Massachusetts – Obscure Vermont

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.

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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The mystery isn’t in the technique, it’s in each of us. ~Harry Callahan.

The dark term dungeon isn’t a common moniker around New England, (unless you count Vermont’s arcane Popple Dungeon Road), so when I heard of a place in Lynn, Massachusetts called Dungeon Rock, of course, I was interested. Interested enough to take the 3-hour drive from Vermont to the fast-paced town of Lynn. In a large tract of woods concealing a landscape of boulderous terrain and large ponds with icy waters gently lapping at gravely beaches, lies an especially craggy boulder at the top of a steep rise of land. If you were to get a little closer and squeeze your way through some narrow crevices, you may notice an iron door set in the rock. Behind that door is a knee bending steep staircase that descends into blackness with dripping cold water, twisting passageways, and steep drops in elevation before eventually ending in solid rock and dank water, where the ceiling becomes so low that crouching becomes necessary.

You could probably speculate a lot of practical reasons why such a cave exists. But you’d probably be wrong. It seems that dungeon is a misnomer, it’s not a dungeon at all (but certainly takes on that appearance) It’s actually the product of a man looking for pirate treasure with instructions given by a ghost.

The story behind this interesting location starts in the early 1600s. It was here at Dungeon Rock where notorious pirate Thomas Veal is said to have buried a sizable treasure here, deep in a well-concealed cavern. Veal himself was hiding out in the wilderness of Lynn, the lone survivor of a band of pirates who were caught and returned back to England where they were hanged for their misdeeds. Veal took refuge in the same cave where he hid his ill-gotten treasure. But misfortune struck in 1658 when an earthquake hit New England and sealed up the cave forever, with Thomas Veal inside.

Shortly after, treasure seekers began trying to extract Veal’s treasure, picking and digging around the rock where they suspected the cave once was. But all efforts proved fruitless. It was lost within the Earth. It was around then when the rock earned its moniker, Dungeon Rock, maybe due to the fact that it was said that the sealed up cave with its dead pirate owner was much like a dungeon.

Interest in the cave stopped until 200 years later, during the craze of spiritualism. The story of Thomas Veal and his treasure attracted the attention of Hiram Marble from Charlton, Massachusetts. In 1852, he bought the property where Dungeon Rock sits, and sought out a spiritualist medium who contacted the ghost of the pirate and learned the precise whereabouts of the treasure.

He erected a house and a few outbuildings, and moved his wife and son there. Confident in the new found information and enthusiasm of finding a vast sum of wealth in the rocky New England soil, he saved a considerable fortune and began excavating operations. Day after day, he would chip at the unyielding stone, which then lead to using blasting powder and drills to dig deeper below the ground. Hiram would hold regular seances where he would have check-ins with Veal’s ghost, to direct the course of his mining. But despite all of his attention into his DIY project, he was only able to dig a single foot every 30 days. Then, in 1856, he ran out of money. But Hiram was committed to continuing his laborious plan.

Moving at such a gruelingly slow pace, with no funds, one might wonder what exactly kept him going? The regular contact of Thomas Veal was probably the culprit, because Hiram still had an astonishing amount of faith. But maybe his efforts were about to pay off? His seances were recorded – the dialogue between the two was written down. One such written account revealed that the pirate told Hiram he was close, just one more curve needed to be dug! But that curve would require at least 12 feet of digging, which would take another grueling year of backbreaking labor.

By 1864, they had managed to dig an astonishing 135 feet of twisting catacomb. Hiram’s son Edwin even joined in. And as luck would have it, his big dig was drawing attention far and wide. So Hiram decided to capitalize on his new found fame, and charge people admission for a tour of the man-made cave. With the admission funds, he continued to finance his project.

Dungeon Rock bonds were sold for a dollar, entitling the purchaser to a share of the treasure.

In November of 1864, after they had managed to borrow 200 feet of tunnel, Hiram died. Edwin followed his father to the grave in 1880, (and is buried beneath a Hemlock tree that grows right near the rock) leaving Hiram’s efforts as nothing more but a useless hole descending far below the ground of Lynn. The city eventually acquired the property in 1888. While some family members bequeath personal heirlooms to their loved ones or elaborate (and often vain) monuments that decorate a community, Hiram Marble left a giant hole that is tainted with sadness and intrigue.

Today, the cave is sealed off by an iron door that is open for a few hours each day in the warmer months, or upon special request by a park ranger, which is how I was able to get in on this particular blustery November day.

Dungeon rock can easily be missed. Though it’s one of the highest points around you, it looks like all of the other rock and boulder outcroppings scattered around the woods, and there are quite a lot.

Once you find the rock, you enter through a narrow crevice that leads to the door, which leads into a cold, wet and dark cave. The daylight immediately vanishes and leaves you having to turn on your flashlights and headlamps, which are necessities to explore the cave with – especially navigating the thin wooden steps leading down to the cavern floor that is so slick, it offers no traction. From there, this dank enclosed space twists and turns deeper below the earth, each corner a specific blueprint from a dead pirate. That’s something to ponder as you scramble around down in the dark. Eventually, the cave becomes too small to stand up in and dead ends abruptly in a pool of orange stagnant water. Once back outside, it’s not hard to see why Dungeon Rock is probably one of the strangest places in New England.

Maybe the lesson here is if you probably wouldn’t trust a pirate in the mortal world, why trust one in the afterlife?

Rocks, rocks, rocks... — Rocks, rocks, rocks… (the Hemlock tree nearest the rock is where Edwin is said to be buried)

the original blasting holes can still be seen

First turn and a bunch of rocks to stumble over

before descending down a slippery rock slope, further bringing us down

more rocks to stumble over, the cavern ceiling getting lower

the roof still getting lower — the passageway still getting lower

and yet, another climb down a slippery rock wall

end of the line err cave. — end of the line, err, cave.

Oh no! It's a pirate ghost! Just kidding, it's me. — Oh no! It’s a pirate ghost! Just kidding, it’s me.

I guess at one point, someone made a fake pirate chest and turned it into a geocache in the cave, which may have disappointed a few explorers, but admittedly is still pretty cool. I didn’t come across it on my visit, however, or a real pirate chest for that matter.

Dungeon Rock is located in Lynn Woods, and can be found on their website

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