sense of how isolated it was.
The Glastenbury casino, 1897. I really like the architecture on this old building, like the multi-story porches and the clocktower. You still get a good sense of how isolated it was.
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You can’t really tell, but this landslide filled in pitted portion of hillside is a foundation. This is where Glastenbury’s casino used to be. The logging and charcoal industry decimated the forests of Glastenbury, so the townsfolk, with a lot of urging from the railroad who didn’t want to go broke, developed South Glastenbury into a mountain tourism getaway. The loggers’ boardinghouse became a hotel and the company store became a casino. It was open for business by 1897 after much painstaking work was put into sprucing up the area, and visitors loved it. Glastenbury must have been pretty cool in its day, way up in the mountains over 2,000 feet. And during the time of inconvenient travel, it must have been a novelty. But a year later, a flood destroyed the tracks to a quality beyond repair, and it successfully killed the town. Most of the buildings just rotted away and fell into their cellar holes, and the national forest took control of the area in the 1930s.

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“Well….” I dragged out the word, in a reverie of run down indecisiveness. “Should we try to scout the hillside a bit? See if we can find anything?” I asked. My friend enthusiastically agreed, not being constantly annoyed by an abused foot throbbing in pain. So, off the trail we went, regardless of the reminders that we were in “The Bennington Triangle” and “this is how people disappear” that my brain was trying to communicate with me. To my relief, which quickly muted by lethargy, my friend ecstatically yelled; “I found bricks!”
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I clambered over to where his form was through the foliage and found myself stumbling over piles and piles of bricks that practically made up the slope we were on. Further up the hill, we began finding some old stone foundations filled in by a century of erosion.

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I read that there were very few photos of any of the charcoal kilns in Glastenbury. Here's one of the few I was able to find.
I read that there were very few photos of any of the charcoal kilns in Glastenbury – and the few that do exist are only after the kilns went defunct. Here’s one of the few I was able to find, with two men standing nearby.
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The further up the slopes we ventured, our efforts paid off. I began finding tons of moss covered bricks and bent up iron bands from the old charcoal kilns! I was so excited to find artifacts that have survived the ravages of time – things that help us reconstruct our past culture.
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A contorted iron band from one of the old kilns.

Visiting the peaceful and secluded location of Glastenbury town was a strange experience. Knowing the lore and the history there sort of make you look at this otherwise banal stream crossing in the woods through a different set of lenses, ones that makes professed monsters a bit more discernable. Unless there is just something in Bolles Brook that made/makes the locals morbidly imaginative.

On our way down the mountain, we saw a couple fellas standing barefoot in the chilly waters of the brook smoking pot – a scent that followed us halfway through the rest of our hike. One gave us a toothless smile and a wave, and kept on giggling at whatever it was they were talking about. I won’t deny that they picked a nice afternoon for woodsy shenanigans.

Thankfully, our car was as we left it when we got back, and we sluggishly made our way back down to Bennington to grab a burger.

My friend and fellow explorer Josh is into video editing and decided to film our oddysey. Cinematography is something I keep saying I’m going to get into more, but my laziness and reserved nature always seem to prevent that from getting a checkmark on my list. If videos are your thing, and you want to see my friend and this blogger being sort of goofy/awkward while tromping through the woods, I’ll link you below.

Things worth mentioning:

If any of you are interested further in Glastenbury, I’d highly recommend author Tyler Resch’s venerable book about the history of the town. I have a copy of it in my library.

I’d also like to suggest Joseph Citro’s Passing Strange, a detailed compendium of New England folklore and weirdness. It was one of the first books I bought as a kid, and my worn out copy is still with me. Both of these books helped further my research and curiosity.

If you missed it, here is my first post on Glastenbury, if you want more on the town’s history and ghastliness.

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Wizard’s Glen

Ever since we started narrating our folklore collectively as a species, we’ve always marked the wildest places of our topography as incubators of contagion shotgun blasts for the darkest, grimmest things our human minds can create, existing in a variety of forms. These tales often like to hang around well into the intervening years where they should become obsolete, and yet, they don’t. We all deal with the dangers of the world in different ways. Sometimes, carrying on the traditions of talking about these kind of fabled places is a way of dealing with these dangers. And sometimes, these monsters reveal the most about humanity.

Wizard’s Glen in the Berkshires is a wild, picturesque depression between two steep-sided hills. Intersected by a lone, narrow and often washed out dirt road with it’s to-the-point name of Gulf Road, you are welcomed into this attention-grabbing area by tons of boulders that are stacked up the hillsides, some covered with some impressive and patriotic graffitic murals instead of the flippant teenage rabble I expected to find in such an area.

The name “Gulf” interested me before I even began to think about Wizard’s Glen.  The noun is a distinctive part of the obscure Vermont vernacular. Gulfs are known to the rest of the world as a large area of the sea or ocean that’s almost entirely surrounded by land, expect for its mouth. A Vermont gulf is a landlocked one – found in our mountains. We know them as deep ravines (or more dramatically, an “abyss”) that run between two parallel mountains or rises. To my knowledge, us Vermonters were/are the only ones to use the word in that sense. Vermont actually goes as far as to erect road signs to let travelers know that you’re passing through one. Granville, Proctorsville and Williamstown Gulfs come to mind, all of which are great drives. But finding a gulf outside of Vermont, even only in the form of a street name, was sort of cool to me. There is also a Gulf Road in New Hampshire near Brattleboro.

This particular Gulf Road runs east to west over the bumps that are the Berkshires. Both entry points are unobtrusive and start out as an unremarkable suburban street with storm drains, crumbling curbs and cobra head street light fixtures that run to the very point when suddenly, the pavement ends, and the obsessively trimmed lawns cease to exist, and you’re in a surprisingly sizable wilderness area that runs for about 1.8 miles between Lanesborough and Dalton. But at the slow speeds you are forced to crawl on this winding roadway, it feels much longer.

Wizard’s Glen

The area known as Wizard’s Glen, vs. the rest of the area that’s not known as Wizard’s Glen, co-exist very inconspicuously with each other. If it wasn’t for the wayfinding graffiti marked boulders, I would have driven right by it.

I got out of the car and noticed the temperature was a pleasant few degrees cooler, and the forest was soluble underneath a still silence. I immediately began to get interactive with my environment and started clambering on top of the boulders and under Hemlock boughs and inside the caves and crevices of undetermined pasts.

Godfrey Greylock described the diminutive gorge in 1879 as being “as though and angry Jove had here thrown down some impious wall of Heaven-defying Titans. Block lies heaped upon block; squared and bedeviled, as if by more than mortal art…”

I have to say, the stories about this place were far more waggish than it’s real life locality would suggest, which only intrigued me more. This place has spawned plenty of strange tales of the supernatural and the dreadful, and many of them are almost as old as New England is.

Someone had told me that the hollow is known for its strange sounds and echo-related properties, and claimed that if you banged on one of the rocks with a hammer, it would make a noise sounding like you were smashing the keys of a xylophone, while inexplicably, the surrounding boulders wouldn’t. However, that enticing theory was disappointingly proven false. Well, at least it didn’t work for me.

It was here that Indian priests and shaman centuries ago performed rituals, ceremonies and incantations amongst the rocks in the ravine known for its echoes. Because they revered this area to have special properties, it was said they even offered human sacrifices here to Hobomocko, the spirit of evil. There is a flat, broad square-ish rock known as “Devils’ Alter” where these cryptic sacrifices were said to be imposed. The rock today has faint traces of red stains on it, which some say is the remaining blood from the aforementioned occurrences – but the reality is the stains just come from iron in the rocks.  The unique name Wizard’s Glen was actually derived from these legends. And it makes sense – it’s aesthetically the type of place where strange happenings can’t be easily dismissed.

The best known story of the glen is of John Chamberlain, a hunter from Dalton about two hundred years ago whose whopper of a story was passed on in Godfrey Greylock’s book Taghconic: The Romance and Beauty of The Hills in 1852, when he interviewed Joseph Edward Adams, a ninety-year-old man who had heard it from the hunter eyewitness himself.

Chamberlain had killed a deer and was carrying it home on his shoulders, when he was overtaken in the hills by a storm. The tired man decided to take shelter in a cavernous recess in Wizard’s Glen. But despite his fatigue, he was unable to sleep and wound up laying awake, lying on the earth with his wide open in the dark. He was suddenly amazed when, according to him, he saw the woods bend apart, disclosing a long aisle that was mysteriously lighted and contained “hundreds of capering forms”. As his eyes grew accustomed to the new faint light, he made out tails and cloven feet on the dancing figures. One very tall form had wings, who the hunter thought to be the devil himself.

As Chamberlain lay watching the through the spiteful deluge from his cave shelter, a tall and painted Indian leaped on Devil’s Alter, fresh scalps dangling around his body and his eyes blazing with fierce require. He muttered a brief incantation and summoned the shadows around him. They came with torches that burned blue, and began to move around the rock singing some sort of harsh chant, until a sign was given, and a nude Indian girl, shrieking, and fighting, was dragged and flung viciously onto the rock.

The figures now rushed towards her brandishing sharpened weapons in their outstretched arms, and the terrified girl let out a shrill cry that the hunter said haunted him for the rest of his life. The “wizard”, (who I’m assuming is the prominent figure with the wings), raised an ax, as the rest of the group waited apprehensively for the oncoming carnalish blood bath. Lightning flashed and quickly illuminated the dark pocket of woods, and Chamberlain noticed the the girl’s face quickly fell on his. The look she gave him tore at his heartstrings. He gathered as much courage as he could, and decided to act. Grabbing his bible he traveled with, he ran towards the debauchery in self-righteous fashion, clutching it in front of him and hollering the name of his god. There was a crash of thunder. The light faded, the demons vanished and the hunter was left sopping wet in the middle of the woods in silence. When morning came, he had almost convinced himself that it was all a dream, until he realized his deer had vanished.

Though not much is really known about Chamberlain, it was apparently well documented at the time that he was “no lover of the Indian race,” which may explain more about the content or the intent of this fanciful legend than anything. In my humble opinion, this eyebrow furrowing story probably shouldn’t be taken as verbatim of a real event. Even as mythology or folklore, it lacks essentially what most of these tales are built on; meaning.

There is no good evidence that any Native American group up in our part of the country even conducted human sacrifices, but I do believe that Wizard’s Glen held some sort of ritualistic importance to the area’s original natives.

Hobbomocco is a real Algonquin deity, though, and was more so associated with darkness and the night. His name is related to all Algonquin words for death and the dead, and has no relation to the Christian idea of Satan, unless misinterpreted by, well, a Christian. In the Algonquin viewpoint, Hobbomocco is actually a side or nuance of the natural world, a potential source of dangerous visions and power, which can be obtained through communication, sort of similar to Voodoo deities, and how it’s said that with enough persuasion, you can persuade them to either carry out good or evil intentions.  I think the rather dramatic story of Wizard’s Glen may be more of a manifestation of the friction between two clashing cultures and their ideas, where everything else is sort of devalued, open for interpretation, or simply cast away.

There is also said to be a talus “cave” known cryptically as Lucky Seven Cave somewhere in the glen. However, after some time clambering around and almost rolling my ankle, I couldn’t find any opening that could shelter a human who wasn’t a small child, so either it’s long toppled, or I just didn’t have good directions. Some speak of covens, convergences and rituals still being practiced in the cave and around the site, given the various paraphernalia and shitty beer cans that you can find there. I find it interesting that this site may still be attracting modern day wizards, witches or spiritualists, or people that think they are these things, but when I visited, I had the beautiful place all to myself under the heat of the day, despite the fact that it’s a geocache location and the famous Appalachian Scenic Trail crosses Gulf Road near the glen, just east of there.

Historic post card image of Wizards Glen, via cardcow.com. Date unknown.

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More Wild Places

While I’m on the topic of gulfs, I’d highly recommend checking out what may be Vermont’s most beautiful; Granville Gulf, a rugged and impressive wilderness area of moss laden cliffs, ferns and waterfalls.

If you’re curious about more of our regional wild places with extraordinary folklore attached to them, my blog entry on Glastenbury and the popularly dubbed “Bennington Triangle” may be worth a read. It’s certainly one of my favorite Vermont tales to tell.

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To all of my fans and supporters, I am truly grateful and humbled by all of the support and donations throughout the years that have kept Obscure Vermont up and running.

As you all know I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made. Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly!

If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my new Gofundme account or Paypal. Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you!

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The Vermont Character: Coffin Windows

One of my favorite pieces of Obscure Vermont is a mixture of architectural vernacular, and good old fashioned Yankee Ingenuity.

Do you see the diagonally tilted window placed in the gable end of this old farmhouse with its long edge parallel to the roof? A lot of people, Vermonters or flatlanders, seem to be flummoxed about these peculiarly slanted windows. That’s because their orientational existence isn’t found in any other states (though someone did tell me that they think they saw one somewhere in New Hampshire not too long ago.) To add a bit more rapturous froth to the isolated mystery, our Vermont parlance labels them “coffin windows”, or sometimes “witch windows”, depending on who you are I guess. Growing up, my mother would always point them out as “coffin windows” whenever we would take a trip out of suburban Chittenden County to more rural parts of the state, where older structures far outnumbered the new. I wasn’t introduced to “witch windows” until much later.

The etymology behind the monikers vary, and can’t really be traced back to a materialized point of origin.

Going alphabetically – it’s said these are called coffin windows because if a family member died upstairs, it was far easier to maneuver the needed coffin out the window and slide it down the roof as opposed to figuring out just how to haul it down a steep and narrow Vermont farmhouse staircase. And trust me, some of them are very steep and narrow to a point of over-cautiousness when walking up or down one – enough for me to sympathize with anyone who would groan at the prospect of dragging anything up or down them.

The name witch window gets a bit more on the superstitious side. It’s said that an old belief was that a witch couldn’t enter your dwelling through a crooked window or opening. A similar superstition that comes to mind is how the ancient Chinese thought bad spirits traveled in straight lines, so their architecture took on steeply peaked rooflines.

I know old Vermonters were a superstitious bunch. Our collective state history and folklore include such grim things as incriminating real people accused of Vampirism, or desecrating the graves of dead people accused of postmortem vampirism (our most famous Vampire execution was a man named Corwin, whose remains still loam underneath Woodstock’s boat shaped town green).

But witches? There isn’t much known on how scared Vermonters were of witches, leaving this as intriguing speculation. However, I was able to dig up a small number of succinct accounts in old state newspapers around the late 1700s and early 1800s of various Vermonters who locals suspected were witches, but in reality were probably nothing more than eccentrics living in a more narrow-minded time. One article amusingly reported that a Stowe woman was blamed for making several farmers’ milk cows run dry.

A more practical theory and probably the most likely of the three, was that these windows were a creative solution to let light into the cramped spaces upstairs. Gables didn’t often leave rooms for traditional sized windows and poor farmers didn’t want to spend the money on drafty dormers or getting a custom window made – which was a costly purchase many families couldn’t afford. They also enabled fresh air and ventilation to keep the house inhabitable. Though there are far more scolding environments than Vermont, our summers do get pretty humid, and the upper floors of an old house easily turn into ovens. 

Further down the line, these windows adopted yet another sobriquet with less dour and more civic pride; Vermont Windows. Though I haven’t heard that term nearly as much as the afore-referenced other two. 

In a world that loves things to fall into human-made symmetry, who knew that a window installed at a tilt could conjure up so many declaratory ideologies.

It seems that these windows have a bit of cool fanfare behind them, apart from your blogger. Some cool individual even made an Instagram account dedicated to them!

Route 100 in South Duxbury
Found one in this abandoned farmhouse I was exploring.
Found one in this abandoned farmhouse I was exploring.
East Calais
Calais
Calais
South Woodbury village
South Woodbury village
South Woodbury village
South Woodbury village
Peacham
Turkey Hill in Northfield.
Warren village
Warren Village
Cornwall
DOUBLE coffin/witch windows in Stowe! I guess these folks didn’t want to take any chances just in case a pesky witch decided to curse them.

Any of you folks know of a coffin window near you? Let me know! I love road tripping around Vermont, and I always make excuses to shunpike somewhere!

—————————————————————————————————————————————–

To all of my fans and supporters, I am truly grateful and humbled by all of the support and donations throughout the years that have kept Obscure Vermont up and running.

As you all know I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made. Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly!

If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my Paypal. Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you!

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/b5jp97d4

 

What Dwells on Woodcrest Circle?

Recently, a good friend of mine just confessed to his childhood home being haunted, and if I had known then what I know now, I don’t think I would have ever dared step inside when I was a kid.

I had visited a few times before, and never thought anything strange about the place. I had no reason to feel uncomfortable there. But my friend could argue otherwise, and the things he finally relayed to me were nothing short of terrifying.

He grew up in the same neighborhood as me, a typical 1980s sub division of simple cookie cutter ranch homes built precisely around planned circles and cul-de-sacs all named after local trees that grow wild on the front lawns. Even today, as Milton continues to grow, the honeycomb of pot holed streets and homes that make up my neighborhood is still considered to be the largest development in town. A neighborhood so big, that most of my friends would often call me from their cellphones and complain that they were lost long after they had pulled out of my driveway to leave.

To understand what exactly went on in that house, it’s good to know a little of the history behind it. One of the first occupants of the small ranch house was your typical American nuclear family. A father, a wife and their children. Though almost nothing is known about the family who owned the house before my friend’s family did, the tragic events that exploded like find powder have seemed to forever linger in the atmosphere like oil on skin.

It was known that the happiness of that family had long been eroding, as the father spent most of his hours working his fingers down to dust, trying to provide for his family. But the problem was sadly beyond what a good paycheck could repair. One day, he came home from a grueling day of work, and noticed he was in the unusual position of walking into a quiet and empty house. His suspicious soon became fire as the night passed and his family still hadn’t returned home. Beginning to panic, he soon made frantic phone calls to just about everyone he knew, asking if they had seen his family. But no one had. A few days later, he would have his answer. His wife had waited until he left for work, taken the children, and left him for another man. To make things more devastating,  he found that she had been cheating on him for several years. Unable to deal with his betrayal and shame, he went into the bathroom and shot himself.

Years later, my friend’s family moved in. Because they had 4 children, more rooms were needed and the basement was eventually converted into 2 makeshift bedrooms. My friend recalls the basement right after they moved in. He said his first impression of the basement wasn’t a great one, saying it made him feel uncomfortable the moment he set foot down there. Towards the far end was an area that was fenced off from the rest of the basement. It was a giant cage type room, with walls made from 2x4s and chicken wire walls. Their landlord informed them that it used to be a dog cage, but there was just something eerie about it still. Eventually, the space that was the cage was converted into bedrooms.

My friend developed a fear of the basement; more specifically, the part of the basement that was his room. Things seemed normal after they had first settled in. But slowly, strange things began to happen.

He first realized that no matter the circumstances, it was always cold in the basement. He would report feeling phantom breezes at night and frigid temperature drops that would leave his room freezing compared to the rest of the house. Before his room had a door, he used a sheet that had been nailed to the wooden frame around it. Some nights, he reported waking up to the sheet blowing in some sort of invisible draft that seemed to manifest itself from nowhere. More peculiarly, the breezes only seemed to disturb the sheet, and didn’t touch anything else around. With no open windows or doors that could act as the scapegoat, the source of these phantom breezes remained a mystery. But that was nothing.

After some time had passed, he woke up to hearing the sound of something moving around on his carpet. As he lay awake listening, he eventually pin pointed the location of the strange noises; they were coming from the broken plastic remains of a Plasma Globe that broke at the foot of his bed, the broken pieces lay scattered on the floor. Now, it sounded like something was crawling around inside the broken plastic shell. Getting up to turn on his light, he scanned the carpet and the broken globe for the mysterious culprit, and found nothing. Turning off his light, he got back into bed with the intention of getting more sleep, but was soon woken up again to the same noises, only this time, they seemed faster and more frantic. Getting up again, he picked up the shards and put them in the garbage. Thinking that was the end, he got back into bed and fell asleep. But for weeks after, he continued to hear noises at night. This time, he described them as what sounded like chirping noises, like a bird would make. They were soft and delicate, and could never be traced. But he knew they were coming from inside his room.

As time progressed, the strange noises stopped as mysteriously as they had appeared. Things once again were uneventful until months later, he awoke one night to the sound of his computer chair moving. Through the dim light coming from outside his room, he witnessed the chair wheeling itself from the computer desk across his room and stop itself right at the foot of his bed. The basement floor was poured concrete and was level, there was no explanation for why the chair moved on its own. He got out of bed and pushed the chair back underneath the desk. Sometime later, he awoke again to find that the chair was back at the side of his bed! Only this time, the back of the chair was reclined – an impossible position without human help, as if something was sitting in it, and it was facing him as if whatever was sitting in the chair was observing him. After a few minutes, the chair straightened back up to its natural position, as if whatever had been sitting in it had gotten up. He watched the chair roll by itself across the room and rest against the wall.

These events seemed to space themselves out unpredictably, and for the most part, innocuous. But soon, the strange phenomenon became more intense and more interactive. He began waking up in all hours of the night for unexplained reasons. Feeling horribly uncomfortable, he would scan the dark shadows of his room. Meeting his gaze was a “shadow figure” standing near the basement doors that lead to a staircase that went outside, staring at him with red eyes that he described as “like cats eyes”. The shadow was reported as being very tall, and reached from floor to ceiling. But this didn’t happen only once. This happened for years, to a point where he went from being absolutely terrified of this mysterious entity, to becoming accustomed to it. Eventually, he came to the realization that he would wake up every night and see it staring at him from his doorway.

He began to have terrifying and powerful nightmares on a nightly basis, so incredibly intense and aggressive that he didn’t want to talk about them. But, he did recall a few that he remembered vividly. Once, he dreamed that he awoke in the middle of the night laying next to a dead girl in his bed. His eyes would open and he would find himself staring into her dead eyes, which he described as calm and soothing. But the rest of her was anything but. Her mouth gaped open and was infested with crawling worms. Sometimes he would freak out and scream, and like lightning, she would begin to eat him until he woke up in his trembling skin.

Another dream he had involved the same girl, only this time he woke up to a rotting hand coming up from his bedside and clutch his chest. That soon was followed by another hand, and eventually, her dead and rotting face. She opened her mouth and let out an agonizing scream of misery and sorrow for what seemed like hours until he woke up. An interesting side note is that after every single nightmare he would suffer through, he would always wake up and see that familiar shadow figure with the cats eyes staring at him from his doorway. The figure would always be in the same spot, but would never come in the room. Could there be a connection between this strange entity and his dreams?

Another night, he awoke to the chirping noises again. At this point, it had been some time since he had last heard them, so he was a little surprised as his memory was revived. But there was something else now. In the desolate moonlight that lit up his room, he reported seeing something truly terrifying that seemed to crawl and shamble along his floor. Extending from the basement doors to the door of his bedroom, he said he saw what he can best be described as a giant human back, without arms, legs or a head attached to it. It withered and twisted and convulsed across the floor, it’s bones looked like they’d pop out of its skin at any moment. He turned his head away, far too afraid to stare at whatever he was seeing. When he heard the chirping noises quiet down, he forced himself to look at his floor again, and whatever he had seen had vanished into the night.

Now, all of this admittedly seems a bit extreme, if not Hollywood in character. But, my friend isn’t one for lying, and his voice was trembling with such emotion and sincerity that I simply can’t believe that he would be having a laugh at my expense. And as I would soon find out, my theory would be proven correct.

A few nights ago, myself and another good childhood friend were enjoying fine Long Trail Coffee Stouts underneath soft Spring breezes that seemed safe and cool. Sitting on two chairs on his back deck, we often would meet up and let our conversations continue into the night, a great way to unwind from the despairs of the day. And somehow, our conversation turned to nostalgia and strange experiences, and eventually, it lead to my friend’s house.

I had mentioned that I wasn’t sure what to make of the claims that were told to me, I was more than a little skeptical, but he intervened and stopped me.

“I had a really strange experience there when I used to spend the night” he told me. “So, you believe that it’s haunted as well?” I asked, almost incredulously. He wasn’t sure what to think. Like me, he tries to see things logically, and even though he was a firsthand witness to a bizarre encounter there, he still had a hard time admitting to himself that he believed what he saw.

Years ago, when he was spending the night, he rolled over on the couch he was sleeping on, and his foot banged into something. His eyes slowly opened, trying to read the situation. This was strange, considering he knew before he went to bed, there was nothing at all that was near the couch that his foot should have bumped into. Eventually, he sat up and noticed that a computer chair was sitting beside the couch. That was strange, because before he went to bed, he recalled that the chair was in fact tucked underneath the computer desk at the other side of the room, a good 6 feet from where he was sleeping. What was it doing over here? He didn’t think much of it, but he noticed that the room was much colder than it had been. On the back of the computer chair, a blanket had been draped over it. Wanting some extra warmth, he quickly snatched the blanket from the chair and pulled it over him. When he grabbed the blanket, the chair expectantly started spinning. But 15 minutes later, he sat there watching the chair incredulously; it was still spinning at a continuous yet slow speed and showed no signs of slowing down. Then to his horror, the chair began to spin faster. In a scene that would only appear to most people on the silver screen, the chair began to spin faster and faster as if pushed by an unseen force, only to come to a direct stop suddenly, the front of the chair facing him. Needless to say, he preferred not to spend another night in that house again.

But there were other strange factors at play here. My friend recalled that his step dad began to suffer from terrible mood swings shortly after they had moved in the house. He would become violent, irrational and his tongue sharp and serpentine. I only met him a few times when I was much younger, and I saw him as an unfriendly type of person, but according to my friend, he was acting “out of character, even for him”. Eventually, the marriage was dissolved and he left the house. But soon after, his mother would report waking up with a body like imprint in her bed, as if someone had been sleeping beside her the entire time.

In a case such as this, a lot of questions remain, and not surprisingly, far more that can ever be answered.

If we were to believe that these events happened with no logical explanation, was there more than one thing troubling my friend and his family? Was it just a series of bizarre occurrences that seemed all too real? And, what sort of person in life was the man who killed himself? Was he kind and troubled, or were his abusive motives a reason why his family had left him? Admittedly, I was having a hard time debunking these claims.

My friend admitted that one night, he tried speaking to the shadow figure outside his door. “Well, what happened?” I asked curiously, my mind not being able to even predict his response. But he simply shrugged his shoulders and nonchalantly said “nothing”.

One theory is that if haunts are the responsibility of the angry and wounded spirit of the man who killed himself, he seems to have a strong dislike towards men, which is probably why my friend seemed to get the brunt of all that happened. Or perhaps, it was personal…

That was years ago, and they have long since moved and grown up. A peculiar ending to this story is that eventually, the strange phenomenon seemed to die out well before they sold the house, but the strange feeling of being watched remained until the day they left.  The house still stands today, and is currently being lived in. It’s been a few years now and it hasn’t been put up for sale, so my best assumption would be that maybe, whatever malevolent entity that plagued the house has perhaps moved on? But maybe the question is, if this is so, where did it go?

The Patch Hollow Massacre

Why do remote and wild places captivate us so much? Maybe it’s because these inaccessible places don’t easily give their secrets or their history – forcing the curious adventurer to truly dig for answers (sometimes literally). Or maybe it’s because here, our imaginations run wild as we find ourselves detached from the modern comforts and the familiarization of our backyards. We seek these places for their inspiring beauty, and ask for the answers to our questions which burn in our veins of desire. Anything can happen out there.

Vermont’s mountains hold quite a few ghastly secrets. Perhaps the most well known story to come out of the Green Mountains is the legend of The Bennington Triangle and the now vanished town of Glastenbury. It was here on the wild slopes of Glastenbury Mountain where 5 innocent people dissapeared without a trace between 1945 and 1950 – no clues or remains were ever found, but the theories were more than plentiful.

I’d like to tell a story just as sinister and lesser known, in a place just as remote and wild. But this story is more gruesome because it can be proved, and its catalysts are human rather then paranormal – hinting that sometimes the most dangerous things on Earth can be ourselves. I’m especially fond of this story for it’s obscurity, and that it’s darkness happened near one of my favorite places.

Patch Hollow

The Long Trail travels north from Glastenbury, over the peaks of Southern Vermont’s Green Mountains, dips down and back up the steep gulf around Route 140, and descends upon a wild and desolate area above Wallingford called “Patch Hollow”.

Running in a north-south direction, Patch Hollow is a deep trench of land high in the Green Mountains, formed by the steep slope of Bear Mountain to the west, and the more gentle Button Hill to the east. In the center of this densely wooded bowl is a large swamp, its green waters occasionally protruded by the skeletons of dead trees that twist towards the Wallingford skies above. In 2008, the beaver dam broke with such a force that it sent a large wall of water plowing down the steep hillsides, carving a jagged gorge into the land and completely taking out a chunk of Route 140, the bafflingly large boulders that were transported down the hill still rest along the roadside today.

The power of Mother Nature is both awesome and awe inspiring, and Patch Hollow is indeed a wild place. I know this hollow personally, as I grew up hiking here and riding my 4 wheeler through the few trails that traversed the rough terrain (and are not for the inexperienced rider). But what I didn’t know at the time, was that there used to be a settlement here – one with a gruesome tale attached.

My first thoughts of any sort of community way up in Patch Hollow, far above the valleys amused me. Looking at the stark wilderness today, it seems almost unrealistic. This is where a lesson in Vermont history comes in handy. When towns were being settled, and the first roads were being cleared, often they were built through the highlands and the mountains because the valleys were prone to flooding and washouts. This means that at one time, Patch Hollow was on the main road through town. In the book “History of Wallingford, Vermont” by By Walter Thorpe, he writes that a settlement of at least 5 families once made their home here. But there are no clues that are left that would point to the bloody struggle that took place at here, not even a hint that civilization was once rooted in this sunny dale.

So what happened here? The story goes back to May 11, 1831. One of the settlements in the hollow was owned by Rolon Wheeler, a “man of violent passions and jealous disposition,” according to an account written in 1911. Wheeler was reportedly guilty of sexual acts with his wife’s sister — a situation that when was leaked, created a great deal of resentment from the community.

Some community members from Wallingford and nearby Shrewsbury were so resentful that they decided to go as far as form a mob – with the intent of tar and feathering him. The threats were made so publicly that Wheeler was forewarned and took measures to defend himself. He fashioned a knife from a large file and barred his door.

On the night of May 11, your classic angry mom scenario formed two parties from Shrewsbury and Wallingford, and set out for Patch Hollow for some justice. Equipped with jugs of rum, a bucket of tar and a sack of feathers, both parties made their way into the mountains. The party from Shrewsbury never made it – getting lost in the woods instead. Their pride damaged – the reality of getting lost over powered the want for vigilante justice, and the group returned home.

The Wallingford group didn’t share the same fate, and did arrive at Wheeler’s house. They eventually forced their way in by prying a hole in the gable end of the roof. Three men leaped into the house and struggled with Wheeler in the dark. Wheeler stabbed one man in the side and another was slashed an excessive amount of 14 times. The door to the cabin was unbarred and more people poured into the cabin. In the scuffle, someone was killed. The angry mob stopped being belligerent and went to get a better look at their prize.

But, in all the haste, they made a fatal, and rather embarrassing mistake. They killed group member and friend, Issac Osborne by mistake…Wheeler was nowhere to be found. After a few minutes of trying to comprehend the situation, the group noticed that a set of clothes had been strewn across the cabin floor. The picture was clearer now. Wheeler had escaped the hands of one of his attackers by wrestling out of his clothes, crawling under his bed, and prying up some floorboards before escaping beneath the house.

A moment of realization was then sparked under the watchful eye of the Patch Hollow shadows. The mob panicked, most likely all scared because they committed murder that night, and hastily fled the house. Later, Dr. John Fox of Wallingford would visit the scene, which he recounted as “the most terrible sight he could recall.”

By the light of a candle, Fox saw “the livid body of Osborne on the bed and cabin literally soaked in blood.”

After escaping his blood stained house, Wheeler decided that spending the night naked in the woods was a safer decision than venturing back into town. Before dawn he stole a shirt from a clothesline, walked to the Hartsboro section of town (now a ghost town and a road of the same name) and hid in a barn. Needing clothes, he spent part of the day crudely weaving a dress from rye straw he found in the barn, and then retreating to his sister’s home in Pawlet. But after all that, Wheeler was finally caught.

He was arrested and put on trial in a makeshift court held at the Baptist Church in Wallingford — the only building in town that could hold the crowds eager to watch the proceedings. In the end, he was found innocent under terms of self defense.

The mob who assaulted him didn’t get off so easily. Two of his attackers were fined $60 each,while three others were fined $40. Justice was served, just not in the way the angry mob had expected.

After the court hearing, something strange happened to Patch Hollow. Perhaps the tragic events of that chaotic night left its scar in the minds of everyone who partook, forever troubling the land. Or maybe it was just “bad for business”. After that bloody incident, Patch Hollow became abandoned shortly afterwards and to this day, no one has tried to rebuild it.

Today’s Patch Hollow is quieter, as the mountain forests reclaimed the land, the only visitors now are the countless hikers that loyally hike the Long Trail to get lost in the Vermont woods for little while, letting the wilderness and the solitude quell their thoughts.

How To Get Here:

Take the Long Trail North from the Route 140 trail head in Wallingford, or South from The Clarendon Gorge just off Route 103 in Shrewsbury.

Links:

For those who are further interested in The Bennington Triangle, there is a great documentary on the area’s history on Youtube

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdyysF0VC20]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBPMp8H3x3w]